On Myself, and Other, Less Important Subjects
On Myself, and Other, Less Important Subjects

Author: Caspar Hare

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2009-08-02

Total Pages: 142

ISBN-13: 9780691135311

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The author makes a case for "egocentric presentism," a view about the nature of first-person experience. A natural thought about the first-person experience is that "all and only the things of which I am aware are present to me." He goes even further and claims that the thought should instead be that "all and only the things of which I am aware are present." That there is something unique about me and the things of which I am aware. This book represents a new take on an old view, known as solipsism, which maintains that people's experiences give them grounds for believing that they have a special, distinguished place in the world--for example, believing that only they exist or that other people do not have conscious minds like their own. The author maintains that the version of solipsism he argues for is capable of resolving some seemingly intractable philosophical problems--both in metaphysics and ethics--concerning personal identity over time, as well as the tension between self-interest and the greater good.

On Myself, and Other, Less Important Subjects
On Myself, and Other, Less Important Subjects

Author: Caspar Hare

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2017-11-21

Total Pages: 134

ISBN-13: 0691178038

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Caspar Hare makes an original and compelling case for "egocentric presentism," a view about the nature of first-person experience, about what happens when we see things from our own particular point of view. A natural thought about our first-person experience is that "all and only the things of which I am aware are present to me." Hare, however, goes one step further and claims, counterintuitively, that the thought should instead be that "all and only the things of which I am aware are present." There is, in other words, something unique about me and the things of which I am aware. On Myself and Other, Less Important Subjects represents a new take on an old view, known as solipsism, which maintains that people's experiences give them grounds for believing that they have a special, distinguished place in the world--for example, believing that only they exist or that other people do not have conscious minds like their own. Few contemporary thinkers have taken solipsism seriously. But Hare maintains that the version of solipsism he argues for is in indeed defensible, and that it is uniquely capable of resolving some seemingly intractable philosophical problems--both in metaphysics and ethics--concerning personal identity over time, as well as the tension between self-interest and the greater good. This formidable and tightly argued defense of a seemingly absurd view is certain to provoke debate.

Objectivity
Objectivity

Author: Lorraine Daston

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2021-02-02

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 1942130619

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Objectivity has a history, and it is full of surprises. In Objectivity, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison chart the emergence of objectivity in the mid-nineteenth-century sciences — and show how the concept differs from alternatives, truth-to-nature and trained judgment. This is a story of lofty epistemic ideals fused with workaday practices in the making of scientific images. From the eighteenth through the early twenty-first centuries, the images that reveal the deepest commitments of the empirical sciences — from anatomy to crystallography — are those featured in scientific atlases: the compendia that teach practitioners of a discipline what is worth looking at and how to look at it. Atlas images define the working objects of the sciences of the eye: snowflakes, galaxies, skeletons, even elementary particles. Galison and Daston use atlas images to uncover a hidden history of scientific objectivity and its rivals. Whether an atlas maker idealizes an image to capture the essentials in the name of truth-to-nature or refuses to erase even the most incidental detail in the name of objectivity or highlights patterns in the name of trained judgment is a decision enforced by an ethos as well as by an epistemology. As Daston and Galison argue, atlases shape the subjects as well as the objects of science. To pursue objectivity — or truth-to-nature or trained judgment — is simultaneously to cultivate a distinctive scientific self wherein knowing and knower converge. Moreover, the very point at which they visibly converge is in the very act of seeing not as a separate individual but as a member of a particular scientific community. Embedded in the atlas image, therefore, are the traces of consequential choices about knowledge, persona, and collective sight. Objectivity is a book addressed to any one interested in the elusive and crucial notion of objectivity — and in what it means to peer into the world scientifically.

