Results for 'Fictionalism'

634 found
Order:
  1. Fictionalism in Metaphysics.Mark Eli Kalderon (ed.) - 2005 - New York: Oxford University Press UK.
    Fictionalism is the view that a serious intellectual inquiry need not aim at truth. It came to prominence in philosophy in 1980, when Hartry Field argued that mathematics does not have to be true to be good, and Bas van Fraassen argued that the aim of science is not truth but empirical adequacy. Both suggested that the acceptance of a mathematical or scientific theory need not involve belief in its content. Thus the distinctive commitment of fictionalism is that (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   22 citations  
  2. Fictionalism.Matti Eklund - 2010 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   47 citations  
  3. A fictionalist account of the indispensable applications of mathematics.Mark Balaguer - 1996 - Philosophical Studies 83 (3):291 - 314.
    The main task of this paper is to defend anti-platonism by providing an anti-platonist (in particular, a fictionalist) account of the indispensable applications of mathematics to empirical science.
    Direct download (5 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   34 citations  
  4. Fictionalism and Moore's Paradox.Zoltán Gendler Szabó - 2001 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 31 (3):293-307.
    A fictionalist attitude towards an area of discourse encourages us to assent to certain sentences of that discourse without believing that they are true. Prima facie, this amounts to a suggestion that we should also assent to sentences of the form 'S but I don't believe that S'. Traditional versions of fictionalism have an answer to this challenge, but I argue that the answer is unavailable for a currently popular type of fictionalism. This is bad news for (...) in general because the currently popular variety is the one that deals best with the Quine-Putnam indispensability argument. (shrink)
    Direct download (7 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  5. Fictionalism and the attitudes.Chris John Daly - 2008 - Philosophical Studies 139 (3):423 - 440.
    This paper distinguishes revolutionary fictionalism from other forms of fictionalism and also from other philosophical views. The paper takes fictionalism about mathematical objects and fictionalism about scientific unobservables as illustrations. The paper evaluates arguments that purport to show that this form of fictionalism is incoherent on the grounds that there is no tenable distinction between believing a sentence and taking the fictionalist's distinctive attitude to that sentence. The argument that fictionalism about mathematics is ‘comically (...)
    Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   20 citations  
  6. Scientific Fictionalism and the Problem of Inconsistency in Nietzsche.Justin Remhof - 2016 - Journal of Nietzsche Studies 47 (2):238-246.
    Fictionalism plays a significant role in philosophy today, with defenses spanning mathematics, morality, ordinary objects, truth, modality, and more.1 Fictionalism in the philosophy of science is also gaining attention, due in particular to the revival of Hans Vaihinger’s work from the early twentieth century and to heightened interest in idealization in scientific practice.2 Vaihinger maintains that there is a ubiquity of fictions in science and, among other things, argues that Nietzsche supports the position. Yet, while contemporary commentators have (...)
    Direct download (5 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  7.  29
    Psychiatric fictionalism and narratives of responsibility.Sam Wilkinson - 2022 - Philosophical Explorations 26 (1):91-109.
    I explore the relationship between psychiatric fictionalism and the attribution of moral responsibility. My central claim is as follows. If one is a psychiatric fictionalist, one should also strongly consider being a fictionalist about responsibility. This results in the ‘intrinsic view’, namely, the view that mental illness does not just happen to interfere with moral responsibility: that interference is an intrinsic part of the narrative. I end by discussing three illustrative examples.
    No categories
    Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  8. Mental Fictionalism: Elements in Philosophy of Mind.T. Parent, Adam Toon & Tamas Demeter - manuscript
    [Under contract with CUP, in preparation] What is a mind? Is it possible for a computer or other machine to have a mind? And how would we know? Mental fictionalism offers a new approach to these timely questions. Its central idea is that mental states (thoughts, beliefs, desires) are useful fictions. When we talk about mental states, we should be seen as merely speaking “as if” humans (and perhaps other creatures or even artifacts) had such states, in order to (...)
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  9. Fictionalism and the folk.Adam Toon - 2016 - The Monist 99 (3):280-295.
