Metaphysical Consequences Research Articles

Against Quantitative Primitivism

Abstract The problem of quantity is the problem of identifying what about the physical world explains why it can be so well represented with mathematical entities. I introduce “quantitative primitivism,” the dominant position in the literature, which offers only a partial solution to the problem of quantity. I argue that a reductive account of quantitativeness provides a full solution to the problem and describe two reductive accounts in the literature. I discuss some of the unique metaphysical consequences of reductive accounts of quantity, including a novel dissolution to the long-standing absolutist–comparativist debate.

The Metaphysics of Opacity

This paper examines the logical and metaphysical consequences of denying Leibniz's Law, the principle that if t1= t2, then φ(t1) if and only if φ(t2). Recently, Caie, Goodman, and Lederman (2020) and Bacon and Russell (2019) have proposed sophisticated logical systems permitting violations of Leibniz's Law. We show that their systems conflict with widely held, attractive principles concerning the metaphysics of individuals. Only by adopting a highly revisionary picture, on which there is no finest-grained equivalence relation, can a well-motivated metaphysics for rejecting Leibniz's Law be developed. We sketch one such picture—a metaphysics of stuff. Stuff ontologies can be initially motivated through ordinary language: stuff stands to mass nouns as objects stand to count nouns. The stuff ontology we propose takes stuff to be fundamental and views the world as composed of an infinite descending hierarchy of kinds and portions of stuff. We defend the coherence of this picture and offer a model theory demonstrating that it can be consistently formalized.

Peirce’s three-dimensional notion of vagueness

My aim in this paper is to provide some introductory coordinates aiming at orienting a unified discourse on the doctrine of vagueness in Peirce. After tracing some of the stages in Peircean scholarship that have brought the concept of vagueness into focus, I will show that vagueness, as it appears in Peircean philosophy, is a three-dimensional concept. Thus, while vagueness is a concept that appears in a logical-semiotic dimension – and more specifically as a problem related to the quantification of the subject within the propositional context – it is also articulated in an epistemological and metaphysical dimension. Here I focus primarily on the semiotic dimension and suggest how an account of vagueness might hold together the epistemological and metaphysical consequences of the notion of vagueness.

О различии в формализации логики у индийцев и греков в связи с различием порядка слов в предикации

The article discusses some logical, semantic and metaphysical consequences or correla­tions with the introduced typology of word order in verbal and nominal sentences, which in the European tradition represent speech patterns used in judgments. The combinatorics of word order gives four variants, of which three are actually represented by native lan­guages of distinctive philosophical traditions. It is shown that the Western word order predisposes the semantic intuition in favor of substantialism, the Arabic variety (in verbal sentences) is in conformity with the process logic of sense discovered and described by A.V. Smirnov. The Sanskrit word order in predication predisposes to the understanding of thinking as a natural transition from one object to another, whereas the ontological type of the object is not predetermined.

Future contingency and God’s knowledge of particulars in Avicenna

ABSTRACT Avicenna’s discussion of future contingent propositions is sometimes considered to entail metaphysical indeterminism. In this paper, I argue that his logical analysis of future contingent statements is best understood in terms of the epistemic modality of those statements, which has no consequences for modal metaphysics. This interpretation is corroborated by hitherto neglected material concerning the question of God’s knowledge of particulars. In the Taʿlīqāt, Avicenna argues that God knows particulars by knowing their complete causes, and when contrasted with the human knowledge of particulars, this epistemically superior access shows that the contingency of statements about future particulars is not due to the modal properties of real particulars but to the nature of human access to them.

Evil is not evidence

AbstractThe article aims to show that, if S5 is the logic of metaphysical necessity, then no state of affairs in any possible world constitutes any non-trivial evidence for or against the existence of the traditional God. There might well be states of affairs in some worlds describing extraordinary goods and extraordinary evils, but it is false that these states of affairs constitute any (non-trivial) evidence for or against the existence of God. The epistemological and metaphysical consequences for philosophical theology of assuming that S4 or Kσρ is the logic of metaphysical necessity are equally untenable. S4 guarantees that God does not exist if there is the slightest evidence against the existence of God. And Kσρ guarantees that God might survive the loss or acquisition of any essential property at all.

