June 13, 2006
Changeable Natural Kinds
I've encountered an issue that I know very little about and was interested if anyone who might occasionally check this blog had an answer. Are there any views out there according to which there are natural kinds but something that is a member of a natural kind might cease to be a member of that natural kind and then be a member of a different one? I'm pretty sure Aristotle would never allow something like this, but I was wondering if any philosophers have defended such a view.
Update: I'm closing comments due to spam. If you wish to leave me a comment, go to the Parableman posting of this.
Posted by Jeremy at 1:58 PM
June 1, 2006
Racial Essentialism
I don't know if anyone is still checking anything here, but I thought I'd try to draw attention to a post on my own blog in case anyone is. I'm trying to work out a taxonomy of the various views someone might hold regarding the nature of racial groups. One of the views, sometimes called racial realism, takes races to be natural kinds something like species in biology. I'm not trying to evaluate this view at this point, just to categorize what view there might be. It seems to me that there's a great variety of possible views even within racial realism, and I'm working out some of what that variety is.
One concern that keeps arising is the use of the term 'racial essentialism', which I think is supposed to be some sort of racial realism, but most who use it don't make it clear what they mean or why they call it a kind of essentialism. I'm trying to work out the various things someone might mean when calling a view racial essentialism, and I'm looking for help in sorting through the views I've come up with and identifying any possibilities I might have missed. The post is here for any who are interested.
Since this blog is basically defunct until some Syracuse grad students want to revive it (in which case I'll happily be involved and continue to maintain the blog), I'm keeping the comments and trackbacks closed. The comments and trackbacks on the post I'm referring you to at my blog are open.
Posted by Jeremy at 8:35 AM
June 14, 2005
On being multi-located
It occurred to me last night that there is something about the problem of temporary intrinsics that I cannot understand. If there is any problem with an object's having contradictory properties without violating Leibniz' Law, then there should equally be a problem about an object's having two contradictory locations. For an object to undergo change and survive, it must be located at two distinct times. How can something be located at two distinct times? The answer is easy for friends of temporal parts: "The object is partially located at one time, and partially located at another time, that's how." But what would the three-dimensionalist say? The standard strategy when responding to the problem of temporary intrinsics is to take it seriously that the contradictory properties are had not simultaneously (which would be a violation of Leibniz' Law) but at different times. You are taking this seriously if you construe properties as disguised relations to times. E.g. One has not the property of being bent and the property of being straight (which contradict), but rather the property of being bent-at-t-1, and the property of being straight-at-t2 (which do not contradict.) It seems that in the case of the problem of contradictory locations, there is no such way out. One couldn't say: Being located at t1 contradicts being located at t2, but being located at t1 at t1 doesn't contradict being located at t2 at t2. (Funny thing: One couldn’t say this, but not because "if we know what being located is, we know it's not a relation," but precisely because we already knew that to be located at a time is to have a relation to that time!) The only (eternalist) way out for the three-dimensionalist is to insist that objects can be wholly located at two distinct times without contradiction. In particular, she can insist that to assume that being wholly located at t1 contradicts with being wholly located at t2 is to beg the question against the three-dimensionalist. Somehow, this alone doesn't seem satisfactory to me.
Posted by ikurtsal at 12:45 PM | Comments (13)
April 15, 2005
S.U. Changing the Past
Today's Daily Orange has this headline:
SU hopes to alter past vs. Rutgers
I thought for a moment that Dean Newton had commissioned the physics department to invent a time machine to prevent John Hawthorne, Ted Sider, and Dean Zimmerman from going to Rutgers. Alas, it was just a lacrosse article, and it doesn't even involve changing the past, just having a future that's not like the recent past in one important respect. I knew the D.O. to be an awful paper, but I didn't know their headlines were so bad that they might mistakenly refer to an ordinary occurrence as a metaphysically problematic concept.
Posted by Jeremy at 1:21 AM | Comments (1)
March 1, 2005
Science (I think)
Just read a metaphysically interesting article on the internet. It even regards the true nature of hells.
