Debunking Arguments about Metaphysics

The question of transtemporal identity of objects in general and persons in particular is an important issue in both philosophy and psychology. While the focus of philosophers traditionally was on questions of the nature of identity relation and criteria that allow to settle ontological issues about identity, psychologists are mostly concerned with how people think about identity, and how they track identity of objects and people through time. In this article, we critically engage with widespread use of inferring folk judgments (...) of identity from study participants’ use of proper names in response to experimental vignettes. We provide reasons to doubt that using this method one can reliably infer judgments of numerical identity over time and transformations. We also critically examine allegedly-Kripkean justification of this method and find it lacking. Merely assuming that names are rigid designators will not help. A study participant’s use of proper names can be taken to track the participant’s identity judgments only if supported by the participant’s belief that names used in the scenario are used rigidly. (shrink)

Eine Rezension des Buches "Every Thing Must Go - Metaphysics Naturalized" von James Ladyman und Don Ross.

Conflicts between our best philosophical theories (BPTs) and our common beliefs are widespread. For example, if eliminativism is our BPT, then our BPT conflicts with common beliefs about the existence of middle-sized composite artifacts. “Compatibilism” is the name usually given to a theoretical attitude, according to which, in the case of a conflict between BPT and a common belief P, we should try to find a reconciliation. The two major variants of compatibilism are “semantic compatibilism” (SC) and “cognitive compatibilism” (CC). (...) According to SC, to be reconciled with BPT is the “real” version of the content of our ordinary assertions; according to CC, to be reconciled with BPT is the mental state we are “really” in while thinking P. In this paper, we present a new kind of compatibilism, epistemic compatibilism (EC). According to EC, to be reconciled with BPT is the explanation of why we believe that P. After presenting EC, we will argue that it fares better than SC and CC for at least two related reasons: EC does not rely on any form of what we call semantic or cognitive “recarving”; thus, EC avoids some sceptical problems that aect the other two versions of compatibilism. (shrink)

Logical monism is the view that there is ‘One True Logic’. This is the default position, against which pluralists react. If there were not ‘One True Logic’, it is hard to see how there could be one true theory of anything. A theory is closed under a logic! But what is logical monism? In this article, I consider semantic, logical, modal, scientific, and metaphysical proposals. I argue that, on no ‘factualist’ analysis (according to which ‘there is One True Logic’ expresses (...) a factual claim, rather than an attitude like approval), does the doctrine have both metaphysical and methodological import. Metaphysically, logics abound. Methodologically, what to infer from what is not settled by the facts, even the normative ones. I conclude that the only interesting sense in which there could be One True Logic is noncognitive. The same may be true of monism about normative areas, like moral, epistemic, and prudential ones, generally. (shrink)

Josh Weisberg develops a form of physicalism which attempts to (a) show why there is no ultima facie explanatory gap between consciousness and the physical world, while (b) making us see why there nonetheless is a prima facie explanatory gap. The former constitutes a solution to the problem of consciousness, the latter a proposal regarding the meta-problem of consciousness (the problem, roughly, of understanding why there is a problem of consciousness to begin with). Together, they are intended to produce a (...) debunking explanation of the explanatory gap, and a comprehensive approach to the philosophical puzzlement generated by the existence of consciousness in an otherwise purely physical world. I will argue that Weisberg-physicalism is less successful on the meta-problem of consciousness than on the first-order problem and will sketch an alternative approach, one that traces the problem of consciousness back to the structure of our folk ontology. (shrink)

Empirical investigation of the conditions under which people prefer, or disprefer, causal explanation, has suggested to many that our judgements about what causally explains what are context sensitive in a number of ways. This has led many to suppose that whether or not a causal explanation obtains depends on various contextual factors, and that said explanations can obtain in one context, and not in another: they are both subjective and agent-relative. Surprisingly, most accounts of metaphysical explanation suppose there to be (...) no psychological, epistemic, or more broadly contextual, aspect to metaphysical explanation. Recently this approach has come under fire from those who argue that since metaphysical explanations are explanations, we should expect them to be both subjective and agent-relative. To date, however, there is no evidence about the conditions under which we make judgements about what metaphysically explains what. In what follows we remedy this. We find that judgements about what metaphysically explains what are indeed context sensitive. We then reflect on the implications of this discovery for extant accounts of metaphysical explanation. (shrink)

