8 - 10 December 2021, Workshop "Mathematics as/in Science", Gent, Belgium

The relationship between mathematics and science continues to be of considerable philosophical interest. Within contemporary philosophy of science, for example, pinpointing the exact role of mathematics in the sciences remains a hotly debated issue. Does mathematics play a mere inferential role in that it allows for the derivations of one substantial truth from another or is mathematics more than a 'theoretical juice-extractor'? Are there distinctive mathematical explanations of physical phenomena? Similar questions can be asked about the role of logic in science.

These issues connect with discussions within the philosophy of mathematics (and the philosophy of logic) concerning the nature of mathematics (or logic). Within the philosophy of mathematics, Platonists, nominalists and structuralists consider mathematics to be fundamentally different in kind from empirical science, while empiricists have argued that mathematics is, just like other sciences, fundamentally about aspects of the empirical world. Different positions within the debate about the nature of mathematics will, arguably, lead to different answers to the question as to how mathematics and science are related.

In this workshop we want to focus on how these different philosophies of mathematics fare in giving an account of mathematical practice and the role of mathematics in scientific practice.