    Mental fictionalism is the view that, even if mental states do not exist, it is useful to talk as if they do. Mental states are useful fictions. Recent philosophy of mind has seen a growing interest in mental fictionalism. To date, much of the discussion has concerned the general features of the approach. In this paper, I develop a specific form of mental fictionalism by drawing on Kendall Walton’s work on make-believe. According to the approach I propose, (...)
    Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   21 citations  
  10.  65
    Religious fictionalism and the problem of evil.Jon Robson - 2015 - Religious Studies 51 (3):353-360.
    The problem of evil is typically presented as a problem – sometimes the problem – facing theistic realists. This article takes no stance on what effect (if any) the existence of evil has on the rationality of theistic belief. Instead, it explores the possibility of using the problem of evil to generate worries for some of those who reject theistic realism. Although this article focuses on the consequences for a particular kind of religious fictionalist, the lessons adduced are intended to (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  11. Causal Fictionalism.Antony Eagle - 2024 - In Yafeng Shan (ed.), Alternative Philosophical Approaches to Causation: Beyond Difference-making and Mechanism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Causation appears to present us with an interpretative difficulty. While arguably a redundant relation given fundamental physics, it is nevertheless apparently pragmatically indispensable. This chapter revisits certain arguments made previously by the author for these claims with the benefit of hindsight, starting with the role of causal models in the human sciences, and attempting to explain why it is not possible to straightforwardly ground such models in fundamental physics. This suggests that further constraints, going beyond physics, are needed to legitimate (...)
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  12. (2 other versions)Mental fictionalism.Meg Wallace - 2022 - In Tamás Demeter, T. Parent & Adam Toon (eds.), Mental Fictionalism: Philosophical Explorations. New York & London: Routledge. pp. 27-51.
    There is an uneasy tension between our ordinary talk about beliefs and desires and the ontological facts supported by neuroscience. Arguments for eliminative materialism can be fairly persuasive, yet error theory about folk psychological discourse may be unacceptable. One solution is to accept mental fictionalism: the view that we are (or should be) fictionalists about mentality. My aim in this paper is to explore mental fictionalism as a viable theoretical option, and to show that it has advantages over (...)
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  13. Pretense and Pathology: Philosophical Fictionalism and its Applications.Bradley Armour-Garb & James A. Woodbridge - 2015 - Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. Edited by James A. Woodbridge.
    In this book, Bradley Armour-Garb and James A. Woodbridge distinguish various species of fictionalism, locating and defending their own version of philosophical fictionalism. Addressing semantic and philosophical puzzles that arise from ordinary language, they consider such issues as the problem of non-being, plural identity claims, mental-attitude ascriptions, meaning attributions, and truth-talk. They consider 'deflationism about truth', explaining why deflationists should be fictionalists, and show how their philosophical fictionalist account of truth-talk underwrites a dissolution of the Liar Paradox and (...)
  14. Modal fictionalism generalized and defended.Seahwa Kim - 2002 - Philosophical Studies 111 (2):121 - 146.
    In this paper, I will defend modalfictionalism. The paper has two parts. In thefirst part, I will suggest a revised version ofmodal fictionalism which can avoid certaintechnical problems. In the second part, I willpropose a nominalized version of modalfictionalism and a general scheme offictionalism for the nominalist.
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  15.  34
    Fictionalism in Ontology: The 2011 Paolo Bozzi Lecture.Achille C. Varzi - 2014 - Rivista di Estetica 56:253-270.
    Fictionalism in ontology is a mixed bag. Here I focus on three main variants – which I label after the names of Pascal, Berkeley, and Hume – and consider their relative strengths and weaknesses. The first variant is just a version of the epistemic Wager, applied across the board. The second variant builds instead on the fact that ordinary language is not ontologically transparent; we speak with the vulgar, but deep down we think with the learned. Finally, on the (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  16.  30
    Moral Fictionalism: How and Why?Victor Moberger & Jonas Olson - 2024 - In Richard Joyce & Stuart Brock (eds.), Moral Fictionalism and Religious Fictionalism. Oxford University Press. pp. 64-85.
    The central challenges for moral fictionalism are twofold: first, to explain how its recommendation that we abandon moral belief and assertion can be reconciled with its rationale of preserving the motivational efficacy of moral thought and discourse; second, to explain what the point is of replacing moral belief and assertion to begin with. This chapter clarifies these challenges and argues that Richard Joyce’s recent “metaphorist” version of fictionalism fares no better with respect to them than his earlier “narrationist” (...)
