Edward Feser and Vincent Torley

I have been following Vincent’s spat with Edward Feser (A Catholic philosopher with some reactionary views – his blog) over whether Feser’s own “cosmological argument” has the merit Feser seems to think. Here’s Vincent’s latest post on the matter.

Not being able to post at Uncommon Descent, I thought I might catch up with Vincent at Feser’s blog but I seem to have worn out my welcome. In case anyone decides to pop in from Feser’s blog, I thought I’d offer this thread for discussion. And please regard it as an open thread. Nothing will be considered off-topic. Usual rules apply!

193 thoughts on “Edward Feser and Vincent Torley

  1. Just thought of a great analogy (well, I think so). A logical argument is like a recipe. The ingredients are the premises and the method is the argument. An edible result is the conclusion.

    Take the deceptively simple Catalan appetizer, pan con tomate. The ingredients are bread, tomatoes, garlic, olive oil, salt and pepper.

    Method: toast slices of bread, rub with clove of garlic, rub in pulp of tomato, drizzle over a little oil, a sprinkle of salt and a grind of pepper.

    But!!!

    Select bread carefully, a dense oven-baked bread sliced thickly like ciabatta or pain de campagne and toast over the barbecue* (vine prunings are a good fuel). Grow your own tomatoes and let them get over-ripe; doing this with imported shop bought fruit is not worth the effort. If you can, get this season’s wet garlic and be generous, half a clove per slice minimum. Best quality extra virgin olive oil that hasn’t been around open or in the light too long. Flakes of salt, not fine grain, something like Fleurs de Guerande or other traditionally produced sea salt gives the right crunch.

    Try it with friends who don’t mind getting the fingers and faces messy, al fresco on a hot day as a conversation opener to a barbecue.

    How good was that analogy!

  2. Wouldn’t repeated independent observations of an abnormal occurrence imply that it is a normal occurrence?

  3. petrushka:
    Wouldn’t repeated independent observations of an abnormal occurrence imply that it is a normal occurrence?

    Indeed!

    But what struck me is something Charles Babbage (presumably the inventor of the difference engine) wrote in the piece Vincent linked to.

    Revealed religion rests on human testimony; and on that alone.

    See, it’s not just me.

    Should have included the quote in the earlier comment – sorry.

  4. I realise now why some of Feser’s regular commenters at his blog were a little impatient with me. While waiting for some clarification from someone – anyone- on what Feser’s real argument, rather than the straw-man he and his supporters routinely claim is being attacked, is based on (what are those pesky premises?), I looked at the reviews for the two books I need to read to begin this process of understanding; Aquinas and The Last Superstition published in 2009 and 2008, respectively.

    Then on to Feser’s blog post on Jerry Coyne and you are on a merry-go-round of SIWOTI posts involving Coyne, Jason Rosenhouse and Eric MacDonald (whose original posts seem to have been lost when his blog joined the Freethought group). It’s déjà-vu all over again.

    Though I find I could have saved a lot of typing by copy-pasting some of the posts and comments I read, the one thing I did not find was any clarification on what the premises of the TCA might be.

    ETA: meant to include a quote from Rosenhouse which I thought summed up the situation well:

    So for the skeptic there are four levels of difficulty before Christian theology even gets off the ground: Does God exist? If He exists, does He have the attributes Christianity says He has? If yes, does the Bible provide correct information regarding His desires and intentions? And if yes to that, how are we to understand the Bible? Theologians need strong, compelling answers to these questions if we are ever to be confident that they are not just reasoning idly within an implausible axiom system. They don’t have those answers. Worse, in each case there are strong reasons for thinking the correct answers to those questions are not what the theologians would like them to be.

    ETA typos

  5. walto: I’ve got no particular beef with Spinoza (on whom I wrote my thesis), but contemporary “rationalists” don’t have the excuse of living in the 17th Century for their silliness.

    I’m fascinated by the resurgence of ‘dogmatic rationalism’ on display with Feser, Torley, and quite a few of the UD regulars. It’s a reassuring bulwark against empiricism and pragmatism, I suppose, and keeps one’s prejudices firmly protected against re-evaluation in light of new evidence.

    In light of the new rationalism, it’s amusing to see that O’Leary now thinks that we should ignore evidence if it conflicts with our deeply-grounded intuitions. In other words, the rule of ID is always follow the evidence wherever it leads, but only if the evidence supports the prejudices one already has; otherwise ignore it.

  6. OT, but poster ‘Doug’ with whom you have numerous exchanges tries a bit of numeroproctology to prove that Homo sapiens cannot have evolved from a common ancestor with Chimps. He takes the known number of base pair differences and an assumption of mean population size, and insists that an adaptive mutation is required every 125-250 individuals.

    So, the simple math of the matter is that there was one “positive” (i.e., conferring selective advantage for natural selection to act) point mutation along the required genomic trajectory for every 125 to 250 of those evolving organisms.

    PS: I understand that this is a quick approximation of the matter, and I am quite aware of the many attempts made to solve this conundrum. None succeed.

    “Quite aware”? Not aware enough, evidently, that the vast majority of bp differences are likely to be neutral, and tick at a predictable rate well within the bounds of the observed differential.

  7. Allan Miller,

    This is the OT thread! Greg is the commenter that’s toying with me. I’m obviously not well-enough versed in the skills of logic and apologetics to warrant any attention from the others.

  8. I appear to have established that the premises put forward by Thomas Aquinas in the first of his “Five Ways”

    The first and more manifest way is the argument from motion. It is certain, and evident to our senses, that in the world some things are in motion. Now whatever is in motion is put in motion by another, for nothing can be in motion except it is in potentiality to that towards which it is in motion; whereas a thing moves inasmuch as it is in act. For motion is nothing else than the reduction of something from potentiality to actuality. But nothing can be reduced from potentiality to actuality, except by something in a state of actuality.

    are not the basis of Feser’s argument, but rather this:

    1. That the actualization of potency is a real feature of the world follows from the occurrence of the events we know of via sensory experience.
    2. The occurrence of any event E presupposes the operation of a substance.
    3. The existence of any natural substance S at any given moment presupposes the concurrent actualization of a potency.
    4. No mere potency can actualize a potency; only something actual can do so

    which makes much more sense.

  9. Much more sense than what, “Ibbledeebibble”? I’m not sure.

    2 and 3 are gibberish.

    If you put 1 as

    We can tell that there is change from our own experience.

    I’m OK with it. 4 also might be strangled into sense, but it would take more time than it’s worth. You’d have to define “potency” and “actualization” and that probably would be hard.

