Published in 1962, Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" is one of the most important works of the 20th century. When he died, Kuhn left an unfinished sequel and a group of essays written since 1970. "The Road since Structure" includes these essays, along with Kuhn's replies to criticism and an interview with Kuhn before his death in 1996. Photos.

A central debate in early modern philosophy, between empiricism and rationalism, turned on the question which of two cognitive faculties—sensibility or understanding—should be accorded logical priority in an account of the epistemic credentials of knowledge. As against both the empiricist and the rationalist, Kant wants to argue that the terms of their debate rest on a shared common assumption: namely that the capacities here in question—qua cognitive capacities—are self-standingly intelligible. The paper terms this assumption the Layer-Cake Conception of Human Mindedness (...) and focuses on Kant’s argument against the empiricist version of the assumption, in particular, as that argument is developed in the B version of the Transcendental Deduction in the Critique of Pure Reason. The paper seeks to show how a proper understanding of the structure of the B Deduction reveals its aim to be one of making sense of each of these two capacities (sensibility and understanding) in the light of the other. For the front of the argument that is directed against the empiricist, this means coming to see how a reading of the text that is informed by the layer-cake conception (and which therefore takes the Transcendental Aesthetic to furnish us with the full story about the nature of our faculty for sensory apprehension) is mistaken. For the front of the argument which is directed against the rationalist, this requires coming to see how a mere inversion of the central claim of such a reading would be equally wrong. It would require seeing how a discursive faculty of understanding able to traffic in nothing more than empty concepts would no more amount to a genuinely cognitive power than would a faculty of intuition able to traffic in nothing more than blind intuitions. That is, it requires seeing how each of these faculties depends on its relation to the other to be the sort of faculty that it is in a finite rational being. (shrink)

Divided into three parts, this work is a record of the direction Kuhn was taking during the last two decades of his life. It consists of essays in which he refines the basic concepts set forth in "Structure"--Paradigm shifts, incommensurability, and the nature of scientific progress.

Wittgenstein is usually taken to have held that the use of a term is not mentally constrained. That is utterly wrong. A use of language unconstrained by meaning is attributed by him to "meaning-blind" or "aspect-blind" creatures, not to us. We observe meaning when an aspect dawns on us; meaning is the impression (Eindruck) of a term as fitting something; hence, unlike pain, it cannot stand alone. That is a mentalistic theory of meaning: use is determined by images (Vorstellungen) that (...) play semantic roles in virtue of their aesthetic properties. Although a term may be arbitrarily interpreted, aesthetic reasons determine which interpretation be seen as right for it. (shrink)

This paper distinguishes two varieties of skepticism and the varieties of philosophical response those skepticisms have engendered. The aim of the exercise is to furnish a perspicuous overview of some of the dialectical relations that obtain across some of the range of problems that philosophers have called (and continue to call) “skeptical”. I argue that such an overview affords a number of forms of philosophical insight.

Wittgenstein gives voice to an aspiration that is central to his later philosophy, well before he becomes later Wittgenstein, when he writes in §4.112 of the Tractatus that philosophy is not a matter of putting forward a doctrine or a theory, but consists rather in the practice of an activity – an activity he goes on to characterize as one of elucidation or clarification – an activity which he says does not result in philosophische Sätze, in propositions of philosophy, but (...) rather in das Klarwerden von Sätzen, in our attaining clarity in our relation to the sentences of our language that we call upon to express our thoughts.1 To say that early Wittgenstein already aspired to such a conception of philosophy is not to gainsay that to aspire to practice philosophy in such a manner and to succeed in doing so are not the same thing. It is therefore not to deny that, by Wittgenstein’s later lights, the Tractatus is to be judged a work that is marked by forms of failure tied to its having failed fully to live up to such an aspiration. But if it is thus to be judged, then it is to some degree a failure even by Wittgenstein’s own earlier lights. This means that if one wants to understand the fundamental turn in Wittgenstein’s thinking as he moves from his earlier to his later philosophy, and why it is that he wanted the Tractatus to be published and read together with Philosophical Investigations, one needs to understand what sort of failure this is – and that requires coming to terms with the Tractatus’s own understanding of what sort of work it was trying to be. We think that readers of the Tractatus – be they admirers or detractors of Wittgenstein – have, on the whole, failed to do this. (shrink)

