Howard Gardner, professor ofeducation and codirector ofProject Zero at Harvard University (Cambridge, Massachusetts), is recipient ofa MacArthur Prize Fellowship (1981-1986), the Grawemeyer Award in Education (1990), an American Psychological Association (APA) William James Award, and an APA National Psychology Awardfor Excellence in the Media . Gardner is author ofCreating Minds : An Anatomy o...

Structural realism has been suggested as the best compromise in the debate on scientific realism. It proposes that we should be realist about the relational structure of the world, not its nature. However it faces an important objection, first raised by Newman against Russell: if relations are not qualified, then the position is either trivial or collapses into empiricism, but if relations are ...

This paper takes a fresh look at the nativism-empiricism debate, presenting and defending a nativist perspective on the mind. Empiricism is often taken to be the default view both in philosophy and in cognitive science. This paper argues, on the contrary, that there should be no presumption in favor of empiricism (or nativism), but that the existing evidence suggests that nativism is the most p...

In Part I (Philosophy of Science, Vol. 41 No. 2, June, 1974) it was argued that in order to rebut Humean sceptical arguments, and thus show that it is possible for pure science to be rational, we need to reject standard empiricism and adopt in its stead aim oriented empiricism. Part II seeks to articulate in more detail a theory of rational scientific discovery within the general framework of a...

Concept empiricists are committed to the claim that the vehicles of thought are re-activated perceptual representations. Evidence for empiricism comes from a range of neuroscientific studies showing that perceptual regions of the brain are employed during cognitive tasks such as categorization and inference. I examine the extant neuroscientific evidence and argue that it falls short of establis...

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...

This article explores the challenges presented by the mandate for evidence-based practice for family therapists who identify with the philosophical stance of social construction. The history of psychotherapy outcome research is reviewed, as are current findings that provide empirical evidence for an engaged, dialogic practice. The authors suggest that the binary between empiricism and social co...

Scientific change has two important dimensions: conceptual change and structural change. In this paper, I argue that the existence of conceptual change brings serious difficulties for scientific realism, and the existence of structural change makes structural realism look quite implausible. I then sketch an alternative account of scientific change, in terms of partial structures, that accommoda...