Category: Metaphysics

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Paul L. Franco – “Susan Stebbing on Logical Positivism and Communication”

In this post, Paul L. Franco discusses his article recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of Paul’s article can be found here.

portrait of Susan Stebbing, 1939
Lizzie Susan Stebbing
photographed by Howard Coster (1939) © National Portrait Gallery, London

In anthologies aimed at giving readers an overview of analytic philosophy in the early twentieth century, we are used to seeing listed works by G.E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, Rudolf Carnap, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. But upon reading these anthologies it is not immediately obvious what, say, Moore’s common-sense philosophy shares with Carnap’s scientific philosophy. Moore waves his hands to prove an external world; Carnap uses formal languages to logically construct it. Yet, both belong to a tradition now-called analytic philosophy. Following Alan Richardson, I think an interesting question in history of analytic philosophy concerns how this happened. 

One common story centers A.J. Ayer’s visit around 1933 to the Vienna Circle to study with Moritz Schlick, Carnap’s colleague and leading representative of the logical positivist movement. Ayer distilled the lessons from his visit in his book Language, Truth and Logic (1936). In a readable style – more accessible than the technical work of some Vienna Circle members – Ayer brought the good word of verificationism to an Anglophone audience, resulting in vigorous debate.

Like Siobhan Chapman, Michael Beaney, and others, I think that this story – although not entirely wrong – neglects Susan Stebbing’s role in shaping early analytic philosophy. She contributed through her involvement with the journal Analysis, which published papers on logical positivism before 1936. She was also a central institutional figure in other ways, inviting Schlick and Carnap to lecture in London. In contrast with Ayer, who admitted that the extent of his scientific background was listening to a Geiger counter once in a lab, Stebbing, like the logical positivists, paid close attention to science. 

Stebbing’s sustained engagement with logical positivists in articles and reviews in the thirties is central to their reception in the British context. This work is also a core part of Stebbing’s rich output on philosophical analysis. For these reasons, her work illuminates early analytic philosophy’s development.

My paper reconstructs and interprets Stebbing’s criticisms of the logical positivist conception of analysis. The centerpiece is “Logical Positivism and Analysis” in which she contrasts her understanding of the logical positivist approach with the sort of analysis Moore practices. Stebbing argues that Moore insists on a threefold distinction between:

  1. knowing that a proposition is true;
  2. understanding its meaning;
  3. giving an analysis of it.

Accordingly, philosophical analysis doesn’t give the meaning of statements or justify them. Instead, it clarifies relationships between statements which are already known and understood.

Although she is not an acolyte of Moore, Stebbing agrees with the fundamentals of his account and contrasts it with the picture offered by logical positivism. On her view, the logical positivist conception of analysis – represented by Wittgenstein, Schlick, and Carnap – begins with the principle of verification. This principle says the meaning of a statement is its method of verification. To know a statement’s meaning is to know what verifies it, and philosophical analysis clarifies a statement’s meaning by revealing its verification conditions. Carnap was also committed to what he called methodological solipsism. This is the view that the verification of statements about physical objects and other minds is provided by that which is immediately given in phenomenal experience. Adopting this methodological commitment means that verification conditions reduce to first-personal statements about experience.

Stebbing asks how the principle of verification can ground communication in light of methodological solipsism. For her, the logical positivists should be able to answer. This is because they are interested in meaning and knowledge, and communication is necessary for intersubjective knowledge. Here, we come to the crux of her criticisms. She says that the identification of meaning with verification conditions collapses Moore’s threefold distinction. Then, she argues that in collapsing the distinction, and given Carnap’s methodological solipsism, the principle of verification gives counterintuitive conclusions about the meaning of statements about other minds and the past.

For example, on Stebbing’s account of logical positivism, the meaning of your statement “I have a toothache” is, for me, given in first-personal statements about my experience of your bodily behavior, your utterances, and so on. Similarly, the meaning of historical statements like “Queen Anne died in 1714” is given by first-personal statements about my experience when consulting the relevant records. After all, the verification theory of meaning identifies the meaning of statements with their verification conditions and methodological solipsism says those are found in statements about what is given in phenomenal experience. But Stebbing thinks this misidentifies knowing that a statement is true with understanding its meaning. For her, it is clear that you don’t intend to communicate about my experience in talking about your toothache. It is also clear that when you speak about Queen Anne’s death, you do not intend to communicate about the way I would verify it. Instead, in talking about your toothache, you intend to communicate about your experience; in talking about Queen Anne’s death, you intend to communicate about the world. Stebbing thinks that I understand the meaning of both statements because they are about the “same sort” (Stebbing 1934, 170) of things I could experience, even though I’m not currently experiencing them. For Stebbing, it is this “same-sortness” of experience which grounds our understanding of the meaning of statements about other minds and history, not our knowledge of their verification conditions. 

