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

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

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)

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)

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)

(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

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.

Modal and temporal irrelevance

One objection you sometimes hear against Lewis’s modal realism (from van Inwagen, Chihara, Jubien, among others) is that what goes on at concrete spacetimes is irrelevant to what is necessary or merely possible. The objection, I take it, is this. We can grant for the sake of argument that there are the many cosmoi Lewis would have us believe in. But even on the assumption that there are these things, it’s not clear what they would have to do with modality. When we think of what is merely possible we are thinking of what could have been the case but isn’t (that’s the work the ‘merely’ is doing); but Lewis tells us that the merely possible is the case, it just isn’t the case here – at the sub-portion of all that there is that is spatio-temporally related to us: the portion that Lewis calls ‘actuality’.

The gist of the modal irrelevance objection, I take it, is that to say that something is merely possible demands that it not be the case – not simply that it not be the case in our surroundings, but that it not be the case at all. If Lewis is right about what there is then, the thought goes, it simply turns out that what is actually the case is a lot more complex than we thought. Actuality, the thought goes, is everything that (unrestrictedly) is the case: if there are talking donkeys that aren’t spatio-temporally related to me then there are actually talking donkeys that aren’t spatio-temporally related to me. Lewis can choose to use the term ‘actually’ as he wishes, of course; likewise with the terms ‘possible’ and ‘necessary’. But nevertheless the point remains that, using those words as we use them, Lewis is asking us to accept that actuality is a lot bigger than we supposed; he’s not asking us to accept the existence of the merely possible. The latter request is unfulfillable: you can’t accept the existence of the merely possible, because if something exists then it’s not merely possible – it’s actual.

Does anyone raise the analogous objection against eternalism? We can imagine someone arguing as follows:

“Just as I have the intuition that to say something is merely possible demands that it not be the case, so I have the intuition that to say that something is merely past or future demands that it not be the case. And yet the eternalist says that past and future events are the case: they’re not the case in my surroundings – the portion of what there is that the eternalist calls ‘the present’ – but they are the case nevertheless. But just as I can’t see why the presence of talking donkeys would result in it being merely possible that there are talking donkeys as opposed to it being actual just because the talking donkeys aren’t spatio-temporally related to me, so I can’t see why the presence of dinosaurs would result in it being the case that there were or will be dinosaurs as opposed to it being the case that there are presently dinosaurs just because the dinosaurs happen to be in a direction I can’t point!”

The objections are totally analogous. Just as the modal irrelevance objection says that you can’t have an ontology of the non-actual, you can only make actuality more complicated, so the temporal irrelevance objection says you can’t have an ontology of the non-present, you can only make the present more complicated.

The temporal irrelevance objection claims that if it was true that there are dinosaurs but that there are not presently dinosaurs then this demands that there are no dinosaurs; likewise, if it will be true that there are Martian colonies but that there are not presently Martian colonies then this demands that there are no Martian colonies. The eternalist will claim that something’s being merely past or future demands not that it not be the case, but only that it not be the case presently. But that is, seemingly, no more convincing than Lewis’s claim that something’s being merely possible demands only that it not be the case actually. The actualist can agree that something’s being merely possible demands only that it not actually be the case provided that actuality is understood as encompassing everything (unrestrictedly). Likewise, the presentist can agree that something’s being merely past or future demands only that it not presently be the case provided that the present is understood as encompassing everything (unrestrictedly).

So, here are some questions:

(1) Has anyone made the temporal irrelevance objection, or anything like it, in the literature?

(2) Do the modal irrelevance and the temporal irrelevance objections really stand or fall together or is there some disanalogy between them?

(3) If they are analogous, is this so much the worse for the eternalist or so much the worse for the modal irrelevance objection?

(2) is the question I’m most interested in. I guess one reason you might think that the temporal irrelevance objection is worse off is that the eternalist can point to certain relations between the dinosaurs and us that justify our claim that the dinosaurs existed before us, whereas there is nothing analogous the Lewisian can do w.r.t. the talking donkeys.

Those relations would, presumably, be causal relations. But will that help? Can’t the presentist who is impressed by the temporal irrelevance objection simply reply that if some of the things that there are stand in causal relations to some of the other things that there are then – unless we have independent reason to think that the former things are past entities and the latter things present entities – we should conclude that causal relations can hold between presently existing entities, not that there is in fact non-present ontology?

Anyway, those are my ramblings for today. Thoughts?

In other news, I see that David Cameron has proposed that the salaries of GPs be tied to the health of their patients and patient satisfaction. Ignoring the obvious problems with such a stupid idea (such as it making it even harder to get GPs to work in deprived areas), I wonder if he’s going to take the obvious next step: to link MP’s salaries to the general level of Eudaimonia and the approval ratings of them by their constituents. Somehow, I doubt it.

ontology of music

There's currently an ontology of music reading group going on at Leeds which I've been enjoying lots, as I've been interested in the ontology of art for a while now, but hadn't been able to motivate myself into getting to know the literature.

Anyway, it seemed to me that the kind of meta-ontological position I defend in my 'Truthmakers and Ontological Commitment' also had interesting applications to the ontology of music debate. So I've written them up. The draft is here. It's still rough, and I'm still in the process of getting acquainted with the literature, so comments are very welcome, but please be gentle with me!

Come and work at Leeds!

I thought Robbie's message about the 4 Leeds jobs was worth repeating here.

Sheer brilliance

Continuing on a theme: utter hilarity, courtesy of Carrie.

UPDATE: And another from Robbie.

frivolity

Lolcat commentary on citation practices.

Update: Ross pointed me towards this lolcat variant. I like it lots!

Gunk

Who says metaphysics isn't of practical use? They obvioulsy aren't aware of the practicality of gunk.

St Andrews pics

Elizabeth has put up some photos from the recent St Andrews workshops: 'The Metaphysics of Being Basic' and 'Adjectives'. You can see them here. They also contain the infamous Reactions to Relativism - not to be missed!

UPDATE: Brit has her own unique take on some of these photos here.

The ethics of citation

I’m sure we’re all familiar with unpublished papers that being something like ‘draft only – please don’t quote or cite without permission’. I’ve started papers that way myself. But then I started to think that maybe this isn’t okay. So: here’s the case against – I’d like to know what people think of this.

