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122326.778706
trices. The main aim is to construct a system of Nmatrices by substituting standard sets by quasets. Since QST is a conservative extension of ZFA (the Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory with Atoms), it is possible to obtain generalized Nmatrices (Q-Nmatrices). Since the original formulation of QST is not completely adequate for the developments we advance here, some possible amendments to the theory are also considered. One of the most interesting traits of such an extension is the existence of complementary quasets which admit elements with undetermined membership. Such elements can be interpreted as quantum systems in superposed states. We also present a relationship of QST with the theory of Rough Sets RST, which grants the existence of models for QST formed by rough sets. Some consequences of the given formalism for the relation of logical consequence are also analysed.
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237631.778783
Determinism is the thesis that the past determines the future, but eorts to dene it precisely have exposed deep methodological disagreements. Standard possible-worlds formulations of determinism presuppose an "agreement" relation between worlds, but this relation can be understood in multiple ways none of which is particularly clear. We critically examine the proliferation of denitions of determinism in the recent literature, arguing that these denitions fail to deliver clear verdicts about actual scientic theories. We advocate a return to a formal approach, in the logical tradition of Carnap, that treats determinism as a property of scientic theories, rather than an elusive metaphysical doctrine. We highlight two key distinctions: (1) the dierence between qualitative and "full" determinism, as emphasized in recent discussions of physics and metaphysics, and (2) the distinction between weak and strong formal conditions on the uniqueness of world extensions. We argue that dening determinism in terms of metaphysical notions such as haecceities is unhelpful, whereas rigorous formal criteria such as Belot's D1 and D3 oer a tractable and scientically relevant account. By clarifying what it means for a theory to be deterministic, we set the stage for a fruitful interaction between physics and metaphysics.
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237652.778792
The idea that the universe is governed by laws of nature has precursors from ancient times, but the view that it is a or even the primary - or even the primary - aim of science to discover these laws only became established during the 16th and 17th century when it replaced the then prevalent Aristotelian conception of science. The most prominent promoters and developers of the new view were Galileo, Descartes, and Newton. Descartes, in Le Monde dreamed of an elegant mathematical theory that specified laws that describe the motions of matter and Newton in his Principia went a long way towards realizing this dream.
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756811.778811
Whereas most scientists are highly critical of constructivism and relativism in the context of scientific knowledge acquisition, the dominant school of chemical education researchers appears to support a variety of such positions. By reference to the views of Herron, Spencer, and Bodner, I claim that these authors are philosophically confused, and that they are presenting a damaging and anti-scientific message to other unsuspecting educators. Part of the problem, as I argue, is a failure to distinguish between pedagogical con - structivism regarding students' understanding of science, and constructivism about the way that scientific knowledge is acquired by expert scientists.
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1276043.778819
The theoretical physicist Michio Kaku ([2014]) once stated that the brain is ‘the most complicated object in the known universe’. For decades, neuroscientists have been trying to disentangle the brain’s complexity in order to understand how it can support our behaviours and mental life. In his latest book, Luiz Pessoa wants us instead to embrace the entanglement of this intricate organ, not as a way to give up on our quest to understand its workings, but as a change in strategy to better comprehend its complexity.
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1333847.778827
Explanatory Essentialism (EE) is the view that a property is the essence of a kind because it causally explains the many properties that instances of that kind exhibit. This paper examines an application of EE to biological species, which I call Biological Explanatory Essentialism (BEE). BEE states that a particular biological origin is the essence of a species on the grounds that it causes certain organisms to display the group of properties the species is associated with. Evaluating BEE is important, as it offers a novel argument for biological essentialism—the contentious claim that biological species have essences. This paper critically assesses the empirical foundations of BEE, focusing on the presupposition that a single biological origin causes the many properties associated with the species in question. By discussing a case of cryptic species among five-toed jerboas within the Scarturus elater species complex, I challenge that presupposition, thereby arguing that cryptic species present a serious obstacle to BEE. I conclude that BEE fails to support biological essentialism and suggest that essentialist philosophers reconsider the role of causal-explanatory factors in accounting for the purported essences of biological species. These philosophers may need to explore alternatives beyond such factors, one of which I briefly outline.