The Structure of Truth: The 1970 John Locke Lectures by Donald Davidson

Reviewed by: The Structure of Truth: The 1970 John Locke Lectures by Donald Davidson Claudine Verheggen DAVIDSON, Donald. The Structure of Truth: The 1970 John Locke Lectures. Edited by Cameron Domenico Kirk-Giannini and Ernie Lepore. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. 120 pp. Cloth, $35.95 This short book consists of the six Locke lectures Donald Davidson delivered at Oxford in 1970, as well as an introduction by the editors, Cameron Domenico Kirk- Giannini and Ernie Lepore, who helpfully summarize the contents of each lecture and connect them to pieces that were published before or after the lectures. It is perhaps no wonder that Davidson himself chose not to see the lectures in print, for much of what they contain was eventually published, if it had not already been at the time of the lectures. But this absence of interest on Davidson's part in seeing the lectures in print does not detract from their interest for anyone eager to understand how one of the great philosophical systems of the twentieth century started developing. For the lectures contain not only an already well worked out semantic program but also the seeds of his metasemantic views and their consequences for metaphysics and epistemology. Moreover, the materials he chose not to publish, pretty obviously because he came to relinquish [End Page 590] the views they advocate, may help the reader to understand better the views he did further develop, and why he developed them, or, alternatively, they may prompt the reader to wonder what different path he may have taken, had he not relinquished those early views. The first lecture, tellingly called "Speaking the Truth," is, to my mind, the most thought-provoking one, for two reasons. First, it endorses a claim that Davidson would famously come to reject, namely, that literal meaning is essentially conventional. Second, it asserts a claim that Davidson always argued for, though this has not always been recognized by his commentators, namely, that meaning cannot be reduced to any nonsemantic notion. The lecture focuses on Davidson's semantic program and thus the idea that a theory of truth could serve as a theory of meaning for a language (here English), that is, a theory that "gives the meanings of all independently meaningful expressions on the basis of their structure." One remarkable thing about the lecture is that Davidson initially chooses (unlike what he had done in "Truth and Meaning," but anticipating "Radical Interpretation") to describe the relation between truth and meaning in terms of the relation between the conditions under which someone speaks the (literal) truth and what she means by her words. Thus, he initially chooses to describe the relation between meaning and truth by appealing to a kind of speech-act. Speaking the (literal) truth is a speech-act, he says, of a kind different from others, such as assertion; indeed, it is "unique" in that it is the only one we can tell has been performed just by knowing the language in which it has been performed, together of course with the way the world is. And it is the only one that is purely conventional, thus "specially suited to systematic study." Interestingly, aside from this blatant claim about meaning being conventional, and, to some extent, because of that claim, the lecture contains many of the claims for which Davidson subsequently further argued. Most notably, Davidson emphasizes the ideas that literal meaning is autonomous, that is, independent of illocutionary force and ulterior purposes (nonlinguistic intentions), and that illocutionary forces are not "wholly definable in terms of conventional procedures." What is also striking about the lecture is that there is no serious attempt to elucidate the nature of meaning in a foundational way. His main goal, Davidson says, is not to provide a "general" theory of meaning but to see how to construct, for a particular language, a theory that would enable us to understand all the linguistic acts, potential and real, performed by the speakers of that language. Thus, at this stage, Davidson's interests are more semantical than metasemantical. This makes it unsurprising that he takes the conventional aspect of literal meaning for granted. But then it is also unsurprising that this is...

