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.
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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.
Making Quotation Transparent: A Compositional Analysis of an Apparently Opaque Phenomenon
MCMP – Metaphysics and Philosophy of Language
1 hour 56 seconds
10 years ago
Making Quotation Transparent: A Compositional Analysis of an Apparently Opaque Phenomenon
Markus Werning (Bochum) gives a talk at the MCMP Colloquium (11 December, 2014) titled "Making Quotation Transparent: A Compositional Analysis of an Apparently Opaque Phenomenon". Abstract: Quotation is regarded as a paradigmatically opaque context. This is due to two failures: (i) A failure of substitution: in quotations the substitution of an expression with a synonym does not leave the meaning of the embedding context unchanged. (ii) A failure of existential generalization: in quotations the replacement of a singular term with an existentially bound variable does not constitute a valid inference. From the failure of substitution it is often inferred that quotation violates the principle of compositionality, according to which the meaning of a complex term is a syntax-dependent function of the meanings of its syntactic parts. The quoted expression, so it is concluded, does not contribute its meaning to the meaning of the embedding context. The failure of existential generalization, furthermore, is taken to entail that quoted singular terms do not introduce referents into the universe of discourse and are hence referentially vacuous. Since compositionality and referentiality are two constitutive principles of semantics, many authors view quotation as an extra-semantic and hence mainly pragmatic phenomenon. The purpose of this paper is to turn the tables and to re-establish the genuinely semantic character of quotation. In the first step I recall that in natural language many phenomena indicate that quoted expressions, at least sometimes, do contribute their meanings to the meaning of the context. This is evident in the case of mixed quotation, but arguable also the case in direct quotation and in many other cases. Moreover, it is argued that the referents of quoted singular terms can often be anaphorically referred to, not only in mixed and direct quotation, but even in some cases of pure quotation. In the second step the inference from opacity to non-compositionality and non-referentiality is reviewed with greater scrutiny. It turns out that additional premises have to be presupposed to make this inference go through. In the third step the pivotal premise that a quoted expression corresponds to a uniform syntactic part of the quotation will be rejected and replaced by the assumption that the quoted expression contributes a syntactically complex structure, which primarily contains phonological and other sub-symbolic information. However, due to a particular semantic interpretation of the quotation marks, the standard meaning and referent of the expression is recovered such that the quoted expression can contribute its standard meaning and referent to the discourse in many circumstances.
MCMP – Metaphysics and Philosophy of Language
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.