Reference, Truth and Conceptual Schemes: A Defense of Internal Realism (Synthese Library, 296)

Forrai, G.

ISBN 10: 9048156777 / ISBN 13: 9789048156771

Published by Springer, 2010

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: Reference, Truth and Conceptual Schemes: A Defense of Internal Realism (Synthese Library, 296)
• Publisher: Springer
• Publication Date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 9048156777
• ISBN 13: 9789048156771
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: Like New
• Book Type: book

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Synopsis

1. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND The purpose of the book is to develop internal realism, the metaphysical-episte­ mological doctrine initiated by Hilary Putnam (Reason, Truth and History, "Introduction", Many Faces). In doing so I shall rely - sometimes quite heavily - on the notion of conceptual scheme. I shall use the notion in a somewhat idiosyncratic way, which, however, has some affinities with the ways the notion has been used during its history. So I shall start by sketching the history of the notion. This will provide some background, and it will also give opportunity to raise some of the most important problems I will have to solve in the later chapters. The story starts with Kant. Kant thought that the world as we know it, the world of tables, chairs and hippopotami, is constituted in part by the human mind. His cen­ tral argument relied on an analysis of space and time, and presupposed his famous doctrine that knowledge cannot extend beyond all possible experience. It is a central property of experience - he claimed - that it is structured spatially and temporally. However, for various reasons, space and time cannot be features of the world, as it is independently of our experience. So he concluded that they must be the forms of human sensibility, i. e. necessary ingredients of the way things appear to our senses.

From the Back Cover

This book contains substantially extended and revised versions of the best papers from the 12th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2010), held in Funchal, Madeira, Portugal, June 8-12, 2010.

Two invited papers are presented together with 39 contributions, which were carefully reviewed and selected from 62 full papers presented at the conference (out of 448 submissions). They reflect state-of-the-art research work that is often driven by real-world applications, thus successfully relating the academic with the industrial community. The topics covered are: databases and information systems integration, artificial intelligence and decision support systems, information systems analysis and specification, software agents and internet computing, and human-computer interaction.