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Truth, Epistemio Ideals and the Psychology of Categorization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2023

Robert N. McCauley
Robert N. McCauley*
Affiliation:
Emory University
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Extract

Many philosophers, and particularly those of a Kantian stripe, have suspected that claims about the ways the world and its Joints are (in contrast to claims about the joints in our models of the world and the way they are) make little sense. Recently, similar views have gained prominence in the philosophy of science and in cognitive psychology. The demise of the strong distinction between theoretical and observational terms over the past two decades is just one, among many, developments in the philosophy of science which is of a piece with such suspicions. Meanwhile, a great deal of recent theoretical work on the psychology of categorization also affirms the fundamentality of our cognitive constructs in structuring human experience.

Type
Part III. Psychology
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1986 , Issue 1: Volume One: Contributed Papers 1986 , 1986 , pp. 198 - 207
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1986

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Footnotes

1

I wish to express my gratitude to Larry Barsalou, William Bechtel, John Heil, George Lakoff, Douglas Medin, Olric Neisser, and Robert Richardson for their helpful comments. Positions advanced in this paper are closely related to those in the last section of McCauley (1985).

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