Science as Social Knowledge
Science as Social Knowledge

Author: Helen E. Longino

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2020-03-31

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 0691209758

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Conventional wisdom has it that the sciences, properly pursued, constitute a pure, value-free method of obtaining knowledge about the natural world. In light of the social and normative dimensions of many scientific debates, Helen Longino finds that general accounts of scientific methodology cannot support this common belief. Focusing on the notion of evidence, the author argues that a methodology powerful enough to account for theories of any scope and depth is incapable of ruling out the influence of social and cultural values in the very structuring of knowledge. The objectivity of scientific inquiry can nevertheless be maintained, she proposes, by understanding scientific inquiry as a social rather than an individual process. Seeking to open a dialogue between methodologists and social critics of the sciences, Longino develops this concept of "contextual empiricism" in an analysis of research programs that have drawn criticism from feminists. Examining theories of human evolution and of prenatal hormonal determination of "gender-role" behavior, of sex differences in cognition, and of sexual orientation, the author shows how assumptions laden with social values affect the description, presentation, and interpretation of data. In particular, Longino argues that research on the hormonal basis of "sex-differentiated behavior" involves assumptions not only about gender relations but also about human action and agency. She concludes with a discussion of the relation between science, values, and ideology, based on the work of Habermas, Foucault, Keller, and Haraway.

Realisms Interlinked
Realisms Interlinked

Author: Arindam Chakrabarti

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2019-09-19

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 1350044474

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This book brings together over 25 years of Arindam Chakrabarti's original research in philosophy on issues of epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind. Organized under the three basic concepts of a thing out there in the world, the self who perceives it, and other subjects or selves, his work revolves around a set of realism links. Examining connections between metaphysical stances toward the world, selves, and universals, Chakrabarti engages with classical Indian and modern Western philosophical approaches to a number of live topics including the refutation of idealism; the question of the definability of truth, and the possibility of truths existing unknown to anyone; the existence of non-conceptual perception; and our knowledge of other minds. He additionally makes forays into fundamental questions regarding death, darkness, absence, and nothingness. Along with conceptual clarification and progress towards alternative solutions to these substantial philosophical problems, Chakrabarti demonstrates the advantage of doing philosophy in a cosmopolitan fashion. Beginning with an analysis of the concept of a thing, and ending with an analysis of the concept of nothing, Realisms Interlinked offers a preview of a future metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of mind without borders.

The Fate of Knowledge
The Fate of Knowledge

Author: Helen E. Longino

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2018-06-05

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 0691187010

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Helen Longino seeks to break the current deadlock in the ongoing wars between philosophers of science and sociologists of science--academic battles founded on disagreement about the role of social forces in constructing scientific knowledge. While many philosophers of science downplay social forces, claiming that scientific knowledge is best considered as a product of cognitive processes, sociologists tend to argue that numerous noncognitive factors influence what scientists learn, how they package it, and how readily it is accepted. Underlying this disagreement, however, is a common assumption that social forces are a source of bias and irrationality. Longino challenges this assumption, arguing that social interaction actually assists us in securing firm, rationally based knowledge. This important insight allows her to develop a durable and novel account of scientific knowledge that integrates the social and cognitive. Longino begins with a detailed discussion of a wide range of contemporary thinkers who write on scientific knowledge, clarifying the philosophical points at issue. She then critically analyzes the dichotomous understanding of the rational and the social that characterizes both sides of the science studies stalemate and the social account that she sees as necessary for an epistemology of science that includes the full spectrum of cognitive processes. Throughout, her account is responsive both to the normative uses of the term knowledge and to the social conditions in which scientific knowledge is produced. Building on ideas first advanced in her influential book Science as Social Knowledge, Longino brings her account into dialogue with current work in social epistemology and science studies and shows how her critical social approach can help solve a variety of stubborn problems. While the book focuses on epistemological concerns related to the sociality of inquiry, Longino also takes up its implications for scientific pluralism. The social approach, she concludes, best allows us to retain a meaningful concept of knowledge in the face of theoretical plurality and uncertainty.