These are just the basics; my paper has other details of Stebbing’s criticisms – and related ones by Margaret MacDonald –that I’m tempted to mention but won’t. Instead, I’ll close by explaining how paying close attention to Stebbing’s engagement with logical positivism can be helpful. As I see it, there are three main upshots.  

First, we can better understand Stebbing’s novel contributions to the analytic turn in philosophy, especially her attention to the nuances of different types of philosophical analysis. 

Second, we realize that the well-worn, presumed-to-be-devastating objection that the principle of verification fails to meet its own criteria for meaningfulness doesn’t appear in Stebbing’s work. Rather, she is concerned about whether logical positivism provides an account of meaning that explains successful communication. Whatever problems verificationism was thought to have, they were more interesting than whether the principle of verification is verifiable.

Third, by paying close attention to Stebbing’s focus on communication, we can better understand how her appeal to the common-sense conviction that we understand what we are talking about when we talk in clear and unambiguous ways is echoed in criticisms of logical positivism in ensuing decades – in particular, in the criticisms developed by ordinary language philosophers like J.L. Austin and P.F. Strawson. 

Stebbing shaped the understanding of logical positivism in a way that made their brand of philosophical analysis recognizably similar to that of philosophers who didn’t share their scientific concerns. In doing so, she helped create the big tent that is early analytic philosophy. 

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/5185/.

About the author

Paul L. Franco is Associate Teaching Professor in Philosophy at the University of Washington-Seattle. His research is in the history of analytic philosophy, the history of philosophy of science, values in science, and intersections between the three areas. He currently serves as the treasurer for HOPOS. 

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Sebastian Bender – “Spinoza on the Essences of Singular Things”

In this post, Sebastian Bender discusses the article he recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of Sebastian’s article can be found here.

Picture of a red drop at the center of an intricate double spiral pattern painted on a rugged cloth
“At the core” (1935) Paul Klee

Essences play a key role in Spinoza’s philosophy, but it is surprisingly difficult to figure out what he takes them to be. Are essences concepts, as some commentators suggest? (Wolfson 1934; Newlands 2018.) Or are they something in things? And what is their theoretical role in Spinoza’s system?

The surprising finding of the paper is that Spinoza’s account of essence is much further removed from traditional Aristotelian accounts than one might expect.

The notion of essence has had a central role in the history of Western philosophy at least since Aristotle, and Spinoza’s account can only be understood against this background. For Aristotle and his scholastic successors, the essence of a thing tells us what that thing is. A well-known example is the Aristotelian definition of a human being as a rational animal. This definition expresses the essence of a human. It states that being rational and being an animal are essential to being human.

Three aspects of traditional Aristotelian essences are noteworthy. First, they are universal. Tina and Tom both belong to the species ‘human’ because they share the same essence. Thus, Aristotelians hold that essences explain why individuals belong to a certain kind or species. Second, the essential features of a thing are its core features, and they are explanatorily prior to any non-essential features. The ability to laugh, for example, is something humans cannot lack, but it is not an essential quality because it depends on rationality, which is explanatorily prior. Finally, according to Aristotelians essential features are intrinsic. This last point is often not mentioned, presumably because it is taken for granted (it is made explicit, though, by Cohen & Reeve 2021).

In the early modern period, many aspects of the Aristotelian metaphysical framework are overthrown. This includes, for instance, the notions of substantial form and prime matter, which many early modern philosophers deem useless or confused. Other Aristotelian concepts and tools, however, continue to be used; among them is the notion of essence. Despite their strongly anti-Aristotelian rhetoric, philosophers such as Descartes, Hobbes, and Cavendish more or less adhere to an Aristotelian conception of essence (Schechtman 2024).

