Otávio Bueno

Typical accounts of reference demand that referring terms denote existent objects. This assumption is shared by theories across a variety of areas of philosophy, in particular, direct reference views in philosophy of language; neo-Fregean conceptions in the philosophy of mathematics, and easy-ontology approaches in metaphysics. In this paper, this assumption is resisted and the significance and the possibility of referring to the nonexistent is highlighted. After identifying difficulties in all these three theories and resisting a free-logic approach, ontologically neutral quantifiers, which do not require the existence of what is quantified over, are suggested as providing a better conception. It is concluded that the difficulties raised to the previous theories do not affect the ontologically neutral approach, while the approach, properly conceived, allows for nonexistent objects to have properties.

This comprehensive collection of original essays written by an international group of scholars addresses the central themes in Latin American philosophy. Represents the most comprehensive survey of historical and contemporary Latin American philosophy available today Comprises a specially commissioned collection of essays, many of them written by Latin American authors Examines the history of Latin American philosophy and its current issues, traces the development of the discipline, and offers biographical sketches of key Latin American thinkers Showcases the diversity of approaches, issues, and styles that characterize the field.

Proofs are central to mathematical practice in large part due to the heuristic role that some of them play. Not only do they help establish a result, but often provide new avenues of mathematical research. Jody Azzouni has argued that underlying the practice of creating mathematical proofs there is a very specific norm: to each proof there should be a corresponding algorithmic derivation, a derivation in an algorithmic system. Here a framework is provided to classify and assess mathematical proofs. It is argued that there is a plurality of kinds of proofs in mathematics and a plurality of roles these proofs play. In the end, mathematical practice is far less unified in this respect than it may seem to be.

Crucial to Hilary Putnam’s realism in the philosophy of mathematics is to maintain the objectivity of mathematics without the commitment to the existence of mathematical objects. Putnam’s indispensability argument was devised as part of this conception. In this paper, I reconstruct and reassess Putnam’s argument for the indispensability of mathematics, and distinguish it from the more familiar, Quinean version of the argument. Although I argue that Putnam’s approach ultimately fails, I develop an alternative way of implementing his form of realism about mathematics that, by using different resources than those Putnam invokes, avoids the difficulties faced by his view.

Styles of reasoning are important devices to understand scientific practice. As I use the concept, a style of reasoning is a pattern of inferential relations that are used to select, interpret, and support evidence for scientific results. In this paper, I defend the view that there is a plurality of styles of reasoning: different domains of science often invoke different styles. I argue that this plurality is an important source of disunity in scientific practice, and it provides additional arguments in support of the disunity claim. I also contrast Ian Hacking’s broad characterization of styles of reasoning with a narrow understanding that I favor. Drawing on examples from molecular biology, chemistry and mathematics, I argue that differences in style of reasoning lead to differences in the way the relevant results are obtained and interpreted. The result is a pluralist view about styles of reasoning that is sensitive to nuances of inferential relations in scientific activity.

In this paper, we provide a new formulation of a coherence theory of truth using the resources of the partial structures approach − in particular the notions of partial structure and quasi-truth. After developing this new formulation, we apply the resulting theory to the philosophy of mathematics, and argue that it can be used to develop a new account of nominalism in mathematics. This application illustrates the strength and usefulness of the proposed formulation of a coherence theory of truth.Neste artigo, propomos uma nova formulação de uma teoria coerentista da verdade utilizando os recursos da abordagem de estruturas parciais - em particular as noções de estrutura parcial e quase-verdade. Após desenvolver esta formulação, aplicamos a teoria resultante à filosofia da matemática, e argumentamos que aquela pode ser usada para desenvolver um novo tratamento do nominalismo na matemática. Esta aplicação ilustra a força e utilidade da formulação proposta de uma teoria coerentista da verdade.

Pyrrhonists provide a way of investigating the world in which conflicting views about a given topic are critically compared, assessed, and juxtaposed. Since Pyrrhonists are ultimately unable to decide between these views, they end up suspending judgment about the issues under examination. In this paper, I consider the question of whether Pyrrhonists can be realists or anti-realists about science, focusing, in particular, on contemporary philosophical discussions about it. Althoughprima faciethe answer seems to be negative, I argue that if realism and anti-realism are understood as philosophical stances rather than particular doctrines—that is, if they are conceptualized in terms of a mode of engagement, a style of reasoning, and some propositional attitudes—the apparent tension between Pyrrhonism, realism, and anti-realism vanishes. The result is a first step in the direction of bringing Pyrrhonism to bear on contemporary debates in the philosophy of science.

