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Showing posts from November, 2012

Upcoming conference: God, Truth and other enigmas

The Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at Polish Academy of Sciences and the Chair of Logic, Computer Science and Philosophy of Science at University of Bialystok are putting together a conference on, I take it, a mixture of philosophy of religion and formal methods. It will take place in Warsaw, September 17-19, 2013.  The list of expected participants includes (just to pick a few names)  M. Szatkowski, J. Kvanvig, J. Lowe, R. Murawski, G. Sandu, J. Wolenski, J. Hawthorne, P. Simons and P. van Inwagen. Once the website is up, I'll link to it.

Yellow Cards for Salmon and Soames open access in Erkenntnis

A paper in which I criticize what I take to be somewhat hasty arguments for platonism about numbers is now available open access in Erkenntnis. Here (then follow the link to Springer). Abstract:  Salmon and Soames argue against nominalism about numbers and sentence types. They employ (respectively) higher-order and first-order logic to model certain natural language inferences and claim that the natural language conclusions carry commitment to abstract objects, partially because their renderings in those formal systems seem to do that. I argue that this strategy fails because the nominalist can accept those natural language consequences, provide them with plausible and non-committing truth conditions and account for the inferences made without committing themselves to abstract objects. I sketch a modal account of higher-order quantification, on which instead of ranging over sets, higher order quantifiers are used to make (logical) possibility claims about which predicate tokens ca