What about Spinoza? As recent scholarship has shown, there is at least one clear point of divergence between Spinoza and the Aristotelian tradition: Spinozistic essences are most likely individual essences (Martin 2008; Della Rocca 2008). For Spinoza, humans do not all share the same essence; instead each human being has a highly specific individual essence. In fact, Spinoza tends to view general kind concepts, such as ‘human’ or ‘horse,’ as epistemically problematic. Such concepts may mislead us because they tempt us to ignore real and meaningful differences between distinct things in the world. Like many other philosophers of the second half of the seventeenth century (including, e.g., Leibniz), Spinoza severs the connection between essences and kinds (Schechtman 2024).

Setting this issue aside, however, many commentators have argued that Spinoza by and large adopts an Aristotelian framework of essence. Here is Thomas Ward’s succinct summary of this reading:

Although [Spinoza] rejects part of the Aristotelian conception of essence, according to which it is in virtue of its essence that a thing is a member of a kind, he nevertheless retains a different part of an Aristotelian conception of essence, according to which an essence is some structural feature of a thing which causally explains other, non-essential features. (Ward 2011, p. 44)

Thus, it seems that according to Spinoza essences are intrinsic features of things, and they are explanatorily prior in that they account for the less fundamental features of such things. It thus seems that, except for the fact that his essences are individual while Aristotelian essences are universal, Spinoza accepts much of the Aristotelian framework.

In contrast, I argue that Spinoza’s account of essence is much less Aristotelian than this commonly held view might suggest. The main issue is that Spinoza questions an idea which Aristotelians, and many other philosophers, simply take for granted: that the essence of a thing tells us what that thing is. On Spinoza’s view, essences – at least the essences of singular things – can do so only in part. 

To see why this is so, it is important to note (i) how singular things relate to God for Spinoza, and (ii) how singular things relate to their own causal history.

As for the first point, Spinoza is a substance monist, who holds that God is the only substance. Everything else—be it tables, apples, or planets—is ‘in’ God and can only be ‘conceived through’ God (E1def5). Thus, in order to (fully) understand what a certain singular thing is, one needs to understand God.

As for the second point, Spinoza holds that “[t]he cognition of an effect depends on, and involves, the cognition of its cause” (E1ax4, translation modified). Thus, in order to (fully) understand what a singular thing is, one must grasp the entire causal history of the thing.

It may seem, then, that essences are really packed, or ‘overloaded,’ for Spinoza (Della Rocca 2008; Lin 2012). But this is not his view. In fact, Spinoza tries to explicitly avoid the ‘overloading’ of essences. At an important passage, he writes that “singular things can neither be nor be conceived without God, and nevertheless, God does not pertain to their essence” (E2p10s2). Similarly, Spinoza does not include the causal history of singular things in their essences.

The result is that, unlike Aristotelians, Spinoza believes that the essences of singular things do not render these things fully conceivable. Both God and the causal history of a thing are needed to fully grasp what a thing is. But since Spinoza excludes information about God and causal history from the essences of singular things, grasping these essences does not enable us to (fully) understand what the things they are essences of truly are. From this we can conclude that Spinoza’s view of essences and their theoretical role is quite different from the traditional Aristotelian account.

Want more?

See the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/2266/.

References

  • Cohen, S. Marc and C. D. C. Reeve (2021). “Aristotle’s Metaphysics.” In: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2021 Edition). Ed by Edward N. Zalta. URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2021/entries/aristotle-metaphysics/>.
  • Della Rocca, Michael (2008). Spinoza. Routledge.
  • Lin, Martin (2012). “Rationalism and Necessitarianism.” Noûs 46(3): 418–48.
  • Martin, Christopher (2008). “The Framework of Essences in Spinoza’s Ethics.” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 16(3): 489–509.
  • Newlands, Samuel (2018). Reconceiving Spinoza. Oxford University Press.
  • Schechtman, Anat (2024). “Modern.” In: The Routledge Handbook of Essence in Philosophy. Ed. by Kathrin Koslicki and Michael Raven. Routledge, 41-52.
  • Spinoza, Baruch de (1985). The Collected Works of Spinoza (2 vols.). Ed. and trans. by E. Curley. Princeton University Press. [References to the Ethics (E) are cited by using the following abbreviations: ax = axiom, d = demonstration, def = definition, p = part, s = scholium.]
  • Ward, Thomas (2011). “Spinoza on the Essences of Modes. British Journal for the History of Philosophy 19 (1): 19–46.
  • Wolfson, Harry (1934). The Philosophy of Spinoza. Harvard University Press.

