Mohan Matthen’s post Teleology in Big Systems brought up two options explaining how someone — Tom Nagel in Mind and Cosmos — would choose a teleological explanation over a naturalistic one. The first, below, got me thinking: First, he might be saying that though it is physically possible (by a fluke series of mutations, for example) for mentality to have come about, it would be better explained by teleology. (Let’s call this the “intelligibility” argument.) […]
Category: ontology
Charity and OOPs
Given an Object Oriented Ontology ethics can present a problem.* It is not obvious how to fit ethics into an object oriented view: even if objects have ethical properties, ethics itself has to be considered just as arbitrary as any other property. One could, of course, hold some Deontological, Consequentialist or other ethical viewpoint, but this position would have to be justified on other grounds, since O.O.O. is silent on the matter. Hence having ethics […]
Review: After Finitude and Facticality
[cross-posted at The Road to Sippy Cups] Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude © has a very interesting discussion of Hume’s problem, Kant’s Copernican Revolution, the principle of sufficient reason and the relationship between dogmatism and fanaticism. Any one of his analyses on these topics makes the book worthwhile, but I’d like to focus on something different: the fundamental assumption of facticality. Meillassoux has a factical view of the world, meaning that the world is made up […]
Occam’s Razor and Entropy
I was trying to understand Occam’s Razor, specifically I wanted to know its justification. There are posts over at Wikipedia and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy worth looking at, but neither left me satisfied. Instead, I came up with “Death Implies Economy”. What this means is that we are fundamentally limited in time and resources, and hence we cannot afford to waste what little we have on unnecessary complication. DIE is a metaphysical justification of […]
Against Physics as Ontologically Basic
1. Biology is epistemically independent of physics: Let’s assume that biology is not epistemically independent of physics, i.e. to know any biology we must first know something about physics. However, consider evolution as determined by natural selection and the struggle for survival. We can know about the struggle for survival and natural selection without appealing to physics — just as Darwin did when he created the theory — and hence we can fundamentally understand at […]
A Priori Against Physicalism
I saw that Richard Brown is working to defend physicalism against a priori arguments. He says that most (all?) arguments use the same intuitions found in the zombie-knowledge arguments. This got me to thinking about a priori arguments against physicalism and I came up with something different: If physicalism is, as Dr. Brown says, “… the view that only physical things exist. Physical things are those things that are postulated by a completed physics,” then […]
On Charitability
There is no such thing as a private reality. By private reality I mean any portion of reality that you alone can experience, that no one else could possibly understand. There is, however, reality that is yet unexperienced and unknown to you. Others may have experienced it before you, like explorers who have been to a far away place. If a philosopher is clever, it is possible that she found a way to imbue her […]
The Non-Reducibility & Scientific Explanation Problem
Q: What is a multiple star system? A: More than one star in a non-reducible mutual relationship spinning around each other. Q: How did it begin? A: Well, I guess, the stars were out in space and at some point they became close in proximity. Then their gravitations caused each other to alter their course and become intertwined. Q: How did the gravitations cause the courses of the stars to become intertwined? Gravity does one […]
Of Duckrabbits and Identity
Of late I’ve become increasingly concerned with the meaning of identity. When we say, ‘x = x,’ we don’t mean that the x on the left is exactly identical to the x on the right because the x on the left is just that, on the left, and the x on the right is on the right, not the left. Since equality would be useless without having 2 different objects (try to imagine the use […]
What Fodor Got Wrong
Jerry Fodor recently (4 March) gave a talk entitled “What Darwin Got Wrong” at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. He accused Darwin of committing the intentional fallacy and hence said, straight out, that he didn’t believe in the theory of evolution. So what exactly does Fodor think Darwin got wrong? He believes that the theory of evolution is vacuously true (or just wrong) and hence not a worthwhile theory of science. You […]