All We Need Is a Paradigm
By Phin Upham
I’ve edited a collection of essays called “All We Need Is a Paradigm.” It was published in 2009 by Open Court Publishing Company and covers the topics of science, economics, and logic. Some of the authors include Israel M. Kirzner, George S. Boolos, Marie McGINN, Luciano Berio, and Richard G. Heck, Jr.
The three major themes come up again and again in the essays and often lead to fruitful philosophical insight—the nature of language, the nature of causality, and the nature of human cognition. Many authors point to the problem Wittgenstein critiqued as the confounding vagaries of language itself—“deep disquietudes, their roots are as deep in us as the forms of our language.”
Secondly, causality is not surprisingly a concern for physicists and others involved in the physical sciences given their need to predict outcomes, but it is surprising to see how applicable philosophical insights from Kant, Hume, and Leibnitz are to such problems in the hard sciences that might seem unrelated to philosophical inquiry. An exploration of human cognition also plays a significant part in these essays—asking questions about whether events in the world are real or perceived, whether human action is rational or irrational, whether arithmetic is logical, analytical or even ‘true’.
In this volume of philosophical essays, our authors productively tackle important questions about the world in ways one would not expect. They show how valuable the rigor and insight of philosophical analysis and thought are in a broad array of fields, including perhaps especially, economics, physics, and logic.