About the author

Picture of the author

Sebastian Bender is Assistant Professor in Philosophy at the University of Göttingen. His research focuses on early modern philosophy, especially on the metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and political philosophy of this era. He writes on figures such as Francisco Suárez, René Descartes, Nicolas Malebranche, Baruch de Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Anne Conway, John Locke, Margaret Cavendish, George Berkeley, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant.

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Brigitte Everett, Andrew J. Latham and Kristie Miller  – “Locating Temporal Passage in a Block World”

In this post, Brigitte Everett, Andrew J. Latham and Kristie Miller discuss the article they recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of their article can be found here.

“Dynamism of a Cyclist” (1913) Umberto Boccioni

Imagine a universe where a single set of events exists. Past, present, and future events all exist, and they are all equally real—the extinction of the dinosaurs, the birth of a baby, the creation of a sentient robot. The sum total of reality never grows or shrinks, so the totality of events that exist never changes. We may call this a non-dynamical universe. Does time pass in such world? 

If your answer to the above question is “no”, then perhaps you think that time passes only in a dynamical universe.

A dynamist is someone who thinks that there is an objective present time, and that which time that is, constantly changes. Many dynamists think that time only passes in dynamical worlds (Smith 1994, Craig 2000, Schlesinger 1994). Perhaps more surprisingly, many non-dynamists—those who deny that there is an objective present time, and that which time that is, constantly changes—have also traditionally held that time does not pass in non-dynamical worlds.

However, recently some non-dynamists have argued that in our world there is anemic temporal passage, namely, very roughly, the succession of events that occurs in a non-dynamical world. (Deng 2013, Deng 2019, Bardon 2013, Skow 2015, Leininger 2018, Leininger 2021). These theorists argue that anemic temporal passage deserves the name “temporal passage”. One way of interpreting this claim is as the claim that anemic passage satisfies our ordinary, folk concept of temporal passage.

Viewed in this way, we can see a dispute between, on the one hand, those who think that anemic temporal passage is not temporal passage at all, because it does not satisfy our folk concept of temporal passage, and, on the other hand, those who think it is temporal passage, because it does. 

We sought to determine whether our folk concept of temporal passage is a concept of something that is essentially dynamical; that is, whether we have a folk concept of temporal passage that is only satisfied in dynamical worlds, or whether something that exists in non-dynamical worlds, such as anemic passage, can satisfy that concept. 

You might wonder why any of this matters. One reason is that the non-dynamical view of time has often been accused of being highly revisionary. It is often claimed to be a view on which what seem like platitudes turn out to be false. For instance, you might think it’s platitudinous that time passes, and yet, it is argued, if a non-dynamical view of time is true, then this platitude turns out to be false. So, if our world were indeed that way, it would turn out to be very different from how we take it to be.

To determine whether our folk concept of temporal passage would be satisfied in a non-dynamical world, we undertook several empirical studies that probe people’s concept of temporal passage. 

We found that, overall, participants judged that time passes in a non-dynamical universe, when our world was stipulated to be non-dynamical. That is, a majority of participants made this judgement. In particular, we found that a majority of people who in fact think that our world is non-dynamical, judge that there is temporal passage in it. As for people who in fact think that our world is most like a moving spotlight world, we found that they judge that, were our world non-dynamical, it would nevertheless contain temporal passage. Interestingly, though, with regards to people who think that either presentism or the growing block theory is most likely true of our world, we obtained a different result: they did not think that our world would contain temporal passage, were it non-dynamical. 

In a second experiment we asked participants to read a vignette claiming that “time flows or flies or marches, years roll, hours pass… time flows like a river” and other vivid descriptions of passage, and then we asked them to state how likely it is that the description is true of a dynamical vs. a non-dynamical world.  We found that participants judged that the description is equally likely to be true of a non-dynamical world as it is of a dynamical world. 

In the last experiment we probed whether people think that time passage is mind-dependent. Overall, we found that participants judged that time passes regardless of whether there are any minds to experience its passing or not.

