• Journal of Korean Philosophical Society
• /
• v.129
• /
• pp.23-51
• /
• 2014

Christine M. Korsgaard believes that constructivism can respond to moral skepticism without depending upon moral realism. The purpose of this paper is to examine Korsgaard's kantian constructivism and her positions on moral realism. According to Korsgaard moral realism cannot answer normative questions in that it sees the function of moral concepts as describing the reality and so accepts the model of applied knowledge for action. In contrast Korsgaard insists that constructivism is better at justifying normativity since it regards moral concepts as representing the solutions to practical problems and so shows that moral principles are necessarily involved in the practical problems of agency. Korsgaard's constructivism has antirealistic elements such as pure proceduralism, the constitutive model to exclude ontological, metaphysical meanings, and the account of human beings as the sources of values. In spite of those antirealistic elements it is difficult to jump to a conclusion that Korsgaard's constructivism is antirealism. Korsgaard, in the early book, The Sources of Normativity, says that kantian constructivism has something to do with a form of realism, or procedural moral realism. And in the following books she argues that constructivism is compatible with realism although she pays attention to the practical implications of constructivism and then sets aside its ontological relevance. That is, Korsgaard does not want that her constructivism results in antirealism. Korsgaard's realism, however, is too weak to be called as realism. There is, also, a question why one would rather take a constructivist approach if one holds on to realism.

• Korean Journal of Logic
• /
• v.17 no.1
• /
• pp.109-136
• /
• 2014

Every (semantic) antirealist accepts one or another form of verification principle. The principle has strong and weak forms, the strong form being highly counterintuitive but the weak one being more plausible. Understandably, antirealists have preferred the weak form of verification principle. Unfortunately, the socalled knowability paradox shows that those two forms are indeed equivalent. To solve this problem, Edgington suggests a yet new form of verification principle. Unfortunately, her new principle has its own difficulty. To overcome this difficulty, Edgington provides a new model of knowledge, according to which every true proposition is somehow associated with a known counterfactual conditional. In this paper, I shall argue that even this new model of knowledge confronts with an insurmountable problem. It is a well-known fact that, in the microscopic levels, some facts manage to occur despite very low physical chances. I will argue that the counterfactuals linked with those facts cannot be known due to the existence of epistemic defeaters. Hence, Edgington's knowledge model does not work in all cases.

• Korean Journal of Logic
• /
• v.11 no.1
• /
• pp.33-65
• /
• 2008

최근에 양은석은 "비트겐슈타인과 초일관성: 비트겐슈타인의 반실재론"에서 모순에 대한 비트겐슈타인의 견해에 대해 매우 주목할 만한 주장을 하였다. 그에 따르면, 비트겐슈타인은 약한 의미의 초일관주의자로 간주될 수 있다. 이 글에서는 이러한 양은석의 주장이 설득력 없는 것임을 보이고자 한다. 또한 비트겐슈타인이 논리학과 수학, 그리고 모순을 어떻게 바라보았는지를 가능한 한 공정하게 조명하고자 한다. 여러 학자들은 모순에 대한 비트겐슈타인의 생각이 대단히 특이한 것이라고 간주하였고, 더 나아가 마치 어떤 중대한 오류를 포함하는 것처럼 평가하였다. 그러나 이제 이러한 평가는 더 이상 유효하지 않다. 모순과 관련된 비트겐슈타인의 생각은 더 이상 특이하지 않다. 왜냐하면 그의 생각은 옳기 때문이다.

• Journal for History of Mathematics
• /
• v.24 no.4
• /
• pp.45-59
• /
• 2011

Constructionists believe that mathematical knowledge is obtained by a series of purely mental constructions, with all mathematical objects existing only in the mind of the mathematician. But constructivism runs the risk of rejecting the classical laws of logic, especially the principle of bivalence and L. E. M.(Law of the Excluded Middle). This philosophy of mathematics also does not take into account the external world, and when it is taken to extremes it can mean that there is no possibility of communication from one mind to another. Two constructionists, Brouwer and Dummett, are common in rejecting the L. E. M. as a basic law of logic. As indicated by Dummett, those who first realized that rejecting realism entailed rejecting classical logic were the intuitionists of the school of Brouwer. However for Dummett, the debate between realists and antirealists is in fact a debate about semantics - about how language gets its meaning. This difference of initial viewpoints between the two constructionists makes Brouwer the intuitionist and Dummettthe the semantic anti-realist. This paper is confined to show that Dummett's proposal in favor of intuitionism differs from that of Brouwer. Brouwer's intuitionism maintained that the meaning of a mathematical sentence is essentially private and incommunicable. In contrast, Dummett's semantic anti-realism argument stresses the public and communicable character of the meaning of mathematical sentences.