To me the stuff in the OP feels less like an erection of a nominalist metaphysics (or an attack on a realist one) than a clearing away to make room for a less constrained approach. (Your quick sketch feels very close to what I think as well) — csalisbury

That's possible. I've located a copy of Naturalism and Ontology but I haven't had the time to dig into it. There are conflicting strands in Sellars's thinking. Brandom and Rorty like to portray him as a heir of American pragmatism and a progenitor to them, but he also appears committed to viewing the ontology of the natural sciences as being foundational in some sort of way. Sellars's own students Paul Churchland and Alex Rosenberg appear to have inherited the scientistic foundationalist strand of his thinking. John Haugeland, however, credits Sellars's neo-Kantianism (and Heidegger) as a main inspiration for his own account (with his 'beholdenness theory of truth') of the comparatively greater generality of scientific ontologies with respect to more mundane ones, while disclaiming any foundational priority to the former. The gain in generality is paid for in loss of specificity.

I still don't really understand. Everything you're saying here reads like a defense of nominalism. — csalisbury

What @Janus says, in the post that you quoted from, rather reads to me like a form of pragmatism. Janus had insisted that nominalism only provides one half of the story. This is also how I view the Sellarsian thesis that kick-started this thread (as merely advancing one half of the story, that is). The advocacy of nominalism is prompted by a rejection of a correspondance theory that reifies the intentional content of the predicates of a language. However, neo-pragmatism, as I conceives of it (in a rather neo-Kantian sort of way) doesn't rest content with objecting to the reification of universals and rather seeks to account for their disclosure (of 'situated-' or 'pragmatized-universals', as we might call them) within a web of embodied practices (scientific or otherwise) that language can never be disembroiled from.

Yes, his complete works — Akanthinos

This volume leaves out "La structure du comportement", unfortunately, doesn't it?

On edit: However, I just found out a freely available (for non-commercial use, in Canada or wherever else intellectual rights expire after 50 years) edition of this specific text. (And also quite a few more)

No, as usual with these kinds of debates; they are simply talking past one another. Nothing to see here, folks... — Janus

I quite agree that they are talking past one another, but there is nevertheless something instructive to see. The way in which they are talking past one another rather closely resembles the way in which Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris are debating the question of the nature of free will. Interestingly enough, Harris's hard determinist stance on free will is very closely aligned with Strawson's own. In this case, Harris and Strawson are both hard-nosed advocates of reductive materialism and deny the possibility of free will on the basis of the strict identification of practical deliberative processes with the underlying physiology. They also are dismissive of compatibilism on the ground that the compatibilist conception of free will (such as Dennett's) isn't, on their view, consistent with the alleged folk-notion of contra-causal free will: the ability to chose what to do irrespective of whatever process might be going on in one's head. In this case also, Dennett argues that free will exists even though free will isn't what such laymen (or libertarian philosophers) might think it is.

It is rather strange that in the cases of both free will and consciousness, Strawson takes the stance that neither one of those thing can possibly have an essential nature any different than common sense indicate that it must have, and, on the basis of those common sense definitions argues that consciousness must exist but free will must be an illusion! The intuitions that are at play, though, are deeply crypto-Cartesian and rely on a sharp separation between what is conceived to belong to 'the mind' (and thereby be 'directly' accessible to introspection) and what belongs to the 'external' material world and can therefore only be inferred to exist on the basis of both observation and theory.

Dennett questions (inconsistently) this Cartesian splitting of the mental and physical worlds. He also questions the strength of the commitments that ordinary folks have to it, as evidenced by their mundane uses of mental vocabulary and rational explanations of behavior. Unfortunately, Dennett has a tendency to want to have his cake and eat it too. So, he often argues convincingly for a non-reductive view of the mental (and of agency) that is roughly Wittgensteinian is spirit, and which he articulates with the idea of a plurality of 'stances'. But his commitment to physicalism also leads him to contradicts some of his commitments to emergentism and to rather crudely identify mental acts with a quasi-mechanical process of narrative construction of an essentially illusory mental reality. This gives rise to the sort of equivocations that Strawson latches on to convict him of consciousness denialism.

And how do you split them? What is ‘propositional content’ without reason, or language? That’s the whole point. — Wayfarer

Agreed. To paraphrase Wilfrid Sellars, for one to characterize a mental state as a state of belief isn't an empirical characterization but rather a matter of locating it within the space of reasons: a space the structure of which is defined by someone's ability to offer reasons supporting what one believes and to appreciate rational challenges to it. A brain scan may display something that counts as the neural correlate of a definite 'state of mind' (such as a belief, perceptual content, intention or motivation) only in the context where the empirical manifestation of this physiological correlate might inform us about a whole network of rational behavioral dispositions of an agent. The structure of this network is irreducible to the empirical-causal structure of the material realization of its nodes ('brain states') for the same reason why rational justifications don't reduce to physical laws. The latter aren't normative in the same way in which the former are, and any attempted reduction or identification would be tantamount to committing the naturalistic fallacy.

Again, the usual epistemic quandry is whether physics is realist or idealist, a fact of the world or an artifact of the mind? But it is this third thing, this in-between thing, of being an example of a pragmatic modelling relation. And that is how its truth claims - especially versus those of commonsense phenomenology - need to be judged. — apokrisis

That was an awesome post.

It quite resonates with a few pages that I was reading, earlier today, from Michel Bitbol's book De L'intérieur du monde (From within the world). This was the section titled L’autonomie du schème par rapport au langage (The autonomy of the scheme with respect to language) in the first chapter titled La relation cognitive, en l’absence d’« extériorité » (The cognitive relation in the absence of "exteriority"). Bitbol is of course a neo-pragmatist who also owes much to Pierce. In this section, he also credits Dewey, James, Piaget, Giulio Preti (who I didn't know), Wittgenstein, Hintikka and Pickering.

You can also say that the cause of the pigeon's behavior was its prior training (contrasting it with untrained pigeons). Or the fact that it was awake and hungry (as opposed to asleep or sated). Or the fact that it was there and not elsewhere. And we've only considered the pigeon as an agent or an organism; we could go further into the various mechanical or physiological causes, and so on. There seem to be so many different causes of the same event operating at the same time, one ought to wonder how it is that they don't clash with one another! But of course they don't. — SophistiCat

Yes, those also all are very good example of contrastive explanations of the effect (or 'event') to be explained. What is especially enlightening, and instructive, though, regarding the color example, is that in this particular case there is a breakdown of supervenience of the domain relative to which the cause operates (and its mention is explanatory) over the material specification of the explained 'event'. This isn't something that I had stressed in the message you replied to.

In all of your examples supervenience obtains. If the cause had been different, counterfactually, then the material basis for the process whereby the cause gives rise to the effect would also have been different. For instance, if the pigeon hadn't been awake then its eyelids would have been closed and hence it would not have visually registered the presence of the stimulus... etc.

On the other hand, in the example where the pigeon had been trained to peck at red objects and thereafter pecks at a crimson object, what makes it a cause (and a good explanation) of the pecking behavior that the object was red, while the fact that the object was specifically crimson is *not* a cause (and neither is it a relevant explanation of the pecking behavior) is the fact that the antecedent 'event' (contrastively defined as being subsumed under the general class "materially constituted the presentation of a red stimulus") belongs, indeed, to a general class that that explains not only the behavior of this pigeon at that time but, potentially, its pecking behavior at a later time, or the behavior of other pigeons that would have been (relevantly) similarly trained. But this fact of explanatory class membership isn't something that supervenes narrowly on the present and actual process that exemplifies it.

No water vapour is the most potent greenhouse chemical and well as methane. — charleton

Methane is indeed a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 is, on a per-molecule basis, but it also is over 200 times less concentrated (1800 parts per billion compared to over 400 parts per million for CO2). As a result, the radiative forcing from the anthropogenic increased in methane concentration is about one third that of the increased CO2 concentration. Obviously, it's part of the problem too, but methane also is less long lived in the atmosphere.

As for water vapor, its contribution to the greenhouse effect is indeed larger than that of non-condensable greenhouse gases such as CO2 and methane. However, its average concentration in the troposphere is being controlled by temperature rather than the other way around. Average water vapor concentration in the troposphere thus functions as a feedback that increases the enhanced greenhouse effect consequent on an increase in the concentration of non-condensable greenhouse gases. It's because of water vapor that the equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) to a doubling of CO2 (or equivalent forcing) is something around 3K/(W/m^2) rather than something around 1K/(W/m^2).

(ECS could actually be anywhere between 2K/(W/m^2) and 4.5K(W/m^2) but the main source of the uncertainty isn't the water vapor feedback, which is very well understood, but rather the cloud feedback.)

Interesting but speculative. — charleton

Hardly. It has been a basic principle spectroscopy almost since its inception although the precise quantum mechanical explanation followed the observation.

Being patronising will not help your (ahem!) "argument" — charleton

I replied over there.

Being patronising will not help your (ahem!) "argument" — charleton

Your own argument is that CO2 is a trace gas and that, as such, it can't contribute much to the enhanced greenhouse effect. It is true that CO2 is a minor component of the atmosphere, which is mainly composed of oxygen and nitrogen. However, both oxygen and nitrogen are gases that are fully transparent to infrared radiation, and so their relatively much higher concentration is quite irrelevant to the CO2 contribution to the greenhouse effect. The CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is high enough that, at sea level pressure and dry conditions, almost all of the upwelling infrared radiation has already been scattered by CO2 molecules on the first ten meters on their way up.

Interestingly enough, skeptics have harped on this fact to argue that the atmosphere already has achieved CO2 saturation and hence increases in CO2 levels can't have any additional effect. This premise runs exactly opposite to your own. What those skeptics neglect, however, is that while the atmosphere is radiatively opaque to infrared radiation in most of the troposphere, in the higher reaches of the atmosphere it is much thinner and there is a level where it is tenuous enough for most of the infrared radiation to escape to space. This highest level of opacity (which varies as a function of wavelength) rises when the concentration of CO2 increases, and, owing to the convective lapse rate, comes to have a lower temperature and hence a lower power of emission. This is the reason why increasing the concentration of atmospheric CO2 reduces the ability of the atmosphere to radiate back to space the power received from the Sun.

Another interesting and relevant fact is that collisions between CO2 molecules and other molecules (such as oxygen and nitrogen) produce what is called pressure broadening of the CO2 spectral lines. It makes CO2 molecules more efficient in scattering infrared radiation. So, the fact that there is such a high concentration of nitrogen and oxygen, compared with CO2, in the atmosphere, actually makes the CO2 molecules more efficient rather than less as a greenhouse gas, which also runs exactly counter to your argument that since CO2 is such a minor relative constituent of the total atmosphere it can't be relevant.

Modern measurements whilst they represent modern concentrations are not directly comparable with historical data. — charleton

They are accurate enough. I am going to abide by @unenlightened's request, though. So, if you want to know why CO2 is important, you can post this again in this thread. I'll then reply over-there.

These days there is only a trace amount of Co2, and the carrying capacity of 0.041% is not significantly greater than 0.035% as it was 100 years ago. — charleton

Your numbers are off. When the Keeling Curve begins, in 1957, the atmospheric CO2 concentration was about 315ppm and now it is 410ppm. That's a 30% increase in just 61 years. It's likely larger now than it has been over the last several million years, and it's still rising about 1% more every two years.

Taylor and Macintyre are both, after all, Catholics at the end of the day (I've got both their books in my To Read pile, but Taylor's book is a real door-stop). — Wayfarer

I am not a Catholic either, not even a Christian (and not even a theist, for that matter, although I am certainly not a militant atheist). I've read large chunks of Taylor's Sources of the Self (plus a couple papers on the philosophy of language), and it had seemed to me that his own religion is very much bracketed out from his philosophical analysis. I plan to read MacIntyre's After Virtue, eventually, because I want to find out in what way he combines narrativism and Aristotelian virtue ethics. I don't expect either that his being a Catholic should inflect his project in any objectionable direction.

See The Anti-Christian Alt-Right in the ecumenical religious studies journal, First Things. — Wayfarer

I quite enjoyed the piece. It's enlightening and thought provoking. The sort of neither relativist nor absolutist conception of pluralistic 'nations' as repositories of values and traditions that it recommends got me to think of Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre. They haven't been mentioned in this thread as serious 'conservative' intellectuals, have they?

David Deutsch the cult leader, and the Quantum Computer the cargo. — Wayfarer

When I was a physics student, in the mid 90s, I had been quite seduced by Deutsch's arguments in favor the MWI interpretation of QM. That was before he was a popular figure. I also attended a seminar on quantum algorithmic with Gilles Brassard. Later, I was much impressed with his book The Fabric of Reality. And then I discovered philosophy.

Here is the Rovelli interview that I was thinking of.
While searching for it I also happened on this.

A relevant review from Peter Woit. — Wayfarer

Interesting review. Voit ends up with acknowledging the relevance of Zurek's work on decoherence for the measurement problem in QM. Coincidentally, I had just been reading today the section discussing decoherence theories in Manuel Bächtold's voluminous dissertation Le possible, l’actuel et l’événement en mécanique quantique, une approche pragmatiste (which he wrote under the supervision of Michel Bitbol). And I had been re-reading yesterday what Bitbol himself had to say about decoherence theories in a couple of his papers on the interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Browsing the comment section I saw one commentator alluding to Rovelli's relational interpretation and declaring himself unsatisfied with it because it is "obviously instrumentalist and can’t answer our burning questions about how nature actually does that". Voit answers thus:

"I’d rather do almost anything with my time than try and moderate a discussion of what is “real” and what isn’t.

Any further discussion of ontology will be ruthlessly suppressed."

In a recent interview Rovelli complained that this sort of agressive and dogmatic anti-philosophical stance being adopted by most of his colleagues might be in part responsible for the stagnation of the field.

Post-Nietzscheans would argue that autopeiotic processes of life are not reducible to physics, at least not without a re-envisioning of physics in a direction suggested by Prigogine and Stengers. — Joshs

Agreed. Nine years ago I wrote a paper (unpublished) on the topic of autonomy in which I distinguished four grades of autonomy, whereby each one realizes an irreducible leap from the previous one. The lowest grade of (proto-)autonomy is realized by spontaneously occurring dissipative structures (thanks to suitably established external boundary conditions). The second grade is realized by genuinely self-maintening autopoietic life-forms. The third one consist in self-moving and perceiving animals. And the last one consists in rational animals that can reflect on, and revise, their own autonomous laws of conduct. The last three grades, of course, parallel Aristotle tripartite division of the psuche.

Yes. And to address the causal exclusion/overdetermination argument head-on, causation is contextual; there isn't some objective matter of fact about what causes what. Mental causation is in no way in competition with e.g. neurophysical causation because in each case causation is situated within an independent, self-contained explanatory scheme. Only other factors within the same explanatory context are relevant to it. — SophistiCat

Yes, I'm quite happy that you brought up the issue of the contextual character of causation. I was thinking about it while writing my post but decided not to delve into it in order not to overburden an already lengthy post.

There has been a recent upsurge of literature on the topic of contrastivism. Some papers focus on the contrastive character of causation while others focus on the contrastive character of explanation. From a neo-pragmatist or neo-Kantian perspective, though, those are two different ways to approach the same issue. There isn't any substantive content to the claim that the occurrence of event A caused (and thereby explains) the occurrence of event B that doesn't implicitly or explicitly relies on the specifications of the contrastive classes of events that would count as non-occurrences of A or B. Here is one nice example: Suppose a pigeon has been trained to peck on red objects and, thereafter, the pigeon is presented with a crimson object and pecks at it. The cause of the pecking behavior, one might say, is the 'event' that consist in the presentation of the specific crimson object. But the pigeon would still have pecked at the object if it had been scarlet, say. So, the antecedent event only can be said to be causative and explanatory of the effect when individuated with reference to the contrastive class 'non-red' rather than 'non-crimson'. And the same can be said of the contrastive character of the effect.

Martijn Blaauw edited a volume on that theme: Contrastivism in Philosophy, Routledge Strudies in Contemporary Philosophy (2013). Chaper 1 (Causal Contextualism, by Christopher Hitchcock); chapter 2 (Contrastive Explanation, by Jonathan Shaffer); and chapter 3 (Free Contrastivism, by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong) are interesting and instructive although the last one, which deals with the application of this topic to the issue of the compatibility of free will and determinism, seems flawed to me. (It is instructively flawed, though, since the topic indeed is quite relevant to the problem).

What about the placebo effect, then? Those are examples of 'top-down causation' which would mitigate against a physicalist explanation, would they not? — Wayfarer

Mental causation is such a widespread phenomenon that one hardly needs to appeal to such things as the placebo effect to exemplify it. I decide to raise my hand and, lo and behold, my hand rises. The decision might have been the result of a deliberative process (and hence of 'mental events') while the outcome is a material process. There would appear to be a complete explanation couched in terms of low-level material/physiological processes that explains in causal terms why it is that my hand rose there and then. Those two explanatory levels pertain to two different domains (i.e. the intentional level of description of behavior, and the physiological level of description of biological processes) that still can be construed to relate to one another by an asymmetrical supervenience relation. You might (counterfactually) have decided to raise your hand earlier, or later, or not at all, but, in such cases, some of the antecedent circumstances of the physical motion of your hand necessarily would (counterfactually) have been different. We can count 'brain states' as part of those antecedent circumstances. Those are (low-level) neurophysiological states which instantiate, or realize, the (high-level) 'reasons' (roughly construed as beliefs and desires) why you would have decided to raise your hand there and then. (I am not actually endorsing this internalist representationalist view of mental content but it is good enough for the sake of simplicity and doesn't prejudge the present argument.)

So, the mere exemplification of mental causation, as an instance of (apparent) downward-causation, in the real world isn't threatening to the supervenience story. Someone who endorses Kim's causal exclusion argument might still acknowledge that the downward-causal story in terms of mental-causation constitutes a useful coarse-grained explanation of the observed event. In spite of its usefulness, Kim would argue that such an explanation is causally redundant because the genuine cause of the 'event' that occurred, as described fine-grainedly in terms of the low-level physiological or physical description, is operative independently of the high-level characterization of the process.

It's true that if we define the outcome (such as someone's arm raising) fine-grainedly in terms of underlying physiological or physico-chemical processes then the outcome is fully determined to occur in a causal sense. From this fact, Kim derives his causal-exclusion conclusion. He argues, on the basis of supervenience, that the outcome could not have been different unless the low-level causal antecedent had been different. And hence, the low-level explanation is deemed to be complete. And hence, the high level explanation, albeit useful for making coarse-grained predictions in the absence of specific knowledge of the underlying low-level properties, is causally redundant. We may thus conclude that 'the mental' (that is, the high-level intentional/psychological functional properties that supervene of the domain of physical states) is epiphenomenal.

The conclusion is unwarranted and very few critics of Kim manage to uproot the fundamental ground of his confusion, and hence the core flaw in his argumentation, although Peter Menzies and Christian List may have come closest in my opinion.

The main flaw in Kim's conception, I think, is that he tends to tacitly and uncritically rely on a metaphysical-realist stance towards low-level material constituents and, on the other hand, on an empiricist or nominalistic stance towards high-level composite entities that are materially constituted by those low-level constituents. While the individuation criteria by means of which we single out (coarse-grainedly) the high-level entities and define their (high-level) powers and properties are somehow defined pragmatically, or theoretically, the low level constituents (such a atoms and molecules, or whatever) are assumed to be causally efficient irrespective of our categorizations of them.

This is a picture that is very strongly indebted to the modern conception of classical mechanics: of objectively real particles and the objectively real forces being exerted between them (or the force fields mediating those forces). 'Objectively real' here is meant to signify that something exists independently of contextual factors or high-level relational characterrizations. The fundamental ground for all genuine causation in the material world consists in the intrinsic properties of corpuscules, and their intrinsic powers to affects the properties of other particles. Everything else that is being defined in terms of aggregates or emergent relational properties is supervenient on this fundamental 'objective' description.

How is Kim's argument affected if we relax those metaphysical assumptions and grant the same ontological status to relational properties that we accord to (putative) intrinsic properties of elementary material constituents? It collapses entirely, on my view. And the reason for that is very simple. If we acknowledge the idea that what makes something what it is isn't exhausted by what it is that this thing is materially constituted of but also is defined by its functional relations to other things, and also by the pragmatic context relative to which this thing is being single out as being representative of a definite category, of instantiating some definite property, then the distinction between the low-level basis of supervenience and the higher-level supervenient domain is abolished. Complete knowledge of the intrinsic properties of the material constituents, and of they elementary mutual interactions, would still constitute an incomplete knowledge of the world since it is fully abstracting away from what it is that those material constituents are constituents of.

Hence, for instance, the low-level explanation for the putative 'event' that was the occurrence of an upward movement of a hand doesn't constitute any kind of a rival causal explanation of the intentionally described event of someone's raising her hand. If what makes this action the action that it is precisely is a context of prior deliberation (for instance) then such actions must be distinguished from upward motions of a hand that might be the result of a stroke, or a strong gust of wind, or whatever. It is thus quite irrelevant that a strict supervenience relation still holds between the domain of intentional behavior and the material-physical domain. The low level explanation can't compete with the high-level one because it abstracts away from the very fact that the low-level outcome (the hand motion) happens to be an instantiation of the phenomenon that we sought to explain, and hence it doesn't even begin to explain why it is that a voluntary action intelligibly occurred.

@Wayfarer By the way, Babatte Babich mentions in her preface to Heelan's book the hard time that she had had bringing to fruition an event with Peter Hacker (and Max Bennett, Dan Dennett, John Searle, and Daniel Robinson who served as a moderator). This event eventually took place and gave rise to a book. It had afforded an opportunity for Searle and Dennett to respond to the excoriating critique of their views that Bennett and Hacker had produced in two appendixes to their book The Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, which is a broadly Wittgensteinian critique of mainstream cognitive science and (Anglo-American) philosophy of mind. I myself am mostly on Hacker's side, of course, even though I believe his criticism of Dennett isn't always entirely fair.

@Wayfarer

Yes, we might say that eliminativists (and reductionists) about the mental, about consciousness, or about subjective experience, are "deniers" somewhat in the sense Strawson intends. But he clearly lumps them up with Wittgensteinian 'philosophical behaviorists', whose position he contrasts with his own idea that subjective experiences (and what those experiences are 'directly' experiences of) are material processes going on literally in the brain. 'Philosophical behaviorists' such as Wittgenstein, Ryle and (in certain respects) Dennett, criticize the crypto-Cartesian conception of 'qualia' conceived as substance-like objects of direct acquaintance that stand in between a cognitive subject and the world that she perceives or thinks about. It doesn't make much difference to this view whether the 'sense data' are conceived to be realized in material stuff (res extensa) or mental stuff (res cogitans). According to Wittgensteinians, as well as other 'relationalists' such as J.J. Gibson, Alan Costall, Patrick Heelan and Michel Bitbol (to name a few) consciousness is ineliminably relational and can't intelligibly be explained by reference to instrinsic properties of the brain or 'mind'.

Nagel's criticism of Dennett, which you quote, is revealing and on target. But this is a feature of Dennett's thinking where he badly fails to follow though on the consequences of his own Wittgenstainianism, and, in the interest of being a good bona fide physicalist, he aligns himself much too closely with Strawson's internalist views on mental content!

Massimo Pigliucci has discussed both on his blog) — StreetlightX

I had recommended those four emergence-themed blog posts when I had had my extended debate regarding reduction and emergence on this forum last year. Worthy of mention is George Ellis's three enlightening interventions in the comment section where he responds to Sean Carroll's objection to Pigliucci's strong emergentism. Ellis also supplies an extended quote from R. B. Laughlin. This is all very relevant to what we've been discussing here. (Here, here and here)

@Wayfarer

Thanks for linking to this. It was instructive but almost painful to read (as is, elsewhere, Strawson's uninspired defense of hard-determinism in the philosophy of free will and determinism, and his related 'debunking' of the very idea of moral responsibility). While I've come to believe Dennett to be subtly misguided in about half of the things that he says, and insightful about the other half, Strawson seems to be enmired through and though in a bottomless pit of philosophical confusion. (This is all the more regrettable since his father, Sir Peter Strawson, was one of the most profound and influential thinker in the whole history of analytic philosophy).

While I don't agree with some of the allegedly "denialist" stances on consciousness that Strawson deplores, his own characterization of the broadly Wittgensteinian strand of though that he is opposes (i.e. the so called 'philosophical behaviorism', also propounded by Gilbert Ryle, and to some degree by Dennett who was Ryle's student) boils down to an almost farcical misrepresentation of it. The idea that whoever denies the claim that being in pain must amounts to nothing else but being 'directly' acquainted with an essentially private 'pain qualia' thereby also is denying that anyone ever is in pain, of feels pain, is ridiculous.

Strawson's broad brush narration of the history of the evolution of conceptions of subjective experience in the history of psychology also is deeply flawed. As a corrective to it, I would recommend Alan Costall's From Darwin to Watson (and Cognitivism) and Back Again: The Principle of Animal-Environment Mutuality (2004), which is one of the most enlightening pieces that I have read over the last year on any topic.

Costall, just like Dennett and Strawson attempt to do, in their different ways, aims at disclosing the crypto-Cartesian assumptions that underpin much of contemporary cognitive science and philosophy of mind. Dennett and Strawson both fail, in my view, with Strawson's attempt being the most unsuccessful. Costall himself goes much further in targeting the unwarranted Cartesian assumptions that condition the thinking of philosophers and psychologists who fancy themselves to be materialist anti-Cartesians but who just repeat the same (or worse) fundamental mistakes in fancier 'materialist' ways. (One of those mistakes is the uncritical reliance on representationalism in the philosophy of perception and of thought content. This is a mistake that Dennett partially overcomes.)

(I wanted to make another specific point but it currently escapes my mind, so I'll edit this space later on)

[Apologies. This is a bit roundabout as an actual response, but I started so I finished...] — apokrisis

No apologies needed. As usual, your posts need being given quite a bit of thought before one can reply to them meaningfully. Have you read the paper by Noah Moss Brender that StreetlightX linked to recently (Sense-Making and Symmetry-Breaking, Merleau-Ponty, Cognitive Science, and Dynamic System Theory)? I just finished reading it today.

That is a roundabout way of getting at the fundamentality of quantum mechanics. QM is a highly general view that includes "everything" by removing every symmetry-breaking and just talking nakedly about the statistics of fluctuations or individuations. It forms a ground zero at the point where indeterminism itself is constrained to produce determinism. — apokrisis

I must give more thought to that too but it rings similar to Bitbol's thesis in his paper Quantum Mechanics as a Generalized Theory of Probabilities.

I'll comment more substantively at a later time.

Columnar basalt — T Clark

Either that or Cretaceous bees were mighty big buggers.

My favorite color is orange. If I were a dictator everyone would wear Donald Trump colored shirts. — Purple Pond

Not everything that can be counted ______, and not everything that counts can be ______.

Once upon a time people thought Mr Phil O'Sophy was the coolest name.Then they heard of Purple Pond. The end. — Purple Pond

I like your narrative style. It reminds me of this.

Seems like either I misunderstood you or I misunderstand her. Or both. — T Clark

What you quoted Crowther to be saying and what @StreetlightX had said seem to be broadly compatible ideas applied to different contexts.

StreetlightX stressed that many macroscopic objects and phenomena can be understood and explained while abstracting away from the laws of quantum mechanics that govern interactions between the micro-constituents of those objects.

Likewise, Crowther provides an examples of relative independence between pairs of domains that are both being governed by quantum mechanics. In the case of superconductivity the electrons behave collectively in a rigid fashion in a way that is explained by the exchanges of 'sound particles' (phonons) that can only exist in the context of low energy (below some definite threshold). When that occurs, the random interactions that electrons normally have with each other and with the lattice cancel out and hence cease to have any effect on the collective behavior of the electrons. One striking fact, though, is that the high-level emergent laws that govern equally emergent objects (the phonons), although independent of many features of their material 'constituents' (the electrons) still are governed by the general principles of quantum mechanics.

In the same vein, in their paper The Theory of Everything, R. B. Laughlin and David Pines commented that:

"The Josephson quantum is exact because of the principle of continuous symmetry breaking. The quantum Hall effect is exact because of localization (17). Neither of these things can be deduced from microscopics, and both are transcendent, in that they would continue to be true and to lead to exact results even if the Theory of Everything were changed."

The "Theory of Everything" here is conceived as the ultimate high-energy (and hence the ultimate micro-physical) unification theory of matter and gravity, assuming that there might be one.

First of all, I want to make sure the Karen Crowther you're referencing is not the outrigger canoe racer from Maui. Is that correct?

I'm looking on the web for articles. Any specific references would be helpful. — T Clark

She is the one. Her only paper that I read is Decoupling Emergence and Reduction in Physics, but it has been extremely enlightening. I've mentioned her a few times in this older thread where I had been discussing Weinberg's reductionism.

By the way, @StreetlightX also had referenced the excellent paper The Theory of Everything by R. B. Laughlin and David Pines. This paper pursued some of Anderson's earlier insights and developed a view a emergence that struck me as having many commonalities with Crowther's own. So, I searched the content of Crowther's new book -- Effective Spacetime: Understanding Emergence in Effective Field Theory and Quantum Gravity, Springer Publishing (2016) -- and found out that she indeed refers several times to Laughlin and Pines. (This book has a whole chapter devoted to discussing the issue of the emergence of classical spacetime in the context of Quantum Loop Theory, which is a theory of quantum gravity developed by Ashtekar, Smolin and Rovelli as an alternative to sting theory.)

Finished the article. Its conclusion is not anti-reductionist. — frank

I just read it too. Anderson doesn't define very clearly what he takes reductionism to amount to, or what analysis is. His examples illuminate what he seemingly thinks (without making it explicit), and his main goal seems to be to refute the unwarranted inference from reduction (defined as the possibility of successful analysis) to constructionism (defined as the ability to come up with the high-level laws deductively on the basis of the low level ones). He is really setting the stage for what have been more recently advanced as anti-reductionist and strong emergentist arguments by some of his colleagues.

A weird moment occurs when Anderson sets up two columns listing sciences that have increasingly complex objects, with each one having the objects from the previous science as its immediate constituents, and he asserts that the objects of science X obey the law of science Y (where science Y is dealing with the constituents of the objects of science X). This is supposed to cash out the idea of reduction qua analysis, I think. But then, immediately after that, he claims that each new stage of complexity brings up entirely new laws. And he proceeds to argue for this claim over the rest of the paper (quite successfully). So, if there are emergent laws, that are new to X, how do those laws relate to the laws of Y? Anderson doesn't say.

More recent philosophers of emergence, such a Karen Crowther, and physicists like George Ellis, argue that the higher level laws (of science X) can be strongly emergent from the lower level laws (of science Y) because, as a result of symmetry breaking, the very constituents of the objects of X don't exist at all under the conditions (such as higher energy conditions) where the objects of Y are typically (and exclusively) manifested. Furthermore, the emergent laws of X are complete in the sense that they fully govern the objects of X in a manner that is, to a large degree, insensitive to the laws that govern the objects of X and to the properties of those 'constituent' objects.

I don't think it's incumbent upon the critic to delineate "good reasons" people might be captivated by Peterson's message (and not just because I don't think there are really any "good reasons"). I can understand (and I'm sure the author understands), that many young people, particularly men, may feel lost and displaced in modern capitalism, within a highly volatile job market, where, mostly white men, feel they are losing cultural power to minorities and women. Of course that's not a "good reason" to become a Peterson acolyte. — Maw

No, of course not. It's not a good reason all things considered. All things considered, Peterson's calls for action only are worthy of being ignored. But I was rather thinking about something like the good reasons why Trump voters were discontent with a political establishment that had betrayed them. Some people focus on all the reasons why voting for Trump was a bad idea (which it was) and don't pause to reflect about the sources of the vacuum that he opportunistically filled. And so is it with Peterson's brand of populism.

If it's not incumbent on Peterson's critics to point out also how mainstream left-wing ideologies and political institutions generate discontentment, them some of the best critics (such as Slavoj Žižek and Gyrus) are going beyond the call of duty. A side benefit from such "even handed" critiques is that they're more philosophical. They seek to dislodge the flawed assumptions that not only animate Peterson's thinking, but that tend to be ignored because his main critics share those assumptions. Another side benefits of those critiques is that it tends to diminish rather than increase the polarized intellectual and political climate. This is a polarization that Peterson himself promotes and strives on.

How is it a hit-piece? — Maw

Maybe because of its lopsidedness? I think the piece is informative in identifying most of the unsavory strands in Peterson's thinking and many of his unsavory and oft forgotten recent historical progenitors. Unlike the equally harsh criticisms by Žižek and Gyrus, though, it fails to enlighten the reader about some of the good reasons why many people get attracted to Peterson, and hence fails to promote self-critical reflection for liberals and progressives.

Pankaj Mishra wrote a unique article in the New York Review of Book yesterday, — Maw

Bugger... Whenever I'm trying to look away from the Peterson circus and keep to more serious readings, one of those crop up.

It doesn't seem as though this would be controversial, so how can any smart, competent physicist claim that physics can be reduced to particles spinning around in isolation from the rest of the world? — T Clark

You can read the third chapter -- Two Cheers for Reductionism -- in Steven Weinberg's book Dreams of a Final Theory, for an instance of such an argument. Such reductionist authors don't reject the idea that the particles are interacting with the rest of the world, where the rest of the world is being characterized as just more particles (and fields), of course. They are saying that whatever complex phenomena "emerge" from such elementary interactions are "nothing over and above" the elementary particles that they are being constituted of, and the interactions between them. Weinberg attempts to cash out such ideas of ontological and explanatory reducibility in terms of "convergence of arrows of explanation" to a lower level of fundamental physics while relying entirely on a strikingly impoverished notion of what an explanation is.

(Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway) — StreetlightX

I only read half of Meeting the Universe Halfway, a few years ago, not because it's not good -- it's excellent -- but because of time constraints. I'll come back to it eventually.

It's worth noting that although the smallness of Planck's constant entails that, for instances, for mesoscale sized bodies very much larger than electrons, Heisenberg's inequality relation relating the products of the uncertainties (or indeterminations) of the positions and momenta of such bodies to Planck's constant have little practical signifiance, measurements of observables that relate to individual photons or electrons *do* have immediate practical significance for the behaviors of the macroscopic measurement apparatuses that are set up for measuring them. The main reason for that is that the mutuality relations that hold between conjugate variables (complementary observables such as position and momentum) do not just affect how microphysical entities behave but limit what sorts of measurement apparatuses can be jointly implemented to probe the very same phenomena that they are measuring without destroying their very conditions of existence. So, just because microphysical phenomena can be effectively amplified by macroscopic apparatuses that interact with them, the finiteness of Planck's constant (i.e. the fact that it's larger than zero) has direct consequences for the structure of the phenomena that we can observe at the macroscopic scale, such as interference patterns. This constraint also undercuts the idea that the microscopic events that are being probed have their determinations independently from the instrumental contexts in which they are being measured, or so have Bohr and Heisenberg argued.

Serious. As I said, QM is just the way things are. I don't feel any ontological agita. Why would you expect things to behave the same at atomic scale as it does at human scale. I hate it when people, even physicists, get all excited and talk about "quantum weirdness" as if they're Neil DeGrasse Tyson, that son of a bitch. This stuff makes me rethink how the universe works. — T Clark

Until just a few years ago I tended to share this judgement about the (lack of significant) philosophical significance of quantum mechanics. There is rather more to it than just a description of the way microphysical objects happen to behave, though. Maybe Bitbol's preface to Heelan's book would lead you to change your judgement about this topic. It is very short and entirely devoid of weirdness or woo. It's been published separately from the book, in case you would have some trouble locating it. (Search for 'Heelan' on this page).

A while ago, I wrote this, on the topic of 'reductionism': — StreetlightX

Very nice OP, and thanks for the links to the texts by P. W. Anderson; by Noah Moss Brender; and by R. B. Laughlin and David Pines. I now know what I'm going to be reading tomorrow.

Regarding the issue of context, here is a relevant quote from Patrick Aidan Heelan's own preface* to his book The Observable: Heisenberg's Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics, which I was reading earlier tonight:

"I had found that phenomenology and hermeneutics were helpful in making sense of the distinction between classical physics and post-classical physics of relativity and quantum mechanics because these new philosophies had the capacity to explore the latent significance and function of context in both scientific traditions; ‘context’ was arguably the central innovative component of these physical theories that had revolutionized 20th century physics.

Specifically, the notion of context can be thought of as having two parts: a part internal to human consciousness, comprising the functions of meaning-making, meaning-using, and meaning-testing; and a part external to human consciousness, comprising the physical processes associated in human life with meaning-making, meaning-using, and meaning-testing. The internal part draws on the hermeneutic resources of intentionality, which is a technical term for the making, using, and testing of meanings. These hermeneutic resources include not only the habitual practices of categorizing what is represented in the sensory flux, but also habits of relating groups of categories to one another by higher-order explanatory laws (or theories). The external part of context acknowledges the physical aspects of the embodied practices of meaning-making, using, and testing, such as the organized conditions of the space and time of the laboratory bench and engagement with the ‘world’ through acts of measurement performed by a qualified embodied observer who, in his/her community of practice, has become skilled in ‘interpreting’ the measured scientific phenomenon as a datum, present as described within the context of the relevant categories and theories." (All italics in the original)

* There also is a preface by Michel Bitbol and another one by Babette Babich who edited to book after Heelan's passing. Bitbol's preface is outstanding.

It's happened already! The long anticipated Peterson-Žižek debate occurred.

@csalisbury Fair enough. For the time being, I am happily agnostic (because ignorant) regarding the notion of grace. So, modulo that, we indeed may be on the same page.