Suppose you’ve given a novel argument for p. Suppose this good argument inspires me to give a new argument for q. My argument for q builds upon your argument for p – the argument won’t work without citing the results of your argument. If your paper begins with ‘don’t quote or cite without permission’ then you are now effectively holding me hostage. I can’t publish my new argument without plagiarising your argument. Given that I’m not going to do that, I have no choice but to hold off doing anything with my new idea until you publish your paper. (I’m assuming your permission is withheld – which must be a serious option, otherwise why write the command in the first place?) Your argument might have completely altered my way of approaching a topic – so now all my new work has to remain on hold. What happens if you change your mind about your argument and decide it shouldn’t be published? I still can’t take credit for having that idea myself, so unless you give me permission am I never to publish the ideas your original idea sparked in me?

Imagine if Kaplan had started ‘Demonstratives’ that way, or if Kripke had placed that restriction on his Locke lectures. All the great literature that those papers spawned whilst circulating unpublished would have had to remain unpublished.

I’m tempted to think that if you put a paper up on the web, that’s to put it in the public domain, and it’s no more appropriate to place a citation restriction on such a paper than it is on a paper published in a print journal. I’m even tempted to think that conference presentations can be freely cited; i.e.that I shouldn’t have to seek Xs permission to refer in one of my papers to the presentation X gave. Papers circulated by e-mail to a small group of people seem to be a slightly different case – but even then the above argument bothers me.

On the other hand, I think it would be a real shame if the tendency to circulate draft papers or put them on-line was diminished by people being worried their ideas would be cited before they’re fully developed.

So, basically, I don’t know what to think. What do other people think?

UPDATE: Brian has a discussion of this over at tar.

UPDATE 2: Brian initiated a discussion of this at crooked timber, too: lots of interesting discussion.

Divine bananas

Check out the video on the latest developments on the teleological argument over at Aidan's blog. Hilarious!

MV goes on holiday

Robbie, Elizabeth and I are all off to St Andrews this week, for a Metaphysical Values holiday! First up is 'The Metaphysics of Being Basic', on thursday. Robbie and I will be giving our paper 'Truth Without Ontology', Elizabeth will be giving her 'Emergence and Fundamentality' and Jonathan Schaffer will be giving his 'The Priority of the Whole'. Then on Saturday and Sunday is the Arche Adjectives Workshop. Should be fun!

BSPC 2007

Elizabeth and I will once again be heading to the Bellingham Summer Philosophy Conference at WWU. Elizabeth will be commenting on Agustin Rayo's 'Vague Representation'. Other papers we know about so far are Carrie and Daniel's 'Backwards Explanation' and a co-authored paper by Andy Egan and Tyler Doggett. This conference was excellent last year (where I gave my Contingency of Composition paper, and got some excellent comments), and Bellingham is beautiful, so we're looking forward to going back.

In other news, MV would like to draw your attention to a new metaphysics blog by Henry Laycock.

Merricks on universalism and composition as identity

My earlier request for comments on my revised version of my Phil Studies paper 'The Contingency of Composition' recevied a grand total of no results, so I'm going to post the argument I particularly wanted reactions on and see if that provokes any response. If it doesn't, I will take this as tacit consent from the entire philosophical community that I am right!

In the paper I claim that composition as identity is compatible with restricted composition. What I would like comments on is my response to Merricks' argument to the contrary. Merricks has us assume, for reductio, that composition as identity is true and that mereological universalism is false. From the latter assumption, there are some things, the Xs, that don't compose. But, says Merricks, they could compose. So there is a world, w, in which there is something that is composed of the Xs, call it A. Composition as identity, if true, is necessarily true, so A is identical to the Xs in w. Hence, from the necessity of identity, A is identical to the Xs in the actual world (@). And so, from composition as identity, the Xs actually compose in @, contrary to the initial assumption.

Now, I'm not sold on the necessity of identity at the best of times, but I think it's particularly problematic here. There are two ways in which we might try and use the Barcan/Kripke argument for the necessity of identity to show that if A is identical to the Xs in w then it is identical to the Xs in @. Firstly, we might argue as follows:

A is necessarily self-identical in w. So in w, A has the property being necessarily identical to A. So, since A is identical to the Xs in w, the Xs has the property being necessarily identical to A. Hence, in the actual world, the Xs has the property being identical to A. Hence, A is identical to the Xs in the actual world, and hence the Xs compose A in the actual world, contrary to the hypothesis that there is nothing that the Xs actually compose.

This argument doesn’t work, however. A familiar complication with the Barcan/Kripke argument is that we must bear in mind is that we are dealing with contingent existents. If A is not a necessary existent then it is not self-identical in every world; all we can say is that it is self-identical in every world in which it exists: that is, that is has the property necessarily, being identical to A, if A exists. So all we can say about the Xs in w is that it has this property; and so all we can conclude is that in the actual world the Xs has the property being identical to A, if A exists. But, of course, proving that the Xs has this property in the actual world doesn’t tell us anything about whether or not the Xs actually compose. All we can conclude is that they actually compose if A actually exists – but, of course, whether or not A exists is precisely what is up for debate.

The argument only has a hope at succeeding if we start not from the necessary self-identity of A but from the necessary self-identity of the Xs. In that case the contingent existence of the Xs is not a problem. We can argue as follows. In w, the Xs is necessarily self-identical, by which we mean that the Xs is self-identical in every world in which the Xs exist. Hence, the Xs has the property necessarily, being identical to the Xs, if the Xs exist. Hence, given Leibniz’s law, A has the property necessarily, being identical to the Xs, if the Xs exist in w, and therefore has the property being identical to the Xs, if the Xs exist in the actual world. Since we know, ex hypothesi, that the Xs exist in the actual world, we can conclude that A is actually identical to the Xs, from which it follows, given composition as identity, that the Xs actually compose A, contrary to the hypothesis that they don’t actually compose anything.

But while there is no problem in this version of the argument due to the contingent existence of the entities involved, there is a further problem that faces this version and not the earlier version. The problem is that, while I am happy to grant the assumption that A is necessarily self-identical in w, I am not happy to grant the assumption that the Xs are necessarily self-identical in w.

