Just a brief note indicating that I’ve uploaded a revised version of my paper on counterfactuals and modal epistemology. I first blogged about this almost a year ago, and I refer you to the previous post for an outline of the paper.

I’ve now got a draft of my paper for the Meaning, Modality and Apriority symposium with Scott Soames. You can get it from here. The abstract of the talk is here. The paper does pretty much what I promise in the abstract: I first summarise Soames’ account of the necessary a posteriori, then I look into Alan Sidelle’s deflationary account of it, and attempt to demonstrate that these two accounts are remarkably close to each other. Hence, Soames is at a risk of sliding towards the view according to which modality is linguistic and the a priori reduces to analyticity — which is a view that he strongly opposes.

I then go on to give an analysis of what I believe is missing both from Soames’ and Sidelle’s account: an examination of the a priori, essentialist principles which are responsible for the modal content of the necessary a posteriori. Since the main example being discussed is that of water, I look into some recent work in the philosophy of chemistry, especially by Robin Hendry. I argue that we will need a detailed analysis of the nature of chemical substances, and specifically whether chemical substances have their molecular structures essentially to determine whether ‘Water is H20′ is an example of the necessary a posteriori. Hendry’s analysis of the case is a good example of how I think the essentialist account should proceed.

The upshot is that Soames is at a crossroads: either he should concede to the deflationist and adopt the view that modality is linguistic and the a priori can be identified with the analytic, or he should engage in the type of work that we saw in Hendry’s suggestion: a detailed analysis of the underlying essentialist principles. Given that Soames is one of the loudest critics of the deflationary approach, I would hope that he is more tempted by the latter option.

The paper is still in draft stage, so comments are especially welcome. I will present the paper in Cologne on May 19th.

Recently I’ve been working on a paper about the fundamental level of reality, and I’ve just about got a draft of the paper ready now. It’s still quite rough and sketchy, but since I need some time away from it before it’s beneficial to have a fresh look, I might as well post about it here. The full paper is available here. A word of warning: although I discuss philosophical themes such as the ‘levels’ metaphor and how it is related to ontological dependence, there is also quite a lot of physics in the paper. I developed some examples from physics that I’ve used before, especially regarding the Pauli Exclusion Principle, and there is also some discussion about fundamental physical constants, especially the fine structure constant. I also use the GRW theory of quantum mechanics as well as loop quantum gravity in my examples. I quite enjoyed browsing physics journals when I did my research for this paper, but I have to admit that I have no deep understanding of the underlying mathematics and there may very well be serious confusions in my examples. Hence, I would especially welcome any input from those who do know their maths/physics.

I’m interested in three question in the paper:

1. Is there a fundamental level of reality?
2. If there is, how can we know that this is the case?
3. Can we know what this fundamental level is like?

I defend a positive answer in regard to the first question, but I am perhaps more interested in the second, methodological question, as well as the third question which is closely related to the second. The presentation of the paper follows the discussion familiar from Every Thing Must Go (2007) by Ladyman & Ross. Ladyman & Ross argue that reality is not organised into levels in the first place and that there is no fundamental level (pp. 4, 53–7, 178–80). I attempt to show that there are plausible interpretations of the ‘levels’ metaphor. The interpretation that I prefer is in terms of ontological dependence. I also present an argument for a fundamental level (outlined below) and a detailed analysis of each premise of the argument. The argument is a priori in nature, although potential support from current physics will be discussed in detail. If the argument is correct, it shows that a fundamental level is metaphysically necessary for the existence of macrophysical objects, but I will not offer support for such a strong result. Rather, in the process of defending the premises of the argument, it will be suggested that a fundamental level is physically necessary, that is, necessary given the physics of the actual world, albeit only if certain emerging theories in physics are correct. At the very least, I hope to establish that a fundamental level of reality is a viable metaphysical possibility. I also analyse our means to acquire information about the existence and nature of this level.

