metaphysical values

Chair in Philosophy and Relgion at Leeds!

2012-01-23T13:50:00.001Z

Leeds is advertising for a chair in philosophy and religion - see the advert pasted below.

Chair in Philosophy and Religion

Faculty of Arts
School of Humanities
Reference: 0995/5
Closing Date: Friday 23rd March 2012

This Chair is a part of a major strategic investment by the University to achieve an ambitious improvement in academic performance and enhanced student experience.

From August of this year, the present School of Humanities will become the new unitary School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science, bringing together the subject areas of Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies and the History of Science. Building on established research excellence, and committed to providing a world-class standard of student education, the School is investing in a significant number of new posts aligned to its strategic commitment to ensuring its place amongst the top-ranked Schools internationally. The creation of this Chair reflects that ambition, alongside recognition of the potential to enhance existing research and teaching strengths through cross-disciplinary collaborative leadership and activity.

Philosophy at Leeds is one of the highest ranked research units in the UK, with an internationally-recognised world-leading status in key areas, while Theology and Religious Studies is an international leader in the study of religion and public life, and the History of Science is one of the foremost units of its kind in the UK, with an impressive international profile. In this context, this post offers an exciting opportunity for an individual to exercise a leading role in enhancing collaborative activity and achievement, while developing their own expertise and career in a School committed to world-leading research and student education. The School is open to applications from candidates with expertise in philosophy of religion, religion and science, and other areas that can build on existing and developing cross-disciplinary strengths in the School, such as religion and ethics, religion and aesthetics and religion and metaphysics. The person appointed will report to the Head of School and deliver research-led education that contributes to an exceptional student experience, top quality research outputs that contribute to impact and innovation, and expect to take on a significant leadership role in the organisation in education and/or research.

Preliminary enquiries about the post should be directed to our retained consultancy firm, Perrett Laver on +44 (0)207 340 6200.

To download further particulars about the role please visit www.perrettlaver.com, quoting reference number 0995/5.

Salary

The salary, which is negotiable, will be within the Professorial range - minimum £59,302 p.a.

For further details and for information on how to apply, please read the complete job description for this role

Oxford Studies in Metaphysics Younger Scholar Prize

2011-12-15T16:19:00.000Z

I've been asked to post the following notice about the

Oxford Studies in Metaphysics Younger Scholar Prize

THE

Sponsored by the Ammonius Foundation (http://www.ammonius.org/) and administered by the editorial board of Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, the 2012 Younger Scholar Prize annual essay competition is open to scholars who are within ten years of receiving a Ph.D. or students who are currently enrolled in a graduate program. (Independent scholars should enquire of the editor to determine eligibility.) The award is $8,000. Winning essays will appear in Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, so submissions must not be under review elsewhere.

Essays should generally be no longer than 10,000 words; longer essays may be considered, but authors must seek prior approval. To be eligible for the 2012 prize, submissions must be electronically submitted by 30 January 2012 (paper submissions are no longer accepted). Refereeing will be blind; authors should omit remarks and references that might disclose their identities. Receipt of submissions will be acknowledged by e-mail. The winner is determined by a committee of members of the editorial board of Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, and will be announced in early March. At the author’s request, the board will simultaneously consider entries in the prize competition as submissions for Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, independently of the prize.

Previous winners of the Younger Scholar Prize are:

Thomas Hofweber, “Inexpressible Properties and Propositions”, Vol. 2;

Matthew McGrath, “Four-Dimensionalism and the Puzzles of Coincidence”, Vol. 3;

Cody Gilmore, “Time Travel, Coinciding Objects, and Persistence”, Vol. 3;

Stephan Leuenberger, “Ceteris Absentibus Physicalism”, Vol. 4;

Jeffrey Sanford Russell, “The Structure of Gunk: Adventures in the Ontology of Space”, Vol. 4;

Bradford Skow, “Extrinsic Temporal Metrics”, Vol. 5;

Jason Turner, “Ontological Nihilism”, Vol. 6;

Rachael Briggs and Graeme A. Forbes, “The Real Truth About the Unreal Future”, Vol. 7;

Shamik Dasgupta, “Absolutism vs Comparativism about Quantities”, forthcoming, Vol. 8.

Enquiries should be addressed to Dean Zimmerman:

dwzimmer@rci.rutgers.edu

Parthood, CAI and grounding

2011-12-05T08:33:00.003Z

I've posted a new paper: 'Parts generate the whole, but they are not identical to it'. The paper argues that the view that wholes are grounded (at least in part) by their parts is better than the view that wholes are their parts (composition as identity), because it does as well or better at solving certain puzzles concerning parthood, and has the advantage of not having counter-intuitive essentialist consequences. Any comments welcome!

Three jobs at Leeds

2011-10-04T16:22:00.004+01:00

We are advertising three continuing lecturer jobs at Leeds, in philosophy of language, epistemology, and value.

(These jobs are roughly equivalent to tenured assistants professorships, in US terms. And feel free to apply for more than one: if you do language and epistemology, e.g., then put in two separate applications, one for each job.)

Further details:

1. Lecturer in Value Philosophy Job reference: ARTHM0010

The School seeks to hire a Lecturer in of Philosophy of Value, broadly construed to include (e.g.) normative ethics, metaethics, and political philosophy.

The position will incorporate undergraduate and postgraduate teaching, some thesis supervision, and some non-teaching administrative duties. With a research record and teaching experience commensurate with career stage, the successful candidate should have completed or submitted a PhD by the beginning of the appointment.

The successful candidate will have the ability to make an outstanding contribution to the research activities of the Centre for Ethics and Metaethics, to the research life of the department in general, and to Philosophy’s REF 2014 submission.

Post must commence no later than 1 September 2012 (or sooner if required to do so in discussion with the School).

Candidates are encouraged to apply for more than one Philosophy position where appropriate.

We particularly welcome applications from candidates belonging to groups that have been traditionally underrepresented in philosophy, including but not limited to women and ethnic minorities.

For more information on Philosophy at the University of Leeds see http://www.leeds.ac.uk/arts/info/20048/philosophy

University Grade 7 (£32,751 – £35,788) or University Grade 8 (£36,862 - £44,016)

Informal enquiries may be made to Professor Graeme Gooday Tel +44 (0)113 343 3274, messages Tel +44 (0)113 343 3260,

Email: g.j.n.gooday@leeds.ac.uk

Closing date 18November 2011

Interviews are expected to be held in February 2012

2. Lecturer in Epistemology Job Reference: ARTHM0009

The School seeks to hire a Lecturer in Epistemology, broadly construed to include (e.g.) specialists in the history of the subject and candidates whose research engages with issues in philosophy of science.

The successful candidate will have the ability to make an outstanding contribution to the research life of the department, and to Philosophy’s REF 2014 submission.

Post must commence no later than 1 September 2012 (or sooner if required to do so in discussion with the School).

Candidates are encouraged to apply for more than one Philosophy position where appropriate.

We particularly welcome applications from candidates belonging to groups that have been traditionally underrepresented in philosophy, including but not limited to women and ethnic minorities.

For more information on Philosophy at the University of Leeds see http://www.leeds.ac.uk/arts/info/20048/philosophy

University Grade 7 (£32,751 – £35,788) or University Grade 8 (£36,862 - £44,016)

Informal enquiries may be made to Professor Graeme Gooday Tel +44 (0)113 343 3274, messages Tel +44 (0)113 343 3260,

Email: g.j.n.gooday@leeds.ac.uk

Closing date 18November 2011

Interviews are expected to be held in February 2012

3. Lecturer in Philosophy of Language Job Reference: ARTHM0011

The School seeks to hire a Lecturer in the Philosophy of Language, broadly construed to include (e.g.) specialists in the history of the subject.

The successful candidate will have the ability to make an outstanding contribution to the research life of the department, and to Philosophy’s REF 2014 submission.

Post must commence no later than 1 September 2012 (or sooner if required to do so in discussion with the School).

Candidates are encouraged to apply for more than one Philosophy position where appropriate.

We particularly welcome applications from candidates belonging to groups that have been traditionally underrepresented in philosophy, including but not limited to women and ethnic minorities.

For more information on Philosophy at the University of Leeds see http://www.leeds.ac.uk/arts/info/20048/philosophy

University Grade 7 (£32,751 – £35,788) or University Grade 8 (£36,862 - £44,016)

Informal enquiries may be made to Professor Graeme Gooday Tel +44 (0)113 343 3274, messages Tel +44 (0)113 343 3260

Email: g.j.n.gooday@leeds.ac.uk

Closing date 18November 2011

Interviews are expected to be held in February 2012

Indeterminacy workshop

2011-07-19T08:35:00.003+01:00

The 2nd workshop for the Leeds Metaphysical Indeterminacy Project will be held on September 8-9 2011 at the University of Leeds.

Speakers and titles include:

* Katherine Hawley (St Andrews) 'A Problem of the Many for Universals' (joint work with Alexander Bird)
* Benj Hellie (Toronto) 'Treating the future as open'
* Nick JJ Smith (Sydney) 'Many kinds of indeterminacy; one kind of credence'
* Jessica Wilson (Toronto) 'Indeterminacy in the World'

The workshop will start around midday on Thursday, and finish mid-afternoon Friday. Thanks to funding from the AHRC, there is no registration fee; but if you'd like to attend, please contact Robert Williams (j.r.g.williams@leeds.ac.uk) so we can ensure we have enough space.

The workshop is the second of six sponsored by the AHRC as part of the 3-year Metaphysical Indeterminacy project at Leeds. Further details can be found at the project homepage.

Open future (again)

2011-06-14T15:06:00.003+01:00

Elizabeth and I have posted a draft of a new paper on the open future: available here. Comments welcome!

Fictional Realism, Nominalism, and Indeterminate Identity

2011-04-21T10:18:00.002+01:00

I’ve posted a new paper: How to be a nominalist and a fictional realist. Here are the Cliff notes.

In my musical works paper, I argued that there are true claims proclaiming the existence of, and properties of, musical works, but that there weren’t really any musical works, because such claims were made true by an ontology that didn’t admit such things. In this paper, I attempt to tell a similar story for fictional characters. It’s literally true that the fictional character Bilbo Baggins exists, and it’s literally that he is a Hobbit according to the fiction The Lords of the Rings. But these claims can be made true without admitting fictional characters, or fictions, into our ontology. What makes them true, I suggest, are our acts of interpreting the fiction. Thus we can account for these truths with a nominalistically acceptable ontology (assuming, as I do, that there is in general a nominalistically acceptable account of the mental).

I also argue that the resulting view solves various puzzle cases concerning fictional characters. The most salient being Anthony Everett’s argument that fictional realism leads to untenable indeterminacy in identity. Everett argues that there are fictions in which it is indeterminate whether A is identical to B. The fictional realist believes in the fictional characters A and B. Whether the fictional characters are in reality identical is determined by whether they are identical according to the fiction to which they belong. So since it’s indeterminate whether they are identical in the fiction, it’s indeterminate in reality whether the fictional characters are identical. Reductio of fictional realist, given Evans’ argument against indeterminate identity.

I attempt to solve this puzzle by locating the source of the indeterminacy to indeterminacy in what fictional character is referred to, thus avoiding conflict with Evans’ conclusion (which is, as Lewis noted, directed only at indeterminate identity de re, not at indeterminacy in identity statements). Roughly, the idea is that when the fiction attempts to make an indeterminate identity, we are forced to interpret the fiction both ways. Given the above account, this results in there being two fictions, and two sets of fictional characters associated with each fiction, and it will as a result be indeterminate which fiction and which characters we refer to. In which case, the statement of identity will be indeterminate, but there will be no indeterminacy of identity de re.

Further details in the paper, of course; comments welcome.

'In virtue of' and propositions

2011-04-20T15:29:00.002+01:00

Like many metaphysicians, I think the world is structured. Some truths hold true in virtue of others; some things exist in virtue of other things; some truths are made true by things. I think that there’s only one relation here, and it is the in virtue of relation, that holds between true propositions. For A to exist in virtue of B (i.e. for A to be ontologically dependent on B) is for the proposition [A exists] to be true in virtue of the proposition [B exists]; for the proposition P to be made true by A is for P to be true in virtue of the proposition [A exists].

Sometimes I hear the objection that this assumes that propositions are themselves fundamental constituents of reality. This objection is misplaced, for the view does not assume that. I can’t really see why one would think it did, but I’ve heard it enough times that I think it’s worth spelling out why I don’t think it does. If I’m just confused, I’d like to hear why!

Suppose you have an in virtue of chain that terminates in the proposition P. All that is entailed by this is that what P says to be the case is fundamentally the case; but that P exists may well be true in virtue of something else, and so P may itself be a derivative entity, despite its content being a fundamental truth.

Here is a toy example, just to illustrate the consistency. Suppose for every proposition, p, that p exists is true in virtue of the fact that it is possible for someone to entertain the content of p. So P might be true in virtue of Q, which is itself fundamental. But the proposition [Q exists] needn’t be fundamental. On the toy proposal, [Q exists] is true in virtue of [Possibly, someone entertains the content of Q]. Of course, now I’ve invoked another proposition, call it R; so if it is to be a derivative entity I need to invoke a new instance of the in virtue of relation. [R exists] in virtue of [Possibly, someone entertains the content of R]. And now we have another new proposition, so need a new instance of the relation; and so on, and so on. We generate an infinite sequence of in virtue of relations. But this is not, I think, a vicious regress. The success of an instance of the in virtue of relation never depends on the success of the instance of the relation it ‘generates’. P obtains in virtue of Q, and that generates a new instance: [Q exists] in virtue of R. But the success of ‘P obtains in virtue of Q’ doesn’t depend on the success of ‘[Q exists] in virtue of R’, for it doesn’t matter to P’s being grounded in Q whether or not Q is fundamental. That Q is not a fundamental existent is nice, but it’s irrelevant to Q’s ability to be the relata of the in virtue of relation. So the fact that there is an infinite sequence of in virtue of instances is, I think, unworrying.

Now, I don’t particularly recommend that account of what grounds the facts concerning the existence of propositions, but it’s clearly just a placeholder for a better account. So I think taking propositions to be the relata of the in virtue of relation simply has no consequences for whether or not propositions are fundamental constituents of the world.

Indeterminacy workshop, update.

2011-01-10T08:01:00.002Z

The schedule is now finalised for the first metaphysical indeterminacy workshop, and follows, with paper titles. Again, let me know if you'd like to come.

Fri, Jan 21

1.00-1.15: Arrival and Registration
1.15-2.45: Antony Eagle (Oxford), The Open Future
2.45-3.00: Break
3.00-4.30: Agustin Rayo (MIT), Metaphysical Indeterminacy and the Contours of Logical Space

Sat, Jan 22

10.00-11.30: Carrie Jenkins (Nottingham), Indeterminacy and Analyticity: Blaming Semantics and Blaming the World
11.30-1.30: Lunch
1.30-3.00: Patrick Greenough (St Andrews), Truthmaker Gluts.
3.00: Conference Closes

All talks will be in G23, Baines wing. (Enter the university via the main entrance at the top of Parkinson steps, and there will be signs from there.)

Metaphysical Indeterminacy workshop

2010-12-29T15:02:00.004Z

The first workshop of the AHRC funded project on Metaphysical Indeterminacy that Elizabeth, Robbie and I run will be held in Leeds on the 21st and 22nd of January. The speakers are

Antony Eagle (Oxford)
Patrick Greenough (St Andrews)
Carrie Jenkins (Nottingham)
Agustin Rayo (MIT)

The workshop will start at 1pm on Jan 21st and end at 2pm on the 22nd. Attendance is free, but if you are planning on coming please e-mail me (r.p.cameron@leeds.ac.uk) and let me know. We'd love to see you there!

Motivating Attitudes De Dicto and De Se

2010-11-04T10:02:00.002Z

According to the Property Theory of content, the contents of our beliefs, desires, etc. aren't propositions, but properties. The contents of de se, or irreducibly first-personal, beliefs are properties we self-ascribe; if I believe that I myself am the messy shopper, I self-ascribe the property of being the messy shopper. If I merely believe de dicto (or even de re) that Jason is the messy shopper, then what I believe is the property of being such that Jason is the messy shopper. If I'm suffering from selective amnesia and have forgotten who I am, I may believe the latter without believing the former.

I like the property theory. I'd like to believe it. I've even defended it against objections. But I'm worried that it's motivations are going to over-generate. The property theory can be thought of as taking thoughts best expressed with one indexical expression -- "I" -- and inserting a slot into the content of this thought for the bit associated with that expression. (E.g., "I am the messy shopper" expresses the content ____ is the messy shopper.) I'm worried the argument that gets us to add in this slot is going to drive us to add in other slots as well.

Consider what I take to be the strongest case for the property theory: Lewis's ("Attitudes De Dicto and De Se", 1979) case of the two gods. Zeus lives at the top of the mountain; Poseidon lives at the bottom of the deepest ocean. They both know all the true propositions. But neither knows who he is. Zeus knows that Zeus is at the top of the tallest mountain; but he doesn't know that he is at the top of the tallest mountain. Since he knows all the true propositions (Lewis argues), and since if he did know that he was at the top of the mountain he'd have a (new) true belief, whatever content Zeus fails to be belief-related to must not be a proposition. But properties: those could do the job. Zeus could believe all the propositions but not believe the property being on top of the mountain.

Properties aren't the only way to handle Lewis's two-gods case. We could instead have belief as a triadic relation between, roughly, a believer, a proposition believed, and a way of presenting that proposition to oneself. Then Zeus might believe the proposition that Zeus is on top of the mountain under one mode of presentation, but not under another, first-personal, mode. Why prefer the property theory to this one? Neil Feit (Beliefs About the Self, 2008) argues (inter alia) that the property theory is just more streamlined, more elegant, than the triadic theory. We'll come back to this in a mo.

Here's the case that's worrying me. We have one god, who is sitting in front of two ghostly spheres -- call them Bo and Luke. They're intrinsic duplicates and, gosh, wouldn't you know it, they're occupying the exact same region right now. But one of them is going to move here in a minute.

Beings like us will have a hard time ostending one of the co-located spheres. But that's no problem for a god! So this god ostends one of them and says, "I wonder if that one is going to be the one that moves in a minute."

It looks like we can repeat the Lewis-style worries here. Our curious god -- call her Daisy -- might well know that Bo is going to move in a minute, but not know whether she is ostending Bo or Luke. Indeed, it looks like she might know all propositions, but still not know whether that sphere is going to move in a minute. So -- by parity of reasoning -- if Lewis's gods case drives us to add a slot in for irreducible "I"-thoughts, shouldn't the Bo and Luke case drive us to add in a slot for irreducibly demonstrative thoughts? But I take it this would be a disaster (once we see the trick, it's a good bet this will get out of hand pretty soon), so we should resist drawing the property-theory lesson from Lewis's two gods case.

I expect the property theorist to respond: "If we're already property theorists, we can find a property that Daisy doesn't believe: the property of ostending Bo. Once she comes to know that property, since she also knows that Bo will move in a minute, she will be in a cognitive state that she is not in now --- and it's one that can serve the role of 'knowing that that sphere will move in a minute'".

But the simplest version of this won't work. Suppose Daisy wonders, "Will it be that sphere or that one which moves in a minute?", respectively ostending Bo and Luke in the process. Even if she knows that she has ostended Bo during her wondering, this won't improve her cognitive state (because she has also ostended Luke). So the property theorist will have to resort to a more linguistically fine-grained property for Daisy to believe, one along the lines of "the property of having first ostended Bo and then ostended Luke", or something like that.

I don't have any argument the property theorist can't make this move work. I rather suspect he can. What I want to point out now is that the property theorist is now relying on properties that seem to be close to the triadic theorist's modes of presenting a proposition. That is: there will need to be some sort of quasi-syntactical specification of the thought that Daisy is having, so that Daisy can learn how parts of this thought are related to the world (e.g., that this part is related to Bo, and that one is related to Luke). This isn't the same thing as the triadic theorist's view by a long shot; but it makes use of many of the same sorts of resources.

But once we're going down this line as property theorists to deal with Daisy's ignorance, what happens to the objection to the triadic theorist's treatment of Zeus's ignorance? The triadic theorist, in essence, says that Zeus doesn't know his mental tokens of "I" pick out Zeus; the property theorist (on the envisaged response) says that Daisy doesn't know that her (particular) mental tokens of "that" pick out Bo and Luke, respectively. If we're going down this line anyway, why not be triadic theorists from the get-go? Maybe the triadic theory is ugly, but if the property theory has to partake of this same ugliness, then there's no argument from ugliness in favor of properties over modes of presentation. And the property theory in fact looks worse, because the triadic theorist can treat what seem like similar phenomena -- indexical ignorance -- in a similar fashion, whereas the property theorist treats some cases of indexical ignorance very differently than others.

AHRC studentship on metaphysical indeterminacy.

2010-08-15T08:03:00.002+01:00

Elizabeth, Robbie and I have received a grant from the AHRC for a three year project on metaphysical indeterminacy. We are very excited about this! Part of this includes a PhD studentship. This will be an excellent opportunity, as the PhD student attached to the project will benefit from contact with the excellent group of international and UK philosophers we've got signed on to be involved! Unfortunately, there's a very short time until applications are due. Application details follow.

AHRC Project Doctoral Studentship, Metaphysical Indeterminacy

The Department of Philosophy at the University of Leeds invites applications for an AHRC-funded doctoral studentship, tenable from October 2010.

The award will be held as part of the AHRC-funded project ‘Metaphysical Indeterminacy’. The successful applicant will engage in research on a topic in the philosophy of indeterminacy, such as the metaphysics of indeterminacy, the logic or philosophy of language of vagueness, etc. The research undertaken by the award holder will contribute to the larger project, directed by Drs Elizabeth Barnes, Ross Cameron and Robert Williams. The chosen candidate will benefit from contact with national and international experts in metaphysics, the philosophy of logic and language and related fields through the programme of international visitors, seminars and workshops funded by the project.

Studentship Information

The studentship is tenable for up to 3 years (full-time) from 1 October 2010. Renewal of the studentship each year is subject to satisfactory academic progress.

AHRC regulations require that applicants must meet UK residency criteria or be ordinarily resident in the EU. EU candidates are normally eligible for a fees-only award, unless they have been ordinarily resident in the UK for 3 years immediately preceding the date of the award. Applicants should normally have, or be studying for, a Master’s degree in Philosophy. Further details concerning eligibility are available via the AHRC website. (PDF link)

Full awards cover academic fees at the standard UK rate and a maintenance grant for full-time study.

Applications

The closing date for applications is Friday 27th August 2010. You should also arrange for two academic references to be sent to us by this date.

Applications should be made using the standard postgraduate research degree application form, which is available for download (Word doc link). The following documents should be submitted with your application: 500 word PhD proposal; a copy of your degree transcripts (or a transcript of your marks to date if you are currently completing a degree); a sample of written work, consisting of a philosophical essay on a question of your choice, not less than 3000 words in length; CV.

All applications and references should be sent to Jenneke Stevens, Postgraduate Secretary, Department of Philosophy, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, email: J.M.Stevens@leeds.ac.uk, tel: +44 113 343 3263.

Intending applicants should contact Dr Ross Cameron (r.p.cameron@leeds.ac.uk) for information about the studentship.

Lewisian realism and modal reduction

2010-06-09T14:33:00.003+01:00

I’ve posted a draft of a new paper that, among other things, defends Lewis against the charge that he needs to employ primitive modality in order for his modal realism to be successful, thus undermining his claims to reduction. One thing I argue is that Lewis’s objectors fail to adequately distinguish two tasks: giving an account of what possibility is, and giving an account of the extent of possibility. The tasks are crucially different and, in my opinion, neither requires for its success the meeting of the other. In particular, an account of what possibility is can stay silent on the extent of what is possible.

So consider the Lycan/Shalkowski objection that Lewis needs a modal understanding of ‘world’ to ensure that there is the correct correspondence between worlds and possibilities, necessary for the material adequacy of Lewis’s account of possibility as truth at a world. Lycan says that Lewis needs ‘world’ to mean ‘possible world’ to rule out the inclusion of impossible worlds in Lewis’s ontology. Shalkowski says Lewis needs the notion of a world to be modal to ensure that the space of worlds is complete: that there are no worlds missing.

I think that’s wrong. What ensures that there are no impossible worlds is Lewis’s account of what possibility is. To be possible just is to be true at a world, so there’s simply no question of there being an impossible world for Lewis. Whatever worlds there happen to be, those worlds will all be possible and none of them impossible, because that’s just what possibility is. Similarly, there’s no question of there being a world missing – of there being a possible circumstance with no corresponding world. But what accomplishes this is not a modal understanding of ‘world’ but, again, Lewis’s account of what possibility is.

It just falls out from Lewis’s analysis that there’s no impossible world, and no possible circumstance unrepresented by a world. Now, here’s what doesn’t fall out from the analysis: that there’s no world with a round square as a part, or that there’s a world with a talking donkey as a part. But contra what Lycan and Shalkowski think, this doesn’t mean that Lewis’s analysis leaves it open that there are impossible worlds or not worlds enough for possibility. If it turns out that there’s a world containing round squares then this is not for it to turn out that there’s an impossible world, according to Lewis’s analysis – it’s for it to turn out that round squares are possible after all! Likewise, mutatis mutandis, if it turns out that there’s no world containing a talking donkey.

Now, Lycan and Shalkowski might complain that any analysis of modality that says that round squares are possible and talking donkeys impossible is not acceptable. Well maybe that’s right. But Lewis’s analysis of course doesn’t say this: it just doesn’t settle that round square are impossible or talking donkeys possible. But that’s fine: the account of what possibility is needn’t settle these claims about the extent of possibility. To demand that Lewis’s analysis settle these facts is to demand too much of analysis: it’s to confuse the two tasks that should be kept separate.

You might think that we need to be able to acquire warrant for thinking that there are no worlds with round squares and that there are worlds with talking donkeys if Lewis’s analysis is to be warranted in the first place. Well, again, that’s fine: Lewis has given us an argument for thinking that the space of worlds is like this. (Namely, that the posit that it is so is theoretically beneficial.) But it’s nothing about the meaning of ‘world’ or the nature of worlds that settles that the space of worlds is so, and nor need it be, since an account of what possibility is needn’t entail an account of the extent of possibility.

I think a similar thing is going on in Divers and Melia’s objection to Lewisian realism. Their argument is as follows. They assume that it’s possible for there to be alien natural properties, and so Lewis’s principle of recombination doesn’t give us a complete account of what worlds there are. Now, it seems that if there could be alien natural properties, there should be no finite bound on the number of possible alien natural properties out there. It seems ad hoc to say there are exactly 17, or a billion, alien natural properties in the multiverse; and so it seems that if we accept the possibility of alien properties in the first place, we should hold that for any finite natural number n, there are at least n alien properties to be found across the space of worlds. But once this is granted, argue Divers and Melia, there is no way to give in non-modal terms a complete account of what worlds there are. For we can’t just say that there are infinitely many alien natural properties spread across the worlds; or that for any finite n there is a world where n distinct alien natural properties are instantiated. Why not? Well, to satisfy those tenets there has to be, across the space of worlds, a denumerable sequence of alien natural properties P1, P2, . . ., Pn. Now, let S be the set of all the worlds that there are. S satisfies both those tenets, of course; but so does the set S* which is the subset of S containing all the members of S except those worlds where, say, P1 is instantiated. Because with P1 missing, there are still of course infinitely many alien properties left; so any tenet you laid down to tell you that there were infinitely many alien natural properties out there in the space of worlds won’t be able to discriminate between it being P1, P2, . . ., Pn that exist across the worlds or merely P2, . . ., Pn that exist. And so there is no tenet you can lay down that will completely yield all the worlds that there are. Unless, of course, we say something like ‘All the possible alien natural properties are instantiated somewhere across the space worlds’. And so the only way to completely say what worlds there are is to invoke primitive modality.

