Event Detail
Sat Nov 21, 2015 60 Evans Hall |
Logic Colloquium Edward N. Zalta (Senior Research Scholar, CSLI, Stanford University) Reflections on Foundations for Mathematical Structuralism |
In a paper recently published in Mind (“Foundations for Mathematical Structuralism”), Nodelman and I offer a rigorous formulation of mathematical structuralism. A mathematics-free theory of structures and structural objects is presented in a background formalism and then the whole is applied to the analysis of mathematics. While the principal structuralist intuitions about structures and the elements of structures are preserved, distinctions formalized in the theory undermine a variety of arguments that have been put forward concerning the nature of structural elements. Arguments from Russell, Dedekind, Benacerraf, Shapiro, Linnebo, Awodey, Keranen, and others, are considered. For those interested in reading the paper in advance, a preprint is available at: http://mally.stanford.edu/Papers/structuralism.pdf