{"title":"A Second Philosophy of Logic","authors":"P. Maddy","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197508855.003.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197508855.003.0009","url":null,"abstract":"This essay begins with the commonsense view that the world contains many individual objects—with properties, standing in relations—a view confirmed by science, and defends it against those who claim that the scientific and commonsense perspectives conflict. These very general features of the world ratify a rudimentary logic as broadly applicable, short of the quantum realm, and developmental psychology reveals that our basic cognitive structures are equipped to detect them, presumably shaped by evolutionary pressures from the macro-world. This rudimentary logic is awkward, though, so two idealizations are added to generate classical first-order logic. Advocates of most deviant logics reject one or the other of these idealizations; their case depends on showing that the relevant idealization is damaging in a particular application and offering something better. Deviant logics intended for something other than the world (e.g., mathematical constructions, belief systems) can peacefully coexist.","PeriodicalId":243091,"journal":{"name":"A Plea for Natural Philosophy","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134487157","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Enhanced If-thenism","authors":"P. Maddy","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197508855.003.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197508855.003.0012","url":null,"abstract":"This essay attempts to revive if-thenism (or deductivism), the view that contemporary pure mathematics is the study of what follows from what. Historical antecedents are traced in Russell and Putnam, some traditional objections dispatched, and an account of applications different from Putnam’s deployed to undercut the indispensability arguments. The central challenge is that mathematics is not indifferent to what goes in the ‘if’ part of the if-then; this is where Simple If-thenism is enhanced to include an account of the rationality of one choice over another. The connection between the ‘if’ and the ‘then’ is accounted for in terms of the second-philosophical view of logic in Essays ##8 and 9, and arithmetic is treated as in Essays ##9 and 10. The final section deals with matters of meta-mathematics, especially Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem.","PeriodicalId":243091,"journal":{"name":"A Plea for Natural Philosophy","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129349448","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Moore’s Hands","authors":"Penelope Maddy","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197508855.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197508855.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"This essay suggests that the long, somewhat tedious run-up to the proof in Moore’s ‘A proof of an external world’ is designed to prepare the ground with common sense and experimentation (with after-images). Given that perspective, the proof, when it finally arrives, is necessarily trivial; the question is whether the skeptic can budge Moore from his home ground. Moore acknowledges that he can’t ‘prove’ his premises, because he can’t ‘prove’ he’s not dreaming, but nevertheless insists that he has conclusive evidence that he’s not dreaming and that asking for more is misguided. Precisely why it’s misguided is explicit in his lectures of 1933–1934, where Moore reasons ‘there are millions of stars’ is an established conclusion of astronomy: if the philosopher asserts it, he’s just repeating what the astronomers have already said; if he denies it, he’s contradicting the astronomers. Moore is more naturalistic than is often appreciated.","PeriodicalId":243091,"journal":{"name":"A Plea for Natural Philosophy","volume":"10 2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116654470","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On the Question of Realism","authors":"P. Maddy","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197508855.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197508855.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"This essay engages the realism/instrumentalism debate in the philosophy of science. As she pursues her investigation of the world and our place in it, the Second Philosopher comes to believe in molecules and atoms based on evidence beginning with Perrin’s famous experiments on Brownian motion. This would seem to qualify her as a realist, but examination of the positions of leading instrumentalists van Fraassen and Stanford reveals that her claim to rational belief in unobservables on those grounds doesn’t amount to ‘realism’ as they understand it. This result suggests that the debate has gone astray.","PeriodicalId":243091,"journal":{"name":"A Plea for Natural Philosophy","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131269775","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Do Numbers Exist?","authors":"P. Maddy","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197508855.003.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197508855.003.0011","url":null,"abstract":"This essay presents the second-philosophical view of arithmetic from Essay #9 to a beginning audience. That view ends with an account of the cognitive and conceptual basis for Peano Arithmetic. This essay addresses the further questions of ontology: do numbers exist?, is arithmetic the study of abstract objects, or is it an extremely useful, idealized theory that’s not literally true? Both options seem open to the Second Philosopher. The suggestion is that once the underlying second-philosophical facts are recognized, the situation can be described either way—with the terms ‘true’ and ‘exist’ or without—and that neither way of speaking comes in conflict with any fact of the matter.","PeriodicalId":243091,"journal":{"name":"A Plea for Natural Philosophy","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130845834","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Wittgenstein on Hinges","authors":"P. Maddy","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197508855.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197508855.