Logical Realism Research Articles

Logic and ontology in the thought of Bolzano

Logic and theology were two domains of great importance to Bolzano. His attempt to reconcile the demands of these two domains led Bolzano to very strong logical realism, or, objectivism, whereby theology could be put on a firm ground. The paper analyzes the problem of objective concepts, propositions, and truths, with an attempt to give an interpretation of these entities, to account for their puzzling ontological status in Bolzano’s system.

Review: The Positivist and the Ontologist: Bergmann, Carnap and Logical Realism

Review: The Positivist and the Ontologist: Bergmann, Carnap and Logical Realism

FACTS, TRUTHS AND THE ONTOLOGY OF LOGICAL REALISM

FACTS, TRUTHS AND THE ONTOLOGY OF LOGICAL REALISM

Facts, Truths and the Ontology of Logical Realism

Facts, Truths and the Ontology of Logical Realism

Against Logical Realism

This paper argues against Logical Realism, in particular against the view that there are facts of matters of logic that obtain independently of us, our linguistic conventions and inferential practices. The paper challenges logical realists to provide a non-intuition based epistemology, one which would be compatible with the empiricist and naturalist convictions motivating much recent anti-realist philosophy of mathematics.

Modeling the nervous system

he collection of articles published in this special issue of TINS is united by a common interest in the use of models as tools to unravel the complex workings of neural systems. As a biologist, I believe that the incorporation of such modeling techiques into the repertoire of basic neuroscientific research is absolutely essential for the eventual success of the field. Even in so-called 'simpler systems' it is clear that great amounts of detailed physiological and anatomical data alone are not enough to infer how these neural circuits work. Nervous systems are simply too complex to be understood without the quantitative approach that modeling provides. The papers in this issue were selected to demon- strate the considerable diversity of model-based approaches currently in use in neurobiology. The majority of these articles describe computer-based modeling efforts intent on replicating stimulus-induced neuronal responses or neurally controlled behavior. As such, they represent the modeling mainstream. However, the article by Bialek and Rieke (pp. 428-434) describes techniques used to decode the information content in single neuronal spike-trains - using models that learn to reconstruct the original stimulus from known neuronal responses. As the authors point out, this is the opposite objective of most modeling efforts. In the paper by Bulloch and Syed (pp. 422-427) techniques to construct what are essentially models of neural circuits using living cells in tissue culture are described. The argument is made that these reduced systems make it much easier to manipulate and understand the complex response properties of neur- ons, in addition to those of small networks. As mentioned above, the majority of the articles in this issue describe more conventional efforts to construct computer models of neuronal function. However, even in this category, the articles selected demonstrate a range of modeling approaches and assumptions. These fall into several distinct, though overlapping, categories that are also characteristic of modeling efforts in general. First, the articles represent the wide variation in the focus and scale of neurobiological modeling. At one end of this scale, the article by Kawato and Gomi (pp. 445-453) describes a systems-level approach to understanding the vestibular-ocular reflex. Their effort is strongly influenced by engineering theory and 'connectionist' modeling techniques, and is intended to explain the behaviorally related interactions of vast numbers of neurons found in several different mammalian brain structures. At the other end of the continuum, Segev (pp. 414-421) describes the tech- niques used to simulate single neurons in great anatomical and physiological detail. Between these two extremes lies the article by Calabrese and De Schutter (pp. 439-445), which describes a bio- physically realistic model of several interacting in- vertebrate neurons, and the contribution by Cohen and colleagues (pp. 434--438), which describes an ongoing multi-lab collaboration intent on under- standing the behavior generated by many more neurons within the lamprey spinal chord. A second difference displayed by the models presented involves their degrees of simulated bio- logical realism. The central pattern generator (CPG) model described by Calabrese and De Schutter includes considerable biological realism at the level of single neurons. In contrast, the CPG modeling of Cohen et al. is based on a mathematical simplification that effectively removes the biophysical behavior of single cells from the model. In both cases the models make biologically testable predictions and provide biologically plausible interpretations. Somewhere in the middle, the article by Segev starts with the assumption that biophysically detailed models of single cells are necessary, but that these models should be used to generate more reduced representations of single cells for eventual inclusion in network simulations. Finally, these modeling efforts, like those in the wider literature, can be very broadly grouped into those that are intended to demonstrate the biological plausibility of a particular pre-existing idea and those that are used as tools for obtaining and testing new ideas. For example, in the article by Kawato and Gomi, the modeling efforts described are strongly influenced by more abstract considerations of motor performance as well as by work with more abstract network models. In this case, the modelers' task is to implement abstract ideas in as biologically realistic a manner as possible. In contrast, the article by Calabrese and De Schutter demonstrates how new ideas about the organization of neural systems can emerge from the process of constructing a biologically realistic model. In this case, the model becomes just another tool the physiologist uses to explore the properties of a complex and not yet well understood circuit.

