Dear All, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held on Tuesday 6th February. We are delighted to welcome Jack Woods (Leeds), who will be giving a paper entitled 'Abductive Immodesty in Mathematics and Morality'. The abstract is below:
It’s increasingly common to recognize that philosophical arguments typically are abductive in character. From Lewis’s original slogan about philosophy being a game of costing views, to the rise of anti-exceptionalism in logic, to the now near universal use of methods like reflective equilibrium in ethics and metaethics, philosophers have started to recognize that often the best we can do, even in esoteric areas like logic and morality, is argue that such and so is the best explanation of some phenomena like our trenchant intuitions about some area. While this is a welcome change, adductive arguments involve relatively heavy theoretical resources that themselves can be in contention. This means that we will occasionally have an argument whose conclusion conflicts with some of the supporting materials we use to justify that conclusion. Call such arguments *self-effacing*. In recent work, I used such cases to distinguish debunking arguments against logic and mathematics from debunking arguments against morality, responding to a tendency to treat these cases as analogous. I maintain, still, that the self-effacingness of typical debunking arguments against logic and mathematics blocks certain forms of skepticism about mathematical and logical realism. But I worry now that certain not unreasonable ethical, metaethical, and aesthetic presumptions, analogous debunking arguments against (some of) morality and aesthetics are also self-effacing. Though this calls into question my earlier conclusions, I’ll argue that we still have much stronger reason to preserve our mathematical and logical beliefs in the face of a cogent debunking argument than we have to preserve our moral beliefs in the fact of such arguments. And this difference in strength—which is due to the depths of the entanglement of mathematics and logic in our abductive machinery--suffices to vindicate the rationality of being immodest about our mathematical and logical beliefs while being modest about our moral beliefs and perhaps our aesthetic beliefs; it provides a substantial additional reason to maintain our mathematical and logical beliefs in the face of debunking arguments aimed at our logical and mathematical beliefs. The meeting will be held at 2:30 until 4:15, in the Barbara White Room at Newnham College, and will be followed by tea and coffee. If you would like to have dinner with the speaker in the evening following his talk at the Moral Sciences Club, please email the secretaries of the club ([email protected]) by midday on Monday 5 February. This dinner is open to anyone who has attended the talk and it will take place at around 7pm at a location to be determined (those who sign up for dinner will be notified of the details by email closer to the time). -- Karamvir Chadha and Cathy Mason Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge [email protected] http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _____________________________________________________ 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.
