FALL 2014 Lectures Series (No.2): Mechanisms, Capacities, and Nomological Machines

Date & Time: Friday, 26 Sept., 3-5 p.m.

Venue: Rm 202, Centre for Humanities and Social Sciences Education, NYMU

About the theme

Cartwright (2007) believes that her work shares much in common with Peter Machamer, Lindley Darden and Carl Craver’s mechanistic philosophy. Machamer, Darden, and Craver (2000) propose a dualistic account of mechanisms and believe that it stands in opposition to both substantivalist and process-ontology accounts. They locate Cartwright within the camp of substantivalists. In this article, I demonstrate that this disagreement can be eliminated and the two accounts are complementary. By comparing Cartwright’s work with that of Machamer, Darden, and Craver, I show that the two accounts presuppose each other’s concepts, and, therefore, that they share a common theoretical structure. But these commonalities oblige them to meet a challenge standardly issued by those philosophers who insist that laws play a crucial role in causal explanations. I argue that this challenge can be overcome by integrating the two accounts. 

About the speaker

陳瑞麟，現為國立中正大學哲學系講座教授，專長為科學哲學、自然哲學、西方科學史及科技與社會研究。

Reading material

Chen, Ruey-lin 'Mechanisms capacities and nomological machines' (unpublished)

奠基、理解、跨域對話- 哲學和人文價值的檢討與前瞻

時間：2014年9月27日(星期六)

地點：陽明大學人社院第二教學大樓 242教室

FALL 2014 Lecture Series (No.1): Revising Logic

Date & Time: Monday, 22 Sept., 3:30-5:30 p.m.

Venue: Rm 201, Centre for Humanities and Social Sciences Education, NYMU

About the theme

Much ink has been spilled over the last few decades in disputes between advocates of “classical logic”—that is, the logic invented by Frege and Russell, and polished by Hilbert and others—and advocates of non-classical logics—such as intuitionist and paraconsistent logics. One move that is commonly made in such debates is that logic cannot be revised. When the move is made, it is typically by defenders of classical logic. Possession, for them, is ten tenths of the law. The point of this paper is not to enter into substantive debates about which logic is correct—though relevant methodological issues will transpire in due course. The point is to examine the question of whether logic can be revised. (And let me make it clear at the start that I am talking about deductive logic. I think that matters concerning non-deductive logic are much the same, but that is an issue for another occasion.) Three questions, then, will concern us:
1. Can logic be revised?
2. If so, can this be done rationally?
3. If so, how is this done?
(extracted from 'Revising logic' by G. Priest provided in the reading material below.)

2014 秋季系列演講 FALL 2014 Lecture Series

時間：每週五 14:00-16:00
Time: Friday, 2-4 p.m.
地點：陽明人社通識教育中心202室
Venue: Rm202, Centre for Humanities and Social Sciences Education, NYMU
預定主題與講者：
Schedule:

• 9/22  Prof. G. Priest 'Revising Logic' *Monday, 15:30-17:30*
• 9/26  陳瑞麟 ‘Experimental discovery, data models, and mechanisms in Biology: an example from Mendel’s work’ *15:00-17:00*
• 10/3  梁益堉 ‘Experiential ownership and pre-reflective immunity’
• 10/31 陳波「反駁Kripke反描述論的語意論證」 *15:00-17:00*
• 11/7  林宜平 「臺伯格的悲歌：台灣電子業女工的職業災害」
• 11/24  朱菁 ‘Cognitive architecture and extended cognition (provisional)’ *Monday, 15:00-17:00*
• 12/5  黃文宏 「從西田哲學來看現象學的『超越』問題」
• 12/10  Prof. A. Guay 'Physical vs. mathematical structures: is there a difference?' *Wednesday, 14:00-16:00*
• 12/12  Prof. J. Pemberton ‘Aristotle’s view of causation’
• 12/19  林伶美 「鋼琴音樂與鋼琴工藝」
• 1/9  陳今偉 「評心智歸屬論」

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SPR 2014 Lecture Series (No.8): The semantics of scientific discourse involving hypothetical entities

Date & Time: Friday, 6 Jun., 2-4 p.m. 

Venue: Rm202, Centre for Humanities and Social Sciences Education, NYMU  

About the theme

     In the scientific realism debate, there has been a recent turn away from wholesale arguments that purport to tell us about the approximate truth of theories in general, and toward retail arguments that purport to tell us about the approximate truth of particular theories. While this shift has brought with it a renewed interest in case studies that has arguably enriched the debate, retail arguments alone fail to have any general implications for the debate. I aim to develop a position that captures what is satisfying about the turn to retail arguments, and yet has some more general implications. My starting point is that many of the case studies that have drawn the most attention involve hypothetical entities. I draw on some work in linguistics on discourse referents in order to defend a general view of the semantics of scientific discourse that involves hypothetical entities. I argue that when scientists introduce terms to name hypothetical entities, those terms have discourse referents, but lack empirical referents; reference to empirical entities is possible only once there is some consensus in the scientific community that an empirical entity has been discovered.