A first step is taken towards articulating a constructive empiricist philosophy of mathematics, thus extending van Fraassen's account to this domain. In order to do so, I adapt Field's nominalization program, making it compatible with an empiricist stance. Two changes are introduced: (a) Instead of taking conservativeness as the norm of mathematics, the empiricist countenances the weaker notion of quasi-truth (as formulated by da Costa and French), from which the formal properties of conservativeness are derived; (b) Instead of quantifying over spacetime regions, the empiricist only admits quantification over occupied regions, since this is enough for his or her needs.

Michael Dummett, Frege and other philosophers. Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1991. xii + 330pp. £35. ISBN W.Balzer and C.U.Moulines, Structuralist theory of science:focal issues, new results, Berlin; de Gruyter, 1996. xi + 295 pp.DM 210. ISBN 3-11-014075-6 Henry Prakken, Logical tools for modeling legal argument a study of defeasible reasoning in law.Dordrecht, The Netherlands:Kluwer Academic, 1997, xiii + 314pp.£75.00/$125.00 J.Srzednicki and Z.Stachniak Lesniewski’s Systems.Protothetic.Nijhoff International Philosophy Series, 54, Dordrecht, Boston and London:Kluwer, 1998. xiv + 310 pp, £99. ISBN 0-7923-4504-5

Perceptual experiences provide an important source of information about the world. It is clear that having the capacity of undergoing such experiences yields an evolutionary advantage. But why should humans have developed not only the ability of simply seeing, but also of seeing that something is thus and so? In this paper, I explore the significance of distinguishing perception from conception for the development of the kind of minds that creatures such as humans typically have. As will become clear, it is crucial to pay careful attention to the different kinds of information that are involved in perceiving and conceiving (including the way such information is gathered and transmitted). By identifying such kinds of information and the role they play, we can then understand an important feature of why creatures like us have the kind of consciousness and mental processes we do.

One important role of belief systems is to allow us to represent information about a certain domain of inquiry. This paper presents a formal framework to accommodate such information representation. Three cognitive models to represent information are discussed: conceptual spaces, state-spaces, and the problem spaces familiar from artificial intelligence. After indicating their weakness to deal with partial information, it is argued that an alternative, formulated in terms of partial structures, can be provided which not only captures the positive features of these models, but also accommodates the partiality of information ubiquitous in science and mathematics.

This comprehensive collection of original essays written by an international group of scholars addresses the central themes in Latin American philosophy. Represents the most comprehensive survey of historical and contemporary Latin American philosophy available today Comprises a specially commissioned collection of essays, many of them written by Latin American authors Examines the history of Latin American philosophy and its current issues, traces the development of the discipline, and offers biographical sketches of key Latin American thinkers Showcases the diversity of approaches, issues, and styles that characterize the field.

Logical pluralism is the view according to which there is more than one relation of logical consequence, even within a given language. A recent articulation of this view has been developed in terms of quantification over different cases: classical logic emerges from consistent and complete cases; constructive logic from consistent and incomplete cases, and paraconsistent logic from inconsistent and complete cases. We argue that this formulation causes pluralism to collapse into either logical nihilism or logical universalism. In its place, we propose a modalist account of logical pluralism that is independently well motivated and that avoids these collapses.

According to the semantic view, a theory is characterized by a class of models. In this paper, we examine critically some of the assumptions that underlie this approach. First, we recall that models are models of something. Thus we cannot leave completely aside the axiomatization of the theories under consideration, nor can we ignore the metamathematics used to elaborate these models, for changes in the metamathematics often impose restrictions on the resulting models. Second, based on a parallel between van Fraassen’s modal interpretation of quantum mechanics and Skolem’s relativism regarding set-theoretic concepts, we introduce a distinction between relative and absolute concepts in the context of the models of a scientific theory. And we discuss the significance of that distinction. Finally, by focusing on contemporary particle physics, we raise the question: since there is no general accepted unification of the parts of the standard model (namely, QED and QCD), we have no theory, in the usual sense of the term. This poses a difficulty: if there is no theory, how can we speak of its models? What are the latter models of? We conclude by noting that it is unclear that the semantic view can be applied to contemporary physical theories.

Ontic Structural Realism is a version of realism about science according to which by positing the existence of structures, understood as basic components of reality, one can resolve central difficulties faced by standard versions of scientific realism. Structures are invoked to respond to two important challenges: one posed by the pessimist meta-induction and the other by the underdetermination of metaphysics by physics, which arises in non-relativistic quantum mechanics. We argue that difficulties in the proper understanding of what a structure is undermines the realist component of the view. Given the difficulties, either realism should be dropped or additional metaphysical components not fully endorsed by science should be incorporated.