tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post9086169646874154440..comments2024-03-29T02:29:03.388-07:00Comments on Edward Feser: Parfit on brute factsEdward Feserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13643921537838616224noreply@blogger.comBlogger130125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-45443438382847056472016-02-15T16:28:28.937-08:002016-02-15T16:28:28.937-08:00In order to clear up my use of the term, which has...<i>In order to clear up my use of the term, which has been ascendant for 80 years, I have defined it explicitly. I don't know what more I can do.</i><br /><br />(1) It has not been ascendant "for 80 years". It has been the standard usage in physics for that period of time. We are, again, talking about the usage outside of physics and fields directly influenced by it.<br /><br />(2) I'm not expecting you to do anything. Your handling of it by defining it was quite admirable. I was pointing out that it was a reason for confusion that you were overlooking.Brandonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06698839146562734910noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-72744697753467646562016-02-15T16:26:41.548-08:002016-02-15T16:26:41.548-08:00The four (I added one since you posted) data point...<i>The four (I added one since you posted) data points I have are four more than I've seen from you.</i><br /><br />As the only data point you've actually given that is relevant is Honderich (assuming, that is, that he is not directly influenced by the physics usage), this is merely rhetorical posturing. <br /><br />But if you are really interested in the underlying evidence, I recommend you start with McTaggart, who is highly influential on discussions of determinism among philosophers in the first half of the twentieth century, and move forward from there; then look specifically at people who do work in free will -- not people like Honderich who discuss free will as part of their discussion of the philosophy of neuroscience and the mind, but people who are actually talking about free will. Or you can look up Huw Price's occasional complaints that philosophers talking about determinism in matters of physics keep dragging in an incorrect idea that it involves causal necessitation. Or you can get out of your textbooks and go find ordinary people talking about determinism, ask them what they mean by it, and see how it fits with your definition. Or, you know, you could actually use all the difficulty you've had here as part of your evidence. I know it's a limited sample; but you have not actually in any way established that the confusion in the thread above about how causal 'determinism' is, is due to scholastic accounts of causation rather than common meanings of the term that don't necessarily have much to do with such accounts.<br /><br /><i>Your notion that concepts from physics are irrelevant to radio active decay is, let me be charitable here, odd.</i><br /><br />This is again something that does not follow from anything I said.Brandonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06698839146562734910noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-39943809098923777252016-02-15T16:20:36.865-08:002016-02-15T16:20:36.865-08:00Brandon,
The upshot is that you keep talking abo...Brandon, <br /><br /><i>The upshot is that you keep talking about the matter as if 'causation' were the only problematic term, in the sense of a term that has shifted its meanings in a very significant way. My point is that 'determinism' is very clearly also a case in which this has happened, and is quite as confusing to people as 'causation'.</i><br /><br />In order to clear up my use of the term, which has been ascendant for 80 years, I have defined it explicitly. I don't know what more I can do.Mack The Mikehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03871914595668413541noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-49712000681531089842016-02-15T16:15:41.624-08:002016-02-15T16:15:41.624-08:00Brandon, you write:
No, you have three data point...Brandon, you write:<br /><br /><i>No, you have three data points, one of which is from physics (and thus irrelevant to the question at hand, which is the meaning outside of physics and fields directly influenced by it)</i><br /><br />A few points.<br /><br />1. The four (I added one since you posted) data points I have are four more than I've seen from you.<br /><br />2. This is a discussion about a question I had regarding Prof. Feser's ideas about PSR as linked to in the main blog post. I specifically referred to Prof. Feser's 12/12/2014 post “Causality and radioactive decay” to which he links from the main blog post because he presumably thought it relevant. Radioactive decay is of interest precisely because it is unpredictable and thus presents a challenge to determinism as the term is used by physicists. Your notion that concepts from physics are irrelevant to radio active decay is, let me be charitable here, odd.Mack The Mikehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03871914595668413541noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-78942975682071810682016-02-15T16:13:00.968-08:002016-02-15T16:13:00.968-08:00The upshot is that you keep talking about the matt...The upshot is that you keep talking about the matter as if 'causation' were the only problematic term, in the sense of a term that has shifted its meanings in a very significant way. My point is that 'determinism' is very clearly also a case in which this has happened, and is quite as confusing to people as 'causation'.Brandonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06698839146562734910noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-53338294227635725022016-02-15T16:09:25.789-08:002016-02-15T16:09:25.789-08:00So I really don't think it's the case that...