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Coherence Theory Reconsidered: Professor Werkmeister on Semantics and on the Nature of Empirical Laws

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

May Brodbeck
May Brodbeck*
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota
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Extract

Werkmeister's new book, The Basis and Structure of Knowledge is the second major attempt in recent years to defend the idealistic theory of knowledge. The first was Blanshard's Nature of Thought; and it is worth noticing that both authors, in undertaking the defense of a position long in the shadows, are well aware of contemporary developments in logic and technical philosophy. Werkmeister freely acknowledges his debt to Blanshard; yet his work differs in scope from the latter's in at least two ways. Firstly, the more recent book is concerned largely with the epistemological analysis of meaning and truth and hardly at all with what an older generation called “philosophical psychology,” while philosophical psychology fills all of the first and part of the second volume of Blanshard's work. In my opinion, this is all to the good. (That our generation inverts the error and too often indulges in psychological philosophy is another story!) Secondly, Werkmeister presents us with detailed analyses of scientific method, of the structure of scientific theories, and of mathematics, all three areas to which Blanshard pays virtually no attention.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , January 1949 , pp. 75 - 85
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1949

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Footnotes

1

The Basis and Structure of Knowledge, 451 pp., Harper & Bros., 1948.

References

2 Thinking and Meaning, H. K. Lewis & Co., London, 1947, p. 27. See also Gustav Bergmann, “Pure Semantics, Sentences, and Propositions,” Mind, Vol. LIII (1944).

3 Max Black, “The Semantic Definition of Truth,” Analysis, Vol. 8, (March, 1948).

4 This difference of category is a difference in the rules for the use of the symbols and these rules can be stated, of course, only in a meta-metalanguage.

5 Foundations of Mathematics, p. 142.

6 For an alternative solution which, however, also preserves the virtue and virtues of material implication, see Wilfrid Sellars' “Concepts as involving laws and inceivable without them,” Philosophy of Science, Oct. 1948. Professor Sellars has recently been developing a coherence theory of meaning from the point of view of logical empiricism. For details of his suggested rapprochement between the rationalist and empiricist traditions, besides the paper just cited, see “Episte mology and the New Way of Words,” Jl. of Phil., Vol. XLIV (1947).

7 Werkmeister's illustration is so chosen as to lead to an unfortunate misformulation of this point. He introduces (p. 149) a system of propositions, A, and another system, B, whose conditional propositions are the contrapositives of those in A. The two systems are, therefore, not contradictory, as he states, but are rather one and the same system. His assertion that “at least one of the two systems must contain false propositions” does not therefore follow.