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Paul L. Franco
@loadofbunk.bsky.social
1.6K followers 290 following 320 posts
Philosophy Professor // New Mexican 🛸 🌶️ in Washington ⛰️ 🌲
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loadofbunk.bsky.social
Mary Hesse on "the political aspect of...the Vienna Circle" and why analytic philosophers had "lost the urgency" of epistemological questions given that they "divorced their philosophy from ideological and practical interests" (1980, xiii).

archive.org/details/revo...
The revival of metaphysical realism after decades of positivism is one of the most remarkable features of current analytic philosophy. It may perhaps be traced to a fundamental difference of interest between analytic philosophers of the present generation and those who founded the positivist schools of epistemology. The difference may briefly be expressed by saying that the latter were concerned with what we can now to be true and wished to repudiate metaphysical claims to knowledge, specially because these tended to be associated with Hegelian tradition not only in philosophy but also in authoritarian religion and politcs. Liberalism and social democracy, the Vienna positivists though, were better defended in association with naturalistic knowledge. Modern analytic philosophers...have generally divorced their philosophical from their ideological and practical interests, and have therefore lost the urgency of the question 'How can we know?' Her reference: "R.S. Cohen, 'Neurath, Otto'...It is remarkable how little of the political aspect of the thought of the Vienna Circle was mentioned in connection with its philosophical history until recently." She tells the reader to contrast the articles in The legacy of logical positivism with Janik and Toulmin's Wittgenstein's Vienna.
November 11, 2025 at 3:32 AM
loadofbunk.bsky.social
A survey of North American grad students in history of science in 1970-1971 asked: "'Are there any works which are models, methodologically, of the kind of scholarship you would like to do?"

www.jstor.org/stable/284483
We also tried to examine the range of interests and approaches by asking, 'Are there any works which are models, methodologically, of the kind of scholarship you would like to do? (These can be papers, books, dissertations, etc. and need not necessarily be works in history of science.)' We suspect that people listed books they liked as often, or more often, than books whose approach they wished to emulate. About one-third of the respondents (twenty- five) did not reply to this question. Of those who did, thirteen cited the works of Thomas Kuhn, who was mentioned far more frequently than any other scholar except Alexandre Koyre, who was cited five times. Kuhn was cited primarily for The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, although his Copernican Revolution and his paper on energy conservation were also mentioned.6 Scholars whose works were cited by at least three respondents included: Ernst Cassirer, Robert Merton, George Rosen, A. I. Sabra, Max Weber, and Lynn White. Scholars mentioned by two students were: Stillman Drake, Charles Gillispie, Mary Hesse, A. 0. Lovejoy, J. T. Merz, Derek Price, and Frances Yates
November 10, 2025 at 6:08 PM
loadofbunk.bsky.social
D.J. O'Connor in 1959 on "The danger of the now fashionable 'Let's not be beastly to metaphysics' movement."

www.jstor.org/stable/3748624
The danger of the now fashionable "Let's not be beastly to metaphysics" movement is that it encourages the growth of irrationalism in philosophy. Philosophy is nothing if it is not an exercise of reason. It is not a matter for "sensitivity" or "imagination" or any of the other nebulous and euphemistic disguises for intellectual muzziness. The philosophers who wrote these essays are far too able and clear-headed to ignore this. But a sympathetic nostalgia for metaphysics coupled with an admission of its logical bankruptcy may encourage less able writers to believe that anything goes in philosophy. So too may their habit of decorating their essays with quotations from Donne, Eliot, Leopardi, Proust, Mrs. V. Woolf and the rest of the cultural circus of the day. As models of philosophical writing, Aquinas, Spinoza, Russell or Carnap are perhaps a little austere for present tastes. But at least they give no encouragement to confuse philosophy with belles lettres.
November 8, 2025 at 8:41 PM
loadofbunk.bsky.social
Thought maybe I needed to figure out microfilm, but the Internet Archive is a modern marvel that makes it possible to find issues of The Listener from 1951 in which Michael Polyani criticizes Stephen Toulmin's interpretation of the second law of thermodynamics.

