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  1. Musil’s Imaginary Bridge.Achille C. Varzi - 2014 - The Monist 97 (1):30-46.
    In a calculation involving imaginary numbers, we begin with real numbers that represent concrete measures and we end up with numbers that are equally real, but in the course of the operation we find ourselves walking “as if on a bridge that stands on no piles”. How is that possible? How does that work? And what is involved in the as-if stance that this metaphor introduces so beautifully? These are questions that bother Törless deeply. And that Törless is bothered by (...)
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  • Why are (some) Platonists so insouciant?William Lane Craig - 2011 - Philosophy 86 (2):213-229.
    Some platonists truly agonize over the ontological commitments which their platonism demands of them. Peter van Inwagen, for example, confesses candidly,I am happy to admit that I am uneasy about believing in the existence of ‘causally irrelevant’ objects. The fact that abstract objects, if they exist, can be neither causes or [sic] effects is one of the many features of abstract objects that make nominalism so attractive. I should very much like to be a nominalist, but I don't see how (...)
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  • Fictionalism in Metaphysics.Frederick Kroon - 2011 - Philosophy Compass 6 (11):786-803.
    This is a survey of contemporary work on ‘fictionalism in metaphysics’, a term that is taken to signify both the place of fictionalism as a distinctive anti‐realist metaphysics in which usefulness rather than truth is the norm of acceptance, and the fact that philosophers have given fictionalist treatments of a range of specifically metaphysical notions.
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  • Review: Two Conceptions of Truth? Comment. [REVIEW]Vann McGee - 2005 - Philosophical Studies 124 (1):71 - 104.
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  • Pragmatic antirealism: a new antirealist strategy.Michael Scott & Philip Brown - 2012 - Philosophical Studies 161 (3):349-366.
    In everyday speech we seem to refer to such things as abstract objects, moral properties, or propositional attitudes that have been the target of metaphysical and/or epistemological objections. Many philosophers, while endorsing scepticism about some of these entities, have not wished to charge ordinary speakers with fundamental error, or recommend that the discourse be revised or eliminated. To this end a number of non-revisionary antirealist strategies have been employed, including expressivism, reductionism and hermeneutic fictionalism. But each of these theories faces (...)
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  • Deferentialism.Chris Daly & David Liggins - 2011 - Philosophical Studies 156 (3):321-337.
    There is a recent and growing trend in philosophy that involves deferring to the claims of certain disciplines outside of philosophy, such as mathematics, the natural sciences, and linguistics. According to this trend— deferentialism , as we will call it—certain disciplines outside of philosophy make claims that have a decisive bearing on philosophical disputes, where those claims are more epistemically justified than any philosophical considerations just because those claims are made by those disciplines. Deferentialists believe that certain longstanding philosophical problems (...)
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  • Creativity, Freedom, and Authority: A New Perspective On the Metaphysics of Mathematics.Julian C. Cole - 2009 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 87 (4):589-608.
    I discuss a puzzle that shows there is a need to develop a new metaphysical interpretation of mathematical theories, because all well-known interpretations conflict with important aspects of mathematical activities. The new interpretation, I argue, must authenticate the ontological commitments of mathematical theories without curtailing mathematicians' freedom and authority to creatively introduce mathematical ontology during mathematical problem-solving. Further, I argue that these two constraints are best met by a metaphysical interpretation of mathematics that takes mathematical entities to be constitutively constructed (...)
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  • Philosophy of mathematics.Leon Horsten - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    If mathematics is regarded as a science, then the philosophy of mathematics can be regarded as a branch of the philosophy of science, next to disciplines such as the philosophy of physics and the philosophy of biology. However, because of its subject matter, the philosophy of mathematics occupies a special place in the philosophy of science. Whereas the natural sciences investigate entities that are located in space and time, it is not at all obvious that this is also the case (...)
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  • (1 other version)Platonism in metaphysics.Mark Balaguer - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Platonism is the view that there exist such things as abstract objects — where an abstract object is an object that does not exist in space or time and which is therefore entirely non-physical and nonmental. Platonism in this sense is a contemporary view. It is obviously related to the views of Plato in important ways, but it is not entirely clear that Plato endorsed this view, as it is defined here. In order to remain neutral on this question, the (...)
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  • Fictionalism.Matti Eklund - 2010 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Carnap and ontological pluralism.Matti Eklund - 2009 - In Ryan Wasserman, David Manley & David Chalmers (eds.), Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. pp. 130--56.
