Dear all, This (academic) week's meeting of the Serious Metaphysics Group will be on Wednesday 27th November, as usual between 5.30-7.00pm in the philosophy board room. The speaker will be Fiona Doherty, who will be giving a talk entitled 'Worrying about Abstraction Principles' (abstract below).
Looking forward to seeing you there. Matthew Simpson Fiona Doherty - _Worrying about Abstraction Principles_ In _Grundlagen_ Frege asks how numbers are given to us. The neo-logicist replies that if we accept Hume's Principle then the existence of numbers follows as a trivial consequence. In particular, treating Hume's Principle as an abstraction principle will provide a purely logical mechanism for generating terms that refer to numbers. Many have worried that here the neo-logicist is attempting to conjure objects from thin air. I want to present a worry for treating Hume's Principle as an abstraction principle that is prior even to this legitimate worry. This regards the nature of the equivalence relation that is posited by Hume's Principle. I will argue that not only is there is a certain explanatory gap in the neo-logicist's story about number acquisition regarding this relation; but that any attempt to fill this gap must satisfy two conditions that are in direct tension with each other. The conclusion will be that we should be pessimistic about providing an adequate account of the relation and thus of the viability of the neo-logicists' story. -- Matthew Simpson PhD Student in Philosophy University of Cambridge Mail: Robinson College, Cambridge, CB3 9AN
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