Tensions Regarding Epistemic Concepts

• Authors: Joseph Margolis
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The paper argues that there is no logic of scientific discovery, but there is an inference-like pattern that we can model as a "logic," retrospectively, once a discovery has been successfully made. While accepting a kind of epistemological pluralism and opportunism, the claim will be advocated that a convergent and reasonably wide-ranging normative "logic" might be constructed, one that might even work reasonably well in selected applications and might (therefore) also lead us to make congruent judgments of irrationality or illogicality wherever it seems not to yield the "normatively appropriate" outcomes in otherwise comparable specimen cases.

Keywords

EN

representationalist form of scientific realism; internal realism; incommensurability; logic of material inference

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Human Affairs
• Year: 2009
• Volume: 19
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 169-181

Dates

published

2009-06-01

online

2009-06-19

Contributors

author

Joseph Margolis

• Department of Philosophy, Temple University, 728 Anderson Hall, Philadelphia, PA 19122 USA

References

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• Hacking, I.Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
• Margolis, J. Rethinking Peirce's Fallibilism. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 43, 2, 229-249, 2007.[WoS][Crossref]
• Peirce, C. S.Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss (Eds.). Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1935.
• Putnam, H.The Many Faces of Realism. LaSalle: Open Court, 1987.
• Testa, I. Hegelian Pragmatism and Social Emancipation: An Interview with Robert Brandom. Constellations, 10, 4, 554-570, 2003.

Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/v10023-009-0031-y