Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held on Tuesday 27th November. We are delighted to welcome Nick Stang (Toronto), who will be giving a paper entitled 'On The Very Idea of an Alien Language: Old Problems for New Carnapians'. The abstract is as follows:
*Carnapian views in meta-ontology have been thriving in recent decades. While these “neo-Carnapians” differ in many important ways, they all trace the inspiration for their views back to Carnap 1950. The key idea of Carnap 1950 was the distinction between ontological questions asked within a “linguistic framework” (i.e. once we have decided to speak the platonist language) and ontological questions asked outside such a framework (i.e. when we are deciding whether to speak the platonist language). I will argue that these neo-Carnapian views inherit from their mentor a deep problem, the problem of “radically alien” language frameworks (i.e. frameworks with no ontology in common with ours). I argue that the neo-Carnapians are committed to the possibility of such frameworks, but cannot account for them. At best, this generates within neo-Carnapian meta-metaphysics exactly the kind of unanswerable metaphysical questions it was designed to avoid, i.e. about the limits of possible languages and the underlying metaphysical structure of the world. At worst, it generates a contradiction within their theory itself. Davidson raised a similar problem for logical positivism. In fact, the problem is structurally analogous to one that dominated the early reception of Kant’s philosophy. These old problems, I will argue, remain dauntingly difficult ones for neo-Carnapians.* The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 in the Jane Harrison 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 the talk at the Moral Sciences Club, please email the secretaries of the club ([email protected]) by midday on Monday*.* This dinner is open to anyone who has attended the talk and it will take place in the evening at a location to be determined (those who sign up for dinner will be notified of the details by email closer to the time). Best, -- Annie Bosse, Benjamin Marschall and Lucy McDonald 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.
