The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on November 11th from 4:15-6:15 in room 7314 of the CUNY Graduate Center for a talk by Martin Pleitz (Hamburg).

Title: Talking about Reification

Abstract: Reification is the systematic association of a non-object with an object that encodes it. Therefore the reificationist must be a trans-objectist – i.e., anyone who thinks that there are instances of reification must also think that some items are not objects. As exemplified by Frege’s puzzle of the concept horse, non-objects and reification are notoriously difficult to talk about. Therefore I will begin my presentation by outlining a formal language that enables the trans-objectist and the reificationist to speak in a way that is not self-undermining. I will go on and employ the framework to give a uniform diagnosis of the set theoretic and semantic paradoxes in terms of static reification that is an alternative to Graham Priest’s Inclosure Schema, and sketch how dynamic reification can provide a uniform solution to the paradoxes as well as a general account of the constitution of abstract objects. In order to achieve this it will be crucial to import some tools of Procedural Postulationism, a dynamic account of the ontology of mathematics developed by Kit Fine.