A new solution to the regress of pure powers

Abstract I offer a new response to the regress argument against pure powers ontologies. This involves rejecting an overlooked premiss, which is that a power’s manifestation is exhaustively accounted for by the powers involved in it. Rejection of this premiss not only answers the regress argument, but also brings with it wider metaphysical consequences, including a shift away from one-category ontologies.

Theology, philosophy of biology and virology: An interdisciplinary conversation in the time of COVID-19

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) moment has stimulated multiple intellectual attempts to make sense of the pandemic. The complexity of the challenge obviously requires an interdisciplinary approach. The specific problem explored in the article is the question whether a dialogue between Virology and Philosophy of Biology on the one hand and theology on the other may open new possibilities for understanding the very nature of reality. The point of departure is that the interdisciplinary conversation is a practice of negotiation and not of addition. New developments in Virology are narrated and the conventional association of viruses as mere pathogens is countered with an appreciation of their age, abundance and evolutionary impact. The discipline of Philosophy of Biology is included in the conversation to underline the metaphysical consequences of thinking about viruses. In the theology of creation, interpretations which resist equating viruses merely as natural evil are narrated. The central proposal of the article, transpiring from the conversation, identifies the notion of equivocity as fundamental description of reality. This ontological insight may do justice to contemporary Virology and to the sense of Mystery in theology and the Christian doctrine of creation.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: The article is an explicit attempt to engage two disciplines of the natural science – Virology and Philosophy of Biology, and theology. Contemporary developments in the state of scholarship of these disciplines are mentioned. A basis in ontology is proposed for the conversation, and a central insight transpiring from the disciplines is suggested – that of equivocity. An interdisciplinary conversation may give rise to a more nuanced insight into the nature of reality.

Akiba's logic of indeterminacy

ABSTRACT A standard approach to indeterminacy treats ‘determinately’ and ‘indeterminately’ as modal operators. Determinacy behaves like necessity; indeterminacy like contingency. This raises two questions. What is the appropriate modal system for these operators? And how should we interpret that system? Ken Akiba has developed an account of ontic indeterminacy that interprets possible worlds as worldly precisifications. He argues that this account vindicates S4 as the logic of indeterminacy. In this paper I explore one significant and surprising consequence of this view. I do this in two stages. First, I prove a technical result, which I call the Infinite Indeterminacy Theorem. Roughly put, this theorem states that, at any given precisification w, either every instance of indeterminacy admits of never-ending higher-order indeterminacy, or else there's indeterminacy in an infinite amount of distinct atomic formulas. In slogan form: either all indeterminacy is infinitely ascending or else there's infinitely wide indeterminacy. Second, I unpack the metaphysical consequences of this technical result (under its intended interpretation) and assess their plausibility. I conclude that these consequences commit Akiba's theory to highly contentious – and arguably untenable – views about the metaphysics of indeterminacy and related matters.

Chances and Propensities in Evo-Devo

While the notion of chance has been central in discussions over the probabilistic nature of natural selection and genetic drift, its role in the production of variants on which populational sampling takes place has received much less philosophical attention. This article discusses the concept of chance in evolution in the light of contemporary work in evo-devo. We distinguish different levels at which randomness and chance can be defined in this context, and argue that recent research on variability and evolvability demands a causal understanding of variational probabilities under which development acquires a creative, rather than a constraining role in evolution. We then provide a propensity interpretation of variational probabilities that solves a conceptual confusion between causal properties, variational probabilities and extant variation present in the literature, and explore some metaphysical consequences that follow from our interpretation, specifically with regards to the nature of developmental types.

Idealism and the Identity Theory of Truth

AbstractIn a recent article, Hofweber (2019) presents a new, and surprising, argument for idealism. His argument is surprising because it starts with an apparently innocent premiss from the philosophy of language: that ‘that’-clauses do not refer. I do not think that Hofweber's argument works, and my first aim in this paper is to explain why. However, I agree with Hofweber that what we say about ‘that’-clauses has important metaphysical consequences. My second aim is to argue that, far from leading us into idealism, denying that ‘that’-clauses refer is the first step toward a kind of direct realism about belief.

