Marți, 11 iunie 2024, ora 14, colegul nostru lect.dr. Andrei Mărășoiu, susține o prezentare la CRESA cu titlul „Neutralism defended”. CRESA (https://www.cresa.eu/) este Centro di Ricerca in Epistemologia Sperimentale e Applicata din cadrul universității Vita Salute San Raffaele din Milano, unde Andrei este cercetător în vizită pentru semestrul al II-lea al anului 2023/24. Programul profesorilor în vizită este disponibil aici: https://www.unisr.it/en/
Aria tematică a prezentării sale se suprapune în bună măsură cu oferta de cursuri a programului masteral în limba engleză „Analytic Philosophy” de la facultatea noastră, singurul master de cercetare în filosofie cu predare în limba engleză din România. Mai multe despre program puteți afla aici: https://filosofie.unibuc.ro/
‘In reformulating her programme about how to best understand or elucidate mathematical axioms in her book, Defending the Axioms, Penelope Maddy articulates a view called „neutralism”, similar in purport to views held by Rudolf Carnap and Arthur Fine, and which seems to best fit with her second philosophy and naturalism in the foundations of mathematics. As I construe it, neutralism is a programmatic deflationism about the relevance to the foundations of mathematics of metaphysical statements. One objection to neutralism might be that the foundational crisis in the 1900’s and the ensuing axiomatizations of set theory are rife with metaphysical concern, both with whether sets exist and with what the nature of sets might be. Consider, for example, Skolem’s discussion of the Axiom of Choice, and his distinction between real sets and objects we may choose to call „sets” in light of a theory of them. I argue that neutralism survives this objection. Granted, genuine, first-philosophical, metaphysical concern with what sets are clearly cannot be dismissed in some historical episodes. But that concession falls short of showing a principled basis for always turning first-philosophical. How some foundational problems are framed (e.g. in the foundational crisis of the 1900’s) might at first be metaphysically perplexing. As time goes by, orthodoxy (ZFC) sets in practice and alternative set theories begin to be explored in an experimental and tolerant spirit. New reasons for endorsing orthodoxy emerge (e.g. the iterative hierarchy as an intuitive picture), and practice begins once more to unfold in agreement with more pragmatic, and less ontologically inflated, descriptions. If metaphysical concerns come and go, neutralist views are on firm footing: they can just wait it out. To say this particular objection falls short is, by my lights, no final defense of neutralism as true. Indeed, I see deflationism about truth as consonant with neutralism about sets.’