Abstract The rejection of metaphysical questions is a constant in Carnap’s thought. first part the paper delves into question basic tenets anti-metaphysics. Tying up to accounts authors like Michael Friedman and Werner Sauer, author examines relation between verificationism so-called logical criteria, arguing not only that secondary, but integration both instruments early philosophy faces diffi...

It is a commonplace in recent metaphysics that one’s logical commitments go hand in hand with one’s metaphysics. Brouwer, Heyting and Dummett have each championed the move to constructive (intuitionistic) reasoning on the grounds of anti-realism. I hope to break this close connection, to explain why a realist ought to reason constructively.

In his book Worlds and Individuals, Possible and Otherwise (2010), Takashi Yagisawa presents and argues for a novel and imaginative version of modal realism. It differs both from Lewis’s modal realism (Lewis 1986) and from actualists’ ersatz accounts (Adams 1974; Sider 2002). Yagisawa draws interesting parallels between tense and modality, and gives a metaphysics of modality which comes close t...

Accepting truth-value realism can seem to raise an explanatory problem: what can explain our accuracy about mathematics, i.e., the match between human psychology and objective mathematical facts? A range of current truth-value realist philosophies of mathematics allow one to reduce this access problem to a problem of explaining our accuracy about which mathematical practices are coherent – in a...

In this paper we introduce a new spatio-temporal methodology for biosurveillance entitled the Repeated Two-sample Rank (RTR) procedure. It is designed to sequentially incorporate information from individual observations and thus can operate on data in real-time as it arrives into an automated biosurveillance system. In addition, upon a signal of a possible outbreak, the methodology suggests a w...

Problem Many attempts have been made, starting from Quantum mechanics (QM), to prove the non-viability of hidden-variable (HV) solutions, and to justify the unnaturalness of QM explanations over physical realism. In particular, Colbeck & Renner (C&R) (2011) claimed to prove that no extension of quantum theory can exist with better predictive power than quantum mechanics itself. This implies tha...

Quantum codewords are highly entangled combinations of two-state systems. The standard assumptions of local realism lead to logical contradictions similar to those found by Bell, Kochen and Specker, Greenberger, Horne and Zeilinger, and Mermin. The new contradictions have some noteworthy features that did not appear in the older ones. PACS: 03.65.Bz, 89.80.+h, 89.70.+c ∗Permanent address: Depar...

The semantic view of theories is one according to which theories are construed as models of their linguistic formulations. The implications of this view for scientific realism have been little discussed. Contrary to the suggestion of various champions of the semantic view, it is argued that this approach does not make support for a plausible scientific realism any less problematic than it might...

There has been an empiricist tradition in the core of Logical Positivism/ Empiricism, starting with Moritz Schlick and ending in Herbert Feigl (via Hans Reichenbach), according to which the world of empiricism need not be a barren place devoid of all the explanatory entities posited by scientific theories. The aim of this paper is to articulate this tradition and to explore ways in which its ke...

The maximum likelihood approach to phylogenetics rests on frequency probability theory. This stands in stark contrast to the logical probability of corroboration-based cladistic parsimony. History is particular and cannot be described in terms of universal statements about abstract generalities, the task of the historical sciences being one of explanation, not prediction. Thus, frequency probab...