    Anyhow, say 1 and 4 are both true. So what? Nothing of interest follows.

  10. Alan Fox: 1. That the actualization of potency is a real feature of the world follows from the occurrence of the events we know of via sensory experience.
    2. The occurrence of any event E presupposes the operation of a substance.
    3. The existence of any natural substance S at any given moment presupposes the concurrent actualization of a potency.
    4. No mere potency can actualize a potency; only something actual can do so

    This is only intelligible by someone who already has a grasp on the concepts of “potency” (what Aristotle called dunamis, from which we get “dynamic”) and “actuality” (what Aristotle called energeia, from which we get “energy”). For Aristotle these weren’t esoteric terms of art — they were tightly integrated into his science, including physics, biology, astronomy, and psychology. (As well as into his ethics).

    The chief error of contemporary Scholastics like Feser (and there are many others) is that they think that they can acknowledge that our physics and biology are no more longer Aristotelian, but that we can still retain Aristotelianism in our metaphysics.

    That is, ironically, a deeply anti-Aristotelian thought. Aristotle uses these concepts in his metaphysics because they are central to his science. Aristotle understood that what we do in metaphysics — what he called “first philosophy” — is based on and answerable to what we do in science — what he called “second philosophy”. Aristotle would never have seriously entertained the thought that we can have a different set of basic concepts in our metaphysical vocabulary than we have in our scientific vocabulary. The two must go hand in hand.

  11. Another way of saying that any philosophizing that is not consilient with science will be wrong or worthless. Science is experience, iteratvely filtered.

  12. Yes. No good philosophy can contradict the (empirical) findings of science. The only caveat there is that scientists sometimes opine on philosophical (which may only be non-empirically verifiable) issues. They may do so without realizing it or may just stray out of their wheelhouse–just as philosophers sometimes do.

  13. Kantian Naturalist: The chief error of contemporary Scholastics like Feser (and there are many others) is that they think that they can acknowledge that our physics and biology are no more longer Aristotelian, but that we can still retain Aristotelianism in our metaphysics.

    I must say I was amazed when inquiring about premises for Feser’s real “Five Ways” (rather than the straw-man nobody has yet managed to see past, apparently) that he has advanced from medieval times to the third century BC. To be fair to Feser, he hasn’t confirmed it is as simple as that; this is filtered through a commenter on his blog.

    I assume it’s OK to quote you there. I appear to have been given the rôle of the crazy guy nobody will sit next to on the bus for fear of catching something nasty but it would be nice to challenge a few assumptions, including my own.

  14. walto: …scientists sometimes opine on philosophical (which may only be non-empirically verifiable) issues. They may do so without realizing it or may just stray out of their wheelhouse–just as philosophers sometimes do.

    It’s almost inevitable with successful academics. Look at Dawkins, Coyne, Myers. Give someone a platform in front of a large audience of admirers and the temptation is hard to resist. But I don’t think it is a bad thing for scientists and philosophers to try to communicate across barriers and disciplines. Coming out of the wheelhouse and being soaked by a wave of criticism and disagreement might be stimulating.

  15. Kantian Naturalist:
    The chief error of contemporary Scholastics like Feser (and there are many others) is that they think that they can acknowledge that our physics and biology are no more longer Aristotelian, but that we can still retain Aristotelianism in our metaphysics.
    […]
    Aristotle would never have seriously entertained the thought that we can have a different set of basic concepts in our metaphysical vocabulary than we have in our scientific vocabulary.The two must go hand in hand.

    In comment 16 if Torley’s linked post UD, Box calls Feser out on that very point:

    Feser seems to argue that coffee, water, atoms and subatomic particles are distinct members of a hierarchical series. This is incorrect. The subatomic particles do not cause the coffee to exist – they are the coffee. “Coffee” and “subatomic particles” are descriptions of the same thing

    I don’t think ID depends on Aristotelian metaphysics. ID is just bad science. Perhaps cargo cult science would be a better term.

    But Aristotelian causes seem to be in vogue for some philosophers to explain consciousness, values, intentionality. For example, I believe Nagel appeals to teleological causes in his latest book.

    KN, don’t you see challenges in making the metaphysics of “liberal naturalism” consistent with science?

  16. Alan Fox: I assume it’s OK to quote you there

    Yes, you may quote me there if you wish. But I’d prefer to avoid commenting on that blog directly, because I’m already too invested in on-line discussions as it is.

  17. BruceS: KN, don’t you see challenges in making the metaphysics of “liberal naturalism” consistent with science?

    BruceS, I’ve been thinking about this a lot the past two days, because I finally finished Every Thing Must Go (ETMG) and it’s given me a lot to mull over. Here’s where I’ve gotten thus far . . . . .

    (1) the starting-point of ETMG is that the sciences give us knowledge of objective reality because the institutionalized norms of scientific inquiry consist of iterated filter mechanisms. (As petrushka nicely put it, “Science is experience, iteratively filtered”. ETMG begins with the exact same thought, which they correctly attribute to Peirce — who also aimed at bringing verificationism to metaphysics, rather than using verificationism to abolish metaphysics.)

    (2) given that, the only kind of metaphysics that bears on objective reality is the metaphysics of science. Specifically, the only legitimate kind of metaphysical hypotheses are those that relate a hypothesis of fundamental physics to a hypothesis of the special sciences. Let’s call this the “metaphysics as metascience” conception of metaphysics.

    (3) The distinction between fundamental physics and the special sciences is central to their account, but it is not that physical reality comes in “layers”. They reject the entire picture of “layers” that has governed the construction of the scientific image.

    The ‘fundamentality’ of fundamental physics lies rather in the fact that it consists of generalizations that can be confirmed or disconfirmed by any measurement taken anywhere in the universe. (By ‘fundamental physics’ they mean quantum mechanics, general relativity, and any successor to those theories. I found that chapter the hardest going, since they know physics really well and discuss it at an expert level. They tend towards agnosticism as to whether thermodynamics is fundamental.)

    By contrast, the special sciences consist of generalizations that are confirmed or disconfirmed by measurements taken only in specifically demarcated regions of space-time. But the special sciences do detect ‘real patterns’, in Dennett’s sense — and conceptualize those patterns in terms of objects and causes. (There are no objects and no causes in fundamental physics — only structures.) The special sciences they consider are biology, psychology, and (interestingly enough) economics.

    As I understand their view, the prospects are rather dim for “reducing” psychology to biology, or biology to physics — though they don’t deny a priori that such reductions are possible. Different kinds of real patterns are detectable under different conditions, and all that the unity of science commits us to is that all real patterns are constrained by fundamental physics.

