John Symons

Rather than taking the ontological fundamentality of an ideal microphysics as a starting point, this article sketches an approach to the problem of levels that swaps assumptions about ontology for assumptions about inquiry. These assumptions can be implemented formally via computational modeling techniques that will be described below. It is argued that these models offer a way to save some of our prominent commonsense intuitions concerning levels. This strategy offers a way of exploring the individuation of higher level properties in a systematic and formally constrained manner. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, Worrell Hall 306, 500 University Avenue, University of Texas, El Paso, TX 79968; e‐mail: [email protected].

Skeptics argue that the acquisition of knowledge is impossible given the standing possibility of error. We present the limiting convergence strategy for responding to skepticism and discuss the relationship between conceivable error and an agent’s knowledge in the limit. We argue that the skeptic must demonstrate that agents are operating with a bad method or are in an epistemically cursed world. Such demonstration involves a significant step beyond conceivability and commits the skeptic to potentially convergent inquiry.

Giandomenico Sica’s volume is a collection of eleven papers on category theory by philosophers, mathematicians, and mathematical physicists. In addition to papers of direct interest to philosophers of mathematics, the volume contains some introductory expositions of category theory along with a valuable discussion of the relationship between category theory and physics by Bob Coecke. While there are several technically difficult papers, the volume as a whole is reasonably accessible to those with some familiarity with the basics of category theory. The importance of the volume lies in the possibility that it will encourage broader interest in category theory among philosophers.