What pluralism could be and might do

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• Tim Button (Faculty of Philosophy)
• Thursday 31 January 2013, 16:30-18:00
• Seminar Room 2, Department of History and Philosophy of Science.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Helen Curry.

Plenty of philosophers of science now explicitly advocate some form of pluralism. Sometimes this is a methodological pluralism: we should consider lots of different problems, and tackle them using many different approaches and theoretical frameworks. That sounds good. But sometimes this is ontological pluralism: what exists is (somehow) relative to our approaches and frameworks. This is sometimes invoked to debunk various metaphysical projects, which are presumed to have framework-independent ambitions. I have good news and bad news for ontological pluralists with such motivations. The bad news is that ontological pluralism is incoherent. The good news is that there is a coherent form of pluralism that will do just as well at debunking metaphysics.

This talk is part of the Departmental Seminars in History and Philosophy of Science series.

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