Our results indicate, first, that the folk concept of temporal passage can be satisfied in a non-dynamical world, and second, that it is not a concept of something essentially mind-dependent. This suggests that non-dynamists should not concede that theirs is a view on which, in some ordinary sense, time fails to pass. 

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/4639/.

References

  • Bardon, A. (2013). A Brief History of the Philosophy of Time. Oxford University Press.
  • Craig, W. L. (2000). The Tensed Theory of Time: A Critical Examination. Kluwer Academic.
  • Deng, N. (2013). “Our Experience of Passage on the B-Theory”. Erkenntnis 78(4): 713-726.
  • Deng, N. (2019). “One Thing After Another: Why the Passage of Time is Not an Illusion”. In A. Bardon, V. Arstila, S. Power & A. Vatakis (eds.) The Illusions of Time: Philosophical and Psychological Essays on Timing and Time Perception, pp. 3-15. Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Leininger, L. (2018). “Objective Becoming: In Search of A-ness”. Analysis, 78(1): 108-117.  
  • Leininger, L. (2021). “Temporal B-Coming: Passage Without Presentness”. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 99(1): 1-17.
  • Schlesinger G. (1994). “Temporal Becoming”. In N. Oakland and Q. Smith (eds.) The New Theory of Time, pp. 214–220. Yale University Press.
  • Skow, B. (2015). Objective Becoming. Oxford University Press.
  • Smith, Q. (1994). “Introduction: The Old and New Tenseless Theory of Time”. In L. N.  Oaklander and Q. Smith (eds.) The New Theory of Time, pp. 17–22. Yale University Press.

About the authors

Brigitte Everett is a doctoral student at University of Sydney, Department of Philosophy. Her research interests focus on the philosophy of time.

Andrew J. Latham is an AIAS-PIREAU Fellow at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies and Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Philosophy and History of Ideas at Aarhus University. He works on topics in philosophy of mind, metaphysics (especially free will), experimental philosophy and cognitive neuroscience.

Kristie Miller is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Time at the University of Sydney. She writes on the nature of time, temporal experience, and persistence, and she also undertakes empirical work in these areas. At the moment, she is mostly focused on the question of whether, assuming we live in a four-dimensional block world, things seem to us just as they are. She has published widely in these areas, including three recent books: “Out of Time” (OUP 2022), “Persistence” (CUP 2022), and “Does Tomorrow Exist?” (Routledge 2023). She has a new book underway on the nature of experience in a block world, which hopefully will be completed by the end of 2024.

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Christopher Frugé – “Janus-Faced Grounding”

In this post, Christopher Frugé discusses the article he recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of his article can be found here.

Picture of the Roman double-faced god Janus: one face, older in age, looks back to the past, while the other, younger, looks forward to the future.
Detail of “Bust of the Roman God Janus” (1569) © The New York Public Library

Grounding is the generation of the less fundamental from the more fundamental. The fact that Houston is a city is not a fundamental aspect of reality. Rather, it’s grounded in facts about people and, ultimately, fundamental physics.

What is the status of grounding itself? Most theorists of ground think that grounding is non-fundamental and so must itself be grounded. Yet, if grounding is always grounded, then every grounding fact generates an infinite regress of the grounding of grounding facts, where each grounding fact needs to be grounded in turn. I argue that this regress is vicious, and so some grounding facts must be fundamental.

Grounding theorists take grounding to be grounded because it seems to follow from two principles about fundamentality. Purity says that fundamental facts can’t contain any non-fundamental facts. Completeness says that the fundamental facts generate all the non-fundamental facts. The idea behind purity is that the fundamental is supposed to be ‘pure’ of the non-fundamental. There can’t be any chairs alongside quarks at the most basic level of reality. Completeness stems from the thought that the fundamental is ‘enough’ to generate the rest of reality. Once the base layer has been put in place, then it produces everything else.

These principles are plausible, but they lead to regress. For example, the fact that Houston is a city is grounded in certain fundamental physical facts. By the standard construal of purity, this grounding fact is non-fundamental, since it ‘contains’ a non-fundamental element: the fact that Houston is a city. But by completeness, non-fundamental facts must be grounded, so this grounding fact must be grounded. But then this grounding fact must be grounded for the same reason, and so on forever.