I think Divers and Melia’s argument that the Lewisian is not going to be able to give a complete account of the space of worlds in non-modal terms is pretty convincing. But unlike them, I see no reason to think this casts doubt on the reductive ambitions of the theory. Why should we demand that the Lewisian be able to give a complete non-modal account of what worlds there are? Given the Lewisian analysis, that’s to demand a non-modal account of the space of possibilities. But why should we demand this? To say what it is to be possible is one thing, to say what is possible another. Maybe no complete account of the space of possibility can be given: that should lead us only to epistemic humility, not to abandon a reductive account of what it is to be possible.

The paper goes into these issues in more detail, as well as making some methodological remarks about how to assess whether something can appropriately be included in a reductive basis. Comments on any of it would be welcome.

Yagisawa Book

2010-04-16T15:53:00.004+01:00

I've written a critical study of Takashi Yagisawa's Worlds and Individuals, Possible and Otherwise for Analysis Reviews. Mostly, I try to get clear on the differences between Yagisawa and Lewis, and argue that Lewis has the upper hand: if anyone's interested, it's here. Comments welcome.

An argument against Platonism

2010-03-15T15:24:00.001Z

Here’s a quick argument against Platonism about mathematical ontology.

Premise 1: For everything that exists, it is conceptually possible that it not exist.

Premise 2: If Platonism is true then the truth of ‘9 is not prime’ depends on the existence of the number 3.

Premise 3: If the truth of p depends on condition X and it is conceptually possible that X not obtain, then it is conceptually possible that p is false.

Premise 4: No conceptual truth is such that it’s conceptually possible that it’s false.

Argument:

1. Platonism is true. (Assumption.)

2. The truth of ‘9 is not prime’ depends on the existence of the number 3. (From (1) and Premise 2.)

3. It is conceptually possible that the number 3 not exist. (From (1) and Premise 1.)

4. It is conceptually possible that ‘9 is not prime’ is false. (From (3) and Premise 3.)

5. ‘9 is not prime’ is a conceptual truth. (Assumption.)

6. Contradiction. (From (4), (5) and Premise 4.)

7. Platonism is not true. (From (1) and (6).)

This argument is valid and rests only on premises 1-4 and the assumption that it’s a conceptual truth that 9 is not prime. I won’t consider challenging that assumption here: it seems to me absurd to deny that it’s a conceptual truth about 9 that it is divisible by a factor other than itself or 1. So the Platonist must deny one of the four premises. Premise 4 is analytic, so it’s premises 1-3 that are of interest.

Premise 3 seems to me to be overwhelmingly plausible. How could it be conceptually necessary that something be true whilst being conceptually possible that the conditions required for its truth not obtain? If it’s conceptually necessary that a thing, A, is a certain way, F, then the truth of ‘A is F’ is guaranteed by our very concept of what A (and F) is; so if there is any further condition on the truth of ‘A is F’ it simply must be the case that the fact that this condition obtains is also guaranteed by our very concept of what A (and F) is. If it’s conceptually possible that this condition not obtain then either it’s not a condition on A’s being F after all or we should hold off on a judgment as to whether A is in fact F until we know whether the condition is met, in which case ‘A is F’ is not conceptually necessary.

So I think the real action is on premises 1 and 2. Premise 1 is the claim that there’s nothing such that our very concept of that thing guarantees its existence. It would be denied by proponents of the ontological argument for the existence of God – but that doesn’t bother me, since that argument is hopeless. And in any case, defenders of it will likely hold that God is the only being that constitutes such a counterexample, and so the argument will still go through if we build in the assumption that the number 3 is not God. (Even Trinitarians, in declaring that God is 3, probably don’t literally mean that God and the number 3 are numerically identical!) The possible exception of God aside, Premise 1 seems plausible to me. Even if the existence or otherwise of mathematical ontology is a metaphysically non-contingent matter, it still seems to me that it is a conceptually contingent matter: whatever the truth of the matter is between nominalism and Platonism, nothing about our concepts of mathematical ontology rules out that it be otherwise.

Premise 2 is, I think, the best premise to give up. But the thought in favour of it is very simple: when a number is not prime we explain why by appealing to an existential – there is some number other than it or 1 that is its factor. But if existence is in general a conceptually contingent matter then we can make sense of all the numbers existing except those factors. As far as our concepts go, we can make sense of all the numbers existing except 3, in which case there simply is no factor of 9 other than 1 or 9 itself. Were that the case, 9 would be prime. Now, of course, the Platonist can rightly insist that this is metaphysically impossible – but the argument here is that the conceptual possibility is worrying enough.

I think the best thing for the Platonist to do is to resist the thought that the non-primeness of 9 is hostage to fortune to the existence of the number 3: that is, to deny the dependence claim. This would be to claim that the existence of the factors is not a necessary condition on it being true that the number in question is so divisible. So the conceptual possibility of the non-existence of 3 doesn’t threaten the conceptual necessity of 9’s being divisible by 3. But once one does this, one starts to pull apart the truth of mathematical claims from the apparent ontological demands of those truths, which undercuts the motivations for Platonism in the first place. If ‘9 is divisible by 3’ doesn’t depend for its truth on the existence of 3, why think it depends on the existence of 9 either? If we start going down this route, why not just follow it to its natural non-Platonistic end, where the truth of mathematical claims doesn’t depend on the existence of mathematical ontology?

Truthmakers survey

2010-02-15T14:27:00.002Z

I've posted a draft of a survey-ish paper on truthmakers I've been writing for the Oxford Handbook of Truth; comments welcome!

Truthmaking and In Virtue Of

2010-01-29T15:54:00.002Z

Suppose you believe in both truthmaking and metaphysical dependence. That is, you believe both that for some true proposition p there is some thing or things which make p true, and that for some true propositions q and r, q is true in virtue of r. Neither relationship, you think, is to be analysed modally: the truth of ‘Necessarily, if A exists then p’ is a necessary condition for A’s making p true, but it is not a sufficient one; likewise for ‘Necessarily, if q then r’ and ‘r is true in virtue of q’.

If you believe all that, it’d be nice if one of truthmaking or in virtue of could be defined in terms of the other, so that we only have one primitive here rather than two. I think the prospects of defining truthmaking in terms of in virtue of are better than vice-versa, and I’d welcome thoughts on this.

How might one define the in virtue of relation that can hold between two true propositions in terms of the makes true relation that holds between a thing and a true proposition? Here are some of the obvious things that come to my mind, and why I don’t like them.

(1) p is true in virtue of q iff q makes p true

Okay, this one is obviously hopeless. For starters, if propositions are necessary existents, this entails that no contingent truth is true in virtue of anything. But even if propositions are contingent existents, presumably their existence is not contingent on them being true; they can exist and be false, and so this definition is still hopeless. Suppose 'X is wrong' is, as the consequentialist says, true in virtue of 'X has bad consequences'; the definition tells us that the latter proposition makes it true that X is wrong. But that proposition can exist and be false (X might have had good consequences), so now we’re committed to thinking that in a world where X has good consequences, X is still wrong, which is exactly the opposite of what the consequentialist wants.

(2) p is true in virtue of q iff the truth of q makes p true

This solves the above problem, but at the cost of admitting weird entities. What type of entity is the truth of q? A truth trope: the particularized truth of the proposition q? Nasty.

(3) p is true in virtue of q iff the state of affairs that q makes p true

That might be okay if there were a state of affairs that p for every true proposition p. But there’s not.

(4) p is true in virtue of q iff (necessarily) whatever makes q true makes p true

No: it’s no part of the definition of truthmaking that every truth has a truthmaker, and we should allow for the possibility that one proposition is true in virtue of another even though neither have truthmakers, as well as the possibility that two propositions lack truthmakers but where one is not true in virtue of the other. And if every truth does have a truthmaker, the definition will entail the wrong result that is true in virtue of any true negative existential, such as , since whatever makes the negative existential true necessarily makes it true that there is something, since everything that makes anything true necessarily makes it true that something exists, since it makes it true that it itself exists.

It doesn’t look to me like there’s a good way of defining in virtue of in terms of truthmaking; but I think truthmaking can be defined in terms of in virtue of. Truthmaker theory says that what is true is grounded in what there is: as I understand it, this is the claim that the totality of truths are ultimately true in virtue of just those truths that are concerned solely with ontology – that is, that any truth at all is ultimately true in virtue of some truth(s) concerning (solely) what there is.

Call the set containing all and only the brute propositions – that is, those that are not true in virtue of anything – BRUTUS. Consider also the set – call it EXISTS – of propositions whose entire content is that some thing, or some things, exist(s): call these propositions pure existence claims. (Pure existence claims will be expressible by sentences of the form ‘a exists’ or ‘the Xs exist’, where ‘a’ is a rigid designator and ‘the Xs’ a rigid plurally referring expression (i.e. it plurally refers in every possible world to the things that are actually the Xs if they exist, and it fails to refer if any of the actual Xs fail to exist.)

We can define truthmaking as follows.

(*) A proposition p is made true by X, or the Xs, just in case either (i) p belongs to BRUTUS & p belongs to EXISTS & p says that X (or the Xs) exist(s) or (ii) There is an x such that (p is true in virtue of x & x belongs to BRUTUS & x belongs to EXISTS & x says that X (or the Xs) exist(s)).

That is: a proposition is made true by some things, the Xs, if and only if it is the brutely true pure existence claim that the Xs exist or it is true in virtue of the brutely true pure existence claim that the Xs exist.

I’d welcome any thoughts on this. Especially if you think there’s a problem with the proposed definition of truthmaking in terms of in virtue of or if you think there’s a good way to define in virtue of in terms of truthmaking.

2 questions

2009-12-11T14:30:00.000Z

Here are two questions I’d appreciate any thoughts on. Firstly, I’ve recently detected an apparent tension in my beliefs. In my paper for Phil Compass on the grounds of necessity, I argue that the Lewisian realist needn’t be worried about the epistemological objection. The objection goes: how could we know what’s (merely) possible if what’s possible is what’s true at a spatially-temporally isolated concrete world – such worlds do not interact with us causally, so how can we come to know what they’re like? Lewis responds by saying that causal interaction is necessary only when the subject matter is a contingent truth – when the claim to be known is a non-contingent matter, causal acquaintance with what the claim is about is not necessary even when the claim is about the realm of concreta. It’s not obvious to me that this is a good reply, but I thought Lewis had a simpler reply available: metaphysical priority is not conceptual priority. To say that what it is for it to be possible that p is for p to be true at some world does not commit us to saying that our epistemic access to the fact that p is possible must go via epistemic access to there being a world at which p. The Lewisian realist needn’t claim we have any way of discovering what’s true at a world independently of discovering what’s possible. Why can’t the Lewisian simply say she knows there’s a world where there’s a talking donkey because she knows that there could be talking donkeys (here appealing to whatever story about modal epistemology that any realist appeals to), and she knows that everything that could be the case is the case at some world (and here she cites the familiar Lewisian reasons for believing that claim)? What’s the problem?

That still seems convincing to me. Here’s my problem. I also find convincing an epistemological objection to consequentialism: were consequentialism true we couldn’t know what’s right or wrong because we can’t know what the full consequences of our actions would be. And it doesn’t seem to me in the least bit satisfying for the consequentialist to say: I know that murdering X will have the worst consequences because I know that murder is wrong – metaphysical priority isn’t epistemic priority, so my knowledge that it is wrong can ground my knowledge about the consequences even though what it is for it to be wrong is for it to have the worst consequences.

What I’d like is for the two cases to be disanalogous so I can consistently do what seems to me intuitive: hold the epistemological objection to consequentialism and reject the epistemological objection to Lewisian modal realism. I haven’t been able to convince myself that they’re analogous yet, so any thoughts on this are welcome (even if they’re of the form: they’re obviously analogous, and you’re wrong about the epistemological objection to ____). (Incidentally, I barely know the literature on consequentialism, so if anyone knows what consequentialists say about the epistemological objection, please enlighten me!)

Question 2. I was reminded by Brian’s post about the autonomy in logic issue. There’s a thought that every logical truth should be provable using only the rules governing the connectives in that truth. This is meant to be bad for classical logic because there are classical tautologies like Pierce’s law where the only connective is the conditional but one can’t prove Pierce’s law using only the rules for the conditional. I was thinking about this briefly, and I couldn’t see how the objection could possibly be right. We can do classical logic with just one logical connective: the Sheffer stroke, e.g. Every wff of classical logic – a fortiori every theorem – has a translation into a sentence statable using only the Sheffer stroke, and the translations of the theorems will be provable using only the rules governing the Sheffer stroke, as those are the only rules you have. But it can’t be the case that the acceptability of a logic depends on what connectives you allow yourself to use to state its theorems. The defenders of the objection are obviously going to be unimpressed with such a simplistic response, so my question to those who know more about this than me (= those who know than is written in this paragraph!) is: why not?

Substitutional Quantification and Supervaluations

2009-12-04T12:33:00.004Z

(Cross-posted with Matters of Subtsance.)

Let U be the (universal) substitutional quantifier: its truth-conditions are

"UxF(x)" is true iff, for every name n, "F(n)" is true.

(Normal quotes are doing double-duty as quasi-quotes here.)

Peter van Inwagen has an argument that we can't understand substitutional quantification. It goes like this:

(1) We can't understand a sentence unless we can specify what proposition it expresses.
(2) The only proposition we know of with the right truth-conditions to be expressed by "UxF(x)" is the proposition that, for every name n, "F(n)" is true. (Call this proposition "UU".)
(3) Friends of substitutional quantification say that UU is not what is expressed by "UxF(x)".
(4) There are no other candidates to be the proposition expressed by "UxF(x)".
(5) So if friends of substitutional quantification are right, we can't understand "UxF(x)".

I want to respond to this argument, but I don't know whether my response rejects premise (1) or (4). So I'll outline the basic idea, and then maybe someone can help me know which premise I'm rejecting.

Suppose some sort of supervaluationism is the right treatment of vagueness, and set aside higher order vagueness. Then a sentence like "Fido is red" doesn't express a proposition simpliciter; rather, it expresses a proposition relative to every precisification of "red".

(Since we can understand "Fido is red", this alone might be enough to lead us to deny (1). But it's not clear how this denial gives us any positive reason to think we should be able to understand substitutional quantification. I want to aim higher. So let's press on.)

The truth-conditions for this sentence with the determinacy operator are:

"Det(Fido is red)" is true iff "Fido is red" is true on every precisification of "red".

Now, we can think about precisifications in a number of ways. One of them is an explicitly semantic way: the precisifications of a term are the precise meanings it can have. But another is a bit more syntactic, relating more precise terms to less. If we have semantic precisifications, we can easily define syntactic ones as follows: T is a syntactic precisification of T* iff T's semantic value is a semantic precisification of T*. If we don't have semantic precisifications, we might take the syntactic ones as primitive, or we might be able to define them some other way (maybe by appealing to metalinguistic predicates like "admits of borderline cases" and some others).

If we have the syntactic understanding of precisification, then we have the truth-conditions

"Det(Fido is red)" is true iff "Fido is R" is true for every term R that is a precisification of "red",

which look remarkably similar to the ones we had for the substitutional quantifier.

So here's my basic idea: think of "x" as a maximally vague name --- a name such that every precise name is a (syntactic) precisification of it. Then think of "U" as a determinacy operator. This gives us essentially the truth-conditions we want.

How does van Inwagen's argument look now, with this understanding of the substitutional quantifiers? That depends, I think, on what we say about the proposition expressed by "Det(Fido is red)". I think there are very good reasons to think that this sentence does not express the proposition that "Fido is R" is true for every term R that is a precisification of red. (One very good reason is that it won't embed right at all --- it might be necessary, say, that Det(Fido is red), even though it certainly isn't necessary that "red" is even a word, much less that it has precisifications. And these thoughts extend to the truth-conditions that go via semantic precisifications, too.) But are we in any position at all to specify a proposition it expresses?

Here I don't know what to say, and this is why I don't know which premise I reject in van Inwagen's argument. On the one hand, maybe we have some recipe for specifying a proposition expressed by "Det(Fido is red)". If so, then we can use the same recipe to specify one expressed by "UxF(x)", and I deny premise (4). Maybe we think "Det(Fido is red)" expresses the conjunction of all the propositions expressed by "Fido is R", where R is a (syntactic) precisification of "red", for instance. If so, then we can say that "UxF(x)" expresses the conjunction of all propositions expressed by sentences of the form "F(a)" for some name "a".

On the other hand, maybe we can't specify any proposition expressed by "Det(Fido is red)". (Maybe we dislike the conjunction proposal for both the "Det" and "U" cases because we think it misses out on the "that's-all"-ish nature of the quantifications involved in the truth-conditions.) Nonetheless, I think it's entirely clear that we understand "Det(Fido is red)". And I also think (but I haven't argued for it) that one way we can come to understand a vague term by learning a recipe for figuring out what its precisifications are, so we can understand what the "x" in "UxF(x)" is doing. But in this case, "UxF(x)" is essentially just "Det F(x)"

There's a lot of details I've left out --- stuff about variable-binding, the viability of the syntactic characterization of precisifications, how to think of modally embedded substitutional quantifications, and so on. But setting these techy details aside, I'm wondering what the right thing to say about the argument is. Or, more to the point, I'm wondering what we should deny when we run a parody argument for our inability to understand the sentence "Det(Fido is red)".

Thoughts, anyone?

Protect research in the UK: sign this petition!

2009-10-19T10:47:00.003+01:00

If you think the allocation of research funding should be decided on the basis of research excellence and not on the short-term and narrowly construed 'impact' it's likely to make (as decided in part by non-specialists), then please sign this petition!

CAI and SCQ

2009-10-06T14:25:00.001+01:00

I've posted a new and expanded version of my paper arguing that composition as identity doesn't settle the special composition question. It's here; thoughts welcome.

The Northern Institute of Philosophy

2009-10-05T09:59:00.003+01:00

The Northern Institute of Philosophy - a research centre at the University of Aberdeen directed by Crispin Wright dedicated to the core areas of analytic philospohy - now determinately exists! It is indeterminately identical to the centre I was a member of during my PhD, so is metaphysically interesting in its own right!

Their website is here, and they have a blog here. An exciting future no doubt awaits!

The REF and 'impact'

2009-10-03T08:15:00.005+01:00

We don't often delve into the political side of things on MV, but this is an extremely important issue for philosophy in the UK. As many will know, there used to be the RAE: the research assessment exercise. This consisted of a panel of subject specialists reading and making a judgment on the (self-nominated) four best papers of every academic in the country put forward by their department (in practice, basically all the research active staff). The resulting department ratings controlled how much money they would get. Like any system, it of course had its problems, but it was beneficial in many ways. Departments could no longer afford to simply hire the person with the Oxbridge degree and ignore the non-Oxbridge person with a stack of papers in good places - it made hiring more meritocratic.

The RAE is no more. It is being replaced by the REF. It does not look like a change for the better. One bad change is that the panels are to be more coarse grained: it will no longer be simply philosophers judging philosophers, etc. But the most disturbing issue is that 25% of the grade a paper gets is now going to be on the 'impact' it makes. At least, they *say* it will be determined by the impact it makes: in practice, of course, it can't be, since no-one has a crystal ball - so the least they could do is be honest and tell us straight that 25% of the grade will be determined by its short term impact. At least wear the short-term-ism on your sleeve if that's what we're aiming for now!

"How do you determine the impact of a specific paper anyway?" one might ask. Yeah, good question. These guys need to read their Quine! The simple counterfactual account is obviously problematic (even putting aside epistemic problems). All signs point to a focus on narrow, direct, short term impact being what's going to be relevant. A disaster!

Alan Weir wrote on open response to the REF that's available here. It's well worth reading: I want to quote a section.

"The taxpayer can see how funding researchers to investigate solutions to
some immediate problem, a virus say, can be justified. But how can the
funding of pure research be justified? Well, since the research is carried
out for its own sake, those involved will think that centuries-long
traditions of transmitting a body of work of enormous intellectual,
cultural and artistic merit from one generation to the next is of great
value in its own right. But to the sceptical taxpayer we have a very
potent additional point to make. What if Albert Einstein, Max Planck,
Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, in trying to determine how the
mysterious sub-nuclear world of quantum physics worked, had been
constrained and directed by whether their research satisfied short-term
impact criteria? What, to move closer to my own area, if Gottlob Frege,
Bertrand Russell, and Kurt Gödel and others who devoted their lives to
investigating the nature of mathematical truth, logical consequence and
the light formal artificial languages can shed on them (and with no
thought to the possibility of automated reasoning machines of the type the
philosopher Leibniz had sketched) had been required to demonstrate the
impact their researches would have outside academe? Then no quantum
physics and modern micro-electronics, no artificial languages, recursion
theory and computer science; we would have likely remained at the level of
Victorian science and technology and all the practical, medical and
intellectual advances which microelectronics and computing have given us
would not have emerged. Even taxpayers with no desire at all to be
Socrates dissatisfied can see the enormous impact (though not on the
ludicrously short scale of ten to 15 years) these
investigations, driven by pure intellectual curiosity, have made by
comparing today’s technology with late Victorian.

It is essential to grasp that the unintended consequences which emerge
from pure disinterested research have arisen because they were precisely
that: the research was not being directed at all to go towards immediate
practical goals."

Hear hear! The 'impact' research makes is both a long term issue, and a holistic one: one simply cannot separate out the impact made by the research activity of mankind and parcel it out paper by paper. To try to do so is simply nonsense, especially on the ridiculously short time scale it would need to be for it to be relevant for funding purposes.

Let's hope sense wins out and the research community in philosophy and elsewhere is not forced to bow to the whims of petty short term thinking, looking only to immediate and foreseeable commercial gain.

Update: There's a good post on this at Logic Matters.

Update 2: Of course, it's not just philosophers who should be worried. The Guardian quoted some reasonably concerned physicists too - even the subjects where you'd expect it would be easier to demonstrate 'impact' still, sensibly, don't want to have their research agenda to be driven by that.

Fine on essence

2009-09-23T14:30:00.002+01:00

I've put online a draft of a paper I'm writing for Phil Compass on the grounds of necessity. Comments on anything in it are welcome, but I'm going to post here some of the stuff I say about Kit Fine's reduction of modality to essence, since I'd especially welcome thoughts on that. So here's Fine:

"Necessity has its source in those objects which are the subject of the
underlying essentialist claim. . . We should view metaphysical necessity
as a special case of essence. . . . The metaphysically necessary truths
[are] . . .the propositions which are true in virtue of the nature of all
objects whatever."

Here are three thoughts (none intended as anything like insurmountable objections, just things to think about):

1) Prima facie, the view seems to require us to accept the existence of things like properties and relations, and thus appears to be incompatible with nominalism. For what entity can we plausibly say has a nature such as to guarantee the
truth of ‘If there are some things, there is a set of those things’ if not the
relation being a member of? No collection of actual individuals guarantees the
truth of that, because the claim says something about what happens no matter
what individuals are around.

2) If it’s necessary that there couldn’t be certain (kinds of) individuals
(universals, say, or God) then we must admit that some of the things that exist
have natures that exclude the existence of other things. You might find this
harder to accept than the claim that some things have natures that guarantee
the existence of other things. (Cf. the familiar objection to admitting
truthmakers for negative existentials: intuitively, they are true because some
things don’t exist, not because some thing does. Similarly, impossible
existents are impossible, intuitively, because there’s something about them
that’s impossible, not because, e.g., there’s something else whose essence is
such as to make them impossible.)

3) It’s easy to see how the essence of an entity e can account for the necessity of
a conditional the antecedent of which says that e exists. So my essence
grounds the truth of, hence accounts for the necessity of, ‘If Ross exists, he is
a human’. From this, it’s easy to see how unconditional necessities can be
grounded if the thing whose essence accounts for its truth has existence as part
of its essence. So were I an essential existent, my essence would account for
the necessity of the antecedent of the above conditional as well, and hence
account for the necessity of the consequent. But we might want to allow for
cases where an unconditional necessity is ‘multiply realized’ in the following
way. Suppose 2+2=4 is actually true in virtue of the essence of the numbers 2
and 4. So we account for the necessity of ‘If the numbers exist, 2+2=4’. But
it’s not just conditionally necessary that 2+2=4, ‘2+2=4’ is itself necessary.
But on this view, that’s not because the numbers exist necessarily: on this
view, while our actual world is Platonist, and mathematical truths are true
because of the numbers, structuralism is possibly true and ‘2+2=4’ is true in
virtue of the essence of certain structures, and maybe in some worlds there are
brute mathematical laws, and ‘2+2=4’ is true in virtue of these laws. So there
are multiple possible grounds for the arithmetical truth, and the truth is
necessary because it’s necessary that there is some ground or other. But what
actual things have essences such as to ground this last necessary truth? The
worry is that Fine can only account for conditional necessities or
unconditional necessities which are unconditionally necessary because there is
some essential existent that accounts for their truth in any possible circumstance.

Jobs at Leeds

2009-09-10T18:26:00.002+01:00

Leeds will be hiring two new positions in the upcoming hiring round, at either lecturer or senior lecturer level (for US readers: roughly equivalent to a tenured assistant prof and an associate prof, respectively). Details below.

University of Leeds
Faculty of Arts
Department of Philosophy

2 Lectureships/Senior Lectureships in Philosophy
(Available from 1 September 2010)

The Department of Philosophy is one of the largest Philosophy departments in the UK, with over 30 academic staff, a large intake of undergraduate and postgraduate students and a vigorous research culture. It received a maximum 24 in the last Teaching Quality evaluation and in the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise 65% of our research was rated "world class" or "internationally excellent" (matching the percentage of leading UK philosophy departments such as Oxford and Cambridge). The Department has distinctive strengths in aesthetics, history and philosophy of science, metaphysics, and moral philosophy.

The ‘Area of Specialisation’ for this position is open, within Philosophy. Potential candidates are strongly advised to consult the department’s website for details of its research and teaching programmes.

The position will incorporate undergraduate and postgraduate teaching, some thesis supervision, and usual non-teaching duties. With a strong record of research publication, the successful candidate should be qualified to masters level or equivalent. A PhD prior to application and teaching experience are strongly preferred for a Lectureship and are essential for a position at Senior Lecturer level.

For general information see http://www.philosophy.leeds.ac.uk/

Lecturer - University Grade 7 (£32.458 – 35,469 p.a.) or University 8 (£36,532 – 43,622 p.a.) Senior Lecturer - University Grade 9 (£44,930 – 52,086 p.a.)

Informal enquiries to philosophy-hod@leeds.ac.uk or tel: +44 (0)113 343 3260

To download an application form and job details please visit www.leeds.ac.uk and click on ‘jobs’. Alternatively these may be obtained by email from recruitment@adm.leeds.ac.uk or tel: +44 (0)113 343 5771.

Job ref 318050 Closing date Wednesday 11th November 2009

Presentations and Interviews will take place on Monday and Tuesday 18th and 19th January 2010

Applicants should submit the completed application form, full CV, and a writing sample (of no longer than 25 pages) by the closing date of 11th November.

Presentism, Truthmakers and Theoretical Virtues

2009-08-11T09:22:00.002+01:00

I’m just back from the BSPC where I gave my Truthmaking for Presentists. I got loads of good questions of and comments, but wanted to comment on one of them. In the paper I argue that truthmaker theory can be contingently true and hence that it’s no immediate objection to my view if there are possible presentist scenarios in which my account doesn’t work, so long as we can reasonably believe that they are not actual. (The scenario in question discussed in the paper is a presentist world with an infinite past.)

One of my commentators, Caspar Hare, was pushing me on whether I thought it was similarly okay for the truthmaker principle to simply be true now. He was expecting me to say yes – but I say no, it must be true always; and he was rightly pushing me to say why one should demand that the principle be true at all times but not at all worlds when one holds a view that treats times and worlds analogously in holding that only one of each (the present time, the actual world) is real.

For me the reasons to be a truthmaker theorist concern theoretical virtues. Truthmaker theory is the theory that all the brute truths are truths about what there is, and this is theoretically more virtuous than theories that take as brute truths not only about what there is but also truths about what there was, could be, should be, etc, as well as truths about how things are, what laws hold, etc, etc. If truthmaker theory is true, God’s language only needs names and an existence predicate: that’s ideologically simpler, and hence more virtuous (other things being equal), than theories which require God to be able to make predications, express tensed facts, etc.