Robustly realistic metaphysical readings of Kant’s mature views have become popular in recent years, largely because of the apparent coherence of applying unschematized categories like that of causation to things in themselves. There is, however, an overlooked problem that arises even for robust realist readings that privilege unschematized categories. The problem is that Kant provides all the elements for what is now called a ‘debunking explanation’ of metaphysical representations of things in themselves. His account of the categories as arising from (...) mere forms of judgment, and being applied primarily for the unity of consciousness, is detached from the issue of whether there are causes among things in themselves. This detachment seems to imply that it would be a huge coincidence if unschematized categories corresponded to any such causes. After making this argument, using the category of causation as my central case, I consider three potential responses: that Kant’s account implicitly appeals to things in themselves’ causation, that Kant has a separate account of non-coincidental representation, and that Kant’s account is merely incomplete in a way that poses no debunking threat. None of these responses, I argue, are successful, so I conclude that either robustly realistic metaphysical readings are mistaken, or there is internal incoherence in Kant’s views. (shrink)

We have a mentalistic view of objects. This is due to the interdependence of folk psychology and folk physics, where these are interconnected by what I call Teleological Commingling. When considering events that don’t involve agents, we naturally default to tracking intentions, goal-directed processes, despite the fact that agents aren’t involved. We have a deep-seated intentionality bias which is the result of the pervasive detection of agency cues, such as order or non-randomness. And this gives rise to the Agentive Worldview: (...) we view nature as a whole as being infused with agency and purpose. Teleological Commingling and the Agentive Worldview it gives rise to are at the core of our conception of objects. I maintain that the ordinary view of material objects is rooted in an implicit, false theory. It should be given no weight in metaphysical debates about the nature of material objects. And this problematizes the central methodological assumption that metaphysical theories of material objects should be beholden to common sense. (shrink)

An encyclopedia entry which covers various revisionary conceptions of which macroscopic objects there are, and the puzzles and arguments that motivate these conceptions: sorites arguments, the argument from vagueness, the puzzles of material constitution, arguments against indeterminate identity, arguments from arbitrariness, debunking arguments, the overdetermination argument, and the problem of the many.

The neo-Aristotelian conception of essence has gained prominence in recent analytic metaphysics. I will present an epistemic problem for such essentialists. The challenge centers on the following question: assuming there are essence-facts, what relationship between essence-facts and essence-attitudes explains why those attitudes’ correctness is not coincidental? It is a debunking challenge—what I call the explanatory challenge. The explanatory challenge is distinctive for at least three reasons: (i) it does not centrally concern the domain in question containing abstract objects, or having (...) evolutionary etiologies, (ii) it targets neo-Aristotelian essentialism, not merely essentialism insofar as it is modally analyzable, and (iii) the challenge comes in three grades—weak, moderate, and strong. Although debunking challenges do not pose a problem unique to essentialism, they have yet to be explicitly applied to essentialism in detail. I aim to redress this omission here. I begin by explaining the challenge’s grades, paying particular attention to a species of the moderate grade, which generates a more specific challenge I call the deflationary challenge. Then, I’ll survey David Oderberg’s and E.J. Lowe’s epistemologies of essence. I’ll argue that their accounts fail the weak challenge and that this leaves them especially vulnerable to the moderate challenge, where this involves positive reason to think essence-facts do not, in fact, play an explanatory role in forming one's essence-attitudes. Lastly, I’ll propose that Amie Thomasson’s deflationary account of identity-conditions might offer a deflationary challenge for essentialism. (shrink)

The goal of the debunking social constructionist is to reveal as social kinds that are widely held to be natural (or, in some cases, to reveal as more deeply social kinds that are already widely recognized to be social). The prominent approach to such debunking has been to make a case for thinking that the individuation conditions for membership in the kinds in question are in fact social (or in fact more deeply social than has previously been recognized). In this (...) paper, I argue that adopting the prominent approach to debunking prevents one from answering the implicit question being posed by the debunker, namely, the question of how a plausibly socially constituted kind can come to appear more natural than it in fact is. I then sketch an alternative way of understanding social kinds that enables us to answer the appearance question while remaining neutral on the nature of social kinds. In particular, I argue that the mechanism of covert normativity explains causally the persistence of the social kinds of interest to the debunker, and so also provides an answer to the appearance question. (shrink)

