Yeah that’s an excellent article as well but it’s a bit different from his other paper in certain respects, the paper you cited is more about structural realism and the OP is more in the analytic metaphysical tradition. They’re somewhat dissimilar, but there is some overlap though the two are still distinct works.

@SophistiCat
It’s from “There’s are No Such Things as Ordinary Objects” in the bookThe Nature of Ordinary Objects

@SophistiCat
Fair enough, usually my iPhone attaches the citation at the bottom, I suppose i must have overlooked it by mistake.

@Olivier5 No need for shade, just bare with me. I’ve had a surprisingly very busy week, I haven’t had the time to give this the attention it deserves and i own that.

I too cuthberts claim about the geopgraphy of Scotland to say that relations were not mind-dependent. Though I think cities aren’t the clearest example because they’re more constructed/abstract than say the moon and the sun which relationship would be there even without a person to perceive it.

The real underlying question is basically if anything we typically think of as existing actually does, including ourselves. So it may be an empty question depending on your philosophical views.

The Lego example is pretty contentious because you can recover an individual Lego from a block as opposed to say an atom which cannot, in principle, recovered from a molecule.

It wasn’t me making this argument, it’s a philosophy we named Steven French. I just took the excerpt straight from him because it’s possibly clearer than my paraphrasing.

There’s elimintivism in theory of mind, but also metaphysics of objects, usually it’s contrasted with permissivism which entail arbitrary combinations of objects such as Trogs, which tree-dogs.

Yeah, so you something like hylomorphism?

Yeah, it’s clunky name, but it reflects how hard it is to find people who like metaphysics like the OP.

Yes, unless you’re an idealist and anti-realist.

It means those facts exist because of other facts

I would follow Dennett’s view that money is a real pattern that has causal and explanatory power.

Also, just because something something is socially constructed doesn’t require it to be metaphysically unreal of certain views like Sally Haslanger and Elizabeth Barnes views.

You could make a case for tables. An atom is an atom by convention because presumably there would still be atoms without people.
Yeah you’re basically saying there’s things are grounded, whereas he just says they don’t exist only the grounding stuff exists, if that.

@Seppo@T clark seconded

@SophistiCat
Good stuff! Very impressive and well explained.

@SophistiCat
Not in this chapter its very brief which makes it kind of opaque as to what they’re solution actually entails. It sounded to me like they were taking the advantages of identity theory and adding them to an non-reductive view. Here below is the middle part of the chapter I cut out that might something.

Fodors’s anxieties are not without foundation was looking very promising. In outline: the materialist relinquishes the search for what exists to the scientist, and simply predicts, on good inductive evidence, that the scientist will not posit psychological phenomena beyond those we are already familiar with. The materialist designates all phenomena, from quarks to thoughts, as things that exist but which are supervenient on some more, yet-to-be-discovered, fundamental level of reality. The materialist seems to have kept everything, including mental entities, at no cost. But in fact the cost, from Fodor’s perspective, is very high. But is it so high? Is it the end of the world?
The first point to be made is that this problem was always lurking in the shadows of materialism. Epicurus, and Lucretius after him, pointed to the swerve as the key explanatory feature of the reality of atoms in the void that would account for our freedom of will. However, no such account was forthcoming. Our intuitive account of ourselves as human beings seems to be implicitly a dualist picture where the individual can stand outside the material order and make free choices. It was observed above that the identity theorists demand a radical rethink of our intuitions about mental entities. What is clear now is that all materialist theories demand a radical rethink of what it is to be a human being.

Yeah that should be in ball park, I believe

I always took it to mean that it something supervenes on something when it depends on it for its existence or function.

As for the rest, I’m as lost in the sauce as you guys, this is all the book has in it. Hopefully, someone more familiar with this will come along and help us out.

@Alkis Piskas
1 The objection to persons existing over time, basically it says causal continuity isn’t sufficient for personal identity.
2. We don’t identify people who causally influence us as responsible for our actions, nor think of them as us.

@Alkis Piskas
Well what do you think I’m saying? Give me a take and I’ll try see what’s unclear.

Higher level facts are facts about people, places, things, that aren’t bottom level of analysis, like for example atoms, quarks, what have you.

@SophistiCat
Nah this is the only place I’ve heard this objection, I’ll just put in the bin then because even Parfit said any cause was fine host framework of personal identity.

Additionally, i linked the paper above so you see it in the objection section if something is unclear.

@theRiddler I don’t know what your talking about, was that addressed to me.

@Alkis Piskas it’s in my OP it’s an objection that causal continuity isn’t enough for personal identity. In metaphysical parlance ground, as I understand it, explains the higher level facts.

@SophistiCat I meant to tag you above, sorry still getting used to this site.

Additionally, the objection section of the above paper mentions the same objection. It may have additional context if I kiss something in my explanation.

Causal Continuity is basically cause and effect like a tree is causally connected to a seed, or a person is causally connected to their previous self by the events of cause and effect.

Causal relationship means having a causal effect upon something or someone, or that’s how I took it in the paper.

You can make them feel emotions or something remember events, for example.

For identity, you can be held accountable for their actions or be identified as that persons.

It's hard. If you press me, I might say that it's not objective, not an "ontological fact". I think it's epistemic, pertaining to how we view this phenomena, which doesn't make it "less real", just that "selves" are not mind independent facts of the world.

I think it’s real in the sense of a real pattern, but not real as like a ghost in the head, so to speak.

Here’s a copy of the paper, I responded to a post about it on Reddit

https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1391&context=comparativephilosophy

SophistiCat,

I can like the paper if you like, it’s in the context of Buddhist reductionism. I’m also not a reductionist, I prefer pluralist/structuralist views of personal identity.

Yeah Strawson’s view is somewhat similar to this problem but it’s more about selfhood in the sense one perceives oneself right? The objection from how I read it has to do more with an objective fluxing so it’s probably more in like with Strawson’s episodic view.

Thanks, for replies guys let’s keep this going.