The entropy of the visible universe for example. — tom

Well, I was assuming all the micro-physical "events" to be shifted as well, not just the macroscopic ones. Since the entropy of a physical system supervenes on its micro-physical state, then the entropy of all the systems (including local cosmic background radiation) would be shifted back in time by the same amount.

Trying to adapt the thought experiment to address time is a little confusing to me. — Mongrel

Can't you ask essentially the same question about time? Anything that occurs (e.g. the construction of a house) could have occurred four years earlier (or later). But could everything that is occurring (and occurred, and will occur) in the whole universe occur four years earlier? Relative to what event would everything have occurred four years earlier?

Hi! What would you say truth is? Doesn't it presuppose truth to say what truth is? If this is so, is it bad? — mew

I'll only comment on your last two questions. If what you seek to achieve is an explanation, or philosophical elucidation, of the concept of truth, then circularity isn't necessarily bad. You can start with the concept of truth as you understand it, and then proceed to analyse it by means of the examination of a variety of practical contexts where the concept is normally used. Circularity only is bad in deductive proofs, or demonstrations. In that case it is a fallacy. You can't assume what you intend to prove as a premise of your demonstration. In informal contexts of discussion, this is also called begging the question.

But where explanations are concerned, Wittgenstein has suggested that circularity only is bad when the circle is too small, and hence uninformative. So, the trouble with some circular explanations isn't the circularity itself but the excessive simplicity: such simplistic, quasi-tautological, explanations aren't sensitive enough to all the relevant aspects of the use of the concept one wishes to elucidate. The solution to this problem is to widen the circle of inter-related concepts one appeals to. Peter Strawson called this (wide) circular method of philosophical analysis "connective analysis" (which could be contrasted with reductive analysis). In epistemology, Clark Glymour has devised a convincing explanation of the somewhat circular nature of empirical evidence for scientific theories. It's called the bootstrapping theory of confirmation. It's a good way to account for the essential theory-ladenness of empirical concepts: your evidence always is couched in terms that presuppose some aspects of the theory you are attempting to confirm by means of scientific experiment or data gathering.

↪VagabondSpectre (Y) — Mongrel

(Y) (Y)

Yes. Do you see a problem? — Mongrel

That would seem to be the same problem afflicting the idea of displacing the whole of space. You can shift a house 100 feet to the North. Can you move the whole of space in the same direction? What would such a hypothetical displacement be relative to?

Well. That surprises me. I thought the reasoning interesting and the similarity obvious. But as it is not on the point of this topic I will not digress. — ernestm

Yes, this issue may not be exactly on the point of this thread. But I agree with you that the reasoning is both interesting and relevant to features of quantum mechanics that bridge metaphysics and epistemology. I had mentioned earlier (I think in this thread) some similar reasoning that had put Heisenberg on the right path for the developments of his early formulation of QM (matrix mechanics). He explained his thought process in The Physicist's Conception of Nature.

Regarding the quality of the reasoning, there might be some obscurity in the argument, but those old Vedic philosophers don't strike me as being as being any less insightful than the early Greek atomists were.

an example of a non-sequitur is this: — Frederick KOH

I agree that it is a non sequitur! It is Weinberg's non-sequitur. It is a non sequitur because there actually are lots of reasonable explanations why some specific laws within some theories obtain that aren't reductive explanations in Weinberg's sense.

There is no scientific theory that does that! — Frederick KOH

Which is precisely why you must seek some deeper reduction base -- a more "fundamental" theory -- in order to disclose at least one of the multiple "arrows of explanation" the alleged convergence of which ground Weinberg's grand reductionism. Weinberg's "arrows" always point from one law or principle of a theory to laws or principles from another theory. Else, in his view, the first theory (and its laws) would be freestanding and grand reductionism would fail.