    My focus here will be Rudolf Carnap’s views on ontology, as these are presented in the seminal “Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology” (1950). I will first describe how I think Carnap’s distinction between external and internal questions is best understood. Then I will turn to broader issues regarding Carnap’s views on ontology. With certain reservations, I will ascribe to Carnap an ontological pluralist position roughly similar to the positions of Eli Hirsch and the later Hilary Putnam. Then I turn to some (...)
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  • Anti-nominalism reconsidered.David Liggins - 2007 - Philosophical Quarterly 57 (226):104–111.
    Many philosophers of mathematics are attracted by nominalism – the doctrine that there are no sets, numbers, functions, or other mathematical objects. John Burgess and Gideon Rosen have put forward an intriguing argument against nominalism, based on the thought that philosophy cannot overrule internal mathematical and scientific standards of acceptability. I argue that Burgess and Rosen’s argument fails because it relies on a mistaken view of what the standards of mathematics require.
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  • Mathematical existence.Penelope Maddy - 2005 - Bulletin of Symbolic Logic 11 (3):351-376.
    Despite some discomfort with this grandly philosophical topic, I do in fact hope to address a venerable pair of philosophical chestnuts: mathematical truth and existence. My plan is to set out three possible stands on these issues, for an exercise in compare and contrast.' A word of warning, though, to philosophical purists (and perhaps of comfort to more mathematical readers): I will explore these philosophical positions with an eye to their interconnections with some concrete issues of set theoretic method.
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  • Fictionalism and the attitudes.Chris John Daly - 2008 - Philosophical Studies 139 (3):423 - 440.
    This paper distinguishes revolutionary fictionalism from other forms of fictionalism and also from other philosophical views. The paper takes fictionalism about mathematical objects and fictionalism about scientific unobservables as illustrations. The paper evaluates arguments that purport to show that this form of fictionalism is incoherent on the grounds that there is no tenable distinction between believing a sentence and taking the fictionalist's distinctive attitude to that sentence. The argument that fictionalism about mathematics is ‘comically immodest’ is also evaluated. In place (...)
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  • A fictionalist theory of universals.Tim Button & Robert Trueman - 2024 - In Peter Fritz & Nicholas K. Jones (eds.), Higher-Order Metaphysics. Oxford University Press.
    Universals are putative objects like wisdom, morality, redness, etc. Although we believe in properties (which, we argue, are not a kind of object), we do not believe in universals. However, a number of ordinary, natural language constructions seem to commit us to their existence. In this paper, we provide a fictionalist theory of universals, which allows us to speak as if universals existed, whilst denying that any really do.
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  • Whence deep realism for Everettian quantum mechanics?Raoni Wohnrath Arroyo & Jonas R. Becker Arenhart - 2022 - Foundations of Physics 52 (6):121.
    ‘Shallow’ and ‘deep’ versions of scientific realism may be distinguished as follows: the shallow realist is satisfied with belief in the existence of the posits of our best scientific theories; by contrast, deep realists claim that realism can be legitimate only if such entities are described in metaphysical terms. We argue that this methodological discussion can be fruitfully applied in Everettian quantum mechanics, specifically on the debate concerning the existence of worlds and the recent dispute between Everettian actualism and quantum (...)
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  • The spectrum of metametaphysics: mapping the state of art in scientific metaphysics.Jonas R. Becker Arenhart & Raoni Wohnrath Arroyo - 2021 - Veritas – Revista de Filosofia da Pucrs 66 (1):e41217.
    Scientific realism is typically associated with metaphysics. One current incarnation of such an association concerns the requirement of a metaphysical characterization of the entities one is being a realist about. This is sometimes called “Chakravartty’s Challenge”, and codifies the claim that without a metaphysical characterization, one does not have a clear picture of the realistic commitments one is engaged with. The required connection between metaphysics and science naturally raises the question of whether such a demand is appropriately fulfilled, and how (...)
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  • Strict Finitism and the Logic of Mathematical Applications.Feng Ye - 2011 - Dordrecht, Netherland: Springer.
    This book intends to show that radical naturalism, nominalism and strict finitism account for the applications of classical mathematics in current scientific theories. The applied mathematical theories developed in the book include the basics of calculus, metric space theory, complex analysis, Lebesgue integration, Hilbert spaces, and semi-Riemann geometry. The fact that so much applied mathematics can be developed within such a weak, strictly finitistic system, is surprising in itself. It also shows that the applications of those classical theories to the (...)
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  • Números naturales: distintas metodologías que convergen en el análisis de su naturaleza y de cómo los entendemos.Melisa Vivanco - 2020 - Critica 51 (153).