We have what’s called the fact regress:

The standard take among grounding theorists is that the regress isn’t vicious, just a surprising discovery. This is because it doesn’t violate the well-foundedness of grounding. Well-foundedness requires that at some point each path of A grounds B and C grounds A and D grounds C… must come to an end.

The fact regress doesn’t violate well-foundedness, because each grounding fact can ground out in something fundamental. It’s just that each grounding fact needs to be grounded. Consider a case where A is fundamental and grounds B, but this grounding fact is grounded in a fundamental C. And that grounding fact is grounded in a fundamental D and so on. This satisfies well-foundedness but is an instance of the fact regress.

Nonetheless, I claim that the fact regress is still vicious. This is because what’s grounded doesn’t merely depend on its ground but also depends on the grounds of its grounding fact – and on the grounds of each grounding fact in the path of grounding of grounding. Call this connection dependence.

Why is connection dependence a genuine form of dependence? Suppose that A grounds B, where B isn’t grounded in anything else. But say that C grounds that A grounds B, where A grounds B isn’t grounded in anything else. Then, B depends not just on A but also on C. If C were removed, then A wouldn’t ground B. So then B would not be generated by anything and so would not come into being. For example, if a collection of particles ground the composite whole of those particles only via a composition operation grounding this grounding fact, then if, perhaps counterpossibly, there were no composition operation then those particles would not ground that whole. Similar reasoning applies at each step in the path of grounding of grounding.

So, then, the fact regress is bad for the same reason that violations of well-foundedness are bad. Without well-foundedness, it could be that each ground would need to be grounded in turn, and so the creation of a non-fundamental element of reality would never end up coming about because it would always require a further ground. Yet, given the fact regress, there can also be no stopping point—no point from which what’s grounded is ultimately able to be generated from its grounds. So determination, and hence what’s determined, would always be deferred and never achieved.

Therefore, I uphold well-connectedness, which requires that every path of grounding of grounding facts terminates in an ungrounded grounding fact:

This prohibits the fact regress.

Well-connectedness falls out of the proper interpretation of completeness, which imposes the requirement that the fundamental is enough for the non-fundamental. For any portion of non-fundamental reality, there is some portion of the fundamental that is ‘enough’ to produce it. If well-connectedness is violated, then there is no portion of fundamental reality that is sufficient unto itself to produce any bit of non-fundamental reality. There would always have to be a further determination of how the fundamental determines the non-fundamental. But at some point the grounding of grounding must stop. Some grounding facts must be fundamental.

However, the fact regress seems to fall out of completeness and purity. So what gives? I think the key is to see that the proper interpretation of purity doesn’t require that grounding facts be grounded.

There’s a distinction between what’s called factive and non-factive grounding. Roughly put, A non-factively grounds B if and only if given A then A generates B. A factively grounds B just in case A non-factively grounds B and A obtains. So it could be that A non-factively grounds B even if B doesn’t obtain since A doesn’t obtain. Thus, in a legitimate sense, the fact that A non-factively grounds B doesn’t ‘contain’ A or B, since that grounding fact can obtain without either A or B obtaining. We can think of the non-factive grounding facts as ‘mentioning’ the ground and ground without ‘containing’ them. But this is consistent with purity, since fundamental non-factive grounding facts don’t have any non-fundamental constituents.

Want more?

Read the full article at: https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/4664/.

About the author

Christopher Frugé is a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford in St John’s College. He received his PhD from Rutgers. He works on foundational and normative ethics as well as metaphysics. 

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Kristie Miller – “Against Passage Illusionism”

Detail of Salvador Dalì’s tarot card “The Magician” (1983)

In this post, Kristie Miller discusses her article recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of Kristie’s article can be found here.

It might seem obvious that we experience the passing of time. Certainly, in some trivial sense we do. It is now late morning. Earlier, it was early morning. It seems to me as though some period of time has elapsed since it was early morning. Indeed, during that period it seemed to me as though time was elapsing, in that I seemed to be located at progressively later times.

One question that arises is this: in what do these seemings consist? One way to put the question is to ask what content our experience has. What state of the world does the experience represent as being the case?

Philosophers disagree about which answer is correct. Some think that time itself passes. In other words, they think that there is a unique set of events that are objectively, metaphysically, and non-perspectivally present, and that which events those are, changes. Other philosophers disagree. They hold that time itself is static; it does not pass, because no events are objectively, metaphysically, and non-perspectivally present, such that which events those are, changes. Rather, whether an event is present is a merely subjective or perspectival matter, to be understood in terms of where the event is located relative to some agent.