The Persistence of Counterexample: Re-examining the Debate Over Leibniz Law

Are there good reasons to reject the principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles as a necessary truth? Refutations seem to abound, the most common of which appeal to considerations of symmetry. But just as numerous are defenses of the principle. Of course, any argument that the identity of indiscernibles is (or fails to be) necessarily true must be examined against an assumed background theory of universals.' A change in the theory may well result in a different assessment of whether indiscernibility with respect to those universals is sufficient for identity. Opponents in the debate have expressed much concern over what univerals there are-one admitting only a subset of the other's universals. This paper contends that a more fundamental issue concerns what the opponents take a universal to be. We distinguish two non-overlapping theories of universals, Logical Realism and Natural Realism, and show that much of the debate conflates these frameworks.

If it is a dog, can it be an animal? the role of metalinguistic knowledge in the acquisition of linguistic superordination

Acquisition of superordinate classification has traditionally been explained in terms of development of class inclusion. More recently, alternative explanations have been put forward by many authors, who consider superordination, as a product of linguistic and metalinguistic acquisitions. An experiment was carried out aimed at understanding the role of metalinguistic knowledge—defined in terms of the nominal realism/nominal relativism distinction. Subjects were 41 children from 7 years 1 month to 8 years 9 months, presented with a free-definition task of objects belonging to familiar categories and a questionnaire regarding the origin of names, their nature, exchangeability, etc. A significant correlation was found between spontaneous definitions of objects and conceptions of the relationships between names and things: Those subjects who are aware of the historical and cultural origin of names (decline of ontological realism) are also able to use superordinates in their definitions. However, superordination is not linked to awareness of the arbitrary nature of the word-referent connection (decline of logical realism).

The conversion of Manzoni's l'Innominato or, The Repressed Catholic Consciousness of a Criminal

THE CONVERSION OF MANZONFS L INNOMINATO OR, THE REPRESSED CATHOLIC CONSCIOUSNESS OF A CRIMINAL ANNETTE LEDDY In the portrayal ofl' Innominato 's religious conversion, conflict we see the dis- which runs throughout Promessi Sposi between two historical novel. tinctly different narrators. One narrator extends the lens of psycho- logical realism, the subjective dimension of the The other narrator is Catholic, and seeks to prove the intrinsically Catholic is nature of fact that human we psychology.^ This problem comphcated by the are the products of are presented with characters who Catholic upbringings within a Cathohc culture and who therefore, whether or not they bave rejected Catholicism, would realistically possess a Catholic psychology. Thus, while the psychological-realist narrator often successfully captures the experience of Catholic anxiety, the Catholic narrator often makes this anxiety less credible, interesting and profound by his habit of informing us of when a character's are those of a anxieties are those of a good Catholic and when they bad Catholic. The Catholic narrator often seems to intervene in the he can give that character's crisis a Catholic name. It is almost as though the Catholic narrator is resisting the dis- analysis of a character so covery of the universal; that is, the potentially non-Catholic nature of

