New Article on the Demarcation Problem Published!
The paper “Demarcation without Dogmas” written by Helsinki Circle members Ilmari Hirvonen and Janne Karisto was published in Theoria on 13 February 2022. Read it if you are interested in how the proposed answers to the demarcation between science and pseudoscience have developed over the decades. In addition, Hirvonen and Karisto give suggestions on how demarcation could…
Virallinen lausunto häirintää ja syrjintää vastaan
Helsingin Piiri on vastikään saanut informaatiota viime vuosien aikana tapahtuneesta asiattomasta ja vahingollisesta käyttäytymisestä filosofian tutkijoiden ja opiskelijoiden keskuudessa. Ongelmakäyttäytymistä on ollut myös tapahtumissa, joissa Piirin jäseniä on ollut läsnä. Helsingin Piiri pyytää vilpittömästi anteeksi kyvyttömyyttään tunnistaa ja reagoida asiattomaan toimintaan niin, että häirintä olisi saatu lopetettua. Teemme tarvittavat konkreettiset muutokset, jotta vahingollista käytöstä ei…
Prescription for Descriptionists
Ilkka Pättiniemi One can take (at least) two attitudes when it comes to the meaning of words (or concepts, phrases etc.). One can be a prescriptivist, that is one can hold to the idea that words have a real meaning that is determined by some, possibly metaphysical, facts about the world outside of their use.…
Consequences of Fallibilism
Ilkka Pättiniemi In my last blog post, I took up the idea that fallibilism should be taken seriously in the philosophy of mathematics. In doing so, I did not mean to imply that philosophers of mathematics (or mathematicians for that matter) deny that we are fallible creatures. Rather, my intent was to state, following Tymoczko,…
Tymoczko on the Epistemology of Mathematics
Ilkka Pättiniemi Lately, as one does, I have been reading up on the philosophy, and especially epistemology of mathematics. In doing so, I chanced upon the great, late philosopher of mathematics, Thomas Tymoczko. In his paper “Computers, Proofs and Mathematicians: A Philosophical Investigation of the Four-Color Proof” (1980) Tymoczko gives five very sensible criteria for…
Pratchett on Truth: Trust, Responsibility, and Truth
Ilkka Pättiniemi A bit of levity for this week, but with serious undertones. In the 25th book of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, The Truth, there is a discussion between the commander of Ankh-Morpork’s city watch, Vimes, and an intrepid journalist William de Worde on trust and responsibility: Vimes said, ‘I don’t trust you, Mr de…
Addendum on Vagueness, Bivalence, and Science
Ilkka Pättiniemi For this week’s installment I will tie up some loose ends from my post on vagueness, as there is always more to say. Thing the first: bivalence and realism.It seems clear that scientific realism requires bivalence, but does bivalence (or the demand for bivalence) imply (a demand for) realism? Simply put: no. The…
No Escape from Method
Petri Turunen While doing metaphilosophy, one can come across some rather hostile attitudes. This is particularly true if one dares to consider such questions as how is, can, or even should philosophy be practiced. Some say that such methodological considerations are a non-starter since philosophy, by its very nature, should not have any constraints. Philosophy…
Does Science Require Metaphysics? – The Case of Vagueness
Ilkka Pättiniemi Some time ago, Ilmari made a general case against the metaphysicians’ claim that science requires metaphysics. I agree with what was said there, but wish to make a more piecemeal case against such claims. To that end, I will look at vagueness, and see whether a metaphysical (or a merely philosophical) solution to…
How to Abolish Minds: What Is It Like to Be a Zombie?
Ilkka Pättiniemi Last time around, Thomas Nagel (1974) came to the rescue for the dualist: we after all can know that there are other minds. Notice, however, that the dissolution of skepticism about other minds rests on the notion of similarity between subjects. This similarity has to be physical/behavioral or else risk begging the question…
How to Abolish Minds: Feeling Batty
Ilkka Pättiniemi When we last left off solipsism loomed in the horizon for the opponent of materialism. Here I will introduce an argument that might save the dualist/mentalist from such a horrid fate: Thomas Nagel’s famous How is it Like to Be a Bat? (1974). In his the paper Nagel argues that…
How to Abolish Minds: Implications of Zombies
Ilkka Pättiniemi For this week’s installment (woefully late) I am going to dive into the depths of the philosophy of mind. Namely I will be arguing against minds, at least as they have been conceived by many thinkers in the past. To that effect I will start with philosophical zombies. Zombies were introduced into the…
The Fear of Instability
Ilkka Pättiniemi While Ilmari is dealing with the errors of empiricism (an endeavour on which I hope to contribute), I will continue diagnosing the realist’s condition. There is of course the idea that if we are not in touch with the really real, then anything goes. That is, a straightforward fear or relativism. But there…
New Article on Scientism Published!
The paper “How Not to Criticise Scientism” written by Helsinki Circle members Johan Hietanen, Petri Turunen, Ilmari Hirvonen, Janne Karisto, Ilkka Pättiniemi, and Henrik Saarinen was published in Metaphilosophy on 21 July 2020. The article is an open access publication and it can be read here.