    José Ferreirós y Abel Lasalle Casanave, El árbol de los números: cognición, lógica y práctica matemática, Editorial Universidad de Sevilla, Sevilla, 2015, 256 pp.
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  • Objects and objectivity : Alternatives to mathematical realism.Ebba Gullberg - 2011 - Dissertation, Umeå Universitet
    This dissertation is centered around a set of apparently conflicting intuitions that we may have about mathematics. On the one hand, we are inclined to believe that the theorems of mathematics are true. Since many of these theorems are existence assertions, it seems that if we accept them as true, we also commit ourselves to the existence of mathematical objects. On the other hand, mathematical objects are usually thought of as abstract objects that are non-spatiotemporal and causally inert. This makes (...)
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  • Fictionalism about musical works.Anton Killin - 2018 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 48 (2):266-291.
    The debate concerning the ontological status of musical works is perhaps the most animated debate in contemporary analytic philosophy of music. In my view, progress requires a piecemeal approach. So in this article I hone in on one particular musical work concept – that of the classical Western art musical work; that is, the work concept that regulates classical art-musical practice. I defend a fictionalist analysis – a strategy recently suggested by Andrew Kania as potentially fruitful – and I develop (...)
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  • Metametametaphysics and Dialetheism.Suki Finn - 2017 - Australasian Journal of Logic 14 (1):128-146.
    This paper reflects on metametaphysics and as such develops a metametameta-physical view: that quietist metametaphysics requires dialetheism, and in turn a paraconsistent logic. I demonstrate this using Carnap’s metametaphysical position in his 'Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology' as an example, with regard to how it exhibits self-reference and results in inconsistency. I show how applying Carnap’s position to itself produces a dilemma, both horns of which lead to a contradiction. Such inconsistency commonly arises from meta-theories with global scope, as the 'meta' (...)
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  • Frege Meets Zermelo: A Perspective on Ineffability and Reflection.Stewart Shapiro - 2008 - Review of Symbolic Logic 1 (2):241-266.
    1. Philosophical background: iteration, ineffability, reflection. There are at least two heuristic motivations for the axioms of standard set theory, by which we mean, as usual, first-order Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory with the axiom of choice (ZFC): the iterative conception and limitation of size (see Boolos, 1989). Each strand provides a rather hospitable environment for the hypothesis that the set-theoretic universe is ineffable, which is our target in this paper, although the motivation is different in each case.
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  • (1 other version)Interdisciplinary Collaboration in Philosophy.Andrew Higgins & Alexis Dyschkant - 2014 - Metaphilosophy 45 (3):372-398.
    Many philosophers would, in theory, agree that the methods and tools of philosophy ought to be supplemented by those of other academic disciplines. In practice, however, the sociological data suggest that most philosophers fail to engage or collaborate with other academics, and this article argues that this is problematic for philosophy as a discipline. In relation to the value of interdisciplinary collaboration, the article highlights how experimental philosophers can benefit the field, but only insofar as they draw from the distinctive (...)
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  • Fictionalism, theft, and the story of mathematics.Mark Balaguer - 2009 - Philosophia Mathematica 17 (2):131-162.
    This paper develops a novel version of mathematical fictionalism and defends it against three objections or worries, viz., (i) an objection based on the fact that there are obvious disanalogies between mathematics and fiction; (ii) a worry about whether fictionalism is consistent with the fact that certain mathematical sentences are objectively correct whereas others are incorrect; and (iii) a recent objection due to John Burgess concerning “hermeneuticism” and “revolutionism”.
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  • What anti-realism in philosophy of mathematics must offer.Feng Ye - 2010 - Synthese 175 (1):13 - 31.
    This article attempts to motivate a new approach to anti-realism (or nominalism) in the philosophy of mathematics. I will explore the strongest challenges to anti-realism, based on sympathetic interpretations of our intuitions that appear to support realism. I will argue that the current anti-realistic philosophies have not yet met these challenges, and that is why they cannot convince realists. Then, I will introduce a research project for a new, truly naturalistic, and completely scientific approach to philosophy of mathematics. It belongs (...)
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  • Fictionalism in the philosophy of mathematics.Mark Balaguer - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Mathematical fictionalism (or as I'll call it, fictionalism) is best thought of as a reaction to mathematical platonism. Platonism is the view that (a) there exist abstract mathematical objects (i.e., nonspatiotemporal mathematical objects), and (b) our mathematical sentences and theories provide true descriptions of such objects. So, for instance, on the platonist view, the sentence ‘3 is prime’ provides a straightforward description of a certain object—namely, the number 3—in much the same way that the sentence ‘Mars is red’ provides a (...)