Posted by cmaxfield at 10:04 PM
January 10, 2005
Contest: Make the Best Actual/Potential Parts/Simples/Gunk/Composition Road-Map
I've just finished reading The Architecture of Matter (by Tom Holden, who used to be at Syracuse, now at UC Santa Barbara), which I recommend highly. In it Holden discusses the Early Modern debates between actual and potential parts theorists and how this intersects with the further issue of whether extended objects are infinitely divisible or not (and, what the nature of minima or simples would be, if there are any). He does a great job of showing the problems of reconciling the actual parts metaphysic with the doctrine of infinite divisibility. The actual parts metaphysic was accepted by most of the Early Modern bigwigs, and seemed part-and-parcel of denying medieval scholasticism, substantial forms, and the semi-mysterious Aristotelian doctrine of 'potential parts,' where such parts are created or actualized upon sundering from the object they are parts of (existing merely 'potentially' before). This represented a shift based upon embracing the new science and its corpuscularian explanations. But, going along with the new science was the geometrization of nature, which seemed to demand infinite divisibility and hence an infinite number of parts for any extended object, regardless of size. There are a lot of (prima facie, at least) paradoxes that crop up for the actual parts-theorist who holds infinite divisibility, which I won't cover here. One overarching problem, however, was that the putative good explanations for macro-phenomenon that the actual-parter could employ by adverting to nice chunky physical corpuscles seemed to dissolve as the minima reduced themselves to extensionless points (the pre-critical Kant, and Boscovich, however, with some influence by More, do a nice job of introducing force-shell atoms or fields to answer some of these problems). Anyways, in order to help in my research, and, because I'm a geek who enjoys this kind of thing, I've been making the following chart which attempts to map the space of views in this field, which, if you're interested, you can check out here (a power point version in landscape format followed by a word version in regular format): Actual/Potential Parts Road-Map Word Version The chart is not complete. I haven't plugged in every influential or famous person who fits into all the categories. I've put in some contemporary people, although hesitantly, and where they fit in (or where I think they fit in). But, mainly, this concerns the Early Moderns. I also wanted to fit in a brief bit on motivations and problems for each node on the tree, but I couldn't fit that in on one page. (if you think I'm missing a branch, or think I should plug in some people to some of the branches, let me know. To save redundancies, however, I only plug philosophers into terminal nodes). One thing to note is that the chart was made by mapping the space of the Early Modern debate, and so doesn't really correspond to a more complete map which would deal with some additional twists and further questions of more contemporary debates about parthood, individuality, and composition. For instance, is Van Inwagen an actual or potential parts theorist? It�s not clear. My hand is not a part (since the simples in my hand-region don�t compose an object according to him), yet all the simples arranged handwise are actual, and jointly compose me with the rest of my simples. (Similar questions can arise for any sortal-essentialist non-DAUP'er who admits that some proper parts of an object are objects, such as my heart, while other putative objects are not, such as all the water in my body or the left half of my heart). Also, consider Burke or Laycock and the doctrine that there can be concrete, non-particular 'entities,' such as the gold in Africa, the bronze that makes up the left half of a statue, or the water in my glass. For them, these items are not even potential parts (i.e., individuals), since, no matter what you make them into, they�ll never be identical to any thing, even such bare things as 'fusions' or 'aggregates' (since there are no fusions whose only persistence conditions are having the parts they do, according to them. Briefly, Burke and Laycock accept, or at least used to accept, that talk about stuff is plural-quantification talk about pluralities of elements). Anyways, in order to map not only the Early Moderns but contemporary folk in the scheme of actual and potential parts we�d need to put in some more divisions on the tree, and perhaps start at the top with different questions. Perhaps the best way would be to start the tree with the question, 'are there minima?', and go from there. Any suggestions? Is there a good way to develop a framework which can contain both the Early Moderns and our contemporaries? If anyone can develop a satisfactory, full chart that can map the space of positions around actual/potential parts, the nature of minima/simples/gunk, and answers to the Special Compositions Question (see Van Inwagen's Material Beings), I'll post it here, and, to make things extra sweet, give you a whole dollar! I expect participation to be minimal, given OrangePhilosophy's posting frequency and readership these days. But, if there's lots of feedback, perhaps we can post the various documents and let commentators vote on it. At the very least maybe we can discuss what ramifications the older divisions of potential/actual parts has for contemporary discussions.