One prominent intellectualist position in the debate on the nature of skill, famously defended by Stanley and Williamson (2001; 2017), claims that skill and knowing-how are reducible to knowledgethat. To defend this claim, Stanley and Williamson argue that skill and knowledge-that develop in a sufficiently similar way through different learning stages. In this paper we offer a novel argument to reject this version of intellectualism on methodological, descriptive, and conceptual grounds. We do so by drawing on the work of Heidegger, (...) Dreyfus, and Ryle on skill. We first offer a descriptive account of skilful action based on the work developed by these authors, and we then move on to show that skill and knowledge-that exhibit significant differences. First, while skills cannot be imparted merely linguistically, some forms of knowledge-that can be exclusively imparted and learned verbally. Second, weshow that the temporal learning curves of skill and knowledge-that are importantly different: the former usually requires a more or less extensive training process, whereas the latter may be acquired in a relatively sudden fashion. Finally, we show that, while the structure of most forms of knowledge-that is aggregative, the structure of skilful understanding is dynamic and holistic, which entails that prior skill stages cannot be retrieved and re-enacted at will. (shrink)

An application of some recent work on the science of generic thought.

An application of some recent work on the science of generic thought.

Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman and others have recently advanced an evolutionary debunking argument aimed at our perceptual beliefs in ordinary objects, based on the Interface Theory of Perception. In contrast with most recent criticisms of Interface Theory, which have targeted its characterizations of perception and veridicality, I raise a broad dialectical problem for Hoffman’s debunking argument. I show that the argument is self-defeating, and that responding to this problem by appealing to Universal Darwinism leads to a fatal dilemma for the (...) view. (shrink)

When and why does awareness of a belief's genealogy render it irrational to continue holding that belief? According to explanationism, awareness of a belief’s genealogy gives rise to an epistemic defeater when and because it reveals that the belief is not explanatorily connected to the relevant worldly facts. I argue that an influential recent version of explanationism, due to Korman and Locke, incorrectly implies that it is not rationally permissible to adopt a “sparse” ontology of worldly facts or states of (...) affairs. I then propose a new explanationist account of genealogical defeat capable of accommodating rational belief in ontological sparsity. According to my account, awareness of a belief’s genealogy gives rise to a defeater when and because it reveals that the belief is not explanatorily connected to its truthmaker. (shrink)

Craig Callender’s What Makes Time Special? (OUP 2017) advocates and practices an innovative, thoroughly interdisciplinary approach to philosophical questions about time and temporal features of our lives. Grappling with it is of intrinsic philosophical interest; it is also part of responding to the methodological invitation the book issues to philosophers of time. This paper is motivated by the wish to clarify WMTS’s philosophical underpinnings. The main claim of the paper is that WMTS relies on an ambiguity between rejecting the A-theory (...) versus B-theory debate, and endorsing a position within that debate. This ambiguity leads to a somewhat unstable position on how a key feature of manifest time, namely our sense of time as flowing, arises from physical time. The paper ends with a suggestion for how to resolve the ambiguity, in a way that is in line with the gist of Callender’s overall vision for the field. (shrink)

Most people believe that consciousness is real. But illusionists say it isn’t—they say consciousness is an illusion. One common illusionist strategy for defending their view involves a debunking argument. They explain why people _believe_ that consciousness exists in a way that doesn’t imply that it _does_ exist; and, in so doing, they aim to show that that belief is unjustified. In this paper I argue that we can know consciousness exists even if these debunking arguments are sound. To do this, (...) I draw on the claim that some knowledge is constituted, not by beliefs in propositions, but by awareness of properties and objects. Then I argue that accepting this claim allows us to evade illusionists’ debunking arguments by allowing us to hold that our knowledge of consciousness does not depend solely on potentially debunked _beliefs_ in consciousness. Finally, while considering potential illusionist responses, I suggest that my strategy also yields a plausible account of our most basic knowledge of consciousness and an explanation for why so few people accept illusionism even when they have (or had) no decisive reply to illusionists’ arguments. (shrink)

How should we give accounts of scientific modal relations? According to the Humean, we should do so by considering the role of such relations in our lives and scientific theorizing. For example, to give a Humean account of chance, we need to identity a non-modal relation that can play the ‘role’ of chance—typically that of guiding credences and scientifically explaining events. Defenders of Humean accounts claim to be uniquely well placed to meet this aim. Humean chances are objective, and so (...) suitable for explaining. Humean chances reduce to patterns in actual events in a way that limits the possible divergence between relative frequencies and chances. So, they argue, Humean chances can uniquely be shown to satisfy chance−credence principles. I’ll argue that Humeans have no special advantage. When used in scientific contexts, Humean chances must be allowed to diverge from the relative frequencies. So, when considering the scientific question of whether agents who align their credences to the chances will do well, it is merely probable that they will. This scientific use of chance undercuts the Humean’s claimed advantage over their rivals. This undercutting also points to a deeper tension in Humeanism: Humeans must either give up the aim of recovering scientific practice, or live with a disunity between science and metaphysics. While a focus on function is laudable, the motivation for being Humean must come from elsewhere. (shrink)