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  • Deductive Pluralism.John M. Hosack - unknown
    This paper proposes an approach to the philosophy of mathematics, deductive pluralism, that is designed to satisfy the criteria of inclusiveness of and consistency with mathematical practice. Deductive pluralism views mathematical statements as assertions that a result follows from logical and mathematical foundations and that there are a variety of incompatible foundations such as standard foundations, constructive foundations, or univalent foundations. The advantages of this philosophy include the elimination of ontological problems, epistemological clarity, and objectivity. Possible objections and relations with (...)
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  • Revolutionary Fictionalism: A Call to Arms.Mary Leng - 2005 - Philosophia Mathematica 13 (3):277-293.
    This paper responds to John Burgess's ‘Mathematics and _Bleak House_’. While Burgess's rejection of hermeneutic fictionalism is accepted, it is argued that his two main attacks on revolutionary fictionalism fail to meet their target. Firstly, ‘philosophical modesty’ should not prevent philosophers from questioning the truth of claims made within successful practices, provided that the utility of those practices as they stand can be explained. Secondly, Carnapian scepticism concerning the meaningfulness of _metaphysical_ existence claims has no force against a _naturalized_ version (...)
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  • (1 other version)Platonism in Metaphysics.Markn D. Balaguer - 2016 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 1 (1):1.
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  • Fictionalism.E. C. Bourne - 2013 - Analysis 73 (1):147-162.
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  • Quine on naturalism, nominalism, and philosophy’s place within science.James Andrew Smith - 2021 - Synthese 198 (2):1549-1567.
    W.V. Quine is a well-known proponent of naturalism, the view on which reality is described only in science. He is also well-known for arguing that our current scientific theories commit us to the existence of abstract objects. It is tempting to believe that the naturalistic philosopher should think scientists outside of philosophy are in the best position to assess the merits of revising our current commitment to abstract objects. But Quine rejects this deferential view. On the reading of Quine’s philosophical (...)
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  • Fictionalism.Fiora Salis - 2015 - Online Companion to Problems in Analytic Philosophy.
    In this entry I will offer a survey of the contemporary debate on fic- tionalism, which is a distinctive anti-realist view about certain regions of discourse that are valued for their usefulness rather than their truth.
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  • A Burgessian Critique of Nominalistic Tendencies in Contemporary Mathematics and its Historiography.Karin Usadi Katz & Mikhail G. Katz - 2012 - Foundations of Science 17 (1):51-89.
    We analyze the developments in mathematical rigor from the viewpoint of a Burgessian critique of nominalistic reconstructions. We apply such a critique to the reconstruction of infinitesimal analysis accomplished through the efforts of Cantor, Dedekind, and Weierstrass; to the reconstruction of Cauchy’s foundational work associated with the work of Boyer and Grabiner; and to Bishop’s constructivist reconstruction of classical analysis. We examine the effects of a nominalist disposition on historiography, teaching, and research.
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  • Handling mathematical objects: representations and context.Jessica Carter - 2013 - Synthese 190 (17):3983-3999.
    This article takes as a starting point the current popular anti realist position, Fictionalism, with the intent to compare it with actual mathematical practice. Fictionalism claims that mathematical statements do purport to be about mathematical objects, and that mathematical statements are not true. Considering these claims in the light of mathematical practice leads to questions about how mathematical objects are handled, and how we prove that certain statements hold. Based on a case study on Riemann’s work on complex functions, I (...)
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  • Grammar and sets.B. H. Slater - 2006 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 84 (1):59 – 73.
    'Philosophy arises through misconceptions of grammar', said Wittgenstein. Few people have believed him, and probably none, therefore, working in the area of the philosophy of mathematics. Yet his assertion is most evidently the case in the philosophy of Set Theory, as this paper demonstrates (see also Rodych 2000). The motivation for twentieth century Set Theory has rested on the belief that everything in Mathematics can be defined in terms of sets [Maddy 1994: 4]. But not only are there notable items (...)
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  • An empirically informed account of numbers as reifications.César Frederico dos Santos - 2023 - Theoria 89 (6):783-799.
    The field of numerical cognition provides a fairly clear picture of the processes through which we learn basic arithmetical facts. This scientific picture, however, is rarely taken as providing a response to a much‐debated philosophical question, namely, the question of how we obtain number knowledge, since numbers are usually thought to be abstract entities located outside of space and time. In this paper, I take the scientific evidence on how we learn arithmetic as providing a response to the philosophical question (...)
