Reliability and Necessary Truth
Folke Tersman (Uppsala Universitet)

May 7, 2015, 12:15pm - 2:15pm
Department of Philosophy, University of Melbourne

G16 (Jim Potter Room)
Old Physics Building
Melbourne
Australia

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Abstract: According to Hartry Field’s version of the Benacerraf challenge, Platonism in mathematics should be abandoned if it rules out the possibility of providing a viable explanation of the reliability of our mathematical beliefs. The plausibility of that idea depends on what ”explaining reliability” means. It might be tempting to define reliability in modal terms and to assume that our beliefs in an area are reliable to the extent that our possession of them is counterfactually dependent on their truth. However, it has been argued (by David Lewis and more recently by Justin Clark-Doane) that such a notion entails that the condition Field has in mind is trivially satisfied, given the necessity of mathematical facts. A possible response is to adopt an alternative notion of reliability such that the necessity of mathematical facts is irrelevant to the question of whether the reliability of our mathematical beliefs can plausibly be explained. The aim of the paper is to develop and examine such a notion, partly by exploring the epistemic assumptions that have to be made for it to validate Field’s argument. For those who have a special interest in the philosophy of mathematics, a warning might be appropriate: Although the original version of the Benacerraf challenge concerns mathematics I am mostly interested in the version that applies to ethics and (non-naturalist forms of) moral realism.

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