Summary: A classic text in which Anscombe argues for a realist view of causation. Specifically, Anscombe holds that causation is both directly perceivable and not subject to philosophical analysis. Anscombe seeks to establish that causal relations do not presuppose laws, and that causal relations can be perceived in a direct way.
Models as mediating instruments
Summary: Morrison and Morgan argue for a view of models as ‘mediating instruments’ whose role in scientific theorising goes beyond applying theory. Models are partially independent of both theories and the world. This autonomy allows for a unified account of their role as instruments that allow for exploration of both theories and the world.
Answerable and Unanswerable Questions
Summary: Thomasson argues that merely verbal disputes arise in metaphysics when ontologists misuse the words ‘thing’ and ‘object’. Application conditions fix the conditions under which a claim can be applied or refused, but some ontological disputes involve using the terms ‘thing’ and ‘object’ in such a way that they lack application conditions. When this happens there is no way to determine the truth values of the claims being made.
How Significant is the Liar?
Summary: Grover argues that one should be unconcerned about the liar paradox. In formal languages there are uniform ties between syntax and semantics: a term, in all its occurrences, carries a fixed meaning; and sequences of sentences that are (syntactically) proofs are always (semantically) inferences. These two features do not hold of natural languages. Grover makes use of this claim to argue that there are no arguments to contradictions from liar sentences in natural languages, as the relevant syntactic ‘moves’ do not come with relevant semantic ‘moves’.
Do the Paradoxes Pose a Special Problem for Deflationism?
Summary: The Liar and other semantic paradoxes pose a difficult problem for all theories of truth. Any theory that aims to improve our understanding of the concept of truth must, when fully stated, include an account of the paradoxes. Not only deflationism but also its competitors – for instance, correspondence and coherence – must ultimately address the paradoxes. The question that concerns me in this essay is whether it is especially urgent for deflationism to do so. Are the paradoxes a special threat, a special problem, for deflationism? I will argue that they are not.1 Deflationists can leave the paradoxes to the specialists to puzzle over. It is the specialists who will be well served if they keep some insights of deflationism firmly in view.
Fictions, representations, and reality
Summary: Uses Maxwell’s model of the ether as a case study in accounting for the role of fictions in science. Argues that we should understand idealisation and abstraction as being different from fiction. Fictional models for Morrison are those that are deliberately intended to be such that the relationship between their structure and the structure of the concrete systems they model is not (immediately) apparent. This is different from mere idealisation, where certain structural features are omitted to make calculations more tractable.
What’s there to know?
Summary: Defends an account of mathematical knowledge in which mathematical knowledge is a kind of modal knowledge. Leng argues that nominalists should take mathematical knowledge to consist in knowledge of the consistency of mathematical axiomatic systems, and knowledge of what necessarily follows from those axioms. She defends this view against objections that modal knowledge requires knowledge of abstract objects, and argues that we should understand possibility and necessity in a primative way.
Three Forms of Naturalism
Summary: A clear introduction to mathematical naturalism and its Quinean roots; developing and defending Maddy’s own naturalist philosophy of mathematics. Maddy claims that the Quinian ignores some nuances of scientific practice that have a bearing on what the naturalist should take to be the real scientific standards of evidence. Historical studies show that scientists sometimes do not take themselves to be committed to entities that are indispensably quantified over in their best scientific theories, hence the Quinian position that naturalism dictates that we are committed to entities that are indispensably quantified over in our best scientific theories is incorrect.
Nominalism
Summary: Introduction to mathematical nominalism, with special attention to Chihara’s own development of the position and the objections of John Burgess and Gideon Rosen. Chihara provides an outline of his constructibility theory, which avoids quantification over abstract objects by making use of contructibility quantifiers which instead of making assertions about what exists, make assertions about what sentences can be constructed.
Pragmatism and Deflationism
Summary: A contemporary defense of a pragmatist account of truth, which contrasts the view with various versions of deflationism. Misak defends the claim that to grasp the concept of truth by exploring its connections with practices we engage in – including assertion, believing, reason-giving, and inquiry. The pragmatist conception of truth, it is argued, helps to elucidate realism/anti-realism: inquiry is truth-apt when it aims at establishing propositions that are indefeasible.