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1449132.778835
Quantum entanglement is widely regarded as a nonlocal phenomenon, but Deutsch and Hayden (2000) have recently received growing support for their claim that in the Heisenberg picture, entanglement can be characterised locally using objects they call descriptors. I argue that the notion of locality underlying this claim is a flawed version of the principle of separability that I call spatial separability. An improved version, spatiotemporal separability, reveals that their claim is false. The proposed analysis of separability also reveals the crucial feature of quantum theory that makes it “spooky” in any picture: quantum entanglement entails that there are non-qualitative properties, which are profoundly different from the qualitative properties we have come to expect from classical physics.
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1524165.778842
This post is free to read, so please share it widely. And, as always, please ‘like’ it via the heart below and restack it on notes if you get something out of it. It’s the best way to help others find my work. …
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2286110.778849
Nietzsche’s first book was entitled The Birth of Tragedy out
of the Spirit of Music (1872), and one of his very last works was
called The Case of Wagner: A Musician’s Problem (1888). As this simple fact indicates, reflection on art (and especially, on
music and drama) is an abiding and central feature of
Nietzsche’s thought. Indeed, very nearly all of his works
address aesthetic questions at least in passing. Some of these
questions are familiar from the philosophical tradition: e.g., how
should we explain the effect tragedy has on us? What is the relation
of aesthetic value to other kinds of value?
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2303301.778855
Journal of the American Philosophical Association () – © The Author(s), . Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Philosophical Association. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/.), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
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2370047.778869
Neil Mehta has written a fantastic book. A Pluralist Theory of Perception develops a novel theory of perception that illuminates the metaphysical structure, epistemic significance, and semantic role of perceptual consciousness. By and large, I found the core tenets of Mehta’s theory to be highly plausible and successfully defended. I could quibble with some parts (e.g., his claim that our conscious awareness of sensory qualities is non-representational). But I suspect our disagreements are largely verbal, and where they are non-verbal, they are minor. Instead of focusing on disagreements, in this commentary I wish to explore the metaphysical ramifications of Mehta’s theory with respect to the mind-body problem. Mehta has a great deal to say about the metaphysics of perception. Much of it seems to me to be in tension with physicalism. But throughout the book he remains officially neutral on the truth of physicalism, “in reflection of [his] genuine uncertainty” (ibid: 100). I will try to show that Mehta’s commitments lead almost inexorably to dualism (or, at least, away from physicalism) by giving three arguments against physicalism that centrally rely on premises to which Mehta is committed.
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2371998.77888
If the philosophy of mathematics wants to be rigorous, the concept of infinity must stop being equivocal (both potential and actual) as it currently is. The conception of infinity as actual is responsible for all the paradoxes that compromise the very foundation of mathematics and is also the basis on which Cantor's argument is based on the non-countability of R, and the existence of infinite cardinals of different magnitude. Here we present proof that all infinite sets (in a potential sense) are countable and that there are no infinite cardinals.
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2429667.778887
The philosophical literature on mathematical structuralism and its history has focused on the emergence of structuralism in the 19th century. Yet modern abstractionist accounts cannot provide an historical account for the abstraction process. This paper will examine the role of relations in the history of mathematics, focusing on three main epochs where relational abstraction is most prominent: ancient Greek, 17th and 19th centuries, to provide a philosophical account for the abstraction of structures. Though these structures emerged in the 19th century with definitional axioms, the need for such axioms in the abstraction process comes about, as this paper will show, after a series of relational abstractions without a suitable basis.
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2632366.778895
This entry surveys the literature surrounding certain kinds of views
about metaphysics. In particular, the central concern here will be
with critiques of metaphysics and responses to those
critiques. And so the views under discussion can be thought of as
metametaphysical views, or metaontological
views. Section 1
distinguishes the views to be discussed—namely, realist and
anti-realist views about metaphysics—from views of
another kind (namely, realist and anti-realist views in
metaphysics). Then the survey of views begins in
section 2. The survey is organized around anti-realist views—i.e.,
views that offer critiques of metaphysics—and realist responses
to the anti-realist critiques.
