conceptual

It is widely accepted that explanation is a factive relation, that is, that it holds among facts (or true propositions, the distinction is not relevant for our purposes): if A explains B, A and B must be actual facts. Beyond that, it is a huge puzzle to determine what else is required for A to explain B. Some philosophers have defended the view that necessitation is another necessary condition for explanation, that is, that for A to explain B, A must necessitate or metaphysically entail B. The rationale for this condition is simple: for A to explain B, A must tell us why B happened instead of anything else that could have happened. If A does not entail B, then A is consistent with some possible outcome C different from B and this cannot explain why B happened instead of C. I (in Barceló 2015) and others have argued against the necessity condition. An interesting counterexample to the hypothesis that necessitation is required for explanation are what I will call explanations b...

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Podemos identificar dos tipos de naturalismos en filosofía: Un naturalismo exacerbado y otro moderado. La primera noción de naturalismo la encontramos, por ejemplo, en el volumen editado por Steven Wagner y Richard Warner, Naturalism, A Critical Appraisal (1993). En su introducción, los editores escriben: We take naturalism to be the view that only natural science deserves full and unqualified credence. (Wagner y Warner 1993, 1. Énfasis mío) Es también esta noción de naturalismo la que aparece en The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (1995), editado por Ted Honderich, donde naturalismo se define como . . . the view that everything is natural, i.e. that everything there is belongs to the world of nature, and so can be studied by the methods appropriate for studying that world. (Honderich 1995, 604) Este naturalismo exacerbado se distingue por cuatro tesis radicales: Naturalismo (Ontológico): Todo es natural. No existen objetos ni sucesos fuera del ámbito de la natu...

Last week, I was invited to a workshop on logicality, where Ives Beziaú mentioned that it was a shame that we used the same word “logic” to name both the philosophical discipline and its subject matter. This, he insisted, is a problem common to other disciplines like history and geography. Other disciplines, like ornithology or meteorology – my example, not his – do not have this problem and thus we can say what their subject of study is without sounding tautological: ornithology studies birds and meteorology studies the atmosphere. But what can we say about what logic studies? Well, it studies logic, of course! just like history studies history and geography studies geography. That is why it is very important to make a difference between logic as a philosophical discipline, with its theories, problems, concepts, etc. and logic as an aspect of reality, with its proper phenomena of propositions following one another, sets of them being consistent or inconsistent, etc. Just ...