    (4) I am not sure that scientific metaphysics a la Ladyman and Ross is all there is to do in metaphysics. But I do think that

    (i) ETMG is a far superior version of scientific metaphysics than anything else I’ve yet seen, and in particular it is far superior to Alex Rosenberg’s “disenchanted naturalism”;

    (ii) scientific metaphysics *might* — MIGHT! — be all the metaphysics that we need if (and only if) objective truth is the only regulative ideal for metaphysical hypotheses;

    (iii) there is something deeply important about ‘the descriptive metaphysics of everyday life’ — a project that we find pursued in Husserl, Heidegger, the late Wittgenstein, Strawson, Merleau-Ponty, and McDowell — I use the term ‘transcendental description’ as an umbrella term for this kind of project:

    (iv) but if we want to reconcile metaphysics as transcendental description with metaphysics as meta-science (the ETMG strategy), then given (ii), that reconciliation or fusion — what I call “speculative naturalism” — will have to be guided by some regulative ideal other than objective truth per se.

    (v) in other words, I now accept that “liberal naturalism” of the sort we find in Tom Nagel, Bob Hanna, Evan Thompson, Terry Deacon, Stephen Talbott (among quite a few others) is not motivated solely by knowledge of objective reality — hence its ‘speculative’ character. (This is made more clear by considering this kind of project in the historical tradition of Naturphilosophie that includes Schelling and Merleau-Ponty.)

    (5) Hence the question I face is, what justifies speculative naturalism in its ‘excess’, its going-beyond of scientific naturalism? As I see it, speculative naturalism would be unjustified or illegitimate as an intellectual project if knowledge of objective reality were the only regulative ideal of theoretical philosophy. (I say theoretical to distinguish it from the regulative ideals of practical philosophy, such as love or justice.) And while that might be the case, I have to say that I also see no reason why knowledge of objective reality is the only regulative ideal of theoretical philosophy. For we also seem to have a legitimate interest in understanding how everything hangs together — or, as Sellars nicely put it

    The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term. Under ‘things in the broadest possible sense’ I include such radically different items as not only ‘cabbages and kings’, but numbers and duties, possibilities and finger snaps, aesthetic experience and death. To achieve success in philosophy would be, to use a contemporary turn of phrase, to ‘know one’s way around’ with respect to all these things, not in that unreflective way in which the centipede of the story knew its way around before it faced the question, ‘how do I walk?’, but in that reflective way which means that no intellectual holds are barred.

    It seems to me that such comprehensive understanding is a legitimate intellectual interest that justifies the speculative moment, and hence a speculative naturalism that talks about more than what metaphysics as meta-science conceptualizes — even if metaphysics as metascience is the only metaphysics of objective reality.

  18. I’ve read the responses on Feser’s blog to my point above about science and metaphysics in Aristotle. I actually have not read anything by Feser so I really should refrain from shooting from the hip. Nor have I read anything in Scholastic metaphysics. I do have a pretty decent working grasp of Aristotle, but I don’t read him in the Scholastic tradition.

    If I read Aristotle through any particular interpretative lenses, it would be in terms of phenomenology and ordinary-language philosophy — thinking of Aristotle as a forerunner of Husserl, Heidegger, Strawson, and Ryle rather than as a forerunner of contemporary scientific metaphysicians like Tim Maudlin and Ladyman and Ross.

    I don’t have any objection to phenomenology or ordinary-language philosophy — quite the contrary, I love reading all that stuff and I’m much more knowledgeable about it than I am about either Greek philosophy or scientific metaphysics. (Though my ‘home turf’ is American pragmatism, I’m strongest on Dewey and weakest on Peirce — and Peirce did acknowledge a profound debt to the Scholastics in general and to Scotus in particular.) If someone were interested in a description of how we experience nature, Aristotle is rich with insight. That doesn’t mean that we can learn anything from Aristotle about how the world really is.

  19. Kantian Naturalist,

    FWIW, my training is a bit different (and probably a bit stupider, if you think about it)–I’ve studied some of the Scholastics but almost no Aristotle at all. I find him really hard and uncongenial–in spite of Hall’s reliance on his concept of categories.

    Chisholm once said in class that when philosophers were difficult for him to understand, he always figured it was their fault and not his–except in the case of Aristotle.

  20. Kantian Naturalist:

    Thanks for the detailed and interesting reply.

    I have not attempted Ladyman’s book but I did listen to him speak about it here.

    He does take a dim view of reducing scientific theories;. As I understand him, each science validly makes claims about reality at certain scales but the causes and explanations of each science stand independently.

    I think Bechtel and others define a useful concept of (pdf) reduction using the concept of mechanisms, which are integral to much scientific explanation. A mechanism is reduced to its parts and their organization and inter-operation. Bechtel claims that is closer to how working scientists view reduction.

    But I think there is a difference between reduction of explanation and reduction of reality. You characterize Ladyman as saying physics constrains all science but it seems to me that constraint applies to more than just physics. For example, I would think that biochemistry constrains biology. I think that type of constraint reflects something about reality.

    Your position that philosophy must have other regulative ideas than objective truth makes sense — otherwise philosophy would be just science, I suppose.

    But then I would ask about that nature of those ideals. In describing the phenomenal nature of reality, or the nature of right and wrong, what distinguishes philosophy from great works of art? How are philosophy’s norms different e from aesthetic norms when philosophy is not being constrained by objective truth?

    I was interested to see in your reply to Walto that you consider Aristotle’s metaphysics as a forerunner of Heidegger. That may explain why I find both inscrutable.

  21. BruceS: Thanks for the detailed and interesting reply.

    I have not attempted Ladyman’s book but I did listen to him speak about it here.

    He does take a dim view of reducing scientific theories. As I understand him, each science validly makes claims about reality at certain scales but the causes and explanations of each science stand independently.

    That’s right — he calls this “the scale relativity of ontology”. By which he means that what kinds of objects it makes sense to talk about depends on the resolution scale of real patterns.

    I think Bechtel and others define a useful concept of (pdf) reduction using the concept of mechanisms, which are integral to much scientific explanation. A mechanism is reduced to its parts and their organization and inter-operation. Bechtel claims that is closer to how working scientists view reduction.

    Ladyman and Ross do allow room for a useful concept of reduction; what they deny is that the unity of science requires reducing all sciences to physics. Conversely, they are also arguing against pluralists like Cartwright and Dupre, for whom the irreducibility of biology to chemistry, or chemistry to physics, means that the sciences are disordered or non-unified. It’s a very delicate balancing-act that L&R are trying to pull off, and there’s plenty of room for thinking that they fall off on one side or the other.

