Substantivalism is the view that space is a real entity. A lot of substantivalists believe that there are (at least) two fundamental kinds - there is space and there are the material objects that occupy space. These kinds of objects are distinct from each other and equally real

It’s easier to understand what Substantivalism is by contrasting it with the main rival, relationalism. Relationalism is the view that all talk about space can be reduced to talk about the material objects that many substantivalists think occupy space. We don’t need space, says the relationalist. Space is not a real entity. Anything you say that you think commits you to the reality of space can be translated into talk about relations between objects.

The relationalist looks at the substantivalist and says, “You’ve got too many kinds of things in your ontology! You’ve got this stuff called space (whatever that is), and you’ve got these material objects. I can get by with just material objects. So I will.”

There is a third way to go. I was a little misleading above. I suggested that Substantivalism is the view that there are two kinds of substances – space and material objects. It is probably best to call that view Strong Substantivalism. Strong Substantivalists keep space and objects. Relationalists think this is unnecessary, and they get rid of space. You could agree with the relationalist that both kinds of substances are unnecessary, but instead of getting rid of space, you could get rid of material objects and reduce them to talk about space. This view maintains that space is a real genuine entity. Let’s call this view Weak Substantivalism. According to Weak Substantivalism, what we call material objects just are regions of space, and space is the real thing.

Ted Sider briefly mentions these two substantivalist views in Four-Dimensionalism (page 110). The main pro for Weak Substantivalism over Strong Substantivalism is that it posits the existence of fewer kinds of things. Of course there are some cons. Some odd sentences of English end up being true – e.g. A region of space-time bounded out the door and barked at the mailman. I bet you can think of many more.

Sider doesn’t think these cons are enough to give up on the view. I want to add some more things to the con list. I doubt the cons that I want to add to this list would persuade Sider, but they strike me as even more odd than the con listed above. I’ll post those cons soon.

Finally! They're doing a Terminator in the future when all the robot war stuff happens. I've wanted this movie ever since I saw the first one (way back when). Christian Bale is playing the adult John Conner.

I gained a new respect for the Terminator movies when I first discovered philosophy of time, read "Paradoxes of Time Travel" and realized that Terminator 1 and 2 were consistent. If I'm not mistaken (and somebody correct me if I'm wrong) Terminator 3 did something toward the end that made it an inconsistent time travel story; however, now I can't remember what that was.

(Bleg, can someone tell me if I'm right about Terminator 3 being inconsistent. Whatever it was it struck me as being pretty minor - e.g., the time of judgement day ended up being off by just a few seconds or something like that.)

Hopefully, Terminator 4 will be (a.) good and (b.) consistent.

In the last few hours, I've stumbled on quite a few cool bits of philosophy...

1. Mike Almeida has a pretty interesting post on Multiverse responses to a variety of versions of the Problem of Evil here.

2. Carrie Jenkins just suggested that we might be able to handle Kripkenstein Undetermination Worries in a (roughly) analogous way that epistemologists might handle Drestke Cleverly Disguised Mule cases.

3. Lewis Powell just pointed out some very cool papers by Mark Schroeder. The one I've been reading through argues that a common argument against Divine Command Theory generalizes to just about any moral theory. We then get a diagnosis of where the original argument goes wrong. I'm only about half-way through the paper, but it's a good read so far. Here's the link.

(HT: Justin over at Show Me The Argument)

Ralph Wedgewood over at PEA Soup presents an interesting puzzle that David Velleman recently discussed at a conference.

Here is the puzzle...

Suppose that Karen, a 14-year old girl, decides to conceive a child. Having a child at such a young age will make life very hard for Karen, and for her child as well: in general, Karen will have a much better life if she delays having a child for another 10 years or so; and the child whom she would have 10 years later would also have a much better life than any child whom she conceives today. So we might accept the statement that she ought not to have a child at her age.

But then Karen's child is born; she names him Max. Max is now a member of the community, and we are committed to treating him with concern and respect. So we are now most reluctant to accept the statement that Max ought not to have been brought into existence. But we know that if Karen had not had a child at the age of 14, Max would not have been brought into existence.

