My busy September is finally coming to an end and it is time for a few reports. I’ll start with the Metaphysics of Science Conference which took place in Nottingham 12-14 September. I’ll try to keep this brief if I can. A report from ENFA4 in Portugal will follow soon.

At the bar on the first night. Daniel Nolan, Katherine Hawley & Andreas Hüttemann

Firstly, my photos from the conference are available in my gallery. Not too many of them this time, and I’ve also neglected Nottingham itself — not that I actually explored the city much. I’ve been to Nottingham once before, for a conference as well. The conference was quite good and I’ve got no complaints about the organisation. I do, however, have some complaints about some of the recent trends in this area of metaphysics.

The conference was dominated by two themes, critiques of essentialism concerning natural kinds, and dispositions. The previous is a topic which is of interest to me, but I was very disappointed to find out that the debate seems to be focused on Brian Ellis’ so called ‘scientific’ essentialism. I can’t say much about Ellis, as I’ve never read him, but from what I heard he seems to be an easy target for criticism. Fair enough, but what bothers me is that the apparently not very well formulated version of essentialism that Ellis defends is taken to be as a typical or even predominant type of essentialism.

My paper: Natural Boundaries and Metaphysical Realism

Lowe’s essentialism for instance was mentioned only in passing, even though it would certainly constitute a much more worthwhile opponent for those who are opposed to essentialism. This is a point which was also noted by Alexander Bird, another essentialist who differs from Ellis. Anyway, I won’t go into any more detail about this topic, it’s something that I’m interested in, but which is currently too specific for my research project to spend much time on. I hope to get back to it at some point though, as I do have things to say about essentialism concerning natural kinds.

In my own talk I aimed to defend a much more modest type of essentialism, namely microstructucal essentialism. Or, more simply, that certain (necessary) properties possessed by microphysical entities, such as the charge of electrons, are necessary for the emergence of macrophysical entities. The talk was entitled ‘Natural Boundaries and Metaphysical Realism’ and it was originally motivated by Achille Varzi’s recent rejuvenation of extreme conventionalism, specifically in his paper ‘Boundaries, Conventions, and Realism’. I’ve got a longer paper about this with some other arguments as well, but I will need to develop the main argument mentioned above a bit. I’ll upload the revised paper when I’ve had a chance to look at it. I had quite a small audience as I was competing with more mainstream topics (such as dispositions), but Katherine Hawley and Helen Beebee showed up, so the discussion was pretty good.

Antony Eagle: Can we Read Metaphysics off Physics?

One more thing I might mention is that in Nottingham as well there was one paper on the topic that I addressed in a previous report from the BSPS conference, namely the relationship between metaphysics and science. Anthony Eagle, one of the invited speakers, gave a talk entitled ‘Can we Read Metaphysics off Physics?’, looking specifically at the case of presentism and whether physics can be of any help there. It was nice to see him actually defend so called autonomous as opposed to naturalised metaphysics (using Ladyman’s distinction). He said for instance that:

I agree that reliance on ‘rational insight’ or conceptual analysis doesn’t look like it will deliver us truths all by itself. That’s okay, since metaphysics needn’t use these dodgy sources of ‘evidence’. I deny that metaphysics has a special method or technique, or even a special subject matter [...]. We offer arguments, based on premises which we believe, to come to believe the validly derived conclusions of those arguments [...]. The job of metaphysics, like the job of philosophy more generally, is to decide on the truth of certain claims [...].

Conference dinner

Ok, so Eagle doesn’t much like conceptual analysis. Nor do I. But I feel like he might conceed too much to Ladyman, although I still haven’t read the primary source! The problem is that the way Eagle sets the job of metaphysics makes it seem more like a translation scheme than anything else: we need to make it clear what the metaphysical claims of science are, and perhaps then we can read some metaphysics off science as well. Well, he does say that it’s hard to argue against a piece of autonomous metaphysics strictly from physics, but I’m afraid he says very little about the actual methodology of autonomous metaphysics (if it isn’t conceptual analysis or something of the like). This is something that I hope to write about as soon as I’ve actually got time to write a new paper…

That’s that, another report will follow soon.

After some complications, namely missing my flight, I made it back from the Société de Philosophie Analytique (SOPHA) Conference in Geneva. To put it shortly, it was one of the best conferences I’ve been to so far. This was also my first time in Geneva, where I’ve been meaning to go to for some time due to the interesting metaphysics that is being done there. And there was plenty of that (and other analytic philosophy): the conference ran for four days from 8.30am until 10pm. I don’t suppose that anyone would be able to attend it all, but I did manage a good number of talks, out of the 300!