A spectator of the passing philosophical scene, recently encountering the current controversy about “resolute readings” of the Tractatus, might be forgiven for finding it difficult to figure out what the debate is supposed to be about and who exactly is on which side and why. This chapter demonstrates, through a reconstruction of some relevant features of “the” debate, that at one point there are in fact several orthogonal debates taking place, confusedly cast as contributions to a single debate. It indicates (...) some of the respects in which the term “resolute reading” has come to acquire different meanings, and sometimes even a different logic. The chapter traces the shifts in the meaning of the term “resolute reading” and the related family of cognate and contrastive expressions. Cora Diamond and James Conant are often presented as the main proponents of a “resolute reading” of the Tractatus. (shrink)

This paper argues that Wittgenstein, both early and late, rejects the idea that the logically simpler and more fundamental case is that of "the mere sign" and that what a meaningful symbol is can be explained through the elaboration of an appropriately supplemented conception of the sign: the sign plus something. Rather the sign, in the logically fundamental case of its mode of occurrence, is an internal aspect of the symbol. The Tractatus puts this point as follows: “The sign is (...) that in the symbol which is perceptible by the senses.” Conversely, this means that it is essential to a symbol – to what a symbol is – that it have an essentially perceptible aspect. For Wittgenstein there is no privileged direction of explanatory priority between symbol and sign here: without signs there are no symbols and without some sort of relation to symbols there are no signs. (shrink)

Two standard readings of Wittgenstein's _Tractatus_ have shaped the ways in which contemporary philosophers think about nonsense. These readings might be termed the “positivist reading” and the “ineffability reading”, respectively. In this paper, I argue (1) that these two mutually opposed readings of the _Tractatus_ presuppose a common conception of nonsense, one which the _Tractatus_ itself sought to undermine; (2) that the sources of Wittgenstein's own conception are to be found in the work of Frege; (3) that, once we trace (...) this conception back to its sources, we will be in a better position to see what sort of criticism (of Frege and others) the _Tractatus_ seeks to advance; and (4) that, once we see this, we will be in a better position to understand the relation between Wittgenstein's early and later work. (shrink)

This volume of new essays presents groundbreaking interpretations of some of the most central themes of Wittgenstein's philosophy. A distinguished group of contributors demonstrates how Wittgenstein's thought can fruitfully be applied to contemporary debates in epistemology, metaphilosophy and philosophy of language. The volume combines historical and systematic approaches to Wittgensteinian methods and perspectives, with essays providing detailed analysis that will be accessible to students as well as specialists. The result is a rich and illuminating picture of a key figure in (...) twentieth-century philosophy and his continuing importance to philosophical study. (shrink)

Why worry about Wittgenstein’s Tractatus? Did not Wittgenstein himself come to think it was largely a mistaken work? Is not Wittgenstein’s important work his later work? And does not his later work consist in a rejection of his earlier views? So does not the interest of the Tractatus mostly lie in its capacity to furnish a particularly vivid exemplar of the sort of philosophy that the mature Wittgenstein was most concerned to reject? So is it not true that the only (...) real reason to worry about the Tractatus is to become clear about what sort of thing it was that the later Wittgenstein was most against in philosophy? Is the interest of the book therefore not largely exhausted by its capacity to show us what the later Wittgenstein did not think? Much of the secondary literature on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, either implicitly or explicitly, answers these questions largely in the affirmative. The aim of this paper is to suggest that the manner in which it has done so has done much to obstruct the possibility of an understanding of Wittgenstein’s philosophy – both early and late. The aim is not to suggest that these questions should be answered instead in the negative, but rather to furnish a prolegomenon to the possibility of a proper understanding of what – and how much – ought to be affirmed in answering them in the affirmative. As the present volume makes evident, there is currently a debate underway about how to read (and how not to read) Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. This paper will not attempt a direct contribution to that debate,2 it will attempt instead to bring out some of what might be at stake in that debate. It is natural to think that all that ought to be at stake is a fairly parochial question concerning the proper interpretation of Wittgenstein’s work during a single, relatively early phase of his philosophical development. Thus it is natural to conclude that, whatever differences may divide the parties to this debate concerning how to read the Tractatus, nonetheless, au fond these interpreters of Wittgenstein may be in broad agreement about how to read most of the rest of Wittgenstein’s work – or, at least, whatever their disagreements may be about the early work, they are ones that can be independently adjudicated, without substantial cost to anyone’s prior.... (shrink)

