Anomalous Presumptions

I find questions about supervenience, the disjunction problem, etc. fascinating. I think at least some of these questions are very important.

But non-philosophers I know find these questions supremely boring — typically just pointless. These are people who find current “hard problems” in cosmology, quantum physics, mathematics, neuroscience, etc. interesting, even though they aren’t professionally involved in those fields. So why not philosophy?

Esoteric questions in other disciplines always seem to be connected to issues that make sense to non-experts. The dynamics of a probe D3-(anti-)brane propagating in a warped string compactification bear on whether there’s life after the big crunch. But technical problems in philosophy often seem disconnected from issues that matter to non-philosophers.

For example, typical arguments for property dualism assign the non-physical properties such a thin, peripheral, technical role that no one outside of philosophy has a reason to care if philosophers decide that property dualism is true or false. Zombies in some metaphysically possible (but nomologically impossible) world might be a little more or less unreal, and that’s about it. Similar disconnects exist for many other hot topics.

A constructive response

Enough complaining. Here is a list of metaphysical questions framed to emphasize their major implications outside of philosophy. I briefly connect each question with the existing philosophical debate and with some examples of non-philosophical implications, but I don’t provide enough background to make this very accessible to people who don’t already know the philosophical issues. If you want more context, ask!

• How should we think about the relationship of a coarser grained entity to its finer grained components?

  This is my version of the question of how mind supervenes on the brain, how macroscopic entities supervene on micro-physics, etc. To connect with any field outside of philosophy, we have to accept that coarser grained entities “exist” in some useful sense; the question is what sense.

  This issue is very important in many disciplines:

  • How do individuals make up institutions?
  • How do modular brain sub-systems interact in complex cognitive skills?
  • How do molecular level biological processes coordinate to maintain and reproduce cellular level structure?

  Every discipline addresses these questions in limited, specific ways. However I think most disciplines avoid dealing with them fully and explicitly, because we currently lack the conceptual framework we need to talk about them clearly, or even to know what should count as a general answer. If philosophy can shed any light on the general question, it will help people better come to grips with the specific issues on their home turf.

• How does a coarser grained entity affect the behavior of its finer grained components?

  This is the question of downward causation, an important issue in the context of supervenience. Again, to engage other disciplines, we need philosophical discussions that accept that disciplines need to think about how coarser grained entities do somehow affect the activities of their components,. Philosophy can potentially provide a schema for handling specific cases.

  Real examples, parallel to the questions above:

  • How do institutions influence the behavior of the people who make them up?
  • How do skills or habits organize the behavior of brain modules?
  • How do cells regulate the molecular processes that maintain them?

• How can we tell whether a proposed concept picks out a meaningful aspect of the world, or not?

  This is typically discussed as the disjunction problem in philosophy. A recent example was the debate in the both the astronomy community and the public sphere over whether Pluto was “really” a planet.

  The deeper questions behind any specific disciplinary debate are:

  • Is this choice of terms arbitrary (perhaps socially determined), or do some terms actually “carve nature at the joints” better than others?
  • Assuming there are terms that better fit the structure of the world, what criteria tell us that we’ve found them?

  These are hard questions, debated by most disciplines from time to time, as new terms are needed or old ones become questionable. But currently, there is no bridge between the related debates in philosophy over the disjunction problem and more generally the relationship between propositions and the structure of the world, and the needs of practitioners in the disciplines.

• How should we handle dubious references?

  There are a number of ongoing struggles within philosophy about how to handle problematic references — for example, to Sherlock Holmes’ hat (I’m sure you remember what it looks like). The problem of course is that Holmes never existed so we can’t even say he had no hat. But in various ways similar problems arise for the entities referenced in counterfactuals (”If a large spider had been here, James would have run away”), theoretical entities of uncertain status (the very D3-(anti-)brane referenced above), and even perfectly normal mathematical entities (3).

  Again, the status of hypothetical entities, and even how to debate that status, is an important issue from time to time in most disciplines. For example, the status of the entities posited by string theory (such as the brane above) is a matter of extremely heated debate. The debate is not just about whether these entities exist, but whether it even makes sense to treat them as hypothetical. More violent disagreements along these lines arise in fields such as literary theory, for example.

  Disciplines must answer questions similar to those above, when confronting any given cluster of dubious references:

  • How should we decide whether these references “work” well enough to be worth using?
  • What can we do to make them into respectable references, or alternatively discover that they should be rejected?

  And again, philosophy has an opportunity, if it chooses, to help disciplines make these judgments by finding ways to translate whatever insights can be derived from its internal debates.

So what?

Questions like these now fall into a no-mans land. The specific disciplines where they arise aren’t professionally concerned with the broad questions — they just want to resolve a specific problem and move on. Philosophy, which seems to be the natural home for these broad questions, appears to largely ignore connections to examples like those that arise in other disciplines.

So I would argue that philosophy is missing a major opportunity here, and failing to contribute in ways that would make it a much more credible and important discipline. Whether or not the discipline of philosophy as a whole addresses these questions, I think they deserve attention, and I plan to work on them.

Filed by Jed at 2:22 am under Agenda, Philosophy
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