The Errors of Empiricism: Infallibility of Experience
Ilmari Hirvonen In some sense empiricism is an almost trivially true doctrine: in order to find out what the empirical world is like, some sort of empirical research is needed. And precisely in this sense empiricism is an integral part of current – and past – science. But in philosophy empiricism has had different, more…
An Addendum on Classification
Ilkka Pättiniemi Last week in considering the realist and conventionalist arguments about the nature of classification, I ended up putting a weak – or perhaps even silly! – argument in the conventionalists mouth. Namely, I had the conventionalist claim that the following is an ampliative inference: “upon encountering a Dewey decimal for a previously unknown…
They Are Merely Conventional Signs!, or, Realism, Conventionalism, and Classification
Ilkka Pättiniemi When it comes to the subject of classification, a conventionalist view might at first blush seem quite welcoming. After all, many classificatory systems are in place for our convenience, and as such we should be free to change them if a new system seems to be doing a better job (given our needs).…
How to Test a (Metaphysical) Theory?
Ilmari Hirvonen Take any theory, model, or claim that is about something. Now, it seems rather obvious that there is a distinction to be made between what is true according to the theory and whether the theory itself is true. In order to make this clearer, consider Newton’s second law: F = ma. By substituting…
The Spirit of Verificationism
Ilkka Pättiniemi In philosophy verificationism seems to often enter the fray when one or more thinkers come to realize that the field has become stale and sterile – old ideas show no way forward, no way of settling controversies. The old ways of doing things have, the verificationist thinks, gotten us stuck. Verificationism, then, is…
Some Musings on Symmetry
Ilkka Pättiniemi Why are symmetries important in physics? Here’s a heuristic answer. We wish our physical theories to be such that nothing of importance depends on an arbitrary choice, say the choice of a coordinate system. Let me make this a bit more precise: Since trivially, if I place the origin in the centre of…
The Trouble With Counterfactuals
Ilkka Pättiniemi An important type of statements are counterfactual statements, that is statements about what would be the case if a fact of the matter were different than it actually is. “If a massive meteor had not hit the Earth at around the KT-boundary, birds would not be the only extant dinosaurs” is a counterfactual…
Rorty on Truth: Truth, What is it Good For?
Ilkka Pättiniemi Welcome, dear reader, to the third installment of Rorty on Truth. This time around I will take a look at what the concept of ‘truth’ can be good for, at least according to Rorty. Let’s start with a caricature. (I’m not sure that this in fact is a caricature, but am perfectly willing…
The Metaphysician’s Motte-and-Bailey
Ilmari Hirvonen Philosophers often think quite highly of what they are doing, and those engaged in metaphysics are no exception. Indeed, metaphysicians offer perhaps the clearest example of this attitude, for they frequently insist that their work is not only important but, in fact, necessary. After all, who could deny the self-evident truth that everyone…
Are You Serious?! Zeno’s Paradox and the Impossibility of Movement
Ilkka Pättiniemi In a recent piece on Starts With a Bang, Ethan Siegel takes up Zeno’s paradox and argues that it takes physics to solve it. Here I will not so much look at Siegel’s piece as take it as an opportunity to look at the absurdity of Zeno’s paradox seriously. Again this will take…
Vat-Knowledge Is Knowledge Enough
Ilmari Hirvonen Among the mighty tasks that analytic epistemologists have taken upon themselves is to give an answer to the philosophical sceptic. Simplifying a little, one could summarise scepticism as the denial of knowledge. In other words, the sceptic claims that we don’t know anything or, alternatively, some specific thing – like whether the past…
Rorty on Truth: Putnam and Relativism
Ilkka Pättiniemi Recall, dear reader, last week’s installment, and Rorty’s thoroughly sociological view of justification. I will take this view for granted for present purposes. That said, it’s time to get on with our story. Hilary Putnam was one of the great pragmatists of the late 20th and the early 21st Centuries, and as such…
Rorty on Truth: Conant, Orwell, and the Facts
Ilkka Pättiniemi Richard Rorty is infamous for his views on truth. Indeed, his insistence that truth is not, nor can it be, the goal of enquiry, and that truth is not an explanatory term (e.g. Rorty 1998), has caused some to call him a relativist, to say that he is anti-science, and so on. I…
A Brief Remark on Thought Experiments, or Did Galileo Refute Aristotle?
Ilkka Pättiniemi The use of a specific a priori method in philosophy is often justified by remarking that the same method is also used to good effect in physics. The method in question is, of course, the use of thought experiments to refute, or to support, claims or theories. A thought experiment can be characterized…
Non-Realism Is Not Anti-Realism
Johan Hietanen Recently, I’ve had the pleasure of discussing with philosophers of science about the virus behind COVID-19. Among other topics, I’ve heard an argument along the following lines: “If you’re not, at your core, a realist about the virus, then it would make no sense for you to support any prevention or management of…
Normative Relativism Isn’t Good for You
Ilmari Hirvonen Let’s start with a bold conjecture: you’re not a normative relativist. Not at least when it comes to issues like morals, linguistic interpretation, or inference. Indeed, adopting normative relativism in regards such topics would be, at the least, detrimental. But what is this thing called “normative relativism” anyway, and what’s so bad about…
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Natural Language
Ilkka Pättiniemi In his classic paper “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences” (1960), Eugene Wigner tells a story of two friends meeting after a long while. One of them has become a statistician working in population trends. He shows a reprint of his recent paper to his friend, who, upon seeing a…
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