Modal:Fictionalism: A Response to Rosen

Brock, Stuart

doi:10.1093/mind/102.405.147

Cited by 73 publications

(17 citation statements)

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“…It is thus not surprising that certain problems which are first discovered in the context of a particular fictionalism subsequently prove to affect an entire family of fictionalist positions. For example, the Brock-Rosen objection (Brock 1993;Rosen 1993), originally directed at modal fictionalism, was found to be a structural problem encountered by a variety of fictionalisms (Nolan and O'Leary-Hawthorne 1996). It is thus a natural question to ask whether the modal fictionalists' incompleteness problem also generalises to other brands of fictionalism.…”

Section: The Threat Of a General Incompleteness Problemmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fictionalism and the incompleteness problem

Skiba

2016

Synthese

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Modal fictionalists face a problem that arises due to their possible-world story being incomplete in the sense that certain relevant claims are neither true nor false according to it. It has recently been suggested that this incompleteness problem generalises to other brands of fictionalism, such as fictionalism about composite or mathematical objects. In this paper, I argue that these fictionalist positions are particularly threatened by a generalised incompleteness problem since they cannot emulate the modal fictionalists' most attractive response. I then defend mathematical and compositional fictionalism by showing that the reasons for which the incompleteness problem has been thought to affect them are mistaken. This leads to the question of whether there are other fictionalist positions to which the problem does in fact generalise. I give a general account of the features of a fictionalist position that generate the incompleteness problem and argue that whenever a fictionalist position does exemplify these features then the problem can be addressed in analogy to the modal fictionalists' preferred response. B Lukas Skiba Keywords

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Section: The Threat Of a General Incompleteness Problemmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fictionalism and the incompleteness problem

Skiba

2016

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“… Contractarianism, whose most prominent recent defender is Gauthier (1986), now faces what many consider to be a serious problem known as the outlier problem (Silvers and Francis 2005).  Modal fictionalism, as articulated by Rosen (1990), now faces what many consider to be serious objections, such as the Brock/Rosen objection (Brock 1993) and the Hale dilemma (1995).…”

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confidence: 99%

The Problem of Unconceived Objections

Mizrahi

2013

Argumentation

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Abstract:In this paper, I argue that, just as the Problem of Unconceived Alternatives (PUA) provides a basis for a New Induction on the History of Science to the effect that a realist view of science is unwarranted, the Problem of Unconceived Objections (PUO) provides a basis for a New Induction on the History of Philosophy to the effect that a realist view of philosophy is unwarranted. I raise this problem not only for skepticism's sake but also for the sake of making a point about philosophical argumentation, namely, that anticipating objections to one's claim is not the same as supporting one's claim. In other words, defending p from objections does not amount to support or evidence for p. This, in turn, presents dialectical and pragma-dialectical approaches to argumentation with the following question: does proper argumentation require that arguers anticipate and respond to unconceived objections?

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“…For discussion, seeRosen (1990Rosen ( , 1993Rosen ( , 1995,Brock (1993),Noonan (1994),Divers (1995),Hale (1995),Nolan and Hawthorne (1996),Chihara (1998), Sider (2002, andFine (2002).…”

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confidence: 99%