In a somewhat odd move, I'm going to post the "abstract" of a paper that I have yet to write. This is because I have not had the time or reason to write the paper but have had the ideas fomenting for quite some time.  Although this brief paragraph won't contain many details, I do believe it outlines a project that can be carried out and that I may in fact carry out in graduate school.

In a paper forthcoming in Noûs, Otavio Bueno and Mark Colyvan outline and defend an extension of mapping accounts of the applicability of mathematics which they call the inferential conception. Despite the extensions made to mapping accounts, the inferential conception still agrees with mapping accounts on the necessity of starting from an "assumed structure" of the world. In Bueno and Colyvan's view, since any dissection of the world into objects and relations will be theory-laden (and such dissections are necessary for any form of correspondence between empirical and mathematical structures to exist), "there is no avoiding such an assumption." (They do, however, maintain that there may be a "natural candidate pre-theoretic structure", as in the case of a street map. More on this later.)  In this post, I will briefly sketch an argument that such an assumption can be avoided using results from the burgeoning subdiscipline of the cognitive science of mathematics.  In particular, by properly understanding the genesis of mathematical concepts from embodied experience and everyday cognitive capacities, I will argue that mathematical structures should be understood as being grounded in empirical ones. From this perspective, the applicability of mathematics is an inevitable feature of mathematics and the existence of it as a problem is an historical artifact.

I am attaching a final paper that I have recently written.  While I will not name the professor or the course, it should be pretty easy to guess with a bit of investigation.

At any rate, this paper is something of a literature review focused on Republic 527d-530c. Readings of Plato's astronomy by Vlastos, Mourelatos, and Gregory are examined both for internal consistency and accuracy with the text.

Click here to read the paper.

After seeing Jonathan Hricko's seminar on Metaphysics and Chemistry, I began reading Ladyman and Ross' Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized.  I am currently almost finished with the first chapter, in which the authors launch an all-out attack on analytic metaphysics and outline their naturalized version.

One component of their naturalized metaphysics is a new solution to the demarcation problem which attempts to address how one distinguishes (i.e. demarcates) science from non-science.  In this post, I wish to address some problems I see with their naturalized demarcation principle.

On page 33, the authors motivate their principle:

A naturalistic demarcation principle should be based on reference to criteria that are empirically observed to regulate the practices of science.

Using these sorts of criteria as a starting point in the search for a demarcation leads, in my opinion, to a couple significant problems.

The most significant problem for a definition based on these criteria is that such a definition will never get off the ground because it presupposes the ability to identify science.  In order to empirically observe criteria that regulate the practices of science, one must already be able to distinguish science form non-science so as to distinguish scientific practice from non-scientific practice.  Seen like this, the first requirement of Ross and Ladyman merely defers the demarcation problem to an empirical demarcation problem of distinguishing two types of activity.

How, then, are we supposed to distinguish scientific practice from non-scientific?  This is where Ross and Ladyman really lose me: through continued appeal to `institutionally bona fide' science, they end up advocating a view that identifies science with practices that will be funded by grant-giving institutions.  According to them (p. 37),

We assume that the institutions of modern science are more reliable epistemic filters than are any criteria that could be identified by philosophical analysis and written down.

As Eric Schliesser points out in this blog post (see note 7),

They are blind to the fact that, especially after success of Kuhn's Structure [of Scientific Revolutions], a lot of disciplines dressed themselves up with a lot of scientific institutions and insisted on a sole paradigm (etc), stampinging out dissent. There is plenty of what one may call 'zombie' science to go around (they look like science, but produce junk).

These quotes combined form a picture where Ross and Ladyman's assumption in the ability of modern institutions as "reliable epistemic filters" is at best an unexamined assumption and at worse a completely false one.

Given the philosophical ambition of Ross and Ladyman's project, to completely naturalize metaphysics and change common perception of fundamental science, the oversight that Schliesser points out strikes me as one that cannot go unaddressed.  On the other hand, because of the wide scope of the project, it is also one that will likely go unnoticed.  While I have not read past chapter 1 yet, I doubt the demarcation issue is a recurring problem in the book.

This raises the question: given how much ink has been spilled on the demarcation problem in the past, should Ross and Ladyman have even offered their (incomplete) account or ignored it for the other fronts of their attack?

(Also, can anyone point me to a fuller explication of this account if it exists?)