<i>So I really don't think it's the case that outside of physics and in discussions of free will that the Aristotelian/Scholastic concepts of causation are the norm.</i><br /><br />This is again something that doesn't follow from anything I said. We aren't talking about causation, we are talking about how people outside of fields directly influenced by physics use the term 'determinism'.<br /><br />Honderich is, fair enough, someone who does not work in philosophy of physics; but since he does work on issues involve neuroscience and the mind it's very likely that he gets it from someone who does. It's also, again, well within the time period I mentioned above for its spread in philosophy.Brandonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06698839146562734910noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-73971736716549072422016-02-15T16:04:02.078-08:002016-02-15T16:04:02.078-08:00I do have one book on free will on my shelf, "...I do have one book on free will on my shelf, "How Free are You?" by Ted Honderich. Honderich distinguishes on page 2 among three uses. The first is the usage I have been using from Russell and Physics, the second is a view about people that has the upshot that people aren't free or responsible, and the third, which he uses throughout the remainder of the book is the notion that people are subject to causal laws. There is no discussion in the text of material, formal, or final causality and his focus in his discussions of causal laws is on events not substances, so I took him to mean 'causal law' in the modern sense (I think I read it about 15 years ago. the copyright is 1993).<br /><br />So I really don't think it's the case that outside of physics and in discussions of free will that the Aristotelian/Scholastic concepts of causation are the norm. Here too, the discussion uses the modern post-Hume view of causation. Mack The Mikehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03871914595668413541noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-92179033934187767092016-02-15T15:42:27.349-08:002016-02-15T15:42:27.349-08:00So I have a 70 year span of consistent usage.
No...<i>So I have a 70 year span of consistent usage. </i><br /><br />No, you have three data points, one of which is from physics (and thus irrelevant to the question at hand, which is the meaning outside of physics and fields directly influenced by it), one of which (Russell) is a deliberate and at the time not common use of the term as it had begun to be used by physicists, and one of which is relatively recent and from an article that almost certainly was written by a philosopher of physics.Brandonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06698839146562734910noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-8296321747227823812016-02-15T15:40:02.261-08:002016-02-15T15:40:02.261-08:00Nonsense. If you want to know where to look for Ma...<i>Nonsense. If you want to know where to look for Mars in the night sky of July 7, 2853, you run a set of equations. This sort of thing is very, very common.</i><br /><br />This is an extremely obvious non sequitur; from the fact that you can often predict with equations it does not follow that the ordinary meaning of 'prediction' includes having a mathematical function of the sort you have in mind.Brandonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06698839146562734910noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-31093954559471352262016-02-15T15:39:53.850-08:002016-02-15T15:39:53.850-08:00Brandon,
My ODP is copyright 2005, my QM textbook...Brandon,<br /><br />My ODP is copyright 2005, my QM textbook is 1990 and while my copy of "Religion and Science" is copyright 1970 with a new forward, the original was copyright 1935, So I have a 70 year span of consistent usage. Mack The Mikehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03871914595668413541noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-38197439656159289832016-02-15T15:36:26.525-08:002016-02-15T15:36:26.525-08:00Scott,
"If you go on to prove that B is true...Scott,<br /><br /><i>"If you go on to prove that B is true and I accept it, you haven't disproved that A→C."<br /><br />He doesn't need to. As he said, all it takes to break entailment is a possibility.</i><br /><br />'→' means 'entails'. So, yes he does. Breaking the entailment means disproving the entailment, A→C.Mack The Mikehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03871914595668413541noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-74293047396367038422016-02-15T15:34:10.872-08:002016-02-15T15:34:10.872-08:00My copy of the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy'...<i>My copy of the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy's entry on Determinism says</i><br /><br />And what is its copyright date?Brandonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06698839146562734910noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-85243575608140389892016-02-15T15:33:36.772-08:002016-02-15T15:33:36.772-08:00I think my use of 'determinism' flows from...<i>I think my use of 'determinism' flows from the modern, non-scholastic, understanding of causality as being a constant conjuction of temporally ordered states which is by far how most scientists use it these days.