Here is a brief outline of my main argument:

1. There are macrophysical objects.
2. Certain things are physically necessary for the existence of macrophysical objects, e.g. the laws that govern molecular binding.
3. These laws require certain regularities on the microphysical level, e.g. that fundamental physical constants fall within a specific range.
4. The required regularity of the microphysical level would not be possible without a fundamental supervenience base.
5. Therefore, there is a fundamental level.

I will not go into the details of the premises here, you can see the actual paper for that. In any case, I hope that the first premise needs no further support, but I defend each of the remaining premises. It should be noted that the modality in premise 4 can be interpreted either as metaphysical or physical. I am optimistic about the metaphysical interpretation, but I will focus on the weaker, physical reading. So, we are primarily interested in the existence conditions of macrophysical objects given the actual laws of physics. I’ll conclude this post with a passage from a paper on braided ribbon networks related to loop quantum gravity, entitled ‘Locality and Translations in Braided Ribbon Networks‘, by Jonathan Hackett, as it supports my case quite nicely:

In the last century, there have been repeated discoveries of underlying structure. Moving from macroscopic objects, to atoms, to components of the nuclei, to quarks, it has been demonstrated repeatedly that the differences between supposedly fundamental particles are, in fact, merely consequences of the composite structure of underlying reality. It only seems a natural progression that such an approach of looking for underlying structure be used to explain the particles of the standard model. Attempts towards this end, dubbed preon models, met with many obstacles, but still there was something deeper that presented itself as a difficulty. The difficulty is that, as such a process does not have an end, we can continue to suppose that below the currently understood structure is another set of more fundamental particles. This idea quickly becomes unappealing at a philosophical level, or even a practical level, as the question then becomes ‘What could make it end?’. The idea that the preons would be as fundamental as possible [...] provides a way of achieving the desired end. One way to achieve this end is to suggest that the preons be composed of structure within spacetime. (Hackett 2008: 5757.)

As I reported in a previous post, I submitted an abstract to a workshop with Scott Soames in Cologne. My paper ‘The Metaphysical Status of Modal Statements’ (see my earlier post for the abstract), is one of the four papers that has been accepted for presentation at the workshop, and the programme is now online. The other presentations at the workshop will be by Robert Michels from Konstanz, Dr. Michael Nelson from UC Riverside, and the fourth speaker is still TBA. There is also a graduate conference preceding the workshop, which I will attend. I’ll post a draft of my paper for the conference once I get around to it. I’ve got most of the material already, but need to work on it quite a bit still.

I will be flying to Cologne on May 13th and staying until the 21st. The reason for such a long stay is that there is also a Workshop on the A Priori just before the Soames conference, and I thought I might as well go to that as well since I’m working on the a priori myself. There will be some good people there too: Carrie Jenkins, Daniel Cohnitz, and Jonathan Ichikawa, among others.

From Cologne I plan to take the train to Dresden, stay there for two nights, then head to Berlin for another two nights, and finally fly back to the UK on May 25th. The Dresden-Berlin trip is just to see some friends and to have a look around in Germany. Any suggestions as to what to do/see in Cologne, Dresden or Berlin are most welcome!

There are still a few more days before the deadline to submit abstracts for a workshop on Scott Soames’ philosophy in Cologne, Germany this May. The conference is aptly titled Meaning, Modality and Apriority, and involves both a Graduate Conference with a keynote from Soames as well as a research workshop with Soames. The call for the graduate conference has passed some time ago, but the deadline for the research workshop is 15th March. There are only four slots though, so I expect that there will be a bit of competition for those. Anyway, since I have commented on Scott Soames’ work before, for instance in my paper ‘On the Modal Content of A Posteriori Necessities’, I thought that I should submit something. I’ve come up with an abstract for a paper in which I plan to show that Soames’ case against the linguistic account of modality supported by people like David Chalmers, Frank Jackson and Alan Sidelle suffers from the fact that his own, supposedly metaphysical story about modal statements, is remarkably close to the one offered by deflationists such as Sidelle. My abstract follows, but please don’t steal it!