If you accept all of the ought-judgements above, it seems like you're committed to a contradiction. Ralph has an interesting (and complex) solution to the problem, but I wonder why we shouldn't just give up on the principle of necessity of origin. That's the principle being assumed in the last sentence of the the passage above.

This is a pretty interesting article that was just posted on Slashdot. It summarizes some pretty cool findings that should be of interest to philosophers interested in issues related to epistemology and perception.

It turns out that there are many cases in which what people expect to see tricks them into thinking they saw it. For example, they had people watch someone throw two balls. The thrower then pretended to throw a third ball. Most people think they see a third ball that suddenly disappears in mid-air. They don't even realize that a third ball wasn't thrown. Their first thought is usually that the person somehow made the third ball disappear.

The research article that Slashdot summarizes is available here.

A couple of months ago Adam Arico over at Aspring Lemming noted that the TV Show Numb3rs gave a quick and dirty presentation of Searle's Chinese Room argument.

I decided to see if I could find the clip on YouTube - Here it is...



The clip cuts off short...but Adam says that the presentation fails to note that Searle's Thought Experiment is supposed to show that machines can't think.

I really want to find time to read Trenton Merrick's new book Truth and Ontology. It looks really interesting.

There are a wide range of metaphysical theses that are rejected because they are alleged to be incompatible with any kind of truth maker principle (or Truth Supervenes on Being Principle). Presentism is example of one of these views.

Defenders of these views usually try to find a way to explain how there views are compatible with some plausible truth maker principle.

Merricks takes a different tack. He denies the main candidate truth maker principles (including the Truth Supervenes on Being Principle).

Ben Caplan's review of the book just came out here.

Truth and Ontology Added to My To Do List','resizable,location,menubar,toolbar,scrollbars,status'));">

Jonathan Ichikawa justed posted about the lengthy journal review process here.
I feel his pain. Today (and, I kid you not, it really is today) a journal has had one of my papers for exactly one year.

In a recent post, I led up to the problem sentence for Nominalism.

(3) Red resembles Orange more than Square-ness.

The task for nominalism is to find an acceptable paraphrase for (3). (3) seems true, so whatever the paraphrase we come up with - it better be true too. We left off with (3**) as our candidate paraphrase.

(3**) The red-set resembles the orange-set more than the square-set

(Note: Red-set = set of all red things. Orange-set = set of all orange things. square-set = set of all square things.)

(3**) seems true. Imagine if you could have a God's eye view of all the red objects out there, and you could compare them side by side with the set of all the orange objects and the set of all the square objects. I bet you'd be inclined to say that this set (or grouping, or fusion, or whatever) of red things does resemble the set of orange things more than the set of square things.

My New Concern
I think my knowledge that (3) is true substantially different from my knowledge that (3**). First, I know (3) immediately and directly on the basis of perception. I can know that the property red that I am looking at right now is more similar to the property orange than it is the property square, merely by looking at any collection of a red, an orange, and a square object. It doesn't seem like my knowledge that (3**) works like that.

Now on the face of it, this looks like another one of those arguments where someone argues that one thing is not identical to another thing, because of the different ways in which the two things are knowable - (Think: Arguments from Introspection for Dualism - check out the bottom of page 14).

However, now I think the problem might run a little deeper and that there is another way to cast the argument. I think my knowledge that (3**) is true evidentially depends on my knowledge that (3) is true. How do I know that from a God's eye view the set of red things would resemble the set of orange things more than the set of square things? It's because I know that red resembles orange more than square.

Now, does that lend more support to the claim that (3**) cannot be an adequate paraphrase of (3)?

Is here...

(It looks like there is some emphasis on philosophical humor...)

One version of nominalism holds that properties just are sets of things. There is no abstract universal red-ness. There just is a set of red things. The problem is that ordinary sentences of English look like they are talking about something that could only be something like a universal. There is no talk of sets.

Consider the following three sentences.