My claim is that it only makes sense to ascribe a property like being self-identical to a plurality of things if there is some thing that the plurality is identical to; i.e. if there is a one that the many are identical to. (We can say that each of the Xs is necessarily self-identical, but that won't help: we need the strong claim that the many are self-identical, and that only seems to make sense if there is a one that the many are identical to.) One can only infer that the Xs have the property of being self-identical at a world if we know that the Xs are identical to some thing at that world – i.e. if we know that they compose at that world (since, we are assuming for the sake of argument, what it is for a collection to compose is for them to be identical to some thing). So one cannot simply assume that the Xs are necessarily self-identical; to make this claim we would need to have a reason for thinking that they are necessarily identical to some thing or other. But that is simply the claim that they necessarily compose, which just begs the question. My contention – the claim Merricks is attempting to argue against – is precisely that the Xs compose in w but not the actual world: that there is some thing in w that they are identical to but that there is no thing in the actual world that they are identical to. In that case I deny that the Xs has the property being necessarily self-identical in w. All that we can say is that in w the Xs has the property being identical to the Xs, if identical to anything as a matter of necessity; but all that will prove is that A actually has the property of being identical to the Xs if identical to anything. And as before, that won’t tell us anything at all about whether A is composed of the Xs in the actual world, since whether or not A is identical to anything at the actual world depends on whether or not A actually exists, which is what is up for dispute.

So I don’t think there is any version of the Barcan/Kripke argument that can prove that A is actually identical to the Xs because A is identical to the Xs in w. We cannot start from the premise that the Xs is necessarily self-identical in w: that begs the question, because it assumes that there is necessarily a one that the Xs is identical to, which is just to assume that they necessarily compose. There is only something which is identical to the Xs if the Xs compose; so, since I take it to be contingent that the Xs compose, I also take it to be contingent that there is some thing that is identical to them, and hence I reject the first premise of the argument that they are necessarily identical to A. If Merricks appeals (on the assumption of composition as identity) to the necessity of the self-identity of the Xs in order to show that the Xs must actually compose then he assumes, I argue, that the Xs necessarily compose; and that is simply to beg the question against me. We can start from the assumption that A is necessarily self-identical – that is unproblematic provided we are careful to mean by this only that A is self-identical in every world in which it exists: but while the resulting argument has true premises, the conclusion is far from what Merricks wants – we cannot conclude that A is actually identical to the Xs, only that A is actually identical to the Xs if it (A) exists. Since the existence of A at the actual world is precisely the issue of disagreement between Merricks and myself, this argument obviously isn’t going to persuade me.

nothing much new to post, so . . .

I was pleased to see this paper by Kris McDaniel and Ben Caplan up on OPP. The mereological myths they’re rightly debunking are ones that really annoy me. It’s part of a more general annoyance at the all too common mistake of pulling de re essentialist conclusions from a de dicto hat.

I also enjoyed Jonathan Wolff’s column on owning up to be a philosopher, and the anecdote Leiter posts here. I remember Vann McGee saying he just tells people he’s a logician, and if they ask what that is he says, quite reasonably, that it’s like being a tax auditor for the mind. It can backfire though. I remember someone (I think it might have been Agustin Rayo) telling of the time they told someone they were a logician, and the person thought for a minute then said: ‘Ah yes, you have to know where your goods are going’!

Scientists

From Wo, further evidence that scientists shouldn't be allowed to interpret their own results.

Kripkenstein

It’s always seemed to me that there is an obvious weak point in Kripke’s discussion of Wittgenstein. I don’t know the literature well at all so I may be making an elementary mistake or pointing out the obvious – either way I’d like to know.

Kripke argues that there are no meaning facts because there’s nothing to determine which of infinitely many rival meaning hypotheses are correct. Nothing about the world determines that I mean addition rather than quaddition by ‘addition’, for example. In arguing for this Kripke tries to show that various ways of choosing between the rival hypotheses won’t work. One way he considers is that it is the simplest hypothesis that is the correct one, and it is here I think he makes a mistake. He says

“[A]n appeal [to simplicity] must be based either on a misunderstanding of the sceptical problem, or of the role of simplicity considerations, or both. . . [S]implicity considerations can help us decide between competing hypotheses, but they obviously cannot tell us what the competing hypotheses are. If we do not understand what two hypotheses state, what does it mean to say that one is ‘more probable’ because it is ‘simpler’? If the two competing hypotheses are not genuine hypotheses, not assertions of genuine matters of fact, no ‘simplicity’ considerations will make them so.” (Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, p38)

Kripke's point, I take it, is this. Grant for the sake of argument that if we have multiple hypotheses about what is meant by a term then the simplest of those hypotheses is the best one. Still this is of no help, because the conclusion proper of the sceptical argument is that there are no such competing hypotheses because any hypothesis about the meaning of a term is literally contentless. As Alex Miller puts it, “if two ascriptions of meaning do not have truth-conditions, what does it mean to say that one of them is more probably true because it is simpler?” (Miller, Philosophy of Language, p173)

But consider the dialectic that was intended to establish the sceptical conclusion. We were given a challenge by the sceptic to account for why it was we meant addition by ‘plus’. And, the argument went, if we can not answer the challenge, then we are stuck with a non-factivity about meaning. The simplicity considerations are raised as an attempt to answer that challenge, so we cannot argue against that attempt by appealing to a result which is only established if that attempt fails. Kripke is illegitimately assuming the conclusion of his sceptical argument at a point in the dialectic where it is still to be established. If simplicity considerations are such that they can adequately choose between rival hypotheses then the sceptical argument fails and the non-factivity of meaning does not follow. One cannot argue against this attempt at a straight solution by arguing that the rival hypotheses lack content; that is to assume what, at this stage in the dialectic, is still very much up for debate: the truth of the sceptical conclusion. So Kripke’s argument against the appeal to simplicity here simply begs the question.

What conclusion should you draw? I’m not saying the appeal to simplicity is the way to answer Kripke; there are still the problems with this appeal that Kripke lays to one side: i.e. “that simplicity is relative, or that it is hard to define, or that a Martian might find the quus function simpler than the plus function” (ibid). But if what I’ve said above is correct is lets us respond to an objection against Kripke’s sceptical solution.

Kripke embraces the non-factivity of meaning and argues that language use and communication is something like a community wide game. The claim is that there need be no facts about meaning for language to be useful. So instead of looking for meaning-constitutive facts – a futile effort, for there are no such things – Kripke suggests we look instead to the role meaning ascriptions play in the ‘langauge game’: to when ascriptions of meaning are justified in the discourse in question. Kripke says

“All that is needed to legitimize assertions that someone means something is that there be roughly specifiable circumstances under which they are legitimitately assertable, and that the game of asserting them under such conditions has a role in our lives. No supposition that ‘facts correspond’ to those assertions is needed.” (ibid. p78)

Kripke’s sceptical solution is criticised by José Zalabardo ('Rules, Communities, Judgements' Critica 63, 1989), who says that the ‘solution’ only tells us how to choose between rival hypotheses about what are the correct meaning ascriptions, and that if Kripke’s sceptical conclusion is right – and the rival ‘hypotheses’ are contentless – then the sceptical solution is no solution at all.

