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2014年2月12日水曜日

Three Criticisms of Meillassoux's Argument in "Potentialité et virtualité"

I have three criticisms of Quentin Meillassoux's argument in "Potentialité et virtualité" (which I read in Japanese translation).

(1) Meillassoux does not make clear his ontology regarding mathematical objects. Since he bases his argument on set theory, and draws conclusions about the experiential universe from these arguments, he may be assuming a Platonist ontology. But in that case, he needs an account of how these Platonic mathematical entities manifest themselves in the experiential world. (However, he may have already given such an account elsewhere, which I am simply unaware of). It is possible to reject Meillassoux's entire project of drawing conclusions from mathematics by rejecting the (presumably) Platonist framework upon which he depends.

(2) Meillassoux's polemic against the argument for Uniformity (as well as the Anthropic Principle) from probabilistic reasoning, based on the contention that universes are not as plenty as blackberries, may be granted. However, the argument for Uniformity is not the only argument for the reality of necessity. We may simply reject the kind of Uniformity assumed by Meillassoux, viz. a Uniformity based on set theoretic reasoning, and instead endorse a Spinozist conception of necessity, in which everything that happens in the universe is on par with mathematical truth. In this view, the "universe of logical possibilities" that Meillassoux speaks of is construed as the product of epistemic limitations on the part of humans, rather than as objective and pre-existing.

(3) Meillassoux leaps from epistemology to ontology. This is justified, given Meillassoux's unrelenting rationalist position, which rejects the epistemology/ontology distinction altogther, on grounds that the distinction is based on experience rather than reason. However, we can again reject Meillassoux's conclusion by altogther rejecting his framework of drawing philosophical conclusions from logic and logic only.

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