(1) The ball is red
(2) Red is a color
(3) Red resembles orange more than square-ness

Each of these appears to be talking about a property, and proponents of abstract universals maintain that their view makes more sense of the truth of (1)-(3) than nominalism.
Nominalism can handle (1) pretty easily, by offering an acceptable paraphrase.

(1*) The ball is a member of the red-set.

Apparent talk about universals turns into talk about the the ball, and how that ball is a member of some particular set. No universal talk is required.
Paraphrasing (2) is a bit trickier since it seems that red-ness is referred to in the subject slot, but nominalists have offered (2*)

(2*) All things that are members of the red-set are members of the colored-set.

Again, (2*) gets rid of talk about universals. All we have in (2*) is talk about particular objects and sets.
It's when we get to (3) that Nominalists have difficulties. (3*) is clearly unacceptable.

(3*) All things that are members of the red-set resemble all things that are members of the orange-set more than things that are members of the square set

Why is (3*) unacceptable? Because (3) is true, but (3*) is false. A red square does not resemble an orange goldfish more than a yellow square. That's enough to falsify (3*), and since you can't translate a true sentence to a false sentence and have succeeded in preserving the meaning - we have an unacceptable paraphrase.
For a while, I thought that nominalists actually might have a good translation of (3). I thought that the nominalist could translate (3) as...

(3**) The red-set resembles the orange-set more than the square-set.

I thought that you might be able to talk about resemblance relations between properties as resemblance relations between the actual sets.

I'm now worried about this...More on that in a moment...

When I teach personal identity in Intro and Metaphysics, I often have a student suggest that what it takes to have the same person across time is for the persons to have the same DNA structure.

A good response to this has always been to point out that identical twins have the same DNA structure, but are not the same persons. That won't work anymore. According to this article, we've discovered that we were wrong in thinking that identical twins have identical DNA structures.

Of course, I think there is still a pretty decent counterexample that would involved identical twins in the neighborhood. It turns out that identical twins differ only slightly in their DNA structure. So, imagine we discovered that there were twins who lacked those slight differences. I take it they wouldn't be the same person. So the counterexample, isn't completely undermined - but we do need to run it using nearby possible worlds. We can't rely on something that's actually true.

That seems interesting and worthy of note.

A common view in philosophy is that counterfactual conditionals with impossible antecedents are all vacuously true. But I'm very worried about that view. There are several counterfactuals with impossible antecedents that seem false. Here are some examples.

Counterfactuals involving Metaphyical Claims
Consider Metaphysical Nihilism, the thesis that there are no composite objects (just simples). According to Nihilism, composition doesn't occur. Suppose you think that metaphysical facts about composition are necessarily true. Under that assumption if Nihilism is false, then (1) is a false counterfactual with an impossible antecedent. If Nihilism is true, then (2) is a false counterfactual with an impossible antecedent.

(1) If Nihilism were true, then composition would occur. (seems false)

(2) If Unrestricted Composition were true, then there would be no composition.

If you think that Metaphysical Facts about composition are not necessarily true, then you should think that (3) is a false counterfactual with an impossible antecedent.

(3) If Nihilism were necessarily true, then composition would occur. (seems false)

Any way you go on the answer to the Special Composition Question, and any way you go concerning the modal status of composition facts - we can generate a false counterfactual with an impossible antecedent.

Counterfactuals Involving Math and Geometry
Here's another fun one...

(4) If triangles had exactly four sides, then the sum of the angles of a triangle would equal 30 degrees.

(False, right?)

However...
I also have some sympathy toward the view that counterfactuals with impossible antecedents are vacuosly true. I can post about that later. I can also post about why I think this matters.

Editing and refereeing for journals is a thank-less job that you don't get paid for. Editors and referees do this out of the goodness of their heart. So it's weird to have a publishing company make money off of this labor. At one time they could justify the charge because they were the only way to get this research circulated.

