seminar: Kripke on Logicism, Wittgenstein, and de re Beliefs about Numbers

speaker: Mark Steiner (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

abstract: I discuss the evolution of Kripke’s thinking about Wittgenstein from Naming and Necessity and Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language till the Whitehead Lectures (Harvard, 1992), which have never been published. Though Kripke never claimed to render Wittgenstein’s thought accurately in any of these three works, in fact his understanding of Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics starts badly but improves over the years, as he overcomes deep ideological antagonism, stemming from Kripke’s own mathematical realism, which impedes comprehension of Wittgenstein’s peculiar form of anti-realism. In the Whitehead Lectures, Kripke develops an approach to mathematical “entities” which I will call “quasi nominalism.” I will show that quasi nominalism is a good description of Wittgenstein’s position (in Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics) as well. One of the notorious consequences of Kripke’s “synthesis” (as he calls it) is that there is more than one natural number series, and that the concept of natural number is culture dependent.

timetable:
Tue 24 Jan, 11:15 - 12:15, Aula Bianchi Scienze
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