Switch to: References

Add citations

You must login to add citations.
  1. The psychopathology of metaphysics.Billon Alexandre - 2024 - Metaphilosophy 1 (01):1-28.
    According to a common philosophical intuition, the deep nature of things is hidden from us, and the world as we know it through perception and science is somehow shallow and lacking in reality. For all we knwo, the intuition goes, we could be living in a cave facing shadows, in a dream or even in a computer simulation, This “intuition of unreality” clashes with a strong, but perhaps more naive, intuition to the effect that the world as we know it (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Why do numbers exist? A psychologist constructivist account.Markus Pantsar - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    In this paper, I study the kind of questions we can ask about the existence of numbers. In addition to asking whether numbers exist, and how, I argue that there is also a third relevant question: why numbers exist. In platonist and nominalist accounts this question may not make sense, but in the psychologist account I develop, it is as well-placed as the other two questions. In fact, there are two such why-questions: the causal why-question asks what causes numbers to (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Ontological Purity for Formal Proofs.Robin Martinot - 2024 - Review of Symbolic Logic 17 (2):395-434.
    Purity is known as an ideal of proof that restricts a proof to notions belonging to the ‘content’ of the theorem. In this paper, our main interest is to develop a conception of purity for formal (natural deduction) proofs. We develop two new notions of purity: one based on an ontological notion of the content of a theorem, and one based on the notions of surrogate ontological content and structural content. From there, we characterize which (classical) first-order natural deduction proofs (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Observation and Intuition.Justin Clarke-Doane & Avner Ash - 2023 - In Carolin Antos, Neil Barton & Giorgio Venturi (eds.), The Palgrave Companion to the Philosophy of Set Theory. Palgrave.
    The motivating question of this paper is: ‘How are our beliefs in the theorems of mathematics justified?’ This is distinguished from the question ‘How are our mathematical beliefs reliably true?’ We examine an influential answer, outlined by Russell, championed by Gödel, and developed by those searching for new axioms to settle undecidables, that our mathematical beliefs are justified by ‘intuitions’, as our scientific beliefs are justified by observations. On this view, axioms are analogous to laws of nature. They are postulated (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • The Caesar Problem — A Piecemeal Solution.J. P. Studd - 2023 - Philosophia Mathematica 31 (2):236-267.
    The Caesar problem arises for abstractionist views, which seek to secure reference for terms such as ‘the number of Xs’ or #X by stipulating the content of ‘unmixed’ identity contexts like ‘#X = #Y’. Frege objects that this stipulation says nothing about ‘mixed’ contexts such as ‘# X = Julius Caesar’. This article defends a neglected response to the Caesar problem: the content of mixed contexts is just as open to stipulation as that of unmixed contexts.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • From Maximal Intersubjectivity to Objectivity: An Argument from the Development of Arithmetical Cognition.Markus Pantsar - 2022 - Topoi 42 (1):271-281.
    One main challenge of non-platonist philosophy of mathematics is to account for the apparent objectivity of mathematical knowledge. Cole and Feferman have proposed accounts that aim to explain objectivity through the intersubjectivity of mathematical knowledge. In this paper, focusing on arithmetic, I will argue that these accounts as such cannot explain the apparent objectivity of mathematical knowledge. However, with support from recent progress in the empirical study of the development of arithmetical cognition, a stronger argument can be provided. I will (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Mathematics: Method Without Metaphysics.Elaine Landry - 2023 - Philosophia Mathematica 31 (1):56-80.
    I use my reading of Plato to develop what I call as-ifism, the view that, in mathematics, we treat our hypotheses as if they were first principles and we do this with the purpose of solving mathematical problems. I then extend this view to modern mathematics showing that when we shift our focus from the method of philosophy to the method of mathematics, we see that an as-if methodological interpretation of mathematical structuralism can be used to provide an account of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • (1 other version)Mathematical Pluralism and Indispensability.Silvia Jonas - 2023 - Erkenntnis 1:1-25.
    Pluralist mathematical realism, the view that there exists more than one mathematical universe, has become an influential position in the philosophy of mathematics. I argue that, if mathematical pluralism is true (and we have good reason to believe that it is), then mathematical realism cannot (easily) be justified by arguments from the indispensability of mathematics to science. This is because any justificatory chain of inferences from mathematical applications in science to the total body of mathematical theorems can cover at most (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Essence, Triviality, and Fundamentality.Ashley Coates - 2022 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 52 (5):502-516.
