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| 6
December
(Wednesday) 5:00
PM Room 226 |
| Tim
Crane
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Department
of Philosophy, CEU, Budapest
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Putnam’s
Ant: Some
Reflections on the
Explanation of
Meaning
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In chapter one of his
book Reason, Truth and
History, Hilary Putnam
argued that the only alternative
to treating reference and
intentionality as causal relations
is to hold a ‘magical’ theory of
reference (where this is supposed
to be a bad thing). He argues this
by employing a famous thought
experiment about an ant
accidentally making a pattern in
the sand which looks like a
picture of Winston Churchill.
Putnam argues that nothing
intrinsic to this pattern makes it
a picture, and nor do any of its
relational properties (e.g.
resemblance to Churchill). He then
claims that “what goes for
physical pictures also goes for
mental images, and for mental
representations in general” — we
need to appeal to causal relations
in order to explain reference or
intentionality; anything else is
an appeal to ‘magic'. In this talk
I examine and criticise Putnam’s
argument.
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| 13
December
(Wednesday) 5:00
PM Room 226 |
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* Institute of
Philosophy, Research Centre for
the Humanities, Budapest
** Department of Logic,
Institute of Philosophy, Eötvös
University Budapest
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The Elimination of
Probability
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There seems to be a
consensus in the philosophy of
probability literature that the
notion of probability cannot be
given a satisfactory definition.
How is it possible that physics
and other sciences are able to
apply the notion of probability
without noticing this fundamental
problem? In this talk we shall
outline and elaborate on a novel
interpretation of probability
(developed in Szabó 2007) that may
shed light on this question. The
basic idea will be that
probability is a notion that is
completely eliminable from the
scientific discourse.
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