David Corfield starts his interesting book with a radical rejection of much that has been written about the philosophy of mathematics. He has no interest in ontology, epistemology, logicism, Platonism, Kantianism, nominalism, fictionalism etc., and does not mention most of them. Taking his cue from Nietzsche, Lakatos and a few others, he likens the traditional approach to the examination of a d...

This paper explores specific issues concerning linguistic theory and the use of simplicity criteria in the early Transformational Generative Grammar literature. In particular, the influence of Nelson Goodman and Willard Van Orman Quine upon the work of Noam Chomsky during the 1950s is assessed. The main topics considered include the development of constructional system theory, the use of mechan...

This article seeks to provide a set of pointers for methodological reflections on Foucauldian-inspired analyses the exercise power. Michel Foucault deliberately eschewed schemata, which may be why so little has been written implications his analyses. While this shares premise that we should refrain from standardized methodology, it argues providing broad informed by critical ambition and concep...

Devitt (2006) makes a sustained critique of Chomskyan linguistics, articulating persistent complaints about the “psychological reality” of generative grammars. I suggest these complaints are merely terminological and that Devitt fails to appreciate the status of Chomsky’s computational formalisms found elsewhere in cognitive science. Devitt ascribes an intentional conception of representations ...

This article summarizes six conceptual dimensions that underlie common assumptions about what counts as an adequate category of psychiatric disorder. These dimensions are 1) causalism-descriptivism, 2) essentialism-nominalism, 3) objectivism-evaluativism, 4) internalism-externalism, 5) entities-agents, and 6) categories-continua. Four different versions of the medical model are described and co...

The Aristotelian double characterization of a primary substance exploits the difference between the part-whole relation and the non-linguistic relation of predication. A problem arises whether and how the second relation could be reduced to something else. Such a reduction is explicitly declared or at least implicitly assumed in all version of conceptualism and nominalism. The moderate realism ...

Current versions of nominalism in the philosophy of mathematics have the benefit of avoiding commitment to the existence of mathematical objects. But this comes with a cost: to avoid commitment to mathematical entities, nominalists cannot take mathematical theories literally, and so, they seem unable to accommodate mathematical practice. In a recent work, Jody Azzouni has challenged this conclu...

This article builds on Hacking's framework of "dynamic nominalism" to show how knowledge about biological etiology can interact with the "kinds of people" delineated by diagnostic categories in ways that "loop" or modify both over time. The authors use historical materials to show how "geneticization" played a crucial role in binding together autism as a biosocial community and how evidence fro...

Jewish philosophy has always had its own way of making it´s answers to the different questions that have been appearing in history thought. This indeed happen with question about language, involve thought not only from philosophical point view, but also religious one. Thereby, a current arises, which can be called “ nominalism ” proposes new think directly confronting main intellectual traditio...

In my recent book "Tropy i uniwersalia" (Tropes and Universals), I argued that Roman Ingarden’s theory of universals is in fact a kind hidden nominalism. This claim has been subjected to serious criticism by Marek Piwowarczyk, who defended position attempted flesh out the Platonic universals. reply, argue his interpretation Platonism, though it fits Plato’s doctrine, does not correspond ontolog...