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  17. Hermeneutic fictionalism.Jason Stanley - 2001 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 25 (1):36–71.
    Fictionalist approaches to ontology have been an accepted part of philosophical methodology for some time now. On a fictionalist view, engaging in discourse that involves apparent reference to a realm of problematic entities is best viewed as engaging in a pretense. Although in reality, the problematic entities do not exist, according to the pretense we engage in when using the discourse, they do exist. In the vocabulary of Burgess and Rosen (1997, p. 6), a nominalist construal of a given discourse (...)
    Direct download (5 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   104 citations  
  18. Fictionalism About Fictional Characters Revisited.Stuart Brock - 2016 - Res Philosophica 93 (2):377-403.
    Fictionalism about fictional characters is a view according to which all claims ostensibly about fictional characters are in fact claims about the content of a story. Claims that appear to refer to or quantify over fictional objects contain an implicit prefix of the form “according to such-and-such story. In.
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  19. A fictionalist theory of universals.Tim Button & Robert Trueman - 2024 - In Peter Fritz & Nicholas K. Jones (eds.), Higher-Order Metaphysics. Oxford University Press.
    Universals are putative objects like wisdom, morality, redness, etc. Although we believe in properties (which, we argue, are not a kind of object), we do not believe in universals. However, a number of ordinary, natural language constructions seem to commit us to their existence. In this paper, we provide a fictionalist theory of universals, which allows us to speak as if universals existed, whilst denying that any really do.
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  20. Modal fictionalism and compositionality.Josh Dever - 2003 - Philosophical Studies 114 (3):223 - 251.
    Modal fictionalists propose to defuse the unwanted ontological commitments of modal realism by treating modal realism as a fictional story, and modal assertions as assertions, prefixed by a fictionalist operator, that something is true in that story. However, consideration of conditionals with modal antecedents raises the problem ofembedding, which shows that the simple prefixing strategy cannotsucceed. A compositional version of the fictionalist strategy isdeveloped and critiqued, and some general semantic morals aredrawn from the failures of both strategies.
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  21. Mental Fictionalism.Tamás Demeter - 2013 - The Monist 96 (4):483-504.
    Direct download (5 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   22 citations  
  22. Fictionalist Strategies in Metaphysics.Lukas Skiba & Richard Woodward - 2020 - In Ricki Bliss & James Miller (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Metametaphysics. New York, NY: Routledge.
    This paper discusses the nature of, problems for, and benefits delivered by fictionalist strategies in metaphysics.
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  23. Can Fictionalists Have Faith?Finlay Malcolm - 2018 - Religious Studies 54 (2):215-232.
    According to non-doxastic theories of propositional faith, belief that p is not necessary for faith that p. Rather, propositional faith merely requires a ‘positive cognitive attitude’. This broad condition, however, can be satisfied by several pragmatic approaches to a domain, including fictionalism. This paper shows precisely how fictionalists can have faith given non-doxastic theory, and explains why this is problematic. It then explores one means of separating the two theories, in virtue of the fact that the truth of the (...)
    Direct download (7 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  24. Fictionalism and the incompleteness problem.Lukas Skiba - 2017 - Synthese 194 (4):1349-1362.
    Modal fictionalists face a problem that arises due to their possible-world story being incomplete in the sense that certain relevant claims are neither true nor false according to it. It has recently been suggested that this incompleteness problem generalises to other brands of fictionalism, such as fictionalism about composite or mathematical objects. In this paper, I argue that these fictionalist positions are particularly threatened by a generalised incompleteness problem since they cannot emulate the modal fictionalists’ most attractive response. (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  25.  10
    Responsibility fictionalism.Alexander Bryan - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    This paper develops and defends a revisionary fictionalist version of the ‘social connection model’ of responsibility. The social connection model has become a prominent account of responsibility in recent years but, as many critics have noted, has difficulty in providing an account of the connection required to generate responsibility which is sufficiently determinate and generates acceptable outcomes. In light of this problem, I first consider whether a fictionalist interpretation of Iris Marion Young’s articulation of the social connection model is tenable. (...)
