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Québec Studies in the Philosophy of Science: Part II: Biology, Psychology, Cognitive Science and Economics Essays in Honor of Hugues Leblanc PDF

309 Pages·1996·7.853 MB·English
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Preview Québec Studies in the Philosophy of Science: Part II: Biology, Psychology, Cognitive Science and Economics Essays in Honor of Hugues Leblanc

QuEBEC STUDIES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE PART II BOSTON STUDIES IN THE PlllLOSOPHY OF SCIENCE Editor ROBERT S. COHEN, Boston University Editorial Advisory Board mOMAS F. GLICK, Boston University ADOLF GRUNBAUM, University of Pittsburgh SAHOTRA SARKAR, McGill University SYLVAN S. SCHWEBER, Brandeis University JOHN J. STACHEL, Boston University MARX W. WARTOFSKY, Baruch College of the City University ofN ew York VOLUME 178 HUGUES LEBLANC Courtesy of Suzanne S. Leblanc '" QUEBEC STUDIES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE Part II: Biology, Psychology, Cognitive Science and Economics Essays in Honor ofH ugues Leblanc Edited by MATHIEU MARION University o/Ottawa and ROBERT S. COHEN Boston University KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS DORDRECHT I BOSTON I LONDON Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN-13: 978-94-010-6537-5 e-ISBN-13: 978-94-009-0113-1 001: 10.1007/978-94-009-0113-1 Published by Kluwer Academic Publishers, P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, The Netherlands. Kluwer Academic Publishers incorporates the publishing programmes of D. Reidel, Martinus Nijhoff, Dr W. Junk and MTP Press. Sold and distributed in the U.S.A. and Canada by Kluwer Academic Publishers, 101 Philip Drive, Norwell, MA 02061, U.S.A. In all other countries, sold and distributed by K1uwer Academic Publishers Group, P.O. Box 322, 3300 AH Dordrecht, The Netherlands. Printed on acid-free paper All Rights Reserved © 1996 Kluwer Academic Publishers Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1996 No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner. TABLE OF CONTENTS EDITORIAL PREFACE ix PHILOSOPHY OF BIOLOGY FRAN<;OIS DUCHESNEAU / Teleological Arguments from a Meth- odological Viewpoint I PAUL DUMOUCHEL / Natural Selection and Selection Type Theories 13 DANIEL LAURIER / Function, Normality and Temporality 25 MURRA Y CLARKE / Natural Selection and Indexical Representation 53 PHILOSOPHY OF PSYCHOLOGY AND COGNITIVE SCIENCE EV AN THOMPSON / Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Life, and the Symbol-Matter Problem 63 JAMES A. McGILVRAY / Making Colored Objects 81 PAUL BERNIER / Why Marr's Theory of Vision Is Not Anti- Individualist 99 MICHEL SEYMOUR / "Three Thought Experiments Revisited" 113 DENIS FISETTE / Davidson on Norms and the Explanation of Behavior 139 DECISION THEORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF ECONOMICS ROBERT NADEAU / Economics and Intentionality 159 MAURICE LAGUEUX / How Could Anyone Be Irrational? 177 ALAIN VOIZARD / "If Cows Had Wings, We'd Carry Big Umbrellas." An Almost Number-Free Note on Newcomb's Problem 193 1. NICOLAS KAUFMANN / The Belief-Desire Model of Decision Theory Needs a Third Component: Prospective In.tentions 215 JOCEL YNE COUTURE / Decision Theory, IndividualistIc Explanations and Social Darwinism 229 EPISTEMOLOGICAL STUDIES SUSAN DWYER / Dispositions to Explain 247 CLAUDE PANACCIO / Belief-Sentences: Outline of a Nominalistic 265 Approach vii viii T ABLE OF CONTENTS MARTIN MONTMINY / Verificationism and the Molecular View of Language 279 NOTES ON THE AUTHORS 295 NAME INDEX 299 EDITORIAL PREFACE By North-American standards, philosophy is not new in Quebec: the first men tion of philosophy lectures given by a Jesuit in the College de Quebec (founded 1635) dates from 1665, and the oldest logic manuscript dates from 1679. In English-speaking universities such as McGill (founded 1829), philosophy began to be taught later, during the second half of the 19th century. The major influence on English-speaking philosophers was, at least initially, that of Scottish Empiricism. On the other hand, the strong influence of the Catholic Church on French-Canadian society meant that the staff of the facultes of the French-speaking universities consisted, until recently, almost entirely of Thomist philosophers. There was accordingly little or no work in modern Formal Logic and Philosophy of Science and precious few contacts between the philosophical communities. In the late forties, Hugues Leblanc was a young student wanting to learn Formal Logic. He could not find anyone in Quebec to teach him and he went to study at Harvard University under the supervision of W. V. Quine. His best friend Maurice L' Abbe had left, a year earlier, for Princeton to study with Alonzo Church. After receiving his Ph.D from Harvard in 1948, Leblanc started his profes sional career at Bryn Mawr College, where he stayed until 1967. He then went to Temple University, where he taught until his retirement in 1992, serving as Chair of the Department of Philosophy from 1973 until 1979. His achievements as a logician include seminal contributions to the development of Free Logic, in particular with the ground breaking paper, written jointly with Theodore Hailperin, 'Nondesignating Singular Terms' (Philosophical Review 68 (1959), pp. 239-43). After initial results by Bas van Fraassen, using supervaluation, Hugues Leblanc and Richmond Thomason obtained completeness results in 'Completeness Theorems for Some Presupposition-Free Logic' (Fundamenta Mathematicae 62 (1968), pp. 125-64). More recently, Leblanc also made seminal contributions to Truth-Value Semantics (cf. his Truth-Value Semantics, Amsterdam, North-Holland, 1976) and, inspired by appendices to Karl Popper's Logic of Scientific Discovery, to