    But I think there is a difference between reduction of explanation and reduction of reality. You characterize Ladyman as saying physics constrains all science but it seems to me that constraint applies to more than just physics. For example, I would think that biochemistry constrains biology. I think that type of constraint reflects something about reality.

    I think that L&R are asking us to think much harder about what exactly talk of “constraint” here means, and what it commits us to. Does biology constrain psychology? If so, how? Does psychology constrain economics? If so, how?

    Your position that philosophy must have other regulative ideas than objective truth makes sense — otherwise philosophy would be just science, I suppose.

    But then I would ask about that nature of those ideals. In describing the phenomenal nature of reality, or the nature of right and wrong, what distinguishes philosophy from great works of art? How are philosophy’s norms different from aesthetic norms when philosophy is not being constrained by objective truth?

    On my view — and I stress that this is only my view, and something that I haven’t seen other people do in the exact form that I’m doing it — the other major task of theoretical (as distinct from practical) philosophy is constructing transcendental descriptions. (This is the Kant/Heidegger/Merleau-Ponty stratum of my thinking, though somewhat refracted through Strawson, Sellars, and McDowell.) Here’s a recent characterization:

    a transcendental description is a description that, on the basis of a reflective intuitive explication of particular experiences, attempts to articulate the basic general structures of sense constituting the experiences in question. (Westerlund, “What is a Transcendental Description?” in Phenomenology and the Transcendental, Routledge 2014).

    (Whether or not transcendental descriptions are a version of the Myth of the Given is a huge question. I take a stab at it in my book but I’m not wholly satisfied with my treatment of it.)

    As I see it, what I call “speculative naturalism” aims at reconciling what we get from transcendental descriptions with what we get from scientific explanations. In one sense, the former counts as a kind of metaphysics, too — what Strawson calls “descriptive metaphysics” in Individuals and what some Dewey scholars call “the metaphysics of experience”. And the latter, too, counts as a kind of metaphysics — the ‘scientistic’ metaphysics that Ladyman and Ross practice. (Alex Rosenberg does it, too, but L&R do it much better. I can’t speak to Tim Maudlin’s The Metaphysics Within Physics.)

    So speculative naturalism aims at reconciling descriptive metaphysics, the transcendental descriptions of experience, with scientistic metaphysics, the unity of empirical explanations. One could call it a “metametaphysics” if one liked.

    I was interested to see in your reply to Walto that you consider Aristotle’s metaphysics as a forerunner of Heidegger. That may explain why I find both inscrutable.

    I probably misspoke in that regard. What Heidegger is intentionally doing (in Being and Time) is transcendental description — he is giving us an account of the basic structures of intelligibility, or of how we make sense of the world as we experience it. (Though to be precise, the “we” in that sentence should be replaced with “Dasein,” i.e. the kind of being that is able to pose for itself the question of why there is anything at all.)

    Aristotle is not attempting to give us transcendental descriptions — however, I think that one way of reading Aristotle as saying something relevant to us, and not a mere historical curiosity, is as if he were giving us a transcendental description (or at least the raw materials for one), together with some interesting arguments about what follows from those descriptions.

  22. Kantian Naturalist: TIt’s a very delicate balancing-act that L&R are trying to pull off, and there’s plenty of room for thinking that they fall off on one side or the other.

    I think that L&R are asking us to think much harder about what exactly talk of “constraint” here means,

    I also got the impression of a balancing act from Ladyman’s podcast. For example, he claims to be neither a scientific realist nor an anti-realist. He is not a realist because no thing is real, only patterns; but he is not an anti-realist because the patterns at each scale which lead to successful science are as real as anything can be.

    Under such a metaphysics, it is challenging to understand what happens to standard concepts used in the philosophical discussions of reducibility like “supervenience”, “type versus token”, “multiple realizability”.

    I don’t know if you followed the discussion in Walt’s thread on quantum mechanics, but Ladyman’s metaphysics does have the “advantage” of getting along well with the Multi-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.

    After all, why be miserly with universes or selves if reality is just patterns of mathematics? Just get the math to agree with results of experiments and live with the number of emergent universes in the result!

    As I see it, what I call “speculative naturalism” aims at reconciling what we get from transcendental descriptions.

    Doing that reconciliation seems to be a worthwhile challenge.
    My rudimentary understanding of some of Kant’s transcendental deductions is that, very roughly, he argued from some unquestioned aspect of our experience to a conclusion about how our experience must be organized for that unquestioned aspect to hold. In particular, from the unity of our selves and our experience, he argued that experience must be organized in categories like cause/effect, space, time.

    If that is even approximately right, the following puzzle me in the light of current science:
    1. We know that damaged brains/minds may have selves which are different from common experience, eg two independent selves in split brain patients or patients denying thoughts as their own after certain types of brain trauma. So can be really have any reliable intuitions about how experience must be?

    2. Or if we start from the conclusion about necessary categories, then modern physics shows that common conceptions of time, space, causality are not a necessary part of our experience of the world (as expressed in math). Doubting the conclusion leads to doubt about the effectiveness of the argument.

    3. Evolution would seem to say that our means of experience is contingent on our evolutionary history. Is it safe to argue that some aspects would be necessary regardless of that history?

  23. BruceS: I also got the impression of a balancing act from Ladyman’s podcast. For example, he claims to be neither a scientific realist nor an anti-realist. He is not a realist because no thing is real, only patterns; but he is not an anti-realist because the patterns at each scale which lead to successful science are as real as anything can be.

    Interesting.

    My view is pretty much the opposite. The things are real, though perhaps their thingness isn’t. However, the patterns are not real at all. The patterns are merely patterns in our representations of reality. And reality does not dictate how it should be represented.

  24. Neil Rickert: Interesting.

    My view is pretty much the opposite.The things are real, though perhaps their thingness isn’t.However, the patterns are not real at all.The patterns are merely patterns in our representations of reality.And reality does not dictate how it should be represented.

    At one point in the podcast, Ladyman comments in passing to the effect that some philophers/physicists are questioning the distinction between the abstract and the concrete. But there is no elaboration of that in the podcast.

    Later, Ladyman is asked if he is a mathematical Platonist. He answers that he is not sure if he is a Platyonist (the abstract objects of math are real) or a Pythagorean (reality is mathematics and mathematics only). He says he is not sure which he is. But I suspect that the fact the he is one or the other relates to his comment on abstract and concrete.