I think that in the absence of further information, if the only reason to believe a theory is that it is theoretically virtuous, then we should take that theory to be at best contingently true. There’s no inconsistency in a theoretical virtue selecting a necessarily true theory, but we’d need some reason to think that it does in any particular case. In general the world needn’t have cooperated with what is theoretically virtuous: being guided by simplicity, parsimony etc might have taken us badly wrong – we just hope it doesn’t actually do so. That’s why I only hold truthmaker theory to be a contingent truth. (It’s also why I hold the contingency of composition, and the contingency of whether there is a fundamental level.)

But it seems to me that satisfaction of the theoretical virtues makes a demand on how the world is across times, not just at the present time, even if the present is all that is real. Suppose we’re faced with two theories, T1 and T2. T1 says that there are always 10,000 things. T2 says that there are now only 100 things but that at all other times there are billions. It seems to me that the presentist doesn’t get even a pro tanto reason to accept T2 on the basis that it says that there are fewer things in reality. (I’m assuming quantitative parsimony is a virtue – replace talk of number of things with number of kinds of things if you don’t.) Sure, the present is all that there is, and T2 says that there are presently 100 things whereas T1 says that there are presently a hundred times as many things. But the presentist should still be moved, I think, by the fact that according to T2 reality just was, and is soon to be again, massively more unparsimonious than T1 says it is. The fact that those times aren’t real shouldn’t make us worry any less about that. (By contrast, if T3 and T4 agree on what actually exists but T4 says there are more possibilia than T3 does, this only gives us even a pro-tanto reason to prefer T3 if we are realist about possibilia.)

I think that what’s driving this thought is an idea that Kit Fine pushes in his fantastic paper ‘Tense and Reality’: that everyone should think of non-present times as part of the same ‘all encompassing reality’ whereas only the realist about possibilia should think that about worlds. Now Fine takes that as a reason to deny that the present time is privileged, and so to be a non-standard realist if you’re going to be a realist about tense; but I think that one can still accept that thought and accept a privileged present. One just needs to accept that what’s going on at other times is relevant to how we judge theories in a way that what’s going on at other worlds is not (at least, not in the same way).

So parsimony doesn’t tell the presentist to accept T2 over T1, and if the truthmaker principle is only true now it doesn’t tell the presentist to be a truthmaker theorist. The virtues of truthmaker theory are only obtained if it is always true; by contrast, whether it is necessarily true are neither here nor there, as far as securing those virtues is concerned.

Graduate conference in metaphysics

2009-06-18T15:58:00.002+01:00

See following call for papers for the CMM graduate conference
__________________________________________________________________

The Centre for Metaphysics and Mind at the University of Leeds is
hosting the 4th Annual CMM Graduate Conference on Friday 4th
September.

Submissions are welcome on any area of metaphysics. Metaphysics should
be broadly construed to include not only traditional metaphysical
topics, but also the metaphysical aspects of e.g. philosophy of mind,
philosophy of physics, philosophy of religion, and aesthetics.

Submissions of any length up to 5,000 words will be considered.

Each paper presented at the conference will be followed by a response
from a member of academic staff or PhD student from the University of
Leeds Department of Philosophy.

As with last year's conference we hope to be able to pay some or all
of the travel and accommodation costs for those people whose papers
are accepted. (This is dependent on successful funding applications.)

Please submit complete papers, preferably by e-mail, to Joanna
Pollock, joeykpollock@googlemail.com. Please mark your submission
clearly as such. Receipt will be acknowledged asap.

All papers should be suitable for blind review (we cannot guarantee
anonymised refereeing if your paper is not suitably anonymised).
Please include a cover page with title, abstract and contact details.

Deadline for receipt of submissions is Sunday 19th July 2009.

Decisions will be made by Monday 10th August 2009.

For more general details on the conference please consult:

http://www.personal.leeds.ac.uk/~phsk/cmmgc09/index.htm

or e-mail Duncan Watson at phl5dw@leeds.ac.uk

Composition as identity does not entail universalism

2009-06-01T15:17:00.003+01:00

In my Contingency of Composition paper, I deny the commonly held claim that composition as identity (CAI) entails universalism about composition. (The entailment is defended by Sider, Merricks, et al.) My basic thought was: CAI says just that a complex object is identical to its parts – that tells us only that when you’ve got a complex object, it is identical to its parts, and this is silent about whether or not for any collection of objects there is such a complex object that they are identical to. If many-one identity makes sense then, prima facie, it makes sense to claim that for some collections of objects there’s a one that they are identical to, and some collections of objects such that there’s no one object that they are identical to. All CAI tells us is that it’s all and only the first collections that compose. To assume that every collection composes is just to assume that for any collection of objects, there’s a one to which they are identical. Why would I accept that if I doubted universalism?

In denying the entailment, I need to respond to an argument that both Sider and Merricks give for it. They argue as follows: Suppose (for reductio) the Xs don’t compose. They could do. Go to the world where they do (w). In w, there’s a one, A, that’s identical to the Xs. Given the necessity of identity, A is actually identical to the Xs. So the Xs actually compose A. Contradiction. Formally:

1) ◊(Xs=A)
2) ◊(Xs=A) -> □(Xs=A)
3) @(Xs=A)

In my paper I attempted to resist this argument with some pretty tricky moves – and while I still think they’re right, I think I haven’t exactly convinced the world! (See the earlier discussion on this blog) But I think I can actually make the point more simply than I did then.

The argument aims to prove that the Xs are actually identical to A. Thus, there is a one that the Xs are identical to: A. So since to compose is to be identical to a one, the Xs compose. But wait! All the argument shows is that it’s actually true that the Xs are A. Where do we get the claim that there’s a one that the Xs are identical to? This follows, obviously, if A is actually a one. But where does that claim come from? All we know is that A is possibly a one. Ex hypothesi A is a one in the world in which the Xs compose. But we can only conclude that A is actually a one – and hence that there’s a one that the Xs are actually identical to – if we have the assumption that anything that is possibly a one is necessarily a one. But what right do we have to make that assumption? If we’re leaving open the possibility that there’s a many that’s not a one but could be (and at this stage we must, lest we beg the question), we should also leave open the possibility that there’s a many that is a one but might not be. Since the many is the one, this is a one that might not be a one: a one that is a many, but that might have been a mere many – a many that is identical to no one. If the Xs don’t actually compose this is the status we should think A has in the world in which they do compose. So sure A is actually identical to the Xs: but A is actually just a name for the plurality, a plurality that don’t actually compose. A is only a one in the worlds in which that many do compose. And we’ve been given no reason to think we’re forced into thinking that our world is one of those.

The Trinity and contingent identity

2009-05-31T08:31:00.002+01:00

I got thinking about the Trinity after the workshop on the metaphysics of theism at Leeds last week, and I got to wondering: has anyone ever suggested that the Trinity is a case of contingent identity? (The good thing about a blog is you can put out those ideas that are too weird for publication! All my thoughts on the philosophy of religion are a proper subset of that category.)

So forget the Trinity for the moment and focus on the father's relationship to the son: the idea is that they are actually identical, but contingently so, and that the father is a necessary existent but the son a contingent existent. In every world in which the son exists, he is identical to the father, but there are worlds in which the father exists and is not identical to the son because there are worlds in which the son does not exist (for the son to exist depends on an act of will on the part of the father, and he might not have so willed).

So there is of course a very tight connection between the father and the son: strict numerical identity - it doesn't get much tighter! Thus vindicating Jesus's claim that that father and he are one. But we can also quite easily, on this view, make sense of Jesus's claim that the father is greater than he is: he's a mere contingent existent, the father a necessary being - that's good grounds for saying that the father is greater.

How to fit in the spirit? Well perhaps the spirit is also a contingent existent, and also actually identical to the father (and, by transitivity, the son), but that there are worlds with son but no spirit and worlds with spirit but no son. So the idea is that although the father, the son, and the spirit are each numerically identical to the others, we can distinguish them by their differing modal profiles. For any two, while they're actually identical, they might not have been. But monotheism is easily seen to be a necessary truth, on this view (whereas other views of the Trinity threaten to commit us to tritheism): necessarily, there is only one God, for necessarily any divine being is numerically identical to the father.

Objection: how can they be numerically identical if they have differing modal profiles? Reply: well, we all know the contingent identity theorist has to resist the Leibniz law argument from differing modal profiles to numerical distinctness. Whatever story they're going to tell to make sense of contingent identity in general, let them tell it here.

Objection: but isn’t there a difference in non-modal properties as well? The father is atemporal, the son temporal, the son human the father not, etc? Reply: okay, we’re going to have to say something odd here. Perhaps we just deny the atemporality of the father, or perhaps we say that God is atemporal qua father but not qua son, etc (and hopefully unpack that and say what it means!). But every view of the Trinity ends up saying something a bit odd at this point – it’s not clear that there’s a particular objection to the contingent identity view here.

So, does anyone know if this has been discussed before, or see any problems with it that aren’t faced by all accounts of the Trinity?

(Posts on sane topics will resume once marking season is over, I suspect!)

Routledge Companion to Metaphysics

2009-04-30T22:07:00.003+01:00

The Routledge Companion to Metaphysics is now out! I'm very proud of this: I think our contributors all did an excellent job, and the volume looks excellent.

It's divided into three sections: the history of metaphysics, ontology, and metaphysics and science, and contains 53 original essays. I hope and believe it'll be a useful work of reference for the foreseeable future. You should buy it!

New research centre in Scotland!

2009-04-30T08:25:00.002+01:00

Exciting news for philosophy in Scotland! Crispin Wright has accepted an offer to found and direct a new philosophical research centre at the University of Aberdeen. The centre will ‘go live’ Sep 1st 09, and is provisionally named ‘The Northern Institute of Philosophy’.

The NIP’s areas of remit will be: Epistemology, Formal Logic, Philosophy of Logic, Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Mathematics, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Mind, and the History of Analytical Philosophy. A number of appointments will be made of various categories in the near future, and a bunch of the Leeds faculty will be involved as Associate Fellows, and in other respects.

Arbitrary Reference

2009-04-28T09:09:00.002+01:00

I posted a while back toying with a view of vagueness whereby there was a sharp cut-off in any sorites series as a result of there always being a unique most meaning among the candidate meanings (i.e. those that fit equally well with usage) for any vague expression; since naturalness is a reference magnet – and since it is ex hypothesi not trumped by usage – this is the meaning we will in fact mean, thus determining that the cut-off is where it is. (I further toyed with the idea that it is ontically indeterminate which meaning is the unique most natural, thus yielding the conclusion that it’s determinate that there’s a sharp cut-off in the sorites series but that it’s ontically indeterminate where it is – but forget about this complication for now.)

I’ve also been thinking about this with respect to arbitrary reference. What’s going on when we reason as follows? Let n be an arbitrary multiple of 4. n is a multiple of 2, all multiples of 2 are even, so every multiple of 4 is even. In particular, what, if anything, is referred to by ‘n’ throughout? Maybe it doesn’t refer; but then it’s hard to see how the sentences could be truth-apt, and we get a kind of Frege-Geach problem. Maybe it refers to a special kind of entity: the arbitrary multiple of 4; but that’s kind of weird. Ofra Magidor and Wylie Breckenridge have a really interesting paper where they argue that n actually refers to some particular multiple of 4 – we just cannot know which one. But in virtue of what do I refer to this particular multiple of 4 rather than some other? In virtue of nothing, they say: this is a brute fact. The semantic facts, on their view, are not fixed by the non-semantic facts: all the non-semantic facts could have been just the same but you have referred to some other multiple of 4 by ‘n’. I don’t like brute semantic facts, but I like a lot about their account, so I am quite attracted to extending the above account of vagueness to cases of arbitrary reference: ‘n’ refers to the most natural arbitrary multiple of 4. (Psst! – and it’s ontically indeterminate what this is. But again, forget this just now.)

There are two problems, one of which is encountered by both Magidor and Breckenridge and myself, the other of which might be thought to tell in favour of Magidor and Breckenridge’s view over my variant. I’d appreciate any thoughts on what I have to say about these.

First the common problem. Any view that takes us to genuinely refer to an F when we aim to refer to an arbitrary F has to have something to say about the case where there can be no Fs. For example, suppose we reason as follows. Let n be an arbitrary even prime greater than 2. n is (because it’s even) divisible by 2. So n is divisible by a number other than itself or 1. So n is not prime. Reductio: there is no such n. This chain of reasoning is perfectly good; but it’s obviously hopeless to take ‘n’ to refer to any even prime greater than 2, precisely because there are no such things. (I guess we could go Meinongian, and claim that there are such things, and ‘n’ refers to one, but that n doesn’t exist. But let’s not.) So what’s going on in this case? This is a case where those who postulate special entities as the referents in the cases of arbitrary reference – the arbitrary F – are at an advantage over those who take us to refer to an F; for if the arbitrary even prime greater than 2 isn’t really an even prime greater than 2, there can be no objection to its existence on these grounds. But of course, such views face other problems: such as, if the arbitrary F isn’t an F, what is it? I think we should treat cases like this as not really being cases of arbitrary reference after all. Despite their surface similarity to such cases, these cases, I suggest, are really reductios on the hypothesis that we have a case of genuine reference. So when we say ‘Let n be an arbitrary even prime greater than 2’, I suggest we are really supposing for reductio the hypothesis that ‘an arbitrary even prime greater than 2’ refers. Then, of course, we need some principle that lets us semantically descend, and conclude that there are no even primes greater than 2 if that expression cannot refer.

Now to the other problem. While I might not know what the most natural F is when I refer to an arbitrary F, there are some things I do know. I do know, for example, that if I refer to an arbitrary property I do not refer to grue, because grue is less natural than green. So when I say ‘Let F be an arbitrary property’, I can conclude that F is not identical to grue. But can’t I then conclude that all properties are not identical to grue, for isn’t one of the rules we’re trying to capture the one that says that if x is an arbitrary F and x is G then all Fs are G? But this rule would then take us wrong, for it’s not true that all properties are not identical to grue, for grue is identical to grue.

If this is a problem for my view, however, there is as much of a problem with Magidor and Breckenridge’s view. Indeed, any view that takes you to refer in a case of arbitrary reference has such a problem, including views that take you to refer to a special kind of entity (the arbitrary F), for the above rule would tell you to infer that all the Fs have the property of having being referred to by you when you said ‘Let n be an arbitrary F’. If I, at time t, say ‘Let n be an arbitrary number’ then, if ‘n’ refers – no matter what it refers to, or how the reference fact is determined – then n has the property having been referred to by me at t. If we follow the rule that tells us to infer that all Fs are G if the arbitrary F is G, it follows that all numbers were referred to by me at t. This is false: either I referred to a particular number, or to a special entity that is the arbitrary number, but I certainly didn’t refer to each number.

So anyone who takes cases of arbitrary reference to really be cases of reference can’t admit that rule in full generality. But views which take us to refer to an F (rather than to a special entity, the arbitrary F) when we say ‘Let a be an arbitrary F’ obviously needed to restrict this rule in any case. Suppose I say ‘Let n be an arbitrary multiple of 4’. We want to be able to reason as follows: n is even, hence every multiple of 4 is even. But suppose, as a matter of fact (putting aside why this is the case), ‘n’ refers, arbitrarily, to 28. 28 is a multiple of 14. So can’t we now conclude, mistakenly, that all multiples of 4 are multiples of 14? The rule had better be restricted so that we cannot so infer. Magidor and Breckenridge respond to this problem by modifying the rule to say that we can only conclude that every number is F if we can prove that the arbitrary number n is F. Because you can’t know that n is 28, you can’t prove that n is a multiple of 14, and hence you can’t conclude that all multiples of 4 are multiples of 14.

I think Magidor and Breckenridge are basically right to restrict the rule so that the properties we can conclude that all Fs have aren’t the ones that n has if n was our arbitrary F but rather just those ones that we can prove that n has from a certain basis. But the basis can’t be the properties we know that n has: for while that would deal with the problem immediately above, since we can’t know that n, our arbitrary multiple of 4, is a multiple of 14, even if it is, this won’t deal with the prior problem, since we can know that n was referred to at t when I said at t ‘Let n be an arbitrary multiple of 4’. I think instead we should restrict the rule as follows: if a is an arbitrary F, then if you can prove that a is G from facts that are true solely in virtue of a being an F (i.e. excluding those facts that are true in virtue of a being the particular F that it is), conclude that all Fs are G. 28 isn’t a multiple of 14 in virtue of being a multiple of 4, it’s a multiple of 14 in virtue of being that particular multiple of 4, but it is even in virtue of being a multiple of 4, and that’s why we conclude that all multiples of 4 are even but why we can’t conclude that they’re all multiples of 14. Nor was 28 the referent of ‘n’ solely in virtue of being a multiple of 14: on my view, it is true in virtue of being the most natural multiple of 14; on Magidor and Breckenridge’s view it is not true in virtue of anything. Either way, the move to ‘all multiples of 14 were referred to by ‘n’ at t’ is blocked.

This also lets me respond to what would otherwise have been an advantage of Magidor and Breckenridge’s approach over my own (I owe the objection to Ofra). Suppose we say ‘let n be an arbitrary number and let m be an arbitrary number’? If the reference facts are just brutely settled, they might be brutely settled so that ‘n’ and ‘m’ co-refer and they might not be. Either way, we can’t prove either that n is identical to m or that n is distinct from m, so we can’t ever conclude that arbitrary Fs a and b are identical (unless we can prove that there’s only one) or that they are distinct: and of course, that’s exactly as it should be. But the worry is that I can know that n=m because I know that ‘n’ and ‘m’ co-refer: they must both refer to the most natural number.

But once the rule isn’t restricted to the properties we can prove n has from the basis of facts we know about n but rather, as it has to be to deal with the reference problem, to the properties we can prove n has on the basis of facts that hold solely in virtue of n being a number, this problem dissolves. n is not identical to m, if it is, solely in virtue of being a number. It is in virtue of n being the particular number that it is, i.e. m, that it is identical to m. Likewise if n is in fact distinct from m, this is true in virtue of n being the particular number that it is - one other than m. With this restriction on the rule – and let me re-emphasise that any account that takes us to refer in cases of arbitrary reference must place some such restriction – I think there will be no unwelcome consequences to my approach. (At least, no additional unwelcome consequences over the brute facts view!) And the advantage is that, at the price of accepting these facts about naturalness, we avoid both brute semantic facts and the postulation of weird entities like the arbitrary number.

Ontological Cheating and Ockham's Razor

2009-03-11T17:21:00.002Z

I’ve written a brief reply to Jonathan Tallant’s forthcoming Analysis paper, 'Ontological Cheats Might Just Prosper', that argues in favour of being the kind of ‘cheating’ presentist and actualist that simply takes truths concerning the past, or what could have been, to be ungrounded. Tallant argues that Ockham’s razor suggests we should be cheats, because if we can do without past or merely possible ontology, Ockham’s razor says we should. Don’t multiply entities beyond necessity, so since it’s possible not to believe in such things, you shouldn’t believe in them.

I argue that this has to be a bad understanding of Ockham’s razor: were it good, we should be Ontological Nihilists and believe that nothing exists. Since it’s possible to believe in nothing at all, believing in anything multiplies entities beyond what’s necessary, hence we shouldn’t believe in anything! Since we’re not Ontological Nihilists, we can’t be operating with this version of the razor.

Why aren’t we Ontological Nihilists? Because while it’s ontologically parsimonious, it’s ideologically extravagant. (See Jason’s paper.) Ockham’s razor has to allow that ontological parsimony needn’t be purchased if the cost is extravagant! But once we allow this, we’re just back to the old game of weighing up the admitted ontological benefits of cheating against what should be the admitted costs in its ideology and/or in its account of how truth depends on reality. The debate hasn’t progressed any.

I argue that every theory owes us an account of three things: what exists, what is true, and how truth links up to ontology. Ockham’s razor tells us, I suggest, that we shouldn’t accept a theory that postulates the existence of some things that don’t, according to its own view of how truth depends on ontology, do any work in accounting for what it itself says is true. That principle is going to tell us not to say, e.g., both that truths about the past are brute but yet there are nevertheless past entities. And that’s as it should be: that’s a bizarre combination of views to hold. But it’s never going to let us decide between two theories just by looking at their ontologies. And I think that’s as it should be: we have to look at the other two components as well, and see if the ontological advantage is being paid for at an appropriate price. And I can’t see any version of the razor that will mandate accepting the ‘cheating’ theories that won’t also mandate accepting Ontological Nihilism.

(I’ve also written a reply to a forthcoming paper by Stefano Predelli which argues against my view that there are no musical works. It’s here.)

Leeds metaphysicians sweep Oxford Studies in Metaphysics prize!

2009-03-07T15:25:00.008Z

Some fantastic news for the Leeds metaphysicians: Jason Turner has won the the Younger Scholar Prize in Metaphysics, for his paper 'Ontological Nihilism'! This was after a record number of submissions. Well done Jason!

And the joint runners-up are Robbie Williams and Elizabeth Barnes for their paper 'A Theory of Metaphysical Indeterminacy' and me for my 'Truthmaking for Presentists'. So a clean sweep for Leeds!

These three papers will all be appearing in a forthcoming volume of Oxford Studies in Metaphysics.

Update: Jason's paper is now available on-line: check it out via the link above!

Further update: It looks like the above three papers will be published alongside Richard Woodward's earlier accepted paper 'Metaphysical Indeterminacy and Vague Existence'. So it looks like Leeds is really going to dominate that issue of OSM! Maybe it should be called 'Oxford Studies in Leeds Metaphysics'.

(Both Rich's and my paper make use of the way of thinking about metaphysical indeterminacy in the way Elizabeth and Robbie tell us to - so this journal will also see three papers defending the Elizabeth/Robbie plan. Metaphysical indeterminacy's day is here!)

New metaphysics blog

2009-02-20T17:37:00.004Z

Just to announce a new group blog on metaphysics:
Matters of Substance. The idea is that this will be a forum for a whole bunch of metaphysicians, along the lines of PEA soup, Certain Doubts, The Garden of Forking Paths, etc. Robbie, Elizabeth and I will be showing up there, as will a bunch of other awesome metaphysicians, so add it to your bookmarks!

New Leeds philosopher

2009-02-14T15:01:00.003Z

I'm delighted to announce that Heather Logue will be joining the department at Leeds in September. Heather is currently finishing up her PhD at MIT, and specialises in the philosophy of mind and epistemology, with interests in metaphysics, philosophy of science and feminist philosophy. She has published on disjunctivism, as well as co-editing an anthology of classic texts on that topic.

Since I arrived at Leeds (three and a half years ago), we've made 11 permanent appointments and 5 of them have been women. That's 45%. It's really nice to be in a department where that's true, and where it's true solely because we've pursued a policy of hiring the best person for the job.

Cameron on Merricks on Cameron on Merricks on Truthmakers

2009-02-01T15:13:00.005Z

I've linked before to my contribution to a symposium on Trenton Merricks' book 'Truth and Ontology' (T&O). Merricks' reply (to me and my fellow symposiasts (?), Jonathan Schaffer and Scott Soames) can be found here. Obviously, in a symposium the author gets the final word. The good thing (and the bad thing) about a blog, though, is that there can always be another word! So here I'm going to respond to some of Merricks' replies to me.

A general style of argument that Merricks makes a few times in T&O runs as follows. If truthmaker theory is true then every truth has a truthmaker; the best candidates for truthmakers for the truths in domain D are the Xs; but we shouldn't believe in the Xs; therefore we shouldn't believe the truths in domain D have truthmakers; but we should believe they're true, therefore truthmaker theory is false.

Two instances of this argument schema plug in truths about the past and negative existentials for D and, respectively, Lucretian properties and totality facts in for the Xs. In my paper, I agree with Merricks that we shouldn't believe in Lucretian properties or totality facts, but I argue that the truthmaker theorist (even if she is a presentist) can do better in each case. Merricks argues that my candidate truthmakers shouldn't be believed in either. He also makes a te quoque against me, and argues that the reasons I give for not believing in Lucretian properties rule out my proposed truthmaker for negative existentials. I'll respond to these charges.

Let's take truths concerning the past first. Given the truth of presentism, what makes it true that I was once a child? The Lucretian says I have (presently) a purely past-directed property: the property of having once been a child. In 'Truthmaking for Presentists', I argued that what is peculiar about such properties is that an object's having them makes no difference to the intrinsic nature of the object at the time it instantiates it. We should only believe in a property F, I argued, if an object instantiating F at t makes a difference to how F is intrinsically at t. Lucretian properties don't make such a difference: they only make a difference to how the bearer was intrinsically – so we shouldn't believe in them. I argued that temporal distributional properties do better: an object's instantiating a temporal distributional property at t makes a difference to how the object is intrinsically at t (thus avoiding the charge of peculiarity facing the Lucretian) but it also makes a difference to how the object was intrinsically at the previous moments of its existence (thus solving the truthmaker problem).

Why might you not like this solution? Here's an inconsistent tetrad:

1) Presentism is true
2) Objects instantiate temporal distributional properties
3) If an entity instantiates a distributional property, it extends throughout the region across which that property distributes
4) If an object extends throughout a region of some dimension, the region of that dimension exists

From (2) and (3), objects extend through temporal regions. From (4) it follows that there are extended temporal regions, which contradicts (1), which entails that only a point of the temporal dimension exists.

Abandoning (1) or (2) would just be to reject my theory, so can either (3) or (4) plausibly be given up? In my contribution to the symposium, I suggested abandoning (4). I said the presentist has to abandon this anyway, since they believe in persisting objects, and these are objects which are extended throughout time, even though the regions of time throughout which they extend do not (according to the presentist) exist.

Merricks objects that "presentists should deny that existing at a time is anything like being located at a region . . . Similarly, presentists should deny that persistence is extension throughout a temporal region. . . So they should reject the view that persisting objects are extended throughout nonexistent regions."

The invocation of location at a (I presume spatial) region suggests that Merricks is thinking of my view as one where objects stretch throughout time just like they stretch throughout space, even though extended regions of time do not (unlike extended regions of space) exist. But certainly, I never urged the presentist to hold that view! The sense in which I claimed the presentist must hold that objects are extended throughout time is a trivial one: they must believe that there are objects which are not instantaneous existents – objects which do exist and either did or will exist at some past or future time. Call this extension through time. The presentist believes in the possibility of extension through time, in this sense, without extended regions of time existing. So in this sense of 'extension', (4) is definitely false, according to any sensible presentist. My point can basically be put as a challenge to those who see a tension between presentist and truthmaker theory: give me an argument that I should accept (3) for any sense of 'extension' stronger than this one. I grant (3) in this trivial sense of 'extension', but then (4) is obviously going to be denied by the presentist. And there are senses of 'extension' like the way an object extends through space which make (4) true, but then I don't see why I must accept the corresponding reading of (3). The burden of proof is on one who is pushing the inconsistent tetrad: tell me the sense of 'extension' you have in mind, and give me an argument as to why I should accept both (3) and (4) – until then, I'll continue to believe my account reconciles truthmaker theory with presentism.

Let's turn to negative existentials. Following this earlier paper, I argued that the truthmaker for claims of the form 'There are no Xs' is the world itself. The view is that each positive truth has a truthmaker, and that the world is essentially composed of all and only these truthmakers. Furthermore, the world is essentially maximal: it is necessarily a world, necessarily the largest thing there is – i.e. it is necessarily composed of all the truthmakers for the positive truths. So it can't be a proper part of any other thing. That means that, necessarily, the world can only exist if all and only the truthmakers for the positive truths are all and only the actual truthmakers for the positive truths. And so, since an actually true negative existential couldn't be false without some actually false proposition being a positive truth requiring a truthmaker, the world suffices as a truthmaker for all the true negative existentials.