I am beginning to think that I will have to use the same reasoning as the proverbial judge who had to rule on what pornography is. — Frederick KOH

The Maxwell equations don't constitute a reduction of the four laws that you mentioned in anything like Weinberg's sense of reduction. That's because, for Weinberg, reducing a law (or scientific principle) consists in explaining why this law (or principle) obtains in terms of a more fundamental theory. The Maxwell equations formalize the laws of electromagnetism in a precise and consistent manner. They don't explain why those laws are valid. As I reminded you -- and you ignored again -- that is precisely why Weinberg seeks to reduce QED (the quantum mechanical version of electrodynamics) to another higher-energy effective field theory such as QCD.

Thank you for bringing this up. This is because you seem to want to define your way out of any counter-argument. How else do I pin down what you mean when you use terms that I have never seen any philosopher of science use?

As an exercise to anyone else still reading this thread, google "autonomous law" and see what you get. — Frederick KOH

Steven Weinberg uses the phrase "autonomous law" in "Two Cheers for Reductionism", one of the two book chapters that you enjoined me to argue against and endeavored to defend. I also was quite careful in explaining how I was using the term, quite consistently with Weinberg's own use, to signify the irreducibility of such a law within a theory to laws and principles from some other more fundamental theory. The explanation why such autonomous laws obtain (answering Weinberg's "Why?" question) rather is to be found at the same level of theory. I first made use of the phrase in this thread in order to explain the idea of a merely partial autonomy from one theory to another; when you had seemed to think that the question of the reducibility (or autonomy) of a whole theory in relation to some other theorie(s) is an all or nothing matter.

Those concepts and setups exist prior to and motivate the theories in question. — Frederick KOH

It's not generally the case that the empirical concepts that figure in a theory already were in use prior to the development of the theory. This would be to forget the theory-ladenness of observation. The theoretical understanding of the laws of a theory, on the one side, and the understanding of the empirical objets, relations and properties that populate the ontology of this theory, on the other side, more often than not grow together. The concept of a gene didn't predate the discovery of Mendelean inheritance. The understanding of the concept of mass and of force weren't quite the same before and after the development of Newtonian mechanics (or before and after Einstein's special theory or relativity), etc.

And in the four laws I gave an example where what the material constituents were is not clear. Especially when we know the classical theory that came after. — Frederick KOH

Sure. In that case you can't achieve reduction through appealing to a more fundamental theory that regulates interactions between smaller material constituents. Weinberg's "why?" questions would still be the question why those laws are valid, assuming that they aren't themselves fundamental. If Weinberg's "grand reductionism" were correct, then there would exist a more fundamental theory -- a reduction base for it (i.e. a theory that is closer to Weinberg's unique "final theory") -- such that those laws are causally and/or deductively determined by it. Maxwell's equations don't constitute such a reduction base, since they merely express those very same laws in a consistent and rigorous manner. Maxwell's equations don't answer the question why they themselves are valid.

The most obvious candidate for a theory that would serve as an appropriate reduction base for classical electrodynamics, according to Weinberg himself, would be a high-energy theory such as QCD. QCD is thus a theory that he deems to figure on the path towards his dreamed of final theory, with a GUT theory, and a theory of quantum gravitation also figuring further down this path. Unfortunately, as I've argued, effective field theories that are valid at different energy scales don't appear to reduce one another.

It is interesting that you managed to get from "the laws of electromagnetism and electrodynamics" to "quantum field theory" without mentioning Maxwell's equations. I am going to be charitable and assume that somewhere in "the laws of electromagnetism and electrodynamics" you include Maxwells equations. — Frederick KOH

Well, yes. The classical theory of electromagnetism indeed incorporates its mathematical expression in the form of Maxwell's equations. Thank you for your generosity.

In either case it is either disingenuousness or ignorance that no mention how those four laws relate to Maxwell's equations.

So, was your point that the four laws that you mentioned somehow "reduce" to Maxwell's equations? With the minor caveat that Coulomb's law just is an approximation (i.e. it doesn't account for "retarded potentials") those laws can be regarded as being unified into a coherent field theory that has been formalized by Maxwell. (Full blown classical electrodynamics also incorporates the Lorentz force law).

