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92448.673417
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-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/.), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that no alterations are made and the original article is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained prior to any commercial use and/or adaptation of the article.
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106070.673716
The original architects of the representational theory of measurement interpreted their formalism operationally and explicitly acknowledged that some aspects of their representations are conventional. We argue that the conventional elements of the representations afforded by the theory require careful scrutiny as one moves toward a more metaphysically robust interpretation by showing that there is a sense in which the very number system one uses to represent a physical quantity such as mass or length is conventional. This result undermines inferences which impute structure from the numerical representational structure to the quantity it is used to represent.
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222496.673745
Nonrelativistic quantum mechanics (QM) works perfectly well for all practical purposes. However once one admits that a successful scienti c theory is supposed not only to make predictions but also to tell us a story about the world in which we live, a philosophical problem emerges: in the speci c case of QM, it is not possible to associate with the theory a unique scienti c image of the world; there are several images. The fact that the theory may be compatible with distinct ontologies, and that those ontologies may themselves be associated with a plurality of metaphysical approaches, gives rise to the problem of metaphysical underdetermination. This paper concludes that the available metametaphysical criteria fail to deliver objectivity in theory choice, and it puts forward its own criterion based on a tension between two methods of metaphysical inquiry: one that is closely related to science and another that is not.
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278755.673759
In his dialogues, Plato presents different ways in which to understand the relation between Forms and particulars. In the Symposium, we are presented with yet another, hitherto unidentified Form-particular relation: the relation is Love (Erôs), which binds together Form and particular in a generative manner, fulfilling all the metaphysical requirements of the individual’s qualification by participation. Love in relation to the beautiful motivates human action to desire for knowledge of the Form, resulting in the lover actively cultivating and bringing into being new beauty in the world, and in herself.
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328260.673774
MeerKAT is an amazing array of 64 radio telescopes in South Africa. Astronomers want to expand this to the Square Kilometer Array, which will actually consist of thousands of telescopes in South Africa and Australia. …
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568826.673786
Del Santo and Gisin have recently argued that classical mechanics exhibits a form of indeterminacy and that by treating the observables of classical mechanics with real number precision we introduce hidden variables that restore determinacy. In this article we introduce the conceptual machinery required to critically evaluate these claims. We present a characterization of indeterminacy which can capture both quantum indeterminacy and the classical indeterminacy of Del Santo and Gisin. This allows us to show that there is an important difference in kind between the two: their classical indeterminacy can be resolved with hidden variables in a manner which is not possible for quantum indeterminacy.
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568853.673804
The self-declared focus of Gordon Belot’s new book, Accelerating Expansion: Philosophy and Physics with a Positive Cosmological Constant, is de Sitter spacetime. Belot discusses its mathematical structure, the central role which it plays in contemporary relativistic cosmology, and—perhaps most importantly for the readers of this journal—the philosophical and conceptual puzzles that arise from taking this central role seriously. The book aims to be a graduate-student-friendly invitation to all things de Sitter, and the main text is accompanied by mathematical exercises and more philosophically-oriented open questions.
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613727.673815
How do plurals and mass nouns refer? What kind of logic should be used in order to account for the truth-conditions of the sentences they appear in? For linguists, first-order predicate logic is adequate, provided it is supplemented by a notion of mereological sum for plurals and for mass nouns. On the contrary, according to some philosophers, new logics must be used, plural logic for plurals and mass logic for mass nouns. We survey these debates in this entry.
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619675.673826
Today I’d like to dig a little deeper into some ideas from Part 2. I’ve been talking about causal loop diagrams. Very roughly speaking, a causal loop diagram is a graph with labeled edges. I showed how to ‘pull back’ and ‘push forward’ these labels along maps of graphs. …
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626667.673836
In this paper, I argue that the constrains operating in some cases of so-called mathematical explanations of physical phenomena (MEPPs) are not strictly speaking mathematical. For this reason, the existence of explanations by constraint in science does not justify mathematical realism, not even in its Aristotelian version. I illustrate this with the now-classic case of the Bridges of Königsberg, as well as the case of the carbon molecules known as buckyballs (buckminsterfullerene).
