Carnap, Quine, and Putnam on Methods of Inquiry - Hardcover

Ebbs, Gary

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1107178150 ISBN 13: 9781107178151

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2017

Synopsis

Carnap, Quine, and Putnam held that in our pursuit of truth we can do no better than to start in the middle, relying on already-established beliefs and inferences and applying our best methods for re-evaluating particular beliefs and inferences and arriving at new ones. In this collection of essays, Gary Ebbs interprets these thinkers' methodological views in the light of their own philosophical commitments, and in the process refutes some widespread misunderstandings of their views, reveals the real strengths of their arguments, and exposes a number of problems that they face. To solve these problems, in many of the essays Ebbs also develops new philosophical approaches, including new theories of logical truth, language use, reference and truth, truth by convention, realism, trans-theoretical terms, agreement and disagreement, radical belief revision, and contextually a priori statements. His essays will be valuable for a wide range of readers in analytic philosophy.

About this title

About the Author

Gary Ebbs is Professor of Philosophy at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the author of Rule-Following and Realism (1997) and Truth and Words (2009), and co-author of Debating Self-Knowledge (Cambridge, 2012). He has also published articles on a wide range of topics in the philosophy of language, logic, and mind, as well as epistemology and the history of analytic philosophy.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1107178150
• ISBN 13: 9781107178151
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288