The discovery of scientific aims and methods

American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly

Volumn 72, Issue 2, 1998, Pages 293-312

  Short, T L ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 63149148607     PISSN: 10513558     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/acpq199872220     Document Type: Article

References (16)

1. References of the form Wm:n are to page n of volume m of Charles S. Peirce, Writings, Vols. 1-5, various editors, Indiana University Press, 1982-1993; those of the form m.n are to paragraph n of volume m of Charles S. Peirce, Collected Papers, Vols. I-VI, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, Vols. VII-VIII, ed. Arthur Burks, Harvard University Press, 1931-58.
2. Kuhn, The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (University of Chicago Press, 1977), 335.
3. Toulmin, Foresight and Understanding, (London: Hutchinson, 1961), 109.
4. The concept of vagueness that I discuss here is one that I find implicit in Peirce's writings: for some evidence in support of this attribution, see T.L. Short; "Hypostatic Abstraction in Empirical Science," Grazer Philosophische Studien, 32 (1988)
5. but also Robert Lane, "Peirce's 'Entanglement' with the Principles of Excluded Middle and Contradiction," Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. XXXI No. 3, Summer (1997).
6. It is obvious that such a term will be a rigid designator in Kripke's sense and that what 1 am saying here has much in common with what Kripke, Putnam, and others have said, in what has come to be known as the causal theory of reference; however, I have retained a Fregean or descriptivist theory of reference. On my account, a causal or other existential relation to something, X, fixes the reference, R, of a rigid designator, D, only because that relation is specified in D's Fregean sense, which, in this case, is indirect: R is that which is in the specified relation to X. (There is a presumption of existence and of uniqueness, that there is exactly one thing in that relation to X; if that presumption is false, then the attempt to refer fails.) Often, X - D, as in Kripke's and Putnam's examples, so that R is fixed by its presumed unique causal or other existential relation to first uses or to paradigmatic uses of D. My fullest account of this is in Short 1988 op.cit., but I used the idea previously to explain how proponents of incommensurable theories can agree about what it is that they disagree about (Short, "Peirce and the Incommensurability of Theories," The Monist 63, [1980]
7. and Short, "An Analysis of Conceptual Change," American Philosophical Quarterly 17 [1980]. Causal theories of reference have been used to show that incommensurable theories can refer to the same things; but they cannot explain agreement about that reference, i.e., the fact that opposing theorists can agree about what it is that they disagree about. Also, causal theories fail utterly in cases where the presumed referent does not exist. What were alternative conceptions of phlogiston conceptions of? I would say, of the supposed entity seen escaping in flames.
8. Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972).
9. Donald T. Campbell, "Evolutionary Epistemology," in The Philosophy of Karl Popper, ed. Schlipp (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1974).
10. William C. Wimsatt, "Teleology and the Logical Structure of Function Statements," Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 3 (1972).
11. Larry Wright, Teleological Explanations, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976).
12. See Wright Teleological Explanations especially.
13. For more details and references, see Short, "Teleology in Nature," American Philosophical Quarterly 20 (1983)
14. and Short, "Teleology and Linguistic Change," in The Peirce Seminar Papers, Vol.IV, M. Shapiro, M. Haley, (New York: Peter Lang [forthcoming]).
15. I discuss Peirce's view of final causation in Short, "Peirce's Concept of Final Causation," Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. XVII No. 4, Fall (1981).
16. I have substantiated this claim in detail in work which I expect some day to publish. See also Short "Teleology in Nature" and "Teleology and Linguistic Change" for brief expositions that nevertheless add to what is said here.