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2728536.778901
[The final chapter of my undergraduate thesis on Modal Rationalism. The initial sections contrast realist vs conceptualist understandings of “metaphysical possibility”, with an eye to helping skeptical readers to grasp the core concept (e.g. …
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2891302.778907
Primitivism about the direction of time is the thesis that the direction of time does not call for an explanation because it is a primitive posit in one’s ontology. In the literature, primitivism has in general come along with a substantival view of time according to which time is an independent substance. In this paper, we defend a new primitivist approach to the direction of time –relational primitivism. According to it, time is primitively directed because change is primitive. By relying on Leibnizian relationalism, we argue that a relational ontology of time must be able to distinguish between spatial relations and temporal relations to make sense of the distinction between variation and change. This distinction, however, requires the assumption of a primitive directionality of change, which ushers in the direction of time. Relational primitivism is an attractive view for those who want to avoid substantivalism about time but retain a primitive direction of time in a more parsimonious ontology.
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3064410.778914
In an article published in the Journal of Chemical Education in 2003 I made a number of criticisms concerning what I saw as confusions and problems within the constructivist approach to chemical education (Scerri, 2003). Recently a response was published by the chemical educator, Keith Taber (Taber, 2010). I would now like to take this opportunity to the twentieth century. I believe that this presents a problem for Taber for two reasons. First of all, logical positivism is now a highly discredited view of the nature of science. Moreover, logical positivism has been traditionally, and rather contemptuously, derided by constructivist science educators (e.g., Spencer, 1999).
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3122164.778921
This paper is about a problem which arose in mathematics but is now widely considered by mathematicians to be a matter “merely” for philosophy. I want to show what philosophy can contribute to solving the problem by returning it to mathematics, and I will do that by elucidating what it is to be a solution to a mathematical problem at all.
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3410495.778927
Spacetime singularities are expected to disappear in quantum gravity. Singularity resolution prima facie supports the view that spacetime singularities are mathematical pathologies of general relativity. However, this conclusion might be premature. Spacetime singularities are more accurately understood as global properties of spacetime, rather than things. Therefore, if spacetime emerges in quantum gravity – as it is often claimed – then so may its singular structure. Although this proposal is intriguing, the attempt to uphold that spacetime singularities may be emergent fails. I provide three arguments in support of this claim, drawing upon different views on spacetime emergence.
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3497639.778934
[Editor’s Note: The following new entry by Mark Wrathall replaces the
former entry
on this topic by the previous author.]
Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) is a central figure in the
development of twentieth-century European Philosophy. His magnum
opus, Being and Time (1927), and his many essays and
lectures, profoundly influenced subsequent movements in European
philosophy, including Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy,
Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism, Simone de Beauvoir’s
feminism, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception,
Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics, Jacques Derrida’s
deconstruction, Michel Foucault’s post-structuralism, Gilles
Deleuze’s metaphysics, the Frankfurt School, and critical
theorists like Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Jürgen Habermas,
and Georg Lukács.
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3725376.77894
PEA Soup is pleased to introduce this month’s Ethics discussion, featuring Elselijn Kingma and Fiona Woollard’s paper Can You Do Harm to Your Fetus? Pregnancy, Barriers, and the Doing/Allowing Distinction, with a précis from Elizabeth Harman. …
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3872093.778949
The paper studies in detail a precise formal construction of spacetime from matter suggested by the logician John Burgess. We presuppose a continuous and perdurantistic matter ontology. The result is a systematic method to translate claims about the geometry of a flat relativistic, or classical, spacetime into claims about geometrical relations between matter points. The approach is extended to electric and magnetic fields by treating them as multifields defined on matter, rather than as fields in the vacuum. A few tentative suggestions are made to adapt the method to general relativity and to quantum theories.
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3964972.778955
This article argues that the “qua problem” for purely causal theories of reference grounding is an illusion. Reference can be grounded via description and fit, but purely causal reference grounding is possible too. In fact, “arguments from ignorance and error” suggest that many of our terms have had their reference grounded purely causally. If the qua problem is illusory, then there is no need to adopt a “hybrid” theory of reference grounding of the kind recently recommended by Amie Thomasson (Ontology made easy, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2015) and Ron Mallon (The construction of human kinds, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2016). This opens the door to a “discovery model” of philosophical knowledge, a model we could then choose to accept.