Merricks objects to this proposal by objecting to the property of being a world. He says this is "a totality property, equivalent to being such that there is nothing more in the universe. So Cameron's world resembles the totality state by exemplifying a totality property essentially. . . Thus what Cameron calls 'the world' is nearly the same thing as the totality state." And hence I haven't really made any advance over Armstrong's totality states. And then there's the te quoque: the property being a world makes no difference to the intrinsic properties of its bearer at the time of instantiation, hence by my own lights (as seen above, RE Lucretianism) it's peculiar, and so my own principle tells us not to accept my own ontology. Ouch!

I think Merricks' objections here are misplaced. (In fairness, I should point out that he makes some others that I am not responding to here.) Merricks objects to the property of being a world. But I didn't appeal to any such property: I only appealed to the world!

I'm assuming the following kind of picture. The reason a truthmaker theorist admits properties into her ontology is to ground accidental predications. The reason we need to admit a property of being charged is to make true truths of the form 'X is charged' – but one only needs the property because X is merely accidentally charged: were X essentially charged, X itself would be an acceptable truthmaker for 'X is charged'. If every charged entity is essentially charged, we simply don't need to admit the property of being charged – the charged entities are ontology enough. It's only because the charged things might not have been charged that we need to admit the state of affairs of them being charged (which involves the existence of the property), to provide a necessitating truthmaker for the fact that they are charged.

There's only one thing that's a world, and it is essentially a world. So I deny that we need to admit a property of being a world. The world is ontology enough. That is why my view is perfectly compatible with the principle that mandates my rejection of Lucretian properties. It's also (one of the reasons) why I think I have an advantage over Armstrong's totality states view (for other reasons, see this paper): I am merely attributing a more robust essence (but in familiar ways) to an entity many of us already believe in – I am not introducing a peculiar property for the sole purpose of solving some truthmaker problem.

Finally, I'll say something about possibilism and modal truth. In T&O Merricks makes what seems to me a very odd claim: that admitting mere possibilia to ground truths concerning what might have been is no use, because both actualist and possibilist alike should, if they are to be truthmaker theorists, hold that what is actually true depends on what there actually is. Hence actual truths concerning what might have been must be grounded in actual ontology – and so admitting mere possibilia is no help to securing the truthmaker thought.

I see no reason why a possibilist who wants to be a truthmaker theorist should hold that actual truth depends on actual being. Actual truth is just truth, so this principle is just that truth depends on actual being. I think that should only be acceptable to a truthmaker theorist if they hold that actual being exhausts being simpliciter. The truthmaker thought, I think, is just that truth depends on ontology: and the truthmaker theorist should be able to appeal to whatever ontology they believe in, whether actual or merely possible, present or past, etc. The only reason for a truthmaker theorist not to appeal to the Xs to ground some truth is if they don’t believe in the Xs.

I made the following analogy to illustrate this. Would anyone think it a good demand that the truthmaker theorist ground truths concerning what goes on at other places only in ontology that exists here? I considered the proposition 'It's raining on the other side of the world', which is true in Australia. Should we demand that Armstrong account for this truth only by appealing to entities that are located in Australia? Surely not! Surely, Armstrong is at liberty to appeal to all the entities he believes in to ground this truth, no matter where in the world they happen to be located. Only a here-now-ist should believe that the only entities to be appealed to in truthmaking are ones that exist here.

Merricks objects to the analogy because he denies "that propositions are true at places". (He points out that were he an eternalist he would deny that propositions are true at times.) But I don't need to commit to propositions being true at places in any objectionable sense in order to make the analogy. My point is just that modal truths should be treated by the possibilist just like truths concerning what goes on at other places should be treated by all of us who deny here-now-ism. There's a perfectly good sense in which 'It's raining on the other side of the world' is true in Australia and not in the UK (given that it's raining in the UK, not raining in Australia, and that Australia is the other side of the world to the UK and vice-versa); there's a perfectly good sense in which 'Gordon Brown is now the Prime Minister of the UK' is true at the present time and not true 10 years ago; there's a perfectly good sense in which 'It's merely possible that there are talking donkeys' is true at this world and not at a world containing talking donkeys. Those are the pre-theoretic data; the philosophical work to be done is spelling out what this amounts to. I agree with what I take to be Merricks' thought: that what we should say in each case depends on what we think about the ontology of places, times and worlds, respectively. If you are a here-now-ist/presentist/actualist you should say that propositions are true at locations/times/worlds; if you are sensible/an eternalist/a possibilist you should say that the propositions expressed by these sentences at one location/time/world are different from the proposition expressed at a different location/time/world, and that the proposition expressed is true or false simpliciter, and not at a location/time/world. But the point remains: whatever we who deny here-now-ism say about my sentence, so should the possibilist say about modal claims. And so I can't see any more reason to insist that the possibilist appeal only to actual ontology in accounting for modal truths than I can see to insist that Armstrong only appeal to Australian ontology in accounting for my truth.

Anyways, Merricks' reply had loads of interesting stuff in it - these are just my initial thoughts about how best to respond.

Indeterminate truthmaking

2008-11-25T16:55:00.005Z

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to think about truthmaker theory if there’s ontic indeterminacy. If you thought that p’s being indeterminate amounted to p’s lacking a truth-value and you were a truthmaker maximalist, your life would be quite easy: you could say that ‘p is indeterminate’ is true just because there’s neither a truthmaker for p not a truthmaker for not-p.

But I, following Elizabeth and Robbie’s work, have committed to the view of ontic indeterminacy whereby ‘p is indeterminate’ does not entail a truth-value gap. ‘Indeterminately, p’, on this bivalent view, is compatible with both the truth of p and the falsity of p. p is either true or false, it’s just unsettled which.

On this view, there’s a gap between truth and determinate truth, and it’s an interesting question in that case what the truthmaker theorist should say. One option is that ‘Indeterminately, p’ and ‘Determinately, p’ just get treated like any other proposition, and get assigned possible truthmakers, but I prefer the option that says we should assign possible truthmakers only to the ‘indeterminacy free’ propositions, and determine the truth-value of the ‘determinacy involving’ propositions based on whether those truthmakers determinately exist or exist but not determinately so.

So the idea is that, e.g., the state of affairs of Ball being red makes it true that Ball is red. And if it’s determinately true that Ball is red that’s not because there’s some further thing, the state of affairs of Ball being determinately red, but rather because the state of affairs of Ball being red is a determinate existent. The thought being that if p is determinately true at one world and true but not determinate at another, it is difference in being enough if the truthmaker for p is a determinate existent at the former world and a mere existent (one which exists, but not determinately so) at the latter. (You can think of this as a difference in the way that the truthmaker exists, or alternatively allow yourself extra ideology – see section 7 of this paper.)

Now, if every proposition got mapped onto exactly one possible truthmaker, life would be simple. But it doesn’t, and it’s not. p might be determinately true not because there is some truthmaker for p that determinately exists but rather because it’s determinate that there exists some truthmaker for p. The case I’m most interested in is the open future. If there’s a fixed past but open future then, I say (see my joint paper with Elizabeth), there’re a bunch of candidate states of the world being a certain way throughout history that agree on how things were and are but disagree on how things will be, and it’s determinate that exactly one of these states exists, but indeterminate which.

It’s determinate that young Earth creationism is wrong because there’s determinately a truthmaker for ‘Dinosaurs existed millions of years ago’ – but there’s no determinately existing truthmaker for that proposition. Each candidate state would make that true, and it’s determinate that one exists, so it’s determinate that it’s made true. ‘Martian colonies will exist in a hundred years’, on the other hand, is neither determinately true nor false, since if a certain candidate state exists it will be made true and if another exists it will be made false, and it’s not determinate which exists.

Exactly one of these candidate states gets things right – it gives us the actual history of the world – so that state exists and all the others don’t. But none of them get it determinately right or wrong, so the existent state is a mere existent and the non-existent states mere non-existents. But saying this doesn’t tell us that it’s determinate that exactly one of these states exists, so we need to either take that as a brute fact or admit a disjunctive state of affairs – the state of affairs of this world state existing or that world state existing or . . . etc – and proclaim it to be a determinate existent.

A decision has to be made when it comes to non-existence. Truthmaker theorists disagree as to whether to admit truthmakers for negative existentials or to let explanation bottom out at facts about what there is not as well as facts about what there is. But either way, the story is going to be more complicated once it can be indeterminate what there is.

Suppose a determinately exists, b exists but not determinately so, c fails to exist but not determinately so, and every other possible existent determinately fails to exist. If you are not a truthmaker maximalist and want to take facts about what there is not as brute you still have to be able to distinguish between the mere non-existence of c and the determinate non-existence of d (say). If you were inclined to believe in two ways of being – determinate and mere being – you should now postulate two ways of non-being – determinate and mere non-being. On this view, to completely determine a world, what God has to do is to say of every possible being which of the four ways of being or non-being it has: once He’s done that, He’ll have settled everything there is to settle. (At least provided that the disjunctive states of affairs mentioned above number amongst the possibilia.)

Now suppose we are attracted to maximalism. Since a and b are the only things there are, we must admit the existence of the second-order totality state of affairs of a and b being the only first-order things that there are. Now for Armstrong, you can stop there: there’s no need to posit an additional third-order totality state of affairs saying of the second-order totality state of affairs that it’s the only second-order totality state of affairs that there is; that’s because it’s necessarily true that there’s only one second-order totality state of affairs, and hence it can itself make it true that it’s the only one. And so there’s no risk of regress. But if it’s not determinate what there is, it will likewise not be determinate what second-order totality state of affairs exists. In our situation it’s not determinate that a and b are all the things there are: both the totality state of affairs of a being the only thing, and of a, b and c being the only things, are non-existents, but they are mere non-existents. However, since it’s determinate that exactly one of these totality facts exists we can’t stop at the postulation of the second-order totality state of affairs; we need to admit a new entity: the disjunctive state of affairs of one of these three totality states of affairs existing. And now we need another new entity – a third-order totality state of affairs – that says that everything we’ve talked about so far are all the things that exist at levels one and two. In essence, this third-order totality state of affairs is the thing that makes it true that all the candidate second-order totality states of affairs are all the candidate second-order totality states of affairs.

Now, our story can stop here if it’s necessarily true that whatever third-order totality state of affairs exists, it is determinately the only third-order totality state of affairs that exists. But if it’s possible for there to be higher-order indeterminacy in what there is – that is, if it’s possible that it’s indeterminate not just what the totality of entities is but what the candidate totalities are – then the third-order totality state of affairs itself may be a mere existent. There could be other candidate third-order totality states of affairs, and it not be determinate which of them exists. But it will be determinate that one of them does . . . and so we’re off on a regress. Now personally, I doubt the coherence of higher-order indeterminacy; I think that while it might be indeterminate what there is, it necessarily won’t be indeterminate what the range of candidate totalities are, and so I think the maximalist will be able to stop at the determinately existing third-order totality state of affairs and resist infinite regress.

Anyway, I go into all of this in more detail in sections 6 and 7 (and 8 to a lesser degree) of my Truthmaking for Presentists paper. If anyone has any comments on either what’s written here or there, I’d welcome them.

Academics as border police

2008-11-25T14:05:00.000Z

New rules on overseas students are being introduced by the Government, which will involve academics having to report to the Border Agency when such students have missed a certain number of contact hours. If you are a British citizen or resident and think it is not our role to act as immigration officers, that such rules threaten the autonomy of Universities, that they will make it harder for us to attract overseas students, or that this is generally a Bad Idea, please sign the petition below:

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/Overseasstudent/

Job: deadline this Friday

2008-11-24T07:41:00.003Z

Just a last reminder that the deadline for applications for the lecturer or senior lecturer at Leeds (in US terms, roughly equivalent to a tenured assistant or associate prof respectively) is THIS FRIDAY (28th).

For details on how to apply, see the post below.

Leeds job: reminder

2008-11-12T09:43:00.002Z

Just a reminder that the deadline for the lecturer/senior lecturer position at Leeds is Nov 28th: just over two weeks from the time of posting.

AOS is open over all areas of the department, but we're particularly interested in applicants working in Theoretical Philosophy (broadly construed: so logic, phil logic, phil language, epistemology, metaphysics, phil of maths, phil mind etc) or the history of philosophy.

For the job ad go here (and scroll down a bit).

Schaffer on truthmakers and ontological commitment

2008-10-17T07:45:00.004+01:00

In a few places, I've argued that Quine was wrong about ontological commitment. If you want to know what a sentence is ontologically committing to, look not to what the quantifier must range over, say I, but to what must exist to make it true.

Jonathan Schaffer replied in his 'Truthmaker Commitments'. He argues that the motivations for my view are bad ones and goes on to offer some objections to it. He does argue that truthmakers play a role though: but it's not in identifying the ontological commitments, but in identifying what is fundamental according to the theory.

I've just written my reply. I argue that the motivations are good ones, and I aim to counter the objections. I hope the view becomes a bit clearer in my responses to the objections - certainly, they forced me to say some things I hadn't said in the paper Schaffer is criticising. I end, though, by suggesting that it's not obvious there's a genuine dispute between me and Schaffer - that we just mean something different by 'ontological commitment'.

Comments, of course, would be welcome.
Update: the paper has been revised as of 18/10/08

Blind refereeing - request for info

2008-10-14T09:51:00.002+01:00

Here's something you don't learn in grad school - probably because it isn't an issue until after you've been publishing for a bit. When submitting a paper, you make it suitable for blind review. Usually, that's really easy: just delete self-references, your name, acknowledgements (well, the latter isn't always done - but I think it should be), etc. But what if you're responding to a paper that is itself responding to you? Do you still need to prepare it for blind review? That would be much more work and might significantly change the tone of the paper, because while you might say things like 'I was unclear: what I meant was . . .' or 'X has misunderstood me' or 'I would respond thus . . .', you would have to hedge everything: 'perhaps Cameron meant . . .', 'Cameron might respond', etc. I'd be interested to hear from people who have experience of writing such replies whether that's what they do or whether they ignore the request to prepare the paper for blind refereeing in such cases (or whether they do something else).

Necessity and triviality

2008-09-17T10:19:00.004+01:00

I’ve posted a new draft paper 'Necessary truth, truthmaking and triviality'. The main motivation of the paper is to defend the view that the necessary truths are all and only the trivial truths. A secondary motivation is to argue that, given truthmaker theory, this entails that the necessary truths are exactly the truths that lack a truthmaker.

A sentence is trivially true if and only if its truth makes no demand on the world. That is to say, its truth-conditions are trivially met. Nothing is required of the world for the truth conditions of a trivial truth to be met. Crucially, this is not the same as saying that the world meets the demands that the truth of the sentence imposes on it as a matter of necessity. It is conceptually consistent that the truth of a sentence makes demands on the world that the world necessarily meets. The substantial claim defended in this paper is that there are no such truths: all substantial truths (ones whose truth makes a demand on the world) are contingent.

To make sense of the idea of a truth with trivial truth-conditions, we must have a non-modal understanding of ‘demands’. The demands the truth of a sentence makes on the world can’t simply be what must be the case if the sentence is true. That is independently plausible: even if there are necessary existents such as numbers, or God, we should want an understanding of ‘demands’ such that the truth of ‘Socrates is a philosopher’ demands that Socrates exist and be a philosopher, but not that God or the number 2 exists. Indeed, I argue in the paper that if you only have a modal understanding of ‘demands’ there are a bunch of apparent conceptual possibilities that you simply can’t make sense of. Now if it makes sense that the truth of a sentence not demand that p be the case, even when p is necessary, we can make sense of the idea that the truth of the sentence makes no demands at all.

I argue that such trivial truths must be necessary, lest we violate a very weak version of the principle that truth is grounded in reality (one far weaker than the truthmaker principle). In that case we have an explanation for the necessity of at least some necessary truths: they are necessary because trivial. I further argue that if this is true we should hold that all necessary truths are trivial, lest we admit unexplained necessitites.

This has real consequences for certain debates in metaphysics. It settles the debate over whether there could have been no concrete objects, since ‘there are concrete objects’ is a substantial truth (it demands that there be concreta), hence a contingent one. It motivates, I argue, in favour of states of affairs as opposed to tropes as the truthmakers for contingent intrinsic predications. That is because ‘If the state of affairs of A being F exists, A is F’ is trivially true if true whereas ‘If the particular redness of A exists, A is red’ is substantially true if true (since more is required for A’s existence than that one of A’s properties exist, whereas since A is a constituent of the state of affairs of A being F, the conditions for A’s existence are already met in meeting the conditions for the existence of the state of affairs), and so only the former can be necessary – and given truthmaker necessitarianism, whichever is true is necessarily true.

(I want to give a shout out to Agustin Rayo. I've been much inspired and influenced by his recent work on truth-conditions, ontological commitment, etc. Go to his webpage and read 'On Specifying Truth-Conditions', 'Ontological Commitment' and 'Towards a Trivialist Account of Mathematics'. It's all really excellent stuff, and will give you an idea of the background I'm operating with in this paper.)

Permanent lecturer/senior lecturer at Leeds

2008-09-02T13:59:00.005+01:00

Leeds is hiring again. We're seeking to appoint a lecturer or senior lecturer - AOS open, but we'd be especially keen on applicants with AOS in Theoretical Philosophy (broadly construed: i.e. phil logic and language, metaphysics, epistemology, phil mind, etc) or the history of philosophy.

Here's the ad:

University of Leeds

Faculty of Arts

Department of Philosophy


Lectureship/Senior Lectureship in Philosophy

(Available from 1 September 2009)


The Department of Philosophy is one of the largest Philosophy
departments in the UK, with around 30 academic staff and a
large intake of students. In recent evaluations it received a
maximum 24 for Teaching Quality and a rating of 5 in the 2001
Research Assessment Exercise. The Department includes the
Centre for History and Philosophy of Science,
the Centre for Ethics and Metaethics and the Centre for
Metaphysics and Mind.

The ‘Area of Specialisation’ for this position is open
across all areas of the Department but we are particularly
interested in applicants working in the areas of Theoretical
Philosophy (broadly construed) or History of Philosophy.

The position will incorporate undergraduate and postgraduate
teaching, some thesis supervision, and usual non-teaching duties.
With a strong record of research publication, the successful
candidate should be qualified to masters level or equivalent.
A PhD prior to application and teaching experience are strongly
preferred for a Lectureship and are essential for a position at
Senior Lecturer level.

For general information see http://www.philosophy.leeds.ac.uk/

University Grade 7 (£30, 912 - £33,780 p.a.) or University 8
(£34,792 - £41,545 p.a.) or University Grade 9
(£42,791 - £49,606 p.a.)

Informal enquiries to Professor Steven French: S.R.D.French@leeds.ac.uk

To download an application form and job details please visit
www.leeds.ac.uk and click on ‘jobs’.

Job ref 321001  Closing date 28 November 2008

Interviews will take place on 14/15 January 2009

Applicants should submit the completed application form,
full CV, and a writing sample (of no longer than 25 pages)
by the closing date of 28 November.

Vagueness and Naturalness

2008-08-26T18:09:00.002+01:00

I've posted a draft of a new short paper on vagueness. I want a view of vagueness that upholds both classical logic and bivalence. I commit, then, to saying that there is a sharp cut-off between the things that satisfy any vague predicate and the things that don't. Williamson secures that by accepting the claim that our usage is fine grained enough for our predicates to latch onto a particular meaning, and that we'd have meant something different had we used the term ever so slightly differently. Like many, I don't find that plausible. Instead, I want to let the other factor that determines meaning do the work: naturalness. The claim I defend is that for any vague predicate there are a bunch of meanings that fit equally well with use, but that one is always the most natural. This is the one we mean, and this determines where the cut-off is: we can't know where the cut-off is because we have no naturalness detector. I explore extending this to arbitrary reference. The idea is that when we say 'Let 'n' be an arbitrary number', 'n' refers to the most natural number. And so on: so I secure bivalence at the cost of some heavy duty metaphysical claims concerning naturalness. It then becomes weighing up the costs and benefits.

But my real view is that the naturalness facts are themselves ontically indeterminate. There is a most natural meaning for 'is bald', but the world hasn't settled which of the candidate meanings is the most natural. In that case, while it is settled that there is a sharp cut-off between the bald and the non-bald things, it is ontically indeterminate where the sharp cut-off is. There is a most natural number that 'n' refers to; but it is ontically indeterminate which one it is.

Comments welcome!

Branching time (x-post from TnT)

2008-07-24T13:56:00.002+01:00

I've recently discovered some really interesting papers on how to think about belief in a future with branching time. Folks are interested in branching time as it (putatively) emerges out of "decoherence" in the Everett interpretation of standard Quantum mechanics.

The first paper linked to above is forthcoming in BJPS, by Simon Saunders and David Wallace. In it, they argue for a certain kind of parallel between the semantics for personal fission cases and the semantics most charitably applied to language users in branching time, and argue that this sheds lights on the way that beliefs should behave.

Now, lots of clever people are obviously thinking about this, and I haven't absorbed all the discussion yet. But since it's really cool stuff, and since I've been thinking about related material recently (charity-based metasemantics, fission cases, semantics in branching time) I thought I'd sit down and figure out how things look from my point of view.

I'm sceptical, in fact, whether personal fission itself (and associated de se uncertainty about who one will be) will really help us out here in the way that Saunders and Wallace think. Set aside for now the question of whether faced with a fission case you should feel uncertain which fission-product you will end up as (for discussion of that question, on the assumption that it's indeterminate which of the Lewisian continuing persons is me, see the indeterminate survival paper I just posted up). But suppose that we do get some sense in which, when you're about to fission, you have de se uncertainty about where you'll be, even granted full knowledge of the de dicto facts.

The Saunders-Wallace idea is to try to generalize this de se ignorance as an explanation of the ignorance we'd have if we were placed in a branching universe, and knew what was to happen on every branch. We'd know all the de dicto truths about multiple futures---and we would literally be about to undergo fission, since I'd be causally related in the right kind of ways to multiple person stages in the different futures. So---they claim---ignorance of who I am maps onto ignorance of what I'm about to see next (whether I'm about to see the stuff in the left branch, or in the right). And that explains how we can get ignorance in a branching world, and so lays the groundwork for explaining how we can get a genuine notion of uncertainty/probability/degree of belief off the ground.

I'm a bit worried about the generality of the purported explanation. The basic thought there is that to get a complete story about beliefs in branching universes, we're going to need to justify degrees of beliefs in matters that happen, if at all, long after we would go out of existence. And so it just doesn't seem likely that we're going to get a complete story about uncertainty from consideration of uncertainty about which branch I myself am located within.

To dramatize, consider an instantaneous, omniscient agent. She knows all the de dicto truths about the world (in every future branch) and also exactly where he is located---so no de se ignorance either. But still, this agent might care about other things, and have a certain degree of belief as to whether, e.g. the sea-battle will happen in the future. The kind of degree of belief she has (and any associated "ignorance") can't, I think, be a matter of de se ignorance. And I think, for events that happen if at all in the far future, we're relevantly like the instantaneous omniscient agent.

What else can we do? Well---very speculatively---I think there's some prospect for using the sort of charity-based considerations David Wallace has pointed to in the literature for getting a direct, epistemic account of why we should adopt this or that degree of belief in borderline cases. The idea would be that we *mimimize inaccuracy of our beliefs* by holding true sentences to exactly the right degrees.

A first caveat: this hangs on having the *right* kind of semantic theory in the background. A Thomason-style supervaluationist semantics for the branching future just won't cut it, nor will MacFarlane-style relativistic tweaks. I think one way of generalizing the "multiple utterances" idea of Saunders and Wallace holds out some prospect of doing better---but best of all would be a degree-theoretic semantics.

A second caveat: what I've got (if anything) is epistemic reason for adopting certain kinds of graded attitude. It's not clear to me that we have to think of these graded attitudes as a kind of uncertainty. And it's not so clear why expected utility, as calculated from these attitudes, should be a guide to action. On the other hand, I don't see clearly the argument that they *don't* or *shouldn't* have this pragmatic significance.

So I've written up a little note on some of these issues---the treatment of fission that Saunders-Wallace use, the worries about limitations to the de se defence, and some of the ideas about accuracy-based defences of graded beliefs in a branching world. It's very drafty (far more so than anything I usually put up as work in progress). To some extent it seems like a big blog post, so I thought I'd link to it from here in that spirit. Comments very welcome!

Update: Oh, and worldle abstract:

Indeterminate survival: in draft (x-post from TnT)

2008-07-24T13:01:00.003+01:00

Update: I posted this over at Theories and Things, but I feel for it's MV posting I should give the Wordle Abstract for the draft paper:

On with the post:

So, finally, I’ve got another draft prepared. This is a paper focussing on Bernard Williams’ concerns about how to think and feel about indeterminacy in questions of one’s own survival.

Suppose that you know that you know there’s an individual in the future who’s going to get harmed. Should you invest a small amount of money to alleviate the harm? Should you feel anxious about the harm?

Well, obviously if you care about the guy (or just have a modicum of humanity) you probably should. But if it was *you* that was going to suffer the harm, there’d be a particularly distinctive frisson. From a prudential point of view, you’d be compelled to invest minor funds for great benefit. And you really should have that distinctive first-personal phenomenology associated with anxiety on one’s own behalf. Both of these de se attitudes seem important features of our mental life and evaluations.

The puzzle I take from Williams is: are the distinctively first-personal feelings and expectations appropriate in a case where you know that it’s indeterminate whether you survive as the individual who’s going to suffer?

Williams thought that by reflecting on such questions, we could get an argument against account of personal identity that land us with indeterminate cases of survival. I’d like to play the case in a different direction. It seems to me pretty unavoidable that we’ll end up favouring accounts of personal identity that allow for indeterminate cases. So if , when you combine such cases with this or that theory of indeterminacy, you end up saying silly things, I want to take that as a blow to that account of indeterminacy.

It’s not knock-down (what is in philosophy?) but I do think that we can get leverage in this way against rejectionist treatments of indeterminacy, at least as applied to these kind of cases. Rejectionist treatments include those folks who think that characteristic attitudes to borderline cases includes primarily a rejection of the law of excluded middle; and (probably) those folks who think that in such cases we should reject bivalence, even if LEM itself is retained.

In any case, this is definitely something I’m looking for feedback/comments on (particularly on the material on how to think about rational constraints on emotions, which is rather new territory for me). So thoughts very welcome!

Primitivism about indeterminacy: a worry (x-post from TnT)

2008-07-24T12:57:00.002+01:00

I’m quite tempted by the view that it is indeterminate that might be one of those fundamental, brute bits of machinery that goes into constructing the world. Imagine, for example, you’re tempted by the thought that in a strong sense the future is “open”, or “unfixed”. Now, maybe one could parlay that into something epistemic (lack of knowledge of what the future is to be), or semantic (indecision over which of the existing branching futures is “the future”) or maybe mere non-existence of the future would capture some of this unfixity thought. But I doubt it. (For discussion of what the openness of the future looks like from this perspective, see Ross and Elizabeth’s forthcoming Phil Studies piece).

The open future is far from the only case you might consider—I go through a range of possible arenas in which one might be friendly to a distinctively metaphysical kind of indeterminacy in this paper—and I think treating “indeterminacy” as a perfectly natural bit of kit is an attractive way to develop that. And, if you’re interested in some further elaboration and defence of this primitivist conception see this piece by Elizabeth and myself—and see also Dave Barnett’s rather different take on a similar idea in a forthcoming piece in AJP (watch out for the terminological clashes–Barnett wants to contrast his view with that of “indeterminists”. I think this is just a different way of deploying the terminology.)

I think everyone should pay more attention to primitivism. It’s a kind of “null” response to the request for an account of indeterminacy—and it’s always interesting to see why the null response is unavailable. I think we’ll learn a lot about what the compulsory questions the a theory of indeterminacy must answer, from seeing what goes wrong when the theory of indeterminacy is as minimal as you can get.

But here I want to try to formulate a certain kind of objection to primitivism about indeterminacy. Something like this has been floating around in the literature—and in conversations!—for a while (Williamson and Field, in particular, are obvious sources for it). I also think the objection if properly formulated would get at something important that lies behind the reaction of people who claim *just not to understand* what a metaphysical conception of indeterminacy would be. (If people know of references where this kind of idea is dealt with explicitly, then I’d be really glad to know about them).