ПОИСК ФИЛОСОФСКИХ ОСНОВ ЧЕЛОВЕЧЕСКОГО СУЩЕСТВОВАНИЯ В РОМАНЕ Р. ГОЛДШТЕЙН «ПРОБЛЕМА СООТНОШЕНИЯ ДУШИ И ТЕЛА»

The research examines the main problems raised in Goldstein’s philosophical novel. The paper aims to reveal how the creation of the characters and the development of the plot in accordance with the philosophical theories of Descartes, Malebranche and Spinoza allow the writer to explore the metaphysical and ethical consequences of following their philosophical ideas in everyday life. Applying the comparative method of analysis to the novel and the classical philosophical texts, the author of the study interprets the text of the novel, rich in symbols and intentionally foregrounded details, and discloses the artistic means used for creating the opposition of the material and the spiritual. Primarily, the confrontation becomes apparent in the image of the central character and her persistent inner conflicts between the rational and the emotional, the publicly displayed and the internal, the objective and the subjective. The main character’s failure to achieve life harmony by a mechanical combination of heterogeneous principles is viewed as a crucial detail, with the help of which the writer strives to emphasize the inconsistency of the dualistic worldview in general. One of the possible ways to overcome philosophical dualism is found in Malebranche’s philosophy, in which the gap between the material and the spiritual is bridged by their unification in the idea of the primary rational source; however, the concept does not look impeccable, with too much emphasis given to the mind at the expense of the body. The main opportunity to achieve harmony and moral progress is finally associated with Spinoza’s philosophical guidelines, which not only assert the importance of the rational cognitive principles and common sense but also demonstrate practical ways to combine freedom and care for another person, emotions and reason.

Un monstruo con cuatro cabezas que se devoran entre sí: Materialismo y Naturaleza Plástica en Ralph Cudworth

En el presente artículo estudio la asociación entre los conceptos de “materialismo” y “ateísmo” en The True Intellectual System of the Universe de Ralph Cudworth y las consecuencias metafísicas que el inglés encuentra en esas corrientes. El inglés ofrece una clasificación exhaustiva de los posibles ateísmos para mostrar sus errores y participar en la gestación de categorías que a la larga se considerarán historiográficas. En un segundo momento, presento el concepto de “naturaleza plástica” y el orden ontológico que Cudworth ofrece como el correcto, en el cual se aprecia la influencia platónica y la subordinación de lo material a lo inmaterial. Así, en su metafísica, Cudworth sostiene un dualismo porque no rechaza la existencia de la materia, sino la utilización errónea que hacen de ella los ateos.

The fundamental: Ungrounded or all-grounding?

Fundamentality plays a pivotal role in discussions of ontology, supervenience, and possibility, and other key topics in metaphysics. However, there are two different ways of characterising the fundamental: as that which is not grounded, and as that which is the ground of everything else. I show that whether these two characterisations pick out the same property turns on a principle—which I call “Dichotomy”—that is of independent interest in the theory of ground: that everything is either fully grounded or not even partially grounded. I then argue that Dichotomy fails: some facts have partial grounds that cannot be complemented to a full ground. Rejecting Dichotomy opens the door to recognising a bifurcation in our notion of fundamentality. I sketch some of the far-reaching metaphysical consequences this might have, with reference to big-picture views such as Humeanism. Since Dichotomy is entailed by the standard account of partial ground, according to which partial grounds are subpluralities of full grounds, a non-standard account is needed. In a technical “Appendix”, I show that truthmaker semantics furnishes such an account, and identify a semantic condition that corresponds to Dichotomy.