Given a structure [Formula: see text] and a stably embedded [Formula: see text]-definable set Q, we prove tameness preservation results when enriching the induced structure on Q by some further structure [Formula: see text]. In particular, we show that if [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] are stable (respectively, superstable, [Formula: see text]-stable), then so is the theory [Formula: see text] of the enrichment of [Formula: see text] by [Formula: see text]. Assuming simplicity of T, elimination of hyperimaginaries and (...) a further condition on Q related to the behavior of algebraic closure, we also show that simplicity and NSOP1 pass from [Formula: see text] to [Formula: see text]. We then prove several applications for tame expansions of weakly minimal structures and, in particular, the group of integers. For example, we construct the first known examples of strictly stable expansions of [Formula: see text]. More generally, we show that any stable (respectively, superstable, simple, NIP, NTP2, NSOP1) countable graph can be defined in a stable (respectively, superstable, simple, NIP, NTP2, NSOP1) expansion of [Formula: see text] by some unary predicate [Formula: see text]. (shrink)

The past few decades have seen considerable interest in the history of analytic philosophy. As this field has developed, complex and provocative questions have emerged about the very nature of analytic philosophy, challenging long- standing assumptions and spawning new research paradigms. In this outstanding collection an international team of contributors examine these questions and contribute to these debates, exploring the idea of analysis, the essence and status of logic, the nature of the proposition and its linguistic expression, the logical act (...) of judgment, the distinction between external and internal relations, the possibility of category mistakes, and the demarcation of sense from nonsense. Several of the chapters shed light on the interconnections between Wittgenstein and other figures within that tradition, including Frege, Russell, Ramsey, and Ryle. Other chapters examine the interaction between analytic philosophers and members of other philosophical traditions, including Frege and Weierstrass, Wittgenstein and Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein and Bradley, Russell and the North American Pragmatists, Russell and the Neo-Kantians, Wittgenstein and Heidegger, and Heidegger and Ryle. Among the specific topics explored are Russell’s conception of the judging subject, Wittgenstein’s discussion of rule-following, Frege’s conception of the logical categories, and Wittgenstein’s conception of nonsense. The volume also includes a book review by Gilbert Ryle – collected and published non-anonymously here for the first time – which sheds important light on the reception of Frege’s philosophy in the analytic tradition. Early Analytic Philosophy: Origins and Transformations will be of great interest to those studying and researching the history of twentieth-century philosophy, contemporary analytic philosophy, and the philosophy of language and logic. (shrink)

We give three counterexamples to the folklore claim that in an arbitrary theory, if a complete type p over a set B does not divide over $C\subseteq B$, then no extension of p to a complete type over $\operatorname {acl}(B)$ divides over C. Two of our examples are also the first known theories where all sets are extension bases for nonforking, but forking and dividing differ for complete types (answering a question of Adler). One example is an $\mathrm {NSOP}_1$ theory (...) with a complete type that forks, but does not divide, over a model (answering a question of d’Elbée). Moreover, dividing independence fails to imply M-independence in this example (which refutes another folklore claim). In addition to these counterexamples, we summarize various related properties of dividing that are still true. We also address consequences for previous literature, including an earlier unpublished result about forking and dividing in free amalgamation theories, and some claims about dividing in the theory of generic $K_{m,n}$ -free incidence structures. (shrink)

This paper comes in three parts. In the first part, I explore the question of the relation between the philosophies of the early and the later Wittgenstein as they are standardly distinguished, with the aim of raising some questions about whether that standard distinction might not obstruct our view of certain significant aspects of the development of Wittgenstein’s thought. In the second part, drawing on the work of Marie McGinn and Warren Goldfarb, I distinguish two senses in which these two (...) commentators have been moved to call upon the expression ‘piecemeal’ in their respective attempts to characterize an important feature of Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophical method. In the third part, I draw upon this distinction to help bring into focus a significant shift in Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophical method which occurs fully within the so-called “later” period—a shift which has in no small part remained invisible due to the manner in which the opposition between an early and a later Wittgenstein has hitherto been conceived. (shrink)

