Dear all,
The next Serious Metaphysics Group meeting will be on Wednesday 4th of June, at 11am in the philosophy board room. Our speaker is Lukas Skiba who will be giving a talk entitled "Fictionalism and the Problem of Incompleteness" (abstract below) I hope to see you there. Best wishes, Matthew Simpson Lukas Skiba - _Fictionalism and the Problem of Incompleteness_ Modal fictionalists want to enjoy the benefits of possible world talk without incurring ontological commitment to worlds other than the actual one. To do so, they reinterpret ontologically controversial statements as ontologically innocent claims about the content of what they consider to be a useful fiction, e.g. Lewis' modal realism. Modal fictionalists are often said to face a problem due to the seeming incompleteness of their story of choice: certain relevant claims are neither true nor false according to the fiction. The problem is that this incompleteness appears to give rise to contradictions in a few simple steps.The standard responses to this problem on behalf of the modal fictionalist involve a rejection of bivalence. It has recently been argued that the incompleteness problem equally arises for fictionalists about mathematical or composite objects, so that they too have to adopt a non-classical logic. I argue that the three types of fictionalists can avoid the incompleteness problem without having to abandon classical logic. -- Matthew Simpson PhD Student in Philosophy University of Cambridge Mail: Robinson College, Cambridge, CB3 9AN _FICTIONALISM AND THE PROBLEM OF INCOMPLETENESS_ Modal fictionalists want to enjoy the benefits of possible world talk without incurring ontological commitment to worlds other than the actual one. To do so, they reinterpret ontologically controversial statements as ontologically innocent claims about the content of what they consider to be a useful fiction, e.g. Lewis' modal realism. Modal fictionalists are often said to face a problem due to the seeming incompleteness of their story of choice: certain relevant claims are neither true nor false according to the fiction. The problem is that this incompleteness appears to give rise to contradictions in a few simple steps. The standard responses to this problem on behalf of the modal fictionalist involve a rejection of bivalence. It has recently been argued that the incompleteness problem equally arises for fictionalists about mathematical or composite objects, so that they too have to adopt a non-classical logic. I argue that the three types of fictionalists can avoid the incompleteness problem without having to abandon classical logic. _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
