On Thursday 17.4.2024. the MetPhil (Croatian Science Foundation IP-2022-10-2550) project team gathered to conduct their tenth workshop. The topic of the workshop was a talk given by Christopher Daly from the University of Manchester titled “Fictionalist approaches to philosophical theories”.
In the first part of the workshop Daly delivered his talk in which he tried to reconfigure the way in which we understand the framework of fictionalism. Among other things, Daly thinks that the role of fiction within fictionalism should be downgraded and seen as primarily serving a heuristic function. This goes against a significant number of fictionalists who would claim that a key to understanding fictionalism is treating a theory of, say, mathematics as fiction in the usual sense of the word. One of the reasons why we should be tempted to sever the parallels between fictionalism and fiction as it is usually understood is because these parallels are sometimes controversial and a target for sustained criticism.
The second part of the workshop was dedicated to a Q&A session where the audience presented their questions and comments to the author.
The minutes of this workshop are attached below.