    I defend a new account of constitutive essence on which an entity’s constitutively essential properties are its most fundamental, nontrivial necessary properties. I argue that this account accommodates the Finean counterexamples to classic modalism about essence, provides an independently plausible account of constitutive essence, and does not run into clear counterexamples. I conclude that this theory provides a promising way forward for attempts to produce an adequate nonprimitivist, modalist account of essence. As both triviality and fundamentality in the account are (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Structure and applied mathematics.Travis McKenna - 2022 - Synthese 200 (5):1-31.
    ‘Mapping accounts’ of applied mathematics hold that the application of mathematics in physical science is best understood in terms of ‘mappings’ between mathematical structures and physical structures. In this paper, I suggest that mapping accounts rely on the assumption that the mathematics relevant to any application of mathematics in empirical science can be captured in an appropriate mathematical structure. If we are interested in assessing the plausibility of mapping accounts, we must ask ourselves: how plausible is this assumption as a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Collective Abstraction.Jon Erling Litland - 2022 - Philosophical Review 131 (4):453-497.
    This paper develops a novel theory of abstraction—what we call collective abstraction. The theory solves a notorious problem for noneliminative structuralism. The noneliminative structuralist holds that in addition to various isomorphic systems there is a pure structure that can be abstracted from each of these systems; but existing accounts of abstraction fail for nonrigid systems like the complex numbers. The problem with the existing accounts is that they attempt to define a unique abstraction operation. The theory of collective abstraction instead (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • The Price of Mathematical Scepticism.Paul Blain Levy - 2022 - Philosophia Mathematica 30 (3):283-305.
    This paper argues that, insofar as we doubt the bivalence of the Continuum Hypothesis or the truth of the Axiom of Choice, we should also doubt the consistency of third-order arithmetic, both the classical and intuitionistic versions. -/- Underlying this argument is the following philosophical view. Mathematical belief springs from certain intuitions, each of which can be either accepted or doubted in its entirety, but not half-accepted. Therefore, our beliefs about reality, bivalence, choice and consistency should all be aligned.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • The structuralist approach to underdetermination.Chanwoo Lee - 2022 - Synthese 200 (2):1-25.
    This paper provides an exposition of the structuralist approach to underdetermination, which aims to resolve the underdetermination of theories by identifying their common theoretical structure. Applications of the structuralist approach can be found in many areas of philosophy. I present a schema of the structuralist approach, which conceptually unifies such applications in different subject matters. It is argued that two classic arguments in the literature, Paul Benacerraf’s argument on natural numbers and W. V. O. Quine’s argument for the indeterminacy of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • The mathematical stance.Alan Baker - 2022 - Synthese 200 (1):1-18.
    Defenders of the enhanced indispensability argument argue that the most effective route to platonism is via the explanatory role of mathematical posits in science. Various compelling cases of mathematical explanation in science have been proposed, but a satisfactory general philosophical account of such explanations is lacking. In this paper, I lay out the framework for such an account based on the notion of “the mathematical stance.” This is developed by analogy with Dennett’s well-known concept of “the intentional stance.” Roughly, adopting (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Parts of Structures.Matteo Plebani & Michele Lubrano - 2022 - Philosophia 50 (3):1277-1285.
    We contribute to the ongoing discussion on mathematical structuralism by focusing on a question that has so far been neglected: when is a structure part of another structure? This paper is a first step towards answering the question. We will show that a certain conception of structures, abstractionism about structures, yields a natural definition of the parthood relation between structures. This answer has many interesting consequences; however, it conflicts with some standard mereological principles. We argue that the tension between abstractionism (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Advances in Natural Deduction: A Celebration of Dag Prawitz's Work.Luiz Carlos Pereira & Edward Hermann Haeusler (eds.) - 2012 - Dordrecht, Netherland: Springer.
    This collection of papers, celebrating the contributions of Swedish logician Dag Prawitz to Proof Theory, has been assembled from those presented at the Natural Deduction conference organized in Rio de Janeiro to honour his seminal research. Dag Prawitz’s work forms the basis of intuitionistic type theory and his inversion principle constitutes the foundation of most modern accounts of proof-theoretic semantics in Logic, Linguistics and Theoretical Computer Science. The range of contributions includes material on the extension of natural deduction with higher-order (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Reasons explanations (of actions) as structural explanations.Megan Fritts - 2021 - Synthese 199 (5-6):12683-12704.