Presentism is, roughly, the ontological view that only the present exists. Among the philosophers engaged in the metaphysics of time there is wide agreement that presentism is intuitive (or commonsensical) and that its intuitiveness counts as evidence in its favour. My contribution has two purposes: first, defending the view that presentism is intuitive from some recent criticisms; second, putting forth a genealogical (or debunking) argument aimed at depriving presentism’s intuitiveness of the evidential value commonly granted to it.

Debunking arguments aim to undermine common sense beliefs by showing that they are not explanatorily or causally linked to the entities they are purportedly about. Rarely are facts about the aetiology of common sense beliefs invoked for the opposite aim, that is, to support the reality of entities that furnish our manifest image of the world. Here I undertake this sort of un-debunking project. My focus is on the metaphysics of ordinary physical objects. I use the view of perception as (...) approximate Bayesian inference to show how representations of ordinary objects can be extracted from sensory input in a rational and truth-tracking manner. Drawing an analogy between perception construed as Bayesian hypothesis testing and scientific inquiry, I sketch out how some of the intuitions that traditionally inspired arguments for scientific realism also find application with regards to proverbial tables and chairs. (shrink)

Amie Thomasson’s work provides numerous ways to rethink and improve our approach to metaphysics. This chapter is my attempt to begin to sketch why I still think the easy approach leaves room for substantive metaphysical work, and why I do not think that metaphysics need rely on any ‘epistemically metaphysical’ knowledge. After distinguishing two possible forms of deflationism, I argue that the easy ontologist needs to accept (implicitly or explicitly) that there are worldly constraints on what sorts of entities could (...) exist, and could co-exist. I argue this leaves room for a substantive role for metaphysics if (following the work of E.J. Lowe) we take metaphysics to be concerned with the possible ways that reality could be. I explain how this conception does not need to appeal to any ‘epistemically metaphysical’ knowledge, and need only make use of conceptual and/or empirical means to arrive at views on what could exist (and co-exist). Thus, the answer I propose to the question posed in the title, at least in my view, is no-one. Or, at least, no-one should be afraid of conceptual analysis. Not even metaphysicians. (shrink)

Genealogies of belief have dominated recent philosophical discussions of genealogical debunking at the expense of genealogies of concepts, which has in turn focused attention on genealogical debunking in an epistemological key. As I argue in this paper, however, this double focus encourages an overly narrow understanding of genealogical debunking. First, not all genealogical debunking can be reduced to the debunking of beliefs—concepts can be debunked without debunking any particular belief, just as beliefs can be debunked without debunking the concepts in (...) terms of which they are articulated. Second, not all genealogical debunking is epistemological debunking. Focusing on concepts rather than beliefs brings distinct forms of genealogical debunking to the fore that cannot be comprehensively captured in terms of epistemological debunking. We thus need a broader understanding of genealogical debunking, which encompasses not just epistemological debunking, but also what I shall refer to as metaphysical debunking and ethical debunking. (shrink)

Explanatory Optimism about the Hard Problem of Consciousness argues that despite the worries of explanatory pessimists, consciousness can be fully explained in “easy” scientific terms. The widespread intuition that consciousness poses a hard problem is plausibly based on how consciousness appears to us in first-person access. The book offers a debunking argument to undercut the justificatory link between the first-person appearances and our hard problem intuitions. -/- The key step in the debunking argument involves the development and defense of an (...) empirical model of first-person access: Automated Compression Theory (ACT). ACT holds that first-person access to consciousness is accomplished by automated accessing of compressed sensory information. Because of the distorting nature of this compressed access, it seems to subjects that consciousness possesses “exceptional” properties—properties leading to the hard problem—even though no such properties are present. If there are no exceptional properties to explain, then an explanation in easy terms can fully account for conscious experience. The book presents a range of empirical evidence for ACT and concludes that the burden of proof is now on the pessimists to show why we shouldn’t be optimistic about explaining consciousness. (shrink)

