Day 3

09.00 - 10.00

Stability of reference through theory change and scientific realism

Michel Ghins (Catholic University of Louvain)

10.00 - 11.00

Can We 'Naturalize All The Way Down'?

Stephen Stich (Rutgers University)

Though Mario Alai is sympathetic to philosophical naturalism, he has expressed doubt that we can “naturalize all the way down”. In this talk I will sketch a naturalistic argument that may go “further down” than Alai would. The focus of the talk is the cognitive science of moral judgment, and the conclusion is that there is no such thing as moral judgment.

11.00 - 11.30

Coffee Break

11.30 - 12.30

How I Developed my Views on Realism

Mario Alai (University of Urbino)

I shall try to sketch, and to an extent justify, the way my ideas on realism evolved over the years. As an undergraduate I was introduced to epistemology, philosophy of language and philosophy of science in an “orthodox” neopositivistic perspective. Soon, however, reading Quine and Kuhn, I became convinced of holism, inextricability of fact and language, incommensurability, conceptual and methodological relativism, scientific catastrophism. Initially I didn’t exactly appreciate how radical the potential irrationalist and antirealist consequences were. When I began to realize the risks of irrationalism and methodological anarchism, however, I found remedies through people like Lakatos, Pera, Shapere, Suppe, and through the non-statement approach to theories.  

For a while I also failed to recognize the strong risk of gnoseological and metaphysical antirealism, a sort of Kantian transcendental idealism. In fact, when Putnam adopted it in his antirealist turn, initially I was quite attracted. This time over, I worked out all by myself both the identification of the problem and its solution. May way out, in a nutshell, consisted in making explicit the very reasons why originally I didn’t see those various forms of relativity as incompatible with realism.

Still, in this way I had just defended gnoseological and metaphysical realism from certain very threatening impossibility arguments, but I hadn’t produced any positive arguments for them, yet. In order to find some, I decided to look at the debate on scientific realism, where I found the “no miracles” arguments. They had to be clarified, especially through the notion of “novel predictions”, defended against various objections, and supplemented by the ideas of partial truth and deployment realism (to fend off the “pessimistic meta-induction”).

At that point, however, I understood that similar arguments could be employed also to positively argue for gnoseological and metaphysical realism, and even to resist skepticism. Nonetheless, (a) only the truth of the assumptions essentially deployed in novel predictions is warranted by the ”no miracles” argument; (b) essentiality is very difficult to recognize, especially prospectively; moreover (c) since deployment realism grants that all past theories were partially false,  a moderately pessimistic induction is still possible. Thus, I am currently willing to grant that widespread falsifications or even outright revolutions may still lie ahead.

12.30 - 13.30

Realism of Properties and Empirical  Causality in Quantum Mechanics: Two Meaningful Philosophical Principles in a Complementary Relation

Gino Tarozzi (University of Urbino)

“Logical positivism and realism are therefore not opposed; anyone who acknowledges our principle must actually be an empirical realist” (M. Schlick).

• In his contribution to my 60th birthday’s Festschrift, Mario Alai argued that my empirical realism of properties is nothing more than a form of logical empiricism. The classical scientific realism of entities advocated by Alai implies in quantum mechanics an ontological commitment towards the wave function as in the case of the (non-local) theories of de Broglie's pilot wave and of Bohm's hidden variables, which assumed a weak form in the approaches that attribute purely relational properties to quantum waves, as I underlined in a joint paper with Alai and Auletta.

• In this talk I intend to show on the one hand how Alai's thesis on the empiricist drift of my realism is well founded and has its roots in my attempt to reconcile logical empiricism and empirical realism carried out from the beginning of my research to its more recent developments, and on the other hand, how our realistic interpretation of the wave function, while representing an alternative to Bohr's complementary interpretation of the wave-particle dualism, nevertheless leads to another form of complementarity between this weak formulation of realism and a strong formulation of the principle of causality both endowed with cognitive meaning in a factual sense from the point of view of a “consistent” empiricism.

13.30 - 15.00

Lunch Break

15.00 - 16.00

Round Table: 

Adriano Angelucci (Urbino), Gabriele Ferretti (Ruhr-University Bochum), Giovanni Galli (Urbino), Giovanni Macchia (Urbino), Mirko Tagliaferri (Urbino).

Appendix:

18,00, Hotel San Domenico

Presentazione del libro di GABRIELE FERRETTI

Correre e Ultracorrere. Saremo tutti Ultramaratoneti?

Editrice il Mulino

Come è possibile che sempre più persone comuni corrano ultramaratone, gare di corsa che arrivano fino a centinaia di chilometri? Di cosa è sintomo questa nuova pratica? Solo una rivoluzione sportiva o anche antropologica? Il libro vuole indagare l’odierna esplosione delle ultramaratone con una analisi che parte dalla biologia evoluzionistica, transita per psicologia e neuroscienze, e approda all’antropologia e alla filosofia. Gabriele Ferretti è un filosofo delle neuroscienze cognitive, dottore di ricerca a Urbino e Anversa, post-doc alla Humboldt Fellow alla Ruhr-University Bochum, Germania.