LANGUAGE, TRUTH AND REASON: 30 YEARS LATER

Cornell University Press eBooks, 2018

The article concerns the meta-epistemological problem of the justification of a theory of knowledge and provides a reconstruction of the history of its formulations. In the first section, I analyse the connections between Sextus Empiricus' diallelus, Montaigne's rouet and Chisholm's "problem of criterion"; in the second section I focus on the link between the diallelus and the Cartesian circle; in the third section I reconstruct the origin of "Fries' trilemma"; finally, in the last section I draw some general conclusions about the issue qua a general problem for a theory of knowledge.

RESISTANCES. Journal of the Philosophy of History, 2021

There is a view in contemporary philosophy of science according to which scientific methodology itself is subject to radical change as part of scientific progress. According to this view, change in science is not confined to accepted theories. The core principles of scientific theory appraisal, including the rules and categories used to rank and confer truth-values on theories, are also said to be subject to radical change as science develops. In this paper, I examine Ian Hacking's version of this no-invariant-methodology thesis. I argue that, just like Thomas Kuhn's "paradigms," Larry Laudan's "research traditions," and Imre Lakatos' "research programmes," Hacking's "styles of reasoning" fail to give an adequate account of scientific progress.

Practices of Reason Fusing the Inferentialist and Scientific Image. Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 2021

https://www.routledge.com/Practices-of-Reason-Fusing-the-Inferentialist-and-Scientific-Image/Koren/p/book/9780367702212 This book offers new insights into the nature of human rational capacities by engaging inferentialism with empirical research in the cognitive sciences. Inferentialism advocates that humans’ unique kind of intelligence is discursive and rooted in competencies to make, assess and justify claims. This approach provides a rich source of valuable insights into the nature of our rational capacities, but it is underdeveloped in important respects. For example, little attempt has been made to assess inferentialism considering relevant scientific research on human communication, cognition or reasoning. By engaging philosophical and scientific approaches in a productive dialogue, this book shows how we can better understand human rational capacities by comparing their respective strengths and weaknesses. In this vein, the author critically revisits and constructively develops central themes from the work of Robert Brandom and other "language rationalists": the nature of the assertoric practice and its connection to reasoned discourse, the linguistic constitution of the shared space of reasons, the social nature and function of reasoning, the intersubjective roots of social-normative practices and the nature of objective thought. Practices of Reason will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language and philosophy of logic.

Revisiting discovery and justification, 2006

Argumentation, 2001

E-LOGOS, 2020

The paper discusses the unexpected trends in the most modern forms of philosophy and science. The traditional differences in the roles of philosophy and science can be traced back to Kant: natural sciences refer to possible experience; philosophy as metaphysics does not affect experience at all. Today, there are very different trends. Some physical theories (such as string theory) have a highly theoretical character and cannot be proved by empirical experiments. A new approach has been developed in philosophy too: experimental philosophy, which makes use of empirical data to inform research on philosophical questions. Are these approaches just contradictions in terms or rather new styles of reasoning? The goal is not a deep analysis of x-phi or string theory but a reflection on the context between tradition and new trends in philosophy and science which are still rather marginal but may play an important role in the future.

In this essay, we argue that, following their perception of practices in the natural sciences, the social sciences have reified methodology, making it the chief imperative of social investigation and using it to ground their knowledge claims. We find this to be the case even in the work of social scientists who try to overcome or reject the dominant positivist paradigm. We argue that this obsession with method has led the social sciences to abandon thinking-beyond-the-given in favor of small, specialized studies whose justification is no longer substantive but methodology driven. After a review of the history of the role of method in traditional philosophies of science, the essay turns to the work of recent critics of social science who have become increasingly dissatisfied with modeling the social sciences after the natural ones. We distinguish between a hermeneutic and phenomenological critique of positivism, both of which, we argue, end up reproducing the scientism they reject. We identify this problem in our careful readings of some of the most influential critics of Popperian scientific philosophy. In the final section, we distinguish between contemporary social science, situated in what we term the epistemological paradigm, and our own critical science, stemming from an alternate, ontohistorical tradition in the history of ideas. Here, we begin to lay out what a critical, nonmethodology-driven, reflective and historical science might look like.