    Non-causal accounts of action explanation have long been criticized for lacking a positive thesis, relying primarily on negative arguments to undercut the standard Causal Theory of Action The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2016). Additionally, it is commonly thought that non-causal accounts fail to provide an answer to Donald Davidson’s challenge for theories of reasons explanations of actions. According to Davidson’s challenge, a plausible non-causal account of reasons explanations must provide a way of connecting an agent’s reasons, not only to what (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Objectivity in Mathematics, Without Mathematical Objects†.Markus Pantsar - 2021 - Philosophia Mathematica 29 (3):318-352.
    I identify two reasons for believing in the objectivity of mathematical knowledge: apparent objectivity and applications in science. Focusing on arithmetic, I analyze platonism and cognitive nativism in terms of explaining these two reasons. After establishing that both theories run into difficulties, I present an alternative epistemological account that combines the theoretical frameworks of enculturation and cumulative cultural evolution. I show that this account can explain why arithmetical knowledge appears to be objective and has scientific applications. Finally, I will argue (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  • Categoricity by convention.Julien Murzi & Brett Topey - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 178 (10):3391-3420.
    On a widespread naturalist view, the meanings of mathematical terms are determined, and can only be determined, by the way we use mathematical language—in particular, by the basic mathematical principles we’re disposed to accept. But it’s mysterious how this can be so, since, as is well known, minimally strong first-order theories are non-categorical and so are compatible with countless non-isomorphic interpretations. As for second-order theories: though they typically enjoy categoricity results—for instance, Dedekind’s categoricity theorem for second-order and Zermelo’s quasi-categoricity theorem (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  • Comparing Mathematical Explanations.Isaac Wilhelm - 2023 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 74 (1):269-290.
    Philosophers have developed several detailed accounts of what makes some mathematical proofs explanatory. Significantly less attention has been paid, however, to what makes some proofs more explanatory than other proofs. That is problematic, since the reasons for thinking that some proofs explain are also reasons for thinking that some proofs are more explanatory than others. So in this paper, I develop an account of comparative explanation in mathematics. I propose a theory of the `at least as explanatory as' relation among (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Homotopy Type Theory and Structuralism.Teruji Thomas - 2014 - Dissertation, University of Oxford
    I explore the possibility of a structuralist interpretation of homotopy type theory (HoTT) as a foundation for mathematics. There are two main aspects to HoTT's structuralist credentials. First, it builds on categorical set theory (CST), of which the best-known variant is Lawvere's ETCS. I argue that CST has merit as a structuralist foundation, in that it ascribes only structural properties to typical mathematical objects. However, I also argue that this success depends on the adoption of a strict typing system which (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Mathematics as a science of non-abstract reality: Aristotelian realist philosophies of mathematics.James Franklin - 2022 - Foundations of Science 27 (2):327-344.
    There is a wide range of realist but non-Platonist philosophies of mathematics—naturalist or Aristotelian realisms. Held by Aristotle and Mill, they played little part in twentieth century philosophy of mathematics but have been revived recently. They assimilate mathematics to the rest of science. They hold that mathematics is the science of X, where X is some observable feature of the (physical or other non-abstract) world. Choices for X include quantity, structure, pattern, complexity, relations. The article lays out and compares these (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Why Can’t There Be Numbers?David Builes - forthcoming - The Philosophical Quarterly.
    Platonists affirm the existence of abstract mathematical objects, and Nominalists deny the existence of abstract mathematical objects. While there are standard arguments in favor of Nominalism, these arguments fail to account for the necessity of Nominalism. Furthermore, these arguments do nothing to explain why Nominalism is true. They only point to certain theoretical vices that might befall the Platonist. The goal of this paper is to formulate and defend a simple, valid argument for the necessity of Nominalism that seeks to (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • XV—On Consistency and Existence in Mathematics.Walter Dean - 2021 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 120 (3):349-393.
    This paper engages the question ‘Does the consistency of a set of axioms entail the existence of a model in which they are satisfied?’ within the frame of the Frege-Hilbert controversy. The question is related historically to the formulation, proof and reception of Gödel’s Completeness Theorem. Tools from mathematical logic are then used to argue that there are precise senses in which Frege was correct to maintain that demonstrating consistency is as difficult as it can be, but also in which (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Supervenience Physicalism and the Berry Paradox.Douglas V. Porpora - 2021 - Philosophia 49 (4):1681-1693.
    This paper intervenes in an argument over the number of thoughts that could be thought. The argument has important implications for supervenience physicalism, the thesis that all is physical or supervenient on the physical. If, per quantum mechanics, the number of possible physical states is finite while the number of possible thoughts is infinite, then the latter exceeds the former in number, and supervenience phyicalsim fails. Abelson first argued that possible thoughts are infinite as we can think of any of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Does Dispositionalism Entail Panpsychism?Hedda Hassel Mørch - 2018 - Topoi 39 (5):1073-1088.
