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Hogarth's Hidden Parts: Satiric Allusion, Erotic Wit, Blasphemous Bawdiness and Dark Humour in Eighteenth-Century English Art by Bernd W. Krysmanski (Book Review)
Get PDFA review of a book about William Hogarth which aims to turn the idea of the "good" Hogarth on its head. The author questions the artist's moralising agendas, his socially engaged and reformist identities, arguing instead that Hogarth was a "bawdy hedonist," a malicious blasphemer, possibly even a pedophile
Saving the intuitions: polylithic reference
Get PDFMy main aim in this paper is to clarify the concepts of referential success
and of referential continuity that are so crucial to the scientific realism debate. I start by considering the three dominant theories of reference and the intuitions that motivate each of them. Since several intuitions cited in support of one theory conflict with intuitions cited in support of another something has to give way. The traditional policy has been to reject all intuitions that clash with a chosen theory. A more radical policy, tied to some experimental philosophers, has called for the rejection of any evidential role for intuitions. I explore a largely ignored third alternative, i.e. saving intuitions (and their evidential role) even when they are at odds. To accommodate conflicting intuitions different sets of internally consistent (yet externally inconsistent) intuitions are taken to lend credence to different concepts of reference. In the current context, this means that the concepts of referential success and referential continuity are not
monolithic. They are what I call ‘polylithic’. This paper is as much about meta-philosophical concerns with the role of intuitions as it is about reference and the scientific realism debate. Regarding the former I hope that a blueprint will emerge for similar projects in other philosophical domains. Regarding the latter, I hope that polylithicity helps disentangle claims about referential success and continuity in the scientific realism debate by making perspicuous which concepts are best equipped to evaluate the realist’s epistemic claims against the historical record of science
The Prospective Stance in Realism
Get PDFScientific realists endeavor to secure inferences from empirical success to approximate truth by arguing that, despite the demise of empirically successful theories, the parts of those theories responsible for their success do, in fact, survive theory change. If, as some antirealists have recently suggested, successful theory parts are only identifiable in retrospect, namely, as those that have survived, then the realist approach is trivialized, for now success and survival are guaranteed to coincide. The primary aim of this article is to counter this argument by identifying successful theory parts independently from their survival
