It is widely believed that platonists face a formidable problem: that of providing an intelligible account of mathematical knowledge. The problem is that we seem unable, if the platonist is right, to have the causal relationships with the objects of mathematics without which knowledge of these objects seems unintelligible. The standard platonist response to this challenge is either to deny that...

Ontological pluralism is the view that there are different fundamental ways of being. Recent defenders this view—such as Kris McDaniel and Jason Turner—have taken these being to be best captured by semantically primitive quantifier expressions ranging over domains. They have thus endorsed, what I shall call, quantificational pluralism. argue focus on quantification a mistake. For, view, structu...

Katz 's new clothes Katz's new view about language and linguistics comes in two parts: platonism and nonreductionism. Those of us who have been skeptical about the empirical basis for claims that have arisen from within linguistics will welcome Katz's defection to our side in respect of platonism, but we will be dismayed by his refusal to adopt the rest of our methodology concerning reductionis...

Abstract About sixty years ago, Hans Albert criticized economists for their “model platonism”, a methodological attitude that immunizes theoretical models against empirical criticism. Since then, economics has taken an turn; yet, model platonism lingers on. The root of the problem is economists’ reluctance to distinguish explicitly between law-like and situational assumptions models. Without th...

The paradox of sex, despite decades of attention, remains unresolved. Recent efforts to gain insight into the nature of the mechanisms underlying the maintenance of sex have led to an emphasis on a pluralist approach, with a particular focus on interaction between multiple mechanisms. However, few empirical tests of pluralist models exist, perhaps due to the widely held assumption that major co...