archive.org/details/list...
Sir. I agree with Mr Toulmin in his talk published in the Listener of March 8, that we should not worry about the running-down of the universe--for I think we have not enough evidence for it--but I am disturbed by the methods of his argument. Mr Toulmin suggests that there is a logical impossibility involved in applying the Second Law of Thermodynamics to the universe, and he illustrates this by the impossibility of weight fire. He ascribes this impossibility to the fact that in our present system of chemical classification, the word 'fire' does not figure as the name of a stuff'. But surely, whatever limitations are imposed on the verbal context in which we may use the word 'fire' are derived from our knowledge of fire, and it is therefore wholly circular to derive any knowledge about fire from the way the word 'fire' may be used. In playing with 'fire' Mr Toulmin is playing with fire; his linguistic critique, bent on casting out verbalism, lets it in with a vengeance." Polanyi continues to note the half a dozen formulations of the second law of thermodynamics.
November 8, 2025 at 7:53 PM
loadofbunk.bsky.social
BREAKING: Quad cherry blossom trees also nice in Fall.
View of UW Quad from an office. On left is building with a little gargoyley dude hanging out. Then some bright orange cherry blossom trees. On the right is a big California redwood. A different view of the cherry blossom trees with slightly fewer leaves, but still bright orange. Gray skies, sun not visible and won't be for like three more months.
November 7, 2025 at 7:30 PM
loadofbunk.bsky.social
Feigl four years after the previous quote: "There seems to be now a fair amount of evidence for the occurrence of mental telepathy and clairvoyance."
There seems to be now a fair amount of evidence f o r the occurrence of mental telepathy and clairvoyance. It is not likely that all this evidence can be explained away as due to experimental errors, statistical miscalcula- scientific knowledge. Further research is urgently needed in this con- troversial field. But any theological conclusions seem to me, to put it mildly, entirely premature.
October 31, 2025 at 9:22 PM
loadofbunk.bsky.social
Feigl, to existentialists who despair and fall into irrational action: "Skill issue."
Our age of scientific enlightenment requires a new form of emotional and moral maturity: We shall have to learn to live with our knowledge about ourselves: to combine scientific, penetrating insight with serious moral and social commitments; to acquire the ability to use our knowledge wisely and humanely. There are many who find no difficulty in this. But there are others who do not feel secure except within the frame of dogmatic creeds. And there are still others who, having lost their religious or their social-political absolute faiths, feel completely at sea and resort to a "philosophy" of nausea, despair, and spasmodic irrational action. Such a philosophy is exemplified in some of the German and French forms of existentialism.
October 31, 2025 at 8:57 PM
loadofbunk.bsky.social
One of my favorite recurring things in 20th century philosophy is a philosopher, in this case Feigl, being open to the existence of phenomena like extrasensory perception and "mediumism."
"But he will also be very reluctant in attributing to the alleged facts of extrasensory perception, psychokinesis, mediumism, etc., any considerable weight as evidence for dualism. It is quite possible that these "facts" (if indeed they are not the result of self-deception, experimental or statistical error, or outright fraud) merely indicate new and strange forms of physical causality which may, however, still be quite compatible with psychophysiological monism. Nevertheless a cautious attitude of open-minded research in this area is the only one that an empiricist can afford to recommend."
October 31, 2025 at 8:24 PM
loadofbunk.bsky.social
My new #HOPOS project is to (1) figure out where Carnap lived in NM, (2) investigate whether Carnap and Feigl ever ate New Mexican enchiladas, and, if so, (3) determine what their answers were to "Red or Green?"
For me [i.e., Feigl], personally, it was also and primarily my frequent visits with Carnap (in Chicago, Princeton, Los Angeles, and for a while at his summer home in the hills outside Santa Fe, New Mexico) that I always found instructive, encouraging, and helpful.
October 29, 2025 at 5:36 PM
loadofbunk.bsky.social
The world if Churchman and Ackoff had gotten their "Institutes of Experimental Method" instead of ending up at business schools.