Now Zalabardo might be right that if Kripke’s sceptical conclusion is correct then the sceptical conclusion can’t get Kripke what he wants. But if what I said above about the simplicity argument is correct, then we can take Kripke’s ‘sceptical’ solution to be a perfectly good straight solution instead. If the ‘sceptical’ solution does let us choose between the rival hypotheses then why not let the meaning facts be what the ‘sceptical’ solution says they are? One can’t complain that there are no hypotheses for the sceptical solution to choose between, because that presupposes the sceptical conclusion; and if the ‘sceptical’ solution really does pick out the correct meaning hypothesis then the sceptical conclusion is not established. So to make that complaint against using the sceptical solution as a straight solution would simply be to beg the question in exactly the same way Kripke begged the question when dismissing the appeal to simplicity.

Kluwer and the persistence conditions of articles

I’ve noticed that when you submit a paper on the Kluwer on-line system, they’ve started asking you if you’ve submitted the paper elsewhere. That seems an odd question to ask. I was submitting a paper that had been rejected from somewhere else, but I was kind of reluctant to admit to that while submitting it somewhere else. Partly, that’s because of the psychological pull of the completely unreliable ‘X rejected Y, therefore Y wasn’t good enough for X’ rule, and so admitting the paper’s been previously rejected seems to be admitting something detrimental about its worth, when you want the journal you’re submitting to to think it’s a good paper.

Of course, all you need to do is create a context where strict counterpart relations are invoked and you can answer ‘no’. “I haven’t submitted this paper elsewhere, because I changed footnote 16 since the last time I submitted a similar paper.” And that just increases the sense that this is a silly question to be asking – since the answer given will depend not only just on the history of the world but on the answerer’s beliefs concerning the persistence conditions of papers.

Does anyone know why Kluwer are asking this, and how the information gets used? Any comments on whether it’s a good or bad idea to ask?

Ross' rants for today

Recently Julian Baggini wrote an article in the Guardian pointing out how stupid and dangerous a naïve relativism about truth is. Predictably, this was followed by a small flurry of silly objection letters. On noticing the amount of overlap between such letters – and ones that had appeared previously – I thought I’d be magnanimous and offer the following ‘defending relativism schema’, thus freeing up the authors’ valuable time to deconstruct themselves.

(1) Begin by pointing out that your favourite maligned ‘continental’ philosopher believed some true proposition p. p should be some proposition that it is morally blameworthy to deny and that was denied by a prominent analytic philosopher. (Example: so-and-so thought Jews were no worse than gentiles, but Frege was an anti-semite.)

(2) Conclude that said maligned philosopher was correct about the nature of truth after all, even though this is completely unrelated.

(3) Apropos of nothing, accuse ‘analytic’ philosophers of indoctrinating their students into positivism, even though no-one is a positivist these days.

(4) Why not end with a nice ad hominem for good measure?

Oh well. Reading the Guardian often makes me angry, but I don’t seem to be able to stop. It’s strange as well – I get far less angry reading the Times, even though what’s written is generally far more repulsive. I just feel the Guardian ought to know better . . .

On a happier note: I have a fondness for amusing signs. I was particularly happy one afternoon while on a woodland walk when I saw both a sign saying ‘please don’t leave the path’ (how am I meant to get home?) and a sign saying ‘please leave the gate closed’ (how am I meant to get to the other side? – especially since I’m stuck to the path and can’t go round the gate!). But a recent good one was at a coffee stall in the train station. It said “Try one of our great cappuccino’s”. There are three mistakes there. Obviously, it’s afflicted with what I like to call ‘the undergrad apostrophe’. Secondly, the plural of ‘cappuccino’ isn’t even the apostrophe-less ‘cappuccinos’, it’s ‘cappuccini’. And thirdly, the coffee wasn’t great, it was rubbish.

As you can see, today I am working hard. I should probably go into my departmental office soon because they have a sign on the door saying “Please knock and enter”. I don’t know why they want me to go in, but I’ll be happy to oblige.

Photos

I've put up some photos from the recent Structure in Metaphysics workshop. I'm also happy to be able to prove that I hung out at the APA with one of the great philosophical minds (oh yeah, and Kris McDaniel also).

Parsimony and the fundamental

In his APA comments on Jonathan Schaffer, Ross asks about some of Jonathan's ideas about the applicability of Ockham's razor. The question arises if you buy into some robust distinction between "fundamental" and "derivative" existents. Candidate fundamental existents: quarks, electrons, maybe organisms (or maybe just THE WORLD). Candidate derivative existents: weirdo fusions, impure sets, maybe tables and chairs (or maybe everything except THE WORLD).

Let's call the idea that "derivative" as well as "fundamental" entities are (thump table) existing things the expansivist interpretation of the fundamental/derivative distinction. Call the idea that only the fundamental (thump table) exists the restrictivist interpretation of that distinction.

Jonathan's position is that Ockham's razor, rightly understood, tells us to minimize the number of fundamental entities. Ross's idea (I think?) is that this is right iff one has a restrictivist understanding of the fundamental/derivative distinction. But Jonathan, pretty clearly, has an expansivist understanding of that distinction: he doesn't want to say that the only thing that (thump table) exists is the world, just that the world is ontologically prior to everything else. So if Ross is right, his application of parsimony is in trouble.

I can see what the idea is here: after all, understanding parsimony as the instruction to minimize (thump table) existents or to minimize the (thump table) kinds of existents is surely close to the traditional understanding. Whereas the idea that we need only minimize (kinds of) existents of such-and-such a type, seems to come a bit out of the blue, and at minimum we need some more explanation before we could accept that revision to our theoretical maxims.