Normative Subjects
Normative Subjects

Author: Meir Dan-Cohen

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0199985200

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Combining constructivist and hermeneutical themes, this book explores normative aspects of human self creation seen as a matter of fixing and elaborating the values and norms that shape human identity, individually and collectively. The book focuses especially on a conception of dignity as the value that accrues to us qua authors of the meanings constitutive of human life.

Considered Judgment
Considered Judgment

Author: Catherine Z. Elgin

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 1999-02-21

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 0691005230

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Philosophy long sought to set knowledge on a firm foundation, through derivation of indubitable truths by infallible rules. For want of such truths and rules, the enterprise foundered. Nevertheless, foundationalism's heirs continue their forbears' quest, seeking security against epistemic misfortune, while their detractors typically espouse unbridled coherentism or facile relativism. Maintaining that neither stance is tenable, Catherine Elgin devises a via media between the absolute and the arbitrary, reconceiving the nature, goals, and methods of epistemology. In Considered Judgment, she argues for a reconception that takes reflective equilibrium as the standard of rational acceptability. A system of thought is in reflective equilibrium when its components are reasonable in light of one another, and the account they comprise is reasonable in light of our antecedent convictions about the subject it concerns. Many epistemologists now concede that certainty is a chimerical goal. But they continue to accept the traditional conception of epistemology's problematic. Elgin suggests that in abandoning the quest for certainty we gain opportunities for a broader epistemological purview--one that comprehends the arts and does justice to the sciences. She contends that metaphor, fiction, emotion, and exemplification often advance understanding in science as well as in art. The range of epistemology is broader and more variegated than is usually recognized. Tenable systems of thought are neither absolute nor arbitrary. Although they afford no guarantees, they are good in the way of belief.

Mere Possibilities
Mere Possibilities

Author: Robert Stalnaker

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2012-01-08

Total Pages: 183

ISBN-13: 0691147124

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It seems reasonable to believe that there might have existed things other than those that in fact exist, or have existed. But how should we understand such claims? Standard semantic theories exploit the Leibnizian metaphor of a set of all possible worlds: a proposition might or must be true if it is true in some or all possible worlds. The actualist, who believes that nothing exists except what actually exists, prefers to talk of possible states of the world, or of ways that a world might be. But even the actualist still faces the problem of explaining what we are talking about when we talk about the domains of other possible worlds. In Mere Possibilities, Robert Stalnaker develops a framework for clarifying this problem, and explores a number of actualist strategies for solving it. Some philosophers have hypothesized a realm of individual essences that stand as proxies for all merely possible beings. Others have argued that we are committed to the necessary existence of everything that does or might exist. In contrast, Mere Possibilities shows how we can make sense of ordinary beliefs about what might and must exist without making counterintuitive metaphysical commitments. The book also sheds new light on the nature of metaphysical theorizing by exploring the interaction of semantic and metaphysical issues, the connections between different metaphysical issues, and the nature of ontological commitment.

Epistemic Angst
Epistemic Angst

Author: Duncan Pritchard

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2015-12-22

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 1400873916

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Epistemic Angst offers a completely new solution to the ancient philosophical problem of radical skepticism—the challenge of explaining how it is possible to have knowledge of a world external to us. Duncan Pritchard argues that the key to resolving this puzzle is to realize that it is composed of two logically distinct problems, each requiring its own solution. He then puts forward solutions to both problems. To that end, he offers a new reading of Wittgenstein's account of the structure of rational evaluation and demonstrates how this provides an elegant solution to one aspect of the skeptical problem. Pritchard also revisits the epistemological disjunctivist proposal that he developed in previous work and shows how it can effectively handle the other aspect of the problem. Finally, he argues that these two antiskeptical positions, while superficially in tension with each other, are not only compatible but also mutually supporting. The result is a comprehensive and distinctive resolution to the problem of radical skepticism, one that challenges many assumptions in contemporary epistemology.