Posted by MarkSteen at 5:54 PM | Comments (5)
December 30, 2004
Quantum News
Someone I know sent me a link to this piece on some new theorem someone proved in quantum theory. Is anyone who knows this stuff able to translate it into simpler language and explain if there are any metaphysical results of this? In particular, is this supposed to show something about the various interpretations of quantum mechanics (and if so what?) or is it simply something new about the equations themselves, and then what does that amount to in terms of the interpretations? Or is this, as I suspect is well within the realm of possibility, someone writing about something they know nothing about and making a mountain out of a molehill?
Posted by Jeremy at 7:17 PM | Comments (3)
July 2, 2004
2nd-Order Vagueness and Definiteness
Andre Gallois has twice presented the following view to me, and I'm now beginning to think the conclusion is right, as strange as it sounds, but when I was talking to him, we were unsure if his argument really shows it. I think I've figured out a way to make the reasoning explicit. The radical conclusion is that higher-order vagueness doesn't raise any problems, because there's only a second order. Once you reach that level, there aren't any other orders. The reason is that second-order vagueness is consistent with definiteness, and therefore there's no penumbral area between second-order vagueness and definiteness.
Let's move along a sorites series to see how it goes. Find something that's definitely red. Then move along for a bit. At some point you've reached definitely not red, but in is there a sharp line between the things that are red and the things that are not red? No. Some things are such that you'll want to say that they're neither red nor not red. This is first-order vagueness. So we adopt a third truth value, indeterminate, for the cases in this penumbral area. So far so good. But wait! What about the boundary between the penumbral area and the definitely red cases (or the boundary between the penumbral area and those that are definitely not red). That seems to be a matter of vagueness also. It doesn't seem as if you go from definitely red to being indeterminate whether it's red over some determinate line. So we need second-order vagueness. Then there's another vague region, in which it's indeterminate whether it's indetermate. Andre wants to argue that we need go no further. We don't need third-order vagueness to talk about the region between red and indeterminate whether it's indeterminate whether it's red. Why not? Well, if something can be both red and indeterminate whether it's indeterminate whether it's red, then there is no third-order vagueness. So if having second-order indeterminacy is consistent with being determinate, then there's no need for third-order determinacy, and infinite regress arguments fail. The only reason I can think of for resisting this view goes as follows. Suppose something is determinately red. That means it's not indeterminate whether it's red. It's definitely not indeterminate whether it's red, because it's definitely red. Well, if it's definitely not indeterminate whether it's red, then it can't be indeterminate whether it's indeterminate whether it's red. Therefore, something can't be both red and indeterminate whether it's indeterminate whether it's red. It has to be definitely not indeterminate whether it's red. This is a bad argument, because it assumes classical two-valued logic. We need a third truth value, indeterminate, if we're going to talk about cases in the penumbral area. That means denying the law of excluded middle. If excluded middle is false, we lose the double negation elimination rule. Not-not-p doesn't mean p, because not-not-p is still consistent with its being indeterminate whether it's p. Even stronger, consider not-indeterminate whether p, which is equivalent to not-not-determinate whether p. By the argument of the last paragraph, we can't conclude p, but it's consistent with p. What about indeterminate whether it's indeterminate whether it's p? It seems that also means we can't conclude p, but it should be consistent with p, right? Why not?
Posted by Jeremy at 11:17 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
June 29, 2004
Vagueness
I have two (don't ask how) hardback copies of Rosanne Keefe & Peter Smith's Vagueness: A Reader, and wish to sell one of them at $25.00. It's in perfect condition: I never opened this copy. I think that's a fair price? I thought this medium would reach more people interesting in this topic than doing a more public auction. Please contact me, if interested.
Posted by kkukla at 2:14 PM | Comments (1)
June 25, 2004
Predictive Prophecy and Counterfactuals
In line with the discussions of time and time travel at my blog and to some degree here also, our own Gnu has a related puzzle using a fun fantasy role-playing kind of example for a philosophical puzzle about conditional predictive prophecy (i.e. predicting what someone will do and then telling him that A will have already happened if he ends up doing P but B will have already happened if he turns out to do Q). I think this case is interesting in terms of its view of time and of the relation of guaranteed prediction to time, but it also has some relevance to how to evaluate counterfactual statements. Read the case first at Gnu's blog, then read on here for my analysis.