    No categories
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  26. Modal fictionalism.Gideon Rosen - 1990 - Mind 99 (395):327-354.
  27.  12
    Mathematical Fictionalism Revisited.Otávio Bueno - 2023 - In Cristián Soto (ed.), Current Debates in Philosophy of Science: In Honor of Roberto Torretti. Springer Verlag. pp. 103-122.
    Mathematical fictionalism is the view according to which mathematical objects are ultimately fictions, and, thus, need not be taken to exist. This includes fictional objects, whose existence is typically not assumed to be the case. There are different versions of this view, depending on the status of fictions and on how they are connected to the world. In this paper, I critically examine the various kinds of fictionalism that Roberto Torretti identifies, determining to what extent they provide independent, (...)
    No categories
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  28. Faith, fictionalism and bullshit.Michael Scott - 2020 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 9 (2):94-104.
    According to a simple formulation of doxasticism about propositional faith, necessarily faith that p requires belief that p. Support of doxasticism is long-standing and was rarely a matter of dispute until William Alston (1996) proposed that that the content of propositional faith need not be believed if it is accepted. Subsequently non-doxastic theories that reject the belief requirement have proliferated and have come to dominate literature in the field. This paper aims to redress the balance by identifying a dilemma for (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  29. Modal fictionalism and possible-worlds discourse.David Liggins - 2008 - Philosophical Studies 138 (2):151-60.
    The Brock-Rosen problem has been one of the most thoroughly discussed objections to the modal fictionalism bruited in Gideon Rosen’s ‘Modal Fictionalism’. But there is a more fundamental problem with modal fictionalism, at least as it is normally explained: the position does not resolve the tension that motivated it. I argue that if we pay attention to a neglected aspect of modal fictionalism, we will see how to resolve this tension—and we will also find a persuasive (...)
    Direct download (5 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  30.  42
    Fictionalism: The Art of Teaching Truth Disguised as Lies.Johan Dahlbeck - 2023 - BRILL.
    Fictionalism confronts the dual epistemological nature of education. In this book, Johan Dahlbeck argues that all education, at bottom, concerns a striving for truth initiated through fictions. This foundational aporia is then interrogated and made sense of via Hans Vaihinger’s philosophy of ‘as if’ and Spinoza’s peculiar form of exemplarism. Using a variety of fictional examples, Dahlbeck investigates the different dimensions of educational fictionalism, from teacher exemplarism to the basic educational fictions necessary for getting started in education in (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  31. Modal Fictionalism and Analysis.Seahwa Kim - 2005 - In Mark Eli Kalderon (ed.), Fictionalism in Metaphysics. New York: Oxford University Press UK. pp. 116.
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   16 citations  
  32.  99
    Moral fictionalism , summary.Mark Eli Kalderon - 2008 - Philosophical Books 49 (1):1-3.
  33. Distinguishing two kinds of fictionalism: metaphor, autism, and the imagination.Elek Lane - 2024 - Synthese 204 (128):1-23.
    Fictionalist theories of metaphor hold that metaphorical utterances aim at fictionality. Fictionalism successfully explains speaker judgments about the truth and aptness of metaphorical utterances, and it also accurately predicts the data around metaphor and autistic individuals (who have deficits in both imaginative play and metaphor comprehension). But fictionalism is not a viable theory of metaphor, despite these merits, because of (what I call) the problem of semantic entailment: semantic entailments that are normally valid fail under metaphorical interpretation, but (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  34. Moral fictionalism, the Frege-Geach problem, and reasonable inference.Mark Eli Kalderon - 2008 - Analysis 68 (2):133-143.
    CHANGE SLIDE Go through outline of talk CHANGE SLIDE It is my sincerest hope that if there is one thing that people take away from Moral Fictionalism, it is the recognition that standard noncognitivism involves a syndrome of three, logically distinct claims. Standard noncognitivists claim that moral judgment is not belief or any other cognitive attitude but is, rather, a noncognitive attitude more akin to desire; that this noncognitive attitude is expressed by our public moral utterances; and, hence, that (...)
    Direct download (9 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  35.  82
    Against Kania’s Fictionalism about Musical Works.Philip Letts - 2015 - British Journal of Aesthetics 55 (2):209-224.