However, the internet has changed all of that. Publishing companies are unnecessary. If editors and referees are going to work for free, then it makes much more sense to have the research posted online for free. Philosophers' Imprint already does this, and they have an excellent mission statement defending open access journals. This is a very high quality journal and it's free to the world. I like that. I hope that most philosophy journals go this route.

Harvard's faculty recently voted to post all of their research online so that it would be freely available to the public. This is a noble gesture, and it sort of fits with the mission of journals like Philosophers' Imprint.

For that reason, I admire what the professors at Harvard are trying to acheive, but the article suggests that research will get published (and counted as research) without peer review screening. Ironically, publishers are criticizing Harvard on the grounds that this risks lowering the quality of the research, but (of course) the publishers are wrong in assuming that you need publishers to have the kind of peer review that would ensure higher quality research. Again, see Philosophers' Imprint.

Of course Harvard probably can't shift the publication of their faculty's research to online in peer review online journals all at once. There probably aren't enough of those journals out there, but I can feel the revolution coming. I hope that Harvard's move here will help push peer reviewed research into free online journals like Philosophers' Imprint. All we need now are some qualified scholars to start more of these open access and peer-reviewed journals.

(hint, hint...Harvard.)

For the past few years, Leiter has put up a post so people can announce new tenure-track hires in the comments thread. It's kind of interesting to see who hires who.

Here's the permanent link.

I imagine that most people who read this also read Leiter, but just in case you haven't seen it yet - I think this is worth posting about.

This starts off as what purports to be a discussion of the misuse of the expression "begging the question"...

Half way through the article, it stops being serious and gets pretty funny.

But it's worth noting that before the article goes humorous, the author gives an example of a valid modus tollens as begging the question. Which begs the question (in the wrong sense of the word) - Why don't philosophers just stop using this phrase? We clearly think that to do philosophy (or any kind of reasoning) we must employ logically valid arguments, but all logically valid arguments, in some sense, assume what they are proving. After all, the thing being proved is contained in the conjunction of the premises.

And this is not some recent discovery. The literature is full of papers discussing the messy, unclear nature of this kind of criticism.

Colleges are going to have to start screening their networks to try and curb illegal file sharing and downloading.

I don't know much about the logistics of Information Technology Departments on a college campus, but this seems like it's one more headache for our already overburdened IT departments. IT people are busy enough, and now this is going to fall on their shoulders? I'd rather our IT departments help students and faculty make use of technology that's useful for teaching and learning. Now they get to play police.

What's worse. If you read the article, the MPAA was wrong about the economic impact of college student downloads. The MPAA estimated that 44% of the profit loss is due to college campus downloads. It turns out they were off by about 30%. If I did my math right, college campuses are (at best) responsible for about 14% of the profit losses.

I'd be interested to know that the cost and upkeep will be to implement a network filtering system (and patching it every time someone hacks around it) for all of the college campuses.

A lot of materialists will admit that there are some kinds of entities that are a little more difficult to make sense of within a materialist ontology. For example - propositions. Here's an argument for immaterialism that I encountered that seems to be aimed at materialists who would accept the existence of propositions.

I've encountered this argument before, but I recently came across it in a dialogue written by Keith Yandel. I think it's an interesting argument, so I decided to try and reconstruct it as carefully as I could. Here it is.

An Argument Against Materialism

1. Some propositions are necessarily true.
2. It is possible for there to be a world with no material entities.
3. If (1) and (2), then it is possible for a proposition to be true in a world without material entities.
4. Therefore, it is possible for a proposition to be true in a world without material entities.
5. If it is possible for a proposition to be true in a world without material entities, then propositions are not material entities.
6. Therefore, propositions are not material entities.
7. If propositions are not material entities, then materialism is false.
   -------------------------------------------------------------------
   
8. Therefore, materialism is false.
   

I've got some thoughts on this argument, but I'm going to mull it over for a bit. If anyone cares to comment - the thread is open.

A former student pointed this blog out. It's great...especially for those of us who like to encourage students to be mindful of use-mention confusion.

(hat-tip: Justin - check his blog out here. It's called "Broadly Construed")