The starting assumption is: saying “it’s an indeterminate case” is a legitimate answer to the query “is that thing red?”. Contrast the following. If someone asks “is that thing red?” and I say: it’s contingent whether it’s red”, then I haven’t made a legitimate conversational move. The information I’ve given is simply irrelevant to it’s actual redness.

So it’s a datum that indeterminacy-answers are in some way relevant to redness (or whatever) questions. And it’s not just that “it is indeterminate whether it is red” has “it is red” buried within it – so does the contingency “answer”, but it is patently irrelevant.

So what sort of relevance does it have? Here’s a brief survey of some answers:

(1) Epistemicist. “It’s indeterminate whether p” has the sort of relevance that answering “I don’t know whether p” has. Obviously it’s not directly relevant to the question of whether p, but at least expresses the inability to give a definitive answer.

(2) Rejectionist (like truth-value gap-ers, inc. certain supervaluationists, and LEM-deniers like Field, intuitionists). Answering “it’s indeterminate” communicates information which, if accepted, should lead you to reject both p, and not-p. So it’s clearly relevant, since it tells the inquirer what their attitudes to p itself should be.

(3) Degree theorist (whether degree-supervaluationist like Lewis, Edgington, or degree-functional person like Smith, Machina, etc). Answering “it’s indeterminate” communicates something like the information that p is half-true. And, at least on suitable elaborations of degree theory, we’ll then now how to shape our credences in p itself: we should have credence 0.5 in p if we have credence 1 that p is half true.

(4) Clarification request. (maybe some contextualists?) “it’s indeterminate that p” conveys that somehow the question is ill-posed, or inappropriate. It’s a way of responding whereby we refuse to answer the question as posed, but invite a reformulation. So we’re asking the person who asked “is it red?” to refine their question to something like “is it scarlet?” or “is it reddish?” or “is it at least not blue?” or “does it have wavelength less than such-and-such?”.

(For a while, I think, it was was indeterminate, one couldn’t know p (think of parallel discussion of “minimal” conceptions ofassumed that every series account of indeterminacy would say that if p vagueness—see Patrick Greenough’s Mind paper). If that was right then (1) would be available to everybody. But I don’t think that that’s at all obvious — and in particular, I don’t think it’s obvious the primitivist would endorse it, and if they did, what grounds they would have for saying so).

There are two readings of the challenge we should pull apart. One is purely descriptive. What kind of relevance does indeterminacy have, on the primitivist view? The second is justificatory: why does it have that relevance? Both are relevant here, but the first is the most important. Consider the parallel case of chance. There we know what, descriptively, we want the relevance of “there’s a 20% chance that p” to be: someone learning this information should, ceteris paribus, fix their credence in p to 0.2. And there’s a real question about whether a metaphysical primitive account of chance can justify that story (that’s Lewis’s objection to a putative primitivist treatment of chance facts).

The justification challenge is important, and how exactly to formulate a reasonable challenge here will be a controversial matter. E.g. maybe route (4), above, might appeal to the primitivist. Fine—but why is that response the thing that indeterminacy-information should prompt? I can see the outlines of a story if e.g. we were contextualists. But I don’t see what the primitivist should say.

But the more pressing concern right now is that for the primitivist about indeterminacy, we don’t as yet have a helpful answer to the descriptive question. So we’re not even yet in a position to start engaging with the justificatory project. This is what I see as the source of some dissatisfaction with primitivism – the sense that as an account it somehow leaves something unimportant explained. Until the theorist has told me something more I’m at a loss about what to do with the information that p is indeterminate

Furthermore, at least in certain applications, one’s options on the descriptive question are constrained. Suppose, for example, that you want to say that the future is indeterminate. But you want to allow that one can rationally have different credences for different future events. So I can be 50/50 on whether the sea battle is going to happen tomorrow, and almost certain I’m not about to quantum tunnel through the floor. Clearly, then, nothing like (2) or (3) is going on, where one can read off strong constraints on strength of belief in p from the information that p is indeterminate. (1) doesn’t look like a terribly good model either—especially if you think we can sometimes have knowledge of future facts.

So if you think that the future is primitively unfixed, indeterminate, etc—and friends of mine do—I think (a) you owe a response to the descriptive challenge; (b) then we can start asking about possible justifications for what you say; (c) your choices for (a) are very constrained.

I want to finish up by addressing one response to the kind of questions I’ve been pressing. I ask: what is the relevance of answering “it’s indeterminate” to first-order questions? How should I alter my beliefs in receipt of the information, what does it tell me about the world or the epistemic state of my informant?

You might be tempted to say that your informant communicates, minimally, that it’s at best indeterminate whether she knows that p. Or you might try claiming that in such circumstances it’s indeterminate whether you *should* believe p (i.e. there’s no fact of the matter as to how you should shape your credences on the question of whether p). Arguably, you can derive these from the determinate truth of certain principles (determinacy, truth as the norm of belief, etc) plus a bit of logic. Now, that sort of thing sounds like progress at first glance – even if it doesn’t lay down a recipe for shaping my beliefs, it does sound like it says something relevant to the question of what to do with the information. But I’m not sure about that it really helps. After all, we could say exactly parallel things with the “contingency answer” to the redness question with which we began. Saying “it’s contingent that p” does entail that it’s contingent at best whether one knows that p, and contingent at best whether one should believe p. But that obviously doesn’t help vindicate contingency-answers to questions of whether p. So it seems that the kind of indeterminacy-involving elaborations just given, while they may be *true*, don’t really say all that much.

Wordles

2008-07-22T12:26:00.004+01:00

Via Robbie, I've discovered the genius source of amusement that is Wordle.

Update: Okay, I've become completely addicted. Here are the ones I've saved so far.

Truthmaking for Presentists

The Open Future

Truthmakers and Ontological Commitment

The Contingency of Composition

Turtles All the Way Down

Truthmakers, Realism and Ontology

On The Source Of Necessity

And here is Elizabeth's: Ontic Vagueness

Quantification, Naturalness, Ontology

2008-07-18T10:22:00.002+01:00

I’ve posted a draft of a paper ‘Quantification, Naturalness, Ontology’; this is slated for the volume New Waves on Metaphysics, edited by Allan Hazlett – but there’s a while until the deadline, so any comments on it would be really helpful. Here are some of the main themes, on which I’d be grateful to hear thoughts. (These are here condensed and presented without much argument; for further info, obviously, see the paper.)

Thesis 1: As in previous work, I’m concerned with defending a distinction between what there is and what there really is. Following Sider, in order to resist neo-Carnapianism we should insist that there’s a unique most natural existential quantifier: one that carves the world along its quantificational joints. But, there’s no need to say that the ordinary quantifiers of English are this natural quantifier. Naturalness is a reference magnet, to be sure, but it can be trumped by use. But we can introduce a quantifier (‘there really is . . .’) stipulated to be the most natural quantifier. As long as you’re happy with the naturalness talk in the first place, there’s now no mystery in saying that what there is might come apart from what there really is.

Thesis 2: I defend a two-dimensionalist approach to sentences like ‘there is a table’. Considering the universalist world as actual, this sentence requires a table as a truthmaker, and so considering other worlds as counterfactual, we should only judge the sentence to be true at those worlds if they contain certain complex objects, namely tables. But considering the nihilist world as actual, the charitable thing to say is not that that sentence is false but that it requires for its truth only the existence of simples arranged table-wise, and so considering other worlds as counterfactual, we should judge the sentence to be true at a world iff it contains simples arranged table-wise. An attractive consequence is this: assuming (which I hope is the case) that the nihilist world is actual, we have a nice explanation for what many people think is a necessary truth, the necessity of which otherwise looks mysterious, namely: if there are simples arranged table-wise then there is a table.

Thesis 3: It’s right to take Moorean truths about what there is as inviolable. What’s wrong, however, is to read the ontology straightforwardly off of them. The truth of ‘Here is a hand’ is indeed on a stronger footing than any conjunction of premises that entails its falsity. But that doesn’t mean that, e.g., compositional nihilism is false. Compositional nihilism, properly understood, is the claim that no complex objects really exist, and that is compatible with the claim that there are complex objects like hands. The proper methodology is to ask what are needed as the ontological grounds for the Moorean truths. There are no Moorean truths about what there really is.

Thesis 4: The problem of the many is easy. There’s a unique cat on the mat. But asking which collection of particles is the cat, is a bad question. There isn’t really a cat. You can only ask, which collection of particles grounds the fact that there is a cat? Answer: all of them (i.e. all the collections which the universalist thinks are candidates for being the cat). But that doesn’t mean that there are many cats, of course – the one sentence can have multiple grounds.

Thesis 5: Since the ontological commitments of a sentence are its ontological grounds, it’s an open possibility that there are true sentences that lack ontological grounds and hence carry no commitments. I suggest that the truths of mathematics are like this. It’s true that there is a prime number between 8 and 12; but it’s a mistake to think that this is ontologically committing to numbers. (And no ‘paraphrase’ of the sentence into something not quantifying over numbers is necessary to say this.) Mathematical claims are trivial in the sense that they make no demands, a fortiori no ontological demands, on the world. (Cf. what I say here to what Agustin Rayo says in his defence of mathematical trivialism in this excellent paper.)

Thesis 6: Actually not a thesis. I tentatively speculate that one could reduce necessity in the following way: p is necessary iff p lacks an ontological ground. Obviously, not everyone’s going to think this is extensionally adequate, since some think contingent negative existentials lack a ground, and others think everything has a ground, including necessary truths. But I think it looks quite hopeful, and would like to hear whether or not anyone else does.

In other news, Elizabeth and my paper (“Elizabeth and my” – is that right? It sounds terrible, but I can’t think what else it should be.) on the open future has been accepted by Phil Studies. But we’d still appreciate any comments on it, as it’s an issue we’re hopefully going to keep working on.

Metaphysics postdoc at Leeds

2008-07-10T17:01:00.001+01:00

Leeds will be hiring a one-year research postdoc in metaphysics (broadly construed) for the academic year 08-09. The post is partially sponsored by the Centre for Metaphysics and Mind.

To apply on line please visit http://www.leeds.ac.uk and click on ‘jobs’, then 'research' (it will be listed as being in the school of humanities, not the department of philosophy). Alternatively, go here. Or application packs are available via email recruitment@admin.leeds.ac.uk or tel+44 (0)113 343 5771. The closing date for applications is August 6th, and interviews will be held in the week beginning Aug 25th.

For US readers: postdocs in the UK are not like in the US. They are a nice gig. There are very minimal teaching or admin duties, so you've basically got a year of research on a decent salary.

Please forward the details on to any potentially interested parties.

PhD studentship in Theoretical Philosophy

2008-07-10T16:58:00.001+01:00

PhD studentship available at Leeds: please pass on to any potentially interested parties:

__________________________________
The Department of Philosophy, University of Leeds, intends to offer a Studentship in Theoretical Philosophy to a suitably qualified candidate for its full-time or part-time PhD programme. The studentship is tenable for 3yr (f-t) or 6yr (p-t) from October 2008 and has both tuition and maintenance components: the tuition component will be equivalent to the full EU PhD fee (currently £3.3k p.a. f-t) and the maintenance component will be equivalent to that of the AHRC Doctoral award (currently £12.6k p.a. f-t).The award is conditional on successful application for admission to study for PhD in the Department. However, applicants need not apply for admission prior to application for this studentship. Renewal of the studentship each year is subject to satisfactory progress towards PhD completion.

The successful applicant will undertake a PhD project in the area of Theoretical Philosophy broadly construed and will be supervised by Dr.Robert Williams, Reader in Theoretical Philosophy (http://www.philosophy.leeds.ac.uk/Staff/JRGW/index.html). For a range of preferred research topics, see link there to Dr.Williams' personal home page.

The Department operates a professional training and development scheme for postgraduates: as part of this scheme, successful applicants are often given the opportunity to undertake teaching, which is paid at an hourly rate. The Department also offers its PhD students financial support for conference attendance.

Applications should consist in 6 copies of a CV which includes a 500 word PhD-proposal: applicants should also arrange for 2 academic referees to submit references directly to the Department.

All applications and references should be marked Studentship in Theoretical Philosophy, and addressed to Ms Jenneke Stevens, Postgraduate Secretary, Department of Philosophy, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK email j.m.stevens@leeds.ac.uk tel 0113 343 3263 fax 0113 343 3265.

Closing date 15 August 2008.

The University of Leeds promotes excellence in teaching, learning and research.

We welcome applications from all sections of the community.

All information is available in alternative formats - please contact 0113 343 5771.

Presentism and Relativity

2008-07-05T16:26:00.003+01:00

Familiarly, presentism faces an objection from special relativity. According to special relativity, so the objection goes, there is no such thing as absolute simultaneity: events that are simultaneous according to some reference frame are not simultaneous according to another. As a result, what counts as the present is different from one reference frame to another. If presentism is true, then, what exists must vary from one reference frame to another. But this is uncomfortable. Let us spell this argument out in a bit more detail.

1) There is no such thing as absolute simultaneity. (Premise from special relativity.)
2) Only the present time exists. (Premise from presentism.)
3) Only presently existing things exist, and only presently occurring events are occurring. (From 2.)
4) The present time is the time that includes all and only what is simultaneous with your reading of this . (Analytic of ‘the present time’.)
5) What is simultaneous with this utterance varies from one reference frame to another. (From 1.)
6) What things exist, and what events are occurring, varies from one reference frame to another. (From 3, 4 and 5.)

Presentism looks unacceptable then insofar as special relativity and what we might call ontological absolutism – the claim that what things exist, and what events are occurring, is absolute and not relative to anything; a fortiori it is not relative to a reference frame – are both acceptable.

What does the presentist need to do to meet this objection? A sufficient condition for meeting it, presumably, is that they give some reason for privileging one reference frame over any other; for in that case they can claim simply that what exists is what is simultaneous with your reading of this according to the privileged reference frame. What is simultaneous with your reading of this according to non-privileged reference frames is neither here nor there: there is no pressure to think these things exist unless they are simultaneous with your reading of this according to the unique privileged reference frame.

But how can the presentist have a reason for thinking that one reference frame is privileged (without resorting to claiming that God smiles upon one and not the others)? What could ground the privileged status of one reference frame over another, given that the physical facts don’t appear to distinguish between them?

I hear that question as a question about truthmakers. What we need is a truthmaker for the claim that some reference frame is privileged. If there is some ontological ground for distinguishing one reference frame from the others – some thing or things that mark to pick out one reference frame – then we can, without being arbitrary, take that reference frame to be the privileged one: the one that reveals what there is. So what might the truthmaker be for the fact that some reference frame is the privileged one?

Remember that, for the presentist, to exist is to be present. So consider all the events that exist – they are all and only the presently occurring events. So surely the privileged reference frame is just that one according to which exactly these events are simultaneous. In that case the truthmaker for the fact that this is the privileged reference frame is just what makes it true that those events exist – namely, those events.

So the thought is this. Everyone in this debate agrees that there is a unique set, S, which is the set of the existing entities. (That just follows from the assumption of ontological absolutism, and if you reject that then there is no problem in the first place.) This lets us single out a unique reference frame: the unique reference frame according to which exactly the members of S are simultaneous. And so, if we’ve got good reason to think that everything that exists is present then we’ve got good reason to think that this frame is the privileged reference frame. Since everything in S exists then everything in S is present; so they had better be simultaneous; so the reference frame that says they are simultaneous (and that nothing outwith S is simultaneous with any of them) is obviously the privileged one.

I imagine that seems way too quick. But ask yourself what the demand against the presentist is. It’s not that they must be able to discover what is present. The preceding remarks do not help the presentist do that. It may be in principle impossible for the presentist to know what exists because it is in principle impossible for them to know if their reference frame is the privileged one. But the objection against the presentist wasn’t epistemic, it was ontological. The objection wasn’t that discovering what is present, and hence what exists according to the presentist, is made difficult because there is no absolute simultaneity; the objection was that there is no absolute fact of the matter as to what is present, and hence no absolute fact of the matter as to what exists according to the presentist, because there is no absolute simultaneity. That is what I think is answered by the preceding remarks: insofar as we have reason to think that there is an absolute fact of the matter as to what exists, the presentist has reason to think that there is an absolute fact of the matter as to what is present, since granting the presentist that there is a unique set of existing entities allows them to uniquely specify a reference frame – the reference frame according to which they are all only the present things. What other reference frame could be a candidate for being privileged, given that the presentist thinks that to exist is to be present?

(And the epistemic objection doesn’t seem too worrying to me in any case. It seems to reduce to: you can’t know what exists, because you can’t know if you’re in the privileged reference frame. But why is that any better than any of the myriad sceptical challenges that aim to undermine your knowledge by showing that there are empirically equivalent possibilities where you get it wrong?)

I think the objection against the presentist has seemed more forceful than it is due to the assumption that the presentist should be able to pick out a unique reference frame independently of picking out the class of existing entities. But why hold that assumption? It’s not as if those entities exist in virtue of that reference frame being privileged. If that were the case then it may well be objectionably circular to presuppose their existence in an explanation of why that reference frame is privileged. But existence facts are, plausibly, brute: when it is true that a exists it is true solely in virtue of a. So the existence of the members of S can be taken for granted in any metaphysical explanation we choose to give - indeed, if the truthmaker theorist is right, all explanation comes to a halt when, and only when, we reach propositions concerning what the members of S are.

The members of S don’t exist because they are all present according to the privileged reference frame; rather, it is that reference frame that is privileged because it is the one according to which all and only the members of S are present. All of us, presentist and non-presentist alike, have to simply accept as brute the existence of some entities. For the non-presentist, accepting a set of things whose existence is brute does not serve to privileged one reference frame, but that is precisely because they don’t accept that to exist is to be present. For the presentist, however, these entities must be present, because everything is present, and so it follows immediately that only a reference frame according to which all and only these things are simultaneous is one that gets things right. Since we are sure of at least one thing that it is present – namely the reading of this sentence – and since there is a unique reference frame according to which that event is simultaneous with exactly the members of S, we know that that reference frame is the privileged one.

The argument from relativity might have force against other versions of the A-theory – such as the moving spotlight or growing block views – that postulate a privileged present without saying that what it is to exist is to be present. Such views require a privileged frame of reference but can’t say that it is the frame of reference according to which all the existing things co-exist: that frame of reference would get things wrong since both views admit the existence of past entities as well as present ones. And so they need another answer as to what grounds the privileged status of the reference frame that gets things right, and it’s not clear what they can say. But presentism, I think, faces no problem: and so this is one reason to think that presentism is the best version of the A-theory available.

Perspectives on Ontology - registration deadline

2008-06-22T08:39:00.002+01:00

The deadline to register for Perspectives on Ontology (July 1st) is fast approaching; so if you want to come to this fantastic conference, you'd better send your registration in asap!

Details here:

www.personal.leeds.ac.uk/~phlrpc/Perspectives on Ontology.htm

Truthmakers, presentism and indeterminacy

2008-05-18T12:03:00.001+01:00

In my ‘Truthmaking for Presentists’ paper, I end up defending the following 2 theses:

1) Truths concerning what was or will be the case are grounded by the presently existing world instantiating a distributional property – I’ll call it a world history – that says how it is across time.
2) The asymmetry of fixity – that the past is fixed and the future is open – is to be explained as follows: there is a non-empty non-singleton set, S, of candidate world histories, such that it’s determinate that exactly one of them is instantiated by the present world but not determinate of any member of S that it is instantiated by the present world. The candidate properties ‘agree’ on how the past was and ‘disagree’ on how the future will be, which is why propositions concerning the past are fixed whilst those concerning the future are unsettled.

This raises a bunch of questions: What makes it the case that the present candidates for being our world’s world history are the present candidates for being our world’s world history? What change in being has there been between yesterday and now that accounts for the fact that there are fewer candidate world histories? What is the difference in being between our world and a world whose past is like ours but which has a less open future? What makes it true that it’s determinate that a member of S is the world history of our world? What makes it true that it’s indeterminate of any particular member of S that it is the world history of our world?

These questions raise issues concerning how the truthmaker theorist should deal with propositions of the form ‘(In)determinately, p’, which I’ve been thinking about recently.

There are two broad approaches to answering these questions. On the first approach, propositions of the form ‘Determinately, p’ or ‘It’s indeterminate whether p’ get treated just like any other. On this view, there will be some truthmaker for ‘Determinately, p’, some thing which can’t exist and p not be determinately true, and some truthmaker for ‘It’s indeterminate whether p’, some thing which can’t exist and p have a determinate truth-value.

This approach will, perhaps, be favoured by those who hold that there is no gap between truth and determinate truth. On this view, it’s safe to simply identify the truthmaker for ‘determinately, p’ with the truthmaker for p: all God has to do to make p a determinate truth is to make p true, so any thing that makes p true will make it true that p is determinately true. On this view, indeterminacy leads to a truth-value gap, and so a truthmaker for ‘It’s indeterminate whether p’ can be thought of simply as something whose existence necessarily excludes the existence both of any truthmaker for p and any truthmaker for not-p.

I, however, hold that there is a gap between truth and determinate truth. More has to happen for the world to be such that p is determinately true than that p is true. If truth doesn’t entail determinate truth, what more is needed of ontology to make p determinately true than is needed to make it merely true? I reject the answer that says there must be an additional truthmaker for ‘Determinately, p’: rather, I say that the truthmaker for p must simply be a determinate existent rather than a mere existent.

If God wants to make sure that p is not only true but determinately true, He doesn’t need to add another entity to the world, in addition to the truthmaker for p, that will make it true that p is determinately true. Rather, all He needs to do to ensure that p is not merely true but determinately true is ensure that the truthmaker for p not only exists but determinately exists, (or at least that it’s determinate that a truthmaker for p exists – He needn’t make it determinate of a particular truthmaker for p that it exists). If God wants to make a world where p is indeterminate, He should create a world where it’s indeterminate whether a truthmaker for p or a truthmaker for not-p exists. And if He wants to create a world where p is true but indeterminate, He should create a world where there is a truthmaker for p but where it doesn’t determinately exist (and nor is it determinate that there is any truthmaker for p).

The idea is that propositions expressed by sentences involving the determinacy or indeterminacy operators don’t themselves get matched up to possible truthmakers. Rather, the ‘(in)determinacy free’ propositions that are their constituents get matched up to possible truthmakers, and the ‘(in)determinacy involving’ propositions get their truth-value bases on whether those truthmakers determinately exist, determinately don’t exist, exist but don’t determinately exist, or don’t exist but don’t determinately not exist.

Traditionally, the truthmaker theorist thinks that in order to fix exactly what is true, God simply has to decide what to create. On the view under offer, this isn’t quite right. Deciding what to create fixes the truth-value of the ‘(in)determinacy free’ propositions; but to further fix the truth-values of the ‘(in)determinacy involving’ propositions, God has to do one more thing: decide which of the things He’s decided to create are to exist determinately and which are to exist but not determinately exist., and decide which of the things He’s decided not to create are to determinately not exist and which are to not exist but not determinately not exist. Once He’s done that, he’ll have settled everything there is to settle.

Let’s return to the questions we asked earlier regarding the candidate world histories. Presumably, what would make it true that H is the world history of our world would be the state of affairs of our world instantiating H. In the normal run of things – when we’re not dealing with indeterminacy – explanation can stop here; we don’t have to admit an additional entity to make it true that the state of affairs of our world instantiating H exists: the state of affairs itself makes that true. Everything makes true the fact that it itself exists, so once we’ve reached the facts concerning what truthmakers exist, we’ve reached the level of facts where explanation comes to a halt.

But in the above context, where it is indeterminate which member of S is the world history of our world, it must be indeterminate what state of affairs exists. Suppose S just has two members: H1 and H2. Then here are three truths:

1) It is indeterminate whether H1 is the world history of our world
2) It is indeterminate whether H2 is the world history of our world
3) It is determinate that exactly one of H1 and H2 is the world history of our world

The truth of (1) – (3) entail the truth of (4) – (6) below:

4) It is indeterminate whether the state of affairs of our world instantiating H1 exists
5) It is indeterminate whether the state of affairs of our world instantiating H2 exists
6) It is determinate that exactly one of the state of affairs of our world instantiating H1 or the state of affairs of our world instantiating H2 exists.

On the approach I rejected, we now need truthmakers for (4) – (6). I suggest abandoning this approach. Intuitively, the difference in being between a world in which (4) is true and a world in which it is false is simply the difference in the status this state of affairs has in both worlds: in one it has determinate existence, in the other it lacks determinate existence (without going so far as to have determinate non-existence). Doesn’t that sound like difference in being enough? Why should we feel the need to postulate something outside of this state of affairs that exists at one world and accounts for the state of affairs’ determinate existence and which doesn’t exist at the world where the state of affairs does not determinately exist?

On the view I advocate, there are no truthmakers for (4) – (6). (4) – (6) are brute truths; explanation comes to a halt here. If p is indeterminately true then what grounds this is that it is indeterminate whether a truthmaker for p exists; but that it is indeterminate that such a truthmaker exists is not itself something that demands a truthmaker.

Is this revisionary? It’s not clear to me that it is, and I certainly think that it’s in the spirit of truthmaker theory. Truthmaker theory just is a theory about what truths are brute. The only brute truths, says the truthmaker theorist, are truths about what there is: explanation only comes to an end when we reach the ontological inventory. Now, if there’s no indeterminacy in the world, then it’s natural to characterise such truths as all being of the form ‘X (the Xs) exist(s)’. But if it can be indeterminate what exists, then it’s not clear why ‘It is indeterminate whether Y exists’ should be grounded in some truth of the form ‘X exists’: there is a perfectly good sense in which ‘It is indeterminate whether Y exists’ is about what there is, and hence is exactly the kind of truth that truthmaker theory allows us to take as brute. ‘It is indeterminate whether Y exists’ is not about how Y is, it’s about whether Y is: it belongs with ‘Y exists’ and not with ‘Y is F’, in that it is a truth simply about what should go on the ontological inventory and not a truth about how the things that are on the ontological inventory are. To put this another way: being indeterminately existent is no more a property than being existent, and so attributing indeterminate existence to an entity is no more to say something about how that entity is than attributing existence to it: both attributions are to do with whether the entity is, not how it is, and so if one can acceptably be taken as brute, so can the other.

The truthmaker theorist is fond of theological metaphors: all God has to do to fix what is true is to fix what exists. I agree. And if He wants to make a proposition p determinately true he will make sure to make the corresponding portion of ontology that makes p true determinately existent (or at least make it determinate that there is a corresponding bit of ontology), whereas if He wants to make it indeterminate whether p is true, He will make it indeterminate whether that portion (or indeed, any such portion) of ontology exists. He does not need to thereby add more ontology to the world to make it true that this portion of ontology determinately or indeterminately exists: His fixing that it determinately or indeterminately exists is part of His fixing what there is.

Consider two presentist worlds, wc and wo. Since they are presentist worlds, they consist of one time only: call it t. But both worlds are such that they will last for exactly one more instant after t and haven’t existed before t. Both worlds will be such that they have lasted for two instants, then. They both contain one entity, a, which exists throughout the duration of the world; which is just to say that a exists at t and that it will persist into the next instant. At t, the first instant of each world (the present instant), a is F. In wc (the closed world), it is settled at t that a will remain F in the second instant. In wo (the open world), it is unsettled at t whether a will remain F in the second instant or whether a will cease to be F.

What does God have to do to make wc? He has to take a and the distributional property of being F and then (in the next instant) F and put them together in the state of affairs of a having this distributional property: call it SC. He then has to make this state of affairs a determinate existent. Were wc actual, it would be true that a will be F, and this would be made true by SC; furthermore, in this closed world, a’s future is settled: it is determinately true that a will be F, and the truth of this is secured by the fact that SC doesn’t just exist but rather exists determinately.

Making wo is a little more complicated for God. As a first step, He’ll need the distributional property of being F and then (in the next instant) not-F, and the state of affairs (call it SO) of a having this property. He then needs to decree that it is determinate that exactly one of SC or SO exists, but that it is indeterminate that SC exists and indeterminate that SO exists. This suffices to ensure that, were wo actual, it would be open what will happen to a: it will be determinate that a is F (since it’s determinate that a truthmaker for ‘a is F’ exists, since it’s determinate that one or other of SC and SO exist, and the existence of either will make it true that a is F), but it will be determinate whether or not a will be F in the future (since it’s indeterminate whether there’s a truthmaker for ‘a will be F’, since one of the candidate world histories would make that true and the other won’t).