In the following I show that Hubert Dreyfus’ account of skill rests on a misguided interpretation of Martin Heidegger’s work on understanding in Being and Time. Dreyfus separates understanding according to the analytic philosophical concept pair, so called ‘know-how’ and ‘knowledge-that’, that corresponds for him to the pragmatist differentiation between skillful acting and theoretical conceptual thinking. Contrary to that, Heidegger argues that only one form of understanding exists that is neither captured by ‘know-how’, ‘knowledge-that’ or a combination of both. Instead (...) of presupposing two radically different ways to engage with the world, one practical-agential, the other theoretical-conceptual, Heidegger shows that all genuine forms of comportments rest on the same form of understanding that exhibits the highest degree of intelligibility when we deal with the world ordinarily. The Heideggerian account therefore comes without the many dichotomies so often criticized in the literature on skill and understanding, and offers a radically different view of world disclosure and of what we do when we ‘theorize’. (shrink)

You see a cherry and you experience it as red. A textbook explanation for why you have this sort of experience is going to cite such things as the cherry’s chemical surface properties and the distinctive mixture wavelengths of light it is disposed to reflect. What does not show up in this explanation is the redness of the cherry. Many allege that the availability of color-free explanations of color experience somehow calls into question our beliefs about the colors of objects (...) around us. We explore how such explanations are supposed to undermine color beliefs, and in particular whether evolutionary considerations have any special role to play. (shrink)

This paper empirically investigates the contention that the folk concept of time is a functional concept: a concept according to which time is whatever plays a certain functional role or roles. This hypothesis could explain why, in previous research, surprisingly large percentages of participants judge that there is time at worlds that contain no one-dimensional substructure of ordered instants. If it seems to participants that even in those worlds the relevant functional role is played, then this could explain why they (...) judge that there is time in those worlds. While our experiment supported the finding that participants are reticent to judge that there is no time, actually, we found no evidence that this is because they deploy a functionalist concept, at least of the kind proposed in recent research. Our findings are, however, consistent with the folk deploying a much more minimal functionalist concept according to which time is just whatever it is—regardless of its nature—that plays the role of grounding our temporal phenomenology. (shrink)

Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in evolutionary debunking arguments directed against certain types of belief, particularly moral and religious beliefs. According to those arguments, the evolutionary origins of the cognitive mechanisms that produce the targeted beliefs render these beliefs epistemically unjustified. The reason is that natural selection cares for reproduction and survival rather than truth, and false beliefs can in principle be as evolutionarily advantageous as true beliefs. The present volume brings together fourteen essays that examine evolutionary (...) debunking arguments not only in ethics and philosophy of religion, but also in philosophy of mathematics, metaphysics, and epistemology. The essays move forward research on those arguments by shedding fresh light on old problems and proposing new lines of inquiry. The book will appeal to scholars and graduate students interested in the possible skeptical implications of evolutionary theory in any of the above domains. (shrink)

Eliminativists sometimes invoke evolutionary debunking arguments against ordinary object beliefs, either to help them establish object skepticism or to soften the appeal of commonsense ontology. I argue that object debunkers face a self-defeat problem: their conclusion undermines the scientific support for one of their premises, because evolutionary biology depends on our object beliefs. Using work on reductionism and multiple realizability from the philosophy of science, I argue that it will not suffice for an eliminativist debunker to simply appeal to some (...) object-free surrogate theory of evolution that results from converting any scientific proposition about some object K into a proposition about simples arranged K-wise. In the process, I examine some hazards peculiar to eliminative reductions of scientific theories, and propose a trilemma for eliminativists who attempt to recoup generality for ontologically sparse reducing theories by appealing to pluralities of simples arranged K-wise. The paper is intended to define and develop the object debunker’s self-defeat problem for further study, and to clarify some of the ways sparse and abundant ontologies interact with scientific theory. (shrink)

The reliability challenge to ontology can be summarized as the complaint that no satisfying explanation is available of how one can have true ontological beliefs, given that the relevant belief-forming methods are noncausal (for example, not perception based or memory based). This paper first presents a version of the reliability challenge against realist approaches to ontology, put forward by Jared Warren. It then explores a response to the challenge on behalf of the realist that appeals to the use of abduction. (...) This response does not satisfactorily deal with the reliability challenge, though, and even leads to a further epistemic impasse. At this point, a version of ontological pluralism is presented, according to which all the competing theories in a certain ontological dispute can be true—in a sense of “true” to be articulated. The final step shows how this version of pluralism deals with the reliability challenge, especially with the complaint that we lack an explanation for our true ontological beliefs. (shrink)

