Dear all, The next meeting of the Serious Metaphysics Group will take place on Wednesday, November 11th at 4.30-6pm on Zoom (details below). Tim Button (UCL) will present a paper entitled 'Metaphysicians hate this one simple trick for avoiding universals, but they can't stop you using it!' (this is joint work (in progress) with Rob Trueman).
Abstract Believing in universals---entities like Wisdom, Goodness, or the colour Red---causes all sorts of philosophical problems. It would be best to deny that they exist. We don't need to posit universals to explain similarities and differences between objects. That is easily (and better) explained using higher-order logic. To say that b and c are similar is to say that there is some F such that F(b) and F(c). We also don't need to posit universals as referents for our predicates. Again, that is easily (and better) explained using higher-order logic. Higher-order expressions refer to higher-order entities. The general strategy, then, is to avoid universals by using higher-order logic. The one problem with this strategy is that natural language doesn't behave as higher-order languages require. To answer this challenge, we present a fiction, according to which universals exist. The fiction is provably conservative over the (higher-order) base language (which eschews universals). This means that we can act as if universals exist, whilst avoiding all the philosophical puzzles they pose. Topic: Serious Metaphysics Group Time: Oct 28, 2020 04:30 PM London Join Zoom Meeting https://zoom.us/j/91992338139?pwd=bFI2R3VJRjh3dHJtTTJJRXhjVmVmQT09 Meeting ID: 919 9233 8139 Passcode: 02947 Best wishes, Wouter _____________________________________________________ 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.