    Andrew Kania has attempted to argue for nihilistic fictionalism about musical works. This view combines an error theory about musical work discourse with the proposal that musical work discourse has a non-alethic value which warrants continued participation in it. In this paper, I argue that Kania fails to establish either component of nihilistic fictionalism. First, I elaborate and reject Kania’s attempt to establish fictionalism on the basis of a methodological proposal he calls ‘descriptivism’. I argue that the (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  36.  20
    Can fictionalists have a genuine emotional response to religious discourse?Dr Jessica Eastwood - 2022 - International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 83 (5):339-350.
    The purpose of this article is to suggest that the fictionalist’s emotions toward religious discourse could be better supported than the current literature allows. By ‘fictionalist’ I mean those of whom interpret religious discourse as useful fiction. The threefold structure of the article will argue that: (1) the concept of aliefs has been falsely equated with the concept of imagining, (2) the fictionalist ought to adopt a hybrid theory of emotions rather than a cognitive appraisal and, (3) if (1) and (...)
    No categories
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  37.  48
    Fictionalism and Realism.Michael Neumann - 1978 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 8 (3):533 - 541.
    Suppose that a scientific theory X is well confirmed, and either states or implies a statement like “classes exist”. Suppose, if the statement is not explicit but implied, that the specified systems are ‘accepted’ by two individuals, R and F, as the ‘best available'. Suppose, finally, that both R and F, in some yet to be explained sense of the word, ‘accept’ and use theory X to regulate their experience. Then we have something very like the situation discussed by Putnam (...)
    Direct download (6 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  38.  22
    Moral Fictionalism and Misleading Analogies.François Jaquet - 2024 - In Richard Joyce & Stuart Brock (eds.), Moral Fictionalism and Religious Fictionalism. Oxford University Press.
    In a central variant, moral fictionalism is the view that we should replace moral belief with make-believe, that is, be disposed to accept some moral propositions in everyday contexts and to reject all such propositions in more critical circumstances. It is said by its opponents to face three significant problems: in contrast with a real morality, a fictional morality would not allow for deductive inferences; moral make-believe would lack the motivational force that is typical of moral belief; and moral (...)
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  39.  89
    A Fictionalist Account of Open-Label Placebo.Doug Hardman - 2024 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 49 (3):246-256.
    The placebo effect is now generally defined widely as an individual’s response to the psychosocial context of a clinical treatment, as distinct from the treatment’s characteristic physiological effects. Some researchers, however, argue that such a wide definition leads to confusion and misleading implications. In response, they propose a narrow definition restricted to the therapeutic effects of deliberate placebo treatments. Within the framework of modern medicine, such a scope currently leaves one viable placebo treatment paradigm: the non-deceptive and non-concealed administration of (...)
    Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  40. Fictionalism, the Safety Result and counterpossibles.Lukas Skiba - 2019 - Analysis 79 (4):647-658.
    Fictionalists maintain that possible worlds, numbers or composite objects exist only according to theories which are useful but false. Hale, Divers and Woodward have provided arguments which threaten to show that fictionalists must be prepared to regard the theories in question as contingently, rather than necessarily, false. If warranted, this conclusion would significantly limit the appeal of the fictionalist strategy rendering it unavailable to anyone antecedently convinced that mathematics and metaphysics concern non-contingent matters. I try to show that their arguments (...)
    Direct download (5 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  41. Psychological Fictionalism, and the Threat of Fictionalist Suicide.Richard Joyce - 2013 - The Monist 96 (4):517-538.
    Direct download (5 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  42. Temporal Fictionalism for a Timeless World.Sam Baron, Kristie Miller & Jonathan Tallant - 2019 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 102 (2):281-301.
    Current debate in the metaphysics of time ordinarily assumes that we should be realists about time. Recently, however, a number of physicists and philosophers of physics have proposed that time will play no role in a completed theory of quantum gravity. This paper defends fictionalism about temporal thought, on the supposition that our world is timeless. We argue that, in the face of timeless physical theories, realism about temporal thought is unsustainable: some kind of anti-realism must be adopted. We (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  43. Moral Fictionalism.Mark Eli Kalderon - 2005 - Oxford, GB: Clarendon Press.
