We're please to have John Burgess (Northwestern/UOW) and Shane Waugh (UOW) presenting a joint paper at the Philosophy Research Seminar series on Tuesday, August 10th. All are welcome to attend.
Title: Pluralism, Neutralism and Propositional Representation
When and Where: 5:30pm, Tuesday, August 10th in room 19.1003
*Back to our usual venue*
Abstract: Theories of interpretation which are duly sensitive to cultural and ideological diversity are usually sufficiently sophisticated to allow for error theoretic and fictionalist approaches to the areas of discourse which require them. Although a welcome step in the right direction, this is not yet sophistication enough; an adequate general account of interpretation must acknowledge the possibility of neutralist interpretation where we can understand a narrative without knowing whether it is fact, fiction or constitutively flawed would-be fact. Not only is this resource required for an adequate representation of interpretation in everyday life, it is also required in philosophy if we are properly to grasp the significance of positions like van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism, Fogelin’s neo-Pyrhhonism and Kalderon’s moral fictionalism. We here develop and defend a position we call mode-variable realism. This task requires us first to explain neutralism and to show how it interacts with more familiar modes of interpretation to produce the mode-variable realist framework. Second, we apply the framework to the three philosophical examples just mentioned.
