Mozersky, M. Joshua (2019) Nominalism, Contingency, and Natural Structure. Synthese, 198. pp. 5281-5296. ISSN 1573-0964
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Abstract
Ian Hacking’s wide-ranging and penetrating analysis of science contains two well developed lines of thought. The first emphasizes the contingent history of our
inquiries into nature, focusing on the various ways in which our concepts and styles of reasoning evolve through time, how their current application is constrained by the conditions under which they arose, and how they might have evolved differently. The second is the mistrust of the idea that the world contains mind-independent natural kinds, preferring nominalism to ‘inherent structurism’. These two pillars of thought seem at first to be mutually reinforcing: the lack of natural structure can help make sense of scientific variability and revision, while variability and revision provide reason to suspect that natural structure is little more than idealization. In what follows, I argue that these two pillars not only fail to support each other, but in fact conflict. One of them must fall, and it is clear which.
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| Item Type: | Published Article or Volume | ||||||
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| Keywords: | Realism, Nominalism, Structure, Contingency, Mind-independence, Science, Ian Hacking, Representation, Skepticism, Reality | ||||||
| Subjects: | General Issues > Scientific Metaphysics General Issues > History of Philosophy of Science General Issues > History of Science Case Studies General Issues > Laws of Nature General Issues > Natural Kinds General Issues > Philosophers of Science General Issues > Realism/Anti-realism |
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| Depositing User: | Professor M. Joshua Mozersky | ||||||
| Date Deposited: | 27 Mar 2024 11:30 | ||||||
| Last Modified: | 27 Mar 2024 11:30 | ||||||
| Item ID: | 23229 | ||||||
| Journal or Publication Title: | Synthese | ||||||
| Publisher: | Springer (Springer Science+Business Media B.V.) | ||||||
| DOI or Unique Handle: | https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02401-8 | ||||||
| Subjects: | General Issues > Scientific Metaphysics General Issues > History of Philosophy of Science General Issues > History of Science Case Studies General Issues > Laws of Nature General Issues > Natural Kinds General Issues > Philosophers of Science General Issues > Realism/Anti-realism |
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| Date: | 15 September 2019 | ||||||
| Page Range: | pp. 5281-5296 | ||||||
| Volume: | 198 | ||||||
| ISSN: | 1573-0964 | ||||||
| URI: | https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/23229 |
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