Dear all, This is a reminder that, tomorrow, Dr. Justin Clarke-Doane (Birmingham) will give a talk entitled "Debunking and Indispensibility". An abstract is included below.
The meeting will be held at 5:15pm on Tuesday, 29 April, in the *Boys Smith Room* (found in the Fisher Building), St. John's College. If you would like to join us for dinner following the talk, please email me at [email protected] by *5pm today*. For more information about the Club, including details about our fees, and our 2013-2014 programme, please visit our website at http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc. Very best, Shyane Siriwardena *ABSTRACT*: In an influential book, Gilbert Harman writes, "In explaining the observations that support a physical theory, scientists [must] appeal to mathematical principles. On the other hand, one never seems to need to appeal in this way to moral principles." What is the epistemological relevance of this contrast? I will argue that ethicists and philosophers of mathematics have misunderstood it. They have confused the challenge to empirically justify our beliefs of a kind with the challenge to explain their reliability. One upshot of the discussion is that genealogical debunking arguments are invalid. Another is that indispensability considerations cannot answer Benacerraf’s epistemological challenge. -- Kyle Mitchell and Shyane Siriwardena Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge [email protected] http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc
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