</i><br /><br />It does not, because up to about the twentieth century everyone who accepted the Humean position on causation opposed positions called 'determinism'. This is heritage going back to Hume, who also uses his account explicitly to oppose it (although it was called the doctrine of Necessity then). Likewise, prior to very late in the nineteenth century everyone who advocates a position called 'determinism' was an opponent of Humean conceptions of causation, the entire point of which was to avoid assuming that one thing necessitates or determines another. The new usage -- and it is new, only become into broader usage in the past forty years or so -- is derived from the adapted usage of physicists, as I already explicitly noted. Thus it obviously comes up whenever physics is involved, as here, or when people give physics-based objections to simultaneous causation. Russell, as I recall, was getting his (nonstandard generally at the time) usage from physicists (among whom it had already begun to be the standard meaning); he was very deliberately doing that. It did not become widely used, even among philosophers, although it much later had a resurgence, again due to the influence of physics. Most people who have accepted the constant-conjunction view in the real world have not been determinists; they think (for the same reason Hume did) that anything might happen at t2, for all one can be sure -- causation is just what we expect to happen on the basis of what usually happens, and for all we can be totally sure the rules might change (although obviously by definition we don't expect that). The only people who use something like the constant-conjunction meaning and hold something stronger than this are physicists, or people getting it from physicists, because their expectations are based on rigorous experiments resulting in highly confirmed mathematical descriptions, which most people are not dealing with when they are talking about determinism (which is usually in the context of discussing free will). Most people don't think of causes in terms of mathematical functions, you know.Brandonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06698839146562734910noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-57063893765502328362016-02-15T15:31:52.353-08:002016-02-15T15:31:52.353-08:00Brandon,
These are inconsistent claims, though; ...Brandon, <br /><br /><i>These are inconsistent claims, though; the ordinary meaning of 'prediction' does not involve having a mathematical function of the sort you have in mind.</i><br /><br />Nonsense. If you want to know where to look for Mars in the night sky of July 7, 2853, you run a set of equations. This sort of thing is very, very common.Mack The Mikehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03871914595668413541noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-70520078676343801982016-02-15T15:23:29.305-08:002016-02-15T15:23:29.305-08:00My copy of the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy'...My copy of the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy's entry on Determinism says, in part: <br /><br /><i>The usual explanation for this is that for every event, there is some antecedent state, related in such a way that it would break a law of nature for this antecedent state to exist and yet the event not happen</i> Mack The Mikehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03871914595668413541noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-58025713399013407752016-02-15T15:16:50.502-08:002016-02-15T15:16:50.502-08:00Brandon,
Yes, but this is not in fact the histor...Brandon,<br /><br /><i><br />Yes, but this is not in fact the historical sense of the word 'determinism'; it's less than a century and a half old, was borrowed by physicists on analogy to a particular (and not universal) philosophical usage of the term that later vanished, and is still almost only ever used this way by physicists and people (like philosophers of science) whose primary association with the word comes from physics rather than other sources. Even today, people calling themselves determinists often don't mean this by the term. It's only come back into philosophical discussions of determinism at all, in fact, by way of arguments about how physics relates to discussions of determinism. It's not surprising that if you go around using the word in this sense that people are going to have some difficulty figuring out what you mean by it.</i><br /><br />Brandon, I'm certainly no expert on the history of the term, but I think my use of 'determinism' flows from the modern, non-scholastic, understanding of causality as being a constant conjuction of temporally ordered states which is by far how most scientists use it these days. Even this comment section shows this. The early dispute over whether causes can be simultaneous with effects shows it. Outside a scholastic blog comment section I think you'd be hard pressed to find any other usage. Russell was a major public intellectual. My undergrad QM textbook uses determinism in this sense. I don't pretend I'm using 'determinism' in the only sense it is ever used or even the historically original, but I think it's the predominate one now.Mack The Mikehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03871914595668413541noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-69780202104844362492016-02-15T15:11:58.451-08:002016-02-15T15:11:58.451-08:00Regarding 'prediction', I mean it in the o...<i> Regarding 'prediction', I mean it in the ordinary sense of the term....I mean prediction as the output of that function f. </i><br /><br />These are inconsistent claims, though; the ordinary meaning of 'prediction' does not involve having a mathematical function of the sort you have in mind. For one thing, you can get this mathematical function long after t2, and it will still output the relevant description for t2 from the t1 description, without being a prediction at all.Brandonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06698839146562734910noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-53286624400303358952016-02-15T15:01:35.948-08:002016-02-15T15:01:35.948-08:00John,