The Liche Lord has predicted what Thurvan would do. That means he knew that Thurvan would go to all the rooms. Therefore, assuming he isn't lying, he hasn't placed the sword in the room he said it would be in if Thurvan had chosen not to go to the other rooms. Thurvan was correct to say that the sword is either there or not, but he was wrong to think that it was there independent of his decision. It was there because of what he would do. If Thurvan had chosen otherwise, and the Liche Lord had still set up the same deal, the sword would have been there. But unless he's lying, the sword can't be there as things stand. Given that the Liche Lord can take the shape of any object and enjoys taking people to be his undead slaves, you might expect that what the dwarf sees as the sword is probably the Liche Lord himself waiting to trap him. Of course, the Liche Lord can see the future, so this is probably only the case if the Liche Lord has predicted that the dwarf will take the sword. He may well have predicted that the dwarf would reason through all this and leave without going for the sword, in which case he may have lied and put the sword there anyway. What's great about this is that the sword might really be there but only if he doesn't try to get it, and it's not there if he does. So he can't get it one way or the other. The only way to get the sword would have been to do what the Liche Lord knew he wouldn't do, and that would have been to avoid the other rooms. In working through this, I had a hard time thinking about what the Liche Lord would have done if Thurvan had chosen otherwise, because it may well be that the Liche Lord would not have chosen to set this scenario up at all without the knowledge of Thurvan choosing the way he did. It's hard to think about counterfactual possibilities where the thing that would have been different depends on knowledge of the future in the counterfactual world. According to David Lewis' semantics of counterfactual statements, 'if Thurvan had chosen to go straight to the sword room, the sword would have been there' is unclear to me. Lewis says to go to the nearest possible world where Thurvan goes straight to the sword room, meaning that you should find the world most like the actual world except for that detail and then see what's true. So if we change nothing in the world except that and what changing it will require, what happens? I can think of three kinds of candidate worlds for the closest: 1. My first thought would be to say that if Thurvan had chosen differently, and if you kept as much intact as possible, then the Liche Lord would have predicted differently and as a result put the sword in the chamber to honor his deal. This world holds the Liche Lord's honesty and abilities constant and changes the state of the world for the entire time between the writing of the letter and the present so that the sword has been there all along. 2. Lewis prefers to find a world intrinsically as much like the actual world as possible. That would require keeping the tomb , just as things are in the actual world. But then the Liche Lord would have to have told something false to Thurvan. Either he was lying (2a), or his predictive abilities failed in this one case (2b). I think Lewis has to favor 2b, because even 2a has intrinsic changes with the Liche Lord's beliefs and intents, whereas 2b could be just a surprising failure of his abilities, something like the miracle worlds Lewis discusses in his paper on whether free will requires breaking the laws of nature. 3. Lewis wouldn't like this at all, because it requires even more of a change of the intrinsic state of the world so far than 1, but some might argue that if Thurvan had chosen to take the sword and not go to the other rooms, the Liche Lord would not have set up the case this way at all and wouldn't have given a deal that would mean he'd end up losing. I'm bring this up only to argue against it as a legitimate near possibility. Seeing this as a near possibility of what would happen given Thurvan's choice to go only for the sword assumes something false. It assumes the Liche Lord is predicting what Thurvan would do given that the Liche Lord sets things up a certain way. According to Gnu's setup, the Liche Lord predicts what Thurvan will do, period. He doesn't consider all the possibilities and make things go his way. His ability only tells him what will happen. So this one requires a difference in the intrinsic state of the world and in the abilities of the Liche Lord. 1 has a difference only in the state of the world (and not even as much of a difference), and 2 has a difference in the abilities or intent of the Liche Lord (and not as much of a difference -- either a one-time failure of the same ability rather than a completely different ability or a different motivation rather than a whole change in the nature of his abilities). So I think 1 and 2 are the real options for which world is closest to the actual one Gnu has constructed. This is a particularly vivid example of those who agree with Lewis on nearness of worlds based on intrinsic likeness and what I think is the more commonsense view of nearness of worlds based on preserving the abilities of the Liche Lord that related causally to the future in certain guaranteed ways. Lewis' view is required for those who reduce causality to relations between instrinsic properties of things across time, and my intuitions against his view on this case are therefore intuitions against his reduction of causality to such things. The causal relations between the Liche Lord and the future that he sees are an important part of the structure of the world, and a world seems to me to be much further from the actual one (of the case) if the Liche Lord has to have different abilities or failure of his abilities to keep the world intrinsically as close as possible. Simply changing some more intrinsic facts seems to me to be less of a change.
