Background
Cornman, James Welton was born on May 31, 1978 in 1929, Philadelphia. *, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States.
Cornman, James Welton was born on May 31, 1978 in 1929, Philadelphia. *, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States.
Dartmouth College and Brown University.
1960-1963, Assistant Professor, Ohio State University. 1963 -5, Assistant Professor, University of Rochester. 1964-1965, Mellon Fellow, University of Pittsburgh.
1965-1967, Associate Professor, University of Rochester;
1967-1978, Professor, University of Pennsylvania.
The bulk of Cornman’s published work concerned Proposed solutions to the mind-body problem. In Metaphysics, Reference, and Language (1966) he began by considering generally how one might solve or dissolve metaphysical problems, typically by one or more forms of linguistic analysis, and he took the mind-body problem as a test case. He rejected the positivists’ dismissal of metaphysical Problems, and the attempts of various ordinary language analysts to dissolve metaphysical problems, on the grounds that each of these approaches relies upon undefended theories of reference. Instead Cornman takes metaphysical Problems to be concerned with external questions, 'n something very close to Carnap’s sense of this term, that is to say, questions which cannot be answered by appealing solely to rules which are internal to a linguistic framework. Cornman’s own theory of mind is adverbial materialism, so-called because it incorporates an analysis of sensations which takes them to be objectless events of sensing. These events he takes to be strictly identical to neural events. Cornman also defended a direct realist theory of perception, and embedded the adverbial account of sensations within it. He defended, too, common sense realism, which takes perceived external objects to be very much as they are perceived to be, although he denied that this thesis faced the problems Usually attributed to naive realism. Cornman’s posthumously published work. Skepticism, Justification and Explanation (1980), ls an extremely detailed treatment of epistemic scepticism and of foundationalist and coherentist theories of justified belief. Cornman defends a most complex version of foundationalism, with the added twist that most non-basic beliefs count as justified only if they help to explain basic, foundational beliefs. In this way, Cornman ends UP incorporating coherentist elements into his |heory, because non-basic beliefs are justified only ■f they are members of a maximally coherent set of beliefs which serve to explain the basic beliefs.