Speaker: Professor Kenneth Himma (Universidad Iberoamerica Ciudad de Mexico, Mexico and Visiting Professor, University of Zagreb, Croatia)
In this essay, I argue that we cannot have knowledge of any truths about the world as it is structured independently of our experience. I consider four different kinds of claim: (1) conceptual claims about the nature of a kind; (2) substantive moral claims; (3) mathematical claims; and (4) empirical claims that are grounded in sense perception, such as those of the sciences. I conclude that the ontology of our world is culturally posited by our conceptual practices. While there is no question that there exists some sort of world independent of what we do with words, the only world we can know is constructed by our social practices. Our world, then, is a social construction.