Posted by Jeremy at 11:10 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
June 15, 2004
Time Travel and Unexplained Loops
At my blog Parablemania, I registered my endorsement of the "time travel on a fixed timeline" view (which assumes eternalism), and my co-blogger Wink followed up by raising the question of unexplained causal loops (which are internally explained, but nothing explains the whole loop). He thinks this makes backward time travel impossible, because he shares the same view of time but won't accept the pos6isbility of these loops, which should be allowed on that view of time (he thinks). I think the discussion's going to get interesting, because there are a number of different ways you could go with this.
Posted by Jeremy at 12:55 PM | Comments (9)
June 11, 2004
Agent Causation
I've been thinking about free will lately, and I wanted to put into words exactly why I think agent causation makes no sense. One silly response to agent causation is that events cause events, and the notion of an agent causing anything is a category mistake. I haven't seen any argument for that view, so I don't consider it a worthy objection. I do think there's a real problem with the notion of agent causation as a defense of libertarian free will, and van Inwagen seems to agree with me, judging by his chapter on free will in his Metaphysics book. The real problem goes back to the issue of how indeterminism can lead to free will. Lucretius said the swerving atom explains freedom, but it doesn't. How can something totally out of anyone's control explain why I'm free? That then leads me to ask about some questions about the purportedly free choice. Is it caused? If it's totally uncaused, then I didn't have anything to do with it. If it's caused, it better have been caused by something in my control, call that event A. Is A caused or uncaused? It better be caused, or else it's not in my control. In fact, it better be caused by something in my control, or it won't be in my control. Then we need a previous event B that caused it that's in my control, and you can quickly see that B will need to have been caused by C, which also must have been in my control and therefore caused by D, which also... We get an infinite regress.
The standard response from libertarians is to deny the whole setup. My choice wasn't caused by a prior event, but it wasn't uncaused either. It was caused by me. I wasn't caused to cause it, but it wasn't random either. Somehow, mysteriously, my will is uncaused to cause it but it still operating in my control. That's how agent causation is supposed to go. There's still a problem, though. What about the event of my causing it? The event of the choice was caused by me. We still haven't figured out whether the event of its being caused by me is caused. If it's uncaused or caused by something random, I'm not free. If it's caused by prior events, we have the same problem as above. If it's caused by me, then we have to ask whether that causing is also caused by me and whether that causing is also caused be me and so on. Another infinite regress arises. So I think the libertarian has three options: 1. Concede to infinite regress in the first argument and just say that every free choice has an infinite number of preceding events all in my control, none of which has any explanation why it's in my control except for previous ones. This fails to explain why any should be in my control. (This must be asymptotic with no first event but all of which are after a certain point, or else they'd go back before I existed.) 2. Concede to infinite regress in the second argument and say that every choice caused by me is an event also caused by me, which means there is an infinite series of causings by me for every choice I make. This fails to explain why any of those causings is caused by me. (This must be asymptotic with no first event but all of which are after a certain point, or else they'd go back before I existed.) 3. Refuse to admit that there's any event of my causing it. I cause it, but that's not an event. I'm not sure why there would be any motivation for such a view, so it seems terribly ad hoc. Furthermore, there seems to be motivation to resist it. How can something happen without there being an event of its happening? If I cause something, there should be an event of my causing it. I just don't see why there wouldn't be. When van Inwagen considers all this, he declares free will to be a mystery. He says compatibilism has a worse mystery, that we can be predetermined and yet be free. Hard determinism also has a worse mystery, that we can fail to be responsible for our choices (we can hold each other responsible, but there's no moral significance to it). So he accepts the libertarian mystery. My own intuitions are far more willing to accept the compatibilist mystery, since that one at least explains why we'd be responsible if we're predetermined. Our choices are caused by previous events, but they're the right kinds of events. They're events in our own minds, events having to do with our beliefs, desires, values, and character. We act based on who we are. Philosophers as antagonistic toward each other's views as Jonathan Edwards and David Hume (not that they knew of each other) agree on this, and I think they're both right.