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738964.673847
Truthmaker semantics is a non-classical logical framework that has recently garnered significant interest in philosophy, logic, and natural language semantics. It redefines the propositional connectives and gives rise to more fine-grained entailment relations than classical logic. In its model theory, truth is not determined with respect to possible worlds, but with respect to truthmakers, such as states or events. Unlike possible worlds, these truthmakers may be partial; they may be either coherent or incoherent; and they are understood to be exactly or wholly relevant to the truth of the sentences they verify. Truth-maker semantics generalizes collective, fusion-based theories of conjunction; alternative-based theories of disjunction; and nonstandard negation semantics. This article provides a gentle introduction to truthmaker semantics aimed at linguists; describes applications to various natural language phenomena such as imperatives, ignorance implicatures, and negative events; and discusses its similarities and differences to related frameworks such as event semantics, situation semantics, alternative semantics, and inquisitive semantics.
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742036.673863
Scientific theories often allow multiple formulations, e.g., classical mechanics allows Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formulations. While we count them as equally true, it has been suggested that one formulation can still be more metaphysically perspicuous than another. This paper provides a new account of metaphysical perspicuity, offering both descriptive and revisionary components: As a descriptive component, we examine how metaphysical perspicuity has been conceptualized in the literature. As a revisionary component, we challenge the conventional conception that associates metaphysical perspicuity with other neighboring notions. Thus, we argue that metaphysical perspicuity is a sui generis notion, worth adding to philosophers’ toolbox.
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742067.673874
It is a widely-held belief that (the values of) physical quantities are part of a theory’s ideology. For example, it seems that special relativity has an ontology of spacetime points and particles, and an ideology of mass and charge properties. But these intuitions cannot be reconciled with the logical structure of physical theories. From the mathematical details of a theory such as special relativity, it turns out that mass and charge properties exist in quite the same way that particles exist: the theory quantifies over them. However, there is a different distinction in physics that can carry the same load, namely that between internal and external quantities. Roughly, the internal quantities depend on the external ones; external quantities instantiate internal ones. In contemporary physics, the values of physical quantities are internal. In this sense, the latter distinction supersedes the former. But ideology has not become irrevelant: we can identify it with the structure of a theory’s (external and internal) spaces. Although we can not read off a theory’s ideology from the formalism in the same way that we can read off its ontology, we can use symmetries to discover this structure.
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742097.67389
In his Zur Einstein’schen Relativitätstheorie Cassirer presents relativity theory as the last manifestation of the tradition of the ‘physics of principles’ that, starting from the nineteenth century, has progressively prevailed over that of the ‘physics of models.’ In particular, according to Cassirer, the relativity principle plays a similar role as the energy principle in previous physics. The paper argues that this comparison represents the core of Cassirer’s neo-Kantian interpretation of relativity. Unlike the individual physical laws, these principles do not pretend to provide models of any specific physical system, but they do impose constraints on the law-like statements that describe them. The latter do not qualify as proper laws unless they satisfy such constraints. Cassirer pointed out that before and after Kant, the history of physics presents significant instances in which the search for formal conditions that the laws of nature must satisfy preceded and made possible the direct search for such laws. In his earlier years, Cassirer seems to have regarded principles like the energy principle, the relativity principle, the principle of least action, etc., as a constitutive but provisional form of a priori, imposing specific limitations on the form of the allowable laws of nature. Only in his later years, by attributing an autonomous status to these statements of principle, did Cassirer attribute a definitive but merely regulative meaning to the a priori. This does not impose specific requirements on natural laws but only a motivation to search for them.
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799912.673901
In this paper, starting from Wittgenstein's "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus," I analyze the universal structure of objects in contrast to the universal structure of descriptions as analyzed there. This is an attempt to systematize the distinction between descriptions and objects. Furthermore, using this universal structural system of objects as a stepping stone, I prove that the law of excluded middle is erroneous.
