Category Archives: Books

The introductory sketch in the last post reveals at least this much about Weir’s neo-formalism: it is the marriage of two independent lines of thought. One idea — call it “formalism about arithmetical correctness” — is that, at a first … Continue reading →

As you might remember, I’m supposed to be writing a review of Alan Weir’s Truth through Proof. I started blogging here about the book some time ago, intermittently discussing the first couple of chapters at length, and then I’m afraid … Continue reading →

Weir, to summarize once more, wants to develop a position that allows him to say sincerely, speaking with the vulgar mathematicians (and not having to cross his fingers behind his back, or do that little dance with the fingers that … Continue reading →

The projectivist about e.g. judgements of tastiness explains how “X is tasty” (as an ordinary judgement made in the restaurant, not the philosophy class) is an assertion that can be correct or incorrect even though there is no such property-out-there … Continue reading →

The projectivist’s root idea is that a judgement that “X is G”, for a predicate G apt for projectivist treatment, is keyed not to a belief that represents X as having a special property but to an appropriate non-cognitive attitude … Continue reading →

Suppose we want to claim that some class of sentences that are grammatically like those of straightforwardly fact-stating, representational, belief-expressing discourse actually  have a quite different semantic function (and remember, this is going to be Weir’s line about mathematical sentences: … Continue reading →

So at long last, it’s back to discussing Alan Weir’s Truth Through Proof (henceforth, TTP). And apologies to Alan, and anyone else, who has been eagerly waiting for further  instalments. Let’s quickly, in this post, review where we’ve got to … Continue reading →

In the present section, Weir says something about the kind of semantic framework he favours, and in particular about issues of context-sensitivity. Here I do little more than summarize. The basic idea is very familiar. “Utterances of declarative sentences are … Continue reading →

As we can see from our initial specification of his position, to get Weir’s philosophy of mathematics to fly will involve accepting some substantial and potentially controversial claims in the philosophy of language and metaphysics. The first two chapters of … Continue reading →