Please continue if you like. I'm inter...John,<br /><br />Please continue if you like. I'm interested in your line of thinking. <br /><br />I know that a certain amount of shorthand is needed, but just to be clear. I'm reading propositions like "q explains p" as "q sufficiently explains p". I understand that there are all sorts of partial explanations for things.<br /><br />You may be further along than you think. I don't think I believe that "If q explains p, q entails (q explains p)" I just believe that "If q explains p, q entails p". Although I think I might be able to retreat to "If q explains p, q predicts p" without too much damage.<br /><br />Mack The Mikehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03871914595668413541noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-29824639206924347662016-02-15T14:45:17.545-08:002016-02-15T14:45:17.545-08:00Brandon,
But this is all beside the point, becaus...Brandon,<br /><br /><i>But this is all beside the point, because you didn't answer my question at all, which was about what you meant by prediction.</i><br /><br />I agree that nothing in the first paragraph of your comment is on point, so I won't comment on it. I also agree that I didn't answer your question about prediction in my response to John West. I'm not sure why you would have expected it to.<br /><br />Regarding 'prediction', I mean it in the ordinary sense of the term. I think your questions about it are answered by my re-formulation of Russell's definition of determinism. I mean prediction as the output of that function f.Mack The Mikehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03871914595668413541noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-9523931999680577362016-02-15T14:43:37.261-08:002016-02-15T14:43:37.261-08:00Mack The Mike:
"If you go on to prove that B...Mack The Mike:<br /><br />"If you go on to prove that B is true and I accept it, you haven't disproved that A→C."<br /><br />He doesn't need to. As he said, all it takes to break entailment is a possibility.Scotthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11979532520761760862noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-67947654894377809042016-02-15T14:40:33.577-08:002016-02-15T14:40:33.577-08:00Mack,
I'm talking about the entailment from t...Mack,<br /><br />I'm talking about the entailment from the correction of February 14, 2016 at 9:55 PM:<br /><br /><i>(What I was thinking was that the detailed </i>explanans<i> doesn't entail that “Fred died because he was shot”.)</i><br /><br />If I can refute that entailment, I can refute the principle that "If <i>q</i> explains <i>p</i>, <i>q</i> entails (<i>q</i> explains <i>p</i>)". I intended to go from there to argue that the falsity of "If <i>q</i> explains <i>p</i>, <i>q</i> entails (<i>q</i> explains <i>p</i>)" causes problems for the plausibility of February 14's sixth premise that "If <i>q</i> explains <i>p</i>, <i>q</i> entails <i>p</i>". <br /><br />So, I'm still dealing with the sixth premise of the argument I made on February 14, 2016 at 1:44 PM, when I asked:<br /><br /><i>It sounds like you're asking if the only way we can avoid the above (or something like it) is by arguing that there are only necessary facts[3], thereby rejecting the second premise. Am I going in the right direction?</i><br /><br />And you replied:<br /><br /><i>John, Yes. Exactly. Well put. That's what I'm thinking. Is there a hole in it?</i><br /><br />If we've moved to a different question (and it looks like we have), let me know. I don't want to flog a dead horse.<br /><br /><i>That doesn't break entailment. Suppose I claim that A→C and B→C and you deny A→C, but agree that B→C. Now say that we agree that both A and C are true. If you go on to prove that B is true and I accept it, you haven't disproved that A→C.</i><br /><br />It does. The proposition that "'Fred was shot and [...]' entails ('Fred was shot and [...]' explains 'Fred died')" requires that "Fred was shot and [...]" implies that ("Fred was shot and [...]" explains "Fred died") in every possible world.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04470664030455998305noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-71435885518717319352016-02-15T14:33:06.907-08:002016-02-15T14:33:06.907-08:00But this is all beside the point, because you didn...<i>But this is all beside the point, because you didn't answer my question at all, which was about what you meant by prediction. (I'll copy you by putting the blatantly obvious in bold.) </i><br /><br />Apologies for this, incidentally, which (1) sounds more sarcastic than I intended and (2) is itself beside the point because you weren't actually responding to me but to John. It's still true, though, that we don't really know what you mean by prediction.Brandonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06698839146562734910noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-1504125705625865792016-02-15T14:18:13.994-08:002016-02-15T14:18:13.994-08:00I don't think determinism is making those kind...