Philosophers have published direct responses and critiques of Penelope Maddy's Second Philosophy.
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Academic literature and book chapters compare and analyze Penelope Maddy's Second Philosophy, addressing her positions on naturalism, logic, and mathematics.
AbstractMany philosophers these days consider themselves naturalists, but it's doubtful any two of them intend the same position by the term. This book describes and practices a particularly austere form of naturalism called ‘Second Philosophy’. Without a definitive criterion for what counts as ‘science’ and what doesn't, Second Philosophy can't be specified directly — ‘trust only the methods of science!’ or some such thing — so the book proceeds instead by illustrating the behaviors of an idealized inquirer called here the ‘Second Philosopher’. This Second Philosopher begins from perceptual common sense and progresses from there to systematic observation, active experimentation, theory formation, and testing, working all the while to assess, correct, and improve methods along the way. ‘Second Philosophy’ is then the result of the Second Philosopher's investigations. This book delineates the Second Philosopher's approach by tracing reactions to various familiar sceptical and transcendental views (Descartes, Kant, Carnap, late Putnam, van Fraassen), comparing methods to those of other self-described naturalists (especially Quine), and examining a prominent contemporary debate (between disquotationalists and correspondence theorists in the theory of truth) to extract a properly second-philosophical line of thought. The book then undertakes to practice Second Philosophy in its reflections on the ground of logical truth, the methodology, ontology, and epistemology of mathematics, and the general prospects for metaphysics naturalized.
AbstractThough extra-mathematical philosophy is irrelevant to the methodological decisions of mathematics, a second-philosophical understanding of the human practice of mathematics requires answers to traditionally philosophical questions of metaphysics and epistemology. This chapter explores three broad schools of thought on these questions: Robust Realism, Thin Realism, and Arealism. One familiar version of Robust Realism is Gödel's platonism, which raises an equally familiar epistemological objection associated with Benacerraf. Thin Realism reorients the epistemological discussion by beginning from the idea that the way to find out about mathematical things is to do mathematics; the Second Philosopher argues that traditional characterizations (objective, nonspatiotemporal, acausal) are retained while the proper methods are just those ratified by mathematical goals and values (as in §IV.3). Arealism embraces the very same mathematical methods as Thin Realism, the very same choices and decisions in practice, but includes no added claims of truth or existence. The Second Philosopher argues that Robust Realism is problematic (though not for strictly Benacerrafian reasons), that Thin Realism and Arealism are viable, and indeed that Thin Realism and Arealism are cosmetic variants of the same view.
AbstractThis final chapter touches on the large question of what Second Philosophy tells us about what there is. Some post-Quinean philosophers have argued for versions of fictionalism, or even felt driven to a kind of ontological nihilism, according to which there are no viable grounds on which to settle questions of existence. On examination, the Second Philosopher suspects that one source of difficulty here is an implicit presupposition that adequate ontological judgments must rest on perfectly general criteria. By her lights, a piece-meal approach seems warranted, as for example different types of considerations figure in the case for atoms and the case for the electro-magnetic field. These straightforward ontological investigations all fall comfortably within range of the second-philosophical method.
AbstractSecond Philosophy is introduced as the theorizing of a particular sort of naturalistic inquirer, the Second Philosopher. Unlike other naturalists, she doesn't reject Descartes's Method of Doubt as ‘unscientific’; she takes him at his word that it will provide a way of improving and correcting her understanding of the world. Her disagreement comes in the implementation, where she thinks he hasn't provided good reasons for his claims.
AbstractThis chapter returns to the compare-and-contrast approach of Part I, focusing this time on van Fraassen's constructive empiricism. The constructive empiricist holds that no evidence can support the claim that unobservable entities exist, which seems to deny the force of the accepted scientific evidence for the existence of atoms. In a move familiar from Kant, Carnap, and Putnam, van Fraassen agrees that the Second Philosopher's evidence is valid for her purposes, but posits another level of inquiry — philosophical or epistemological inquiry — where the existence of atoms can never be confirmed. As before, the Second Philosopher sees this other inquiry as unmotivated and its methods unclear, but this doesn't ally her with van Fraassen's opponents, the scientific realists, who join him in thinking the ordinary evidence needs some kind of supplementation. The chapter closes with an examination of Worrall's anti-naturalism.
Logical Realism—A Tale of Two Theories* | Springer Nature Link
# Logical Realism—A Tale of Two Theories*
- First Online: 16 October 2024
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- pp 241–261
The Philosophy of Penelope Maddy
## Abstract
This paper compares two theories of the nature of logic: Maddy’s, (2007, 2014a)—henceforth “Theory 1”—and Sher’s (1991, 2016)—“Theory 2”. The two theories share a significant element: they both diverge from the commonly held view that logic is grounded only in the mind (language, concepts, conventions, etc.). Instead, they argue that logic is crucially grounded in the world. But the two theories differ in significant ways as well. Most distinctly, one is an anti-holist, “austere naturalist” theory while the other is a non-naturalist “foundational holistic” theory. This methodological difference affects their questions, goals, orientations, the scope of their investigations, their logical realism (the way they ground logic in the world), their explanation of the modal force of logic, and their approach to the relation between logic and mathematics.
* I would like to thank Pen Maddy for helpful comments.
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