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"Wittgenstein’s On Certainty is often regarded as the sourcebook of contemporary hinge epistemology. However that may be, this essay argues that Wittgenstein himself was not a hinge epistemologist. He did feel the draw, but in the end, hinge propositions were not part of his considered view. Rather, they characterize one of the competing voices in his treatment of external world skepticism, the so-called voice of correctness (analogous to the Kripkean skeptical solution in the rule-following case), with the voice of temptation represented by Moore, as Wittgenstein understands him (analogous to a straight solution in the role-following case). To support this reading of the first-draft notes collected by the editors into OC, the argument extrapolates from readings of the Tractatus, the Philosophical Investigations, and the Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, supplemented by new biographical and philological work by Brian Rogers on Wittgenstein’s final months.","PeriodicalId":243091,"journal":{"name":"A Plea for Natural Philosophy","volume":"27 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126493459","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Note on Truth and Reference","authors":"P. Maddy","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197508855.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197508855.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"A naturalistic philosopher typically confronts the question of truth in her effort to explain the effectiveness of human language use. This often inspires a search for a roughly causal account of reference to anchor a Tarskian theory of truth, a search that faces a series of problem cases from the history of science. This essay suggests that the search itself is misguided, that what’s actually needed to explain the effectiveness of human language use is an account of what Wilson calls ‘directivities’ (guidelines for usage) and ‘supports’ (worldly circumstances, correlation with which make those directivities effective). While encouraging such an investigation of word-world connections, the Second Philosopher proposes a broadly deflationary position on truth and reference that explores the use of ‘true’ and ‘refers’ in the mold of Austin’s ordinary language proposal.","PeriodicalId":243091,"journal":{"name":"A Plea for Natural Philosophy","volume":"102 3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131604903","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Plea for Natural Philosophy","authors":"P. Maddy","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197508855.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197508855.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"In ‘A plea for excuses’, Austin offers excuses as a suitable topic if one wishes to employ the method of ordinary language philosophy. Reversing the order, this essay proposes the natural-philosophical approach of the early moderns (e.g., Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Reid, also Boyle and Newton) as a suitable method if one wishes to investigate the topic of the world and our place in it. It argues that this method, which recognizes no distinction between ‘science’ and ‘philosophy’, lives on in contemporary interdisciplinary inquiries in the foundations of the various sciences, and that, in contrast, some mainstream topics that we now call ‘philosophy’—in epistemology (e.g., analysis of ‘knowledge’) and metaphysics (e.g., color ontology)—are different, arising in the wake of Kant’s later introduction of a priori critical philosophizing. Special attention is given to the history of epistemology and the primary/secondary distinction.","PeriodicalId":243091,"journal":{"name":"A Plea for Natural Philosophy","volume":"212 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114843349","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Hume and Reid","authors":"P. Maddy","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197508855.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197508855.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"Stroud, among others, argues that Hume was the first to reject the Cartesian detached intellect and study human nature empirically. In fact, Hume’s Science of Man seeks to found the sciences in a way that precludes its appeal to scientific conclusions, and the naturalistic credit here actually belongs to Reid. Reid responded to Hume’s external world skepticism by rejecting the theory of ideas and its attendant Argument from Illusion, but more fundamentally, he rejected the Cartesian assumption that the study of human cognition must begin from introspective evidence alone. Introspection, for Reid, is just one among our faculties, all of which are mostly reliable, but occasionally fallible, so it makes no sense to single it out as uniquely problematic and demand that it be justified in terms of the others. Instead, he investigates our perceptual faculties empirically, assessing their strengths and weaknesses in much the same spirit as contemporary cognitive science.","PeriodicalId":243091,"journal":{"name":"A Plea for Natural Philosophy","volume":"52 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123184294","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Psychology and the a priori Sciences","authors":"P. Maddy","doi":"10.4324/9781315277134-2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315277134-2","url":null,"abstract":"This essay explores the role of psychology in the philosophies of logic and arithmetic. It begins by reviewing the role of developmental psychology in a second-philosophical position on logic, with some attention to whether logical structure is fully represented, then draws this moral: because logic rests on our primitive cognitive mechanisms, we tend to think it couldn’t be otherwise; this explains why we imagine logic to be necessary when it’s actually contingent (e.g., failing in the quantum world). This account extends to elementary arithmetic (2 + 2 = 4), but the potential infinite shifts support from structures present in the world to a conceptual element rooted in the language-learning device. Each of us imagines that our intuitive picture of the infinite natural number sequence is shared and that it’s coherent, unique, and determinate, but the second moral from psychology is that these convictions are less secure than we tend to think.","PeriodicalId":243091,"journal":{"name":"A Plea for Natural Philosophy","volume":"42 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-05-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123376611","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}