Some philosophers accept what I call minimalist views about composition. They either deny that composition ever occurs, or they only allow that composition occurs when some things are taken up into a life. While minimalists often take their views to be somewhat revisionary, they usually want to distinguish their views from truly radical views such as the view that there is no external world at all. They often do this by noting that, although they don’t believe that there are tables, (...) chairs, or planets, they do believe that there are mereological simples arranged tablewise, chairwise, and planetwise. In this paper, I appeal to the nature of perceptual experience to present a problem for this move. I contend that, given some plausible assumptions, compositional minimalists cannot consistently maintain that they are justified in their minimalism and justified in believing propositions about the arrangements of mereological simples. I will argue that this commits such minimalists to external world skepticism. (shrink)

In a series of recent papers, David Rose and Jonathan Schaffer use a number of experiments to show that folk intuitions about composition and persistence are driven by pre-scientific teleological tendencies. They argue that these intuitions are fit for debunking and that the playing field for competing accounts of composition and persistence should therefore be considered even: no view draws more support from folk intuitions than its rivals, and the choice between them should be made exclusively on the basis of (...) theoretical considerations. In this paper I argue that Rose and Schaffer draw the wrong conclusion from their own findings, which should instead push us toward sparse views about composition and persistence. Most metaphysicians (including Schaffer himself, and arguably Rose too) should be worried by this result, since they hold views that are flatly incompatible with it. (shrink)

Revisionary ontologies seem to go against our common sense convictions about which material objects exist. These views face the so-called Problem of Reasonableness: they have to explain why reasonable people don’t seem to accept the true ontology. Most approaches to this problem treat the mismatch between the ontological truth and ordinary belief as superficial or not even real. By contrast, I propose what I call the “uncompromising solution”. First, I argue that our beliefs about material objects were influenced by evolutionary (...) forces that were independent of the ontological truth. Second, I draw an analogy between the Problem of Reasonableness and the New Evil Demon Problem and argue that the revisionary ontologist can always find a positive epistemic status to characterize ordinary people’s beliefs about material objects. Finally, I address the worry that the evolutionary component of my story also threatens to undermine the best arguments for revisionary ontologies. (shrink)

Imagination is a source of evidence for objective modality. It is through this epistemic connection that the idea of modality first gains traction in our intellectual life. A proper theory of modality should be able to explain our imagination’s modal epistemic behaviors. This chapter highlights a peculiar asymmetry regarding epistemic defeat for imagination-based modal justification. Whereas imagination-based evidence for possibility cannot be undermined by information about the causal origin of our imaginings, unimaginability-based evidence for impossibility can be undermined by information (...) about the causal origin of the unimaginability. It is argued that an acceptance of S4 over S5 as the true logic for objective modality best explains this epistemic asymmetry. (shrink)

We investigated, experimentally, the contention that the folk view, or naïve theory, of time, amongst the population we investigated is dynamical. We found that amongst that population, ~ 70% have an extant theory of time that is more similar to a dynamical than a non-dynamical theory, and ~ 70% of those who deploy a naïve theory of time deploy a naïve theory that is more similar to a dynamical than a non-dynamical theory. Interestingly, while we found stable results across our (...) two experiments regarding the percentage of participants that have a dynamical or non-dynamical extant theory of time, we did not find such stability regarding which particular dynamical or non-dynamical theory of time they take to be most similar to our world. This suggests that there might be two extant theories in the population—a broadly dynamical one and a broadly non-dynamical one—but that those theories are sufficiently incomplete that participants do not stably choose the same dynamical theory as being most similar to our world. This suggests that while appeals to the ordinary view of time may do some work in the context of adjudicating disputes between dynamists and non-dynamists, they likely cannot do any such work adjudicating disputes between particular brands of dynamism. (shrink)

Philosophers sometimes give arguments that presuppose the following principle: two theories can fail to be empirically equivalent on the sole basis that they present different “thick” metaphysical pictures of the world. Recently, a version of this principle has been invoked to respond to the argument that composite objects are dispensable to our best scientific theories. This response claims that our empirical evidence distinguishes between ordinary and composite-free theories, and it empirically favors the ordinary ones. In this paper, I ask whether (...) this response to the dispensability argument is tenable. I claim that it is not. This is because it presupposes an indefensible thesis about when two empirical consequences are distinct or the same. My argument provides some insight into what our empirical consequences are, and I conclude that empirical evidence is radically metaphysically neutral. This gives us some insight into the significant content of our scientific theories—the content that a scientific realist is committed to—and I show how this insight relates to questions about theoretical equivalence more broadly. (shrink)