    According to recent arguments for panpsychism, all physical properties are dispositional, dispositions require categorical grounds, and the only categorical properties we know are phenomenal properties. Therefore, phenomenal properties can be posited as the categorical grounds of all physical properties—in order to solve the mind–body problem and/or in order avoid noumenalism about the grounds of the physical world. One challenge to this case comes from dispositionalism, which agrees that all physical properties are dispositional, but denies that dispositions require categorical grounds. In (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   20 citations  
  • Pasch's empiricism as methodological structuralism.Dirk Schlimm - 2020 - In Erich H. Reck & Georg Schiemer (eds.), The Pre-History of Mathematical Structuralism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 80-105.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • The ineffability of God.Omar Fakhri - 2020 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 89 (1):25-41.
    I defend an account of God’s ineffability that depends on the distinction between fundamental and non-fundamental truths. I argue that although there are fundamentally true propositions about God, no creature can have them as the object of a propositional attitude, and no sentence can perfectly carve out their structures. Why? Because these propositions have non-enumerable structures. In principle, no creature can fully grasp God’s intrinsic nature, nor can they develop a language that fully describes it. On this account, the ineffability (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Structural Relativity and Informal Rigour.Neil Barton - 2022 - In Gianluigi Oliveri, Claudio Ternullo & Stefano Boscolo (eds.), Objects, Structures, and Logics, FilMat Studies in the Philosophy of Mathematics. Springer. pp. 133-174.
    Informal rigour is the process by which we come to understand particular mathematical structures and then manifest this rigour through axiomatisations. Structural relativity is the idea that the kinds of structures we isolate are dependent upon the logic we employ. We bring together these ideas by considering the level of informal rigour exhibited by our set-theoretic discourse, and argue that different foundational programmes should countenance different underlying logics (intermediate between first- and second-order) for formulating set theory. By bringing considerations of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • The philosophy of linguistics: Scientific underpinnings and methodological disputes.Ryan M. Nefdt - 2019 - Philosophy Compass 14 (12):e12636.
    This article surveys the philosophical literature on theoretical linguistics. The focus of the paper is centred around the major debates in the philosophy of linguistics, past and present, with specific relation to how they connect to the philosophy of science. Specific issues such as scientific realism in linguistics, the scientific status of grammars, the methodological underpinnings of formal semantics, and the integration of linguistics into the larger cognitive sciences form the crux of the discussion.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • The Structuralist Thesis Reconsidered.Georg Schiemer & John Wigglesworth - 2019 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 70 (4):1201-1226.
    Øystein Linnebo and Richard Pettigrew have recently developed a version of non-eliminative mathematical structuralism based on Fregean abstraction principles. They argue that their theory of abstract structures proves a consistent version of the structuralist thesis that positions in abstract structures only have structural properties. They do this by defining a subset of the properties of positions in structures, so-called fundamental properties, and argue that all fundamental properties of positions are structural. In this article, we argue that the structuralist thesis, even (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  • What are Implicit Definitions?Eduardo N. Giovannini & Georg Schiemer - 2019 - Erkenntnis 86 (6):1661-1691.
    The paper surveys different notions of implicit definition. In particular, we offer an examination of a kind of definition commonly used in formal axiomatics, which in general terms is understood as providing a definition of the primitive terminology of an axiomatic theory. We argue that such “structural definitions” can be semantically understood in two different ways, namely as specifications of the meaning of the primitive terms of a theory and as definitions of higher-order mathematical concepts or structures. We analyze these (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • On the Philosophical Significance of Frege’s Constraint.Andrea Sereni - 2019 - Philosophia Mathematica 27 (2):244–275.
    Foundational projects disagree on whether pure and applied mathematics should be explained together. Proponents of unified accounts like neologicists defend Frege’s Constraint (FC), a principle demanding that an explanation of applicability be provided by mathematical definitions. I reconsider the philosophical import of FC, arguing that usual conceptions are biased by ontological assumptions. I explore more reasonable weaker variants — Moderate and Modest FC — arguing against common opinion that ante rem structuralism (and other) views can meet them. I dispel doubts (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • The Structures of Social Structural Explanation: Comments on Haslanger’s What is (Social) Structural Explanation?.Rachel Katharine Sterken - 2018 - Disputatio 10 (50):173-199.