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4160422.778963
This paper defends a conceptualistic version of structuralism as the most convincing way of elaborating a philosophical understanding of structuralism in line with the classical tradition. The argument begins with a revision of the tradition of “conceptual mathematics”, incarnated in key figures of the period 1850 to 1940 like Riemann, Dedekind, Hilbert or Noether, showing how it led to a structuralist methodology. Then the tension between the ‘presuppositionless’ approach of those authors, and the platonism of some recent versions of philosophical structuralism, is presented. In order to resolve this tension, we argue for the idea of ‘logical objects’ as a form of minimalist realism, again in the tradition of classical authors including Peirce and Cassirer, and we introduce the basic tenets of conceptual
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4301084.778969
[Chapter One of my undergraduate thesis on Modal Rationalism. Excuse the outdated references to “current” events — it was written in 2006. Still, I hope it may serve as a useful introduction to some key ideas in the philosophy of language. …
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4331900.778975
Could we transfer you from your biological substrate to an electronic hardware by simulating your brain on a computer? The answer to this question divides optimists and pessimists about mind uploading. Optimists believe that you can genuinely survive the transition; pessimists think that surviving mind uploading is impossible. An influential argument against uploading optimism is the multiplicity objection. In a nutshell, the objection is as follows: If uploading optimism were true, it should be possible to create not only one, but multiple digital versions of you. However, you cannot literally become many. Hence, you cannot survive even a single instance of uploading, and optimism about uploading is misguided. In this paper, I will first spell out the multiplicity objection in detail and then provide a two-pronged defence against the objection. First, uploading pessimists cannot establish that uploading optimism has the contentious implication. Second, it is in fact plausible to think that we could become multiple distinct persons. Optimists’ hope for a digital afterlife is therefore not thwarted by the prospect of multiplicity.
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4331923.778984
There appears to be an epistemic gap between the personal and the impersonal. The apparent epistemic gap presents a challenge to reductionist views about personal identity according to which facts about personal identity are grounded in impersonal facts about physical and/or psychological continuity. I discuss and reject two strategies of trying to close the apparent epistemic gap, a phenomenalist and a Cartesian one. I then develop and motivate an alternative account of the epistemic gap based on the special perspecti-val character of inside imagination. The imagination-based account explains why there appears to be an epistemic gap between the personal and the impersonal and at the same time avoids a corresponding ontological gap.
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4429943.778993
In this paper, I argue that facts about an individual’s sexual identity are partially or fully grounded in facts about their sexual orientation, where an individual’s sexual identity (e.g. being queer, being straight) has to do with the social position they occupy, and their sexual orientation (e.g. being homosexual, being heterosexual) has to do with the sexual dispositions they have. The main argument for this orientation-based theory is that it gets the right results in cases in which an individual hasn’t come out yet to themselves or others. I reply to Matthew Andler’s argument against the orientation-based theory, which is that it gets the wrong results in cases having to do with (a) intergenerational gay friendship and (b) “str8 dudes,” men who have sex with men but who present themselves online as straight. I also argue that, at least in the case of being queer, Andler’s own cultural theory is consistent with sexual identity facts being partially grounded in sexual orientation facts.
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4556696.778999
“From the Archives” is a new blog series that will share some of my favorite posts, lightly revised and updated, from my 18 years of archives at philosophyetc.net. I’ll kick things off with my undergraduate honours thesis on “Modal Rationalism”, which I think remains a neat general introduction to some core issues in metaphysics, modal epistemology, and the philosophy of language. …
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4564115.779005
Since the early debates on teleosemantics, there have been people objecting that teleosemantics cannot account for evolutionarily novel contents such as “democracy” (e.g., Peacocke 1992). Most recently, this objection was brought up by Garson (2019) and in a more moderate form by Garson & Papineau (2019). The underlying criticism is that the traditional selected effects theory of functions on which teleosemantics is built is unable to ascribe new functions to the products of ontogenetic processes and thus unable to ascribe functions to new traits that appear during the lifetime of an individual organism. I will argue that this underlying thought rests on rather common misunderstandings of Millikan’s theory of proper functions, especially her notions of relational, adapted, and derived proper functions (Millikan 1984: Ch. 2). The notions of relational, adapted, and derived proper functions not only help us solve the problem of novel contents and can ascribe functions to the products of ontogenetic selection mechanisms but are indispensable parts of every selected effects theory.