Research Seminar November 21st: Silvia Jonas (Post-doc Fellow, The Polonski Academy, Van Leer Jerusalem Institute) - Analogical Reasoning for Non-empirical Domains of Truth

Over the last three decades, a new and rapidly expanding body of literature has emerged, exploiting local structural parallels between mathematics and other non-empirical domains of truth. Most of this work has centred on comparing the domains of mathematics and metaethics. However, mathematics has also been argued to be relevantly similar to other non-empirical domains of truth, such as logic and modality. Mathematics and metaethics have been argued to be analogous in three main respects: they face a common problem of epistemic access; they are arguably indispensable to science or other human intellectual projects; and their statements are objectively true without necessarily being about a realm of Platonic objects. From these structural parallels, several far-reaching conclusions have been drawn, for example that the reliability of our mathematical and ethical beliefs are explained by the same facts; that ethical and mathematical claims are equally justified; that mathematics and ethics are equally objective; and that mathematical and moral realism are equally well-founded. Comparing mathematics and metaethics thus promises new and exciting metaphysical and epistemic insights into each domain. However, inferring global conclusions about entire domains from merely local points of analogy also raises questions. First, are the specific analogies tenable on their own terms? Second, under what conditions are non-empirical domains of truth relevantly similar, and what is the right methodology for constructing a valid and genuinely insightful analogical argument about them? Third, what are the prospects for a theoretical unification of metaphysical and epistemological work about relevantly similar domains?