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806778.673915
In the previous post, I showed that Goodman and Quine’s counting method fails for objects that have too much overlap. I think (though the technical parts here are more difficult) that the same is true for their definition of the ancestral or transitive closure of a relation. …
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1261490.673926
What do we mean when we diagnose a patient with a disease? What does it mean to say that two people have the same disease? In this paper, I argue that diseases are natural kinds, using a conception of kinds derived from John Stuart Mill and Ruth Millikan. I demonstrate that each disease is a natural kind and that the shared properties occur as a result of the pathogenesis of the disease. I illustrate this with diverse examples from internal medicine and compare my account to alternative ontologies.
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1361919.673936
Linsky & Zalta (1994) argued that simplest quantified modal logic (SQML), with its fixed domain, can be given an actualist interpretation if the Barcan formula is interpreted to conditionally assert the existence of contingently nonconcrete objects. But SQML itself doesn’t require the existence of such objects; in interpretations of SQML in which there is only one possible world, there are no contingent objects, nonconcrete or otherwise. I defend an axiom for SQML that will provably (a) force the domain to have the relevant objects and thereby (b) force the existence of more than one possible world, thereby forestalling modal collapse. I show that the new axiom can be justified by describing the theorems that can be proved when it is added to SQML. I further justify the axiom by the reviewing the theorems the axiom allows us to prove when we assume object theory (‘OT’), in its latest incarnation, as a background framework. Finally, I consider the conclusions one can draw when we consider the new axiom in connection with actualism, as this view has been (re-)characterized in recent work.
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1389566.673945
I’m talking about ‘causal loop diagrams’, which are graph with edges labeled by ‘polarities’. Often the polarities are simply and signs, like here:
But polarities can be elements of any monoid, and last time I argued that things work even better if they’re elements of a rig, so you can not only multiply them but also add them. …
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1487371.673956
In Part 1 I explained ‘causal loop diagrams’, which are graphs with edges labeled by polarities. These are a way to express qualitatively, rather than quantitatively, how entities affect one another. For example, here’s how causal loop diagrams us say that alcoholism ‘tends to increase’ domestic violence:
We don’t need to specify any numbers, or even need to say what we mean by ‘tends to increase’, though that leads to the danger of using the term in a very loose way. …
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1809439.673966
The main source of perplexity raised by Leibniz’s (mathematical) argument against the soul of the world stems from the idea that it is the infinity of the universe that precludes it from having a soul. But if this is so, how is it possible that organic bodies, which, having infinitely many parts, are also infinite, are endowed with a soul? The present paper aims to provide a new solution to this puzzle. The solution explains the difference between the body and the universe by looking at how their respective parts are arranged. It is the arrangement of the parts of the body that allows a body to be divided into infinitely many parts whilst, at the same time, having a finite magnitude. By contrast, the way in which the alleged parts of the world are arranged makes it impossible that the world has a finite magnitude: the world cannot be a whole, and so it cannot have a soul. The consequence is that it does not matter how many parts bodies have, but only that they have a finite magnitude. In this case, bodies respect the Part-Whole Principle (the whole is bigger than any of its proper parts) and therefore can be described as finite wholes with parts.
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1822739.673977
Are you interested in using category-theoretic methods to tackle problems outside of pure mathematics? Then you might like the Adjoint School. You’ll work online on a research project with a mentor and a team of other students for several months. …
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2011726.673987
Despite all the encyclopedic knowledge that biological sciences have accumulated regarding living beings, their physiology and behaviour, their molecular bases, their development and evolution, it is still frustratingly elusive to find a neat and uncontroversial answer to the (apparently) simple question “What are living beings?” The traditional approach to answering this question has been by means of definitions. Many have been proposed in the literature over the years (each one emphasising different aspects of living beings, such as biochemical composition, metabolism, thermodynamics, evolution, or self-organisation), but none have achieved transversal acceptance in the community (Sagan 1970; Pályi, Zucchi and Caglioti 2002; Tsokolov 2009; Bedau and Cleland 2010; Trifonov 2011; Kolb 2018). So much is the case that some have declared, with resignation, that it is impossible to find such a definition and that we should better forget the whole question (Machery 2012).
