Burge, Tyler

"Context determines meaning in ways that formal logic struggles to capture."

"Pragmatics shows how much of human communication depends on shared backgrounds."

"Literal meaning underdetermines what speakers actually convey and mean."

"Implicature and presupposition are not defects of language but features that enable flexibility."

"Interpretation requires charity and the assumption that speakers are generally rational."

"Understanding others demands engagement with their conceptual schemes as wholes."

"Incommensurable vocabularies may describe the same world in genuinely different ways."

"Conceptual relativism need not collapse into the view that anything goes."

"Pluralism about truth values respects both objectivity and the plurality of human concerns."

"Different domains may legitimately employ different standards of correctness."

"Pragmatic success is one measure of conceptual adequacy."

"The usefulness of a concept contributes to its justification."

"Interests and values inevitably shape what we investigate and how we interpret findings."

"Objectivity is achievable not by eliminating perspective but by accounting for it carefully."

"Scientific communities correct for bias through institutionalized skepticism and replication."

"Peer review, despite flaws, provides structure for collective quality control."

"Dissent and criticism are not obstacles to knowledge but essential to its pursuit."

"Consensus is provisional and always subject to revision by future evidence."

"Scientific progress consists partly in recognizing the limitations of previous frameworks."

"Paradigm shifts show that scientific change is not merely incremental accumulation."

"Incommensurability between theories poses genuine difficulties for simple accounts of progress."

"Yet despite incommensurability, later theories often better satisfy our explanatory standards."

"Problem-solving power and empirical support remain touchstones of scientific adequacy."

"Mathematics provides structure that physical theories must respect to be successful."

"The applicability of mathematics to the natural world remains philosophically mysterious."

"Language and thought are shaped by the mathematical structures we've learned to manipulate."

"Logic constrains rational thought but does not determine unique conclusions."

"Deductive validity is necessary but not sufficient for good reasoning in practice."

"Abductive inference guides much of human learning despite lacking formal guarantee."

"Induction, properly understood, is more subtle than simple enumeration of instances."