Category Archives: Metaphysics

Frank Arntzenius gave the departmental seminar here at Leeds the other day. Given I’ve been spending quite a bit of time just recently thinking about the Fieldian nominalist project, it was really interesting to hear about his updating and extension of the technical side of the nominalist programme (he’s working on extending it to differential geometry, gauge theories and the like).

One thing I’ve been wondering about is how  theories like statistical mechanics fit into the nominalist programme. These were raised as a problem for Field in one of the early reviews (by Malament). There’s a couple of interesting papers recently out in Philosophia Mathematica on this topic, by Glen Meyer and Mark Colyvan/Aidan Lyon. Now, one of the assumptions, as far as I can tell, is that even sticking with the classical, Newtonian framework, the Field programme is incomplete, because it fails to “nominalize” statistical mechanical reasoning (in particular, stuff naturally represented by measures over phase space).

Now one thing that I’ll mention just to set aside is that some of this discussion would look rather different if we increased our nominalistic ontology. Suppose that reality, Lewis-style, contains a plurality of concrete, nominalistic, space-times—at least one for each point in phase space (that’ll work as an interpretation of phase space, right?). Then the project of postulating qualitative probability synthetic structure over such worlds from which a representation theorem for the quantitative probabilities of statistical mechanics looks far easier. Maybe it’s still technically or philosophically problematic. Just a couple of thoughts on this. From the technical side, it’s probably not enough to show that the probabilities can be represented nominalistically—we want to show how to capture the relevant laws. And it’s not clear to me what a nominalistic formulation of something like the past hypothesis looks like (BTW, I’m working with something like the David Albert picture of stat mechanics here). Philosophically, what I’ve described looks like a nominalistic version of primitive propensities, and there are various worries about treating probability in this primitive way (e.g. why should information about such facts constrain credences in the distinctive way information about chance seems to)? I doubt Field would want to go in for this sort of ontological inflation in any case, but it’d be worth working through it as a case study.

Another idea I won’t pursue is the following: Field in the 80’s was perfectly happy to take a (logical) modality as primitive. From this, and nominalistic formulations of Newtonian laws, presumably a nomic modality could be defined. Now, it’s one thing to have a modality, another thing to earn the right to talk of possible worlds (or physical relations between them). But given that phase space looks so much like we’re talking about the space of nomically possible worlds (or time-slices thereof) it would be odd not to look carefully about whether we can use nomic modalities to help us out.

But even setting these kind of resources aside, I wonder what the rules of the game are here. Field’s programme really has two aspects. The first is the idea that there’s some “core” nominalistic science, C. And the second claim is that mathematics, and standard mathematized science, is conservative over C. Now, if the core was null, the conservativeness claim would be trivial, but nobody would be impressed by the project! But Field emphasizes on a number of occasions that the conservativeness claim is not terribly hard to establish, for a powerful block of applied mathematics (things that can be modelled in ZFCU, essentially).

(Actually, things are more delicate than you’d think from Science without Numbers, as emerged in the JPhil exchange between Shapiro and Field. The upshot, I take it  if (a) we’re allowed second-order logic in the nominalistic core; or (b) we can argue that best justified mathematized theory aren’t quite the usual versions, but systematically weakened versions; then the conservativeness results go through).

As far as I can tell, we can have the conservativeness result without a representation theorem. Indeed, for the case of arithmetic (as opposed to geometry and Newtonian gravitational theory) Field relies on conservativeness without giving anything like a representation theorem. I think therefore, that there’s a heel-digging response to all this open to Field. He could say that phase-space theories are all very fine, but they’re just part of the mathematized superstructure—there’s nothing in the core which they “represent”, nor do we need there to be.

Now, maybe this is deeply misguided. But I’d like to figure out exactly why. I can think of two worries: one based on loss of explanatory power; the other on the constraint to explain applicability.

Explanations. One possibility is that nominalistic science without statistical mechanics is a worse theory than mathematized science including phase space formulations—in a sense relevant to the indispensibility argument. But we have to treat this carefully. Clearly, there’s all sorts of ways in which mathematized science is more tractable than nominalized science—that’s Field’s explanation for why we indulge in the former in the first place. One objective of the Colyvan and Lyon article cited earlier is to give examples of the explanatory power of stat mechanical explanations, so that’s one place to start looking.