Conceiving existence: on Hume’s argument against the distinctness of the idea of existence

ABSTRACTThere are two questions concerning Hume’s doctrine of existence which have not yet found any persuasive answer: (a) What is his argument in favour of the thesis that there is no distinct idea of existence? (b) What are the semantic and metaphysical consequences of this thesis within his philosophical framework? This paper mainly aims to answer question (a). In order to do that, I will first explain why some reconstructions suggested by interpreters such as Cummins and Bricke are problematic. One of them relies on exegetically dubious presumptions; the other departs too much from Hume’s text. Then, I will offer my own reconstruction that makes maximal use of some principles which are very familiar to Hume’s readers, including the principle stating the similarity between perceptions and their images. After that, I will discuss a potential objection to my reconstruction and make a brief remark on question (b), arguing that, as opposed to numerous interpreters’ concerns, Hume’s thesis that there is no distinct idea of existence does not by itself prevent him from being able to conceive negative existential propositions.

Lewis, P. (2016). Quantum Ontology: A Guide to the Metaphysics of Quantum Mechanics. Oxford University Press. 232pp.

Quantum Ontology: A guide to the Metaphysics of Quantum Mechanics by P. Lewis, is a book with a philosophical orientation devoted to delve into the metaphysics of quantum mechanics. This book provides a comprehensive and detailed study to the various interpretations of quantum mechanics and their metaphysical consequences in relation to indeterminism, locality, free will, probability, holism and many other topics. Due to its rich philosophical perspective the author has dispensed with the mathematical formalism aiming to a rigorous conceptual approach.

On Some Troubles with the Metaphysics of Fermionic Compositions

In this paper I discuss some metaphysical consequences of an unorthodox approach to the problem of the identity and individuality of “indistinguishable” quantum particles. This approach is based on the assumption that the only admissible way of individuating separate components of a given system is with the help of the permutation-invariant qualitative properties of the total system. Such a method of individuation, when applied to fermionic compositions occupying so-called GMW-nonentangled states, yields highly implausible consequences regarding the number of distinct components of a given composite system. I specify the problem (which I call the problem of fermionic inflation) in detail, and I consider several strategies of solving it. The preferred solution of the problem is based on the premise that spatial location should play a privileged role in identifying and making reference to quantum-mechanical systems.

Super-relationism: combining eliminativism about objects and relationism about spacetime

I will introduce and motivate eliminativist super-relationism. This is the conjunction of relationism about spacetime and eliminativism about material objects. According to the view, the universe is a big collection of spatio–temporal relations and natural properties, and no substance (material or spatio–temporal) exists in it. The view is original since eliminativism about material objects, when understood as including not only ordinary objects like tables or chairs but also physical particles, is generally taken to imply substantivalism about spacetime: if properties are directly instantiated by spacetime without the mediation of material objects, then, surely, spacetime has to be a substance. After introducing briefly the two debates about spacetime (Sect. 1) and material objects (Sect. 2), I will present Schaffer’s super-substantivalism (Sect. 3), the conjunction of substantivalism about spacetime and eliminativism about material objects at the fundamental level. I shall then expose and discuss the assumption from which the implication from eliminativism to substantivalism is drawn, and discuss the compatibility of eliminativism with relationism: if spacetime is not a substance, and if material objects are not real, how are we to understand the instantiation of properties (Sect. 4)? And what are the relata of spatio–temporal relations (Sect. 5)? I then show that each argument in favor of super-substantivalism offered by Schaffer also holds for super-relationism (Sect. 6) and examine several metaphysical consequences of the view (Sect. 7). I conclude that both super-substantivalism and super-relationism are compatible with Schaffer’s priority monism (Sect. 8).

What is mereological harmony?

Say that mereological harmony is the view that there is at least some mirroring between the mereological structure of material objects and the mereological structure of their locations: each, in some way, mirrors the other. As it turns out, there is a confusing array of systems of harmony available to the substantivalist. In this paper, I attempt to bring some order to these systems. I explore some systems found in the literature, as well as some natural systems which haven’t been discussed. Along the way, I explore a number of metaphysical consequences of the different systems of harmony. The paper ends with a roadmap of possible views for the substantivalist.