Carnap’s naturalism evidently differs from Quine’s, but the precise nature of this difference has proven elusive to generations of commentators. This chapter focuses on what Quine defends as his “provincial” naturalism against a Carnapian “cosmopolitan” alternative. The problem with this contrast, however, is that Quine does not represent a pure form of what he calls a “provincial” view – he vacillates between provincial and cosmopolitan temptations. To illustrate a purely provincial view the position of Peter Strawson is held up as an opposite, provincial extreme to Carnapian cosmopolitanism, and while Quine is clearly tempted by both these extremes, the attempt to locate him on a continuum between them is complicated by his evident indecisiveness. This is further illustrated by his tergiversations about analyticity; after initially denying that there was even an explicandum worth bothering about, he later offered his own ordinary-language-based account of analyticity, without feeling any need to supply a more exact explication; there would appear to be no way to resolve the resulting stand-off with the cosmopolitan standpoint. This chapter suggests a more robust explicandum for analyticity (and cosmopolitanism more generally). We come back, in the end, to the confrontation between Carnap and Quine in Chicago in 1950, where Carnap convinced Quine that their differences did not concern any question about which there could be right or wrong, correct or incorrect; it is regretted that Quine soon lost this lesson from sight.

This chapter provides a critical survey of six of the most important interpretations of Carnap’s Logical Structure of the World or Aufbau. I argue that the variety of interpretations of the Aufbau reflect a reasonable pluralism of approaches. This pluralism can be traced to two factors. First, an interpretation of a philosophical text is sensitive to both normative and descriptive elements. Second, there is a reasonable pluralism with respect to the normative elements of an interpretation, especially the philosophical aim that an interpreter attributes to the author of the text. This analysis builds on recent discussions by Beaney of how the history of analytic philosophy should be done. The upshot of the chapter is that a more reflective approach to writing the history of philosophy should help us to acknowledge the plausibility of interpretations of a text that we refuse to endorse.

Chapter 8 explores the ways in which the press talk about people having mental illness using a mixed-methods approach. In the chapter, the frequency and semantic and pragmatic content of the verbs ‘suffer’ and ‘ experience’ in the context of prescribed forms for talking about having mental illness are investigated. I show that ‘suffer’ and ‘experience’ occur in different semantic contexts in the MI 1984–2014 Corpus as well as general language corpora, which may contribute to ‘suffer’ being a more problematic term for describing mental health than ‘experience’. Moreover, I show that ‘suffer’ is proportionally less likely to be used in first-person narratives because ‘suffering’ is attributed to people with mental illness by others, for example, medical professionals, in reported speech. I bring together my findings in a set of lexicogrammatical heuristics based on the semantic content of ‘suffer’ and ‘experience’ in context (e.g. whether the word encodes animacy or is temporally bounded).

The idea there is a “balance of nature” was a staple of the schools of natural philosophy from which biology emerged. Not until the second half of the twentieth century was the concept of a balance of nature rigorously characterized as ecological stability, and the metaphysical speculations about its cause superseded with scientific hypotheses about its basis. But significant uncertainty and controversy exists about what features of an ecological system’s dynamics should be considered its stability and thus no consensus has emerged about how ecological stability should be defined. Instead, ecologists have employed a confusing multitude of different terms to attempt to capture apparent stability properties, e.g., constancy, persistence, resilience, resistance, robustness, tolerance. This chapter diagnoses and resolves the underlying lack of conceptual clarity about ecological stability. It presents a comprehensive account of stability as a three-fold concept that crucially depends on two reference specifications. The account clarifies the concepts ecologists have used that are defensible, their interrelationships, and their potential relationships with other biological properties. Besides providing insights about how problematic scientific concepts should be characterized, the idea that ecological stability is a conceptually confused concept is also criticized.

This chapter describes the biodiversity concept and guides the reader through the growing scientifically oriented philosophical literature on biodiversity. Although the concept’s significance is common currency within environmental ethics, biodiversity has only recently garnered broader philosophical attention. Whatever the correct account of the structure and dynamics of biological communities, some are clearly more complicated than others. For example, tropical communities usually contain more species, there is evidence their species interact more intensely, these interactions are more variegated in form, and they exhibit more trophic levels than high latitude communities. Coined as a simple shorthand for “biological diversity,” “biodiversity” captures this notion of ecological diversity and much more, including developmental, morphological, and taxonomic diversity. How biodiversity should be characterized thus depends on how these systems are represented, particularly on how their parts are individuated, classified, and distributed among those classes. Several adequacy conditions on characterizing this diversity are proposed, and value-driven attempts to define the concept are criticized. It also makes the first connection, explored in later chapters, between ecology proper and the kind of applied ecology conducted in efforts to conserve biodiversity.

Throughout his career, Wittgenstein’s philosophical attitude was characteristically non-revisionist: philosophy as he conceives it does not change established concepts or practices, but leaves everything as it is. This essay seeks to understand Wittgenstein’s non-revisionist conception by contrasting it against the views of the two most prominent and self-conscious revisionists in the analytic tradition: Carnap and Quine. This comparison in turn serves to reveal continuities and discontinuities between Wittgenstein’s early and later versions of philosophical non-revisionism, and these continuities and discontinuities are in turn related to some central developments in his thought on language, logic, and the nature of philosophical perspicuity. Finally, it is argued that the revisionist methodologies of Carnap and Quine are fundamentally question-begging.