[IHPST] Announcement Research Seminar : 'Structure in Ontology'

Wed Oct 17 16:13:57 UTC 2007

Announcement Research Seminar : Structure in Ontology
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Organizers : Francesco Berto (IHPST/Venice) / Friederike Moltmann (IHPST)

This seminar consists in presentations of new research and discussions of published recent work dealing with structure in ontology. Some of the papers will be made available in advance. Further suggestions very welcome!

Time:  Wednesdays 11-13, every two weeks, starting October 24, 2007
Place:  Salle Pasteur, Pavillon Pasteur, ENS, 45 rue d’Ulm, 75005 Paris

Preliminary Schedule:

October 24: Peter Simons (University of Leeds):

Collections and Complexification, Structures and Abstraction: the Ontology and Operations behind Numbers and Sets

Abstract:
Since the heroic time of Frege, Russell and Zermelo, most modern formal ontology has been modelled on the assumed ontology of mathematics. The collapse of logicism and formalism as foundational programmes in mathematics put sets in the driving seat to explicate the ontology of number. Their prestige thus assured, sets became widely invoked by ontologists, in some cases completely taking over ontology. In this talk I shall argue that this development is ontologically completely back to front. Sets are not only mathematical latecomers; they are ontologically extremely obscure,  and unfit for fundamental ontological duty. To understand what sets are, we need to explicate them in terms of more general notions. We must understand first of all the wider ontology of collections-- plural or collective entities--and the patterns of relations they exhibit, their structures. From there to numbers we proceed by considering the degenerate case of collections, mere pluralities or
 multitudes, and abstracting from their particular differences. A number is an abstractum of a multitude. Sets come in via a different cognitive operation, that of complexification, which posits a singular complex determined by a structured collection. From there to sets we proceed by considering again the degenerate case of multitudes: a set is the complex of a multitude. Abstraction and complexification are cognitive operations whose ontological import is debatable: they may be taken as recognitional, as creative, or as fictive. The resulting ontologies for number and set are accordingly platonist, constructivist, or nominalist.

November 7:   Francesco Berto (IHPST / University of Venice): 

More than Words (Or why Mereologists Can’t Do Much Better than Sortalists)

Abstract
Meta-ontology (in van Inwagen’s influential sense) concerns, among other things, the methodology of ontology, and a very controversial meta-ontological issue is to what extent ontology can rely to semantic analysis in the business of establishing the furniture of the world. In this talk I discuss an argument advanced by some extensional mereologists (call them Unifiers) against supporters of sortal concepts (call them Multipliers), and its alleged meta-ontological import. Unifiers claim that, in trying to introduce metaphysical distinctions on the basis of semantic ones, sortalism rests on a fallacy of verbalism (entailing, among other things, a trade-off between a de dicto and a de re reading of modal claims in the Multiplier’s argument to the effect that two objects of different sorts can co-occupy the same spatiotemporal region). I aim at showing that a tu quoque can be raised against Unifiers: they cannot even distinguish material objects (or events) from the
 spatiotemporal regions they occupy, unless they also resort to linguistic distinctions; therefore, their methodological purpose to emancipate themselves from semantic analysis in ontological businesses is to a large extent a chimera. This is achieved by showing that both philosophical contenders face the problem of finding (in Michael Della Rocca’s jargon) non-question-begging predicates: predicates that can be used to apply Leibniz’s Law non-circularly in order to establish metaphysical distinctions.

November 21: TBA

December 5: Harold W. Noonan (University of Birmingham)

Moderate Monism, Sortal Concepts and Relative Identity

Abstract
    Coincidence (e.g., of a statue and the piece of bronze which constitutes it) comes in two varieties - permanent and temporary. Moderate monism (about coincidence) is the position that permanent coincidence, but not temporary coincidence, entails identity. Extreme monism (also known as the stage theory) is the position that even temporary coincidence entails identity. Pluralists are opponents of monism tout court. [1] <https://owa.nottingham.ac.uk/exchange/apzhwn/Drafts/RE:.EML/1_text.htm#_ftn1>The intuitively obvious, commonsensical position (= my own position) is moderate monism. It is therefore important to see if it can be sustained.

    In what follows I first outline the moderate monism position and compare and contrast it with other metaphysical positions it is often associated with. I then outline the arguments for moderate monism that seem to me most persuasive, drawing on earlier work of my own (1993) and Mark Johnston's (1992). Next I turn to three criticisms of moderate monism, by Jim Stone (2005a, 2005c), Eric Olson (2006) and Penelope Mackie (unpublished). In responding to these criticisms I maintain (a) that sortal concepts satisfy de dicto modal principles that constrain the histories of the things falling under them and that may be thought of as specifying the criteria of identity for the things falling under the sortal concepts, (b) that a distinction is required between restricted sortal quantification and unrestricted quantification over the things falling under a sortal concept (between e.g., 'some statue is ...' and 'something is a statue and is ...') and (c) that reflecting on the
 arguments which enforce this distinction provides the best ground for accepting that 'identity is relative' in one sense familiar from the writings of Peter Geach (1980), namely  
that identity under a sortal concept at a time (expressible in the form 'is the same S as at t') does not entail absolute, Leibnizian identity. I shall suggest that one way (not the only way) of combining these ideas is to defend a variant of stage theory which is a sort of synthesis of some of the ideas of Hawley (2001) and Sider (2001), but is not so great a departure from standard perdurantism and which yields a variant on moderate monism - which may be thought of as moderately extreme monism.

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