    In a recent paper (Haslanger 2016), Sally Haslanger argues for the importance of structural explanation. Roughly, a structural explana- tion of the behaviour of a given object appeals to features of the struc- tures—physical, social, or otherwise—the object is embedded in. It is opposed to individualistic explanations, where what is appealed to is just the object and its properties. For example, an individualistic explanation of why someone got the grade they did might appeal to features of the essay they wrote—its (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Infinity and the foundations of linguistics.Ryan M. Nefdt - 2019 - Synthese 196 (5):1671-1711.
    The concept of linguistic infinity has had a central role to play in foundational debates within theoretical linguistics since its more formal inception in the mid-twentieth century. The conceptualist tradition, marshalled in by Chomsky and others, holds that infinity is a core explanandum and a link to the formal sciences. Realism/Platonism takes this further to argue that linguistics is in fact a formal science with an abstract ontology. In this paper, I argue that a central misconstrual of formal apparatus of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  • Questions and Answers: Metaphysical Explanation and the Structure of Reality.Naomi Thompson - 2019 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 5 (1):98-116.
    This paper develops an account of metaphysical explanation according to which metaphysical explanations are answers to what-makes-it-the-case-that questions. On this view, metaphysical explanations are not to be considered entirely objective, but are subject to epistemic constraints imposed by the context in which a relevant question is asked. The resultant account of metaphysical explanation is developed independently of any particular views about grounding. Toward the end of the paper an application of the view is proposed that takes metaphysical explanations conceived in (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   21 citations  
  • Animal Cognition, Species Invariantism, and Mathematical Realism.Helen De Cruz - 2019 - In Andrew Aberdein & Matthew Inglis (eds.), Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics. London: Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 39-61.
    What can we infer from numerical cognition about mathematical realism? In this paper, I will consider one aspect of numerical cognition that has received little attention in the literature: the remarkable similarities of numerical cognitive capacities across many animal species. This Invariantism in Numerical Cognition (INC) indicates that mathematics and morality are disanalogous in an important respect: proto-moral beliefs differ substantially between animal species, whereas proto-mathematical beliefs (at least in the animals studied) seem to show more similarities. This makes moral (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • An encoding approach to Ante Rem structuralism.T. G. Murphy - 2019 - Synthese 198 (7):5953-5976.
    While ante rem structuralism offers a promising account of mathematical truth and mathematical ontology, several of the most prominent formulations of the view seem to be subject to significant difficulties involving the identity conditions of the objects they posit. In this paper I argue that those difficulties can be overcome by adopting encoding structuralism, a version of realism about mathematical objects developed by Bernard Linsky, Uri Nodelman and Edward Zalta.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Hale’s argument from transitive counting.Eric Snyder, Richard Samuels & Stewart Shapiro - 2019 - Synthese 198 (3):1905-1933.
    A core commitment of Bob Hale and Crispin Wright’s neologicism is their invocation of Frege’s Constraint—roughly, the requirement that the core empirical applications for a class of numbers be “built directly into” their formal characterization. According to these neologicists, if legitimate, Frege’s Constraint adjudicates in favor of their preferred foundation—Hume’s Principle—and against alternatives, such as the Dedekind–Peano axioms. In this paper, we consider a recent argument for legitimating Frege’s Constraint due to Hale, according to which the primary empirical application of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Contingentism in Metaphysics.Kristie Miller - 2010 - Philosophy Compass 5 (11):965-977.
    In a lot of domains in metaphysics the tacit assumption has been that whichever metaphysical principles turn out to be true, these will be necessarily true. Let us call necessitarianism about some domain the thesis that the right metaphysics of that domain is necessary. Necessitarianism has flourished. In the philosophy of maths we find it held that if mathematical objects exist, then they do of necessity. Mathematical Platonists affirm the necessary existence of mathematical objects (see for instance Hale and Wright (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   17 citations  
  • (3 other versions)The Intelligibility of the Universe.Michael Redhead - 2001 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 48:73-90.
    Hume famously warned us that the ‘[The] ultimate springs and principles are totally shut up from human curiosity and enquiry’. Or, again, Newton: ‘Hitherto I have not been able to discover the cause of these properties of gravity … and I frame no hypotheses.’ Aristotelian science was concerned with just such questions, the specification of occult qualities, the real essences that answer the question What is matter, etc?, the preoccupation with circular definitions such as dormative virtues, and so on. The (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   34 citations  
  • Set-theoretic pluralism and the Benacerraf problem.Justin Clarke-Doane - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (7):2013-2030.