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  • An ‘i’ for an i, a Truth for a Truth†.Mary Leng - 2020 - Philosophia Mathematica 28 (3):347-359.
    Stewart Shapiro’s ante rem structuralism recognizes the structural or ‘algebraic’ aspects of mathematical practice while still offering a face-value semantics. Fictionalism, as a purely ‘algebraic’ approach, is held to be at a disadvantage, as compared with Shapiro’s structuralism, in not interpreting mathematics at face value. However, the face-value reading of mathematical singular terms has difficulty explaining how we can use such terms to pick out a unique referent in cases where the relevant mathematical structures admit non-trivial automorphisms. Shapiro offers a (...)
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  • Book Review: Jody Azzouni. Deflating Existential Consequence: A Case for Nominalism. [REVIEW]Julian C. Cole - 2005 - Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 46 (2):235-247.
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  • Two conceptions of truth? – Comment.V. Mc Gee - 2005 - Philosophical Studies 124 (1):71 - 104.
    Following Hartry Field in distinguishing disquotational truth from a conception that grounds truth conditions in a community's usage, it is argued that the notions are materially inequivalent (since the latter allows truth-value gaps) and that both are needed. In addition to allowing blanket endorsements ("Everything the Pope says is true"), disquotational truth facilitates mathematical discovery, as when we establish the Gödel sentence by noting that the theorems are all disquotationally true and the disquotational truths are consistent. We require a more (...)
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  • Fictionalism and Meinongianism.Nathaniel Gan - 2021 - Theoria : An International Journal for Theory, History and Fundations of Science 36 (1):49-62.
    Fictionalism about a kind of disputed object is often motivated by the fact that the view interprets discourse about those objects literally without an ontological commitment to them. This paper argues that this motivation is inadequate because some viable alternatives to fictionalism have similar attractions. Meinongianism—the view that there are true statements about non-existent objects—is one such view. Meinongianism bears significant similarity to fictionalism, so intuitive doubts about its viability are difficult to sustain for fictionalists. Moreover, Meinongianism avoids some of (...)
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  • Reply to Armour-Garb.M. Balaguer - 2011 - Philosophia Mathematica 19 (3):345-348.
    Hermeneutic non-assertivism is a thesis that mathematical fictionalists might want to endorse in responding to a recent objection due to John Burgess. Brad Armour-Garb has argued that hermeneutic non-assertivism is false. A response is given here to Armour-Garb's argument.
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  • Understanding and Mathematical Fictionalism.B. Armour-Garb - 2011 - Philosophia Mathematica 19 (3):335-344.
    In a recent paper in this journal, Mark Balaguer develops and defends a new version of mathematical fictionalism, what he calls ‘Hermeneutic non-assertivism’, and responds to some recent objections to mathematical fictionalism that were launched by John Burgess and others. In this paper I provide some fairly compelling reasons for rejecting Hermeneutic non-assertivism — ones that highlight an important feature of what understanding mathematics involves (or, as we shall see, does not involve).
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  • (1 other version)Interdisciplinary Collaboration in Philosophy.Alexis Dyschkant Andrew Higgins - 2014 - Metaphilosophy 45 (3):372-398.
    Many philosophers would, in theory, agree that the methods and tools of philosophy ought to be supplemented by those of other academic disciplines. In practice, however, the sociological data suggest that most philosophers fail to engage or collaborate with other academics, and this article argues that this is problematic for philosophy as a discipline. In relation to the value of interdisciplinary collaboration, the article highlights how experimental philosophers can benefit the field, but only insofar as they draw from the distinctive (...)
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  • God and Abstract Objects: The Coherence of Theism: Aseity.William Lane Craig - 2017 - Cham: Springer.
    This book is an exploration and defense of the coherence of classical theism’s doctrine of divine aseity in the face of the challenge posed by Platonism with respect to abstract objects. A synoptic work in analytic philosophy of religion, the book engages discussions in philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and metaontology. It addresses absolute creationism, non-Platonic realism, fictionalism, neutralism, and alternative logics and semantics, among other topics. The book offers a helpful taxonomy of the wide range of options (...)
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  • You Can’t Mean That: Yablo’s Figuralist Account of Mathematics.Sarah Hoffman - unknown
    Burgess and Rosen argue that Yablo’s figuralist account of mathematics fails because it says mathematical claims are really only metaphorical. They suggest Yablo’s view is implausible as an account of what mathematicians say and confused about literal language. I show their argument isn’t decisive, briefly exploring some questions in the philosophy of language it raises, and argue Yablo’s view may be amended to a kind of revolutionary fictionalism not refuted by Burgess and Rosen.
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