Those who claim that time itself passes typically use this claim to explain why we experience it as passing: we experience time as passing because it does. What, though, should we say if we think that time does not pass, but is rather static? You might think that the most natural thing to say would be that we don’t experience time as passing. We don’t represent there being a set of events that are non-perspectivally present, and that which those are, changes. Of course, we represent various events as occurring in a certain temporal order, and as being separated by a certain temporal duration, and we experience ourselves as being located at some times (rather than others) – but none of that involves us representing that some events have a special metaphysical status, and that which events have that status, changes. So, on this view, we have veridical experiences of static time.

Interestingly, however, until quite recently this was not the orthodox view. Instead, the orthodoxy was a view known as passage illusionism. This is the view that although time does not pass, it nevertheless seems to us as though it does. So, we are subject to an illusion in which things seem to us some way that they are not. In my paper I argue against passage illusionism. I consider various ways that the illusionist might try to explain the illusion of time passing, and I argue that none of them is plausible.

The illusionist’s job is quite difficult. First, the illusion in question is pervasive. At all times that we are conscious, it seems to us as though time passes. Second, the illusion is of something that does not exist – it is not an experience which could, in other circumstances, be veridical.

In the psychological sciences, illusions are explained by appealing to cognitive mechanisms that typically function well in representing some feature(s) of our environment. In most conditions, these mechanisms deliver us veridical experiences. In some local environments, however, certain features mislead the mechanism to misrepresent the world, generating an illusion. These kinds of explanation, however, involve illusions that are not pervasive (they occur only in some local environments) and are not of something that does not exist (they are the product of mechanisms that normally deliver veridical experiences). This gives us reason to be hesitant that any explanation of this kind will work for the passage illusionist.

I consider a number of mechanisms that represent aspects of time, including those that represent temporal order, duration, simultaneity, motion and change. I argue that, regardless of how we think about the content of mental states, we should conclude that none of the representational states generated by these mechanisms individually, or jointly, represent time as passing.

First, suppose we think that the content of our experiences is exhausted by the things in the world that those experiences typically co-vary with.  For instance, suppose you have a kind of mental state which typically co-varies with the presence of cows. On this view, that mental state represents cows, and nothing more. I argue that if we take this view of representational content, then none of the contents generated by the functioning of the various mechanisms that represent aspects of time, could either severally or, importantly, jointly, represent time as passing. For even if our brains could in some way ‘knit together’ some of these contents into a new percept, such contents don’t have the right features to generate a representation of time passing. For instance, they don’t include a representation of objective, non-perspectival presence. So, if we hold this view on mental content, we should think that passage illusionism is false.

Alternatively, we might think that our mental states do represent the things in the world with which they typically co-vary, but that their content is not exhausted by representing those things. So, the illusionist could argue that we experience passage by representing various temporal features, such that our experiences have not only that content, but also some extra content, and that jointly this generates a representation of temporal passage.

I argue that it is very hard to see why we would come to have experiences with this particular extra content. Representing that certain events are objectively, metaphysically, and non-perspectivally present, and that which event these are, changes, is a very sophisticated representation. If it is not an accurate representation, it’s hard to see why we would come to have it. Further, it seems plausible that the human experience of time is, in this regard, similar to the experience of some non-human animals. Yet it seems unlikely that non-human animals would come to have such sophisticated representations, if the world does not in fact contain passage.

So, I conclude, it is much more likely, if time does not pass, that we have veridical experiences of a static world rather than illusory experiences of a dynamical world.

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/2914/.

About the author

Kristie Miller is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Time at the University of Sydney. She writes on the nature of time, temporal experience, and persistence, and she also undertakes empirical work in these areas. At the moment, she is mostly focused on the question of whether, assuming we live in a four-dimensional block world, things seem to us just as they are. She has published widely in these areas, including three recent books: “Out of Time” (OUP 2022), “Persistence” (CUP 2022), and “Does Tomorrow Exist?” (Routledge 2023). She has a new book underway on the nature of experience in a block world, which hopefully will be completed by the end of 2024. 