However... One thing that seems important is to consider what sort of principles of parsimony might be present in more ordinary theorizing (e.g. in the special sciences). The appeal of appealing to parsimony in metaphysics is in large part that it's a general theoretical virtue, applicable in all sorts of areas that are paradigms of good, productive fields of inquiry. Now, theoretical virtues in the sciences is not a topic that I'm in a position to speak with authority on. But one thing that seems to me important in this connection: if you think that the entities of special sciences aren't fundamental entities, then principles of parsimony restricted to the fundamentals aren't going to be in a position to give you much bite. (NB: I think that this was raised by someone in comments on Jonathan's paper in Boise, but I can't remember who it was...).

If that's right, then whether you're an expansivist or a restrictivist about the fundamental/derivative distinction seems beside the point. Any theorist who gives a story about what the fundamentals are that's unconstrained by what the special sciences say, is going to be in trouble with the idea that principles of parsimony should be restricted to constraints on fundamental existents: for such principles of parsimony won't then be able to get much bite on theorizing in the special sciences. I'd like to think that quarks, leptons etc are going to populate the fundamental, rather than Jonathan's WORLD. This point bites me as much as Jonathan.

There's plenty of room for further discussion here, particularly the interaction of the above with what you take to be evidence for some entities being fundamental. E.g. if you thought that various types of emergentism in special science would be evidence for "higher level" fundamental entities, then maybe the above parsimony principle would still have application to special sciences: it'd tell you to reduce to the number of emergent entities you postulate (i.e. it'd be a methodological imperative towards reductionism).

Also, it seems to me that there is something to the thought that some entities are simply "don't cares" when applying parsimony principles. If I'm concerned with theorizing about the behaviour of various beetles in front of me, I care about how many kinds of beetles my theory is giving me, but not with how many kinds of mathematical entities I need to invoke in formulating that theory. Now, maybe that differential attitude can be explained away by pointing to the generality of the mathematica involved (e.g. that total science is "already committed to them"). But one natural take would be to look for restrictions to principles of parsimony/Ockham's razor, making them sensitive to the subject-matter under investigation.

To speculate wildly: If principles of parsimony do need to be sensitized in this way, and if the study of what fundamentally exists is a genuine investigation, maybe the principle of parsimony, in application to that study, really would tell us to minimize the number of, and kinds of, fundamental entities we posit.

Paper changes

I've made changes to a couple of my papers that I'd welcome comments on. Firstly, I realised at the APA that I was saying some completely false things regarding the individuation of sums in my paper on fundamentality. I now hope I'm saying true things. The changed section is section 4 - the stuff concerning necessary connections and whether they're unobjectionable if the things in question overlap.

I've also made an addition to my paper on the Contingency of Composition. I have always argued that composition as identity is compatible with restricted composition and I've needed to say something about Merricks' argument to the contrary. Merricks relies on the necessity of identity, and I've previously been happy simply to play the counterpart theory card and reject this. But on further reflection I think I can show that you shouldn't accept Merricks' argument even if you accept the standard Barcan/Kripke proof of the necessity of identity. The final version of this paper has to be sent off soon, so if anyone had any comments on my response to Merricks here I'd appreciate them.

On another note. As I understand it, women are under-represented in the major journals (I mean, even given their under-representation in the profession - that is, woman are even more under-represented in the journals than you'd expect them to be, given how many women there are in the profession). Why is this? Well, we'd need a study on this, but the following seems likely to me. Since women are under-represented in the profession it is very likely, for every paper sent to a journal, that it will be refereed by a man. Men and women vary in their styles of writing and arguing. So while when a man submits a paper it is likely that it will be reveiwed by someone who writes and argues in a broadly similar style, with women this is very unlikely. Hence, women face a disadvantage in trying to get papers published.

Okay - it's hardly likely to be that simple. But I bet there's something to this. And if there's some truth to this then there's a good case to be made, it seems to me, for journals implementing the rule that papers by women should, other things being equal, be reveiwed by women. (The 'other things' packs in a lot, because it seems far more important that papers be reveiwed by experts in the subject.) Is there a good reason why this shouldn't happen?

APA post mortem

Elizabeth and I are back in the Old Country after an extremely enjoyable trip to the San Francisco APA. San Francisco is an awesome city! I was responding to Jonathan Schaffer on ‘The Least Discerning and Most Promiscuous Truthmaker’ and the session seemed to go really well (my comments are below). Other highlights, for me, included the ‘author meets critics’ session on Hud Hudson’s The metaphysics of Hyperspace (there was a particularly illuminating debate between Hud and Josh Parsons on primitive location relations), Joshua Spencer’s talk on extended simples (Joshua provides further evidence – as if Kris McDaniel, Ryan Wasserman and Shieva Kleinschmidt weren’t enough – of the excellence of the best of the WWU students), and Alyssa Ney’s paper on causation. And there were plenty of other interesting looking sessions that I didn’t get to go to because of scheduling clashes (i.e. I wanted to go to the golden gate bridge). Leeds made a good showing: as well as me and Elizabeth, CMM’s own Robbie and Andy were there, as were Leeds ethicist Ulrike Heuer, and ex-Leeds head of department Mark Nelson. There was also a reunion of the Arche old guard, since Roy Cook, Agustin Rayo and Josh Parsons were all there.

The biggest problem was a common one: chairs not chairing! It was extremely rare, at least in my experience, for a chair to tell someone there was no more time for their question, or even to hurry up and get to the point; it was as if the only point of a chair is to keep track of who wants to ask questions. This is pretty common, it seems to me; and it’s not a good thing. Chairs should rule with an iron fist. I appreciate that’s not easy for everyone to do (“I’m sorry Professor Kripke, I don’t think you’re going anywhere with this, we’ll have to move on . . .”) but it’s worth us as a community working to establish a firmer line on chairing. The speaker and the questioner are not always in the best position to decide whether a point is worth pursuing – whether or not, for example, they’re simply talking past one another; we need chairs familiar with the debate who are willing to move the discussion on if necessary. The BSPC was a perfect example of how to do things. Chairs were issued with firm chairing guidelines, and the first session was chaired by one of the organisers to lead the way. And it worked really well – when the chair intervened on questions everyone knew they were just following the rules and there wasn’t any resentment (as far as I could tell). That’s obviously going to be harder to enforce at bigger conferences; but not impossible, and it’s worth the effort.

And now, for anyone who’s interested, here are the comments I made to Schaffer. I didn’t read these out, but they approximate what I said.