If someone believes himself to have discovered the solution to the problem of life … then in order to refute himself he need only reflect that there was a time when this ‘solution’ had not been discovered; but it must have been possible to live then too…. And that is the position in which we find ourselves in logic. If there comes to seem to be a ‘solution’ to logical (philosophical) problems, we should need only to caution ourselves that there (...) was a time when they had not been solved (and even at that time people must have been able to live and think). (shrink)

We study the theory T m,n of existentially closed incidence structures omitting the complete incidence structure K m,n, which can also be viewed as existentially closed K m,n -free bipartite graphs. In the case m = n = 2, this is the theory of existentially closed projective planes. We give an $\forall \exists$ -axiomatization of T m,n, show that T m,n does not have a countable saturated model when m, n ≥ 2, and show that the existence of a prime (...) model for T2,2 is equivalent to a longstanding open question about finite projective planes. Finally, we analyze model theoretic notions of complexity for T m,n. We show that T m,n is NSOP1, but not simple when m, n ≥ 2, and we show that T m,n has weak elimination of imaginaries but not full elimination of imaginaries. These results rely on combinatorial characterizations of various notions of independence, including algebraic independence, Kim independence, and forking independence. (shrink)

We show that if a first-order structure${\cal M}$, with universe ℤ, is an expansion of (ℤ,+,0) and a reduct of (ℤ,+,<,0), then${\cal M}$must be interdefinable with (ℤ,+,0) or (ℤ,+,<,0).

In NIP theories, generically stable Keisler measures can be characterized in several ways. We analyze these various forms of “generic stability” in arbitrary theories. Among other things, we show that the standard definition of generic stability for types coincides with the notion of a frequency interpretation measure. We also give combinatorial examples of types in NSOP theories that are finitely approximated but not generically stable, as well as ϕ-types in simple theories that are definable and finitely satisfiable in a small (...) model, but not finitely approximated. Our proofs demonstrate interesting connections to classical results from Ramsey theory for finite graphs and hypergraphs. (shrink)

Hilary Putnam, James Conant; On Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Mathematics, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 97, Issue 1, 1 June 1997, Pages 195–22.

About this book Hilary Whitehall Putnam was one of the leading philosophers of the second half of the 20th century. As student of Rudolph Carnap's and Hans Reichenbach's, he went on to become not only a major figure in North American analytic philosophy, who made significant contributions to the philosophy of mind, language, mathematics, and physics but also to the disciplines of logic, number theory, and computer science. He passed away on March 13, 2016. The present volume is a memorial (...) to his extraordinary intellectual contributions, honoring his contributions as a philosopher, a thinker, and a public intellectual. It features essays by an international team of leading philosophers, covering all aspects of Hilary Putnam's philosophy from his work in ethics and the history of philosophy to his contributions to the philosophy of science, logic, and mathematics. Each essay is an original contribution. Author information James Conant, Univ. of Chicago/Univ. of Leipzig, USA/Germany; Sanjit Chakraborty, IISER Kolkata/VIT-AP University, India. (shrink)

For n≥3, define Tn to be the theory of the generic Kn-free graph, where Kn is the complete graph on n vertices. We prove a graph-theoretic characterization of dividing in Tn and use it to show that forking and dividing are the same for complete types. We then give an example of a forking and nondividing formula. Altogether, Tn provides a counterexample to a question of Chernikov and Kaplan.