Modal knowledge accounts that are based on standards possible-worlds semantics face well-known problems when it comes to knowledge of necessities. Beliefs in necessities are trivially sensitive and safe and, therefore, trivially constitute knowledge according to these accounts. In this paper, I will first argue that existing solutions to this necessity problem, which accept standard possible-worlds semantics, are unsatisfactory. In order to solve the necessity problem, I will utilize an unorthodox account of counterfactuals, as proposed by Nolan, on which we also (...) consider impossible worlds. Nolan’s account for counterpossibles delivers the intuitively correct result for sensitivity i.e. S’s belief is sensitive in intuitive cases of knowledge of necessities and insensitive in intuitive cases of knowledge failure. However, we acquire the same plausible result for safety only if we reject his strangeness of impossibility condition and accept the modal closeness of impossible worlds. In this case, the necessity problem can be analogously solved for sensitivity and safety. For some, such non-moderate accounts might come at too high a cost. In this respect, sensitivity is better off than safety when it comes to knowing necessities. (shrink)

The objectively best language is intended to refer to some metaphysically privileged language that ‘carves reality at its joints’ perfectly. That is, it is the kind of language that various ‘metaphysical deflationists’ have argued is impossible. One common line of argument amongst deflationists is that we have no means to compare languages that all express true facts about the world in such a way to decide which is ‘better’. For example, the language is physics is not objectively better than the (...) language of economics, as each language has the semantic purpose of expressing some domain of truths about the world inexpressible in the other language, and therefore neither could be ‘objectively best’. In this paper, I argue that metaphysical deflationists have failed to recognise a distinction between fine- and coarse-grained semantic purposes of languages, and that a recognition of that distinction provides us grounds to compare languages to see which is objectively best. I argue that once we recognise the distinction between fine- and coarse-grained semantic purposes, then we can see that it is relative to the coarse-grained purpose that we must compare putative objectively best ontological languages. (shrink)

I argue that one’s views about which “metaphysical laws” obtain—including laws about what is identical with what, about what is reducible to what, and about what grounds what—can be used to deflect or neutralize the threat posed by a debunking explanation. I use a well-known debunking argument in the metaphysics of material objects as a case study. Then, after defending the proposed strategy from the charge of question-begging, I close by showing how the proposed strategy can be used by certain (...) moral realists to resist the evolutionary debunking arguments. (shrink)

In this article, I discuss a trivialization worry for Hartry Field’s official formulation of the access problem for mathematical realists, which was pointed out by Øystein Linnebo (and has recently been made much of by Justin Clarke-Doane). I argue that various attempted reformulations of the Benacerraf problem fail to block trivialization, but that access worriers can better defend themselves by sticking closer to Hartry Field’s initial informal characterization of the access problem in terms of (something like) general epistemic norms of (...) coincidence avoidance. (shrink)

_Justin Clarke-Doane* * Morality and Mathematics. _ Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. xx + 208. ISBN: 978-0-19-882366-7 ; 978-0-19-2556806.† †.

Amie Thomasson and Eli Hirsch have both attempted to deflate metaphysics, by combining Carnapian ideas with an appeal to ordinary language. My main aim in this paper is to critique such deflationary appeals to ordinary language. Focussing on Thomasson, I draw two very general conclusions. First: ordinary language is a wildly complicated phenomenon. Its implicit ontological commitments can only be tackled by invoking a context principle; but this will mean that ordinary language ontology is not a trivial enterprise. Second: ordinary (...) language often points in different directions simultaneously, so that a wide variety of existence questions cannot be deflated merely by appealing to ordinary language. (shrink)

I present an exemplary Humean modal epistemology. My version takes inspiration from but incurs no commitment to both Hume’s historical position and Lewis’s Humeanism. Modal epistemology should meet two challenges: the Integration challenge of integrating metaphysics and epistemology and the Reliability challenge of giving an account of how our epistemic capacities can be reliable in detecting modal truth. According to Lewis, modal reasoning starts from certain Humean principles: there is only the vast mosaic of spatiotemporally distributed local matters of fact. (...) The facts can be arbitarily recombined. These principles cannot be taken for granted. I suggest a bottom-up approach instead: Humean principles of recombining the mosaic of facts can be retrieved from the evolutionarily instilled and empirically informed use of imagination in exploring everyday circumstantial possibilities. This use of imagination conforms to a primitive conception of matter as freely recombinable. The modal beliefs that can be obtained from generalizing the more elementary exercise of imagination have to be corrected. Recombination is limited by sortal criteria of identity. Moreover, the overall picture of a recombinable spatiotemporal mosaic must be weighed against the results of science. (shrink)