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Jonas Werner – “Extended Dispositionalism and Determinism”

Picture of a tall glass tumbler, meant to represent the glass disposition to break.
“Nr. 1598” (2001) Peter Dreher © Courtesy of the Peter Dreher Foundation

In this post, Jonas Werner discusses the article he recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of Jonas’ article can be found here.

You should handle glasses with care because they are fragile and could break. Dispositions, like fragility or inflammability, go hand in hand with possibilities, like the possibility that the glass breaks or the paper ignites.

Modal dispositionalists take this observation as the starting point for their theory of metaphysical modality. Every possibility, so they claim, is underwritten by a disposition. Some of these dispositions are possessed to a very small degree, some are iterated (dispositions to acquire certain dispositions), and some were lost and are only a thing of the past.

At the heart of the modal dispositionalist’s position  lies the following biconditional:

It is metaphysically possible that p just in case something has, had, or will have an (iterated or non-iterated) disposition to be such that p.

I call the proponent of this biconditional the “classic dispositionalist”.

I argue that, for some p, it is possible that p although nothing has, had, or will have a disposition to be such that p. Some possibilities are only indirectly underwritten by dispositions. 

Why should one be unhappy with classic dispositionalism? Because, when combined with certain plausible assumptions, it quickly leads to a disaster.

The first assumption is that dispositions are always future-directed: nothing can be disposed to change the past.  For the classic dispositionalist, this immediately leads to the result that the first moment in time (if there is one) could not have been different.

The second assumption is that there are immutable truths about the dispositional roles of fundamental physical objects. Plausibly, nothing has the power to change these dispositional roles. For example, nothing can stop electrons from repelling protons. As a result, truths about the fundamental dispositional roles of fundamental objects turn out to be necessary for the classic dispositionalist.

The problem with both assumptions is that they generate too many necessities. To see the force of this worry, assume (something close to) determinism:

A complete description of the state of the universe at the first moment in time, in conjunction with immutable truths about the dispositional roles of physical objects, entails a complete description of every later state of the universe.

Now, the first assumption gave us that the state of the universe at the first moment in time is necessarily the way it is, while the second assumption gave us that fundamental dispositional roles are necessarily the way they are. Whatever is entailed by necessities is itself a necessity. Hence, we get the result that every state of the world obtains by necessity.

According to this result, for a match that never ignites – because I accidentally dropped in a pond, for example – it is impossible that it ignites. If we were to still subscribe to classic dispositionalism, we would even have to say that it was never flammable. This seems absurd!

Of course, there is some room for manoeuvre for the classic dispositionalist, which I discuss in some detail in the paper. For now, I just wish to mention that the case based on determinism is just an extreme version of the general worry that the classic dispositionalist might be forced to accept necessities that are incompatible with the manifestation of some dispositions.

In the second part of my paper, I propose a variant of dispositionalism that is immune to this problem, which I dub “extended dispositionalism”.

Clearly, the right-to-left part of the biconditional has to be saved. Something having a disposition to be such that p needs to be sufficient for the possibility that p, otherwise the central idea of modal dispositionalism is lost. But the dispositionalist need not say that something having a disposition to be such that p is necessary for it being possible that p.

Extended dispositionalism allows that possibilities are indirectly underwritten by dispositions; it allows that the left-to-right direction of our biconditional fails. This blocks the problem described above, because from the fact that nothing is disposed to be such that p we need not conclude that it is not possible that p.

How can possibilities be indirectly underwritten by dispositions?

In a nutshell, we can take a collection of true propositions to be a candidate for a collection of metaphysical necessities just in case every disposition is such that its manifestation is logically consistent with the conjunction of all propositions in this set.

There will be many such collections. However, some of them might be more plausible candidates for a basis of all metaphysical necessities than others. Maybe there is a maximal collection; maybe a collection is the largest one that avoids arguably objectionable cases of arbitrariness; or maybe it turns out that what’s necessary is indeterminate.

In any case, the method of looking for a collection of necessities that is compatible with the right-to-left direction of our biconditional has it that dispositions keep their role as the source of modality.

Still, we might have possibilities that are not the manifestation of any dispositions. We could, for example, hold that the first state of the universe is not necessary, although nothing ever has, had, or will have a disposition for it to be different.

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/2280/

About the author

Jonas Werner is a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bern. He received his PhD from the University of Hamburg. His research focuses on metaphysics and the philosophy of language.