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2184755.674002
Jessica Wilson (2021) offers three characterizations of strong emergence: (1) heuristically, when higher-level features cannot in-principle be deduced from lower-level features, (2) the rejection of Physical Causal Closure in the emergence hexalemma, and (3) when a higher-level feature depends on lower-level features but has a novel power. I explicate Bernard Lonergan (1992 [1957])’s account of emergence to argue that these three characterizations come apart. Lonergan’s account is only weak emergence according to (1), and affirms Physical Causal Closure by denying adjunct premises rather than any of the assumptions of the emergence hexalemma, yet counts as strong emergence according to (3).
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2184783.674013
RÉSUMÉ: La métaphysique est traditionnellement conçue comme visant la vérité — en réalité les vérités les plus fondamentales sur les caractéristiques les plus générales de la réalité. Les partisans du naturalisme philosophique, qui insistent pour que les revendications philosophiques soient fondées sur la science, ont souvent adopté une attitude éliminativiste à l'égard de la métaphysique, n’accordant par conséquent que peu d’attention à cette définition. Dans la littérature plus récente, toutefois, le naturalisme a plutôt été interprété comme signifiant que la conception traditionnelle de la métaphysique ne peut être acceptée que si l'on est réaliste scientifique (et que l'on met les bonnes contraintes sur les revendications métaphysiques acceptables).
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2280987.674024
The best-system theory of lawhood is understandably popular (especially in the philosophy-of-science wing of metaphysics), above all because it avoids the metaphysical excesses of more inflationary competitors. But some regard its best-known version, namely, David Lewis’s, as still being too inflationary. “Lite” versions have been developed that attempt to avoid Lewis’s reliance on a distinction between natural and non-natural properties. The concerns about naturalness are misguided. Lewis’s theory doesn’t introduce a problematic gap between the metaphysics of laws and the aims of physics. And lite best-system theories (which come in different flavors) have their own troubles. Accept no substitutes! The best best-system theory is the original, still with 100% naturalness.
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2323165.674035
Modern analyses of causation standardly treat cause and effect as events. Disagreement persists over what exactly events are, and whether some nearby analysis—perhaps in terms of facts or states of affairs—might be superior. There is, however, not much sympathy for the traditional understanding of causes as persisting things, whether those be substances, powers, or properties. One does still find hearty bands of enthusiasts who defend such old-school ideas. But to endorse things as causes requires setting oneself against the mainstream of research in the metaphysics of causation.
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2357856.674046
This series of Elements in Philosophy of Science provides an extensive overview of the themes, topics and debates which constitute the philosophy of science. Distinguished specialists provide an up-to-date summary of the results of current research on their topics, as well as offering their own take on those topics and drawing original conclusions.
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2703260.674058
The Octoberfest is a noble tradition in category theory: a low-key, friendly conference for researchers to share their work and thoughts. This year it’s on Saturday October 26th and Sunday October 27th. …
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2819464.67407
The question of whether chemical structure is reducible to Everettian Quantum Mechanics (EQM) should be of interest to philosophers of chemistry and philosophers of physics alike. Among the three realist interpretations of quantum mechanics, EQM resolves the measurement problem by claiming that measurements (now interpreted as instances of decoherence) have indeterminate outcomes absolutely speaking, but determinate outcomes relative to emergent worlds (Maudlin, 1995). Philosophers who wish to be sensitive to the practice of quantum chemistry (e.g. Scerri, 2016) should be interested in EQM because Franklin and Seifert (2020) claim that resolving the measurement problem also resolves the reducibility of chemical structure, and EQM is the interpretation which involves no mathematical structure beyond that used by practicing scientists. Philosophers interested in the quantum interpretation debate should be interested in the reducibility of chemistry because chemical structure is precisely the kind of determinate three-dimensional fact which EQM should be able to ground if it is to be empirically coherent (see Allori, 2023). The prospects for reduction of chemical structure are poor if it cannot succeed in EQM; the prospects for EQM as a guide to ontology are poor if it cannot reduce chemical structure.