Abstract
In “Neo-fregeanism: An Embarrassment of Riches” (Notre Dame J Formal Logic 44(1):13–48, 2003) Alan Weir introduces a number of formal constraints on abstraction principles that have become central to subsequent discussions of the Bad Company Problem, including stability and (Field and Caesar-neutral) conservativeness. In this essay we return to another notion introduced in that paper that has received much less attention—modest reflection—and we demonstrate that a natural version of this criterion is (i) a plausible constraint that acceptable abstraction principles must meet, (ii) distinct from all other such constraints proposed in the subsequent literature, yet (iii) intimately connected to a recent puzzle raised by Heck (and intimately connected to Heck’s own preferred solution to this puzzle).
Original language | English (US) |
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Title of host publication | Synthese Library |
Publisher | Springer Science and Business Media B.V. |
Pages | 133-170 |
Number of pages | 38 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 2024 |
Publication series
Name | Synthese Library |
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Volume | 484 |
ISSN (Print) | 0166-6991 |
ISSN (Electronic) | 2542-8292 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024.
Keywords
- Abstraction
- Conservativeness
- Distractions
- Logicism
- Modest reflection
- Monotonicity
- Neo-logicism