Lauener's philosophical approach is well-articulated and has many features that are fully justified: epistemology appears at the level of metascience, as a normative discipline; Lauener's transcendentalism is open, the norms being able to evolve over time; in his analytic a priori-synthetic a posteriori dichotomy, analyticity is relative to the context and results from conventions, and the dichotomy is compatible with Quine's universal revisibility; Lauener has shown that a theory and the metatheory it is based on cannot be revised at the (...) same time, a strong argument for ontological relativity but against general holism, he conceives of tmth as applicable only within a theory, relative to an ontology and dependent on references, etc. Other aspects, however, appear more problematic: the idea that mathematical entities are the product of our thinking, which makes them more similar to fictional than to physical objects (the main objection to this is that mathematics plays a constitutive role in physical concepts), or the tendency to speak of "existence relative to modem physics" (as if real existence were a type of existence, on a par with existence in fiction). (shrink)

Lauener's philosophical approach is well-articulated and has many features that are fully justified: epistemology appears at the level of metascience, as a normative discipline; Lauener's transcendentalism is open, the norms being able to evolve over time; in his analytic a priori-synthetic a posteriori dichotomy, analyticity is relative to the context and results from conventions, and the dichotomy is compatible with Quine's universal revisibility; Lauener has shown that a theory and the metatheory it is based on cannot be revised at the (...) same time, a strong argument for ontological relativity but against general holism, he conceives of tmth as applicable only within a theory, relative to an ontology and dependent on references, etc. Other aspects, however, appear more problematic: the idea that mathematical entities are the product of our thinking, which makes them more similar to fictional than to physical objects (the main objection to this is that mathematics plays a constitutive role in physical concepts), or the tendency to speak of "existence relative to modem physics" (as if real existence were a type of existence, on a par with existence in fiction). (shrink)