In this paper reasons are given for accepting a paradigmatically ‘metaphysical’ thesis called Unrestricted Mereological Composition, or something close to it. These reasons are drawn from thoroughly empirical considerations that played a significant role in the history of physical sciences, particularly in the emergence of the Newtonian laws of motion. Roughly: this metaphysical thesis is supported by a principle of ‘inference to the best explanation’ of observations of the very same kind that paradigmatically furnish evidence supporting or undermining empirical theories (...) in physics. There are methodological morals in metaphilosophy to be drawn from this historical example – blurring the distinction that has been traditionally drawn between ‘metaphysical’ theses and ‘empirical’ hypotheses. (shrink)

Challenging the myth that mathematical objects can be defined into existence, Bigelow here employs Armstrong's metaphysical materialism to cast new light on mathematics. He identifies natural, real, and imaginary numbers and sets with specified physical properties and relations and, by so doing, draws mathematics back from its sterile, abstract exile into the midst of the physical world.

This book espouses a theory of scientific realism in which due weight is given to mathematics and logic. The authors argue that mathematics can be understood realistically if it is seen to be the study of universals, of properties and relations, of patterns and structures, the kinds of things which can be in several places at once. Taking this kind of scientific platonism as their point of departure, they show how the theory of universals can account for probability, laws of (...) nature, causation and explanation, and explore the consequences in all these fields. This will be an important book for all philosophers of science, logicians and metaphysicians, and their graduate students. The readership will also include those outside philosophy interested in the interrelationship of philosophy and science. (shrink)

This book espouses an innovative theory of scientific realism in which due weight is given to mathematics and logic. The authors argue that mathematics can be understood realistically if it is seen to be the study of universals, of properties and relations, of patterns and structures, the kinds of things which can be in several places at once. Taking this kind of scientific platonism as their point of departure, they show how the theory of universals can account for probability, laws (...) of nature, causation, and explanation, and explore the consequences in all these fields. This will be an important book for all philosophers of science, logicians, and metaphysicians, and their graduate students. The readership will also include those outside philosophy interested in the interrelationship of philosophy and science. (shrink)

ABSTRACT We argue that in societies like our own the prevailing view that parents have both special responsibilities for and special rights over their children fails to give a proper understanding of the autonomy both of parents and of children. It is our claim that there is a logical priority of the separable interests of a child over the autonomy of its parents in the fulfilment of their special responsibilities for and the exercise of their special rights over their children. (...) However, we believe that in acknowledging the child as a distinct locus of interests appropriate weight can still be given to parental autonomy. In particular, since raising a child is a long‐term commitment which plays a central role in the life‐plans of many adults it will be a legitimate exercise of an adult's autonomy strongly to influence the future of any children involved in such a plan. Such influence will be quite separate from paternalistic concern for those children. But the logical priority of the child's interests will at the same time show why parents are not entitled to behave proprietorially toward their children, even when paternalistic concern is called for. (shrink)

Humean supervenience is the doctrine that there are no necessary connections in the world. David Lewis identifies one big bad bug to the programme of providing Humean analyses for apparently non-Humean features of the world. The bug is chance. We put the bug under the microscope, and conclude that chance is no special problem for the Humean.

Traditionally, forces are causes of a special sort. Forces have been conceived to be the direct or immediate causes of things. Other sorts of causes act indirectly by producing forces which are transmitted in various ways to produce various effects. However, forces are supposed to act directly without the mediation of anything else. But forces, so conceived, appear to be occult. They are mysterious, because we have no clear conception of what they are, as opposed to what they are postulated (...) to do; and they seem to be hidden from direct observations. There is, therefore, strong initial motivation for trying to eliminate forces from physics. Furthermore, as we shall explain, powerful arguments can be mounted to show that theories with forces can always be recast as theories without them. Hence it seems that forces should be eliminated, in the interests of simplicity. We argue, however, that forces should not be eliminated--just differently construed. For the effect of elimination is to leave us without any adequate account of the causal relationships forces were postulated to explain. And this would remain the case, even if forces could be identified with some merely dispositional properties of physical systems. In our view, forces are species of the causal relation itself, and as such have a different ontological status from the sorts of entities normally considered to be related as causes to effects. (shrink)

The authors argue, against Frank Jackson, that weakness (and strength) of will involves higher-order mental states. The authors hold that this is compatible with a decision-theoretic belief-desire psychology of human action.

