Davide Rizza

University of East Anglia | UEA · School of Philosophy

Questo libro offre una introduzione semplice e stimolante alla metodologia computazionale nota come Aritmetica dell’Infinito. Originariamente proposta da Yaroslav Sergeyev, l’Aritmetica dell’Infinito consente di effettuare computazioni numeriche coinvolgenti quantità infinitamente grandi e piccole in modo semplice e diretto. Essa consente inoltre d...

The Königsberg bridge problem has played a central role in recent philosophical discussions of mathematical explanation. In this paper I look at it from a novel perspective, which is independent of explanatory concerns. Instead of restricting attention to the solved Königsberg bridge problem, I consider Euler’s construction of a solution method for...

In this paper I study the activity of mathematical problem-solving in scientific practice, focussing on enquiries in mathematical social science. I identify three salient phases of mathematical problem-solving and adopt them as a reference frame to investigate aspects of applications that have not yet received extensive attention in the philosophic...

Certain mathematical problems prove very hard to solve because some of their intuitive features have not been assimilated or cannot be assimilated by the available mathematical resources. This state of affairs triggers an interesting dynamic whereby the introduction of novel conceptual resources converts the intuitive features into further mathemat...

In this paper, we report findings from a pilot study investigating school students' epistemologies of mathematics by using novel mathematics definitions. Students aged 17 and 18-year-old in Italy and the UK were asked to complete a worksheet that used a numerical approach to determine the sizes of infinite sets and were, then, invited to attend foc...

Ø. Linnebo, Philosophy of Mathematics, Princeton Foundations of Contemporary Philosophy, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2017, vi + 203 pp. - Volume 24 Issue 2 - Davide Rizza

In this paper I study how divergent mathematical treatments affect mathematical modelling, with a special focus on utility theory. In particular I examine recent work on the ranking of information states and the discounting of future utilities, in order to show how, by replacing the standard analytical treatment of the models involved with one base...

Physical supertasks are completed, infinite sequences of events or interactions that occur within a finite amount of time. Examples thereof have been constructed to show that infinite physical systems may violate conservation laws. It is shown in this paper that this conclusion may be critically sensitive to a selection of numeral system. Weaker nu...

Using a basic theorem from mathematical logic, I show that there are field-extensions of on which a class of orderings that do not admit any real-valued utility functions can be represented by uncountably large families of utility functions. These are the lexicographically decomposable orderings studied in Beardon et al. (2002). A corollary to this...

In a recent paper (Okasha, Mind 120:83–115, 2011), Samir Okasha uses Arrow’s theorem to raise a challenge for the rationality of theory choice. He argues that, as soon as one accepts the plausibility of the assumptions leading to Arrow’s theorem, one is compelled to conclude that there are no adequate theory choice algorithms. Okasha offers a parti...

In this paper I examine some difficulties with the argument presented as a topological sorites in Z. Weber and M. Colyvan, 'A topological sorites', Journal of Philosophy 107, 311-325. In particular, I suggest that the argument may be used to support the claim that sorites-type paradoxes cannot arise in a cohesive environment.

In this article, I argue that mapping-based accounts of applications cannot be comprehensive and must be supplemented by analyses of other, qualitatively different, forms of application. I support these claims by providing a detailed discussion of the application of mathematics to a problem of election design that is prominent in social choice theo...

When a law court makes a decision based on the individual deliberation of each judge, a case of judgment aggregation occurs. The possibility that the aggregation's outcome be logically inconsistent, even though it is based on consistent individual judgments, arises relatively easily and has been the subject of several investigations. In this paper...

Baker (2005) claims to provide an example of mathematical explanation of an empirical phenomenon which leads to ontological commitment to mathematical objects. This is meant to show that the positing of mathematical entities is necessary for satisfactory scientific explanations and thus that the application of mathematics to science can be used, at...

In this paper I introduce a novel strategy to deal with the indiscernibility problem for ante rem structuralism. The ante rem structuralist takes the ontology of mathematics to consist of abstract systems of pure relata. Many of such systems are totally symmetrical, in the sense that all of their elements are relationally indiscernible, so the ante...

In this paper I defend mathematical nominalism by arguing that any reasonable account of scientific theories and scientific practice must make explicit the empirical non-mathematical grounds on which the application of mathematics is based. Once this is done, references to mathematical entities may be eliminated or explained away in terms of underl...

Peano's axiomatizations of geometry are abstract and non-intuitive in character, whereas Peano stresses his appeal to concrete spatial intuition in the choice of the axioms. This poses the problem of understanding the interrelationship between abstraction and intuition in his geometrical works. In this article I argue that axiomatization is, for Pe...

In this paper I examine Field's account of the applicability of mathematics from a measurement-theoretic perspective. Within this context, I object to Field's instrumentalism, arguing that it depends on an incomplete analysis of applicability. I show in particular that, once the missing piece of analysis is provided, the role played by numerical en...