{"title":"What is the Verifiability Criterion a Criterion of?","authors":"Stuart Brown","doi":"10.1017/S0080443600001047","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0080443600001047","url":null,"abstract":"As my title implies, I think the verifiability criterion is indeed a criterion of something. I do not intend, therefore, merely to commemorate it. On the other hand I am not sure that those who put it forward in its more liberal forms as a criterion of ‘factual significance’ or ‘literal meaningfulness’ were right in what they identified as the consequence of a sentence's failing to satisfy it. What I want to argue for, in a somewhat reductionist spirit, is a resurrected version of the ‘weak’ verifiability criterion. My resurrected version will certainly appear more rarefied, in so far as it is independent of (and does not therefore require to be embodied in) empiricism. It will, I hope, also be purified of some of the mortal blemishes from which the criterion, as construed by members of the Vienna Circle, seems not to have recovered.","PeriodicalId":322312,"journal":{"name":"Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures","volume":"85 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1975-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114170930","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Empiricism in Science and Philosophy","authors":"E. Harris","doi":"10.1017/S0080443600001059","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0080443600001059","url":null,"abstract":"The term ‘Empiricism’ has had at least two different, though not unconnected, applications in modern thought, one to scientific method and the other to philosophical theory. My intention in this lecture is to try to show that, while these two applications of the term have a common source, their actual referents are widely divergent and in large measure even mutually incompatible.","PeriodicalId":322312,"journal":{"name":"Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures","volume":"127 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1975-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127073946","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Wittgenstein on Seeing and Interpreting","authors":"P. Lewis","doi":"10.1017/S0080443600001011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0080443600001011","url":null,"abstract":"In those twenty or so pages of section xi of Part Two of the Philosophical Investigations in which Wittgenstein discusses the concept of noticing an aspect and its place among the concepts of experience, there are three passages which are explicitly concerned with the relations between seeing and interpreting in the experience of noticing an aspect.","PeriodicalId":322312,"journal":{"name":"Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures","volume":"3 3","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1975-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132692964","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Empiricism in Ethics","authors":"S. Körner","doi":"10.1007/978-1-349-02804-7_14","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-02804-7_14","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":322312,"journal":{"name":"Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1975-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121602741","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Nature and Necessity","authors":"G. Robinson","doi":"10.1017/S0080443600001084","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0080443600001084","url":null,"abstract":"Determinism is a spectre that has haunted our scientifically-oriented culture from the beginning. I happen to think that it is literally a ‘spectre’, a trick of the vision, an appearance with an internal cause only, and that it is no more than the ghost of our own conceptual determinations projected outward into a world in which it has no place and no proper being. From one point of view it is no more than an alienated fantasy involving a number of incoherent assumptions. Of these, one of the most important, and one of the most deeply eroded by much contemporary work, is the assumption that science and scientific understanding is a potentially completable system. From another point of view, however, the deterministic picture seems an inevitable product of scientific activity.","PeriodicalId":322312,"journal":{"name":"Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1975-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127147482","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Why Should the Science of Nature be Empirical?","authors":"L. Cohen","doi":"10.1017/S0080443600001060","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0080443600001060","url":null,"abstract":"In the past empiricist philosophy has urged one or other or both of two interconnected, and sometimes interconfused, theses. The first has been a thesis about the causal origins of certain beliefs, the second a thesis about the proper criteria for appraising these beliefs. The causal thesis is that all beliefs about the structure and contents of the natural world are the end-product of a process that originates wholly in individual experiences of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, or touching. The criterial thesis is that all these beliefs are ultimately to be appraised for their truth, soundness or acceptability in terms of the data afforded by such perceptual acts. Of recent years the causal version of empiricism has been much attacked, primarily in regard to its implications about language-learning. The language in terms of which our beliefs are constructed is heavily conditioned, we are told, by certain congenital features of the human brain. But, whenever Chomsky and his followers have assailed the causal version of empiricism, they have always been careful to claim for their doctrines the warrant of empirical evidence. They have never questioned the correctness of the criterial version of empiricism.","PeriodicalId":322312,"journal":{"name":"Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures","volume":"53 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1975-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124734630","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"New Phenomenalism as an Account of Perceptual Knowledge","authors":"Alan Hobbs","doi":"10.1017/S0080443600001023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0080443600001023","url":null,"abstract":"To be an Empiricist with respect to knowledge of the natural world, is to insist that all knowledge of that world is rooted in perceptual experience. All claims which go beyond the deliverances of the senses must, in the end, be justified by, and understood in terms of, relations holding between those claims and sensory data. Crucial to the Empiricist case, therefore, is an account of how perception can be a source of knowledge. How can sensory experiences provide, for the owner of those experiences, information about objects and events which exist independently of the experiences themselves? The following essay scavenges in contemporary sources to arrive at a fresh Empiricist account of perceptual knowledge. There are sufficient parallels with earlier doctrines to call the outcome ‘New Phenomenalism’, but the label is not important. The materials for the thesis have been gathered (and probably twisted) from several current writers, most notably P.F. Strawson and Jonathan Bennett, but no one of these writers is a proponent of the expounded thesis as a whole. As with a composite photograph, no face completely fits.","PeriodicalId":322312,"journal":{"name":"Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1975-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130377153","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"An Empirical Account of Mind","authors":"D. M. Taylor","doi":"10.1017/S0080443600000996","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0080443600000996","url":null,"abstract":"What could an empirical theory of the Mind be? Surely one which demonstrated that questions about the existence of minds were empirical questions – to be decided by observation, by the senses. This in turn would require an explanation of the meaning of statements about minds or mental states in terms referring to observable events, states and objects.","PeriodicalId":322312,"journal":{"name":"Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures","volume":"84 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1975-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130380924","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Hume and Wittgenstein","authors":"O. Hanfling","doi":"10.1017/S0080443600000984","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0080443600000984","url":null,"abstract":"It is well known that Wittgenstein's reading of the philosophical classics was patchy. He left unread a large part of the literature which most philosophers would regard as essential to a knowledge of their subject. Wittgenstein gave an interesting reason for his non-reading of Hume. He said that he could not sit down and read Hume, because he knew far too much about the subject of Hume's writings to find this anything but a torture. In a recent commentary, Peter Hacker has taken this to show that ‘Wittgenstein seems to have despised Hume’. Hume, he adds, ‘made almost every epistemological and metaphysical mistake Wittgenstein could think of.","PeriodicalId":322312,"journal":{"name":"Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1975-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129544245","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"PHS volume 9 Cover and Front matter","authors":"L. Cohen, O. Hanfling, A. Hobbs, S. Korner","doi":"10.1017/s0080443600000935","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0080443600000935","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":322312,"journal":{"name":"Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures","volume":"44 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1975-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132049949","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}