Here’s one thought about that. It’s not clear that the sort of explanations we get from statistical mechanics, cool though they may be, are of relevantly similar kind to the “explanations” given in classical mechanics. So one idea would be to try to pin down this difference (if there is one) and figure out how they relate to the “goodness” relevant to indispensibility arguments.

Applicability. The second thought is that the “mere conservativeness” line is appropriate either where the applicability of the relevant area of mathematics is unproblematic (as perhaps in arithmetic) or where there aren’t any applications to explain (the higher reaches of pure set theory). In other cases—like geometry, there is a prima facie challenge to tell a story about how claims about abstracta can tell us stuff about the world we live in. And representation theorems scratch this itch, since they show in detail how particular this-worldly structures can exactly call for a representation in terms of abstracta (so in some sense the abstracta are “coding for” purely nominalistic processes—“intrinsic processes” in Field’s terminology). Lots of people unsympathetic to nominalism are sympathetic to representation theorems as an account of the application of mathematics—or so the folklore says.

But, on the one hand, statistical mechanics does appear to feature in explanations of macro-phenomena; and second, the reason that talking about measures over some abstract “space” can be relevant to explaining facts about ripples on a pond is at least as unobvious as the applications of geometry.

I don’t have a very incisive way to end this post. But here’s one thought I have if the real worry is one of accounting for applicability, rather than explanatory power. Why think in these cases that applicability should be explained via representation theorems? In the case of geometry, Newtonian mechanics etc, it’s intuitively appealing to think there are nominalistic relations that our mathematized theories are encoding. Even if one is a platonist, that seems like an attractive part of a story about the applicability of the relevant theories. But when one looks at statistical mechanics, is there any sense that it’s applicability would be explained if we found a way to “code” within Newtonian space-time all the various points of phase space (and then postulate relations between the codings)? It seems like this is the wrong sort of story to be giving here. That thought goes back, I guess, to the point raised earlier in the “modal realist” version: even if we had the resources, would primitive nominalistic structure over some reconstruction of configuration of phase space really give us an attractive story about the applicability of statistical mechanical probabilities?

But if representation theorems don’t look like the right kind of story, what is? Can the Lewis-style “best theory theory” of chance, applied to stat mechanical case (as Barry Loewer has suggested) be wheeled in here? Can the Fieldian nominalist just appeal to (i) conservativeness (ii) the Lewisian account of how the probability-invoking theory and laws gets fixed by the patterns of nominalistic facts in a single classical space? Questions, questions…

I’ve been thinking about Hartry Field’s nominalist programme recently. In connection with this (and a draft of a paper I’ve been preparing for the Nottingham metaphysics conference) I’ve been thinking about parallels between the error theories that threaten if ontology is sparse (e.g. nominalistic, or van Inwagenian); and scientific revolutions.

One (Moorean) thought is that we are better justified in our commonsense beliefs (e.g. `I have hands’) than we could be in any philosophical premises incompatible with them. So we should always regard “arguments against the existence of hands” as reductios of the premises that entail that one has no hands. This thought, I take it, extends to commonsense claims about the number of hands I possess. Something similar might be formulated in terms of the comparative strength of justification for (mathematicized) science as against the philosophical premises that motivate its replacement.

So presented, Field (for one) has a response: he argues in several places that we exactly lack good justification for the existence of numbers. He simply rejects the premise of this argument.

A better way presentation of the worry focuses, not on the relative justification for one’s beliefs, but on conditions under which it is rational to change one’s beliefs. I presently have a vast array of beliefs that, according to Field, are simply false.

Forget issues of relative justification. It’s simply that the belief state I would have to be in to consistently accept Field’s view is very distant from my own—it’s not clear whether I’m even psychologically capable of genuinely disbelieving that if there are exactly two things in front of me, then the number of things in front of me is two. (If you don’t feel the pressure in this particular case, consider the suggestion that no macroscopic objects exist—then pretty much all of your existing substantive beliefs are false). Given my starting set of beliefs, it’s hard to see how speculative philosophical considerations could make it rational to change my views so much.