I don't see this as a clear case of one theory being reduced to another. (And even if it were, that would lend no support whatsoever to Weinberg's "grand reductionism"; that would just be another instance of "petty reductionism", which pluralists and emergentists are happy to grant). Maybe your point is different. Again, when you have a point to make, if would make our discussion less cumbersome if you would just make it explicitly, rather than rely entirely on the mere asking of rhetorical or gotcha questions.

Do you agree that these four laws developed in a way that is very different from the ones in chemistry? Are they autonomous laws? — Frederick KOH

You were postulating that your question regarding the autonomy of those laws was being asked in 1835. One would have to look up what the status of each of those laws, and of the broad theories they were a part of, were at that time. When a law is first being derived empirically from the identification of some regularity, or of manifest causal networks, in a set of observations and experiments, then the question of the autonomy or derivability of those laws relative to another as of yet unknown theory is an open question. In the case of the laws of electromagnetism and electrodynamics, the question of their potential reduction began to make sense when quantum field theory was developed. It turned out that relative to their "realization base" (higher-energy effective field theories) the laws of quantum electrodynamics were partially autonomous since they involved different degrees of freedom and were, in a sense, multiply-realizable.

But also a sense which does not include instruments and experimental set up in a theory meant to be empirical. — Frederick KOH

This complaint is rather fuzzy. In what way should the sense of the word autonomy "include instruments and experimental set up"? Each theory has its own set of observational concepts and relies on specific types of experimental setups. Reductibiliy (or autonomy) concerns derivability (or lack thereof) of the laws in one set from the laws in the other set. It is a matter of theoretical analysis whether or not such a derivability is possible. But it is a matter of empirical inquiry whether the laws governing the entities belonging to either levels are satisfied.

The gish gallop was from you. From your own switch from "autonomous theories" to "autonomous laws", deftly, and with wiliness, hoping no one would notice that the term used has changed without you characterizing the difference. — Frederick KOH

That's not true. I took some pain to explain the sense in which individual laws can be said to be autonomous relative to the laws that govern the interactions between the material constituents in the lower-level theory. I had explained this here and here among other places.

When the discussion touched chemistry, you used the term "autonomous law" instead of "autonomous theory".

Suppose this question was asked in 1835:

Are the following what you consider to be autonomous laws:

Coulomb's Law
The Biot-Savart Law
Oersted's Law
Faraday's Law of Induction — Frederick KOH

You often present alleged examples of reduction, which I then proceed to analyse. You then ignore my analysis, ask more rhetorical questions, and then challenge me with more examples. What's the point in me analyzing and discussing your own examples in details if you are just going to ignore the analysis again? This new Gish gallop of yours is you answer to my request that you would give me some inkling of the meaning of your claim that: 'It means that "fundamental" theories have two means of being "transported" from their original birthplace to other areas of inquiry.'

This was beginning to look like an argument. Can you make it a little more explicit?

In what sense is QCD autonomous?

The data that theorists sought to explain and whose work resulted in QCD were created by instruments designed on principles that are not based on QCD. — Frederick KOH

In the context of effective field theories, the autonomy at issue is the autonomy of a large-scale, low-energy, theory (such as QED) relative to a smaller-scale, higher-energy, theory (such as QCD). I've already explained the sense in which it is autonomous. In addition to Crowther's paper, referenced earlier (Decoupling emergence and reduction in physics), you can also look up Jonathan Bain, Emergence in Effective Field Theories (2012).

So killing atheists is fine because other people have done nasty stuff? — tom

No. It's not fine. I was merely reinforcing Mariner's point, which you ignored.

No doubt, because they are states. All it takes to establish that is to observe that Islamic minorities in non-Islamic states do not kill all of those people. In other words, statehood is a requirement for those killings; Islam isn't. — Mariner

Indeed. We can also observe that Islamic states kill people who simply are deemed to be enemy of the state, regardless of religious motive, and also that non-Islamic states have killed more than one hundred million innocent people for various reasons in the 20th century alone.