    If KN reads this, perhaps he will comment on whether these topics are covered in the book.

  25. BruceS: I also got the impression of a balancing act from Ladyman’s podcast. For example, he claims to be neither a scientific realist nor an anti-realist. He is not a realist because no thing is real, only patterns; but he is not an anti-realist because the patterns at each scale which lead to successful science are as real as anything can be.

    He’s a realist about patterns and an anti-realist (sort of) about things. That is, we talk about things as a way of keeping track of real patterns. (At the folk level and also in the special sciences). But he denies that there are discrete entities with well-defined intrinsic properties in fundamental physics. This is why he thinks that the universe isn’t “made of” anything at all — fundamental physics is the study of universal structures with objective modal properties.

    Under such a metaphysics, it is challenging to understand what happens to standard concepts used in the philosophical discussions of reducibility like “supervenience”, “type versus token”, “multiple realizability”.

    That’s part of the point — they want to say that all of the standard concepts of analytic metaphysics should be junked. All of that stuff is just “neo-scholasticism,” by their lights.

    After all, why be miserly with universes or selves if reality is just patterns of mathematics? Just get the math to agree with results of experiments and live with the number of emergent universes in the result!

    They do have a discussion of Everett’s many-worlds interpretation of QM but I couldn’t follow the details. They spend a lot of time talking about the metaphysics of QM and the metaphysics of GR, and why those differences make it difficult to come up with a theory of quantum gravity.

    They do say many times that, if our universe is informationally closed, then there’s no point at all to speculating about other universes, or the cause of this one. “What is the cause of the universe?” is, by their lights, a senseless question, because (i) current science cannot give us an answer and (ii) metaphysics should not go beyond current science. I’m beginning to think that they are right about this. At any rate, I want to draw to a distinction between metaphysics that doesn’t go beyond current science and metaphysics that does.

    My rudimentary understanding of some of Kant’s transcendental deductions is that, very roughly, he argued from some unquestioned aspect of our experience to a conclusion about how our experience must be organized for that unquestioned aspect to hold. In particular, from the unity of our selves and our experience, he argued that experience must be organized in categories like cause/effect, space, time.

    The Mutuality Thesis goes both ways: nothing can be experienced as an object without being experienced by a subject, and nothing that has experiences as a subject can not have experiences of objects.

    What makes experience about an object is that is structured in certain ways: objects are locatable in space and in time (except for mental entities, which have no spatial location), and that they are characterized in certain ways — as being substances with properties, as having causal relations with other objects, as having amounts, as existing or not existing.

    What makes experience belonging to a subject is that the subject unifies its thoughts as belong to itself, so that it’s not

    thought that p, thought that q, thought that r . . .

    or even

    I think that p, I think that q, I think that r . .

    but rather

    I think that [p, q, r, . . . ]

    and that nothing can have experiences about objects without also have this formal kind of self-consciousness (what Kant calls “the transcendental unity of apperception”). Consciousness of objects and self-consciousness are inter-dependent.

    This picture is silent on (i) how the whole schema is causally implemented in the brain or in the brain-body-environment system and (ii) whether there are other kinds of experience that aren’t structured like this. Kant seems to have thought that there aren’t, but then again, Kant was probably not familiar with psychedelics or know much about mental illness.

    If that is even approximately right, the following puzzle me in the light of current science:
    1. We know that damaged brains/minds may have selves which are different from common experience, e.g. two independent selves in split brain patients or patients denying thoughts as their own after certain types of brain trauma. So can be really have any reliable intuitions about how experience must be?

    In those kinds of cases, the mutuality thesis only tells us that those kinds of people have radically different kinds of experience than we do, and in particular, they don’t have consciousness of objects as we do. But we already knew that, so it’s no objection to the mutuality thesis. Even the most radical suggestion that I know of — Bakker’s “blind brain theory” — tells us that intuition is unreliable about how the brain actually functions, and so subjective consciousness can’t tell us what causes subjective consciousness. Bakker thinks that this undermines Kant and phenomenology, but I don’t see why.

    2. Or if we start from the conclusion about necessary categories, then modern physics shows that common conceptions of time, space, causality are not a necessary part of our experience of the world (as expressed in math). Doubting the conclusion leads to doubt about the effectiveness of the argument.

    That’s a fair objection to a strict Kantian position. (In fact, the logical positivists were the first people to object to neo-Kantianism on precisely these grounds.) Kant not only insists that we can only conceptualize the world in spatio-temporal terms, but goes so far as to say that we necessarily experience the word as having a Euclidean geometry. And of course that’s false, insofar as we can conceptualize non-Euclidean geometries, construct a physical theory on that basis, and thereby design experiments which show that space-time is non-Euclidean.

    One cannot be a strict Kantian after Einstein. The question is, can one be any kind of Kantian after Einstein? Michael Friedman has been arguing (e.g. here) that one can ‘relativize’ the a priori, and Sellars had a very similar view. (No one has yet worked out a complete rapprochment between Friedman and Sellars, though I know a post-doc who is working on it.)

    3. Evolution would seem to say that our means of experience is contingent on our evolutionary history. Is it safe to argue that some aspects would be necessary regardless of that history?

    What’s contingent is the fact that there are any beings in the universe of which the Mutuality Thesis is true — that they experience of objects and self-consciousness. Also contingent is the specific evolutionary pathways through which those beings came into existence. The Mutuality Thesis doesn’t say that there must be such beings, or that if there such beings, that they must rely primarily rely on visual information and a spoken language.

    One can be a kind of Darwinian Kantian by saying that if beings happen (contingently) to evolve that can have the kinds of experiences that we have — capable of ascribing properties to objects, tracking causal relations, characterizing extensive and intensive magnitudes, and so on — then necessarily those beings will have self-consciousness, and conversely.

  26. Neil Rickert: My view is pretty much the opposite. The things are real, though perhaps their thingness isn’t. However, the patterns are not real at all. The patterns are merely patterns in our representations of reality. And reality does not dictate how it should be represented.

    The reason why the patterns are real – that there are “extra-representational real patterns” — is because they can square real patterns with their methodological commitment to the priority of fundamental physics. By contrast, they hold that there aren’t any “things” in fundamental physics — they think that the characteristic picture of self-subsisting entities whizzing all over the place and banging into each other isn’t supported by what we know from quantum mechanics. Instead, “things” are just a practical device that we use to keep track of real patterns. It’s patterns all the way down!

  27. BruceS: At one point in the podcast, Ladyman comments in passing to the effect that some philophers/physicists are questioning the distinction between the abstract and the concrete. But there is no elaboration of that in the podcast.