Jonathan claims simplicity as a virtue of his theory. But is his theory really ontologically parsimonious? Sure, Jonathan only has one truthmaker as opposed to, e.g., Armstrong’s many, many truthmakers; but the theories may be identical as to what they claim exists. Suppose I tell you that this chair has the property of being the universal wife: it is the thing that any man is married to, if they are not married to any woman. Why should you believe me? Economy – we minimise the number of bachelors in the world! That won’t convince anyone, of course: there’s no theoretical benefit in minimising the number of bachelors if doing so doesn’t minimise the number of entities we are committed to. Why should I minimise the number of truthmakers then? Jonathan and I might agree exactly on what there is – we just disagree on what, among those things, play a truthmaking role. If so, in the absence of further explanation, I don’t see why I should concede that Jonathan’s view has the benefit of parsimony.

As always, of course, there’s more to be said. Perhaps the principle that is guiding Jonathan is ‘minimise the number of fundamental entities’. In that case, given Jonathan’s claim that truthmakers must be fundamental, which I’ll grant for the moment, it will follow that we should minimise the number of truthmakers.

But why should I minimise the number of fundamental entities? Again, unless there’s more to be said this looks just like the case above: Jonathan and I can agree exactly on what there is, we just disagree about which, among those things, has the property of fundamentality – and it’s not clear why thinking fewer things have this property is a theoretical benefit.

Perhaps it’s because only the fundamental is real. If the derivative entities are unreal – if we don’t occur any genuine ontological commitment by believing in the derivative – then it’s reasonable to assume that when Ockham’s razor tells us to minimise entities it means the fundamental, real, entities.

I don’t think of fundamentality that way: I think of the ‘fundamental/derivative’ relation as holding between equally real entities; but opinion differs here. But if Jonathan takes this route I think it weakens his case for the priority monism that lies behind his truthmaker theory. Jonathan is keen to distinguish his monism from what we might call numerical monism: the claim that only one thing exists. Many are willing to dismiss the latter monistic theory because of the violence it does to common sense intuitions: namely, that it denies that you and I exist, or that the tables and chairs here exist, etc. Jonathan points out that such objections don’t touch his theory: he does believe in you and I and in the tables and chairs – he simply doesn’t think they’re fundamental. But if Jonathan thinks that you and I don’t really exist this response seems somewhat weakened. The intuition against monism is that we exist, dammit! To find out that it’s okay to talk about us, even though we’re unreal, hardly sweetens the pill! I pose Jonathan a dilemma then: either there is genuine ontological commitment to the derivative or there isn’t. If there is, then it is not clear to me that I should concede him parsimony. If there isn’t, then, while I grant him parsimony, I think he incurs a serious cost in going against common sense intuition.

Also, I granted for the sake of argument Jonathan’s claim that truthmakers must be fundamental, but I don’t actually believe that. I think the truthmaker for , for example, is the redness of the chair (a trope); but I do not think this trope is fundamental – I think it is dependent on the chair.

When arguing for the fundamentality of truthmakers Jonathan says “The truth of propositions is not fundamental, and so needs grounding. But if the truthmakers are not themselves fundamental, then the ground has not been reached.”

I think there is an equivocation on ‘ground’ here. I think there are two distinct grounding relations: the relation between a true proposition and its truthmaker, and the relation between a dependent entity and that which it is dependent on: the existence of a truthmaker necessitates the truth of that which it makes true, but for ontological dependence the necessitation goes the other way – the existence of the dependence necessitates the existence of that which it is dependent on. Jonathan thinks it is the same relation. In correspondence he proposed the following reduction of truthmaking to ontological dependence:

(*) A makes p true iff the truth of p is ontologically dependent on A.

Okay, so now we’re believing in ‘the truth of p’ – a particularised verity belonging to a proposition? That’s not something I believe in, so again I’m brought back to asking: is Jonathan’s theory really economical? Jonathan can say ‘Yes, because I only recognise an ontological commitment to the fundamental, and the truth of p is derivative’. But I can’t help but feel that the cards are being stacked too highly in Jonathan’s favour from the outset: he can appeal to anything he likes that will help him out and not face any charges of ontological profligacy because he only ever recognises commitment to one thing: the world.

Let me end by wondering whether Jonathan really has slain the dragon of negative facts. Jonathan rightly says that any theory according to which the number of truthmakers is a necessary truth will slay the dragon. Once we know what the n truthmakers are we know that is false, because there would have to be another truthmaker were it true, and we know that there aren’t any others, because there have to be exactly n. Since Jonathan’s theory says that there is, necessarily, exactly one truthmaker, then it slays the dragon.

But Jonathan’s justification for thinking that there is necessarily exactly one truthmaker relies on his view that priority monism is not just true but necessarily true. I am more attracted to the view that such claims are contingent truths: that whether the dependence relation goes from part to whole or vice-versa varies from world to world.

I won’t say too much about that here, although I will say that I take the burden of proof always to be on he who sees necessity over he who sees contingency. But also, consider one of Jonathan’s arguments for priority monism. If the whole is dependent on the parts, says Jonathan, the world couldn’t be gunky, for then dependence would never ‘bottom out’. Since gunk is possible, then, priority monism is true. I agree that the whole couldn’t be dependent on the parts in a gunky world. But for the same reasons, the parts can’t be dependent on the whole in an ‘anti-gunky’ world: a world where everything is a proper part of some thing. I don’t see the possibility of gunk being on a stronger footing than the possibility of anti-gunk, so I think this is as good an argument for priority pluralism as the previous argument was for priority monism. The conclusion I take is that priority pluralism and priority monism are both possible, and that what is true depends on the contingent mereological facts concerning the actual world. But in that case, even if priority monism is actually true, and there is actually only one truthmaker, it will be possible for there to be many truthmakers. And so the problem of negative facts remains open.

The Shrinking Block

Why are there no defenders of the shrinking block theory of time - the view that the present and future exist but not the past? Here's one advantage of the theory: it gives a good explanation for a version of the 'thank goodness that's over' intuition. If I tell you that there is going to be an hour of pain in your lifetime and you can choose whether it's to be in your past or your future which would you choose? I bet, other things' being equal, you'd choose it to be in your past. But why? If Shrinking Block is true there's a good reason for so choosing: existent pains are a lot worse than non-existent ones.

Does Growing Block have advantages over Shrinking Block? Why be a growing block theorist? My old friend from grad school, Joseph Diekemper (currently Gifford fellow at St Andrews, and soon to be lecturer at Queen's Belfast) cites the fixity of the past and the openness of the future as reason to accept Growing Block. But his main target is the presentist: Joseph thinks the presentist can't account for the asymmetry in fixity because they have no corresponding asymmetry between the past and future. Well, this alone won't move the Shrinking Block theorist, because they do have such an asymmetry - it's just the other way around from the Growing Block.

