Links
I learned about the Carving collection when I was asked to review it for Notre Dame Philosophy Reviews. I love open-access journals in general and NDPR in particular, so I was glad to do it. My
[ add comment ] ( 3906 views ) | [ 0 trackbacks ] | permalink
In a recent article,* Karen Bennett poses and attempts to answer a metaphysical dilemma about the relationship between ontological grounding and the fundamental. Grounding is a relation between basic and less basic facts or stuff. For example: a series of notes grounds a melody, the physical grounds the mental (according to physicalists), and so on. Fundamental things and facts are ones which are absolutely basic, i.e. ungrounded.
Is the grounding relation itself fundamental?
First, suppose the answer is yes. Then consider some grounding relation, like that physical states ground my sadness. It is ex hypothesi a fundamental fact. So there are fundamental facts that involve my sadness, even though sadness is not a fundamental notion. That can't be.
Second, suppose the answer is no. Then there must be some further fact or stuff which grounds physical states grounding my sadness. Regress ensues.
Bennett's own strategy is to argue that the regress is stopped by the nature of the grounding relation. I have little to say about that. Instead, I want to thnk about some different replies.
A strategy which Bennett considers but passes over is to reject grounding. This would mean that everything which exists is metaphysically fundamental. As she puts it, the world would be ontologically flat. She writes, "I have no knockdown argument against the claim that the world is flat. But every fiber of my being cries out in protest." Crying fibers are like incredulous stares, but I think it would be a bad turn to say that everything is necessarily fundamental. If that were so, it would not be clear what the hell 'fundamental' was supposed to mean. It must at least have a possible contrast to be sensible.
A related strategy is to reject fundamentality. Bennett considers this only in a footnote and objects:
I truly think it is near impossible - certainly a bad idea - to do away with fundamentality talk altogether. Everyone, even those who reject grounding, should be able to claim that some things are more fundamental than others. (Good luck doing philosophy if you can't.) [fn 9]
There is something funny about this reply. She is right to say that we ought to be able to say that "some things are more fundamental than others." For example: individuals are more fundamental than trios, subatomic particles are more fundamental than atoms, and so on. However, this comparative notion 'more fundamental than' does not require that we can say of anything that it is utterly fundamental. That notion of absolute fundamentality is one I can do without. I accept only the comparative notions of grounding and more-fundamental-than. This dissolves Bennett's dilemma, because without the utterly fundamental there is no way to pose the worry about grounding.
One may object to my suggestion: It is possible to define the monadic 'fundamental' in terms of the relations. Let 'A is fundamental' mean 'There does not exist an X such that X grounds A' or 'There does not exist an X such that X is more fundamental than A'.**
The problem with the objection is that the existential quantifier in the definition must be unrestricted. On the usual accounts, like Sider's, unrestricted quantification is itself a fundamental notion. By refusing to accept the notion of fundamentality, I am also refusing to countenance unrestricted quantification. So my suggestion eliminates the resources required for the objection.
Although the fibres of metaphysicians' being might cry out, rejecting fundamentality does not make it impossible for me to do philosophy. Insofar as I care about grounding or more-fundamental-than in the first place, it is to consider particular cases. For example: What's the relationship between the mental and the physical? the musical and the acoustic? kinds and individuals? These questions can be answered in terms of the relation. It seems to me, in fact, that a term 'utterly fundamental' does not help me with such questions whatsoever.
* 'By Our Bootstraps', Philosophical Perspectives, 25(1), 2011.
** This objection is readily available. Bennett suggests this argument in her essay. Ted Sider made it explicitly to a similar suggestion in the Q&A at the UAlbnay Grad Student Conference last Spring.
[ 3 comments ] ( 8953 views ) | [ 0 trackbacks ] | permalink
In summarizing his philosophical approach to the photographer Steve Pyke, David Lewis said, "I am philosophically conservative: I think philosophy cannot credibly challenge either the positive convictions of common sense or the established theses of the natural sciences and mathematics."*
This seems like an odd thing to say, and I suspect that it summarizes why David Lewis' work has always made me a little uneasy. He conceives of philosophy as doing something separate and outside ordinary or scientific enquiry. Such an approach makes metaphysics a matter of window dressing our beliefs, without any possible influence on what the main doxastic inventory is.
Of course, this kind of conservatism is not unique to Lewis. I gave a job talk once and, during the question and answer period, an epistemologist in the audience objected to my argument on the grounds that it might lead us to disagree with scientists about some things and (he said) he would not want to tell scientists that they were wrong. The best reply to such an objection: But what about when scientists are wrong? It would be perverse not to point that out.**
Diametrically opposed to Lewis' approach is a kind of eliminativist naturalism according to which responsible philosophy is just science that happens to be done in a department called 'Philosophy'. Quine is the posterboy for such an approach. This kind of eliminativism is conservative in its own way, because it means that there is nothing that philosophy as such can add to science. There ends up being no philosophy as such at all.
A natural middle position is to say that philosophers typically address different questions than scientists do. Moreover, the methods appropriate to those questions are not identical to methods appropriate to the natural sciences. There is no sharp boundary between the scientific and the philosophical (Quine is right about that) but there is sufficient difference on either side of the boundary that the existence of philosophy departments is not just as arbitrary administrative fact about universities. Yet the porous nature of the boundary means that the enquiries can have things to say to one another.
Philosophy of science must accept science as for the most part OK. If it yielded total, utter scepticism, then it would stop being philosophy of science and becomes something else. (Mysticism, maybe.) But the qualifier 'for the most part' is important. Philosophers can call into question parts of science. Philosophers of science might even challenge and overturn some canonical examples of good science; what they can't do is overturn all of them.
A further aside: It's odd that Lewis invokes the "convictions of common sense", as if common sense consists primarily of a paddock of inviolate beliefs. As I have argued elsewhere it is better to think of common sense as a commitment to giving prima facie trust to certain methods and inferences. For example, seeing x is prima facie reason to believe that x exists. The same holds for the sciences: They are in the first place a matter of method rather than a matter of conviction.
* HT: Steinblog.
** I do not recall what answer I actually gave. I recall being shocked by the objection, and I might just have said "Really?!?"
[ 3 comments ] ( 5387 views ) | [ 0 trackbacks ] | permalink
Here is a despairing rant about the cost of textbooks and how my attempts to do something about it have been frustrated by bullshit:
I wrote forall x because existing logic textbooks were ridiculously expensive and were rapidly reissued in new editions so as to kill the market for cheaper, used copies. My book is written to be a physical book. It has practice problems, solutions in the back, reference tables, and content which is best accessed by thumbing back and forth between various sections. So I allowed students to buy it as a course packet, paying only the printing cost.
Because other people beyond just my students might want to use it, I made it available for download on the internet. Faculty at dozens of schools have used it as a course text, and lots of people have used it for independent study. To reiterate, electronic availability was just for distribution to the broader world.
When the copy shop across the street from campus closed, I let the campus bookstore sell the course packet. The first semester I did this, they charged a reasonable $10. The second semester, they jacked that up to $20 without letting me know. So I started using the copy center on campus instead. Last year, the copy center closed. The only place that will sell course packets off campus is several miles away, and students grouse if I ask them to schlepp over there.
So for this coming semester, I asked the campus bookstore to determine how much they would charge. The answer: $27.15. For 160 pages. That are covered by an open license. I was told, "That price is solely based on production costs."
My reply: "The course packet service you are using simply lies about production costs. It's the worst kind of bullshit."
So I am just going to point students to the PDF and encourage them to print their own copy. Many of them won't, which will be a mistake. They would do better in the course if they had the textbook in an accessible form. Working practice problems on scratch paper is easier with a workbook than in front of a computer screen. But they could pay 15 cents a page for printing and still save money over what the bookstore would have charged.
[ 2 comments ] ( 5322 views ) | [ 0 trackbacks ] | permalink
Regarding the lengths of things that I've written, the manuscript for the unstably named book on natural kinds is about 75K words. My dissertation was just 43K words.
[ add comment ] ( 4619 views ) | [ 0 trackbacks ] | permalink
<<First <Back | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | Next> Last>>