    Mark Eli Kalderon argues that morality is a fiction by means of which our emotional attitudes are conveyed. This is an improvement on the standard noncognitivist view, which denies that moral judgement is belief but claims instead that it is the expression of an emotional attitude. Noncognitivists tend to deny that moral sentences even purport to represent moral reality, and so they have developed non-standard semantics for moral discourse. Kalderon's fictionalism shows that noncognitivism can manage without such controversial semantics. (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   94 citations  
  44. Fictionalism in the philosophy of mathematics.Mark Balaguer - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Mathematical fictionalism (or as I'll call it, fictionalism) is best thought of as a reaction to mathematical platonism. Platonism is the view that (a) there exist abstract mathematical objects (i.e., nonspatiotemporal mathematical objects), and (b) our mathematical sentences and theories provide true descriptions of such objects. So, for instance, on the platonist view, the sentence ‘3 is prime’ provides a straightforward description of a certain object—namely, the number 3—in much the same way that the sentence ‘Mars is red’ (...)
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   28 citations  
  45. Religious fictionalism.Michael Scott & Finlay Malcolm - 2018 - Philosophy Compass 13 (3):1-11.
    Religious fictionalism is the theory that it is morally and intellectually legitimate to affirm religious sentences and to engage in public and private religious practices, without believing the content of religious claims. This article discusses the main features of fictionalism, contrasts hermeneutic, and revolutionary kinds of fictionalism and explores possible historical and recent examples of religious fictionalism. Such examples are found in recent theories of faith, pragmatic approaches to religion, and mystical traditions in religious theology.
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  46. Mental Fictionalism: A Foothold amid Deflationary Collapse.Meg Wallace - 2022 - In Tamás Demeter, T. Parent & Adam Toon (eds.), Mental Fictionalism: Philosophical Explorations. New York & London: Routledge. pp. 275-300.
    This is my second entry in Mental Fictionalism: Philosophical Explorations. It examines three meta-ontological deflationary approaches - frameworks, verbal disputes, and metalinguistic negotiation - and applies them to ontological debates in philosophy of mind. An intriguing consequence of this application is that it reveals a deep, systematic problem for mental deflationism – specifically, a problem of cognitive collapse. This is surprising. Cognitive collapse problems are usually reserved for serious ontological views such as eliminative materialism and mental fictionalism, not (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  47.  50
    The fictionalist analysis of some moral concepts.Jay Newman - 1981 - Metaphilosophy 12 (1):47–56.
  48.  27
    Moral Fictionalism and Religious Fictionalism.Richard Joyce & Stuart Brock (eds.) - 2024 - Oxford University Press.
    Atheism is a familiar kind of skepticism about religion. Moral error theory is an analogous kind of skepticism about morality, though less well known outside academic circles. Both kinds of skeptic face a "what next?" question: If we have decided that the subject matter (religion/morality) is mistaken, then what should we do with this way of talking and thinking? The natural assumption is that we should abolish the mistaken topic, just as we previously eliminated talk of, say, bodily humors and (...)
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  49. Three problems for “strong” modal fictionalism.Daniel Nolan - 1997 - Philosophical Studies 87 (3):259-275.
    Modal Fictionalism, the theory that possible worlds do not literally exist but that our talk about them should be understood in the same way that we understand talk about fictional entities, is an increasingly popular approach to possible worlds. This paper will distinguish three versions of Modal Fictionalism, and will show that the third, a version endorsed by some of the most prominent Modal Fictionalists, faces at least three serious objections: that it makes modality too artificial, the modal (...)
    Direct download (5 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   29 citations  
  50.  75
    Fictionalism, Indifferentism, and Easy Ontology.Daniel Z. Korman - 2024 - Festschrift for Matti Eklund.
    Fictionalism is supposed to be motivated, at least in part, by its ability to undermine our ordinary grounds for believing in numbers and other contested entities. Eklund argues that a weaker and less controversial view, which he calls indifferentism, can do the job just as effectively. I will show that whether he’s right about this depends upon how we think about “our ordinary grounds”. If we think about our ordinary grounds as consisting in what people are pre-theoretically inclined to (...)
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
1 — 50 / 634