Indeed, in some ways the Shrinking Block view seems more able to account for the fixity of the past and the openness of the future. The intuition to be saved, I take it, is that we can affect how the future will be but not how the past was. Well ask yourself this: what would it be easier for us to affect - an existent state of affairs or a non-existent one? Surely an existent one, since we can't even have causal interaction with a non-existent state of affairs.

I'm not seriously trying to get you to believe the Shrinking Block theory, of course. But I'd be interested to know just why Growing Block is meant to be a better option.

Naturalness in Idaho

I'm off very soon to the INPC metametaphysics conference in Boise. Many other fun people will be there (not least fellow CMM-er Andy McGonigal, fresh from a spell at Cornell).

Together with Iris Einheuser, I'm going to be responding to Ted Sider's paper "Which disputes are substantive?". It's been great to have a serious think about the way that Ted thinks of this stuff, and how it relates to the Kit Fine inspired setting that I've been working on lately.

Anyway, the whole writing-a-response thing got way out of hand, and I've ended up with a 7,500 word first draft. I do think there's a couple of substantive issues raised therein for the kind of framework (otherwise really really attractive) that he's been pushing here and in recent work. The worry centres around quantification into the scope of Ted's "naturalness" operator. For any who are interested, I've put the draft response up online.

After the INPC, I'll be in San Fran for the Pacific APA, along with many other CMM and Leeds folks.

CMM attracts more metaphysicians

We are delighted to announce that Sonia Roca Royes has been awarded an externally funded postdoc to spend two years at the CMM, starting in June 2007. Sonia's research so far has been on essentialism, and she has published in Mind and Erkenntnis. We're very pleased that she'll be joining us.

This is the same period of time that Stephan Leuenberger, currently a postdoc at the ANU and winner of the 2006 Oxford Studies in Metaphysics Younger Scholars Competition, will be joining us, replaing me as the CMM research fellow in metaphysics.

It's also around this time that Professor John Divers will be making his triumphant return to Leeds. And Helen Steward will have just joined us from Oxford.

The future of metaphysics at Leeds looks very bright indeed!

Fundamentality again

I've added two substantial sections at the end of my paper on real and derivative existents; the latest version, for anyone who cares, is here.

Robbie and I are going to be giving a joint presentation on this stuff at a metaphysics workshop in St Andrews on may 17th. Elizabeth will also be giving a paper. - Watch this space for details!

Dear John, thank you for your paper . . .

Elizabeth and I were talking to Kris McDaniel last night about the similarity between rejection letters from journals and ‘Dear John’ letters from significant others who are soon to be ex-significant others. So: we offer the following translation manual for interpreting journals.

In place of ‘Thank you for submitting your paper X to our journal. Competition is intense, and . . .’ read ‘We need to talk . . . ’

In place of ‘We wish you every success in finding an alternative avenue of publication’ read ‘I’m sure there’s someone really special out there for you.’

In place of ‘Competition is intense, and although I read your paper with interest . . .’ read ‘I’m young – I need to consider all my options’

In place of ‘The referees thought the paper deviated from the aims of the journal’ read ‘It’s not you, it’s me’

In place of ‘Based on the advice we’ve received, we cannot accept your paper’ read ‘My friends don’t like you, so it’s over’

In place of 'The Editor would be prepared to consider a revised version ... ' read 'Perhaps we could hook up sometimes when I'm in town --- on a "no commitment" basis ... '

In place of ‘Please consider our journal in the future’ read ‘I hope we can still be friends!’

And in place of ‘I’m sorry to tell you that, upon consideration of the referees’ comments, your paper will not be accepted for publication’. Read: ‘I just don’t think this is gonna work’

Vagueness and contradiction in derivative reality

While we disagree on some of the details, both Robbie and I agree one can admit that there are complex objects without, in some sense, being ontologically committed to complex objects: there need be no complex objects in fundamental ontology.

What complex objects exist derivatively then? Well, if they’re not really extra elements of our ontology we might think we should just go ahead and say that the claims of universalism come out true: that for any collection of objects, there is (derivatively) a sum of those objects. That, I think, is Armstrong’s view: complex objects are an ontological free lunch, so we might as well be universalists.

But we’re certainly not forced into saying that. Just as we are concerned with reconciling a nihilistic ontology with the truth of everyday judgements concerning the existence of tables and persons, etc, we might also be concerned with not going too far – that is, preserving the everyday judgements concerning the non­-existence of the sum of Hitler’s left ear, an atom in the sun, and the number 2. So we might tell a story whereby our fundamental, atomistic, ontology accounts for the truth of some theory of restricted composition.

Indeed, it seems that we can avoid one of the main objections to restricted composition: namely, the Sider-Lewis objection from vagueness. If composition is restricted, they say, it must be either brute or vague. If it’s brute, that’s metaphysically arbitrary in an objectionable way. But if it’s vague then this must be ontic vagueness, since there’s no vagueness in the language of quantificational theory, and that’s no good because ontic vagueness is A Bad Thing.

There’s plenty to say about that argument as applied against run-of-the-mill restricted composition theorists, of course, (Is brutality really all that bad?[1] Is ontic vagueness?[2]), but even if you think the argument is good there, it seems to have no weight at all against the kind of restricted composition you would get on the Robbie/Ross route.

Suppose we go organicist. A complex object only (derivatively) exists if the simples that account for its existence jointly and exhaustively participate in some life. There will be cases where it is vague whether we have a complex object. Is this objectionable? It seems not – even on the assumption that there cannot be ontic vagueness. Because what there really is is (we may suppose) perfectly precise. It’s just vague whether some collections of the fundamental existents account for the existence of a complex object. In my terminology, it will be vague whether they make true any existence claims concerning complex objects. Ontic vagueness only looks worrying, if it ever does, if it infects fundamental ontology: the derivative can be as indeterminate as you like. (C.f. Elizabeth’s ‘Ontic vagueness without supervenience’.)

(Maybe this gives us an argument for priority monism: the view (defended by Jonathan Schaffer) that the one big whole is what's fundamental, and the parts derivative on it. Quantum mechanics tells us (my esteemed colleagues tell me!) that the very smallest things are indeterminate. Maybe that gives us reason to deny that they're fundamental and instead accept that the quantum particles are derivative on the fundamental whole.)