The Metaphysical Status of Modal Statements
ABSTRACT

In his Reference and Description: The Case Against Two-Dimensionalism (2005), Scott Soames puts forward an influential critique of the framework of two-dimensional modal semantics and the interpretation of a posteriori necessities proposed by proponents of the framework, especially Frank Jackson (1998) and David Chalmers (1996). While I agree with much of what Soames has to say about the topic, I am concerned that ultimately both Soames and the two-dimensionalists fail to see the fine-grainedness of the metaphysical status of modal statements. This is partly due to the short-comings of Kripke’s (1980) original treatment of a posteriori necessities, and partly due to the contemporary deflationist trend, which takes modality to reduce fully to linguistic or conceptual content. The latter is familiar especially from the work of Jackson and Chalmers, as well as Alan Sidelle (2002).

On the face of it, Soames is clearly opposed to this trend, as he thinks that Kripke’s most important achievement was to break the illusion that the a priori can be identified with the analytic, and that modality is merely linguistic (Soames 2006: 307). Soames claims that any kind of interesting philosophy will not fit into this deflationary, linguistic model. I very much sympathise with this idea, but it seems to me that Soames fails to fully commit to it himself. E. J. Lowe (2007a, 2007b) has raised similar concerns about the shortcomings in Soames’ metaphysical story, but so far Soames has not replied to them in any detail (cf. Soames 2007). The closest that Soames comes to addressing the metaphysical status of modal statements are the last three chapters of his earlier book, Beyond Rigidity (2002, ch. 9-11). We are especially interested in his analysis of the difference between the following identity sentences:

[1] For all x, x is a drop of water iff x is a drop of a substance molecules of which contain two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom.
[2] For all x, x is a drop of water iff x is a drop of the substance instances of which fall from the sky in rain and fill the lakes and rivers. (Soames 2002: 272.)

Presumably, (1) is metaphysically necessary, while (2) is contingent. Soames takes a point from Nathan Salmon (2005), which I believe to be of crucial importance for this analysis: what makes (1) a metaphysical necessity, if anything, is the underlying assumption concerning chemical substances, namely, that they have their molecular structures essentially (Soames 2002: 273). Now, Soames goes on to ask ‘What exactly are substances, and how do we arrive at our modal intuitions (pretheoretic beliefs) regarding them?’ (ibid.). This is of course where one ought give the metaphysical story, but the story that Soames gives is remarkably close to the one familiar from the deflationists. Soames describes how we introduce a natural kind term such as “water” with the intention that it is a ‘substance term’, i.e. applies to everything that shares the molecular structure in the original sample that we decided to call “water”. However, we do not need to know what that structure is when we introduce the term, all that matters is that we intend to use the notion in a way that respects the original intuition. We may subsequently learn more about the substance in question, e.g. that water is H2O, but this is the point where the metaphysical story about (1) ends (cf. Soames 2002: 273-275).

Soames goes on to refine the account somewhat, but this picture is effectively what he ends up with. Now, it seems that we could sum up Soames’ account roughly as follows: ‘Nothing counts as water in any situation unless it has the same deep explanatory features (if any) as the stuff we call “water”’, which I have quoted from Sidelle (2002: 319). But as Sidelle argues, this is an analytic principle concerning the linguistic usage of the the term “water” rather than a metaphysical a priori truth! The way Soames sometimes puts this is almost exactly as in the passage quoted from Sidelle:

‘”Water” was stipulated to designate whatever underlying physical characteristic it is that is shared by (nearly) all members of the class of paradigmatic water-samples that explains their most salient features – the fact that they boil and freeze at certain temperatures, that they are clear, potable, and necessary to life, etc.’ (Soames Forthcoming: 7).

