NON-CATEGORICAL THINKING:
POSSIBILITIES, PROBABILITIES AND CONDITIONALS
For creatures like us, it is natural to think non-categorically – in terms of the possible, the probable and the conditional. This fact prompts the following philosophical questions.
Is non-categorical thinking indispensable, in any sense, to all practical and intellectual life? How should we think of reality and our cognitive relations to it in light of our answers to that question? Is our non- categorical thought an instrument that we need only because of our ignorance of how the world categorically is (cf Spinoza), or when we think non-categorically do we sometimes track a corresponding (probabilistic, modal or conditional) non-categorical reality? What are the best systematic (formal) representations of non-categorical thinking and how do these relate (normatively or otherwise) to our non- categorical thought? Has the practice of natural science settled some of these questions and if some of the questions are so settled how does that bear on the others? Can we look to the case of mathematics to find models of what practical and intellectual indispensability (of a way of thinking) might amount to and the epistemological and metaphysical implications of these models?
The central purpose of the project is to develop questions about modalities, conditionals and probabilities in the context of a unified philosophical framework: one that will promote applications of research programmes that have been successful in one area of non-categorical thought to the others.
John Divers, University of Leeds, July 3rd 2015
Is non-categorical thinking indispensable, in any sense, to all practical and intellectual life? How should we think of reality and our cognitive relations to it in light of our answers to that question? Is our non- categorical thought an instrument that we need only because of our ignorance of how the world categorically is (cf Spinoza), or when we think non-categorically do we sometimes track a corresponding (probabilistic, modal or conditional) non-categorical reality? What are the best systematic (formal) representations of non-categorical thinking and how do these relate (normatively or otherwise) to our non- categorical thought? Has the practice of natural science settled some of these questions and if some of the questions are so settled how does that bear on the others? Can we look to the case of mathematics to find models of what practical and intellectual indispensability (of a way of thinking) might amount to and the epistemological and metaphysical implications of these models?
The central purpose of the project is to develop questions about modalities, conditionals and probabilities in the context of a unified philosophical framework: one that will promote applications of research programmes that have been successful in one area of non-categorical thought to the others.
John Divers, University of Leeds, July 3rd 2015