Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held on Tuesday 3rd February, when Kyle Mitchell (Cambridge) will give a talk entitled 'Does fictionalism rest on a mistake?'.
The meeting will begin at 2.30, ending at 4.15, and will be in Newnham college's Sidgwick Hall (a map can be found here: http://www.newn.cam.ac.uk/sites/www.newnham.local/uploads/files/About-Newnham/college_map_08.pdf). As always, attendees are welcome to join us for tea and coffee in the philosophy faculty after the talk. There is a small charge for attendance at a single meeting (£2 for students; £3 for faculty); alternatively, those wishing to become members of the club may purchase an annual subscription (for the remainder of this academic year) for £7.50 (students) or £15 (faculty). We look forward to seeing many of you there. Best wishes, Ali Boyle and Matthew Simpson Kyle Mitchell - Does fictionalism rest on a mistake? Yablo's (2005) fictionalism about mathematics should be turned into a different metaontological stance towards the existence of mathematical entities: what I call `pragmatic pluralism'. I do this by distinguishing Yablo's fictionalist claim from his claim that mathematics serves an expressive, rather than explanatory, role. Then I show that the expressivist claim is plausible, but the fictionalist claim isn't. This gives us reason to endorse the expressive claim and nevertheless hold that our commitment to mathematical entities is genuine --- and this is just pragmatic pluralism. I then diagnose why fictionalism might have seemed like the only alternative to Platonism by showing how Yablo's motivations for fictionalism rest on a mistakenly metaphysical picture of ontological commitment. -- Ali Boyle and Matthew Simpson 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.