Uni Mail, the conference venue

Needless to say, it was good to catch up with old mates from previous conferences and to meet a bunch of new people as well. The biggest name at the conference was no doubt Paul Boghossian (photo below) from NYU. His talk on relativism was both intriguing and accessible, although not in my primary area of research. The organisation of the conference was top notch, there was even a 10min pause between each talk to enable switching rooms and the chairs managed to impose this quite well. Thanks go especially to Philipp Keller.

My photos from the conference are available here. The thumbnails here lead to my gallery as well. I decided to start putting conference photos there as well, although I haven’t so far. I usually post them on Facebook, but not everyone is on there so I thought it’s better if they’re in my gallery as well. Anyway, I’ll add some photos from previous conferences as well if I have time at some point.

Paul Boghossian

My own talk, entitled Two-Dimensional Modal Semantics, Conceivability, and Modal Epistemology [the link leads to a version which is in need of revision...] was in the very first parallel session, which turned out to be a good time: people were still awake and attending. I had an ample audience and plenty of discussion afterwards, even if I didn’t get anything particularly useful out of it. The quality of the talks in general was fairly good, which many people commented on, although I did see some not-so-good talks as well. It’s difficult to pick a talk that I would like to comment on in more detail, but if I had to do it (and I will!), I think it would be John Divers’ talk, ‘A necessary condition of belief in absolute necessity’ (see photo below)

My talk

Divers is a known authority on modality, which is why I was especially concerned to see that he implemented features of two-dimensional modal semantics in his theory — I was specifically arguing against the 2D framework in my own paper. He suggested that we need to introduce a distinction between primary and secondary intensions, or something similar (as the 2D framework does), to handle the apparent conflict between McFetridge’s thesis and epistemic possibility. So, (original) McFetridge’s thesis (from Divers’ handout):

If X believes that it is logically necessary that P then X will be prepared to add P as a premise in reasoning from any supposition whatsoever.

Now, it seems that we can legitimately suppose that some a posteriori belief that necessarily P (=box-P) could have been false, which causes a problem for the above thesis. The suggested solution is that we must introduce a distinction between A-suppositions and C-suppositions, for instance: (A) Suppose that O didn’t kill Kennedy; (C) Suppose that O hadn’t killed Kennedy. Accordingly:

If X believes that box-P then, for any C-supposition, S, from which X aims to reason stably to conclusions which are true-in-S, X will be prepared to add P as a premise (in/to) S.

John Divers

Here S is to be interpreted as something that conflicts with box-P, i.e. not-P. Well, this looks just like the 2D framework to me. But an objection which I raised in my own paper applies: when we introduce S, we are just playing around with empirical defeasibility — that’s all that the epistemic possibility of not-P amounts to. And why does this matter? Well, if we remove the empirical part of the story, as we can do with certain examples, then the 2D framework produces unacceptable results, namely, it classifies metaphysically trivial and substantial statements in the same manner. You’ll have to see my paper for the details though, as I’m afraid that I’ve already lost most of the audience. In fact, when I confronted Divers about this afterwards he did make some concessions, but I’m interested to hear what he thinks of my dilemma for the 2D framework.

Peter Simons

Incidentally, this was also the first time since my viva that I saw Peter Simons, my external examiner (photo on the left). He gave an interesting talk about the glitches in our efforts to standardize dimensional concepts, although I would have rather heard something closer to actual metaphysics.

So much for the philosophical content. I didn’t have time to explore Geneva much, but there are a couple of photos from my brief stroll in the gallery. In any case, I did like the city, it’s just the right size: not too small, not too big. And very international. I might have that impression just because people spoke French, it always makes me feel international. Sadly I can’t speak French myself. Well, to make a long story short, I enjoyed Geneva so much that I am trying to organise a slightly longer visit there soon if at all possible. I’ve had this in mind for some time, but it’s easier now that I’ve been there. Also, my previous plan to go to NYU this academic year didn’t work out very well since Kit Fine will not be there, and he’s the main reason why I want to go. But news about this will follow in due course if it’s actually happening.

Right now I’m working on my next two presentations which will take place very soon in Nottingham and Portugal, respectively. I will be extremely busy until the end of September, so updates will probably follow in about three weeks or so. Let’s finish with a photo of all, or most participants of the conference, taken just before the conference dinner (I ended up being the photographer as Philipp was looking for someone with a proper camera).

The conference crowd