Series:

Representation and Mind

2 total works

Cover of The Metaphysics of Meaning

The Metaphysics of Meaning

by Jerrold J. Katz

Published 16 October 1990

Jerrold J. Katz offers a radical reappraisal of the "linguistic turn" in twentieth-century philosophy. He shows that the naturalism that emerged to become the dominant philosophical position was never adequately proved. Katz critiques the major arguments for contemporary naturalism and develops a new conception of the naturalistic fallacy. This conception, inspired by Moore, explains why attempts to naturalize linguistics and logic, and perhaps ethics, will fail. He offers a Platonist view of such disciplines, justifying it as the best explanation of their autonomy, their objectivity, and their normativity.

Cover of Realistic Rationalism

Realistic Rationalism

by Jerrold J. Katz

Published 8 December 1997
In Realistic Rationalism, Jerrold J. Katz develops a new philosophical position integrating realism and rationalism. Realism here means that the objects of study in mathematics and other formal sciences are abstract; rationalism means that our knowledge of them is not empirical. Katz uses this position to meet the principal challenges to realism. In exposing the flaws in criticisms of the antirealists, he shows that realists can explain knowledge of abstract objects without supposing we have causal contact with them, that numbers are determinate objects, and that the standard counterexamples to the abstract/concrete distinction have no force. Generalizing the account of knowledge used to meet the challenges to realism, he develops a rationalist and non-naturalist account of philosophical knowledge and argues that it is preferable to contemporary naturalist and empiricist accounts.

The book illuminates a wide range of philosophical issues, including the nature of necessity, the distinction between the formal and natural sciences, empiricist holism, the structure of ontology, and philosophical skepticism. Philosophers will use this fresh treatment of realism and rationalism as a starting point for new directions in their own research.