Ramsey sentences and Newman’s objection

Concerns about referential indeterminacy also feature prominently in discussions about realism within the philosophy of science. In this chapter we examine a particular version of scientific realism that arises by considering Ramsey sentences. Roughly, these are sentences where all the theoretical vocabulary has been existentially quantified away. Ramsey sentences seem promising, since they seem to incur a kind of existential commitment to theoretical entities, which is characteristic of realism, whilst making room for a certain level referential indeterminacy. We examine both the relation between Newman's objection and the Push-Through Construction, and the relation between Ramsey sentences and various model-theoretic notions of conservation. By combining the Push-Through Construction with these notions of conservation, we show that the dialectic surrounding Newman's objection mirrors the dialectic surrounding Putnam's permutation argument in the philosophy of mathematics from chapter 2.

Neither Analytic Nor Dialectic I: Horizon

The second chapter contains an exposition and critique of Garcia’s definitions of analysis and dialectics, again tying his discussion to canonical discussion in analytic and continental philosophy. ‘Analysis’ is explicated via a discussion of G.E. Moore’s canonical arguments as well as more recent work on Ramsey sentences, Ramsifying the George Dickie’s Institutional Theory of Art in the Process. Recent criticisms of Ramsey Sentence Functionalism support Garcia’s contention about analysis. For dialectics Garcia’s tragic aporetic dialectics is contrasted with traditional explications of Hegel.