<i>I don't think determinism is making those kinds of claims at all. I think all determinism is claiming is that a particular kind of mathematical relationship obtains between antecedent and and subsequent states of affairs in the world that could, in principle, be used to make true predictions with certainty. Determinists use terms like causal in their descriptions to mean just those sorts of mathematical relationships.</i><br /><br />Yes, but this is not in fact the historical sense of the word 'determinism'; it's less than a century and a half old, was borrowed by physicists on analogy to a particular (and not universal) philosophical usage of the term that later vanished, and is still almost only ever used this way by physicists and people (like philosophers of science) whose primary association with the word comes from physics rather than other sources. Even today, people calling themselves determinists often don't mean this by the term. It's only come back into philosophical discussions of determinism at all, in fact, by way of arguments about how physics relates to discussions of determinism. It's not surprising that if you go around using the word in this sense that people are going to have some difficulty figuring out what you mean by it.Brandonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06698839146562734910noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-6068465229476259172016-02-15T14:13:02.277-08:002016-02-15T14:13:02.277-08:00John,
All we need to break an entailment relation...John,<br /><br /><i>All we need to break an entailment relation is a possibility.<br /><br />Is there a possible world in which every fact in the explanans is true and yet something additional happened that instead explains the explanandum?</i><br /><br />That doesn't break entailment. Suppose I claim that A→C and B→C and you deny A→C, but agree that B→C. Now say that we agree that both A and C are true. If you go on to prove that B is true and I accept it, you haven't disproved that A→C.Mack The Mikehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03871914595668413541noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-69380202864262361402016-02-15T14:02:48.774-08:002016-02-15T14:02:48.774-08:00The regress terminates once every true fact about ...<i>The regress terminates once every true fact about the world inside the sphere is in the explanans.</i><br /><br />The description of the sphere itself requires truths that are not reducible to facts within the sphere. For instance, the boundary of the sphere is a relation between what is within the sphere and what is not (or, if we assume there is nothing outside the boundary of the 'sphere', the truths that characterize this state), and this entire set-up requires that the boundary of the sphere be taken into account. It's a basic error to think that the truths describing your set-up are somehow all somehow "inside" the sphere and bounded by it. The mathematics itself is not "inside" the sphere; there are infinitely many mathematical truths that that are relevant to everything in the sphere. There are vastly many, perhaps infinitely many, metaphysical truths about alternative ways in which each of those mathematical truths could be physically exemplified, which are potentially relevant to understanding what is going on inside the sphere. Only talking about the inside of the sphere doesn't actually restrict anything when we move to talking about truths and how they are related, because truths are very obviously not related by distances in light-spheres.<br /><br />But this is all beside the point, because you didn't answer my question at all, which was about <b>what you meant by prediction</b>. (I'll copy you by putting the blatantly obvious in bold.) <br /><br /><i> Determinism is the doctrine that there exists a well defined function (f) such that given a complete description (d1) of the contents of a sphere at time (t1), the function evaluates to a complete description (d2) of the contents of a smaller sphere concentric with the original sphere at some later time (t2) provided that the radius of d2 is no larger than the radius of d1-c(t2-t1), where c is the speed of light. Or in other words d2=f(d1,t2-t1)</i><br /><br />I'm not sure what you mean by a 'complete description'. If you mean the description is exhaustive, i.e., can be represented as the infinite set including every truth that can possibly under any circumstances be stated about the events in the spheres in question, then it's unclear why you think the falsehood of this position, holding Relativity to be true, requires that PSR be false; PSR doesn't make any appeal to complete descriptions in this sense, nor does it seem to require descriptions in such a sense exist, or that there exists any such well-defined function as you suggest here. There seems to be gap between the one and the other. On the other hand, if you mean something else, it would need to be more explicit.<br /><br />It's worth noting, incidentally, that your definition really can't just be between two descriptions and times; it has to cover all descriptions and times related in the relevant way. When it's put in causal terms because causality removes happenstance relations; if you take it out and still only talk about two states, it could be sheer accident that that particular function in question relates them, in something analogous to the way that it is utterly useless that there is a mathematical function that gets you from pounds of ice-cream consumed in the United States in years 2015 and 2016 to the number of pockets picked in Rome in 2017 and 2018. There's some expression that's bound to get you from one to the other; it has nothing to do with either predicting or explaining.Brandonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06698839146562734910noreply@blogger.com