I wonder if other users experienced this. When I select some portion of a message that I want to reply to, there appears a floating button labelled "Quote". The normal behavior when I click on that button is that the selected text then automatically is copied in the edit box below, properly tagged. The trouble is that this button often doesn't work. When I click on it, the selected text gets deselected but nothing gets copied below. I have to re-select the text and click again on the "Select" button. Sometimes it works on the first or second try. Something on the 20th try. I've no idea why it works sometimes and most of the time not.

The formalization, more than just explicitness, gives a sense that there are actual stakes to what's being done – because if you need your models to produce certain results, and they don't, you've failed, and in a concrete way, and this failure leads to a possible metric of improvement. — The Great Whatever

I remember either Timothy Williamson or Scott Soames (or maybe both) making this exact same methodological recommendation. David Wiggins also sometimes formalises some of his arguments in a very precise fashion. But he also proposes the methodological principle that, in order to pass a necessary sanity test, arguments that are couched in technical or semi-technical terms must make sense when rephrased in plain English (or whatever your native language is).

I've realized I've wasted a lot of time constructing myself the left-out arguments in continental philosophy, and it's so refreshing to read people who spell it out. (That said, I still think many of the continentals make extremely good points and have a better synoptic vision. I would like to read them in conjunction.) — csalisbury

I quite agree with you on both counts, regarding the complementary strength/weaknesses of both traditions.

Also: part of the above is that it kind of usea particular individuals to illustrate general laws (i.e. if any individual a with power b does c, then d). The reason the sentence in my example is true has absolutely nothing to do with alex. — csalisbury

Your example then would be an example of a counterfactual conditional statement used to specify what it is for individuals of a specific kind (e.g. human beings) to have the power to benchpress 400 pounds, or to lack this power. Do we have a problem with the semantics of this statement in the actual case where the antecedent is false (i.e. in the actual case where Alex has the power to benchpress 400 pounds?

Rather than being faced with a counterfactual conditional statement where the antecedent describes an unactualized power, as my initial suggestion was meant to be dealing with, we now have an antecedent that describes a power not being possessed by an individual, in the counterfactual case, that he actually possesses. The statement that you propose then is a logical consequence of a partial definition of what it is for individuals of a specific kind not to possess a specific power. This definition could be construed as a partial specification of what it is for actual human beings no to possess the power to lift 400 pounds. It would go something like this: "Someone who raises the bar no more than 3 inches when she attempts to benchpress 400 pounds lack the power to benchpress 400 pounds." The deflationary explanation of the truth of this partial definitional statement would be: "Someone who raises the bar no more than 3 inches when she attempts to benchpress 400 pounds lacks the power to benchpress 400 pounds." is true if someone who raises the bar no more than 3 inches when she attempts to benchpress 400 pounds lacks the power to benchpress 400 pounds.

In line with my previous suggestion, the counterfactual conditional statement regarding Alex can be regarded to be true on account of the fact that it is a logical consequence of this partial definition of the lack of a power to benchpress 400 pounds.

It means that "fundamental" theories have two means of being "transported" from their original birthplace to other areas of inquiry. — Frederick KOH

I don't follow. What are those two means?

I was making a claim about areas of inquiry. We saw a stark example with a simple statement about acids. — Frederick KOH

What I said about broad theories, as opposed to individual laws, is also true of wide areas of inquiry. The explanation of the properties of acids and bases may make reference to both emergent laws and reductive laws. Maybe it is a stark example of the scientific fruitfulness of reductive explanations (Ernst Mayr's "analysis"). So? There are also stark examples of the scientific fruitfulness of non-reductive explanations.

This means that areas of inquiry with autonomous theories are not themselves autonomous. — Frederick KOH

No, it doesn't entail that. The autonomy of whole theories almost always is merely partial, since broad theories encompass both emergent laws and reducible laws. As applied to individual laws, then the autonomy can be total.

Given a question, explanations do not have to stay within a theory, autonomous or not.

They may not need to but they very often do.

So this gives a sense to the word "fundamental" as used by Weinberg whether you agree with his choice of word. The more "fundamental" a theory is, the more widespread the possibility and actuality of its use becomes (especially if you include the theories underwriting the instruments of observation).

