Ontological character

It seems to me that this worry has really very little to do with physicalism. It can be raised without any references to physics. It would go like this. Take what we know about any non-mental thing. The set of facts we can list does not include the fact that it is ontologically dependent on the mind. So we have just found a counterexample to (IR1). But this sort of worry can be raised only if we forget that the facts we list are the facts we know, and knowledge presupposes mind.11 This forgetfulness can be excused only by metaphysical realists, who believe that the facts are simply out there and their character is completely independent on the mind. So this is not really a worry about the compatibility of physicalism and internal realism. Rather, it is an expression of metaphysical realist resentment to internal realism. 

Each SOAP Web service is described in terms of Web Service Description Language (Booth and Liu 2007), which is a specification in XML. This enables data passed over the Web, say a sequence of characters such as CMRSGGCTRRYAC, to have its type specified according to an ontology, thus telling the code that that sequence of characters is a consensus DNA sequence rather than an author name or a geographical location. A RESTful Web service works in terms of HTTP requests and thus has potentially a less constrained syntax. 

What does it mean to say that chemistry is or is not reducible to physics Two chapters in the volume pursue this question, choosing to focus on epistemological issues such as whether and in what sense chemical theories and/or practices are reducible to those of physics, rather than on the ontological issue of whether or not the entities with which chemists operate are reducible to the entities of physics. Maureen and John Christie, in the chapter entitled " Laws and Theories in Chemistry Do Not Obey the Rules," make a case for the diverse character of laws and theories in the sciences and. 

I can explain vividly the difference between metaphysical physicalism and ontological physicalism by reference to a fictional character. Commander Data (Block, 2002, 2007b). The TV series Star Trek The Next Generation 16 February 1989) includes an episode ( The Measure of a Man ) in which there is a trial to decide whether a human-like android. Commander Data, may legally be turned off and taken apart by someone who does not know whether he can put the parts together again. (The... 

As I have already pointed out, the notion of atom that Boyle inherits from Sennert is closely related to the chemical atomism of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Such atomism retained the concept of fixed chemical species and reduced microstructural speculation to the bare minimum. It is not the case, of course, that semipermanent material corpuscles are really required in order for something to be irreducible and intransmutable (hence elementary ). One need only think of the spectral colors. Despite Isaac Newton s personal commitment to a corpuscular ontology, his claim for the elementary character of the spectral colors required only that he demonstrate them to be caused by rays of unequal refrangibility, not that they be corpuscular. The claim that matter is corpuscular in nature receives support in the work of Boyle and Sennert from a host of additional empirical considerations beyond mere resistance to dissolution, such as the ability to penetrate the fine pores of filter paper, the fact that sublimation often produces finely divided powders, and so forth. 

In the second paper, Alexander Sich argues that engineering cannot be foundational in the search for truth because the engineering disciplines depend fundamentally on highly-focused natural scientific knowledge applied to the production of artifacts, while the particular natural sciences depend foundation-ally upon metaphysics for their first principles. Moreover, Sich contends that a failure to draw proper ontological distinctions between the objects studied by the natural sciences and philosophy leads to confusion over the character of inferences to the existence of the objects studied. 

Mendeleev s philosophical views relating to the philosophy of chemistry can be broken down into three general areas questions of ontology concerning fundamental entities in chemistry questions of reductionism and the relation between physics and chemistry and questions of the character of natural laws. The categorizations and language used throughout this section, unless specified otherwise, are the present author s and not Mendeleev s. 

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