Probability Semantics and Probability Theory, in his paper 'Probabilistic Semantics for First-Order Logic' (ZeitschriJt fur mathematische Logik und Grundlagen der Mathematik 25 (1979), pp. 498- 509). In all, Leblanc has written more than one hundred scientific papers, the more recent of them in collaboration with Peter Roeper (Australian National University), and four books, he collaborated on two books and edited or co edited four. Many logic students will remember learning the subject from his classic textbook, written with William A. Wisdom, Deductive Logic (3rd edn., Englewood Cliffs, Prentice Hall, 1993). After a long and fruitful career in the United States, Hugues Leblanc is now ix x EDITORIAL PREFACE back in Quebec, where the philosophical milieu has changed beyond recogni tion since his student days. He came back to find studies in logic and in all aspects of philosophy of science in a flourishing state. As a result of the revolu tion tranquille which took place among the French-speaking society in the sixties, philosophy in Quebec opened up to external influences such as, initially, phenomenology and Marxism and, increasingly in the past twenty years, Anglo American analytic philosophy. As a result, there is now a growing number of French-speaking logicians and philosophers of science - although not all of them work from the point of view of analytical philosophy. Conditions were set for fruitful exchanges with the English-speaking philosophical community. (But we should add here that the essential role of immigrants in the evolution of the philosophical life in Quebec should not be overlooked. Contributors to the present volumes come not only from other parts of Canada, but also from Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Germany, Ireland, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States). Such exchanges have led recently to the creation of research groups across Quebec. These are now joined together under the name of Groupe de recherche sur la representation, l' action et Ie lang age or GRRAL. Our two volumes of Quebec Studies in the Philosophy of Science comprise the first full-scale collec tion of studies in the philosophy and history of science from French- and English-speaking philosophers of Quebec to appear in English; they include in particular most members of the GRRAL. As editors, we are happy to join the contributors in dedicating these volumes to Hugues Leblanc, who is, among philosophers, the first logicien quebecois. In our second volume, we have collected papers in philosophy of biology, phi losophy of psychology and cognitive sciences, philosophy of economics and decision theory, and relevant epistemological studies (while papers in logic, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of physics and in general philosophy and history of science were collected in volume one). This volume includes members of two of the research groups forming the GRRAL, the group Naturalisation de l'intentionalite (D. Laurier, C. Panaccio, M. Seymour, A. Voizard) and a group located at McGill, working on the possibility of a scien tific theory of meaning (S. Dwyer, J. McGilvray; the contributions of P. Pietroski and D. Davies are in volume I). Another group, Rationalite et sciences humaines, not affiliated to the GRRAL is also represented here (P. Dumouchel, M. Lagueux, R. Nadeau). In the section on philosophy of biology, Franr;ois Duchesneau explores the use of teleological arguments in biology, while Paul Dumouchel discusses selection type theories. In papers oriented towards the program of teleo semantics, Daniel Laurier examines the notion of natural function and Murray Clarke discusses the issue of the selection of true beliefs. The section on the philosophy of psychology and cognitive science opens with a paper at the border between theoretical biology and cognitive science, Evan Thompson discusses the notion of syntactic interpretability in relation to the 'symbol- EDITORIAL PREFACE xi matter' problem. Jim McGilvray looks at bearers of color properties from a subjectivist point of view. Paul Bernier argues against Burge's interpretation of Marr's theory of vision as anti-individualist, while Michel Seymour reexamines thought experiments (by Putnam, Burge & Kripke) which are used to support the later. Finally, Denis Fisette looks at the support given to Davidson's anom alous monism by the normative character of rationality. The next section opens with papers on the foundations of economics by Robert Nadeau, who argues that intentionality is a phenomenon constitutive of the domain of economic theory, and by Maurice Lagueux, who challenges the possibility of a characterization of irrationality free of value judgements. Then follow three papers concerned with issues in decision theory: Alain Voizard argues for Bayesian decision theory by minimizing the impact of Newcomb's problem. Nicolas Kaufmann argues for the incorporation of prospective inten tions in the model of expected utility maximization and Jocelyne Couture attacks individualistic interpretations of decision theory. In the last section, we collected papers dealing with wider philosophical issues, which are nevertheless relevant and complementary to some of the issues raised in this volume: Susan Dwyer argues for a dispositional explana tion of linguistic competence, while Claude Panaccio present his own nominal istic interpretation of belief .sentences and Martin Montminy raises objections to Dummett's molecularist"conception of meaning. We would like to thank Alain Voizard for his help in writing this preface. Once again we express our gratitude to Annie Kuipers for her assistance, encourage ment and patience. Boston and Montreal MATHIEU MARION & ROBERT S. COHEN April 1995

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