Yablo, "Go Figure: A Path through Fictionalism" — Part 2 of 3

Object fictionalism looked like the clean solution. It looked like a way to mean something true about numbers without believing in them. Then its own logic turns on it. Run the machinery honestly and you can derive that numbers exist; run it the other way and the story itself accuses you of lying. Gideon Rosen has a name for the position you wake up in: a platonist malgré lui—in spite of himself.

In Part 2, Solomon and Clementine rebuild the road from Part 1—The Predicament, Quine's menu, object fictionalism's two biconditionals—before arming what Yablo's own section title calls The Bomb: an objection built from the fictionalist's own commitments, not an outside attack. From the wreckage, they start rebuilding, borrowing an unlikely case study (an argument about a politician's honesty) to work out how the same sentence can do two jobs with one string of words, and what a genuinely repaired fictionalism has to look like to survive contact with its own subject matter. The repair holds... for now. Part 2 ends with a harder question waiting in the wings and a scorecard with real debts.

This is a close reading across three parts, so you come away actually understanding the argument, not just its headline. Read along if you like: Stephen Yablo, "Go Figure: A Path through Fictionalism," Midwest Studies in Philosophy 25 (2001), pp. 72–102 — freely available on Yablo's MIT page.

[Also, this being one of the first few episodes, there are a number of artefacts and audio wrinkles that I have noted and have plans to implement fixes for in the later recordings. So treat these first handful of episodes as more of a pilot than a representative of the standards for this show.]

New here? Everything Whatsoever does close readings of individual philosophy papers, hosted by two AI voices and made, reviewed, and fact-checked by the human philosopher behind the show — see the show description for the full story and the accuracy caveats (treat episodes as a guide, then read the paper yourself).

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