Weinberg's "final theory" only is fundamental, then, in the sense that its scope of application is allegedly wider. But it is only wider than the scope of high-level theories owing to the fact that it explains laws that govern either the parts of the entities explained by those theories, or the parts or their parts, or the parts of the parts of their parts, etc. So, it is merely concerned with the ultimate "parts" (or quantum fields or whatever) while abstracting away from emergent structures that don't depend on intrinsic properties of their parts (or of whatever laws govern the phenomena of the "underlying" theories), and that generalize across multiply-realizable domains (and hence actually have wider explanatory scopes than theories merely applying to a bunch of small particles!).

So, Weinberg's preferred arrows of explanations all point towards the smallest parts. He ignores the arrows that point to structural relationships between parts at the same level of mereological composition. His explanation of what is "fundamental" then fails to justify his view of reductionism, since this view is premised in the idea of the convergence of the arrows explanation but he has simply ignored all the arrows that don't ultimately lead to his preferred "fundamental" level.

This seems like an alternative version of modal collapse, which today is widely (though not universally) considered to be a fallacy in modal logic. Usually it is presented as the claim that whatever is actual is necessary, hence it entails strict determinism. — aletheist

Interesting! Indeed, it seems to be equivalent.

1) Actual(P) entails Nec(P) (=def modal collapse)
2) Actual(~P) entails Nec(~P)
3) ~Nec(~P) entails ~Actual(~P)
4) Possible(P) entails P (=def actualism)

Interestingly enough, the route that leads to actualism (or to modal collapse) begins with a healthy dose of Humean skepticism about "natural necessity", or the necessities derived from a realist interpretation of nomological event causation. This leads the Humean skeptic to be equally skeptical about unactualized powers. The last step for the Humean skeptic is to retain the concept of a power but to narrow its scope of application strictly to actualized powers. What is ironical is that this conclusion then condones a strict metaphysical determinism: the strongest possible form of causal neccessitation!

The various theories of truth--correspondence, coherence, consensus, instrumental--only arise within the context of nominalism regarding generals. Pragmatic realism (i.e., pragmaticism) understands truth as encompassing all of these notions, because it is defined as what an infinite community of investigators would believe after an indefinite inquiry. — aletheist

Hmmm... I would hope that that an ideal community of investigators would end up not merely producing a final theory that encompasses all the early theoretical attempts, but that it would also discard some false starts ;-)

What about: "If Pierce had the power to see to it that the stone drops during a lecture, then, if Pierce had dropped the stone during a lecture, it would have fallen."

It seems just as true as the first sentence, but not to be ultimately grounded in some existent having any latent power. — csalisbury

This is a bit tricky because the truth of this sentence seems to entail the position Micheal Ayers labeled actualism (in his brilliant The Refutation of Determinism: An Essay in Philosophical Logic, London: Methuen (1968)). That is the position seemingly endorsed (at least tacitly) by many Humeans that whatever is possible is actual, and whatever isn't actual is impossible. This is also the view that there are no unactualized powers. That's because the subjunctive conditional statement that you propose would entail that the failure for Pierce to exercise his power would count as (conclusive) evidence that he lacks the power.

To explain this further, the OP raises a problem with the correspondence theory of truth. Statements are said to be true if they correspond to some obtaining state of affairs, but statements like "if A had happened then B would have happened" are said to be true even though neither A nor B are obtaining states of affairs. — Michael

Indeed. This is also how I understood the problem.

It's called decoherence. — tom

I know what it's called. Giving it a name doesn't address the issue.

I used to call them "counterfactuals," until someone on this forum insisted that by definition, this means that they must be "counter to fact." I switched to "subjunctive conditionals" to preclude any such terminological debates. — aletheist

OK, but I think the OP meant discuss a semantical problem that is raised specifically by subjunctive conditionals that have a false antecedent -- that is, by counterfactual conditionals in the strict sense.

