Dear all, The next meeting of the Serious Metaphysics Group will take place on Wednesday, October 30th, 3-4:30pm in the Philosophy Graduate Common Room. Hasok Chang (Cambridge) will give a talk entitled "The Pragmatic Meaning of Reality”, see below for an abstract.
IMPORTANT CHANGE: This time we meet earlier than usual at 3pm and in the Philosophy Graduate Common Room! This is to avoid a clash with Elliott Sober’s Tarner Lectures. Hope to see many of you there! Abstract: I argue that our philosophical discussions of reality should be guided by more attention to our quotidian and scientific practices of judging what is real and what is not. Part of this attention is semantic, in the spirit of J. L. Austin’s ordinary-language philosophy: what do we mean, and what are we doing, when we call something ‘real’? Adapting and extending Ian Hacking’s arguments for ‘experimental realism’, I propose an ‘operational coherence theory of reality (real-ness)’, and propose that there is no useful sense of reality that goes beyond this. One important consequence of my view on reality is ontological pluralism: there can be different and conflicting systems of real objects even in one and the same domain. All the best, Benjamin _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