A symposium on my *Objects: Nothing Out of the Ordinary* (2015). In response to Wallace, I attempt to clarify the dialectical and epistemic role that my arguments from counterexamples were meant to play, I provide a limited defense of the comparison to the Gettier examples, and I embrace the comparison to Moorean anti-skeptical arguments. In response to deRosset, I provide a clearer formulation of conservatism, explain how a conservative should think about the interaction between intuition and science, and discuss what (...) conservatives should say about scattered territories, clonal colonies, and arbitrary systems. In response to Tillman and Spencer, I fortify my original presentation of the debunking arguments by clarifying why, even while trees (if they exist) are paradigmatically causal, conservatives are meant to be rationally obstructed from believing that it is trees that are causing our tree beliefs. (shrink)

Some philosophers argue that non-presentist A-theories problematically imply that we cannot know that this moment is present. The problem is usually presented as arising from the combination of the A-theoretic ideology of a privileged presentness and a non-presentist ontology. The goal of this essay is to show that the epistemic problem can be rephrased as a pessimistic induction. By doing so, I will show that the epistemic problem, in fact, stems from the A-theoretic ideology alone. Hence, once it is properly (...) presented, the epistemic problem presents a serious threat to all A-theories. (shrink)

What it would take to vindicate folk temporal error theory? This question is significant against a backdrop of new views in quantum gravity—so-called timeless physical theories—that claim to eliminate time by eliminating a one-dimensional substructure of ordered temporal instants. Ought we to conclude that if these views are correct, nothing satisfies the folk concept of time and hence that folk temporal error theory is true? In light of evidence we gathered, we argue that physical theories that entirely eliminate an ordered (...) substructure vindicate folk temporal error theory. (shrink)

This paper empirically investigates one aspect of the folk concept of time by testing how the presence or absence of directedness impacts judgements about whether there is time in a world. Experiment 1 found that dynamists, showed significantly higher levels of agreement that there is time in dynamically directed worlds than in non-dynamical non-directed worlds. Comparing our results to those we describe in Latham et al., we report that while ~ 70% of dynamists say there is time in B-theory worlds, (...) only ~ 45% say there is time in C-theory worlds. Thus, while the presence of directedness makes dynamists more inclined to say there is time in a world, a substantial subpopulation of dynamists judge that there is time in non-directed worlds. By contrast, a majority of non-dynamists judged that there was time in both growing block worlds and C-theory worlds, with no significant differences between the means. Experiment 2 found that when participants are only presented with non-dynamical worlds—namely, a directed world and a non-directed world—they report significantly higher levels of agreement that there is time in B-theory worlds. However, the majority of participants still judge that there is time in C-theory worlds. We conclude that while the presence of directedness bolsters judgements that there is time, most people do not judge it to be necessary for time. (shrink)

Recent research (Latham, Miller and Norton, forthcoming) reveals that a majority of people represent actual time as dynamical. But do they, as suggested by McTaggart and Gödel, represent time as essentially dynamical? This paper distinguishes three interrelated questions. We ask (a) whether the folk representation of time is sensitive or insensitive: i.e., does what satisfies the folk representation of time in counterfactual worlds depend on what satisfies it actually—sensitive—or does is not depend on what satisfies it actually—insensitive, and (b) do (...) those who represent actual time as dynamical, represent time in all possible worlds as dynamical—what we call insensitive dynamism—or do they represent time in all possible worlds as dynamical only conditional on the actual world in fact being dynamical—what we call sensitive dynamism and (c) do dynamists and non-dynamists deploy two different representations of time, or deploy the same representation, but disagree about what actually satisfies that representation? We found no evidence that the folk representation of time is sensitive, or that the folk representation of time is essentially dynamical in either sense, though we did find evidence of a shared representation, on which dynamical features are sufficient, but not necessary, for time. (shrink)

Many philosophers take purportedly logical cases of ground ) to be obvious cases, and indeed such cases have been used to motivate the existence of and importance of ground. I argue against this. I do so by motivating two kinds of semantic determination relations. Intuitions of logical ground track these semantic relations. Moreover, our knowledge of semantics for first order logic can explain why we have such intuitions. And, I argue, neither semantic relation can be a species of ground even (...) on a quite broad conception of what ground is. Hence, without a positive argument for taking so-called ‘logical ground’ to be something distinct from a semantic determination relation, we should cease treating logical cases as cases of ground. (shrink)