Carnap, Quine, and Putnam on Methods of Inquiry
Published on 7. June 2017
Book
Hardback
288 pages
978-1-107-17815-1 (ISBN)
Description
Carnap, Quine, and Putnam held that in our pursuit of truth we can do no better than to start in the middle, relying on already-established beliefs and inferences and applying our best methods for re-evaluating particular beliefs and inferences and arriving at new ones. In this collection of essays, Gary Ebbs interprets these thinkers' methodological views in the light of their own philosophical commitments, and in the process refutes some widespread misunderstandings of their views, reveals the real strengths of their arguments, and exposes a number of problems that they face. To solve these problems, in many of the essays Ebbs also develops new philosophical approaches, including new theories of logical truth, language use, reference and truth, truth by convention, realism, trans-theoretical terms, agreement and disagreement, radical belief revision, and contextually a priori statements. His essays will be valuable for a wide range of readers in analytic philosophy.
Reviews / Votes
'Ebbs' volume ... is an important publication from both an historical and a systematic point of view. It offers a new perspective on the relation between Carnap, Quine, and Putnam, as well as a substantive contribution to ongoing systematic debates about truth, justification, and language use. As such, it will be of interest and value not only to historians of analytic philosophy, but also to all philosophers who believe that Carnap's, Quine's, and Putnam's most fundamental insights deserve continuous discussion and adaptation.' Notre Dame Philosophical ReviewsMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge
United Kingdom
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Illustrations
Worked examples or Exercises
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 157 mm
Thickness: 20 mm
Weight
544 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-107-17815-1 (9781107178151)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
06/2017
Cambridge University Press
€23.49
Available for download
E-Book
06/2017
Cambridge University Press
€19.49
Available for download
Person
Gary Ebbs is Professor of Philosophy at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the author of Rule-Following and Realism (1997) and Truth and Words (2009), and co-author of Debating Self-Knowledge (Cambridge, 2012). He has also published articles on a wide range of topics in the philosophy of language, logic, and mind, as well as epistemology and the history of analytic philosophy.
Content
Part I. Carnap: 1. Carnap's logical syntax; 2. Carnap on ontology; Part II. Carnap and Quine: 3. Carnap and Quine on truth by convention; 4. Quine's naturalistic explication of Carnap's logic of science; Part III. Quine: 5. Quine gets the last word; 6. Reading Quine's claim that definitional abbreviations create synonymies; 7. Can logical truth be defined in purely extensional terms?; 8. Reading Quine's claim that no statement is immune to revision; Part IV. Quine and Putnam: 9. Conditionalization and conceptual change: Chalmers in defense of a dogma; 10. Truth and trans-theoretical terms; Part V. Putnam: 11. Putnam and the contextually apriori.