Tag Archives: pragmatism

Frank Ramsey’s Anti-Intellectualism

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Volume 12.2 of The Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy (JHAP) has now been published online, with full open-access:

https://jhaponline.org/jhap/issue/view/511

It features an article by Soroush Marouzi, entitled “Frank Ramsey’s Anti-Intellectualism”. Here is the abstract:

Frank Ramsey’s philosophy, developed in the 1920s in Cambridge, was in conversation with the debates surrounding intellectualism in the early twentieth century. Ramsey made his mark on the anti-intellectualist tradition via his notion of habit. He posited that human judgments take shape through habitual processes, and he rejected the separation between the domain of reason, on one hand, and the domain of habit, on the other. Ramsey also provided the ground to explore the nature of knowledge employed in acting from habit. That ground was passed onto Margaret MacDonald who came up with the distinction between knowing that something is the case and knowing how to apply a rule (or habit), the distinction that set the stage for Gilbert Ryle’s philosophical project against intellectualism from the 1940s onward. Ramsey thus influenced Ryle’s account of knowledge through the channel of MacDonald.

JHAP is a free, open-access, peer-reviewed journal. It is available at https://jhaponline.org/. Submissions welcome!

Why “is at”? —On Quine’s Objection to Carnap’s Aufbau in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”

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Volume 6.4 of The Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy (JHAP) has now been published online, with full open access.

It features an article by Ka Ho Lam entitled ‘Why “is at”? —On Quine’s Objection to Carnap’s Aufbau in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”’. Here is an Abstract:

In “Two Dogmas”, Quine indicates that Carnap’s Aufbau fails “in principle” to reduce our knowledge of the external world to sense data. This is because in projecting the sensory material to reconstruct the physical world, Carnap gives up the use of operating rules and switches to a procedure informed by general principles. This procedure falls short of providing an eliminative translation for the connective “is at”, which is necessary for the reduction. In dissecting Quine’s objection, I argue that Quine has at best proven the claim that the use of general principles essentially fails the task of radical reductionism. However, in order to establish the conclusion that the Aufbau fails in principle, Quine needs to further vindicate two other claims. They are: first, a switch from operating rules to general principles is necessary; second, the set of general principles Carnap adopts is the best alternative. By disambiguating the notion of “explicit definition” and examining the concept of definability in the Aufbau, I explore the possibility of justifying these two claims that Quine overlooks in his objection. The result suggests that Quine’s objection stands in tension with his radical reductionist reading of the Aufbau.

The volume also contains a review of Anna Boncompagni’s Wittgenstein and Pragmatism. On Certainty in the Light of Peirce and James, written by Annalisa Coliva.

JHAP is a free, open-access peer reviewed journal. It is available at https://jhaponline.org/. Submissions welcome!

Early Forms of Metaethical Constructivism in John Dewey’s Pragmatism (JHAP)

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Volume 4.9 of the Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy (JHAP) is now online (full open access). It features an article entitled “Early Forms of Metaethical Constructivism in John Dewey’s Pragmatism”, by Pierre-Luc Dostie Proulx. Here is an abstract:

This paper demonstrates the innovative character of the approach to metaethics underlying John Dewey’s pragmatism. Dewey’s theory of evaluation is contrasted with one of the most dominant contemporary metaethical theses: constructivism. I show that the insistence placed by metaethical constructivists on the actor’s practical point of view, on the rejection of the subjective preferences model, and on a specific form of ethical antirealism and naturalism echoes some of the most crucial claims made by Dewey. This argumentation leads to my main hypothesis: an analysis of Dewey’s conception of evaluation allows us to highlight the groundbreaking character of its metaethical approach—an approach that will be characterized as fairly constructivist.

JHAP is available at: https://jhaponline.org. Submissions welcome.