A 20th and 21st century Canadian philosopher who has not made as large a dent in the fields of philosophy of science and, more generally, of epistemology as he may reasonably have hoped: Ian Hacking died a little more than a year ago, in May 2023, when his heart failed him at the age of 87 at a retirement home in Toronto. Hacking is best remembered as the foremost advocate in the philosophy of science of the view known as "entity realism". This is related to our discussion of the Vienna Circle in recent posts. Consider that in the philosophy of science, in the heyday of the VC and in our own time as well, one central question is "do we need to explain the predictive success of the best scientific theories? and, if we do, is their approximate truth an accurate non-circular explanation?" Scientific realism says "yes we do and yes it is." A theory about electrons may be right because electrons are real, and it may be successfully predictive because it is ...
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Hilary Putnam tell the story of his taking to his supervisor, Hans Reichenbach, a copy of Quine’s ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’. Putnam told Reichenbach: “it is an extraordinary paper; Quine argues that the difference between the analytic and the synthetic is not a difference of kind, but one of degree.” Reichenbach looked puzzled and then replied “Hilary, is the difference between a difference of kind and one of degree a difference of kind or one of degree?”.