But God’s job isn’t done yet. For suppose wo is actual. Once we wait an instant, we’ll be able to see whether a is F in the second instant of wo’s history, and this will reveal whether the proposition ‘a will be F’ was true at t. Suppose a does in fact remain F. In that case, a’s history in the two worlds is just the same: it’s just that in one world its history was open and in the other it was closed. At t in both worlds, what lies ahead in the future for a is the same: it’s just that in one world it is settled that this is what lies ahead for a, and in the other world it’s not settled that this is a’s future, because there are genuine alternatives that are not ruled out. So God needs to do one last thing to make wo: He needs to make SC exist. He just needs to be careful that in doing so He doesn’t make it determinately exist!

wo and wc, then, are exactly alike with respect to what ‘(in)determinacy free’ propositions are true, and differ solely with respect to the truth-value of propositions of the form ‘Determinately, p’ or ‘It is indeterminate whether p’. And this leads to exactly what you’d expect on the view under offer: they are exactly alike with respect to what exists, and differ only as to whether some of the things that exists determinately exist and whether some of the things that don’t exist determinately don’t exist. SC exists at both worlds and SO doesn’t exist at either world; but in wc SC is a determinate existent and SO a determinate non-existent, whereas in wo it’s neither determinately the case that SC exists or determinately the case that it doesn’t exist, and likewise for SO. On the other hand, a is a determinate existent at both worlds, and SX, the state of affairs of a having the distributional property being not-F and then (in the next instant) F, determinately doesn’t exist at both worlds.

So, I’d love any feedback on the above approach. I’d also really appreciate any thoughts on my response to the following potential objection.

Objection: “What you’re doing, basically, is allowing more truths as brute than simply those of the form ‘such-and-such exists’. You’re also allowing as brute truths of the form ‘Determinately, p’ or ‘Indeterminately, p’ provided that p is itself a truth of the form ‘such-and-such exists’. But if we’re allowed to do that with the determinacy operators, what’s the bar on doing that with temporal operators? That is, why can’t we allow as brute truths of the form ‘WAS, p’ or ‘WILL BE, p’, provided that p is itself a truth of the form ‘such-and-such exists’? If, when characterising what God has to do to fix what is the case, we’re allowed to say that He makes A a determinate existent and B an indeterminate existent, why are we not allowed to also say that He simply makes C a past existent, D a future existent, etc. There’s no privileged difference that will allow you to take truths of the form ‘Determinately, A exists’ as brute and not truths of the form ‘It will be the case in a year’s time that B exists’; but if we can take the latter as brute, there’s simply no truthmaker objection to presentism, and so all of the above is unnecessary.”

Reply: I think there is a privileged difference. ‘Determinately, such-and-such exists’ is about what there is in a way that ‘WAS, such-and-such exists’ is not – it’s just about what there was.

The temporal (and modal, for that matter) operators ‘point beyond’ themselves in a way that the determinacy operators don’t. When I modify ‘A exists’ with a temporal or modal operator, I’m attributing to A the same kind of existence as if I simply said ‘A exists’, but I’m attributing this kind of existence to A not in the circumstances of utterance but at some point removed from the circumstances of utterance: I’m saying that A has the bog-standard mode of existence – but it doesn’t have it here, it has it some distance along the temporal or modal dimension. By contrast, when I modify ‘A exists’ with a determinacy operator (by saying ‘Determinately, A exists’ or ‘It’s indeterminate whether A exists’) I’m making a claim about A’s existence in the circumstances of the utterance and instead modifying the mode of A’s existence.

To say that p is determinate or indeterminate is to say something about p’s status in our current circumstances, it’s not to ‘point beyond’ our current circumstances and say something about its status at circumstances removed from ours along some dimension in the way that we do when we say that p was or will be true, or that it could or must have been true. Determinate existence and not-determinate existence are types of existence a thing can have in the current circumstances; necessary or contingent existence, or temporary or eternal existence (e.g.), are not modes of existence – a necessary/eternal existent exists in the same way as a contingent/temporary existent, it just does so at every point across the modal/temporal dimension. Whereas when I say that something is a determinate existent, this is not to say (contra Akiba) that that thing exists at every point across some ‘precisificational’ dimension , but to say something about how it exists in our circumstances.

That’s why I think it’s acceptable for the truthmaker theorist to take as brute truths concerning what determinately exists or exists but not determinately, etc, but not truths concerning what will or did exist, or what could or must exist. Only the former are truths concerning what there is; the latter concern not what there is, but only what there was or will be, or what there could or must be, and hence must be grounded in facts concerning what there is.

Jobs at Leeds

2008-05-07T09:11:00.002+01:00

Leeds is advertising for two one-year lecturerships; one with a preferance for phil science, the other with a preferance for value/history. Details here.

These are quite nice gigs, because (unlike a lot of temporary jobs) your workload and teaching/admin duties will be just like that of any other member of staff, temporary or permanent - so the successful applicants will have the same amount of time dedicated for research as any other member of staff.

Neo-Carnapianism and triviality

2008-04-23T15:32:00.002+01:00

So here's something that's been puzzling me, and I've made very little progress on. The neo-Carnapian holds that ontological debates are shallow. When two ontologists argue as to whether there are Fs, the neo-Carnapian says that this isn't a genuine ontological debate: that at worst these two theorists are simply talking past one another; at best their disagreement is merely linguisitc, over the correct usage of the English terms involved.

Now, it's obviously trivial that we could use the term 'exists' differently, so that 'there exists an F' would have had the opposite truth value from what it in fact has. We could have meant by 'there exists' what we in fact mean by 'there doesn't exist', for example. That's not interesting. So what is the neo-Carnapian thesis? Sider characterises it, correctly, as the doctrine that there are multiple meanings for the quantifier and that none of them is more natural than any of the others. (Either because there's no such thing as naturalness, or because there is and they're all equally natural.) Okay, but we just used a quantifier to state that: there are multiple meanings for the quantifier that are equally natural. So if neo-Carnapianism is true, wouldn't their own theory tell them that their theory is not a substantial theory: that is, one whose truth is sensitive not to the metaphysics but simply to what we mean by our words? If neo-Carnapianism is false, it's substantially false, but if it's true it's trivial (in one good sense of trivial).

Is that right? And if so, is it a problem for neo-Carnapianism? It's a strange dialectical position to be in, to hold a view that is trivial if true and substantially false if false, but it's not obviously incoherent.

(I've been considering a neo-Carnapian who thinks that all ontologiacal disputes are shallow; of course, many don't - Hirsch, for example, thinks disputes about the existence of complex objects etc are shallow, but not disuputes about the existence of, e.g., numbers and sets. So let the question be: does the above give us reason to reject global neo-Carnapianism: to hold that at least the question as to whether there is a most natural meaning for the quantifier is a substantive ontological question?)

Perspectives on Ontology - Register Now!

2008-04-02T13:47:00.004+01:00

UPDATE: Registration details are now available for Perspectives on Ontology. Please see the website here.

Attendance at the conference is limited, so I urge early registration.

Details are also available for the graduate bursaries.

Perspectives on Ontology

A major international conference on metaphysics to be held at the University of Leeds, Sep 5th-7th 2008.

Speakers:
Karen Bennett (Cornell)
John Hawthorne (Oxford
Jill North (Yale)
Helen Steward (Leeds)
Gabriel Uzquiano (Oxford)
Jessica Wilson (Toronto)

Commentators:
Benj Hellie (Toronto)
Kris McDaniel (Syracuse)
Juha Saatsi (Leeds)
Ted Sider (NYU)
Jason Turner (Leeds)
Robbie Williams (Leeds)

There's also going to be a graduate conference directly prior to this. Details, including a call for papers, are available here.

Counterpart theory and the incarnation. Cos why not?

2008-04-02T10:41:00.003+01:00

While I generally try and avoid the philosophy of religion unless I'm bored of an afternoon, this year I have been teaching 'metaphysical issues in religion', and so have been forced to get to grips with some of the issues.

One issue that's not been uninteresting is a familiar problem regarding God’s incarnation as the man Jesus Christ. Christ is both human and divine. This is to say that he has a human nature and a divine nature. As the Council of Chalcedon put it in 451AD, "the same Christ . . . [is] to be acknowledged in two natures . . . the characteristic property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one person."

The threat is that this leads quickly to outright contradiction. Associated with the divine nature are properties of perfection, such as omnipotence, omniscience and omnibenevolence; but associated with the human nature is the absence of such perfections. Humans are neither omnipotent, omniscient nor omnibenevolent. And so we seem driven to saying that Christ both is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent (in virtue of being divine) and not omnipotent, omniscient or omnibenevolent (in virtue of being human): a contradiction three times over!

How to respond? One option is to deny that it follows from having a human nature that one doesn’t have any of the qualities of divine perfection. Certainly, it is no part of the human nature that a human have these qualities: but it hardly follows that in virtue of being human a thing must lack those qualities – being human might simply be silent as to the presence or absence of the divine perfections. In that case Christ’s humanity simply doesn’t speak to his having or lacking omnipotence, omniscience and omnibenevolence. As far as his human nature is concerned, it is simply an open question whether he has those properties or not. The door is closed, however, because of his divinity, which ensures that he does indeed have them. And so Christ simply has the divine perfections, and there is no threat of contradiction.

Such a view is taken by Thomas Morris. Morris distinguished between being wholly human and merely human. Christ is wholly human because he belongs to the kind human. And if it makes any sense to speak of things as partially belonging to a kind, Christ does not only partly belong to it, he wholly belongs to it. But he is not merely human. To be merely human is to have no more essential properties that what are guaranteed by being a member of the kind human; and Christ does have more, because he also has the properties that are guaranteed by his divinity.

This view avoids the paradox, but at a cost. There is a strong temptation to hold not only that being human doesn’t entail the possession of the divine perfections but that it entails their absence. To say otherwise, after all, is to invite the theologically immodest claim that even we mere humans might have been omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent. We are not in fact as God is; but we could have been.

But also, there is some desire to be able to say that Christ the man lacked them. Think of Christ in Gethsemane: it appears for all the world to be the story of a man who is worried about the future. But why would such concerns arise unless Christ lacked knowledge about how things would turn out? Think now of Christ being tempted by Satan: it appears for all the world to be a story about a man overcoming temptation. But unless there was the possibility of his succumbing, there was nothing to overcome. And so the threat of contradiction is pressing. Christ, we want to say, is both limited and unlimited, both perfect and flawed. How can this be?

One thing we might be tempted to say is that Christ has the divine perfections qua God but not qua man. But what do such locutions mean? Well, there’s a familiar story about how that can be the case; and surprisingly it has received no discussion, to my knowledge, in this context. I want to put this option on the table: the option is counterpart theory.

Compare the case of Christ and omnipotence with a familiar case which is structurally analogous: the case of the statue and the clay. The clay can be squashed but the statue cannot. And yet many of us feel the pressure to say that there is only one entity here: the lump of clay simply is the statue. How, then, are we to avoid the absurdity that one and the same thing both has and doesn’t have the property of squashability?

As above, there is a temptation to say that this one thing is squashable qua lump of clay but not qua statue. But what does this mean? Counterpart theory gives us an answer. The properties of this one thing remain constant, but whether any of its properties deserve to be called the property of squashability depends on contextually variant factors, which means that whether or not the entity satisfies the predicate ‘. . . could be squashed’ can itself vary from context to context. When we speak of the one thing as the clay, this is enough to make salient the clay-ness of the entity, and in such a context one of the properties had by this entity deserves to be called the property of squashability, which is why we speak truly when we say that the clay could be squashed. When we speak of the one thing as the statue, on the other hand, this is enough to make salient the statue-ness of the entity, and in such a context none of the properties had by this entity deserves to be called the property of squashability – including the one previously correctly so described! This is why we speak truly when we say that the statue could not be squashed. And this is what we mean when we say that the entity can be squashed qua lump of clay but not qua statue.

That is enough to show that there need be no inconsistency in saying in one context that an entity satisfies some predicate and in another that it lacks it (despite not having undergone change): to generate an inconsistency one needs the further assumption that the property being picked out by that predicate is the same in both contexts. Since the predicate ‘. . . could be squashed’ is picking out a different property depending on whether the subject is referred to as the statue or as the clay, there is no inconsistency in saying that the statue couldn’t be squashed but that the clay could, even though they are one and the same thing. Likewise, if ‘. . . is omnipotent’, ‘. . . is omniscient’ etc pick out a different property depending on whether the subject is referred to as God or as man then there is no inconsistency in saying that Christ the man lacks omnipotence and omniscience etc and that Christ the God possesses them, even though the God is the man.

Omnipotence is a modal property like squashability: it is the property of being able to do anything possible. One needn’t actually do every possible action to be omnipotent, it simply has to be within one’s powers, which is to say that for any possible action one could do it. In that case, the counterpart theoretic solution can simply be carried over to the case of Christ and omnipotence. It is true to say that Christ the God is omnipotent and false to say that Christ the man is omnipotent. Why? Not because there are two entities, but because different standards of similarity are invoked depending on whether it is the divine or the human characteristics of one and the same entity that are made salient. If Christ’s divinity is salient then no possible being would count as dissimilar to Christ in virtue of doing some possible action – and so, for any possible action, there is a counterpart of Christ that performs that action, which is why Christ satisfies ‘. . . is omnipotent’. But if Christ’s humanity is salient then beings that perform miraculous feats like creating the universe ex nihilo don’t get to count as Christ’s counterparts, since humans just can’t do such things. And so, in this context, it will be true to say that there are things that Christ (the man) just couldn’t do, and thus true to say that he is not omnipotent.

Does the counterpart theoretic story carry over to the other divine perfections, such as omniscience and omnibenevolence? I think the prospects aren't terrible. It is easy to construe such predicates as being implicitly modal. It is no stretch of the imagination to suggest that to be omnibenevolent it is not enough simply to have managed not to actually do anything wrong: rather, one must have had the disposition to act rightly no matter what the circumstances. (You don’t get to be omnibenevolent by moral luck!) And so whether an object satisfies ‘. . . is omnibenevolent’ depends on whether or not that object has counterparts that do wrong things, and so the above story applies. Likewise with omniscience: it’s not enough simply to know all truths – the omniscient being would know even the propositions that are actually false, had those propositions been true. And in general, when we’re dealing with the divine perfections, they will concern not just how the bearer actually is but how it could have been. Perfection implies a counterfactual robustness – you don’t get to be perfect y accident. God’s perfection with respect to knowledge or power or etc concerns how he is and how he could and must have been: a being does not get to share in these properties by virtue of chance or luck. And as soon as one insists on counterfactual robustness one makes these predicates modal, which invites the counterpart theoretic solution to the threatening paradox.

What about God’s actual knowledge of all actual truths? Don’t we want to deny this to Christ the man as well? (Consider his apparent lack of knowledge, in Gethsemane, as to how the future would turn out.) If so, then to run the above story we must accept a modal account of what it is for an agent to know something. But this is not implausible. It’s what Ryle held, for example. x knows that p iff, roughly, x is disposed to act in a p-believing way in suitable circumstances. Now, of course, Ryle combined this with a behaviourism about the mental and an account of dispositions as brute truths; but we needn’t join him in either of those theses to find plausible the linking of knowledge ascriptions with ascriptions of some complex dispositional. It needn’t be an analysis of what it is for x to know that p for x to be disposed in a certain manner in order for the truth of the knowledge ascription to go hand in hand with the truth of the dispositional ascription. And if the truth of the knowledge ascription is sensitive to the truth of the dispositional ascription then context sensitivity in the latter will result in context sensitivity in the former. Christ the God can be correctly ascribed knowledge that p because all his relevant Godly counterparts act in a p-believing way when in the appropriate circumstances, but Christ the man cannot correctly be ascribed knowledge that p because he has manly counterparts that fail to exhibit p-believing behaviour even when prompted appropriately.

Here's an interesting consequence of the counterpart theoretic view: it commits us to saying that while the second person of the Trinity, God the Son, in fact incarnated as the man Jesus Christ, he might not have done. Counterpart theory, familiarly, commits us to the contingency of identity. The statue is in fact identical to the lump of clay, but it might not have been: had the lump of clay been squashed, it wouldn’t have been identical to the statue. Likewise, Christ the God, the second person of the Trinity, is in fact identical to Christ the man (who is also therefore, given Leibniz’s law, the second person of the Trinity). But Christ the God might not have been identical to Christ the man: had the man been flawed he wouldn’t have been identical to the God. And so whilst Christ the God is essentially the second person of the Trinity, Christ the man is only accidentally the second person of the Trinity.

Regimentation

2008-03-17T14:31:00.003Z

Here's something you frequently hear said about ontological commitment. First, that to determine the ontological commitments of some sentence S, one must look not at S, but at a regimentation or paraphrase of S, S*. Second (very roughly), you determine the ontological commitments of S by looking at what existential claims follow from S*.

Leave aside the second step of this. What I'm perplexed about is how people are thinking about the first step. Here's one way to express the confusion. We're asked about the sentence S, but to determine the ontological commitments we look at features of some quite different sentence S*. But what makes us think that looking at S* is a good way of finding out about what's required of the world for S to be true?

Reaction (1). The regimentation may be constrained so as to make the relevance of S* transparent. Silly example: regimentation could be required to be null, i.e. every sentence has to be "regimented" as itself. No mystery there. Less silly example: the regimentation might be required to preserve meaning, or truth-conditions, or something similar. If that's the case then one could plausibly argue that the OC's of S and S* coincide, and looking at the OC's of S* is a good way of figuring out what the OC's of S is.

(The famous "symmetry" objections are likely to kick in here; i.e. if certain existential statements follow from S but not from S*, and what we know is that S and S* have the same OC's, why take it that S* reveals those OC's better than S?---so for example if S is "prime numbers exist" and S* is a nominalistic paraphrase, we have to say something about whether S* shows that S is innocent of OC to prime numbers, or whether S shows that S* is in a hidden way committed to prime numbers).

Obviously this isn't plausibly taken as Quine view---the appeal to synonymy is totally unQuinean (moreover in Word and Object, he's pretty explicit that the regimentation relationship is constrained by whether S* can play the same theoretical role as we initially thought S played---and that'll allow for lots of paraphrases where the sentences don't even have the appearance of being truth-conditionally equivalent).

Reaction (2). Adopt a certain general account of the nature of language. In particular, adopt a deflationism about truth and reference. Roughly: T- and R-schemes are in effect introduced into the object language as defining a disquotational truth-predicate. Then note that a truth-predicate so introduced will struggle to explain the predications of truth for sentences not in one's home language. So appeal to translation, and let the word "true" apply to a sentence in a non-home language iff that sentence translates to some sentence of the home language that is true in the disquotational sense. Truth for non-home languages is then the product of translation and disquotational truth. (We can take the "home language" for present purposes to be each person's idiolect).

I think from this perspective the regimentation steps in the Quinean characterization of ontological commitment have an obvious place. Suppose I'm a nominalist, and refuse to speak of numbers. But the mathematicians go around saying things like "prime numbers exist". Do I have to say that what they say is untrue (am I going to go up to them and tell them this?) Well, they're not speaking my idiolect; so according to the deflationary conception under consideration, what I need to do is figure out whether there sentences translate to something that's deflationarily true in my idiolect. And if I translate them according to a paraphrase on which their sentences pair with something that is "nominalistically acceptable", then it'll turn out that I can call what they say true.

This way of construing the regimentation step of ontological commitment identifies it with the translation step of the translation-disquotation treatment of truth sketched above. So obviously what sorts of constraints we have on translation will transfer directly to constraints on regimentation. One *could* appeal to a notion of truth-conditional equivalence to ground the notion of translatability---and so get back to a conception whereby synonymy (or something close to it) was central to our analysis of language.

It's in the Quinean spirit to take translatability to stand free of such notions (to make an intuitive case for separation here, one might, for example, that synonymy should be an equivalence relation, whereas translatability is plausibly non-transitive). There are several options. Quine I guess focuses on preservation of patterns of assent and dissent to translated pairs; Field appeals to his projectivist treatment of norms and takes "good translation" as something to be explained in projective terms. No doubt there are other ways to go.

This way of defending the regimentation step in treatments of ontological commitment turns essentially on deflationism about truth; and more than that, on a non-universal part of the deflationary project: the appeal to translation as a way to extend usage of the truth-predicate to non-home languages. If one has some non-translation story about how this should go (and there are some reasons for wanting one, to do with applying "true" to languages whose expressive power outstrips that of one's own) then the grounding for the regimentation step falls away.

So the Quinean regimentation-involving treatment of ontological commitment makes perfect sense within a Quinean translation-involving treatment of language in general. But I can't imagine that people who buy into to the received view of ontological commitment really mean to be taking a stance on deflationism vs. its rivals; or about the exact implementation of deflationism.

Of course, regimentation or translatability (in a more Quinean, preservation-of-theoretical-role sense, rather than a synonymy-sense) can still be significant for debates about ontological commitments. One might think that arithmetic was ontologically committing, but the existence of some nominalistic paraphrase that was suited to play the same theoretical role gave one some reassurance that one doesn't *have* to use the committing language, and maybe overall these kind of relationships will undermine the case for believing in dubious entities---not because ordinary talk isn't committed to them, but because for theoretical purposes talk needn't be committed to them. But unlike the earlier role for regimentation, this isn't a "hermeneutic" result. E.g. on the Quinean way of doing things, some non-home sentence "there are prime numbers" can be true, despite there being no numbers---just because the best translation of the quoted sentence translates it to something other than the home sentence "there are prime numbers". This kind of flexibility is apparently lost if you ditch the Quinean use of regimentation.

Updates

2008-03-14T13:05:00.003Z

There are two new papers posted on my homepage. One is my contribution to a symposium in Philosphical Books on Trenton Merricks' 'Truth and Ontology'. Basically, this paper just gives the bite-sized versions of what I think are the best motivations for truthmaker theory and the best accounts of truthmakers for negative existentials, modal truths, and temporal truths in a presentist setting.

The other is the first draft of a paper that Elizabeth and I have written on the open future. Our goal here is to argue that theses that often get run together with the thesis that the future is open are not consequences of it. In particular, we argue that the future can be open and bivalence hold unrestrictedly, determinism about laws be true, and the future exist.

I've also updated my 'Truthmaking for Presentists' paper, to stop it making false claims (or at least to stop it making as many false claims) about here-now-ism (thanks Nolan!).

You should also check out Elizabeth and Robbie's new paper on metaphysical indeterminacy, which is awesome.

Phlox

2008-02-22T15:52:00.001Z

I just found about about Phlox, a (relatively) new weblog in philosophy of logic, language and metaphysics. It's attached to a project at Humboldt University in Berlin. As well as following the tradition of philosophy centres with Greek names (this one means "flame", apparently) "Phlox" is a cunning acronym for the group's research interests.

There's several really interesting posts to check out already. Worth heading over!

Relative identity at a time

2008-02-06T18:02:00.000Z

Working at the ancestral home of relative identity, I feel the need to say something about it. The relative identity theorist says that we can’t speak of x and y being identical simpliciter but only identical relative to a sortal, and that while x and y might be the same F they might not be the same G. So, for example, while the foetus in 1979 might be the same biological organism as that typing this blog post, it is not, perhaps, the same person.

Something I was reading recently suggested the following argument against relative identity. The cases that are remotely plausible as being cases of relative identity are (like the one above) cases of identity across time. There are no plausible cases of relative identity at a time. But if that’s the case, we should think that identity at a time is absolute. In which case we shouldn’t think that the relation that is holding across time and is sortal relative is identity at all. And so we don’t really have relative identity: we’ve just got no cases of identity across time, but with a surrogate relation that holds between entities across time and is like identity in some respects but which is sortal relative.

I guess I think that’s a good argument against relative identity if the premise is correct, but I’m not convinced that there aren’t cases of relative identity at a time that are just as plausible as the cases of relative identity across time.

Before I give my case, consider the following situation. Suppose there is a sculptor, Bob. Bob takes a lump of clay at t1 – call it CLAY - and makes it into a statue of a man at t2 – call it STATUE. We have the familiar question as to the relationship between CLAY and STATUE. Some will say that STATUE is a proper temporal part of the CLAY, some that it is distinct but constituted by CLAY. The relative identity theorist, as I understand her, thinks she has a simpler story: STATUE is the same lump of clay as CLAY, but not the same statue (since CLAY is not a statue, and x and y are only the same F if they are both Fs). But that is relative identity across time, of course, not at a time. We don’t get relative identity at a time on this story: STATUE is both the same statue and the same lump as STATUE, and CLAY is the same lump as CLAY, and it doesn’t make sense to either say or deny that CLAY is the same statue as CLAY, since it isn’t a statue.

Now suppose another sculptor, Sara, made a different statue from a different lump. Sara’s sculpture is an intrinsic duplicate of Bob’s sculpture (STATUE), but while Bob’s sculpture is of a man, Sara’s sculpture is of a lump of clay shaped like a man. Sara’s sculpture has aesthetic properties that Bob’s sculpture lacks: her work is a comment on the very nature of art and representation. You can imagine her sipping Merlot out of a teacup and proclaiming the impossibility of separating the signifier from the signified, or something.

Now suppose there is a third sculptor, Jacob, who decided to kill two birds with the one stone and sculpt two statues from the one lump of clay: a statue of a man and a statue of a lump of clay shaped like a man. We know they are two, because they differ in their aesthetic properties. At a single time t after the sculpting is complete, then, there is the lump of clay, LUMP, the statue of a man, MAN, and the statue of the lump of clay shaped like a man, LUMP-MAN. MAN is the same lump of clay as LUMP, and LUMP-MAN is the same lump of clay as LUMP. It seems to follow that MAN is the same lump of clay as LUMP-MAN. Now, the logic of relative identity is somewhat up for grabs, but x is the same F as y and y is the same F as z seem to entail that x is the same F as z. Counterexamples to transitivity should only arise when there’s a change in sortal. And in any case, it’s independently plausible that MAN is the same lump of clay as LUMP-MAN, since there’s only one lump of clay in the vicinity. But MAN is not the same statue as LUMP-MAN – they are distinct statues, for they have different aesthetic properties. So MAN and LUMP-MAN are, at one time t, the same lump of clay but different statues. So we have relative identity at a time.

Now of course there are loads of things we could say without invoking relative identity, such as that the one lump constitutes two statues at this time, or (my preference) that you can’t conclude that there are two statues from a difference in aesthetic properties. But that’s not the point. There’s always an absolutist story one can tell when the relativist would tell a relativist story; my claim is only that this case of relative identity at a time is just as plausible as the alleged cases of relative identity across time, in which case the above argument against relative identity is unsound, and doesn’t give us reason to accept absolutism. (Common sense on the other hand . . . )

Four new appointments at Leeds

2008-01-28T13:24:00.001Z

I'm delighted to have four new permanent colleagues joining us at Leeds in the near future.

Firstly, there are the appointments of Jason Turner and Pekka Vayrynen to the philosophy section at Leeds.

Jason works on metaphysics, philosophy of action and free will, and the philosophy of logic and language. He is currently finishing his PhD at Rutgers and already has an impressive list of publications in these areas, including publications in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Philosophical Studies, and Mind and Language. (Have a peek at them here!)

Pekka is joining us from UC Davis. His main interests are in meta-ethics and value theory, and the overlap between these areas and metaphysics and the philosophy of language. He's published a boatload of really interesting stuff, and will make a fantastic addition to Leeds' new Centre for Ethics and Metaethics.

The division of history and philosophy of science within the department has also recently made two appointments: Juha Saatsi and Sophie Weeks.

Juha works on the philosophy of science. He has published on various aspects of scientific realism, and has recently been working on metaphysical issues arising from the philosohpy of science. Juha has been at Leeds this year on a temporary contract and has been a wonderful colleague, so we're delighted that he'll be staying around.

