172 research outputs found
Global supervenience without reducibility
Does the global supervenience of one class on another entail reductionism, in the sense that any property in the former class is definable from properties in the latter class? This question appears to be at the same time formally tractable and philosophically significant. It seems formally tractable because the concepts involved are susceptible to rigorous definition. It is philosophically significant because in a number of debates about inter-level relationships, there are prima facie plausible positions that presuppose that there is no such entailment: standard versions of non-reductive physicalism and of normative non-naturalism accept global supervenience while rejecting reductionism. I identify a gap in an influential argument for the entailment, due to Frank Jackson and Robert Stalnaker, and draw on the model theory of infinitary languages to argue that some globally supervening properties are not reducible
Supervenience, Logic, and Empirical Content: Commentary on Hans Halvorson, The Logic in Philosophy of Science
Halvorsonâs bookâs real achievement is that it is both a source and a challenge, and not just for philosophers of science. I will begin with some notes to add to Halvorsonâs discussion of supervenience and definability. Then secondly I will engage the bookâs way of dealing with empirical content. Extension of formal methods to the relation of theory to world, as mediated by experiment and measurement, seems to me crucial to its value, and I will make three suggestions for this. Then thirdly I will turn to the tantalizing hints Halvorson gives us of an overall view of logic and language, and speculate about how that would answer questions about scientific representation and more specifically about the object language / metalanguage relation
Supervenience, Logic, and Empirical Content: Commentary on Hans Halvorson, The Logic in Philosophy of Science
Halvorsonâs bookâs real achievement is that it is both a source and a challenge, and not just for philosophers of science. I will begin with some notes to add to Halvorsonâs discussion of supervenience and definability. Then secondly I will engage the bookâs way of dealing with empirical content. Extension of formal methods to the relation of theory to world, as mediated by experiment and measurement, seems to me crucial to its value, and I will make three suggestions for this. Then thirdly I will turn to the tantalizing hints Halvorson gives us of an overall view of logic and language, and speculate about how that would answer questions about scientific representation and more specifically about the object language / metalanguage relation
Structural problems for reductionism
Universal reductionismâthe sort of project pursued by Carnap in the Aufbau, Lewis in his campaign on behalf of Humean supervenience, Jackson in From Metaphysics to Ethics, and Chalmers in Constructing the Worldâaims to reduce everything to some specified base, more or less austere as it may be. In this paper, I identify two constraints that a promising strategy to argue for universal reductionism needs to satisfy: the exhaustion constraint and the chaining constraint. As a case study, I then consider Chalmersâ Constructing the World, in which a priori implication, or âscrutabilityâ, plays the role of reduction. Chalmers first divides up the total vocabulary of our language into different families, and then argues, for each family separately, that truths involving expressions in that family are scrutable from the putative base. He does not systematically address the question whether âcross-family sentencesââsentences involving expressions from more than one familyâare scrutable. I shall argue that this lacuna cannot be filled, since scrutability does not allow for the exhaustion constraint and the chaining constraint to be jointly satisfied. I further suggest that Carnapâs account, in which definability plays the role of reduction, has better prospects of meeting these constraints
Supervenience among classes of relations
This paper extends the definition of strong supervenience to cover classes of relations of any adicity, including transworld relations. It motivates that project by showing that not all interesting supervenience claims involving relations are global supervenience claims. The proposed definition has five welcome features: it reduces to the familiar definition in the special case where the classes contain only monadic properties; it equips supervenience with the expected formal properties, such as transitivity and monotonicity; it entails that a relation supervenes on its converse; it classifies certain paradigms correctly; it makes distinctions even in the realm of the non-contingent, as witnessed by the fact that identity does not supervene on any class of relations. Finally, the paper applies the defined concept, and the related concept of orthogonality, to the study of internal and external relations
What Makes a Computation Unconventional?
A coherent mathematical overview of computation and its generalisations is
described. This conceptual framework is sufficient to comfortably host a wide
range of contemporary thinking on embodied computation and its models.Comment: Based on an invited lecture for the 'Symposium on
Natural/Unconventional Computing and Its Philosophical Significance' at the
AISB/IACAP World Congress 2012, University of Birmingham, July 2-6, 201
On the Emergence of Time in Quantum Gravity
We discuss from a philosophical perspective the way in which the normal
concept of time might be said to `emerge' in a quantum theory of gravity. After
an introduction, we briefly discuss the notion of emergence, without regard to
time (Section 2). We then introduce the search for a quantum theory of gravity
(Section 3); and review some general interpretative issues about space, time
and matter Section 4). We then discuss the emergence of time in simple quantum
geometrodynamics, and in the Euclidean approach (Section 5). Section 6
concludes.Comment: To appear in ``The Arguments of Time'', ed. J. Butterfield, Oxford
University Press, 199
Supervenience, Reduction, and Translation
This paper considers the following question: what is the relationship between supervenience and reduction? I investigate this formally, first by introducing a recent argument by Christian List to the effect that one can have supervenience without reduction; then by considering how the notion of Nagelian reduction can be related to the formal apparatus of definability and translation theory; then by showing how, in the context of propositional theories, topological constraints on supervenience serve to enforce reducibility; and finally, how constraints derived from the theory of ultraproducts can enforce reducibility in the context of first-order theories
Ramsey equivalence
In the literature over the Ramsey-sentence approach to structural realism, there is often debate over whether structural realists can legitimately restrict the range of the second-order quantifiers, in order to avoid the Newman problem. In this paper, I argue that even if they are allowed to, it wonât help: even if the Ramsey sentence is interpreted using such restricted quantifiers, it is still an implausible candidate to capture a theoryâs structural content. To do so, I use the following observation: if a Ramsey sentence did encode a theoryâs structural content, then two theories would be structurally equivalent just in case they have logically equivalent Ramsey sentences. I then argue that this criterion for structural equivalence is implausible, even where frame or Henkin semantics are used
Ramsey equivalence
In the literature over the Ramsey-sentence approach to structural realism, there is often debate over whether structural realists can legitimately restrict the range of the second-order quantifiers, in order to avoid the Newman problem. In this paper, I argue that even if they are allowed to, it wonât help: even if the Ramsey sentence is interpreted using such restricted quantifiers, it is still an implausible candidate to capture a theoryâs structural content. To do so, I use the following observation: if a Ramsey sentence did encode a theoryâs structural content, then two theories would be structurally equivalent just in case they have logically equivalent Ramsey sentences. I then argue that this criterion for structural equivalence is implausible, even where frame or Henkin semantics are used
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