Richard Creath
Research Bio
I am a philosopher of science primarily interested in what makes one claim about the world more worth believing than another. On one hand it seems as though our only access to an independent world is though our senses. On the other hand there are some things that we seem to know that are neither confirmed nor disconfirmed by our experience. Or at least it seems that if experience can influence the reasonable acceptance of such claims, it is in no straightforward way that it does so. In bringing observation to bear on our beliefs, logic and mathematics, and even philosophy itself, seem to be presupposed and thus not tested by the experience.
So my overall enterprise is to sort these matters out, that is, to develop reasonable concepts of logic, mathematics, philosophy, and the like that do justice both to their apparent peculiarity and to their important roles in empirical science. Developing these concepts should yield an illuminating picture of the overall structure of empirical knowledge.
My methods in doing all this involve the very careful historical study of two of the most important philosophers of science of the twentieth century, Rudolf Carnap and W.V.O. Quine. While their writings have been enormously influential, and they clashed on just the issues at hand, their respective positions and arguments have, almost demonstratively, not been well understood. This is unfortunate because both men had extraordinarily important things to say that are relevant to our own current philosophic concerns.
Current Projects: Currently I am working on a book on the Quine-Carnap debate over analyticity, that is, over their respective accounts of the structure of scientific knowledge. I am also editing (with Michael Friedman) the Cambridge Companion to Carnap, which will probably be finished in 2005 and out in 2006. By far the largest project in sheer number of pages is as General Editor of the 14 volume Collected Works of Rudolf Carnap. For this there is also a distinguished Editorial Board, for which see __________ This Collected Works will be published by Open Court Publications and will take many years to complete. I am also working on such papers as "The Construction of Reason: Kant, Carnap, Kuhn, and Beyond" and "Turning Point: The Indeterminacy of Translation at Middle Age".
Selected Publications
"Vienna, The City of Quine's Dreams" (forthcoming)
The Linguistic Doctrine and Conventionality: The Main Argument in "Carnap and Logical Truth" (2004)
"Every Dogma Has Its Day" (1991)
Biology and Epistemology (edited with Jane Maienschein in 2000)
Dear Carnap, Dear Van: The Quine-Carnap Correspondence and Related Work (edited in 1990)