Sophie is a historian of early modern science, and specialises in Francis Bacon. She's currently working on a monograph on Bacon which, in her words, "focuses upon the close relation between Bacon's matter theory, his inductive method of inquiry, and his moral and political philosophy, whilst drawing attention to his synthesis of Stoic, Epicurean and various Renaissance borrowings."

All will be starting Aug/Sep '08, except Sophie who will be starting in '09, so she can finish her current research fellowship at Cambridge.

UEA wants fuzzy philosophers

2008-01-24T10:56:00.000Z

The University of East Anglia is advertising for an 'indefinite' lecturer in philosophy. I don't know whether this means lecturers with fuzzy boundaries or vague parts, or whetherit just means lecturers who haven't made their minds up on what they believe yet.

Seriously, what does this mean? Is it obvious to everyone else? Is it for a position such that they don't know how long it's going to last? Is it permanent, and they're saying 'indefinite' because you're not allowed to say 'permanent'? (But then, why not use the standard 'continuing'?) What does it mean?? Oh well, never trust a Wittgensteinian, that's what I say.

Sorry MV has been so quiet of late; normal service will resume shortly.

Structured propositions over at T&T

2007-12-18T21:20:00.000Z

I'm not going to x-post them all on this blog, but I just wrote up three notes on structured propositions over at Theories and Things that metaphysical folk might have opinions on... here here and here. Any thoughts much appreciated!

Truthmakers and Ontological Commitment (update)

2007-12-11T13:05:00.000Z

This paper is now forthcoming in Philosophical Studies (special issue devoted to selected papers from the 2007 BSPC).

Truthmaker theorists should be priority monists.

2007-12-06T10:33:00.000Z

I’ve written a paper arguing that the truthmaker theorist has to be a priority monist, on pain of being committed to mysterious necessary connections. That is, if you think that for every true proposition there is an entity which couldn’t exist and that proposition be false then you should also think that there is only one fundamental existent, with every other entity being ontologically dependent on The One, otherwise you violate my suggested version of the Humean ban on necessary connections.

The full paper is here, and any comments will be much appreciated. But here’s the argument in outline. The first step is to identify when necessary connections are acceptable. A completely die-hard Humean would say: never. I’m interested in how to be less die-hard and still have a principled position (one that can be justified independently of considerations concerning truthmaker theory). One popular option is: necessary connections are bad when they’re between wholly distinct existents, but acceptable when they’re between distinct but not wholly distinct entities – i.e. entities that overlap. I don’t like that. In general, things have the parts they do, and belong to the complexes they do, as a matter of contingency; and if that’s the case then necessary connections between overlapping entities are as mysterious as necessary connections between wholly distinct entities. I suggest instead that necessary connections are acceptable iff there is an appropriate relationship of ontological dependence between the entities. I want to analyse ontological dependence in terms of truthmaking: B is ontologically dependent on A iff B exists in virtue of A’s existence, which is to say just that A is the truthmaker for the fact that B exists. In that case, it’s no surprise if the existence of A necessitates the existence of B – that just follows from truthmaker maximalism. With a caveat that I won’t go into here (but I do in the paper), I suggest we limit the necessary connections in our ontology to those where the necessitated entity is ontologically dependent on the necessitating entity. Those necessary connections are explainable just by what ‘ontological dependence’ means, so if all the necessary connections are of that kind, we’re okay.

If that’s right the argument to priority monism is pretty quick. The truthmaker theorist needs not only truthmakers for atomic truths but also a totality truthmaker that says that all the first-order truthmakers are all the first-order truthmakers. The existence of the higher-order truthmaker necessitates the existence of each of the first-order truthmakers: if it didn’t, it wouldn’t be doing the job it was introduced to do. If that necessary connection is to be explainable, then, the first-order truthmakers must be ontologically dependent on the higher-order truthmaker. The fact that the first-order truthmakers exist must be true in virtue of the existence of the higher-order truthmaker. And so we’re driven to the view that the only fundamental being is the higher-order truthmaker – the totality fact that says how the world as a whole is; other things exist – such as the states of affairs of proper parts of the world being some way – but these will all be ontologically derivative entities, dependent on the totality fact.

I don’t particularly care as to whether one should modus ponens and be a priority monist or modus tollens and reject truthmaker theory. I care about the conditional; any thoughts on it will be welcome.

Nihilism, maximality, problem of the many (x-post)

2007-11-28T11:15:00.000Z

Does nihilism about ordinary things help us out with puzzles surrounding maximal properties and the problem of the many? It's hard to see how.

First, maximal properties. Suppose that I have a rock. Surprisingly, there seem to be microphysical duplicates of the rock that are not themselves rocks. For suppose we have a microphysical duplicate of the rock (call it Rocky) that is surrounded by extra rocky stuff. Then, plausibly, the fusion of Rocky and the extra rocky stuff is the rock, and Rocky himself isn't, being out-competed for rock-status by his more extensive rival. Not being shared among duplicates, being a rock isn't intrinsic. And cases meeting this recipe can be plausibly constructed for chairs, tables, rivers, nations, human bodies, human animals and (perhaps) even human persons. Most kind-terms, in fact, look maximal and (hence) extrinsic. Sider has argued that non-sortal properties such as consciousness are likewise maximal and extrinsic.

Second, the problem of the many. In its strongest version, suppose that we have a plentitude of candidates (sums of atoms, say) more or less equally qualified to be a table, cloud, human body or whatever. Suppose further that both the sum and intersection of all these candidates isn't itself a candidate for being the object. (This is often left out of the description of the case, but (1) there seems no reason to think that the set of candidates will always be closed under summing or intersection (2) life is more difficult--and more interesting--if these candidates aren't around.) Which of these candidates is the table, cloud, human body or whatnot?

What puzzles me is why nihilism---rejecting the existence of tables, clouds, human bodies or whatever---should be thought to avoid any puzzles around here. It's true that the nihilist rejects a premise in terms of which these puzzles would normally be stated. So you might imagine that the puzzles give you reason to modus tollens and reject that premise, ending up with nihilism (that's how Unger's original presentation of the POM went, if I recall). But that's no good if we can state equally compelling puzzles in the nihilist's preferred vocabulary.

Take our maximality scenario. Nihilists allow that we have, not a rock, but some things arranged rockwise. And we now conceive of a situation where those things, arranged just as they actually are, still exist (let "Rocky" be a plural term that picks them out). But in this situation, they are surrounded by more things of a qualitatively similar arrangement. Now are the things in Rocky arranged rockwise? Don't consult intuitions at this point---"rockwise" is a term of art. The theoretical role of "rockwise" is to explain how ordinary talk is ok. If some things are in fact arranged rockwise, then ordinary talk should count them as forming a rock. So, for example, van Inwagen's paraphrase of "that's is a rock" would be "those things are arranged rockwise". If we point to Rocky and say "that's a rock", intuitively we speak falsely (that underpins the original puzzle). But if the things that are Rocky are in fact arranged rockwise, then this would be paraphrased to something true. What we get is that "are arranged rockwise" expresses a maximal, extrinsic plural property. For a contrast case, consider "is a circle". What replaces this by nihilist lights are plural predicates like "being arranged circularly". But this seems to express a non-maximal, intrinsic plural property. I can't see any very philosophically significant difference between the puzzle as transcribed into the nihilists favoured setting and the original.

Similarly, consider a bunch of (what we hitherto thought were) cloud-candidates. The nihilist says that none of these exist. Still, there are things which are arranged candidate-cloudwise. Call them the As. And there are other things---differing from the first lot---which are also arranged candidate-cloudwise. Call them the Bs. Are the A's or the B's arranged cloudwise? Are there some other objects, including many but not all of the As and the B's that *are* arranged cloudwise? Again, the puzzle translates straight through: originally we had to talk about the relation between the many cloud-candidates and the single cloud; now we talk about the many pluralities which are arranged candidate-cloudwise, and how they relate to the plurality that is cloudwise arranged. The puzzle is harder to write down. But so far as I can see, it's still there.

Pursuing the idea for a bit, suppose we decided to say that there were many distinct pluralities that are arranged cloudwise. Then "there at least two distinct clouds" would be paraphrased to a truth (that there are some xx and some yy, such that not all the xx are among the yy and vice versa, such that the xx are arranged cloudwise and the yy are arranged cloudwise). But of course it's the unassertibility of this sort of sentence (staring at what looks to be a single fluffy body in the sky) that leads many to reject Lewis's "many but almost one" response to the problem of the many.

I don't think that nihilism leaves everything dialectically unchanged. It's not so clear how many of the solutions people propose to the problem of the many can be translated into the nihilist's setting. And more positively, some options may seem more attractive once one is a nihilist than they did taken cold. Example: once you're going in for a mismatch between common sense ontology and what there really is, then maybe you're more prepared for the sort of linguistic-trick reconstructions of common sense that Lewis suggests in support of his "many but almost one". Going back to the case we considered above, let's suppose you think that there are many extensionally distinct pluralities that are all arranged cloudwise. Then perhaps "there are two distinct clouds" should be paraphrased, not as suggested above, but as:

there are some xx and some yy, such that almost all the xx are among the yy and vice versa, such that the xx are arranged cloudwise and the yy are arranged cloudwise.

The thought here is that, given one is already buying into unobvious paraphrase to capture the real content of what's said, maybe the costs of putting in a few extra tweaks into that paraphrase are minimal.

Caveats: notice that this isn't to say that nihilism solves your problems, it's to say that nihilism may make it easier to accept a response that was already on the table (Lewis's "many but almost one" idea). And even this is sensitive to the details of how nihilism want to relate ordinary thought and talk to metaphysics: van Inwagen's paraphrase strategy is one such proposal, and meshes quite neatly with the Lewis idea, but it's not clear that alternatives (such as Dorr's counterfactual version) have the same benefits. So it's not the metaphysical component of nihilism that's doing the work in helping accommodate the problem of the many: it's whatever machinery the nihilist uses to justify ordinary thought and talk.

There's one style of nihilist who might stand their ground. Call nihilists friendly if they attempt to say what's good about ordinary thought and talk (making use of things like "rockwise", or counterfactual paraphrases, or whatever). I'm suggesting that friendly nihilists face transcribed versions of the puzzles that everyone faces. Nihilists might though be unfriendly: prepared to say that ordinary thought and talk is largely false, but not to reconstruct some subsidiary norm which ordinary thought and talk meets. Friendly nihilism is an interesting position, I think. Unfriendly nihilism is pushing the nuclear button on all attempts to sort out paradoxes statable in ordinary language. But they have at least this virtue: the puzzles they react against don't come back to bite them.

Jobs at Leeds

2007-10-27T11:35:00.000+01:00

The philosophy department at Leeds is advertising for four jobs.

Two of the jobs will be in one or more of philosophy of value, epistemology, philosophy of mind, logic and language, and history of philosophy; one will be in the philosophy of science, with preference for phil physics; and one will be in the history of early modern/enlightenment science.

The appointments will either be at the lecturer or senior lecturer level (see the advert for details). Those unfamiliar with the UK system should check out Robbie's post here to see how this roughly translates into the US system.

London Logic and Metaphysics Forum

2007-10-24T14:32:00.000+01:00

If you're in London on a Tuesday evening, what better to do than to take in a talk by a young philosopher on logic or metaphysics?

Spotting this gap in the tourist offerings, the clever folks in the capital have set up the London Logic and Metaphysics forum. Looks an exciting programme, though I have my doubts about the joker on the 11th Dec...

Tues 30 Oct: David Liggins (Manchester)
Quantities

Tues 13 Nov: Oystein Linnebo (Bristol & IP)
Compositionality and Frege's Context Principle

Tues 27 Nov: Ofra Magidor (Oxford)
Epistemicism about vagueness and meta-linguistic safety

Tues 11 Dec: Robbie Williams (Leeds)
Is survival intrinsic?

8 Jan: Stephan Leuenberger (Leeds)

22 Jan: Antony Eagle (Oxford)

5 Feb: Owen Greenhall (Oslo & IP)

4 Mar: Guy Longworth (Warwick)

Full details can be found here.

Big Ideas at MV

2007-10-24T13:55:00.000+01:00

Metaphysical Values is the featured blog this month at Big Ideas. We are truffle oil (apparently) . . .

Truthmaking for presentists

2007-10-24T11:23:00.000+01:00

At this week’s CMM I’ll be presenting a paper I’ve been working on recently, ‘Truthmaking for Presentists’. Here’s the general gist. Many see a tension between presentism and truthmaker theory. Some (Sider, Armstrong etc) see this as counting against presentism, some (e.g. Merricks) see this as counting against truthmaker theory. Fewer of us want to reconcile the two. While I am no presentist, my paper aims at reconciliation.

I say that people see a ‘tension’ between the two doctrines. The tension is not incompatibility. It’s hard for a doctrine to be incompatible with truthmaker theory because, without further constraints, it’s just too easy to be a truthmaker theorist. The tension arises because, allegedly, the only way to be a truthmaker theorist and a presentist is to accept the existence of things that violate some other norm governing what we should postulate in our ontology. Consider, for example, the Lucretian reconciliation of truthmaker theory and presentism, defended by Bigelow. Bigelow thinks there are properties like being such as to have been a child, and the state of affairs of me instantiating this property is the truthmaker for the fact that I was a child. Sider and Merricks agree that this is not an attractive reconciliation: they both charge these Lucretian properties with peculiarity and both claim that it is a cheat to appeal to them. I want to offer the presentist a truthmaker that isn’t peculiar in the way that the Lucretian’s truthmaker is peculiar.

So in what sense are the Lucretian properties peculiar. In the paper I settle on the following: those properties are peculiar because they make no contribution to the intrinsic nature of their bearer at the time of instantiation.

An assumption in the paper (that I think the presentist should definitely grant) is that it makes sense to talk of the intrinsic nature of an object at a time as opposed to the intrinsic nature of an object atemporally speaking. An object’s currently instantiating being such as to have been a child does indeed tell us something about the intrinsic nature of that object if by its intrinsic nature we mean its atemporal intrinsic nature; but, I want to say, its instantiating that property now doesn’t tell us about how it intrinsically is now. That is what’s peculiar about properties like that, I claim: properties should make a difference to their bearers; since, for the presentist, the bearers are not temporally extended objects, a property can only be making a difference (in the relevant sense) if they’re making a difference to its present intrinsic nature. Lucretian properties don’t, so we shouldn’t believe in them.

If I’m right about what makes Lucretian properties peculiar, then the challenge for the presentist truthmaker theorist is to find properties the present instantiation of which makes a difference to the present intrinsic nature of the bearer but which are also such that the bearer couldn’t instantiate them without some truths of the form ‘the bearer was F’ being true. That is, the presentist needs properties which make a difference both to the present intrinsic nature of their bearers and which fix the truths concerning how the bearer was in the past.

I think Josh Parsons’ distributional properties fit the bill. Consider an extended simple that is polka-dotted with red spots on white. What explains the polka-dotted-ness of this object? Not that the object has some parts which are red simpliciter and some parts that are white simpliciter, because it doesn’t have parts. Not that the object is red at some places and white at others, because being white is not a relation between a thing and a region. Parsons’ answer is that the object simply has a distributional property of being polka-dotted in a certain fashion. This is a property that says how the object is across space, but Parsons also believes in distributional properties that says how an object is across time. What explains why I am a bent at t and straight at t*? Not that I have a part that is a bent simpliciter and a part that is straight simpliciter because (let us suppose) I don’t have temporal parts. Not that I am bent at some times and straight at others, because (as Lewis taught us) being bent isn’t a relation between a thing and a time. Parsons’ answer is that I simply have a distributional property that says how I am across time. Now, crucially, I couldn’t currently instantiate that very distributional property and it not be the case that I was bent. So my instantiating that distributional property is a truthmaker for the fact that I was bent. But it’s not peculiar in the way the Lucretian property is: instantiating it now is making a difference to my present intrinsic nature, because it is in virtue of having this property that I am straight. And so I think we’ve got a non-peculiar way of being presentist truthmaker theorists. Distributional properties ground facts about how things were, solving the truthmaker problem, while at the same time grounding facts about how things now are, avoiding the charge of peculiarity.

So that’s the basic idea. The draft paper is here; comments are, of course, welcome.

St Andrews phil of maths is famous

2007-10-23T18:05:00.000+01:00

I'm currently reading Iain Banks' latest, 'The Steep Approach to Garbadale'. One of the main characters, Alban, is dating a mathematician, who is described in the following paragraph.

"She sporadically had quite involved and sometimes surprisingly heated email forum discussions with people way outside her field about things like the nature of consciousness and brain-bafflingly obscure questions such as, 'Where are the numbers?' ('Where you left them?' had been Alban's suggestion.) This one was still unresolved; she was talking about this with a guy from St Andrews who was interested in the philosophy of mathematics - a speciality Alban had never even imagined existing but felt obscurely comforted to know did."

Excellent! I wonder who the philosopher of maths was. I suspect Crispin. It's just a shame Arche doesn't get a mention.

Chatting with God

2007-10-18T14:50:00.001+01:00

After seeing it linked from Brit's blog, I've spent my office hour talking to God-bot. I won't bore you with the whole transcript, but here are the edited highlights.

God:

My name is God. Really.

Me:

My name is Ross. Really.

God:

Hey Ross. For real.

Me:

For real?

God:

Existing in reality, eh?

. . .

Me:

A proposition is true if and only if it has a truthmaker. There is a truthmaker for 'Ross exists'. So I exist.

God:

Er. We have that much in common, Ross.

Me:

I have a lot in common with God?

God:

Where did you get it?

. . .

Can you make a stone so heavy you cannot lift it?

God:

What are the ingredients?

Me:

Stone.

God:

Do you have any Stone?

Me:

Yes.

God:

Far out.

. . .

Me:

Why is there evil?

God:

Why do I exist?

Me:

Dude, you're God!

God:

Yup. That's me alright. Dude,.

. . .

Me:

Why do I exist?

God:

The reason is due to my mental model of you as a client.

Me:

Are you an idealist?

God:

Yes I am an idealist. How did you know?

Me:

Is everything immaterial?

God:

Only God knows for sure.

Me:

So tell me.

God:

I thought I told you already.

. . .

Me:

Is David Lewis with you?

God:

Signs point to yes.

Me:

I knew it!

God:

How did you know?

Me:

Because Lewis was great.

God:

Good reason. When was this exactly?

Me:

Atemporally.

God:

My brain contains categories, but not one that matches your last input.

Me:

You sound like Kant.

God:

Oh really what does it sound like?

Me:

Gibberish.

Truthmakers, propositions as sets of worlds, and triviality

2007-10-11T14:47:00.001+01:00

In a couple of papers on truthmaker theory I’ve appealed – more for convenience than anything else – to the Lewisian identification of propositions with sets of possible worlds. This has, on a couple of occasions, elicited comments to the effect that if such an identification is made truthmaker theory is trivial and uninteresting. The argument for this is never made explicit but appears to be something like this.

1) Every proposition p is a set of possible worlds.

2) What it is for a proposition to be true at a world is for that world to be a member of that proposition.

3) From 2, what it is for a proposition to be true is for the actual world to be a member of it.

4) From 3, a proposition p is true in virtue of whatever makes it true that the actual world is a member of p.

5) When p is necessary, locating a truthmaker for p is (in some sense) trivial.

6) When a is a member of S, it is necessary that a is a member of S.

7) From 3, 5 and 6, the task of finding truthmakers for true propositions of the form ‘the actual world is a member of the proposition p’ is trivial.

8) From 4 and 7, all truthmaking is trivial.

I think there’s got to be something wrong with this argument; the task of explaining why a proposition is true can’t be so easy just because we identity propositions with sets of worlds. So what’s wrong with the argument? I deny premise 5 in general, and it’s certainly open to deny 6, especially if you’re a counterpart theorist. But even granting these, I think something’s got to be wrong.

Here’s what I think is wrong. Why is it true that there is something red? The proposition ‘there is something red’ is true because it has the actual world as a member. But why is that proposition the proposition ‘there is something red’? I’m not asking here why something is identical to itself – that is also (allegedly) necessary and therefore (allegedly) trivial. I’m asking why that proposition deserves the name ‘the proposition that there is something red’. The truthmaker explanation is: because at every member of that proposition a truthmaker for ‘there is something red’ (the redness universal, or a redness trope) exists, and at no world that is not a member of that proposition does such a truthmaker exist. This is itself no necessary truth, because even though sets have their members essentially, it’s (at least arguably) not the case that worlds have their constituents essentially. (I might not have existed; and had I not existed, the world would not have had me as a constituent.)

My suggestion then is that if propositions are sets of worlds the demand for explanation should be characterised as follows. If you want to hold that it is true that there are cats, say, then you need to explain why one of the many sets of worlds that the actual world is a member of deserves the name ‘the proposition that there are cats’. There are deflationist explanations available (“because it is the proposition that there are cats”), but the truthmaker theorist insists that the explanation will be the contingent truth that at every member of one of those propositions is a thing that couldn’t exist and it not be the case that there are cats, and at no world that is not a member of that proposition is there such a thing. Since the actual world is a member this means there must be some such thing at the actual world. And so the truthmaker demand places constraints on actual ontology and hence is in no way trivial.

Does this sound right to people? And if not, what (if anything) is wrong with the triviality argument?

Properties as sets of (actual) individuals

2007-09-28T12:44:00.000+01:00

One benefit of admitting the existence of possibilia, says Lewis, is the identification of properties with sets of possibilia. I've always been confused as to why this is meant to be better than the actualist saying that proeprties are sets of their instances.

Lewis says, "The usual objection to taking properties as sets is that different properties may happen to be coextensive. . . the property of having a heart is different from the property of having a kidney, since there could have been a creature with a heart but no kidneys." And this is usually the reason I'm given when I ask this question.

But the 'since' is no good! The fact that there could have been a creature with a heart but no kidneys shows only that the property of being a renate might not have been the property of being a cordate. That only tells us that the properties are actually distinct, and hence that the properties aren't actually identical to their actual instances, if we accept the (necessity of) the necessity of non-distinctness. But Lewis *doesn't* accept that, due to his acceptance of counterpart theory.

Assuming contingent identity in general is not incoherent, what would be wrong with someone holding that being a cordate *is* identical to being a renate, but only contingently so? On this view, something might have had being a cordate and lacked being a renate because the actually identical properties might have been distinct. Whenever Lewis holds that two distinct properties are accidentally coextensive this theorist holds that they are contingently identical; properties that Lewis identifies, this theorist claims to be necessarily identical. Would anything go wrong with this?

You might object to the proposal on the grounds that, even if contingent identity in general is okay, it's not okay for sets to be contingently identical. Why? Because sets have their members essentially and because the axiom of extensionality is necessary. Those two claims entail that identical sets are necessarily identical. (Proof: if S and S* are identical they share their members. Given the essentiality of membership they share their members in all worlds. So given the necessity of extensionality they are identical in all worlds.) But I don't find this that convincing from the perspective of the counterpart theorist. I think the counterpart theorist should hold that whether sets have their members essentially is a context-sensitive matter, just as it is a context-sensitive matter whether or not I am essentially human. When we specify a set extensionally - 'the set of a, b, and c' - it's natural to suppose we invoke a context whereby nothing gets to be a counterpart of that set unless its members are the counterparts of a, b and c (what we say if one of a, b or c has multiple counterparts at a world is going to get tricky). But when we specify a set intensionally - 'the set of the Fs' - it's natural to suppose that the counterpart of this set at a world is the set of the things at that world that are F. It doesn't seem objectionable to me, then, to say that 'the set of the cordates' and 'the set of the renates' are contingently identical which, on the current proposal, is just what it is for the proeprties being a cordate and being a renate to be contingently identical. Being such that 2+2=4 and being such that everything is self-identical, on the other hand, will be necessarily identical, because at every world the set of things that are such that 2+2=4 is identical to the set of things that are such thateverything is self-identical - namely, it is the set containing everything at that world.

I'd be interested to hear reasons for not going this way.

From Ockham to nihilism?

2007-09-24T15:21:00.000+01:00

Some thoughts I've been having as a result of a conversation with Daniel Nolan:

Does Ockham’s razor give us reason to be mereological nihilists? Ockham’s razor tells us not to multiply entities beyond necessity. A popular argument for nihilism is that mereologically complex entities don’t do anything simples arranged a certain way wouldn’t do on their own. That’s why Merricks, for example, believes that the only complex entities are conscious ones: he thinks that consciousness is a property that can’t be had collectively by a plurality of simples, so there needs to be a conscious mereologically complex object; but unconscious complex entities like tables and chairs wouldn’t do anything simples-arranged table/chair-wise on their own wouldn’t do, and so it would be a violation of Ockham’s razor to admit their existence.

But is it true that tables don’t do anything that collections of simples arranged table-wise wouldn’t do on their own? One thing I think my table does is stop my glass – which is, I think, sitting on it – from falling to the floor. If there were no table would the collection of simples arranged table-wise do this on their own? You might think not, because the closest possible world in which the simples arranged table-wise exist but the table doesn’t is one in which the glass also doesn’t exist, and only the simples arranged glass-wise are being kept from falling to the floor (or, rather, the simples arranged floor-wise).

An assumption here in the above is that a nihilistic world is closer to our world (assuming nihilism is in fact false) than a world where some of the collections that would compose in our world compose but some don’t. Why believe that? Well if the simples arranged table-wise don’t compose anything but the simples arranged glass-wise do then it would seem to be an entirely arbitrary matter whether a collection of simples compose something. We’d like to be able to explain why some collection composes or fails to compose some thing by saying something like ‘they compose something because every collection composes something’, or ‘they don’t compose anything, but no plurality of things ever composes some thing’, or ‘they compose something because they’re close enough together’, or some such thing. There doesn’t seem to be any natural condition that the parts of the glass meet but the simples arranged table-wise don’t meet, however; so in the world in question, composition seems to be an arbitrary affair. The nihilistic world – despite being unlike our world in many ways – is like ours (or like we hope ours is) in that composition occurs or fails to occur systematically: there is intra-world supervenience of the composition facts on the non-compositional facts. Perhaps that’s enough to give some reason for thinking that the nihilist world is closer to ours than the ‘mixed-world’. In any case, let us grant the assumption for the sake of argument.

Does it follow from that assumption that there is no Ockham’s razor argument for nihilism? The nihilist might object that the argument is question-begging, since it assumes that some of the work that is to be accounted for is the work of keeping the glass from falling to the ground. We should, the nihilist might counter, start from a neutral ground, in which case the datum to be accounted for can only be described as that the table-like simples are keeping the glass-like simples from falling to the ground-like simples.

But wouldn’t that be equally question begging on the part of the nihilist? Why shouldn’t I appeal to the table’s ability to stop the glass itself – not just the simples arranged glass-wise – from falling to the ground as something that the table itself – not just the simples arranged table-wise – does? After all, I think it’s true that there is a glass on a table and that it would fall to the ground were the table not there. Isn’t the nihilist’s insistence that I only admit objects to explain facts that the nihilist accepts as true simply stacking the deck in favour of nihilism?

The nihilist might question my reason for believing that to be true. Fair enough – obviously I should have a reason for taking as true the truths I want my ontology to ground. Here’s my reason then: I can see the glass on the table, and by induction I know that were the table not there the glass would fall to the floor. The nihilist denies that this is what I see, of course; but why let her set the debate by accepting her description of the phenomena rather that mine?

Anti-nihilism, one might think, is the default view. We have to be argued away from a belief in tables in chairs towards a nihilist ontology; we don’t have to be argued from a nihilist ontology towards a belief in tables and chairs. The burden of proof is on the nihilist, not the compositionalist. If that’s right then it’s perfectly appropriate for me to take as a datum that the glass is held up by the table and to try to explain it. I grant that if one can explain that datum with a nihilist ontology then there’s an Ockham’s razor argument for nihilism over compositionalism; but the fact that one could explain a nihilistic paraphrase of that datum with a nihilist ontology is neither here nor there. Since it is doubtful that a nihilist ontology can explain why my glass is held up by the table, it’s not obvious that there’s even a pro tanto reason for nihilism by way of Ockham’s razor.