Here’s one way of trying to put some flesh on this general worry. In order to assess an empirical theory, we need to measure it against relevant phenomena to establish theory’s predictive and explanatory power. But what do we take these phenomena to be? A very natural thought is that they include platitudinous statements about the positions of pointers on readers, statements about how experiments were conducted, and whatever is described by records of careful observation. But Field’s theory says that the content of numerical records of experimental data will be false; as will be claims such as “the data points approximate an exponential function”. On a van Inwagenian ontology, there are no pointers, and experimental reports will be pretty much universally false (at least on an error-theoretic reading of his position). Sure, each theorist has a view on how to reinterpret what’s going on. But why should we allow them to skew the evidence to suit their theory? Surely, given what we reasonably take the evidence to be, we should count their theories as disastrously unsuccessful?

But this criticism is based on certain epistemological presuppositions, and these can be disputed. Indeed Field in the introduction to Realism Mathematics and Modality (preemptively) argues that the specific worries just outlined are misguided. He points to cases he thinks analogous, where scientific evidence has forced a radical change in view. He argues that when a serious alternative to our existing system of beliefs (and rules for belief-formation) is suggested to us, it is rational to (a) bracket relevant existing beliefs and (b) consider the two rival theories on their individual merits, adopting whichever one regards as the better theory. The revolutionary theory is not necessarily measured against we believe the data to be, but against what the revolutionary theory says the data is. Field thinks, for example, that in the grip of a geocentric model of the universe, we should treat `the sun moves in absolute upward motion in the morning’ as data. However, even for those within the grip of that model, when the heliocentric model is proposed, it’s rational to measure its success against the heliocentric take on what the proper data is (which, of course, will not describe sunrises in terms of absolute upward motion). Notice that on this model, there’s is effectively no `conservative influence’ constraining belief-change—since when evaluating new theories, one’s prior opinions on relevant matters are bracketed.

If this is the right account of (one form of) belief change, then the version of the Moorean challenge sketched above falls flat (maybe others would do better). Note that for this strategy to work, it doesn’t matter that philosophical evidence is more shaky than scientific evidence which induces revolutionary changes in view—Field can agree that the cases are disanalogous in terms of the weight of evidence supporting revolution. The case of scientific revolutions is meant to motivate the adoption of a certain epistemology of belief revision. This general epistemology, in application to the philosophy of mathematics, tells us we need not worry about the massive conflicts with existing beliefs that so concerned the Mooreans.

On the other hand, the epistemology that Field sketches is contentious. It’s certainly not obvious that the responsible thing to do is to measure revisionary theory T against T’s take on the data, rather than against one’s best judgement about what the data is. Why bracket what one takes to be true, when assessing new theories? Even if we do want to make room for such bracketing, it is questionable whether it is responsible to pitch us into such a contest whenever someone suggests some prima facie coherent revolutionary alternative. A moderated form of the proposal would require there to be extant reasons for dissatisfaction with current theory (a “crisis in normal science”) in order to make the kind of radical reappraisal appropriate. If that’s right, it’s certainly not clear whether distinctively philosophical worries of the kind Field raises should count as creating crisis conditions in the relevant sense. Scientific revolutions and philosophical error theories might reasonably be thought to be epistemically disanalogous in a way unhelpful to Field.

Two final notes. It is important to note what kind of objection a Moorean would put forward. It doesn’t engage in any way with the first-order case that the Field constructs for his error-theoretic conclusion. If substantiated, the result will be that it would not be rational for me (and people like me) to come to believe the error-theoretic position.

The second note is that we might save the Fieldian ontology without having to say contentious stuff in epistemology, by pursuing reconciliation strategies. Hermeneutic fictionalism—for example in Steve Yablo’s figuralist version—is one such. If we never really believed that the number of peeps was twelve, but only pretended this to be so, then there’s no prima facie barrier from “belief revision” considerations that prevents us from explicitly adopting a nominalist ontology. Another reconciliation strategy is to do some work in the philosophy of language to make the case that “there are numbers” can be literally true, even if Field is right about the constituents of reality. (There are a number of ways of cashing out that thought, from traditional Quinean strategies, to the sort of stuff on varying ontological commitments I’ve been working on recently).

