Two-Track Depictions of Leibniz’s Fictions

Physics and Leibnizs Principles

Leibniz’s principles made for an elegant and coherent philosophy. In part metaphysical, in part methodological, they addressed fundamental questions in the treatment of symmetry, in the relationship of physics to mathematics, in logic that are if anything even more pressing today than they were in Leibniz’s time. As I shall read them, they also expressed a distinctive and uncompromising form of...

Finding truth in fictions: identifying non-fictions in imaginary cracks

I critically examine some recent work on the philosophy of scientific fictions, focusing on the work of Winsberg. By considering two case studies in fracture mechanics, the strip yield model and the imaginary crack method, I argue that his reliance upon the social norms associated with an element of a model forces him to remain silent whenever those norms fail to clearly match the characteristi...

Laboratory Fictions

Fictions, fantasies, and fears

The debate about cloning and genetic engineering, which began in 1997, has been strongly influenced by fictional narratives, scripts, and images. They in turn provided the seeds for the creation of various metaphors used in the debate, especially by the media. The flow of metaphors and images associated with cloning is now ebbing away and is being replaced by a new wave of images and metaphors ...

Indexicals, Fictions, and Ficta

We defend the view that an indexical uttered by an actor works on the model of deferred reference. If it defers to a character which does not exist, it is an empty term, just as ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Ophelia’ are. The utterance in which it appears does not express a proposition and thus lacks a truth value. We advocate an ontologically parsimonious, anti-realist, position. We show how the notion of tru...