Vectors, we will argue, are not just mathematical abstractions. They are also physical properties--universals. What make them distinctive are the rich and varied essences of these universals, and the complex pattern of internal relations which hold amongst them.

The world contains not only causes and effects, but also causal relations holding between causes and effects. Because causal relations enter into the structure of the world, their presence has various modal and probabilistic consequences. Causation and “necessary and sufficient conditions” do often go hand in hand. Causation, however, is a robust ingredient within the world itself, whereas modalities and probabilities supervene on the nature of the world as a whole, and on the resulting relations between one possible world and (...) others. Some modalities, therefore, are essentially causal; but causation is not essentially modal.19. (shrink)

This paper concerns the semantics of belief-sentences. I pass over ontologically lavish theories which appeal to impossible worlds, or other points of reference which contain more than possible worlds. I then refute ontologically stingy, quotational theories. My own theory employs the techniques of possible worlds semantics to elaborate a Fregean analysis of belief-sentences. In a belief-sentence, the embedded clause does not have its usual reference, but refers rather to its own semantic structure. I show how this theory can accommodate quantification (...) into belief-contexts. I close with skirmishes against the threat posed by the Liar Paradox. (shrink)

Given Quine's views on philosophical methodology, he should not have taken the axioms of classical mereology to be "self-evident", or "analytic"; but rather, he should have set out to justify them by what might be broadly called an "inference to the best explanation". He does very little to this end. In particular, he does little to examine alternative theories, to see if there might be anything they could explain better than classical mereology can. I argue that there is something important (...) that needs to be explained, namely, the way that properties "travel around in clusters" (eg. we often know that "when and where there is something with such-and-such property, there is also something with so-and-so other property", and so on). I argue that these clusterings of properties can be given various subtle (broadly "commonsense") explanations using a version of mereology that denies the classical axiom of "extensionality" (that is, denying that two distinct things must have distinct parts). I offer a challenge to the Quinean metaphysics: to show that these "non-extensional" explanations can be replaced by better explanations that use only classical, extensional mereology and set theory. (shrink)

Frank Jackson argued, in an astronomically frequently cited paper on 'Epiphenomenal qualia '[Jackson 1982 that materialism must be mistaken. His argument is called the knowledge argument. Over the years since he published that paper, he gradually came to the conviction that the conclusion of the knowledge argument must be mistaken. Yet he long remained totally unconvinced by any of the very numerous published attempts to explain where his knowledge argument had gone astray. Eventually, Jackson did publish a diagnosis of the (...) reasons why, he now thinks, his knowledge argument against materialism fails to prove the falsity of materialism [Jackson 2005. He argues that you can block the knowledge argument against materialism - but only if you tie yourself to a dubious doctrine called representationalism. We argue that the knowledge argument fails as a refutation of either representational or nonrepresentational materialism. It does, however, furnish both materialists and dualists with a successful argument for the existence of distinctively first-person modes of acquaintance with mental states. Jackson's argument does not refute materialism: but it does bring to the surface significant features of thought and experience, which many dualists have sensed, and most materialists have missed. (shrink)

There is an important family of philosophical positions which deserve the name “realism”, and there is a natural diagnosis of what all these positions share in common. There is also an important family of philosophical positions which deserve the name “antirealism”, and there is a natural diagnosis of what all these positions share in common. These two families are feuding, but the nature of the conflict between them is far from clear. When we extract the definition which realists would give (...) for their position, and the definition antirealists would give for their position, we find that the antirealists do not see themselves as denying quite the same thing that the realists see themselves as asserting. I will begin by discussing the self-definition of some realists. (shrink)

