Fictionalism: The Bucharest-Budapest Workshop in Philosophy

In contemporary analytic philosophy, a fictionalist view of one type or another has been proposed in areas like philosophy of language, metaethics, and metaontology, and extended over areas like philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of mind, and even philosophy of science. Critical responses, in every such area, have also been offered by defenders of realism, eliminativist anti-realism, non-cognitivism, Meinongianism, deflationism, etc. Nevertheless, there has been little interaction between proponents and critics of fictionalism across these areas. This workshop attempts to increase such interaction and see what (if anything) can be learned from its possible outcomes.

April 4, Friday

14:45 Opening remarks by Eva Fodor

15:00 – 17:15 Session 1/Chair: Iulian Toader

Emily Caddick Bourne: “True to fictionalism”

Gábor Bács: “Fictionalism – What for?”

Gabriel Sandu: “Fictional entities in the formal semantics of natural language”

17:30 – 18:30 Session 2/Chair: Sorin Costreie

Simon Blackburn: “Is there a conflict between pragmatism and representation?”

April 5, Saturday

9:00 – 10:00 Session 3/Chair: Tamás Demeter

Daniel Hutto: “Mental Fictionalism and the Hard Problem of Content”

10:30 – 12:45 Session 4/Chair: Gábor Bács

Mircea Dumitru: “Remarks on Modal Fictionalism”

Miklós Márton & János Tőzsér: “Mental Fictionalism and the Problem of Other Minds”

Gheorghe Ştefanov: “Force Fictionalism - Morals from Speech Act Theory “

13:00 – 15:00 Lunch break

15:00 – 17:15 Session 5/Chair: Miklós Márton

Jessica Carter: “'Fictionalism in mathematics? Representations and context”

Sorin Costreie: “Frege's Puzzle against Fictionalism”

László Kocsis: “Mathematical Fictionalism and Non-Causal Scientific Explanations”

17:30 – 18:30 Session 6/Chair: Gheorghe Ştefanov

Matti Eklund: “Fictionalism and Ontological Deflationism”