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Michael De: What Is Metaphysics?
Michael De: What Is Metaphysics?
Michael De University of Utrecht Department of Philosophy Utrecht, Netherlands mikejde@gmail.com June 10, 2011
talk into gappy talk, but no translation will help the gap theorist understand what the glut theorist intends to say. For an example from metaphysics, consider the open future cashed out in terms of (i) divergence and (ii) branching. We may be able to always obtain a branching structure from a divergent one and conversely, but that in no way shows some substantive notion of equivalence between divergence and branching. For on the divergence picture the future is open only in an epistemic sense, while on the branching theorists the indeterminacy of the future is at root ontic. What can we say, then, regarding the signicance of formal equivalences? Metaphysically, not much. For instance, we cant say that divergence and branching come to the same thing. What we can say is that a language interpreted with respect to either divergent models or branching models yields the very same logic. That itself is an interesting fact. It tells us that on very dierent pictures of the open future, one epistemic the other ontic, the very same patterns of reasoning come out valid. Maybe theres more to it than that, but until we are given some plausible story for thinking so, we shouldnt be tempted into granting formal equivalences any signicant metaphysical role.
References
[1] Per Lindstrm, Aspects of incompleteness, Lecture Notes in Logic, Springer, o 1997. [2] Francis Jery Pelletier and Alasdair Urquhart, Synonymous logics, Journal of Philosophical Logic 32 (2002), 259285.