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Haecceities and Mathematical Structuralism

Haecceities and Mathematical Structuralism

FromMCMP – Philosophy of Mathematics


Haecceities and Mathematical Structuralism

FromMCMP – Philosophy of Mathematics

ratings:
Length:
54 minutes
Released:
Jun 19, 2014
Format:
Podcast episode

Description

Christopher Menzel (Texas A&M University) gives a talk at the MCMP Colloquium (18 June, 2014) titled "Haecceities and Mathematical Structuralism". Abstract: It is well-known that some earlier versions of mathematical structuralism (notably from Resnik and Shapiro) appeared to be committed to a rather strong form of the Identity of Indiscernibles (II) that is falsified by the existence of structures like the complex field that admit of non-trivial automorphisms, or symmetries. In light of more recent work (notably, by MacBride, Ketland, Shapiro, Ladyman, and Leitgeb and Ladyman), it is widely accepted that the mathematical structuralist is not committed to II and that, in fact, the principle can be rejected outright on robustly structuralist grounds. I accept a qualified form of this view but I don't think the issue is as cut and dried as it might appear. In a 2007 Analysis article, José Bermúdez suggests that a strong version of II is still in play for the structuralist that can meet the challenge of non-trivial symmetries. The key to the proposal (as I will interpret it) lies in allowing identity properties, or haecceities, like being identical to c (for an arbitrary complex number c, say) to count as structural properties. Typically, structuralists dismiss such properties as obviously non-structural. I will argue to the contrary that haecceities can be viewed as properly structural and, in some circumstances, can serve as legitimate properties for discerning otherwise indiscernible “positions” in structures. Drawing on the model theoretic concept of an expansion, I base my argument on a notion of discernibility rooted intuitively in “underlying structure”. This notion turns out to be equivalent to a notion of discernibility identified in some previous studies but proves useful in focusing when haecceities can legitimately be invoked and why Bermúdez's proposed version of II falls short of a fully satisfactory structuralist principle.
Released:
Jun 19, 2014
Format:
Podcast episode

Titles in the series (22)

Mathematical Philosophy - the application of logical and mathematical methods in philosophy - is about to experience a tremendous boom in various areas of philosophy. At the new Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, which is funded mostly by the German Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, philosophical research will be carried out mathematically, that is, by means of methods that are very close to those used by the scientists. The purpose of doing philosophy in this way is not to reduce philosophy to mathematics or to natural science in any sense; rather mathematics is applied in order to derive philosophical conclusions from philosophical assumptions, just as in physics mathematical methods are used to derive physical predictions from physical laws. Nor is the idea of mathematical philosophy to dismiss any of the ancient questions of philosophy as irrelevant or senseless: although modern mathematical philosophy owes a lot to the heritage of the Vienna and Berlin Circles of Logical Empiricism, unlike the Logical Empiricists most mathematical philosophers today are driven by the same traditional questions about truth, knowledge, rationality, the nature of objects, morality, and the like, which were driving the classical philosophers, and no area of traditional philosophy is taken to be intrinsically misguided or confused anymore. It is just that some of the traditional questions of philosophy can be made much clearer and much more precise in logical-mathematical terms, for some of these questions answers can be given by means of mathematical proofs or models, and on this basis new and more concrete philosophical questions emerge. This may then lead to philosophical progress, and ultimately that is the goal of the Center.