There is an important family of philosophical positions which deserve the name “realism”, and there is a natural diagnosis of what all these positions share in common. There is also an important family of philosophical positions which deserve the name “antirealism”, and there is a natural diagnosis of what all these positions share in common. These two families are feuding, but the nature of the conflict between them is far from clear. When we extract the definition which realists would give (...) for their position, and the definition antirealists would give for their position, we find that the antirealists do not see themselves as denying quite the same thing that the realists see themselves as asserting. I will begin by discussing the self-definition of some realists. (shrink)

Throughout his career, Barry Taylor argued for several key theses in semantics and in epistemology. He calls these theses “Antirealism”. I will suggest, however, that a “Realist” could, and perhaps should, accept these semantic and epistemic theses. Doing so would not, I argue, conflict with the core this of philosophical Realism, properly so-called, since this thesis is not semantic or epistemological, but “ontological”. A Realist about (say) badgers is just someone who believes that there are badgers. And Taylor’s semantic and (...) epistemological theses are not intended to entail any denial that there are (say) badgers. However, Taylor argues that the core theses of “realism” cannot be any such merely ontological theses. I will defend a simplistic, “ontological” understanding of “realism” against Taylor’s arguments. Taylor also usefully identifies something that others have called “Common-sense Realism”. But this so-called “Realism”, Taylor argues, is not properly described as any kind of “realism” at all – because it does not affirm Taylor’s key theses in semantics and epistemology. Yet I say it is realism – provided only that it does not also take a perverse stand on a realist’s “Euthyphro” question: Do (say) badgers exist because our ways of talking and knowing would ideally converge on an affirmation of the sentence “Badgers exist”? Isn’t it, rather, the case that, insofar as our ways of talking and knowing would ideally converge on an affirmation of the sentence “Badgers exist”, this is so at least in part because badgers exist? (shrink)

Few people can have had many thrills quite like the one Hiram Bingham had when he discovered ruins of what had once been an Incan city, unexpectedly and precariously perched on the knife-edge of a ridge joining two peaks, Machu Picchu and Huayna Picchu, high in the Andes Mountain Range in Peru. He was excited, but also mystified. Was it an abandoned Incan city – or a monastery? or a fortress? or a “University of Idolatry”, as some later suggested? In (...) 1911, Bingham was not in a position to know quite what it was that he had discovered. There were precious few clues on the site, apart from the snugly fitted, massive stones that manifestly had once constituted walls, lanes, stairways, aqueducts, drains, and other constructions of monumental architecture. These stone ruins can be reached by a three days’ walk along Incan trails that follow high ridges, winding northwest from the ancient Incan capital city, Cuzco. But Bingham did not follow the high trails of the Incas. Being an explorer of European descent, he followed rivers that plunged, at first westwards, down steep, narrow valleys, but destined eventually to feed into the Amazon Basin, in the jungles far away to the northeast, and to empty into the Atlantic Ocean. From the jungles of the valley floor, Bingham climbed up to these ruins on a ridge far above him. When he reached the ridge and saw the secret stones there, he was elated, and intrigued. Many years later, comic books appeared with a dashing hero, “Indiana Jones”, an archaeologist from an American University, who was in some ways rather like Bingham; and later, these comics were translated into a series of Hollywood movies. The comics and movies no doubt leave out many of the more tedious tasks required of 3 archaeologists in their daily work – but they do convey some giddy feelings, and wild fantasies, a little like those that might sometimes buzz about inside an explorer’s head, on discovering a mysterious site like Machu Picchu. Before discovering these ruins, Bingham had sifted through written records, seeking clues to the locations of lost Incan cities, and found none mentioning this place. (shrink)