Posted by Jeremy at 9:58 AM | Comments (28) | TrackBack
June 9, 2004
A Few Thoughts on Markosian's "Simples, Stuff, and Simple People"
I�ve been meaning to do a long post on Ned Markosian�s "Simples, Stuff, and Simple People" which just came out in the Monist, but haven�t had time. One brief point did, however, come pretty quickly to mind.
Ned sets out several principles about the nature of stuff, simples, common-sense objects, and their relations, and a few seem in tension. The principles that seemed most dubious was principle #(3) that "There cannot be matter[i.e., �stuff�] without objects.", in conjunction with principle #(6) that "Some portions of stuff constitute things, but not every portion of stuff constitutes a thing."
We can get at the tension when we look at Markosian�s analysis of simples. In his paper, "Simples," he states that an x is a simple just in case x is a maximally continuous object, and
x is a maximally continuous object =df x is a spatially continuous object and there is no continuous region of space, R, such that (i) the region of space occupied by x is a proper subset of R, and (ii) every point in R falls within some object or other.
Markosian also rejects the doctrine of arbitrary undetached parts, a contemporary analogue of the �actual parts� theory.
Although Ned doesn�t explicitly state this, it seems to follow from various parts of various works of his that if there are no simples there can be no objects at all (although there can be �portions�, which Ned insists are not objects�this is a major point of contention I�ll take up later).
However, the following scenarios seem possible:
Scenario (1): A world w1 completely filled with homoeomerous matter, or, �gunk�, which stretches off infinitely in all directions. Scenario (2): A world w2 where the only object is a infinitely long gunky cylinder (although it is within an infinitely large 3d space). And so on.
Now, according to (3), there must be objects in each world. And, oddly enough, in both w1 and w2 we find that both are simples according to MaxCon.
Maybe this wouldn�t be so bad if we didn�t have to contend with principle (6), when we look at the test of why some stuff does not constitute a thing. Markosian contends that not all portions of stuff constitute a thing (remember, he rejects DAUP and holds that portions are not things), and the example is the arm-shaped portion of stuff which is part of that continuous portion of stuff which constitutes a simple which is in the shape of a statue. So, it seems that some portion does not constitute a simple if it has no set of endpoints in all three dimensions which are discontinuous with any other portions. So, in order for some portion to constitute a thing it must have some set of endpoints or boundaries. But, in w1 and w2, there are no continuous portions which are discontinuous from any others, and so no thing is constituted by any stuff, and so no thing exists, not even a simple.
Ned needs a patch here (or, I�ve made a mistake, which is quite likely when thinking about infinitely large objects and perhaps thinking about them w/finitary intuitions). It seems he needs to build into MaxCon some kind of caveats about outer bounds along all three dimensions. This will eliminate there being �simples� that have no bounds, but will necessitate him dropping (3) as a principle. It seems, in w1 at least, and if DAUP is true, that there are no objects at all.
Posted by MarkSteen at 10:41 PM | Comments (6)
May 11, 2004
What Is Race?
We haven't had much in the way of philosophical content on our new site, mostly because we moved right in the middle of grading season. I don't have the time to type up anything new, but I posted some of what I've been working on with the racial classification issue to my own blog not too long ago. I was going to post it to OrangePhilosophy, too, but I wanted to wait until the move, and then I wanted to wait until the next draft, but since there's been little here I'm going ahead with it anyway. I've developed this a bit further since writing this, but I haven't gotten anything seriously organized enough to post. I'm developing this into one of my area papers right now, so I really am looking for feedback. Also, be aware that most of it was originally written for an undergraduate course and could use some increase in its rigor. Update: Due to circumstances beyond my control, many links on my site got changed. The link in this entry is now correct again.
Posted by Jeremy at 9:48 AM | Comments (5)