2:50 p.m.
We are pleased to announce that on Friday, November 15 at 17.30 (CET), Sebastian Speitel
(Bonn) will give the talk Securing Arithmetical Determinacy as part of the Lugano
Philosophy Colloquia Fall 2024 organised by the Institute of Philosophy (ISFI) at USI.
This hybrid talk will take place in Room Multiuso, FTL Building (USI West Campus) and
online via Zoom. If you are interested in joining online, please write to
events.isfi(a)usi.ch.
Here is the abstract of the talk:
The existence of non-standard models of first-order Peano-Arithmetic threatens to
undermine the claim of the moderate mathematical realist that non-mysterious access to the
natural number structure is possible on the basis of our best arithmetical theories. The
move to logics stronger than FOL is denied to the moderate realist on the grounds that it
merely shifts the indeterminacy “one level up” into the meta-theory by -- illegitimately
-- assuming determinacy of the notions needed to formulate such logics. This paper argues
that the challenge can be met by showing that the notion “infinitely many” is uniquely
determinable in a naturalistically acceptable fashion and is thus available to the
moderate realist in the formulation of a theory of arithmetic. If there is time, I will
discuss how the approach can be extended to other important mathematical theories and
compare it with Field's alternative proposal and the popular strategy of invoking a
second-order formalism, arguing that it is more robust than either of these.
For more information: https://www.ftl.usi.ch/it/feeds/14780