www.jstor.org/stable/185209
We take the future of science to depend upon a unification through devices such as "Institutes of Experimental Method",whose organization conforms to the broad outline offered below. The suggested organization grows out of the realization that experimental science has now reached the stage where it recognizes that certain individuals qualify as specialists in the field of methodology. The progressive research worker of today is learning that he must rely more and more upon the information contributed by experts in this field. There have been outstanding examples in America of statistical groups which have effectively cooperated as methodological experts with research organizations. Flying cars, a guy walking a robot dog, generally taken to be a vision of technological utopia. Futuristic looking buildings, etc. The meme image.
October 26, 2025 at 11:48 PM
loadofbunk.bsky.social
Finally, an example in the wild that I can give to skeptical philosophy of language students to show them the power of Russell's theory of descriptions.
Billups was not a named defendant in this investigation, but for context, Co-Conspirator 8 is described in the indictment only as "an NBA player from approximately 1997 through 2014, and an NBA coach since at least 2021," which would uniquely designate him.
October 23, 2025 at 8:56 PM
loadofbunk.bsky.social
I did actually show the diagonal elevator video in my proseminar yesterday.
0. Doing research Here’s a video on diagonal elevators in video games that I’m using—somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but also somewhat seriously—to illustrate one way of going about research. • Identify something that grabs your attention. It’s usually good for that thing to be narrower—diagonal elevators in video games meeting specific criteria—than broader—elevators in video games. o Of note: The person who made the video became interested in the topic via something that is widely accepted as influential/important. Often, that will happen for us in philosophy too as we read and engage arguments by others. • Look around to see if anyone has looked into the topic: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and any relevant reference page; philpapers.org; citations to the paper you’ve read (via Google Scholar); etc. o It can be hard to know when to stop, but you do have to at some point. o In a course context, think about the topic/narrative of the course: How does the thing you’re interested in relate? What other relevant things are you reading; what and who do they cite? o Someone also mentioned that the video above was “also a cross-domain/field research, as the initial example comes from Akira, an anime, but the video mainly deals with videogame instances of those elevators.” Is there something related in a different field you’re familiar with? • If you don’t find anything, then perhaps there’s a literature gap; if there are others who have looked into it, find some way to distinguish your angle, e.g., by narrowing or widening your scope or exploring some connection someone else hasn’t. • Find a hook that will draw in the interest of others. • Now, for the easy part: Start writing…
October 16, 2025 at 4:17 PM
loadofbunk.bsky.social
Weird vans with business names I don't know, palm trees next to a classic brownstone, spaceships on the lawn, Elvis blasted at all hours of night. The Roku City I knew and loved doesn't exist anymore.
Roku City. Stitch is dancing on the lawn of a house that doesn't even fit in with the nice brownstone right next to it. A van with agzzz on it.
September 19, 2025 at 2:51 AM
loadofbunk.bsky.social
I'm not sure that Russ Ackoff made it past the table of contents of Feigl and Sellars's anthology.
Readings in Philosophical Analysis. HERBERT FEIGL AND WILFRID SEL- LARS. Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., New York, 1949. x + 626,$5.00. Most of the essays in this collection represent the positions of Cambridge Analysis and Logical Positivism. The book contains a good number of the classics of analysis and should therefore provide useful source material for courses in Contemporary Philosophy, Problems, and Methods. Those represented in the selections are Feigl (4 essays), Kneale, Quine (2), Tarski, Carnap (3), Frege, Russell, Lewis (3), Schlick (4), Aldrich (2), Adjukiewicz, Nagel, Waismann, Hempel (4), Reich- enbach (2), Moore, Stace, Sellars, Broad (3), Chisholm, Mace, Ducasse, and Stevenson. The essays cover the subjects of linguistics, logic, mathematics, the a priori, induction, probability, mind and body, description, explanation, and ethics. R. L. A.
September 15, 2025 at 11:55 PM
loadofbunk.bsky.social
For years, there wasn't a lawn sign for those households hesitant to announce "We believe...Science is real" but that were also not anti-realist either. No(a) longer!
Lawn sign that says: In this house, we trust the evidence of our senses, on the whole, with regard to the existence and features of everyday objects. And we have similar confidence in the system of check, double-check, triple-check of scientific investigation, as well as the other safeguards built into the institutions of science.
September 13, 2025 at 10:53 PM
loadofbunk.bsky.social
To hang in your kitchen, or by the front door. From the Logical Empiricist collection at Bed, Bath, and Beyond.
A sign you can hang up in your home that reads: "Define, Verify, Serve life" with hearts dotting the i's.
September 13, 2025 at 10:25 PM
loadofbunk.bsky.social
Working on a paper about Feigl and found this very interesting paper about value-neutrality and the history of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues and am now really interested in what is in J.J. Gibson's FBI file.