Book Notes

Book NOTES BOOK REVIEWS 105 Ralph Waldo Emerson. By Josephine Miles. Univ. of Minn. Pamphlets on American Writers, 41. (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minn. Press, 1964. Pp. 48. Paper, $.65) This "pamphlet" by Professor Josephine Miles is a substantial essay on Emerson, relating his Essays to his life and his style to his thought. It is supplemented by a useful bibliography. --H. W. Scm,mm~ Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, IV, I (Winter 1968). Ed. Edward C. Moore (Amherst: Univ. of Mass. Press, 1968. Pp. 58) Periodicals are not ordinarily reviewed in this journal. However we call attention to the exceptional unity and importance of the contents in this one. It contains Murray G. Murphey's Presidential address, "Kant's Children: The Cambridge Pragmatists," in which he develops in detail the emergence of Peirce's philosophy of science and conceptions of truth and reality within the framework of phenomenalism and transcendental idealism. This essay is followed by "Existence, Reality and Objects of Knowledge: A Defense of C. S. Peirce as a Realist" by B. Gresham Riley, which shows the relation of Peirce's pragmaticist philosophy of science to his realistic ontology. Then Douglas Greenlee mediates between these rival interpretations by showing the double function of "Peirce's Hypostatic and Factorial Categories." The reader would do well to supplement his study of these excellent papers by reading also Max Fisch'.~ recent work on the steps by which Peirce shifted from his early "nominalism" to a modified Seotist "realism." This analysis brings out the complications involved in Peirce's accepting a general logical realism, but repudiating the Scotist doctrine of real "supposits" because he wished to locate reality not in substance but in the future reference of judgments. This adds a further complication to a very complicated analysis. --H.W.S. Selected Writings. By George Herbert Mead. Ed. with intro. Andrew J. Reck. The Library of Liberal Arts, 177. (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964. Pp. lxxiiq-416. Paper, $2.45) This is a most welcome and useful collection of Mead's basic writings, arranged chronologically . Thus the volume shows how Mead's social psychology developed gradually into a theory of the social gestalt of self-consciousness and of knowledge until it finally suggested a philosophy of history and a reafistic ontology of objective relativity. It provides, therefore, what Mead in his life-time failed to achieve--a fairly complete system of philosophy. The editor's well-organized introduction supplies an excellent outline of this system in ils development. In view of the scattered sources from which these writings are gathered, it is a great service that this volume renders not only to students of Mead, but to historians who, realizing the growing significance of Mead's work, need to have the source-material for reaching an understanding of how the distinctive traits of recent American philosophy took shape. For Mead had one of the most original and constructive minds among those who shaped this history. He seemed to sense, more than most of his colleagues, the radical implications of behavioral sociology and psychology for the general philosophy of science and of culture. He was pre-occupied much of his time with "movements of thought in the nineteenth century," but out of this historical study he arrived at critical insights that have proved to be basic in the development of twentieth-century thought. One of the most striking achievements was Mead's alertness in generalizing the theory of relativity. --H.W.S. The Philosophy o! No: A Philosophy of the New Scientific Mind. By Gaston Bachelard. Trans. G. C. Waterstou. (New York. Grossmann Publishers, 1968. Pp. xi+123. $6) This is a translation of a volume first published by the Presses Universitaires de France in 1940 under the title La Philosophic du non. The following titles of the six chapters indicate the subject matter: "The Various Metaphysical Explanations of a Scientific Concept,.... The 106 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Notion of an Epistemological Profile," "Non-substantiaIism, the Preliminaries of a NonLavoisian Chemistry," "The Elementary Spatial Connections of Noa-analytics," "Non-Axistotelian Logic," and "The Synthetic Value of the 'philosophy of No."" --H. W. S. Pleasure and Pain: A Study in Philosophical Psychology. By J...

A Preface to Logic The Revival of Realism : Critical Studies in Contemporary Philosophy

THESE two books both advocate logical realism, as opposed to the conceptualism or nominalism which has been fashionable in Western thought since the fourteenth century. Undoubtedly universals are concepts, but concepts are not generic images, as Prof. Cohen points out ; nor are universals merely concepts if they play their parts successfully. Undoubtedly names are special kinds of universals, but to say that universals are merely names is to make knowledge illusory. A Preface to Logic By Morris R. Cohen. Pp. xix + 202. (London: George Routledge and Sons, Ltd., 1946.) 8s. 6d. net. The Revival of Realism : Critical Studies in Contemporary Philosophy By James Feibleman. Pp. vii + 333. (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1946.) 22s. net.