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.
Refutation of Putnam's Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy
MCMP – Ethics and Value Theory
44 minutes 47 seconds
6 years ago
Refutation of Putnam's Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy
Eckehart Köhler (Vienna) gives a talk at the MCMP Colloquium (22 May, 2013) titled "Refutation of Putnam's Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy". Abstract: In 2002, Hilary Putnam shocked philosophers with the story that value terms have “thick” meanings, where facts and values are “entangled”. (“Crime” and “cruel” are especially “thick”.) This phenomenon is easy to explain, since many professionals treat norms factually, e.g. currently “valid” price quotations, whereas a document leaves the deontic modality ambiguous. Those same professionals certainly are able to distinguish the modalities of propositions they use in their professional work for themselves! (E.g., an active legislator can distinguish those bills which he wants passed from bad bills, etc., and similarly in all professions, at least where procedures for norming exist.) Putnam entirely ignores this. Putnam even ignores Decision Theory, where he has done work. This is crucial: standard Bayesian Decision Theory absolutely requires independence of facts and values, since probability and utility must be independent — if they were not, then no one could empirically predict behavior, nor could anyone recommend optimal policy to a client. Putnam got his collapse from Quine’s collapse of the analytic/synthetic dichotomy, and (correctly!) concluded that if the latter fails, so does the former. But since probabili-ties are “orthogonal” to utilities (which we know from their measurement), “Hume’s Law” is valid; and so is the analytic/synthetic dichotomy. I discuss Morton White’s attempt to subsume analyticity under ethical value. Finally, I claim that (Dewey’s and Quine’s) Naturalism collapses once this (empirically real) sensorium for observing normative validity is acknowledged which is separate from sensory perception.
MCMP – Ethics and Value Theory
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.