Rocznik Filozoficzny Ignatianum (Jan 2017)

The heuristic role of world-pictures in the process by which philosophical facts come to be accepted

  • Piotr Duchliński

DOI
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.260153
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 22, no. 2
pp. 139 – 178

Abstract

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This article aims to show that our acceptance or non-acceptance of certain facts is influenced by our adoption of a philosophical world-picture as a kind of background knowledge on the basis of which one decides what does or does not exist, and what is true or false. For this purpose, I discuss the positions of the existential Thomists, as well as those of Wittgenstein and Abel, while also occasionally invoking the work of Putnam and Fleck. To begin with, it is demonstrated that philosophical facts are accepted on the basis of a world-picture that is itself a tangle of facts, values, and theories exhibiting varying degrees of generality. Whether we embrace them or not is thus not determined by any sort of direct experience. There are no neutral philosophical facts. Our world-picture suggests what sort of facts we are prepared to accept, and what methods we use to explain them. It is on precisely this that the heuristic role played by world-pictures in “creating” philosophical facts depends.

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