This book proposes a novel position in the debate on scientific realism: Modal Empiricism. Modal empiricism is the view that the aim of science is to provide theories that correctly delimit, in a unified way, the range of experiences that are naturally possible given our position in the world. The view is associated with a pragmatic account of scientific representation and an original notion of situated modalities, together with an inductive epistemology for modalities. It purports to provide a faithful account of scientific practice and of its impressive achievements, and defuses the main motivations for scientific realism. More generally, Modal Empiricism purports to be the precise articulation of a pragmatist stance towards science. This book is of interest to any philosopher involved in the debate on scientific realism, or interested in how to properly understand the content, aim and achievements of science.

This collection highlights the new trend away from rationalism and toward empiricism in the epistemology of modality. Accordingly, the book represents a wide range of positions on the empirical sources of modal knowledge. Readers will find an introduction that surveys the field and provides a brief overview of the work, which progresses from empirically-sensitive rationalist accounts to fully empiricist accounts of modal knowledge. Early chapters focus on challenges to rationalist theories, essence-based approaches to modal knowledge, and the prospects for naturalizing modal epistemology. The middle chapters present positive accounts that reject rationalism, but which stop short of advocating exclusive appeal to empirical sources of modal knowledge. The final chapters mark a transition toward exclusive reliance on empirical sources of modal knowledge. They explore ways of making similarity-based, analogical, inductive, and abductive arguments for modal claims based on empirical information. Modal epistemology is coming into its own as a field, and this book has the potential to anchor a new research agenda.

Empiricism and the Problem of Metaphysics develops and defends an empiricist solution to the problem of metaphysics, then examines the implications of such a solution for skeptical arguments and the is-ought gap. At the heart of the solution is an empirically verifiable empiricist view of the a priori.

Philosophy is thinking critically about questions that matter. But many people find philosophy intimidating, so they never discover how it can help them engage ideas, culture, and even their faith. In this second edition of a classic text, Garrett DeWeese and J. P. Moreland use straightforward language with plenty of everyday examples to help to make philosophy a little less difficult.

Philosophical questions regarding the nature and methodology of philosophical inquiry have garnered much attention in recent years. Perhaps nowhere are these discussions more developed than in relation to the field of metaphysics. The Routledge Handbook of Metametaphysics is an outstanding reference source to this growing subject. It comprises thirty-eight chapters written by leading international contributors, and is arranged around five themes: • The history of metametaphysics • Neo-Quineanism (and its objectors) • Alternative conceptions of metaphysics • The epistemology of metaphysics • Science and metaphysics. Essential reading for students and researchers in metaphysics, philosophical methodology, and ontology, The Routledge Handbook of Metametaphysics will also be of interest to those in closely related subjects such as philosophy of language, logic, and philosophy of science.

For some centuries now the western world has endeavored to choose between rationalism and empiricism; or, when a choice was found impossible, somehow to reconcile them. But the particular brands of both which were taken for granted in confronting the problem were sUbjective: individual human reasoning stood for rationalism and private sense experience for empiricism. Since Plato it has been known that reasoning and feeling are often in conflict. No wonder that a standard for deciding between them or for harmonizing the two was found difficult to come by. Fortunately, due to the revival of realism, a way out presented itself, and we could now consider rationalism and empiricism on some kind of objective basis. In other words, rationalism is a theory about something outside us, and reasoning involves the utilization of a logic which in no wise depends upon our knowledge of it. Similarly; sense experience reveals the existence of data which can be reached through the senses but which in no way relies upon experience for its existence. Thus both reasoning and sensing bring us fragmentary news about an external world which contains not only logic and value but also the prospects for their reconciliation. The implicit philosophy of nominalism is self-liquidating. Where is the proposition which asserts or takes for granted the sole reality of actual physical particulars to get its reality? The meaning of it as a proposition has no place among the particulars.