There are no abstract objects
In Theodore Sider, John Hawthorne & Dean W. Zimmerman (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Metaphysics. Blackwell (2008)
| Abstract | I explicate and defend the claim that, fundamentally speaking, there are no numbers, sets, properties or relations. The clarification consists in some remarks on the relevant sense of ‘fundamentally speaking’ and the contrasting sense of ‘superficially speaking’. The defence consists in an attempt to rebut two arguments for the existence of such entities. The first is a version of the indispensability argument, which purports to show that certain mathematical entities are required for good scientific explanations. The second is a speculative reconstruction of Armstrong's version of the One Over Many argument, which purports to show that properties and relations are required for good philosophical explanations, e.g. of what it is for one thing to be a duplicate of another. | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,865 |
| External links |
  Try with proxy. Try with proxy. |
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesJohn Hawthorne & Theodore Sider (2002). Locations. Philosophical Topics 30 (1):53-76.
Bernard Linsky & Edward N. Zalta (1995). Naturalized Platonism Versus Platonized Naturalism. Journal of Philosophy 92 (10):525-555.
Andrew Wake (2011). Spacetime and Mereology. Erkenntnis 74 (1):17-35.
Jennifer Wilson Mulnix (2008). Reliabilism, Intuition, and Mathematical Knowledge. Filozofia 62 (8):715-723.
Edward N. Zalta (2001). Fregean Senses, Modes of Presentation, and Concepts. Philosophical Perspectives 15 (s15):335-359.
David Liggins (2008). Quine, Putnam, and the 'Quine-Putnam' Indispensability Argument. Erkenntnis 68 (1):113 - 127.
Sandy Berkovski (2011). Lewis' Reduction of Modality. Acta Analytica 26 (2):95-114.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2009-01-28Total downloads291 ( #494 of 556,807 )Recent downloads (6 months)19 ( #3,606 of 556,807 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
| Start a new thread | There is 1 thread in this forum |
| 2009-05-15 | |
|
Alastair Wilson
University of Birmingham |
Cross-posted from http://mleseminar.wordpress.com/
... This week we discussed Cian Dorr’s ‘There are no abstract objects’, which isn’t currently available online, but is in ‘Contemporary Debates in Metaphysics’. Here’s the handout instead. As we had Cian on the spot for this meeting, the discussion mostly took a question-and-answer format. So here are what I recorded of some questions and some answers, with a few that I didn’t get time to ask thrown in at the end. Apologies if my paraphrases of Cian's answers misrepresent him! Q: What about people who would resist the paraphrase strategy (p.37) because they think that counterpossibles are all vacuously true (Williamson takes this line in The Philosophy of Philosophy). A: Nominalism/anti-nominalism are both contingent theses. But even if you think that nominalism is necessary if true, there will be certain kinds of truths like ‘there are possibly some things with a number-like structure’ which can be used to ground the relevant counterfactua ... (read more)
Permanent link: http://philpapers.org/post/932
Reply
|