    Set-theoretic pluralism is an increasingly influential position in the philosophy of set theory (Balaguer [1998], Linksy and Zalta [1995], Hamkins [2012]). There is considerable room for debate about how best to formulate set-theoretic pluralism, and even about whether the view is coherent. But there is widespread agreement as to what there is to recommend the view (given that it can be formulated coherently). Unlike set-theoretic universalism, set-theoretic pluralism affords an answer to Benacerraf’s epistemological challenge. The purpose of this paper is (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  • Reasoning about Arbitrary Natural Numbers from a Carnapian Perspective.Leon Horsten & Stanislav O. Speranski - 2019 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 48 (4):685-707.
    Inspired by Kit Fine’s theory of arbitrary objects, we explore some ways in which the generic structure of the natural numbers can be presented. Following a suggestion of Saul Kripke’s, we discuss how basic facts and questions about this generic structure can be expressed in the framework of Carnapian quantified modal logic.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • William Lane Craig.*God and Abstract Objects – The Coherence of Theism : AseityWilliam Lane Craig. God Over All : Divine Aseity and the Challenge of Platonism.Simon Hewitt - 2018 - Philosophia Mathematica 26 (3):418-421.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Social Structures and the Ontology of Social Groups.Katherine Ritchie - 2018 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 100 (2):402-424.
    Social groups—like teams, committees, gender groups, and racial groups—play a central role in our lives and in philosophical inquiry. Here I develop and motivate a structuralist ontology of social groups centered on social structures (i.e., networks of relations that are constitutively dependent on social factors). The view delivers a picture that encompasses a diverse range of social groups, while maintaining important metaphysical and normative distinctions between groups of different kinds. It also meets the constraint that not every arbitrary collection of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   66 citations  
  • Mathematical Knowledge, the Analytic Method, and Naturalism.Fabio Sterpetti - 2018 - In Sorin Bangu (ed.), Naturalizing Logico-Mathematical Knowledge: Approaches From Psychology and Cognitive Science. New York: Routledge. pp. 268-293.
    This chapter tries to answer the following question: How should we conceive of the method of mathematics, if we take a naturalist stance? The problem arises since mathematical knowledge is regarded as the paradigm of certain knowledge, because mathematics is based on the axiomatic method. Moreover, natural science is deeply mathematized, and science is crucial for any naturalist perspective. But mathematics seems to provide a counterexample both to methodological and ontological naturalism. To face this problem, some authors tried to naturalize (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Quantification and Paradox.Edward Ferrier - 2018 - Dissertation, University of Massachusetts Amherst
    I argue that absolutism, the view that absolutely unrestricted quantification is possible, is to blame for both the paradoxes that arise in naive set theory and variants of these paradoxes that arise in plural logic and in semantics. The solution is restrictivism, the view that absolutely unrestricted quantification is not possible. -/- It is generally thought that absolutism is true and that restrictivism is not only false, but inexpressible. As a result, the paradoxes are blamed, not on illicit quantification, but (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Why pure mathematical truths are metaphysically necessary: a set-theoretic explanation.Hannes Leitgeb - 2020 - Synthese 197 (7):3113-3120.
    Pure mathematical truths are commonly thought to be metaphysically necessary. Assuming the truth of pure mathematics as currently pursued, and presupposing that set theory serves as a foundation of pure mathematics, this article aims to provide a metaphysical explanation of why pure mathematics is metaphysically necessary.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • Non-ontological Structuralism†.Michael Resnik - 2019 - Philosophia Mathematica 27 (3):303-315.
    ABSTRACT Historical structuralist views have been ontological. They either deny that there are any mathematical objects or they maintain that mathematical objects are structures or positions in them. Non-ontological structuralism offers no account of the nature of mathematical objects. My own structuralism has evolved from an early sui generis version to a non-ontological version that embraces Quine’s doctrine of ontological relativity. In this paper I further develop and explain this view.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Mathematical Knowledge and Naturalism.Fabio Sterpetti - 2019 - Philosophia 47 (1):225-247.
    How should one conceive of the method of mathematics, if one takes a naturalist stance? Mathematical knowledge is regarded as the paradigm of certain knowledge, since mathematics is based on the axiomatic method. Natural science is deeply mathematized, and science is crucial for any naturalist perspective. But mathematics seems to provide a counterexample both to methodological and ontological naturalism. To face this problem, some naturalists try to naturalize mathematics relying on Darwinism. But several difficulties arise when one tries to naturalize (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark