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Minogue on Intensional Reference

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Mary Hesse*
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge

Extract

I am grateful to Brendan Minogue (1978) for his careful and detailed discussion of the concept of “intensional reference” (IR) as it appears in my book The Structure of Scientific Inference (1974). He concludes that my account contains some important inconsistencies that vitiate my attempt to reconcile the idea of cumulative acquisition of scientific knowledge with radically changing theories. He rightly sees that this attempt depends crucially on the account of translatability between theories, and this in turn upon the notion of “identity of intensional reference.” This means that the attempt fails if there are inconsistencies in the concept of IR. Since Minogue's careful analysis nevertheless contains some misunderstandings, I must plead guilty to a number of unclarities, but I do not believe there are basic inconsistencies. Let me try again.

Type
Discussion
Copyright
Copyright © 1980 by Philosophy of Science Association

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References

Hesse, M. (1974), The Structure of Scientific Inference. Berkeley: University of California.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Minogue, B. P. (1978), “Discussion: Realism and intensional reference,” Philosophy of Science 45: 445-455.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scheffler, I. (1967), Science and Subjectivity. New York: Bobbs-Merrill Co., Inc.Google Scholar