For the rest of us, Unitary Quantum Mechanics solves the problem of the ontological status of counterfactuals. — tom

I wonder how Unitary Quantum Mechanics deals with the semantics of counterfactual conditional statements that have counterlegal antecedents. (e.g. If Ceasar had led the First Golf War, he would have used catapults. Or, if photons had had a finite rest mass, then they wouldn't be traveling at c)

I can't be in two different branches of a decohered wavefunction. I'm only ever in one. — Michael

Indeed. If there ends up there being two "copies" of you, you never find yourself in a situation where you are both of them.

This thread is about counterfactuals, which I prefer to call subjunctive conditionals; — aletheist

It seems to me that some authors use the phrase "counterfactual conditional" to mean the same as "subjunctive conditional", but it also occurs frequently that the former phrase is restricted to those subjunctive conditionals that have a false antecedent. In recent years, I've also noticed that the adjective "counterfactual" has been used in the wider cultures (e.g. in op-eds.) to mean roughly the same as "false", which I find annoying.

No, what makes the first statement true is not some "power" that Peirce has. Rather, it is the fact that there is a real tendency in the universe for things with mass (such as a stone and the earth) to move toward each other in the absence of some intervening object (such as a man's body). — aletheist

There are many ways to translate statements about occurrences governed by real laws (either deterministic or probabilistic) conceived to be governing sequences of event into statements about occurrences conceived as manifesting the actualization of powers in specific circumstances. Pierce would not have the specific power that I ascribed to him if the masses involved didn't have the power to draw themselves closer to one another. My proposal isn't changed much if you would rspeak of real tendencies rather than of real powers, although I think powers of substances can't always be analysed dispositionally without some loss of meaning. But this caveat isn't really relevant to the issue raised by the OP.

Alright, so to get back on track, what makes a counterfactual true for a deflationary theorist? If Pierce had dropped the stone during a lecture, it would have fallen. That's a true statement, correct? — Marchesk

Yes. The deflationary theorist then would seem to be faced with the same problem that the correspondence theorist was faced with, as andrew4handel explained in the OP. For the deflationary theorist might, at first blush, attempt to explain it thus:

"If Pierce had dropped the stone during a lecture, it would have fallen." is true iff if Pierce had dropped the stone during a lecture, it would have fallen.

Though I am not a logician, it's not even entirely clear to me if there is an unambiguous meaning to the "if and only if, if" complex logical connective that shows up here (even after scope disambiguation). In any case, the strategy that I had suggested might work to simplify the modal semantics a bit (as well as the metaphysics of counterfactual conditionals) is to construe the sentence's meaning as being parasitic on the meaning of a categorical statement about the real power of something. What makes "If Pierce had dropped the stone during a lecture, it would have fallen." true is that "Pierce has the power to see to it that the stone drops during a lecture." is true, since the first sentence can be derived from the second as a material inference from the second one. (i.e., a "material inference", in Wilfrid Sellars's sense, warranted by the conceptual content of the term "power"). And finally, what makes the second sentence about Pierce's power true is that Pierce indeed has this power, as can be ascertained empirically through testing this power of his in some specific circumstances.

So what is the point of deflationary truth? That there is nothing metaphysically significant about truth or propositions? So all one needs to do is give a decent account of knowing, and I suppose some account of how language works, and that's all there is to it? — Marchesk

I think the main point of the deflationary theories of truth is negative. It is to show that meaningful uses of the "...is true" predicate in natural language don't have the metaphysical implications that the correspondence theorists (who also often are naive, or "dogmatic", realists) take them to have.

Of course, when this negative point has been made, then the correspondence theorist is entitled to ask the deflationary theorist what alternative metaphysics/epistemology she might be proposing instead.

(This is somewhat side-tracking us from the problem of counterfactuals raised in the OP, though.)

I see. So a deflationary view of truth is based on Kantian categories of thought. — Marchesk

Well, lets say that it is post-critical in the Kantian sense, and not reliant on anything as crude as naive realism. Many deflationary theorists may only make some minimalist formal points about the semantics of "... is true", and hence aren't committed to any sort of metaphysics or epistemology. But what I had in mind were specific developments of deflationary theories (by McDowell, Wiggins, Hornsby and Rödl) that address the epistemological problem that you raised, and that are broadly neo-Kantian in the way they explain conceptual abilities.