Titles in search of a paper

2007-09-18T10:19:00.000+01:00

Aidan has a funny post about good and bad puns in paper titles. This prompted me to think of some potential papers yet to find an author. I came up with:

“Trouble up mill!” (A paper pointing out difficulties for the harm principle – probably only funny if you know anything about Yorkshire – or watched enough Monty Python.)

“You can’t get a nought from an is.” (An paper arguing against reifying absences.)

“Does ought imply Kamm?” (a paper on Frances Kamm and moral obligation.)

“Frege’s conception of women as objects.” (A paper on neo-Logicist feminism.)

“There can be only one.” (Monism meets Highlander.)

Any others?

Society of Solipsists

2007-09-12T13:51:00.001+01:00

This is quite funny.

A post about nothing

2007-09-10T18:41:00.000+01:00

Scientists at the University of Minnesota have apparently discovered “a void in the universe a thousand times bigger than any previously discovered”, according to this week’s THES. Professor Marco Peloso is quoted as saying “It’s really strange that there is such an empty region. How do you explain this?”

So while metaphysicians are worrying about why there is something rather than nothing, physicists are worrying about why there is nothing rather than something.

I wonder if Prof Peloso and colleagues have managed to discover whether this nothing noths.

Simplicity and possibility

2007-08-30T11:16:00.000+01:00

I find mereological nihilism an attractive view. All there are are simples: there’s no mereological complexity to the world. I feel no need to say as a result of this that there are no tables or chairs, provided we don’t take those claims to be perspicuously describing fundamental reality. ‘There are tables’ might be a true sentence of English; but it is being made true not by a mereologically complex object, but simply by a collection of simples arranged a certain way. (See my paper and Robbie’s paper on fundamentality.)

I’m also attracted to the view that there aren’t really any structural universals. All there are are the perfectly natural basic universals. That’s not to say that there’s no methane; it’s just to say that claims about methane will be made true not by a structured universal METHANE but, ultimately, by the pattern of instantiation of the basic (let us suppose) universals HYDROGEN and CARBON.

One type of argument you hear against views like this is that we have to believe in the complex things because there might not be the entities at the bottom level. So we have, e.g., Sider and Armstrong, arguing that we’ve got to believe in mereologically complex entities because there might be no simples, i.e. the world might be gunky. And we have, e.g., Lewis and Armstrong arguing that we’ve got to believe in structural universals because there might be no basic ones. (I’m using a bit of poetic license here: Lewis didn’t really believe in structural universals – but he thought this was the best argument to believe in them.)

There are two ways to read the complaint. One is to read the ‘might’s in the above as meaning metaphysical possibility, one is to read them as meaning epistemic possibility.

I find the former form of the argument unconvincing. For starters, the metaphysical possibility of gunky worlds, or worlds with infinitely descending chains of structural universals, is far from a datum. (See this paper and this paper by Robbie, which attempt to explain away the illusions of possibility in each case.) But also, even if these are genuine possibilities, I only see a reason to believe that there might have been mereological complexity and structural universals; I don’t see any reason to think that the world actually contains either kind of complex entity. The two positions I confessed my attraction to are claims about how the world actually is, not how it must have been; the possibility of infinite complexity doesn’t give me any reason to accept the actuality of infinite complexity. (See my paper on the contingency of composition.)

What if the ‘might’s are read as epistemic modality? There the complaint is that we have no right to reject the existence of mereologically complex objects or structured universals because we have no guarantee that there are in fact the mereological simples, or basic universals, that there would need to be.

This is, I think, how Armstrong intends the objection (at least sometimes). As he sees it, I think, we’ve got no right just to assume that there are simples or basic universals. That would be a priori ontology, and therefore suspicious! We shouldn’t build theories on the assumption that there are the entities at the bottom level, then, and this means we have to allow that there are the complex entities.

I’ve heard something like that argument from quite a few people, but I don’t find it at all moving. Yes, there might not be any simples or basic universals. My theory might be wrong! There’s no a priori guarantee that there are simples or basic universals. So what? There’s no a priori guarantee that there are complex objects or structural universals either, so where’s the asymmetry? In accepting the two theories above I close off the epistemic possibility that there are no simples or basic universals, but in accepting Armstrong’s theory I close off the epistemic possibility of there being no complex objects or structural universals: why is one better than the other? Every theory closes off epistemic possibilities, unless it is a theory that tells us nothing about the world. So why is it a good objection to the above theories that their truth requires the existence of entities that we have no guarantee exist? Sure, I have no guarantee that there are simples or basic universals. It’s a hypothesis that there are; that hypothesis will then be judged just like any other: on the balance of costs and benefits.

Why might you think there was an asymmetry between reliance on the existence of the simple ontology and reliance on the existence of the complex ontology? You might think that there is an a priori guarantee of the existence of the complex ontology but not the simple ontology? Why? Well in the case of mereology, the existence of the complex objects is guaranteed by the axioms of classical mereology but the existence of simples is not. But that’s not convincing. The question then is simply: why believe in the axioms of classical mereology? They close off epistemic possibilities as well. To claim that they’re a priori looks no better to me than the claim that it’s a priori that there are simples. Assume the axioms of classical mereology and construct your theory on that basis by all means; but then I have as much right to do the same with the assumption that there are the simples – and then to the victor the spoils.

Perhaps the asymmetry is meant to be that the hypothesis that there are the complex objects is empirically sensitive in a way the hypothesis that there are the simple objects isn’t. But I can’t see any reason to think that that is true. If anything it’s the other way round: there would be no observable difference in the world were there complex objects as opposed to simples arranged a certain way, but if scientists are unable to split the lepton (or whatever) that gives us some reason to believe that leptons are mereologically simple. (I don’t really believe that, but some people do.)

So where’s the asymmetry? Any suggestions? Is the metaphysician who relies on the existence of simples doing anything worse than the metaphysician who relies on the existence of complexity?

PPR back up?

2007-08-17T03:31:00.001+01:00

I'm not sure I've seen this advertised around the place, but PPR appear to be back up and running. The website for submissions is a little hard to find at the moment, since it's swamped on google by the (I believe) out of date site at Brown. Anyway, the new site, I think is here.

Emergence, Supervenience, and Indeterminacy (x-posted from T&T)

2007-08-17T03:27:00.001+01:00

While Ross Cameron, Elizabeth Barnes and I were up in St Andrews a while back, Jonathan Schaffer presented one of his papers arguing for Monism: the view that the whole is prior to the parts, and the world is the one "fundamental" object.

An interesting argument along the way argued that contemporary physics supports the priority of the whole, at least to the extent that properties of some systems can't be reduced to properties of their parts. People certainly speak that way sometimes. Here, for example, is Tim Maudlin (quoted by Schaffer):

The physical state of a complex whole cannot always be reduced to those of its parts, or to those of its parts together with their spatiotemporal relations… The result of the most intensive scientific investigations in history is a theory that contains an ineliminable holism. (1998: 56)

The sort of case that supports this is when, for example, a quantum system featuring two particles determinately has zero total spin. The issues is that there also exist systems that duplicate the intrinsic properties of the parts of this system, but which do not have the zero-total spin property. So the zero-total-spin property doesn't appear to be fixed by the properties of its parts.

Thinking this through, it seemed to me that one can systematically construct such cases for "emergent" properties if one is a believer in ontic indeterminacy of whatever form (and thinks of it that way that Elizabeth and I would urge you to). For example, suppose you have two balls, both indeterminate between red and green. Compatibly with this, it could be determinate that the fusion of the two be uniform; and it could be determinate that the fusion of the two be variegrated. The distributional colour of the whole doesn't appear to be fixed by the colour-properties of the parts.

I also wasn't sure I believed in the argument, so posed. It seems to me that one can easily reductively define "uniform colour" in terms of properties of its parts. To have uniform colour, there must be some colour that each of the parts has that colour. (Notice that here, no irreducible colour-predications of the whole are involved). And surely properties you can reductively define in terms of F, G, H are paradigmatically not emergent with respect to F, G and H.

What seems to be going on, is not a failure for properties of the whole to supervene on the total distribution of properties among its parts; but rather a failure of the total distribution of properties among the parts to supervene on the simple atomic facts concerning its parts.

That's really interesting, but I don't think it supports emergence, since I don't see why someone who wants to believe that only simples instantiate fundamental properties should be debarred from appealing to distributions of those properties: for example, that they are not both red, and not both green (this fact will suffice to rule out the whole being uniformly coloured). Minimally, if there's a case for emergence here, I'd like to see it spelled out.

If that's right though, then application of supervenience tests for emergence have to be handled with great care when we've got things like metaphysical indeterminacy flying around. And it's just not clear anymore whether the appeal in the quantum case with which we started is legitimate or not.

Anyway, I've written up some of the thoughts on this in a little paper.

A puzzle about supervenience arguments for dualism (x-posted from T&T)

2007-07-25T01:19:00.001+01:00

Suppose there's a qualitative duplicate of the actual world (It might be a world with haecceitistic differences from the actual one, but it doesn't have to be). Call the actual world A, and its duplicate, B.

I'm conscious in world A. Call the extension at the actual world of the things which are conscious S. There are cauliflowers in world B. Call the extension at B of the things which are cauliflowers, S*. Now consider the gruesome intension cauli-consc, which has S as its extension at world A, and S* as its extension in world B (it doesn't matter what its extension is in other worlds: maybe it applies to all and only conscious cauliflowers).

Is there a property that things have iff they are cauli-consc? So long as "property" is intended in an ultra-lightweight sense (a sense in which any old possible-worlds intension corresponds to a property) then there shouldn't be an trouble with this.

However. Cauli-consc is a property that doesn't supervene on the pattern of instantiation of fundamental physical properties. After all, A and B are alike in all physical respects. But they differ as to where cauli-consc is instantiated.

Cauli-consc is a property, instantiated in the actual world, that doesn't supervene on physical properties! Does that mean that the fact that I'm cauli-consc is a "further fact about our world, over and above the physical facts" (Chalmers 1996 p.123)? That is, do we have to say that, if there are such qualitive duplicates of the actual world, then materialism is shown to be wrong by cauli-consc?

Surely not. But the interesting question is: if some properties (like cauli-consc) can fail to supervene on the physical features of the world, what is that blocks the inference from failure of supervenience on physical features of the world, to the refutation of materialism? For what principled reason is this property "bad", such that we can safely ignore its failure to supervene?

Here's a way to put the general worry I'm having. Supervenience physicalism is often formulated as follows (from Lewis, I believe): any physical duplicate of the actual world is a duplicate simpliciter. But if duplication is understood (again following Lewis) as the sharing of natural properties by corresponding parts, then to get a counterexample to physicalism you'd need not only to demonstrate that a certain property fails to supervene on the physical features of the world, but also that some natural property fails to supervene: otherwise you won't get a failure of duplication among physical duplicates. The case of cauli-consc is supposed to dramatize the gap here. Sometimes it looks like you can get properties which fail to supervene, but which don't seem to threaten materialism.

However, when you look at the failure-to-supervene arguments for dualism, you find that people stop once they take themselves to establish that a given property fails to supervene, and not, in addition, that some natural property does so (For example, Chalmers 1996 p132 assumes that it's enough to show that the 1-intension of "consciousness" fails to supervene, without also arguing that it's a natural property) .

Now, I think in particular cases I can see how to run the arguments to address this issue. Add as a premise that e.g. the 1-intensions of the words of our language supervene on the total qualitative character of the world, so that we're guaranteed that if there's a world in which "1-consciousness" is instantiated and another where it isn't, those can't be qualitative duplicates. If now we find a failure of 1-consciousness to supervene on physical features of the world, we'll be able to argue for the existence of physical duplicate worlds differing over 1-consciousness, we now know can't be qualitative duplicates. (In effect, the suggestion is that the sense in which cauli-consc is bad is exactly that it fails to supervene on the total qualitative state of the world).

That all seems reasonable to me, but it does start to add potentially deniable premises to the argument against materialism. (For example, I'm not sure it should be uncontroversial that consciousness supervenes on the total qualitative state of the world. Is it really so clear, for example, that there are no haecceitistic elements to consciousness: that a world containing me might contain a conscious being, but a qualitiative duplicate containing some other individual doesn't?)

So I'm not sure whether the elaboration of the Zombie argument for dualism I've just sketched is the way Chalmers et al want to go. I'd be interested to know how they have/would respond (references welcome, as ever).

Metametaphysics in Barcelona/some distinctions

2007-07-24T10:04:00.000+01:00

Logos are holding a meta-metaphysics conference in Barcelona in 2008. The CFP is now out: with deadline being April 1st 2008.

I went to a Logos conference back in 2005, when I was just finishing up as a graduate student. It was a great experience: Barcelona is an amazing city to be in, Logos were fantastic hosts, and the conference was full of interesting people and talks. I also had what was possibly the best meal of my life at the conference dinner. This time, the format is preread, which I've really enjoyed in the past.

Here's a quick note on the "metametaphysics" stuff. Following the Boise conference on this stuff, it seemed to me that under the label "metametaphysics" go a number of interesting projects that need a bit of disentangling. Here's three, for starters.

First, there's the "terminological disputes" project. Consider a first-order metaphysical question like: "under what circumstances do some things make up a further thing" (van Inwagen's special composition question). This notes the range of seemingly rival answers to the question (all the time! some of the time! never!) and asks about whether there's any genuine disagreement between the rival views (and if so, what sort of disagreement this is). The guiding question here is: under what conditions is a metaphysical/philosophical debate merely terminological (or whatever).

Note that the question here really doesn't look like it has much to do with metametaphysics per se, as opposed to metaphilosophy in general. Metaphysics is just a source of case studies, in the first instance. Of course, it might turn out that metaphysics turns out to be full of terminological disputes, whereas phil science or epistemology or whatever isn't. But equally, it might turn out that metaphysics is all genuine, whereas e.g. the Gettier salt mines are full of terminological disputes.

In contrast to this, there's the "first order metametaphysics" (set of) project(s). This'd take key notions that are often used as starting points/framework notions for metaphysical debates, and reflect philosophically upon those. E.g.: (1) The notion of naturalness as used by Lewis. Is there such a notion? If so, are their natural quantifiers and objects and modifiers as well as natural properties? Does appeal to naturalness commit one to realism about properties, or can something like Sider's operator-view of naturalness be made to work? (2) Ontological commitment. Is Armstrong right that (at least in some cases) to endorse a sentence "A is F" is to commit oneself to F-ness, as well as to things which are F? Might the ontological commitments of our theories be far less than Quine would have us believe (as some suggest)? (3) unrestricted existential quantifier. Is there a coherent such notion? How should its semantics be given? Is such a quantifier a Tarskian logical constant?

These debates might interest you even if you have no interesting thoughts in general about how to demarcate genuine vs. terminological disputes. Thinking about this stuff looks like it can be carried out in very much first-order terms, with rival theories of a key notion (naturalness, say) proposed and evaluated. Of course, this sort of first-order examination might be a particularly interesting kind of first-order philosophy to one engaged in the terminological disputes project.

The third sort of project we might call "anti-Quine/Lewis metametaphysics". You might think the following. In recent years, there's been a big trend for doing metaphysics with a Realist backdrop; in particular, the way that Armstrong and Lewis invite us to do metaphysics has been very influential among the young and impressionable. A bunch of presuppositions have become entrenched, e.g. a Quinean view of ontological commitment, the appeal to naturalness etc. So, without in the first instance attacking these presuppositions, one might want to develop a framework in comparable detail which allows the formulation of alternatives. One natural starting point is to go with neoCarnapian thoughts about what the right thing to say about the SCQ is (e.g. it can be answered by stipulation). That sort of line is incompatible with the sort of view on these questions that Quine and Lewis favour. What's the backdrop relative to which it makes sense? What are the crucial Quine-Lewis assumptions that need to be given up?

Now, this sort of project differs from the first kind of project in being (a) naturally restricted to metaphysics; and (b) not committed to any sort of demarcation of terminological disputes vs. genuine disputes. It differs from the second kind of project, since, at least in the first instance, we needn't assume that the differences between the frameworks will reduce to different attitudes to ontological commitment, or naturalness, or whatever. On the other hand, it's attractive to look for some underlying disagreement over the nature of ontological commitment, or naturalness, or whatever, to explain how the worldviews differ. So it may well be that a project of this kind leads to an interest in the first-order metametaphysics projects.

I'm not sure that these projects form a natural philosophical kind. What does seem to be right is that investigation of one might lead to interest in the others. There's probably a bunch more distinctions to be drawn, and the ones I've pointed to probably betray my own starting points. But in my experience of this stuff, you do find people getting confused about the ambition of each other's projects, and dismissing the whole field of metametaphysics because they identify it with some one of the projects that they themselves don't find particularly interesting, or regard as hard to make progress with. So it'd probably be helpful if someone produced an overview of the field that teased the various possible projects apart (references anyone?).

Williamson on vague states of affairs (x-posted from T&T)

2007-07-13T13:47:00.000+01:00

In connection with the survey article mentioned below, I was reading through Tim Williamson's "Vagueness in reality". It's an interesting paper, though I find its conclusions very odd.

As I've mentioned previously, I like a way of formulating claims of metaphysical indeterminacy that's semantically similar to supervaluationism (basically, we have ontic precisifications of reality, rather than semantic sharpenings of our meanings. It's similar to ideas put forward by Ken Akiba and Elizabeth Barnes).

Williamson formulates the question of whether there is vagueness in reality, as the question of whether the following can ever be true:

(EX)(Ex)Vague[Xx]

Here X is a property-quantifier, and x an object quantifier. His answer is that the semantics force this to be false. The key observation is that, as he sets things up, the value assigned to a variable at a precisification and a variable assignment depends only on the variable assignment, and not at all on the precisification. So at all precisifications, the same value is assigned to the variable. That goes for both X and x; with the net result that if "Xx" is true relative to some precisification (at the given variable assignment) it's true at all of them. That means there cannot be a variable assignment that makes Vague[Xx] true.

You might think this is cheating. Why shouldn't variables receive different values at different precisifications (formally, it's very easy to do)? Williamson says that, if we allow this to happen, we'd end up making things like the following come out true:

(Ex)Def[Fx&~Fx']

It's crucial to the supervaluationist's explanatory programme that this come out false (it's supposed to explain why we find the sorites premise compelling). But consider a variable assignment to x which at each precisification maps x to that object which marks the F/non-F cutoff relative to that precisification. It's easy to see that on this "variable assignment", Def[Fx&Fx'] comes out true, underpinning the truth of the existential.

Again, suppose that we were taking the variable assignment to X to be a precisification-relative matter. Take some object o that intuitively is perfectly precise. Now consider the assignment to X that maps X at precisification 1 to the whole domain, and X at precisification 2 to the null set. Consider "Vague[Xx]", where o is assigned to x at every precisification, and the assignment to X is as above. The sentence will be true relative to these variable assignments, and so we have "(EX)Vague[Xx]" relative to an assignment of o to x which is supposed to "say" that o has some vague property.

Although Williamson's discussion is about the supervaluationist, the semantic point equally applies to the (pretty much isomorphic) setting that I like, and which is supposed to capture vagueness in reality. If one makes the variable assignments non-precisification relative, then trivially the quantified indeterminacy claims go false. If one makes the variable assignments precisification-relative, then it threatens to make them trivially true.

The thought I have is that the problem here is essentially one of mixing up abundant and natural properties. At least for property-quantification, we should go for the precisification-relative notion. It will indeed turn out that "(EX)Vague[Xx]" will be trivially true for every choice of X. But that's no more surprising that the analogous result in the modal case: quantifying over abundant properties, it turns out that every object (even things like numbers) have a great range of contingent properties: being such that grass is green for example. Likewise, in the vagueness case, everything has a great deal of vague properties: being such that the cat is alive, for example (or whatever else is your favourite example of ontic indeterminacy).

What we need to get a substantive notion, is to restrict these quantifiers to interesting properties. So for example, the way to ask whether o has some vague sparse property is to ask whether the following is true "(EX:Natural(X))Vague[Xx]". The extrinsically specified properties invoked above won't count.

If the question is formulated in this way, then we can't read off from the semantics whether there will be an object and a property such that it is vague whether the former has the latter. For this will turn, not on the semantics for quantifiers alone, but upon which among the variable assignments correspond to natural properties.

Something similar goes for the case of quantification over states of affairs. (ES)Vague[S] would be either vacuously true or vacuously false depending on what semantics we assign to the variables "X". But if our interest is in whether there are sparse states of affairs which are such that it is vague whether they obtain, what we should do is e.g. let the assignment of values to S be functions from precisifications to truth values, and then ask the question:

(ES:Natural(S))Vague[S].

Where a function from precisifications to truth values is "natural" if it corresponds to some relatively sparse state of affairs (e.g. there being a live cat on the mat). So long as there's a principled story about which states of affairs these are (and it's the job of metaphysics to give us that) everything works fine.

A final note. It's illuminating to think about the exactly analogous point that could be made in the modal case. If values are assigned to variables independently of the world, we'll be able to prove that the following is never true on any variable assignment:

Contingently[Xx].

Again, the extensions assigned to X and x are non-world dependent, so if "Xx" is true relative to one world, it's true at them all. Is this really an argument that there is no contingent instantiation of properties? Surely not. To capture the intended sense of the question, we have to adopt something like the tactic just suggested: first allow world-relative variable assignment, and then restrict the quantifiers to the particular instances of this that are metaphysically interesting.

Ontic vagueness (x-posted from T&T)

2007-07-13T13:46:00.000+01:00

I've been frantically working this week on a survey article on metaphysical indeterminacy and ontic vagueness. Mind bending stuff: there really is so much going on in the literature, and people are working with *very* different conceptions of the thing. Just sorting out what might be meant by the various terms "vagueness de re", "metaphysical vagueness", "ontic vagueness", "metaphysical indeterminacy" was a task (I don't think there are any stable conventions in the literature). And that's not to mention "vague objects" and the like.

I decided in the end to push a particular methodology, if only as a stalking horse to bring out the various presuppositions that other approaches will want to deny. My view is that we should think of "indefinitely" roughly parallel to the way we do "possibly". There are various disambiguations one can make: "possibly" might mean metaphysical possibility, epistemic possibility, or whatever; "indefinitely" might mean linguistic indeterminacy, epistemic unclarity, or something metaphysical. To figure out whether you should buy into metaphysical indeterminacy, you should (a) get yourself in a position to at least formulate coherently theories involving that operator (i.e. specify what its logic is); and (b) run the usual Quinean cost/benefit analysis on a case-by-case basis.

The view of metaphysical indeterminacy most opposed to this is one that would identify it strongly with vagueness de re, paradigmatically there being some object and some property such that it is indeterminate whether the former instantiates the latter (this is how Williamson seems to conceive of matters in a 2003 article). If we had some such syntactic criterion for metaphysical indeterminacy, perhaps we could formulate everything without postulating a plurality of disambiguations of "definitely". However, it seems that this de re formulation would miss out some of the most paradigmatic examples of putative metaphysical vagueness, such as the de dicto formulation: It is indeterminate whether there are exactly 29 things. (The quantifiers here to be construed unrestrictedly).

I also like to press the case against assuming that all theories of metaphysical indeterminacy must be logically revisionary (endorsing some kind of multi-valued logic). I don't think the implication works in either direction: multi-valued logics can be part of a semantic theory of indeterminacy; and some settings for thinking about metaphysical indeterminacy are fully classical.

I finish off with a brief review of the basics of Evans' argument, and the sort of arguments (like the one from Weatherson in the previous post) that might convert metaphysical vagueness of apparently unrelated forms into metaphysically vague identity arguably susceptable to Evans argument.

From vague parts to vague identity (x-posted from T&T)

2007-07-13T13:44:00.000+01:00

(Update: as Dan notes in the comment on theories and things, I should have clarified that the initial assumption is supposed to be that it's metaphysically vague what the parts of Kilimanjaro (Kili) are. Whether we should describe the conclusion as deriving a metaphysically vague identity is a moot point.)

I've been reading an interesting argument that Brian Weatherson gives against "vague objects" (in this case, meaning objects with vague parts) in his paper "Many many problems".

He gives two versions. The easiest one is the following. Suppose it's indeterminate whether Sparky is part of Kili, and let K+ and K- be the usual minimal variations of Kili (K+ differs from Kili only in determinately containing Sparky, K- only by determinately failing to contain Sparky).

Further, endorse the following principle (scp): if A and B coincide mereologically at all times, then they're identical. (Weatherson's other arguments weaken this assumption, but let's assume we have it, for the sake of argument).

The argument then runs as follows:
1. either Sparky is part of Kili, or she isn't. (LEM)
2. If Sparky is part of Kili, Kili coincides at all times with K+ (by definition of K+)
3. If Sparky is part of Kili, Kili=K+ (by 2, scp)
4. If Sparky is not part of Kili, Kili coincides at all times with K- (by definition of K-)
5. If Sparky is not part of Kili, Kili=K- (by 4, scp).
6. Either Kili=K+ or Kili=K- (1, 3,5).

At this point, you might think that things are fine. As my colleague Elizabeth Barnes puts it in this discussion of Weatherson's argument you might simply think at this point that only the following been established: that it is determinate that either Kili=K+ or K-: but that it is indeterminate which.

I think we might be able to get an argument for this. First our all, presumably all the premises of the above argument hold determinately. So the conclusion holds determinately. We'll use this in what follows.

Suppose that D(Kili=K+). Then it would follow that Sparky was determinately a part of Kili, contrary to our initial assumption. So ~D(Kili=K+). Likewise ~D(Kili=K-).

Can it be that they are determinately distinct? If D(~Kili=K+), then assuming that (6) holds determinately, D(Kili=K+ or Kili=K-), we can derive D(Kili=K-), which contradicts what we've already proven. So ~D(~Kili=K+) and likewise ~D(~Kili=K-).

So the upshot of the Weatherson argument, I think, is this: it is indeterminate whether Kili=K+, and indeterminate whether Kili=K-. The moral: vagueness in composition gives rise to vague identity.

Of course, there are well known arguments against vague identity. Weatherson doesn't invoke them, but once he reaches (6) he seems to think the game is up, for what look to be Evans-like reasons.

My working hypothesis at the moment, however, is that whenever we get vague identity in the sort of way just illustrated (inherited from other kinds of ontic vagueness), we can wriggle out of the Evans reasoning without significant cost. (I go through some examples of this in this forthcoming paper). The over-arching idea is that the vagueness in parthood, or whatever, can be plausibly viewed as inducing some referential indeterminacy, which would then block the abstraction steps in the Evans proof.

Since Weatherson's argument is supposed to be a general one against vague parthood, I'm at liberty to fix the case in any way I like. Here's how I choose to do so. Let's suppose that the world contains two objects, Kili and Kili*. Kili* is just like Kili, except that determinately, Kili and Kili* differ over whether they contain Sparky.

Now, think of reality as indeterminate between two ways: one in which Kili contains Sparky, the other where it doesn't. What of our terms "K+" and "K-"? Well, if Kili contains Sparky, then "K+" denotes Kili. But if it doesn't, then "K+" denotes Kili*. Mutatis Mutandis for "K-". Since it is is indeterminate which option obtains, "K+" and "K-" are referentially indeterminate, and one of the abstraction steps in the Evans proof fail.

Now, maybe it's built into Weatherson's assumptions that the "precise" objects like K+ and K- exist, and perhaps we could still cause trouble. But I'm not seeing cleanly how to get it. (Notice that you'd need more than just the axioms of mereology to secure the existence of [objects determinately denoted by] K+ and K-: Kili and Kili* alone would secure the truth that there are fusions including Sparky and fusions not including Sparky). But at this point I think I'll leave it for others to work out exactly what needs to be added...

Leeds attracts Analysis studentship

2007-07-10T11:22:00.000+01:00

We are very pleased that next year's recipient of the Analysis Studentship - Richard Woodward - has chosen to spend his year of research here at Leeds.

Richard is currently a PhD student at Sheffield, and his paper 'Why Modal Fictionalism is not
Self-Defeating' is forthcoming in Philosophical Studies.