spssi.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...
The FBI kept files on APA and SPSSI member from the 1930s on, as Harris (1980) discovered. The increased surveillance of the late 1940s and 1950s with the APA described as a communist infiltrated body had, according to Harris (1980), the indirect effect of encouraging some to abandon controversial lines of research for more conservative topics. James Gibson was investigated by the FBI starting in 1946 and lost his security clearance in 1951. His social psychological research came to an end during the 1950s, partly due to the success of his work on perception, but according to Reed (1988), partly due to his growing pessimism that the study of social issues would be possible in the anticommunist climate. Reisch (2005) argued that even the philosophy of science, including Herbert Feigl’s view of science and values, was altered by the Cold War. In such a climate, a claim to be entirely value-free would certainly be safer than the 1930s activist stance of the SPSSI founders.
September 12, 2025 at 12:05 AM
loadofbunk.bsky.social
This must be a big relief for Oxford moral philosophy.
No, there isn't a consensus that Oxford moral philosophy corrupts the youth; in fact, philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe argued in her famous 1957 radio lecture that it couldn't corrupt youth because the philosophy was so inert
September 9, 2025 at 6:30 PM
loadofbunk.bsky.social
No mention in this 1904 News and Notes piece about how G.S. [sic] Stout's move to St. Andrews from Oxford is expected to affect the general rankings and mental philosophy specialty rankings in 1905's Philosophical Gourmet Report.
The Wilde readership in mental philosophy at Oxford, vacant by the removal of Mr G.S. Stout to accept the professorship of logic and metaphysics at St. Andrews, has been filled by the election of Mr. William McDougall, now reader in experimential psychology at University College, London. There is more text about W.G. Smith resigning a position at King's College London and accepting one at Liverpool, as well as various other stuff, that I decided to not make a joke about.
September 8, 2025 at 9:42 PM
loadofbunk.bsky.social
Feigl, a paragraph later, intentionally cracking a Freudian joke about metaphysicians, and unintentionally predicting the Mach 3 razor.
I turn now to one of the most fundamental and notoriously contro- versial issues: the empiricist criterion of meaning. It is not surprising that this has aroused so much dispute. Occam's razor is apt to mobilize the castration complex of the metaphysicians. But psychoanalytic jokes aside, there are, as it were, three blades to Occam's razor,
September 5, 2025 at 8:29 PM
loadofbunk.bsky.social
Herbert Feigl on W.V. Quine, who he thought was too easily impressed by a mere logical point leading to a "distorted picture of scientific method."
It is curious that it should be the logicians who first undermine their own enterprise by a denial of the sharp distinction between the empirical and the logical (because here they are struck with the vague- ness of ordinary discourse and of scientific methodology), and then pro- ceed to blur the methodology of science beyond recognition (because from a purely formal point of view a theory is in principle adjustable in any one of its parts) . I suggest that if our logical analyses and recon- structions of the scientific enterprise are thus far unable to do justice to its most important and indispensable criteria {of confirmability and of confirmation), we must look for better analyses and reconstructions instead of giving a distorted picture of scientific method.
September 5, 2025 at 8:26 PM
loadofbunk.bsky.social
Rawls on the time Ryle fell asleep during the Q&A of his own after-dinner talk. (From Bruce Kuklick's "John Rawls and R. M. Hare: A Study of Canonization".)
I still recall vividly an evening in 1953 when I had dinner in Gilbert Ryle’s rooms at Magdalen. With William Kneale and J.D. Mabbott. H.H.Price, the fourth member of their group, which had met regularly for years for dinner and a paper to be delivered by one of them, couldn’t come, so I was invited to fill in... We... retired to Ryle’s study where he proceeded to read his paper. As Ryle read on,... I noticed that Mabbott had fallen asleep. It occurred to me that if there was to be a discussion, I’d better be prepared with a question, so I tried hard to listen and formulate one. I didn’t want to disgrace myself! Then I looked around and noticed that Kneale had also fallen asleep....Once Ryle had stopped, I tried to carefully phrase my question, only to find that when I finally finished asking it, Ryle too had fallen asleep! I feared I had violated their long tradition by staying awake! After a while, Kneale got up, tapped Ryle on the shoulder and said, ‘Good show, Gilbert, ’and left. Mabbott then woke with a start, did the same, saying, ‘Jolly good, Gilbert.’ I could hardly say that, so I said, ‘Thank you and good night, Professor Ryle.’ He looked up, gasped, ‘Good show, Rawls,’ and then nodded off again as I let myself out.(Rawls2002a,Box42,Folder12)
August 29, 2025 at 6:59 PM
loadofbunk.bsky.social
I noticed this and it threw me off too!
Screenshot of microsoft word spacing options showing that it is no longer set at single spacing.
August 14, 2025 at 8:32 PM
loadofbunk.bsky.social
Went to my local analytic metaphysics shop and got some cool new chair merch.
A notebook with three different red folding chairs on it and a keychain with black chair on it.
August 6, 2025 at 9:48 PM
loadofbunk.bsky.social
Lewis White Beck exercising executive privilege to talk about aliens in his 1971 address to the Eastern division of the American Philosophical Association.

www.jstor.org/stable/31297...
Title: Extraterrestrial Intelligent Life Author: Lewis White Beck I must confess that I have a singular reason for being at the privilege of delivering this paper as a presidential address -if it were not the presidential address I doubt that accepted by the Program Committee. Our Association is not hospitable to cosmological speculations. I can avail myself only of presidential license in asking you to consider a perennial theme in philosophy which is neglected by philosophers at a time when it is most cherished by scientists. Many eminent phillosophers-among others Aristotle', Nicholas of Cusa, Gioradano Bruno, Gassendi, Locke, Lambert, Kant, and William Whewell--have believed that there is extraterrestrial life; yet I know of only one or two living professional philosophers writing in English who have even discussed the question.
July 4, 2025 at 5:16 PM