If that’s right, it seems to apply to other cases as well. I’m thinking in particular of dialetheism. Many people find objectionable the idea that both a proposition and its negation can be true. I share the suspicion if the proposition concerns how fundamental ontology is; but it doesn’t seem objectionable to me if fundamental reality is consistent, but the consistent way fundamental reality is results in an inconsistent derivative reality.

Think of the particular cases of true contradictions dialetheists are fond of. The Liar sentence – L – springs to mind. L is both true and false! But who cares? Sentences are not, we might think, part of fundamental ontology. What’s fundamental is, on my view, just the truthmakers. So what would be objectionable is if, say, the truthmaker for L both existed and didn’t exist, for then fundamental reality would be inconsistent. But the dialetheist is not committed to anything like this. We could easily tell a story whereby fundamental reality (for me, the truthmakers) is consistent and makes true both L and its negation. And this just doesn’t seem objectionable to me. Why should I care about some sentence being both true and false? Why should I care, even, if some thing both does and doesn’t exist – provided the sense in which it exists is mere derivative existence? All that seems bad to me is if there is inconsistency at the fundamental level; if our best theory tells us that this consistent fundamental reality accounts for true inconsistencies, so be it.

---

[1] See Ned Markosian’s ‘Brutal Composition’, Daniel Nolan’s ‘Vagueness, Multiplicity and Parts’ and my ‘The Contingency of Composition’.

[2] Go to Elizabeth’s homepage!

More on fundamentality

Robbie says below that people thinks about the fundamental/derivative distinction in such different ways. One truthmaker for this claim is the pair of him and me! At least, maybe: we've been talking about this stuff, and I'm not entirely sure about whether we do in fact disagree substantially. Anyway, I thought I'd also post my current thoughts on the matter. This is *extremely* work-in-progressy, and a lot of work needs to be done, so comments are very welcome.

My paper is here.

Fundamental and derivative truths (x-post)

After a bit of to-ing and fro-ing, I've decided to post a first draft of "Fundamental and derivative truths" on my work in progress page.

I've been thinking about this material a lot lately, but I've found it surprisingly different to formulate and explain. I can see how everything fits together: just not sure how best to go about explaining it to people. Different people react to it in such different ways!

The paper does a bunch of things:

• offering an interpretation of Kit Fine's distinction between things that are really true, and things that are merely true. (So, e.g. tables might exist, but not really exist).
  
• using Agustin Rayo's recent proposal for formulating a theory of requirements/ontological commitments in explication.
  
• putting forward a general strategy for formulating nihilist-friendly theories of requirements (set theoretic nihilism and mereological nihilisms being the illustrative cases used in the paper).
  
• using this to give an account of "postulating" things into existence (e.g. sets, weirdo fusions).
  
• sketching a general answer to the question: in virtue of what do our sentences have the ontological commitments they do (i.e. what makes a theory of requirements *the correct one* for this or that language?)

This is exploratory stuff: there's lots more to be said about each of these, and plenty more issues (e.g. how does this relate to fictionalist proposals?) But I'm at a stage where feedback and discussion are perhaps the most important things, so making it public seems a natural strategy...

I'm going to be talking in more detail about the case of mereological nihilism at the CMM structure in metaphysics workshop.

(X-posted from theories n' things)

objectionable content?

I just noticed that at the top of the Blog page there's a link where you can alert Blogger to objectionable content.

I can just see it: "Dear Blogger. Cameron thinks that *every* truth has a truthmaker. What a nutcase! Can't you do something about him?"

:-)

I hoped to have something interesting to say about Jonathan Schaffer's 'The Least Discerning and Most Promiscuous Truthmaker' which I'm responding to at the Pacific APA. But I'm driving myself crazy thinking about different dependence relations, and I'm still too traumatized to speak about it. Hopefully next week . . .

structure etc

The final line-up for the Structure workshop on March 10th are:

Katherine Hawley (St Andrews): 'Magic and Mereology'
E.J. Lowe (Durham): 'Structure and Categories'
Kris McDaniel (Syracuse): 'Ways of Being'
Robbie Williams (Leeds): 'Semantics for Nihilists'

(Julian Dodd unfortunately had to pull out.)

The timetable is up at

http://www.personal.leeds.ac.uk/~phlrpc/StructureWorkshop.htm

College values

There was an article in the Guardian yesterday written by a professor who had taught a theatre class at an American university. As part of the assessment of the course students were required to view a particular play and write on it. At one point in the play two men kiss. One of the students informed the professor that he wouldn’t be watching the play, and when asked why not he replied (“with a smile” – the smile is crucial!) that he couldn’t, because he was a Christian.

In the article the professor was speaking out against the view – apparently gaining in popularity – that the student should have the right to opt out of that assessment. His reason was that universities are bastions of liberal thought and values, and that we should simply come clean and admit that it is these values that we are teaching to our students. And if you don’t like it? Tough, no one forces you to be here!

I agree with his conclusion – that the student shouldn’t have been able to opt out of this assignment while still remaining in that class – but for completely different reasons.

I don’t think universities should be in the business of trying to impart liberal values on our students; or any values for that matter – we should be trying to educate our students to enable them to come to an informed decision about their beliefs and values. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t set as an assessment a play involving a homosexual incident, for the simple reason that to set such an assessment isn’t to teach, or even endorse, the values that the play might expound.

If a professor sets Mein Kampf as a course text, that doesn’t mean she is forcing Nazi values on her students, nor does it mean she is endorsing them. What she is doing is teaching students what those values are, which will hopefully lead them to make an educated choice regarding those values.

Provided the professor is marking an assessment based on the quality of the arguments and not the particular conclusions that are defended, I don’t see how there can be any problem over setting as an assignment a piece of work that preaches values that might be different from a student’s. If the Christian student believes that homosexuality is wrong, and if he thought that made an impact on the aesthetic quality of the play, then he can say that in his assignment. If he makes his case well, then it shouldn’t matter to the professor what his conclusion is; and if he doesn’t make it well then he should perhaps think harder about why he believes what he believes.

So no – this student shouldn’t have been able to opt out of this assessment. But it’s nothing to do with liberal or conservative ideologies; the point is simply that what you think of an assigned piece of work shouldn’t have a bearing on whether you participate in the assignment – it should only affect the content of your assignment.