    Later, Ladyman is asked if he is a mathematical Platonist. He answers that he is not sure if he is a Platonist (the abstract objects of math are real) or a Pythagorean (reality is mathematics and mathematics only). He says he is not sure which he is. But I suspect that the fact the he is one or the other relates to his comment on abstract and concrete.

    Briefly, they raise the following worry about the abstract/concrete distinction — can this distinction be drawn in a way that is fully consistent with the metaphysics of fundamental physics? Consider what makes the difference.

    Usually the distinction is drawn in terms of causation or spatio-temporality. Concrete objects have causal powers and/or are located in space-time, and abstract objects are not. But causal powers are really hard to operationalize at the quantum level — for example, entanglement violates the principle of common cause – and we have no reason to think that this doesn’t scale up. Space-time might be, depending your favorite theory of quantum gravity, non-fundamental.

    So we have reasons based on the metaphysics of physics to think that the criteria between concrete and abstract objects do not reflect an objective structural feature of reality. If mathematics is the study of structures and relations, and so too is fundamental physics, then the two converge.

    The important things to keep in mind about L&R are the following:

    (1) the institutionalized norms of empirical science make it the case that successful scientific theories give us the only knowledge we can have about objective reality;

    (2) making sense of scientific theories is the only legitimate goal of a metaphysics concerned with objective reality. [This is what they call “PNC-compatible” — the Principle of Naturalistic Closure — according to which “metaphysics is the enterprise of critically elucidating consilience networks across the sciences” (p. 28), and more precisely,

    Any new metaphysical claim that is to be taken seriously at time t should be motivated by, and only by, the service it would perform, if true, in showing how two or more specific scientific hypotheses, at least one of which should be drawn from fundamental physics, jointly explain more than the sum of what is explained by the two hypotheses taken separately. (p. 37)

    The PNC is the backbone of the entire book and they pursue its various implications in physics and in the special sciences. They use it deny what they call “strong metaphysics”, understood here as the claim that “it is (practically) possible for a person to set out to cultivate non-trivial doctrinal beliefs about the structure of the world that go beyond what the sciences tell us or imply, and then come to have a preponderance of true such beliefs relative to false such beliefs because of the activity of cultivating them” (p. 60). So it’s a very aggressive kind of scientism that rejects not only theology but also all metaphysics based on intuitions or a priori considerations! All that metaphysics amounts to is “the articulation of a unified world-view derived from the details of scientific research. We call this (weak) metaphysics because it is not an activity that has a specialized science of its own. In case someone want to declare our usage here eccentric or presumptuous, we remind them that we share it with Aristotle” (p. 65) — hence my comment about Feser from a few days ago.

    Given that, they then go to say the following:

    The sole source for verifiable limits on the scope of the formal is our collective mathematical ingenuity to date, whereas the limits on physical theories are set by the physical possibilities for measurement. Non-verificationists about metaphysics think it is appropriate for metaphysics to be constrained only in the way that mathematics is constrained, that is, by nothing more than our collective ingenuity. We have been arguing that such constraints are too loose; there is nothing in metaphysics that corresponds to the alternative constraints provided in mathematics by the requirement of formalization. . . . . If all the Platonist thereby wants to make ontological room for are numbers, and perhaps sets and other mathematical structures, we are happy to be mere spectators to this enterprise. We will be interested only in PNC-compatible motivations for Platonism (as for any of its rivals), but those might be defensible. One distinct, and very interesting, possibility is that as we become used to thinking of the stuff of the physical universe as being patterns rather than little things, the traditional gulf between Platonic realism about mathematics and naturalistic realism about physics will shrink or even vanish. (pp. 236-237)

    In other words, Platonic realism about mathematics could be vindicated on the basis of fundamental physics — but since that’s the only way of vindicating Platonic realism that is PNC-compatible, that’s the only way of vindicating Platonic realism that they care about.

    L&R are, indeed, verificationists with a vengeance — and they follow Peirce rather than Hume and Carnap in being verificationists about metaphysics, rather than using verificationism to sever science from metaphysics. It might be better put to say that they follow Peirce in (a) understanding verificationism as an epistemic norm rather than a semantic one and (b) use verificationism to sever ‘strong metaphysics’ (theological or analytic) from ‘weak metaphysics’.

    I find it hard to see what’s wrong with that!

  28. KN,

    I think that L&R are asking us to think much harder about what exactly talk of “constraint” here means, and what it commits us to. Does biology constrain psychology? If so, how?

    How could it not? Minds depend on brains, and brains are biological entities.

    Does psychology constrain economics? If so, how?

    Again, how could it not? Economic agents are psychological entities (or aggregates of psychological entities).

  29. keiths: How could it not? Minds depend on brains, and brains are biological entities.

    I think that this claim is much less obvious than it seems, but more importantly, there’s no reason at all for naturalists to say so.

  30. To argue that minds don’t depend on brains is to argue that they can function independently of brains. If you have any evidence that this happens, I’m all ears.

  31. Kantian Naturalist:
    I find it hard to see what’s wrong with that!

    Thanks for taking the time to provide this summary.

    The quote you provide from the book about always having to include hypotheses from physics whenever one wants to discuss the metaphysics of some special science would seem to bear on most philosophy of mind.

    I read it as saying that the mind/brain psychology/neuroscience discussion is pointless if done without referring to physics.

    Where’s the fun in that?

    On the pod cast, Ladyman is asked to recommend a book. He recommends Penrose’s Road to Reality which he says he has spent years studying and restudying, often as part of a group. (Although billed as a book for anyone, in fact it is chock full of advanced mathematics). It seems he believes a similar course of study is prerequisite for doing metaphysics.

  32. keiths:
    To argue that minds don’t depend on brains is to argue that they can function independently of brains.If you have any evidence that this happens, I’m all ears.

    KN will have a more subtle reply, but I understand L&R are posing a different sort of challenge to this type of question: They claim there is no such thing as a “thing”, like a biological entity, for example. Once you accept this QM-based concept of reality, you have to rethink the definition of “depends” in terms of QM.

    I don’t think you can address their type of concerns with the usual supervenience versus dualism arguments.

    I agree it does let the air out of all the usual types of phil of mind discussions I have read and enjoy!

    It’s not a topic I could defend or discuss in detail, but Massimo P has also discussed their theories, if you are interested in another summary.

  33. Kantian Naturalist:

    What makes experience about an object is that is structured in certain ways: objects are locatable in space and in time (except for mental entities, which have no spatial location), and that they are characterized in certain ways — as being substances with properties, as having causal relations with other objects, as having amounts, as existing or not existing.

