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Sharon Berry [8]Sharon E. Berry [1]
  1. (Probably) Not companions in guilt.Sharon Berry - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (9):2285-2308.
    In this paper, I will attempt to develop and defend a common form of intuitive resistance to the companions in guilt argument. I will argue that one can reasonably believe there are promising solutions to the access problem for mathematical realism that don’t translate to moral realism. In particular, I will suggest that the structuralist project of accounting for mathematical knowledge in terms of some form of logical knowledge offers significant hope of success while no analogous approach offers such hope (...)
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  2. Coincidence Avoidance and Formulating the Access Problem.Sharon Berry - 2020 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 50 (6):687-701.
    In this article, I discuss a trivialization worry for Hartry Field’s official formulation of the access problem for mathematical realists, which was pointed out by Øystein Linnebo. I argue that various attempted reformulations of the Benacerraf problem fail to block trivialization, but that access worriers can better defend themselves by sticking closer to Hartry Field’s initial informal characterization of the access problem in terms of general epistemic norms of coincidence avoidance.
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  3. Σ01 soundness isn’t enough: Number theoretic indeterminacy’s unsavory physical commitments.Sharon Berry - 2023 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 74 (2):469-484.
    It’s sometimes suggested that we can (in a sense) settle the truth-value of some statements in the language of number theory by stipulation, adopting either φ or ¬φ as an additional axiom. For example, in Clarke-Doane (2020b) and a series of recent APA presentations, Clarke-Doane suggests that any Σ01 sound expansion of our current arithmetical practice would express a truth. In this paper, I’ll argue that (given a certain popular assumption about the model-theoretic representability of languages like ours) we can’t (...)
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  4. Modal Structuralism Simplified.Sharon Berry - 2018 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 48 (2):200-222.
    Since Benacerraf’s ‘What Numbers Could Not Be, ’ there has been a growing interest in mathematical structuralism. An influential form of mathematical structuralism, modal structuralism, uses logical possibility and second order logic to provide paraphrases of mathematical statements which don’t quantify over mathematical objects. These modal structuralist paraphrases are a useful tool for nominalists and realists alike. But their use of second order logic and quantification into the logical possibility operator raises concerns. In this paper, I show that the work (...)
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  5. External World Skepticism, Confidence and Psychologism about the Problem of Priors.Sharon Berry - 2019 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 57 (3):324-346.
    In this paper I will draw attention to an important route to external world skepticism, which I will call confidence skepticism. I will argue that we can defang confidence skepticism (though not a meeker ‘argument from might’ which has got some attention in the 20th century literature on external world skepticism) by adopting a partially psychologistic answer to the problem of priors. And I will argue that certain recent work in the epistemology of mathematics and logic provides independent support for (...)
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  6. Metaethical Deflationism, Access Worries and Motivationally Grasped Oughts.Sharon Berry - 2024 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 27 (3).
    Mathematical knowledge and moral knowledge (or normative knowledge more generally) can seem intuitively puzzling in similar ways. For example, taking apparent human knowledge of either domain at face value can seem to require accepting that we benefited from some massive and mysterious coincidence. In the mathematical case, a pluralist partial response to access worries has been widely popular. In this paper, I will develop and address a worry, suggested by some works in the recent literature like (Clarke-Doane, 2020 ), that (...)
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  7. Gunk Mountains: A puzzle.Sharon E. Berry - 2019 - Analysis 79 (1):3-10.
    This note points out a conflict between some common intuitions about metaphysical possibility. On the one hand, it is appealing to deny that there are robust counterfactuals about how various physically impossible substances would interact with the matter that exists at our world. On the other hand, our intuitions about how concepts like MOUNTAIN apply at other metaphysically possible worlds seem to presuppose facts about ‘solidity’ which cash out in terms of these counterfactuals. I consider several simple attempts to resolve (...)
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  8. Justin Clarke Doane: Morality and Mathematics Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2020 hardback, 9780198823667, 208pp. [REVIEW]Sharon Berry - 2023 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 26 (4):627-630.
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