Alfred Schramm | University of Graz (original) (raw)
Papers by Alfred Schramm
Grazer Philosophische Studien
Edmund Gettier (1963) argued that there can be justified true belief (JTB) that is not knowledge.... more Edmund Gettier (1963) argued that there can be justified true belief (JTB) that is not knowledge. The correctness of Gettier’s argument is questioned by showing that Smith of Gettier's famous examples does not earn justification for his incidentally true beliefs, while a doxastically more conscientious person S would come to hold justified but false beliefs. So, Gettier’s (and analogous) cases do not result in justified and true belief. This is due to a tension between deductive closure of justification and evidential support. For being justified, any believing, disbelieving, or withholding of deductively inferred propositions must be distributed proportionally to given evidential support. This proportionality principle has primacy over deductive closure in case of conflict. Although the argument does not save the JTB-account, it explains why the intuition that subjects in Gettier situations do not earn knowledge is correct.
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ERKENNTNIS (2014) Vol.79, pp. 571-591, Jun 1, 2014
Extant literature on Goodman’s ‘New Riddle of Induction’ deals mainly with two versions. I consid... more Extant literature on Goodman’s ‘New Riddle of Induction’ deals mainly with two versions. I consider both of them, starting from the (‘epistemic’) version of Goodman’s classic of 1954. It turns out that it belongs to the realm of applications of inductive logic, and that it can be resolved by admitting only significant evidence (as I call it) for confirmations of hypotheses.
Section 1 prepares some ground for the argument. As much of it depends on the notion of evidential significance, this concept is defined and its introduction motivated. Further, I introduce and explain the distinction between support and confirmation: put in a slogan, ‘confirmation is support by significant evidence’.
Section 2 deals with the Riddle itself. It is shown that, given the provisions of section 1, it is not the case that ‘anything confirms anything’ (as maintained by Goodman): significant green-evidence confirms only green-hypotheses (and no grue-hypotheses), and significant grue-evidence confirms only grue-hypotheses (and no green-hypotheses), whichever terms we use (whether 'Green/Blue' or 'Grue/Bleen' terminology) for expressing these evidences or hypotheses.
Section 3 rounds off my treatment. First I show that Frank Jackson’s use of his counterfactual condition is unsuccessful. Further, I argue that no unwanted consequences result, if one starts from the other, ‘objective’, definition of ‘grue’: it is no more than a mere fact of logic that cannot do any harm. Finally, I present a grue-case involving both kinds of definition, where the exclusive confirmation of either the green- or the grue-hypothesis is shown.
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Philosophical Studies (2012) 161:109–117, 2012
Lehrer Semantics, as it was devised by Adrienne and Keith Lehrer, is imbedded in a comprehensive... more Lehrer Semantics, as it was devised by Adrienne and Keith Lehrer, is
imbedded in a comprehensive web of thought and observations of language use and
development, communication, and social interaction, all these as empirical phenomena.
Rather than for a theory, I take it for a ‘‘model’’ of the kind which gives us
guidance in how to organize linguistic and language-related phenomena. My
comments on it are restricted to three aspects: In 2 I deal with the question of how
Lehrerian sense can be empirically distinguished from Lehrerian reference as a
precondition for the claim that sense relationships are in general more stable than
reference relations. It seems that this very claim must already be presupposed for
doing the respective empirical investigation. But in 3, I argue for the option to
interpret the Lehrers’ concept of sense resp. sense vectors as intension concepts, by
which move one may gain a generalized concept, so-to-say ‘‘graded analyticity’’,
containing Carnapian strict analyticity for language systems as the extreme case of
sense vectors with maximum value. Such graded sense may also be empirically
investigated in the case of normal languages. In 4, I plead for my view that what the
Lehrers take for communal languages are really collections of family-resembling
idiolects of individual speakers and hypotheses of individual speakers about the
idiolects of their fellow speakers. This move should free us from the fiction of, and
sterile discussions about, the ‘‘true’’ meanings of words, but nevertheless keep
normal language communication possible. As a concluding remark I propose in 5 to
have both: normal languages from an empirical point of view, and codified languages
from a logical reconstructionist one.
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Ian Jarvie, Karl Milford, David Miller (eds.), Karl Popper: A Centenary Assessment, Ashgate 2006, pp. 245 - 263.
This paper constitutes one extended argument, which touches on various topics of Critical Rationa... more This paper constitutes one extended argument, which touches on various topics of Critical Rationalism as it was initiated by Karl Popper and further developed (although into different directions) in his aftermath. The result of the argument will be that critical rationalism either offers no solution to the problem of induction at all, or that it amounts, in the last resort, to a kind of Critical Rationalist Inductivism as it were, a version of what I call Good Old Induction. One may think of David Miller as a contemporary representative of what I consider as the ‘no solution’ version of critical rationalism, while Alan Musgrave stands for the version of ‘critical rationalist induction’. Popper’s own writings admit of either interpretation.
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PHILOSOPHIA SCIENTIAE, tome 3, n° 2 (1998-1999), 1998
Starting from the question whether Ernst Mach's notorious notion of "Elemente" (Elements) must le... more Starting from the question whether Ernst Mach's notorious notion of "Elemente" (Elements) must lead to the verdict that the arch-anti-metaphysician himself may be justly accused of holding an essentially metaphysical position, the idea of metaphysical neutrality will be explained in Section I. Section II deals with Quine's verdict on abstract entities, among which Mach's Elements would have to be counted if there were no way out of the Quinean test. Such a way out, it will be proposed in Section III, is Carnap's Remedy: the distinction of external from internal questions. Finally, in Section IV, the empirical meaning of Mach's notion of Elements is explained, from which explanation we may argue that Mach's "Philosophy" is good, non-metaphysical, empirical science.
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Inductive Knowledge. In Lehrer, K., Marek, J.Ch. (Eds). Austrian Philosophy Past and Present, Essays in Honor of Rudolf Haller, Dordrecht/Boston/London 1996, pp. 221-235., 1996
Starting from Humes problem, several strategies to counter it are discussed, with the result that... more Starting from Humes problem, several strategies to counter it are discussed, with the result that only a non-probabilistic version of 'Good Old-fashioned Induction' remains as a viable option.
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Originally published in Spanish as: Conceptos de Probabilitad en el Círculo de Viena , in: Arbor, Vol. CLV, 512 (Diciembre 1996), 131 147. , 1996
I think that this paper gives still a good background for a better understanding of more recent d... more I think that this paper gives still a good background for a better understanding of more recent developments in the philosophy of probability.
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Grazer Philosophische Studien, Vol.40, 1991, pp. 71 - 87, Jan 1, 1991
Keith Lehrer describes in his Theory of Knowledge a Justification Game which is played by a Claim... more Keith Lehrer describes in his Theory of Knowledge a Justification Game which is played by a Claimant who tries to establish his justification for some contingent claim and a rather harmless Skeptic who tries to stop the Claimant. The doubts of a serious philosophical skeptic are - in opposition to Lehrer - analyzed as doubts concerning the justification of our beliefs and not their contents. Making the reglementations for a solid philosophical argumentation more precise the setting of a Serious Justification Game is defined and thus replaying the game it tums out that the philosophical skeptic succeeds in providing a profound philosophical argumentation for his denial of Lehrer's positive claim for justification.
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Grazer Philosophische Studien, 1987
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
R. Bouveresse, H. Barreau (ed.), Karl Popper science et philosophie, Paris 1991, pp 113 - 120., 1991
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
R. Haller - F. Stadler (Hrsg.) Wien-Berlin-Prag, Der Aufstieg der wissenschaftlichen Philosophie, Wien 1993, S. 538 - 554., Jan 1, 1993
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Meinong und die Gegenstandstheorie, Grazer Philosophischen Studien Bd. 50, 1995, S. 507 - 520., 1995
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
W.Gombocz, H.Rutte, W.Sauer (Hrsg.), Traditionen und Perspektiven der analytischen Philosophie. Festschrift für Rudolf Haller, Wien 1989, S. 97 - 105., 1989
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
J.Speck (Hrsg.) Grundprobleme der großen Philosophen. Philosophie der Neuzeit VI, Göttingen 1992, S. 109 - 137., Jan 1, 1976
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
V. Gadenne (Hrsg.), Kritischer Rationalismus und Pragmatismus, Amsterdam-Atlanta 1998, S. 77 – 88, 1998
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
J.M. Böhm, H. Holweg, C. Hoock (Hrsg.) Karl Poppers kritischer Rationalismus heute, Tübingen, 2002
Popper's claim to have solved the problem of induction is disputed: neither did he achieve an ade... more Popper's claim to have solved the problem of induction is disputed: neither did he achieve an adequate re-formulation, nor is his proposed solution successful.
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A. Schramm (Hrsg.): Philosophie in Österreich 1996, Wien 1996, S. 51- 66., 1996
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Grazer Philosophische Studien 28 (1986), S.47 -56, 1986
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Grazer Philosophische Studien 22 (1984), S.41 - 67., 1984
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Grazer Philosophische Studien
Edmund Gettier (1963) argued that there can be justified true belief (JTB) that is not knowledge.... more Edmund Gettier (1963) argued that there can be justified true belief (JTB) that is not knowledge. The correctness of Gettier’s argument is questioned by showing that Smith of Gettier's famous examples does not earn justification for his incidentally true beliefs, while a doxastically more conscientious person S would come to hold justified but false beliefs. So, Gettier’s (and analogous) cases do not result in justified and true belief. This is due to a tension between deductive closure of justification and evidential support. For being justified, any believing, disbelieving, or withholding of deductively inferred propositions must be distributed proportionally to given evidential support. This proportionality principle has primacy over deductive closure in case of conflict. Although the argument does not save the JTB-account, it explains why the intuition that subjects in Gettier situations do not earn knowledge is correct.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
ERKENNTNIS (2014) Vol.79, pp. 571-591, Jun 1, 2014
Extant literature on Goodman’s ‘New Riddle of Induction’ deals mainly with two versions. I consid... more Extant literature on Goodman’s ‘New Riddle of Induction’ deals mainly with two versions. I consider both of them, starting from the (‘epistemic’) version of Goodman’s classic of 1954. It turns out that it belongs to the realm of applications of inductive logic, and that it can be resolved by admitting only significant evidence (as I call it) for confirmations of hypotheses.
Section 1 prepares some ground for the argument. As much of it depends on the notion of evidential significance, this concept is defined and its introduction motivated. Further, I introduce and explain the distinction between support and confirmation: put in a slogan, ‘confirmation is support by significant evidence’.
Section 2 deals with the Riddle itself. It is shown that, given the provisions of section 1, it is not the case that ‘anything confirms anything’ (as maintained by Goodman): significant green-evidence confirms only green-hypotheses (and no grue-hypotheses), and significant grue-evidence confirms only grue-hypotheses (and no green-hypotheses), whichever terms we use (whether 'Green/Blue' or 'Grue/Bleen' terminology) for expressing these evidences or hypotheses.
Section 3 rounds off my treatment. First I show that Frank Jackson’s use of his counterfactual condition is unsuccessful. Further, I argue that no unwanted consequences result, if one starts from the other, ‘objective’, definition of ‘grue’: it is no more than a mere fact of logic that cannot do any harm. Finally, I present a grue-case involving both kinds of definition, where the exclusive confirmation of either the green- or the grue-hypothesis is shown.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Philosophical Studies (2012) 161:109–117, 2012
Lehrer Semantics, as it was devised by Adrienne and Keith Lehrer, is imbedded in a comprehensive... more Lehrer Semantics, as it was devised by Adrienne and Keith Lehrer, is
imbedded in a comprehensive web of thought and observations of language use and
development, communication, and social interaction, all these as empirical phenomena.
Rather than for a theory, I take it for a ‘‘model’’ of the kind which gives us
guidance in how to organize linguistic and language-related phenomena. My
comments on it are restricted to three aspects: In 2 I deal with the question of how
Lehrerian sense can be empirically distinguished from Lehrerian reference as a
precondition for the claim that sense relationships are in general more stable than
reference relations. It seems that this very claim must already be presupposed for
doing the respective empirical investigation. But in 3, I argue for the option to
interpret the Lehrers’ concept of sense resp. sense vectors as intension concepts, by
which move one may gain a generalized concept, so-to-say ‘‘graded analyticity’’,
containing Carnapian strict analyticity for language systems as the extreme case of
sense vectors with maximum value. Such graded sense may also be empirically
investigated in the case of normal languages. In 4, I plead for my view that what the
Lehrers take for communal languages are really collections of family-resembling
idiolects of individual speakers and hypotheses of individual speakers about the
idiolects of their fellow speakers. This move should free us from the fiction of, and
sterile discussions about, the ‘‘true’’ meanings of words, but nevertheless keep
normal language communication possible. As a concluding remark I propose in 5 to
have both: normal languages from an empirical point of view, and codified languages
from a logical reconstructionist one.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Ian Jarvie, Karl Milford, David Miller (eds.), Karl Popper: A Centenary Assessment, Ashgate 2006, pp. 245 - 263.
This paper constitutes one extended argument, which touches on various topics of Critical Rationa... more This paper constitutes one extended argument, which touches on various topics of Critical Rationalism as it was initiated by Karl Popper and further developed (although into different directions) in his aftermath. The result of the argument will be that critical rationalism either offers no solution to the problem of induction at all, or that it amounts, in the last resort, to a kind of Critical Rationalist Inductivism as it were, a version of what I call Good Old Induction. One may think of David Miller as a contemporary representative of what I consider as the ‘no solution’ version of critical rationalism, while Alan Musgrave stands for the version of ‘critical rationalist induction’. Popper’s own writings admit of either interpretation.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
PHILOSOPHIA SCIENTIAE, tome 3, n° 2 (1998-1999), 1998
Starting from the question whether Ernst Mach's notorious notion of "Elemente" (Elements) must le... more Starting from the question whether Ernst Mach's notorious notion of "Elemente" (Elements) must lead to the verdict that the arch-anti-metaphysician himself may be justly accused of holding an essentially metaphysical position, the idea of metaphysical neutrality will be explained in Section I. Section II deals with Quine's verdict on abstract entities, among which Mach's Elements would have to be counted if there were no way out of the Quinean test. Such a way out, it will be proposed in Section III, is Carnap's Remedy: the distinction of external from internal questions. Finally, in Section IV, the empirical meaning of Mach's notion of Elements is explained, from which explanation we may argue that Mach's "Philosophy" is good, non-metaphysical, empirical science.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Inductive Knowledge. In Lehrer, K., Marek, J.Ch. (Eds). Austrian Philosophy Past and Present, Essays in Honor of Rudolf Haller, Dordrecht/Boston/London 1996, pp. 221-235., 1996
Starting from Humes problem, several strategies to counter it are discussed, with the result that... more Starting from Humes problem, several strategies to counter it are discussed, with the result that only a non-probabilistic version of 'Good Old-fashioned Induction' remains as a viable option.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Originally published in Spanish as: Conceptos de Probabilitad en el Círculo de Viena , in: Arbor, Vol. CLV, 512 (Diciembre 1996), 131 147. , 1996
I think that this paper gives still a good background for a better understanding of more recent d... more I think that this paper gives still a good background for a better understanding of more recent developments in the philosophy of probability.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Grazer Philosophische Studien, Vol.40, 1991, pp. 71 - 87, Jan 1, 1991
Keith Lehrer describes in his Theory of Knowledge a Justification Game which is played by a Claim... more Keith Lehrer describes in his Theory of Knowledge a Justification Game which is played by a Claimant who tries to establish his justification for some contingent claim and a rather harmless Skeptic who tries to stop the Claimant. The doubts of a serious philosophical skeptic are - in opposition to Lehrer - analyzed as doubts concerning the justification of our beliefs and not their contents. Making the reglementations for a solid philosophical argumentation more precise the setting of a Serious Justification Game is defined and thus replaying the game it tums out that the philosophical skeptic succeeds in providing a profound philosophical argumentation for his denial of Lehrer's positive claim for justification.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Grazer Philosophische Studien, 1987
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
R. Bouveresse, H. Barreau (ed.), Karl Popper science et philosophie, Paris 1991, pp 113 - 120., 1991
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
R. Haller - F. Stadler (Hrsg.) Wien-Berlin-Prag, Der Aufstieg der wissenschaftlichen Philosophie, Wien 1993, S. 538 - 554., Jan 1, 1993
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Meinong und die Gegenstandstheorie, Grazer Philosophischen Studien Bd. 50, 1995, S. 507 - 520., 1995
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
W.Gombocz, H.Rutte, W.Sauer (Hrsg.), Traditionen und Perspektiven der analytischen Philosophie. Festschrift für Rudolf Haller, Wien 1989, S. 97 - 105., 1989
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
J.Speck (Hrsg.) Grundprobleme der großen Philosophen. Philosophie der Neuzeit VI, Göttingen 1992, S. 109 - 137., Jan 1, 1976
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
V. Gadenne (Hrsg.), Kritischer Rationalismus und Pragmatismus, Amsterdam-Atlanta 1998, S. 77 – 88, 1998
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
J.M. Böhm, H. Holweg, C. Hoock (Hrsg.) Karl Poppers kritischer Rationalismus heute, Tübingen, 2002
Popper's claim to have solved the problem of induction is disputed: neither did he achieve an ade... more Popper's claim to have solved the problem of induction is disputed: neither did he achieve an adequate re-formulation, nor is his proposed solution successful.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
A. Schramm (Hrsg.): Philosophie in Österreich 1996, Wien 1996, S. 51- 66., 1996
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Grazer Philosophische Studien 28 (1986), S.47 -56, 1986
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Grazer Philosophische Studien 22 (1984), S.41 - 67., 1984
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact