... Does that make freewill now a quasi-classical phenomenon? Well no. As I argued earlier, freewill is a much higher level socially constructed deal. It is about the construction of a "thinking self" that negotiates between a set of established cultural norms around behaviour, and some set of needs and feelings that represent "our selves" as a biological and psychological individual within that wider framework. — apokrisis

Yes, I quite agree; and so do I with most of the rest of your excellent post, with only minor reservations...

Which is also why a quantum interpretation that focuses on the observer rather than the observables, the complex epistemic relation rather than the simple ontic facts or events, would be the way forward.

Indeed!

Quantum Mechanics Unscrambled.
Just read it. Overly complicated - one suspects that at some points he is just showing off that he's technically proficient with QM formalism and complex analysis - and it is almost entirely devoid of any metaphysics, so I wouldn't bother wasting your time, unless you are interested in the technical idea that QM theory can be reshaped as a new kind of probability theory. At a couple of points he touches on the idea that what these "novel" approaches are proposing is just some kind of instrumentalism/operationalism, but he does nothing to actually argue that they should not be taken in precisely that kind of way. — jkg20

(We are veering a bit off-topic...)

I've now read about two thirds of it and let me demur. It seems to be an excellent paper. Rather than it being devoid of metaphysics I would rather say that it targets with great accuracy the metaphysical prejudices that sustain some of the most popular interpretations of QM. From what I see, he also is rather careful to distinguish his own pragmatist account from the cruder forms of positivism that it now has become fashionable to ascribe to Bohr and to Heisenberg. It is not entirely unfair to charge Bohr himself with operationalism but Delhôtel (just like Bitbol before him) also is careful to disclaim the idea of reducing quantum phenomena to classical 'observables'. He rather deflates the metaphysical implication of the quantum formalism through displaying how the generality and empirical adequacy of this formalism derives (and, indeed, can be mathematically derived) from principles that apply to classes of experimental contexts that obey some very general pragmatic requirements (such as the necessity to account for phenomena that are partially constituted and/or produced by the very circumstances of their observation) and simple norms of logical consistency.

I am getting to the point where Delhôtel seemingly is going to distinguish his approach from Bitbol's own approach (developed in Quantum Mechanics as Generalised Theory of Probabilities). This is quite interesting. I'll comment later.

I'm over my head here. But I've seen MWI described as superdeterministic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism
The future of all measurements is already known it's just that you happen to be in the one where the train of thought has completed. — JupiterJess

My argument, which was relying on the partial acceptance of the compatibilist notion of free will, addresses the sort of challenge posed by superdeterminism. What it is that evolves superdeterministically, on such a conception of the 'multiverse', never is, as you note, the trajectory of a conscious observer but rather the state vector which represents the 'state' of the whole multiverse. The effect from the manifold 'spitting' of observers over time ought not to be anymore troublesome to a compatibilist conception of free will than is the fact that, within any determinate history of a single observer, there are unlikely events that occasionally occur as the outcome of the uncontrolled amplification of quantum fluctuations. This is not sufficient to remove the agent's control where it matters, except in very restricted and artificial situations, since not all features of the emergent classical domain are subject to such uncontrollable fluctuations.

Presumably the worlds where your train of thought gets completed are the ones that are relatively normal with the illusion of the higher level regularities (breathable atmosphere ect). In that sense notions of identity and control are eliminable or instrumental.
I understand some say that it is not true and the state of things are that there are more (normal) worlds which is why when you think: "I raise my arm" the arm does go up rather than say your leg because there are more of the former than the latter. But I'm not sure why that is (more worlds of a certain kind than others).

To be honest, I am not sure either in what way, exactly, many-worlders account for the empirical verification of the Born rule in the individual 'worlds' (or individual splitting world-lines) of the agents/obervers (and it is a problem that used to trouble me greatly when I was myself a fan of David Deutsch and of many-world interpretation) but that is a problem that is quite distinct from the problem of superdeterminism (as it allegedly relates to the free will debate).

The constraint based physics being posted by Apokrisis here makes more intuitive sense to me but what seems intuitive might not be true

I am quite sympathetic also with the main drift of Apokrisis's constraint-based approach. But I think is it quite congenial to the pragmatist (or relational) interpretation of QM that I also favor over the alternative metaphysically 'realist' interpretations. It is indeed thanks to thermodynamical constraints that the structured and controllable 'classical world' emerges at all from the chaos of the homogeneous gas of the early expanding universe.

↪apokrisis
This would be a good starting point - https://www.nature.com/news/physics-quantum-quest-1.13711 — jkg20

@apokrisis By the way, there is a paper, which I haven't yet read, by Jean-Michel Delhôtel, discussing both Hardy's and Bitbol's approaches to the intepretation quantum mechanics: Quantum Mechanics Unscrambled.

Under GR gravity is not a force at all, it is the manifestation of the structure of spacetime, and is thus not something that can be transmitted from one body to another via particles like gravitons. — jkg20

Under GR the gravitational effects still are attributed to a field and to disturbances of this field by matter. This field just happens to be the structure of space-time in this case. The fundamental equations of GR are Einstein's field equations. They relate the metric tensor (characterizing the geometrical structure of space-time) to the source of the field (characterized by the stress-energy tensor, which registers the distribution of energy and momentum throughout space-time). So, the idea of a quantum theory of gravity is to quantize the field of gravity (that is, the perturbations in the structure of space-time) just as all the other fields are being quatized in quantum field theory. This is easier said than done, of course.

You can thus think of the graviton as a quantum of excitation of the metric of space-time roughly in the same way as you can think of the photon as a quantum of excitation of the electromagnetic field. Of course, your intuition is correct that the graviton can't be correctly conceived as a point particle that is traveling through space-time and somehow interacting with it. But this naive picture wouldn't be correct as applied the the photon's relation to the electromagnetic field either!

Under MWI, there will be infinitely many worlds in which all the bands are composed of the least likely events. So the bands will be exactly where they shouldn't be for an infinity of observers. — apokrisis

The MWI is a metaphysical gloss on Everett's relative-state interpretation. Everett's own interpretation is somewhat anti-metaphysical inasmuch as its main philosophical import is negative. It consists in denying the metaphysical reality (local realism) with respect the alleged collapse of the wave function. It is still somewhat 'realistic' inasmuch as it achieves this denial though reifying the state vector associated with the observer and then accounts for the singularity of the measurement result though relativising (one-to-one) the projected states of the observed system to the corresponding projected states of the observer that it is interacting with. This yields the problem of the determination of the privileged basis for the projections of the combined 'oberver+system' super-system. Decoherence theories seek to solve this privileged basis problem by means of an appeal to the interactions with the environment but run into other problems while attempting to factor out the quantum mechanical descriptions of the composite 'system + observer + environment' in a principled way. (This problem is intractable and ill-conceived, it seems to me, mainly owing to its reliance on the possibility of an un-situated God-eye-view on the whole universe (or its state vector) as a theoretically 'pure' standpoint from which to effect the factoring out of this universe onto the three components: oberved-system, observer and environment.)

The problem that you are raising for the MWI also arises within the framework of decoherence theories, but it seems to be mostly technical and relatively minor. If we don't reify the many-worlds as metaphysically real entities then we could account for the probability densities of potential quantum measurement (relative to 'observers') by means of coarse-grained descriptions of them. The main trouble with such interpretations, on my view, isn't so much the difficulty in accounting for the empirical verification of the probabilities derived from the Born rule so much as the ad hoc character of the definition of 'observers' (or or the 'worlds' of the MWI) seemingly devised for the sole purpose of rescuing metaphysical realism from the challenges posed to is by the profoundly relational character of the observables associated with quantum mechanical micro-physical 'states'. The realist interpretations seek to make QM palatable to the philosophically prejudiced theorist, with her 'classical' intuitions, but, in the process, obscure its most radically pragmatist implications.

But I think the many worlds stuff renews it though. Since that is completely (super?) deterministic and people have no will over which worlds they find themselves in. — JupiterJess

That is true, but somewhat misleading in the context of the free will debate, even granting, for the sake of the argument, the dubious metaphysical picture that underlies the 'many-worlds' interpretation of quantum mechanics. While an agent can't determine, prior to a quantum measurement, which 'world' it is that she would find herself into -- in which a single determinate measurement result is actualized -- from the set of all all the potential results (or 'worlds'') that had a finite probability of occurrence (or that she could find herself into) -- she can still control those probabilities by means of the prior set up. If she sets up Young's double-slit experiment, for instance, she can ensure that a photon (almost) never will strike the vicinity of a region of zero-amplitude on the receiving screen even though she will not control which one of the several bands with large amplitude the photon will strike.

The more germaine question, then, is whether the agent can control the probabilities of the event that are occurring causally upstream of her own practical deliberative process. Libertarian philosophers are likely to demand that she ought to be able to do so. But it seems to me that compatibilist philosophers are right to deny there to be any need for an agent to be able to fully control such processes in order that her actions can be deemed free, and her own, in most of their relevant respects.

The indeterminacy of QM offers nothing in explaining the contradictory nature of free will. Free will asserts both something occurring outside the causal chain as well as the agent's control, and therefore responsibility, over that event, which is to suggest a God-like property that defies explanation. — Hanover

I think this is a problem that afflict some libertarian (so-called) 'contra-causal' conceptions of free will. According to such conceptions, while most natural events are governed by universal laws, acts of the will interfere with the working of those laws such that, in the case where an agent did something, if the history of the universe were to be rolled-back to its initial state before the person acted, then, in those exact same 'circumstances', the possibility that she could have done otherwise remains open; and the counterfactual actualization of this possibility also is being construed as the manifestation of an act of the agent's will. (This is one possible construal of the principle of alternative possibilities, of PAP).

The main trouble with this conception relates to what Robert Kane has called 'the problem of intelligibility'. If in the exact same 'circumstances' where an agent might equally give expression to the state of her will though doing A or doing B, where A and B are two incompatible actions that satisfy incompatible rationales, then how do we account for such acts of the will that are thereby insensitive to reasons that may favor A over B (or vice versa)? We would have to imagine that the 'state the will' of the agent -- which presumably includes some degree of awareness of, or sensitivity to, the reasons that the agent has for acting -- resides outside of the 'circumstances' of the agent, where those 'circumstances' are construed by the contra-causal libertarian as to includes the agent's whole history down to the exact neurophysiological state of her brain.

On my view, compatibilists are right to object to such a thin (and likely incoherent) conception of the agent and of her will such that they are not only free from the constraints that natural laws put on material processes but such that they can also act against them. Compatibilists rather (and more plausibly) seek to account for the features of the will in such a manner that, while it isn't so much as partially free from natural constraints, many of those 'constraints' aren't best construed as constrains on the agent's freedom but rather as rational or motivational constraints that the agent herself exerts on her own actions. She doesn't exercise them from outside of her 'circumstances', as the contra-causal libertarian would have it, but rather while still being subjected to the 'internal' circumstances that are partially constitutive of who she is as an embodied rational agent. Such 'internal circumstances' include some features of her history that have led to her acquiring practical rational deliberative abilities and some contingent set of motivations.

So, when QM is being construed as providing some leeway into the broadly deterministic laws of nature, such that if the 'state of the universe' (or the 'state' of an embodied agent and of her 'circumstances') were to be rolled-back to some fixed earlier state, then, in that case, the agent might have acted differently, no satisfactory account is thereby provided of the freedom of the agent. And that's because of the aforementioned 'problem of intelligibility'.

On the other hand, another feature of QM could have some relevance -- analogical rather than explanatory -- to the problem of free-will and determinism. And this feature has very little to do with the fundamental indeterminacy of the potential outcomes of measurement processes effected on quantum mechanical 'systems'. It rather has to do with the radical inseparability of the physical phenomena from the embodied and situated context within which those phenomena are being teased out from a determinate experimental set-up. It is because of this fundamental inseparability that it makes no sense to inquire about the actual position of an electron in the circumstances where the experimental set up has been established so as to measure its momentum. On that view, the very idea of the position of an electron (which is called an 'observable' in QM) is essentially relational rather than being a characterization of the intrinsic state of an individual electron. The position of an electron characterizes possible interactions of the electron with an observer which are only possible in a range of set-ups that are inconsistent with the observation of its (precise) momentum, and vice versa. So, attempts to characterize the electron's behavior deterministically, such that prior to having been observed it would already be disposed to manifest determinate positions and momenta, are attempts to separate the phenomenon from the circumstances of its constitution. This can't be achieved according to Bohr's or Heisenberg's interpretation of QM. On my view, hidden-variable or many-worlds interpretations of QM can be construed as attempts to rescue the metaphysical view from nowhere of physical reality such that quantum phenomena can be given non-relational descriptions that, however weird, still comport somewhat with our intuitions of the classical-mechanical universe: an universe that is populated with items that have the kinds of determinations that they have quite independently from the nature of our interactions with them. Both of those classes of interpretations seek to dispense with the essentially relational nature of quantum phenomena. They reflect attempts by the theorist to radically separate herself from the universe which she seeks to describe and explain from a point of view that abstracts (per impossibile) from her constitutive relations with the phenomena that she observes.

I'd like to propose that both contra-causal libertarian accounts of free-will and most compatibilist accounts of free-will suffer from a defect that is deeply analogical to the 'metaphysical' (or 'realist') interpretations of QM. In the case of free-will accounts, though, the impossible task that is being attempted is the task of separating the agent from her world rather than the task of separating the observer/theorist from her world. Most compatibilist philosophers, on my view, only recognize partially the essentially relational character of agency since, unlike contra-causal libertarians, they acknowledge that parts of the 'circumstances' of an agent really are constitutive of who she is, as a radically embodied agent, rather than representing constraints on her agency which only operate 'from without'. On the other hand, they tend to theorize this separation between internal 'circumstances' (e.g. desires, values, reason) and external circumstances (knowledge, coercitions, physical limitations) from a point of view that is still a view from nowhere, and hence that allows from a deterministic psychology of the 'internal circumstances' of an agent. Because of that, I think, most compatibilists miss out on the nature of rational-causation, and of the autonomy of practical reason, as a neo-Kantian might conceive of them in irreducibly relational terms.

I just bought the kindle edition of Joseph Rouse's recent Sellarsian book: Articulating the World: Conceptual Understanding and the Scientific Image. Here is Robert Nola's review.

@StreetlightX is likely to find the free sample of the book interesting. One of the three stands that Rouse weaves together appeals to Jablonka and fellow 'top-down integrative Darwinians', as I might dub them. StreetlightX may already know Rouse as the posthumous editor of Haugeland's projected book on Heidegger: Dasein Disclosed. I know him also because of his excellent How Scientific Practices Matter: Reclaiming Philosophical Naturalism. (Here is a review).

I had said earlier that I wanted to comment more on left-wing Sellarsians versus right-wing Sellarsians (also sometimes called simply 'left-' or 'right-Sellarsians'. But I'm still busy reading a paper by Michael Williams (on Sellars) and another one by Bitbol (on the Kantian boundaries of the conceptual/undestanding. Are they absolute or relative to a conceptual scheme?). So, I'll keep postponing my comment. Meanwhile, here is a useful summary from one of the footnotes in Rouse's recent book:

"The distinction between left- and right-Sellarsians tracks two loosely defined groups of philosophers, each strongly influenced by the work of Wilfrid Sellars. Right-Sellarsians (exemplified by Ruth Millikan, Daniel Dennett, Paul Churchland, William Lycan, or Jay Rosenberg) draw especially upon Sellars’s commitment to scientific realism, his thoroughgoing naturalism, his insistence upon accommodating a more sophisticated empiricism and a prominent role for conceptual rationality within a broadly reductionist conception of the scientific image, and in some cases, his retention of a role for representational “picturing.” Left-Sellarsians (exemplified by Richard Rorty, Robert Brandom, John McDowell, or John Haugeland) emphasize his rejection of the empiricist Myth of the Given, the irreducibility of the logical space of reasons to causal or law-governed relations, his emphasis upon inferential roles as determinative of conceptual content, and the role of social practice in interpreting and justifying conceptual content while downplaying or rejecting his naturalism, scientific realism, and pictorial representationalism." -- Joseph Rouse, Articulating the World, 2015

...at which time it may no longer be relevant. Oh, well... — Janus

Don't worry. I also often postpone responses for a long time because I want to think things though first or do some more readings about the topic. There is no harm done in resurrecting dormant threads, or revisiting an old point within a thread, with the statement of some new thought. In fact, it's better than keeping up with the flow of the discussion while expressing half-baked or knee-jerk opinions. Also, truly philosophical questions tend to retain most of their relevance for two and a half millennia or more.

Sellars's own students Paul Churchland and Alex Rosenberg appear to have inherited the scientistic foundationalist strand of his thinking. — Pierre-Normand

Oops... I now realize that I had Jay Rosenberg and Alex Rosenberg confused in my mind. Jay, who unfortunately passed away 10 years ago, was Sellars's student, not Alex.

I had them both correctly pegged as 'scientistic foundationalists', though. I'll say more about 'left-wing' Sellarsians (Rorty, Brandom, McDowell, Williams) versus 'right-wing' Sellarsians (Millikan, Churchland, Jay Rosenberg, Dennett, and also, I thinks, Brassier!) in another post.

Just some general reflections to feel my way back into this thread — StreetlightX

Thanks for those! I'll read chapter 3 in Naturalism and Ontology, to get a better grasp of Sellars's motivation in dispensing specifically with the idea of references of predicates but not with the references of singular terms. It's hard for me to understand the rationale for that. I'll comment later.

And this is one of his best papers. — Banno

I quite enjoyed it although it doesn't top Three Ways of Spilling Ink. Austin wittily savages Mr. Mackinnon's and Mr. Maclagan's musings on the alleged non-sensuous acquaintance with universals. He doesn't propose any positive pragmatist account of the mastery of general concepts, though, but he makes suggestive comments that are reminiscent on Wittgenstein (regarding the unintelligibility of private languages) and Anscombe (regarding the intrinsically causal character of several concepts of action). He guards in one early footnote against the general-specific and particular-universal confusion of distinctions. Later on, Richard Hare and, following him, David Wiggins have also been insistent about the philosophical perils that lay in the wake of failures to attend to this distinction among two quite different distinctions. It's interesting to see Austin bringing this to bear to philosophers's troubles with the metaphysics and epistemology of universals.

I don't know how I feel about the idea that Humanities purpose was always to create a courtoisie class, or even that Humanities value cannot be expressed outside of an adherence to the curriculum of said Humanities. — Akanthinos

Maybe Stover meant to put it in a rather provocative way. But if we bracket out the rather modern Marxist connotation of a class and rather hold on to the more 'conservative' idea of a guild, tradition, art, craft, tradition of excellence, etc., then maybe we can get at the idea that what is valuable in the humanities is nothing else than the historically situated social practices in which they are embodied rather then their instrumental values for individual or societal needs that are external to those practices.

Sometimes when I am being asked about the value that I find in philosophy, the question takes the form 'A quoi ça sert?' (what is it useful for) and my provocative reply is that philosophy is utterly useless, which is why it's so valuable. But what is valuable isn't so much the activity (though it is) as the fact that engagement in this activity maintain alive the intrinsically valuable tradition in which it is embodied. And this, I think, Stover's piece conveys well, although, as he acknowledges, it may not make for a convincing argument in the current cultural context. But he also is cautiously optimistic that the humanities will withstand the attacks that they are being subjected to from left and right not because they are 'defensible' but precisely because people are drawn to them in spite of them being indefensible from the outside (and maybe because of it).

But here we have Sellars saying that there are no facts, only objects. — Banno

Yes, I don't buy that. Ordinary facts, objects and properties come as a package, on my view (but not "events"). But Sellars is such a deep and brilliant thinker that, even when he's wrong, it's worthwhile figuring out why it is that he's asserting something.

Are there a priori[/i] concepts?[/i]

The argument proceeds by showing that understanding a concept is no more than understanding how to use the associated terms. So understanding the concept red is just being able to use the word "red". — Banno

Thanks! I see it's the second chapter in his Philosophical Papers, and only 22 pages long. I'll read it. Austin is one of my favorite philosophers.

This is described as a pragmatic approach, but looks to me more like a redundant approach - "P is true" just means P. — Banno

In the wake of Davidson't work on truth and 'radical' interpretation, disquotational theories of truth have come to acquire quite a bit more substance than the redundancy theory of truth. That's because while the claim of redundancy still applies to individual instances of Tarski's T-schema, the whole theory that generates the schemata, and which rest on a substantive (and pragmatic) interpretation of the language as a whole, has a richer content than could accrues from merely providing any finite bunch of those schemata in extension.

Roughly, that there is nothing had in common by, say, red things, but instead we just use the word "red" in a way that suits our purposes. The meaning of "red" is nothing more than it's use to refer to those sorts of things. To pick the red sports car from the yellow one; the red of the sunset from the grey of the associated clouds. — Banno

In what text did Austin express that?

Earlier in this thread, @Nagase and @fdrake had an interesting exchange regarding the the sorts of constraint that the references of our predicates might have on our predicative judgements. Nagase was focusing on the case of so called natural kind terms (while appealing to the sort of semantics developed by Kripke and Putnam), while fdrake was stressing than even in the case where we may appear to have cut nature (or the quasi-Platonic realm of mathematical entities) at its joints, there always remain the liability that may arise unforeseen particulars that aren't neatly sorted by our extent predicates. So, it would seem that the sort of pragmatism advocated by fdrake is close to the form of pragmatism that you are attributing to Austin.

However, while I like my pragmatism to be "radical" in the sense that it doesn't leave any room for a residual core of self-individuated natural kinds (entities, that is, that are individuated as they are in themselves quite appart from our interests in sorting them out and reidentifying them in specific ways), I also seek to resist the sort of linguistic-idealism that attends to some forms of social constructivism. The trouble with this idealism, on my view, isn't that it's too radical but rather that it is not radical enough. Through picturing us as being entirely free to sort out bare particulars into whatever kinds we might deem useful to sort them into, it tends to portray us as purely intellectual subjects who are encountering them passively in experience rather than as embodied agents who are dealing with them in our Umwelt and our social worlds. Hence, a truly radical pragmatism must seek, in my view, to account for the efficacy of the concrete practices of individuating objects and their properties in such a way that the issue of capturing us in the process of individuating them from sideways on (to use McDowell's phrase) -- that is in such a way that we can make sense of the separate existence of (material) objects, on the one side, and of (intellectual) subjects, on the other, prior to the existence of embodied practices of individuation -- is entirely dispensed with as an unintelligible possibility.

Cheers. I'll keep reading — Banno

I actually meant that primarily as a self-admonition since there appears to be some good contributions that I either skipped or only read very obliquely.

So - and I've just started catching up on this thread, so this might have become apparent in other posts - his point is that predication is something we do, and hence predicates are not something we find but something we use?

As Austin? — Banno

Here is a relevant paragraph from the SEP article on Wilfrid Sellars:

"Platonic realists are often moved by the belief that the most basic linguistic structure, predication itself, involves a commitment to abstracta, for common explications of predication make essential mention of properties, relations, and such. Sellars argues that this gets the order of explication exactly wrong: apparently purely descriptive claims about property instantiation are, in fact, misleading ways of communicating norms of linguistic correctness. Sellars offers a different explication of predication, according to which the focus is not on any relation between an object and some abstract entity, but qualifying and arranging names to suit them for certain linguistic purposes. So understood, the Platonist’s treatment of predication seems, again, to be an elaborate and misleading way to make a simpler, more pragmatic point. At the most basic, atomic level, predication is a matter of endowing the names with counterpart characteristics of the objects they purport to name, enabling some true atomic sentences to ‘map’ or ‘picture’ objects in the world. Predication thus commits one only to natural objects potentially correlated with each other. See NAO, chapter 3, for the most complete statement of this view."

This is a bit of a head scratcher since, although it betrays a clear resistance to the reification of abstracta, it still seems to express a commitment to "real" material objects ('substances' or 'continuants',) seemingly individuated quite appart from our individuating practices. I guess there is no shortcut but to delve into chapter three of Naturalism and Ontology (or pay closer attention to the excellent earlier contributions in this thread ;-)

I don't know what Austin's view on predicates or properties is.

But here is a counter- argument in favour of obscure, pedantic overspecialisation 'for its own sake'. — unenlightened

Thanks for uncovering that. It's a real gem. I read the piece mentioned in the OP a couple days ago when it was suggested in my Google feed. This other piece by Justin Stover constitutes the best possible counterpoint to Rachel William's own, and locates the source of the alleged problem within the much larger debate regarding the continued relevance (or alleged irrelevance) of the traditional fields of the humanities. I nevertheless concur, with many reservations, with some of William's complaints directed specifically at academic philosophy, or some tendencies within it.

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).