In any case, I’d be really interested in people’s take on the initial tension here—and particularly on how to think about rational belief change when confronted with radically revisionary theories—pointers to the literature/state of the art on this stuff would be gratefully received!

I’ve recently discovered some really interesting papers on how to think about belief in a future with branching time. Folks are interested in branching time as it (putatively) emerges out of “decoherence” in the Everett interpretation of standard Quantum mechanics.

The first paper linked to above is forthcoming in BJPS, by Simon Saunders and David Wallace. In it, they argue for a certain kind of parallel between the semantics for personal fission cases and the semantics most charitably applied to language users in branching time, and argue that this sheds lights on the way that beliefs should behave.

Now, lots of clever people are obviously thinking about this, and I haven’t absorbed all the discussion yet. But since it’s really cool stuff, and since I’ve been thinking about related material recently (charity-based metasemantics, fission cases, semantics in branching time) I thought I’d sit down and figure out how things look from my point of view.

I’m sceptical, in fact, whether personal fission itself (and associated de se uncertainty about who one will be) will really help us out here in the way that Saunders and Wallace think. Set aside for now the question of whether faced with a fission case you should feel uncertain which fission-product you will end up as (for discussion of that question, on the assumption that it’s indeterminate which of the Lewisian continuing persons is me, see the indeterminate survival paper I just posted up). But suppose that we do get some sense in which, when you’re about to fission, you have de se uncertainty about where you’ll be, even granted full knowledge of the de dicto facts.

The Saunders-Wallace idea is to try to generalize this de se ignorance as an explanation of the ignorance we’d have if we were placed in a branching universe, and knew what was to happen on every branch. We’d know all the de dicto truths about multiple futures—and we would literally be about to undergo fission, since I’d be causally related in the right kind of ways to multiple person stages in the different futures. So—they claim—ignorance of who I am maps onto ignorance of what I’m about to see next (whether I’m about to see the stuff in the left branch, or in the right). And that explains how we can get ignorance in a branching world, and so lays the groundwork for explaining how we can get a genuine notion of uncertainty/probability/degree of belief off the ground.

I’m a bit worried about the generality of the purported explanation. The basic thought there is that to get a complete story about beliefs in branching universes, we’re going to need to justify degrees of beliefs in matters that happen, if at all, long after we would go out of existence. And so it just doesn’t seem likely that we’re going to get a complete story about uncertainty from consideration of uncertainty about which branch I myself am located within.

To dramatize, consider an instantaneous, omniscient agent. She knows all the de dicto truths about the world (in every future branch) and also exactly where he is located—so no de se ignorance either. But still, this agent might care about other things, and have a certain degree of belief as to whether, e.g. the sea-battle will happen in the future. The kind of degree of belief she has (and any associated “ignorance”) can’t, I think, be a matter of de se ignorance. And I think, for events that happen if at all in the far future, we’re relevantly like the instantaneous omniscient agent.

What else can we do? Well—very speculatively—I think there’s some prospect for using the sort of charity-based considerations David Wallace has pointed to in the literature for getting a direct, epistemic account of why we should adopt this or that degree of belief in borderline cases. The idea would be that we *mimimize inaccuracy of our beliefs* by holding true sentences to exactly the right degrees.

A first caveat: this hangs on having the *right* kind of semantic theory in the background. A Thomason-style supervaluationist semantics for the branching future just won’t cut it, nor will MacFarlane-style relativistic tweaks. I think one way of generalizing the “multiple utterances” idea of Saunders and Wallace holds out some prospect of doing better—but best of all would be a degree-theoretic semantics.

A second caveat: what I’ve got (if anything) is epistemic reason for adopting certain kinds of graded attitude. It’s not clear to me that we have to think of these graded attitudes as a kind of uncertainty. And it’s not so clear why expected utility, as calculated from these attitudes, should be a guide to action. On the other hand, I don’t see clearly the argument that they *don’t* or *shouldn’t* have this pragmatic significance.

So I’ve written up a little note on some of these issues—the treatment of fission that Saunders-Wallace use, the worries about limitations to the de se defence, and some of the ideas about accuracy-based defences of graded beliefs in a branching world. It’s very drafty (far more so than anything I usually put up as work in progres). To some extent it seems like a big blog post, so I thought I’d link to it from here in that spirit. Comments very welcome!