And Works In Progress

My scholarly interests cover a broad range of subjects in the philosophy of science (methodology), the philosophy of language, 20th century analytic philosophy, epistemology, philosophical logic, and Chinese philosophy.  Recently, my writings and publications focus primarily on the issues of incommensurability, scientific rationality, semantic presuppositions, conceptual schemes, cross-language understanding, facts and possible facts, David Hume, and Thomas Kuhn (for more detail, please check the selected publications section).  To give you a general impression on where I currently stand on these issues, I humbly present the main conclusions of my works in progress below.  Any comments and criticism are more than welcome.  I can be reached by email at wang@juniata.edu.

Abstract: The current discussions of conceptual schemes and its related topics are misguided; for they are based on a tacit assumption that the difference between two schemes consists in the different distributions in truth values. I argue that what should concern us, in the discussions of conceptual schemes and related issues, is not truth-values of assertions, but rather the truth-value-status of the sentences used to make the assertions. This is because the genuine conceptual innovation between alternative theories/languages does not lie in differences in determining truth values of their sentences, but turns on whether these sentences have truth values when considered within the context of a competing one. This new interpretation of the notion of conceptual schemes, which I call presuppositional languages, is not only good in itself--to establish the intelligibility and tenability of the notion, but the effect on other related issues is quite beneficial.