Fix a weakly minimal (i.e. superstable U-rank 1) structure M. Let M∗ be an expansion by constants for an elementary substructure, and let A be an arbitrary subset of the universe M. We show that all formulas in the expansion (M∗,A) are equivalent to bounded formulas, and so (M,A) is stable (or NIP) if and only if the M-induced structure AM on A is stable (or NIP). We then restrict to the case that M is a pure abelian group with (...) a weakly minimal theory, and AM is mutually algebraic (equivalently, weakly minimal with trivial forking). This setting encompasses most of the recent research on stable expansions of (Z,+). Using various characterizations of mutual algebraicity, we give new examples of stable structures of the form (M,A). Most notably, we show that if (G,+) is a weakly minimal additive subgroup of the algebraic numbers, A⊆G is enumerated by a homogeneous linear recurrence relation with algebraic coefficients, and no repeated root of the characteristic polynomial of A is a root of unity, then (G,+,B) is superstable for any B⊆A. (shrink)

This chapter begins with an examination, testing the reader’s knowledge of Socrates and Wittgenstein. It goes on to consider the question of why the exam might be a difficult one, and the question of what this difficulty shows about Wittgenstein. The chapter further discusses, on a more general level, the questions of why the claim that a philosopher’s conception of philosophy bears a Socratic aspect was once a tautology and why the claim that Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy bears a Socratic (...) aspect is no longer a tautology. Along the way, the chapter argues in favor of several claims of this latter, non-tautological sort. (All three parts of the exam are also provided, detached from the text, in the form of three appendices; a fourth appendix contains the correct answers.). (shrink)

As we have seen, the crucial step in Nietzsche’s argument for his early doctrine is summed by in the following remark: ‘If we are forced to comprehend all things only under these forms, then it ceases to be amazing that in all things we actually comprehend nothing but these forms’ (1979, pp. 87–8). Before eventually learning to be suspicious of it, Nietzsche spends a good deal of time wondering instead what it would mean to live with the conclusion that (what (...) he calls) “the Kantian philosophy” apparently thus forces upon one, if one allows oneself to take this step. The different ways of living with its implications that Nietzsche goes on to distinguish in his early writings play an important role in his own subsequent retrospective understanding of the stations of the dialectic through which his thought had to traverse in its movement towards his mature perspectivism. Nietzsche contrasts these, in turn, with different possible versions of stage-two perspectivism. It is these finer discriminations that Nietzsche makes among the possible ways of occupying the second and third stages of the dialectic that will briefly concern us in this part of the paper. (shrink)

If, as the title of this book suggests, the state of Tractatus commentary has at times recently resembled something close to a state of war, then it has most of all resembled a war of attrition. Against this background, Roger White's "Throwing the Baby Out with the Ladder" makes for refreshing reading. To be sure, White repeats some of the familiar misconceptions of what resolute readers do or must claim that have marred the debate over the adequacies or inadequacies of (...) such an approach to the Tractatus (TLP). But he also introduces some novel and interesting lines of criticism that merit serious attention. Foremost among the latter is White's treatment (in Section III of his paper) of three engaging examples that he sees as making trouble for resolute readers, and for their opposition to the standard idea that the lesson of the Tractatrrs could consist in its communicating, and our grasping, ineffable insights by way of its nonsense-sentences. (shrink)

If practical philosophy is the area of philosophy that concerns itself with the study of practical reason, in the broadest sense, it may seem obvious and innocent to think of this as indicating a division of labour of the following kind. Just as the field of epistemology, say, concerns itself with a certain area of reality (roughly, the area occupied by cognitively relevant mental states), so practical philosophy also studies a certain part of reality: namely, that which is occupied by (...) agents, the mental states that constitute their reasons, and the processes through which, from time to time, the latter give rise to bodily movements—movements about which we can then go on to ask whether they are, e.g., free, rational, or moral. On this understanding of the philosophical division of labour, then, practical reasons and action appear as just some of the things or events that make up the ‘furniture of the world’, and are to be subjected to analysis as such. Now although we will not attempt to argue for it here, we believe this picture of the division between different philosophical domains to already be mistaken when it comes to epistemology. Here we only want to suggest that it is mistaken when it comes to practical philosophy, and that this confusion obscures the possibility of a very different understanding of the domain of practical philosophy—one that, as we will go on to explain, this volume is meant to draw attention to, and which is exhibited by the various contributions to it. (shrink)

The following is a transcript of a discussion about the question between Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, and James Conant. The discussion was part of a series of discussions on more or less philosophical subjects broadcast on Chicago Public Radio. This discussion is anchored by Gretchen Helfrich. Two listeners (Chris and Edwin) also took part.