    Very informative KN. Thanks again.

  34. keiths: To argue that minds don’t depend on brains is to argue that they can function independently of brains. If you have any evidence that this happens, I’m all ears.

    I didn’t claim that minds don’t depend on brains; I claimed that it’s not really obvious that minds do depend on brains.

    More importantly (for my purposes), the claim that minds depends on brains is pretty obscure — what exactly is being claimed here? — and it’s not a claim that any naturalist must be committed to, simply by virtue of naturalism.

    There’s nothing I can see in naturalism that commits us to reductionism. I say that even though I regard naturalism as a metaphysical position, as well as an epistemological and methodological position. (The various attempts to disentangle epistemological, methodological, and ontological/metaphysical naturalism strike me as highly suspect.)

    Let’s take naturalism in the L&R sense: to be a metaphysical naturalist is to deny that “it is (practically) possible for a person to set out to cultivate non-trivial doctrinal beliefs about the structure of the world that go beyond what the sciences tell us or imply, and then come to have a preponderance of true such beliefs relative to false such beliefs because of the activity of cultivating them”, and that all that metaphysics should amount to is “the articulation of a unified world-view derived from the details of scientific research”.

    But the unification of the sciences can take lots of different forms, and that needn’t be reductionist. (Arguably, the idea that “unification is not reduction” is one of the biggest ideas in ETMG.) A reduction has to earn its keep by showing us how to translate from the reducing vocabulary to the reduced vocabulary. Intertheoretic reductions are very rare in the history of science, and there’s no a priori reason why “the articulation of a unified world-view derived from the details of scientific research” indicates that we should expect that psychology can be reduced to neuroscience.

    Now, what’s the relation between “minds depend on brains” and “psychology can be reduced to neuroscience”? One might think that it would still be reasonable to assert that “minds depend on brains” even if psychology cannot be reduced to neuroscience.

    But I am not at all sure about that, because I worry that reference is theory-dependent. And if that’s so, then “mind” is what our psychologies theories refer to, and “brain” is what our neuroscientific theories refer to. Hence if reference is theory-dependent, then the reasonableness of “minds depend on brains” follows from, and is not independent of, the reducibility of psychological explanations to neurological explanations.

    But that’s no threat to metaphysical naturalism — certainly no more of a threat than the irreducibility of biology to chemistry. In fact, if Ladyman and Ross are right, neither the irreducibility of any special science to any other special science nor the irreducibility of any special science to fundamental physics is any threat at all to the articulation of a unified world-picture based on nothing more than scientific research. That’s why naturalists don’t have to be reductionists.

  35. BruceS: KN will have a more subtle reply, but I understand L&R are posing a different sort of challenge to this type of question: They claim there is no such thing as a “thing”, like a biological entity, for example. Once you accept this QM-based concept of reality, you have to rethink the definition of “depends” in terms of QM.

    One of the key ideas to come out of L&R is what they call “the scale relativity of ontology”. Basically, since

    (i) nothing is really real that isn’t a real pattern (“to be is to be a real pattern”);

    (ii) different real patterns are detectable at different spatio-temporal resolutions and energy thresholds;

    (iii) all there is to object-hood is practical book-keeping of real patterns;

    (iv) the spatio-temporal resolutions and energy thresholds are built into the boundary conditions of the norms of inquiry of the science in question;

    then

    (iv) different sciences study different kinds of objects.

    Fundamental physics (GM + GR + whatever theories succeed them) constrains all sciences because it studies universal real patterns, but the different special sciences do not constrain each other, because they study different real patterns.

    This isn’t to say that there can’t be interesting interdisciplinary cross-overs — there are, and there should be, and arguably L&R should have said something about them. There’s cognitive neuroscience, there’s the molecular biology of organism development, there’s evolutionary-developmental biology (“evo-devo”), and there are some interesting bridges being built between psychology and economics. But bridge-building isn’t inter-theoretic reduction in Ernst Nagel’s sense. (Quite possibly Nagel was overly optimistic about inter-theoretic reduction because all of the sciences he was concerned with were theories within fundamental physics itself.)

  36. Kantian Naturalist: (Arguably, the idea that “unification is not reduction” is one of the biggest ideas in ETMG.)

    Follow-up comment — in recent years, the main defenders of anti-reductionism, such as Nancy Cartwright and John Dupre, have concluded that the sciences are not unified at all. So L&R are staking out a new position by saying that we can have unification without reduction.

  37. Kantian Naturalist:
    This isn’t to say that there can’t be interesting interdisciplinary cross-overs — there are, and there should be, and arguably L&R should have said something about them.There’s cognitive neuroscience, there’s the molecular biology of organism development, there’s evolutionary-developmental biology (“evo-devo”), and there are some interesting bridges being built between psychology and economics.But bridge-building isn’t inter-theoretic reduction in Ernst Nagel’s sense.

    That is why the mechanism reduction approach that Bechtel favors makes sense to me.

    In one sense, mechanisms cannot be reduced, since they depend on the organization of their constituent parts, not just the parts alone. Further, mechanisms often only work in the appropriate physical context.

    But still, some limited reduction is involved, since to understand how each part contributes to the operation of the mechanism can involve the type of cross-overs you mention, eg explaining some aspects of psychology by interaction of neural networks. Or explaining non-rational economic behavior by psychological cognitive biases of the economic agents (eg suckers for ads like me).

    I once heard Alex R defending reductionism against an anti-reductionist. The anti-reductionist claimed that reductionism failed because it could not account for the context in which some mechanisms functioned. He gave protein folding as the example since what folding happens depends on the context and not just the protein itself.

    Alex basically agreed. His position was that reductive science always had to make simplifying assumptions about the isolation of the system under study.

    I think they concluded that their disagreement was mainly about how much progress reductive science could make in expanding the scope of the isolated system and whether, in the end, the whole universe might need to be involved, which then would not fairly be considered reductive.

    And that in some sense is similar to the QM entanglement issues that L&R raise.

  38. Different sciences are unified by consilience. They do not need to study the same things or have the same vocabularly, but they must not contradict each other. Geology and biology must not disagree on the age of the earth. Etc.

  39. petrushka: Different sciences are unified by consilience. They do not need to study the same things or have the same vocabulary, but they must not contradict each other. Geology and biology must not disagree on the age of the earth. Etc.

    That’s pretty much right, and L&R should have spent some time discussing it.

    I would sound a small note of caution here — consilience is something to aim for, definitely, but disagreements between the sciences can be immensely productive.

    I’m just old enough to remember when Ramapithecus was considered a valid taxon and an ancestral hominid. When the first work on molecular clocks came out in the 1980s, suggesting a much more recent human-ape divergence than the fossils did, all hell broke loose. Paleontologists and geneticists were arguing up and down about which had priority — the bones or the genes?

    Eventually, consilience was achieved when some paleontologists showed that Ramapithecus was a smaller version of Sivapithecus, an ancestor of the orangutan. In the past ten years or so we’ve found enough primitive hominid material that we can date the hominid-hominoid split roughly where the geneticists said it would be.

    So where the search for consilience, when the sciences conflict with each other, can be immensely productive. That’s different from any imaginary case where one of the special sciences generates a hypothesis that conflicts with general relativity and/or quantum mechanics.

  40. Kantian Naturalist: But I am not at all sure about that, because I worry that reference is theory-dependent. And if that’s so, then “mind” is what our psychologies theories refer to, and “brain” is what our neuroscientific theories refer to. Hence if reference is theory-dependent, then the reasonableness of “minds depend on brains” follows from, and is not independent of, the reducibility of psychological explanations to neurological explanations.

    I haven’t thought about this much, but, FWIW, that seems pretty implausible to me. Surely, “Mind depends on brains” has some kind of OL meaning. When I say or hear others say “Mind depends on brains” I leave it open (and I believe they generally do too) that this might not be an identity thing (reductionism), because it could be a Cartesian interaction thing, or a matter of property dualism, or who knows what all else. I mean, when I say “Whether Jones comes tonight depends on how his wife is feeling,” I’m not requiring any type of eliminative reduction that’s a function of physical theories, and I don’t see why there is any difference here.

    Anyhow, if “mind depends on brains” DOES require the sort of reductionism you suggest, then I’d want to come up with some other expression that means….well…that minds depend on brains…..in some manner that doesn’t require identity. You know something that just means, you kill the brain, bye-bye mind; you change the brain, you alter the “mental state.” And then the dispute of why that is so could rage on, even between neuroscientists and the meatballs posting on the religious sites y’all enjoy reading.

  41. walto: Anyhow, if “mind depends on brains” DOES require the sort of reductionism you suggest, then I’d want to come up with some other expression that means….well…that minds depend on brains…..in some manner that doesn’t require identity.

    I’m perfectly comfortable with something like this:

    As a constitutive explanation, any and all conceptual, perceptual, conative, and affective capacities are capacities of, and enacted by, a living animal in an environment; as an enabling explanation, any and all conceptual, perceptual, conative, and affective capacities that we are presentably able to observe are causally actualized through well-functioning neurocomputational mechanisms.

    That’s vague enough to leave open just how this “enabling” happens, and why this is the case, but still precise enough to distinguish this kind of view from anything a dualist or theological metaphysician would want.

  42. Kantian Naturalist: That’s pretty much right, and L&R should have spent some time discussing it.
    [..].

    So where the search for consilience, when the sciences conflict with each other, can be immensely productive.

    I’m not sure how consilience would fit into a strict interpretation of L&R, if that interpretation means patterns and causal relations of different sciences are independent.

    Consider checking consilience of psychology and neuroscience. To do such checking, you need observables to compare. Suppose you choose behavior. Then you are saying that physical movements of a brain/body are identical/isomorphic to behavior of a person. And fMRI* experiments combining psychological tasks with brain scans do exactly that.

    But then you have to consider mental versus physical causation of such movement events which you saying are the same observable in psychology and neuroscience.

    If you say movement is caused by both mental and physical causes, then I think Kim’s arguments against overdetermination of causes apply: you’d have overdetermined causation of the movement.

    So you can try saying that the mental event is the true cause. But then if mental overrides physical, why are Las Vegas gambling casinos still in business?

    Or you can say physical causes only: epiphenomenalism. Not an attractive option IMHO.

    Or you can say mental and physical are different concepts referring to the same thing. That is, brains/bodies and minds have an identity of sorts.

    Then you have to deal with issues like wide content (eg minds supervening on society as well as brains), but that is enough from me for now.

    —————————————
    (*) If anyone is interested in the details of the statistics underlying fMRI analysis, there is a very good Coursera course which is quite technical in breadth although limited in depth due to time constraints.

  43. walto: , “Mind depends on brains”

    Speaking about minds versus brains and qualia versus objective reality (well, maybe that is a stretch to stay OT but WTH):

    I see you’ve somehow convinced Hilary Putnam to do those posts on direct perception and color realism that I’ve bugged you about. How did you manage that?

    Since you commented on one of his blog posts, do you know how his approach to color deals with Metamerism (roughly: different mixtures of wavelengths giving rise to the same color (or color*?) due to overlaps in the wavelengths covered by the three types of color cones in normal human eyes)?

    More specifically, Putnam motivates his original post by referring to the phenomenon that one can have different color experiences by looking separately with right eye versus left eye at the same object.

    But Metamerism is the opposite situation in a sense: the same color sensation but from objects reflecting different wavelengths.

    Do you know how that situation fits his ideas on objective color?

  44. The colours we see are context dependent. Take colour “illusions”. I’m pretty sure that hues are not identical with reflectance profiles.

  45. davehooke:
    The colours we see are context dependent. Take colour “illusions”. I’m pretty sure that hues are not identical with reflectance profiles.

    Putnam has a different view of how to use the word color, as I understand him. His articles are pretty clear and short and worth reading, working backwards from the link in my note to Walt..

    He is well aware of illusion and context, and includes them in a discussion of subjective looks, intersubjective illusions, and objective properties.

    I don’t want to try to explain his stuff in detail as I am still grappling with it myself.

  46. BruceS,

    Bruce, I hope to spend some serious time on Putnam, Block and Raffman at some point (unless I can get somebody else to do it–I’ve tried to convince Guy Longworth and Keith Wilson, but so far no dice). But so far, I’ve only read through their stuff pretty quickly. Lately I’ve been concentrating on my ethics lectures and on a paper on (of all things) aesthetic value and musical form. Anyhow, I don’t think I’m in a position to opine on Putnam’s (constantly shifting) views on perception. I’d probably get them all mucked up.

  47. Kantian Naturalist: I’m perfectly comfortable with something like this:

    That’s vague enough to leave open just how this “enabling” happens, and why this is the case, but still precise enough to distinguish this kind of view from anything a dualist or theological metaphysician would want.

    I think your translation is much more specific and position-excluding than my pre-analytic version. I’d make your description ONE way that “Minds depend on brains” could be true–but not the only way.

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