According to Soames, when this stipulation is combined with our empirical information about water, it follows that water is necessarily H2O. So, it seems that Soames has given us little more than what the deflationary picture offers, and hence we are still at risk of identifying the a priori with the analytic and reducing modality to linguistics. In fact, Soames explicitly opts for a linguistic analysis rather than a metaphysical one, although he claims that this helps us to narrow down ‘the range of feasible ontological alternatives’ (ibid., 1).

In addition to an inquiry into Soames’ account of modal statements, I will offer a more detailed analysis of the metaphysical assumptions associated with modal statements and argue that the metaphysical story is much more fine-grained than Soames suggests. The elements of the metaphysical story are indeed already familiar from Salmon (2005), but there is much more to be said about e.g. the status of chemical substances, and it seems to me that Soames does not do justice to Salmon, who did recognize the complexity of the underlying metaphysical story (p. 176 ff.). Relying on recent work in the philosophy of chemistry (e.g. Hendry 2006, Needham 2008), I will attempt to give a more satisfactory account about the underlying metaphysical assumptions concerning chemical substances. We will see that there are some good reasons to think that the assumption according to which chemical substances have their molecular structures essentially may even be mistaken.

The upshot is that although Soames is on the right lines in challenging the deflationary approach to modal statements, his own account fails to fully accommodate their metaphysical status.

References:

• Chalmers, D. (1996) The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
• Hendry, R. F. (2006) ‘Elements, Compounds, and Other Chemical Kinds’, Philosophy of Science 73, 864–75.
• Jackson, F. (1998) From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defence of Conceptual Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
• Lowe, E. J. (2007a) ‘Does the Descriptivist/Anti-Descriptivist Debate Have Any Philosophical Significance?’, Philosophical Books 48, 27-33.
• Lowe, E. J. (2007b) ‘A Problem for A Posteriori Essentialism Concerning Natural Kinds’, Analysis 67.4, 286-92.
• Needham, P. (2008) ‘Resisting Chemical Atomism: Duhem’s Argument’, Philosophy of Science 75, 921–31.
• Salmon, N. U. (2005) Reference and Essence, 2nd ed. (New York: Prometheus Books).
• Sidelle, A. (2002) ‘On the Metaphysical Contingency of Laws of Nature’, in Conceivability and Possibility, ed. T. S. Gendler & J. Hawthorne (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 309-336.
• Soames, S. (2002) Beyond Rigidity: The Unfinished Semantic Agenda of Naming and Necessity (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
• Soames, S. (2005) Reference and Description: The Case Against Two-Dimensionalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press).
• Soames, S. (2006) ‘The Philosophical Significance of the Kripkean Necessary Aposteriori’, Philosophical Issues 16: Philosophy of Language.
• Soames, S. (2007) ‘The Substance and Significance of the Dispute Over Two-Dimensionalism’, Philosophical Books 48: 34–49.
• Soames, S. (Forthcoming) ‘What are Natural Kinds?’, Philosophical Topics.

Firstly, if you haven’t seen my previous post, go there now and leave a comment. I’m hoping to get some feedback about what people would like to see on this blog. In the meanwhile, here is another post in the ‘Work in Progress’ series. This time a survey article of sorts based on the lectures that I gave in Geneva last December, entitled ‘Varieties of Modality’. I was hoping to get this published somewhere like Philosophy Compass, but it seems that I entered the party a bit too late, as they are not intending to commission any more modality stuff at this time. It may be difficult to find a home for this, as it is really a survey article, although I do entertain some rather wild ideas towards the end of the paper…

The question that I pursue in the paper is how many different kinds of modality – different realms of possible worlds – are there? Philosophers commonly talk at least about metaphysical, conceptual, epistemic, logical, physical, mathematical, biological, technological, normative and natural modality. It is not always clear how these different types of modality are related, or whether some of them are more fundamental than others. The relationships between metaphysical, conceptual and logical necessity and possibility are particularly interesting. The paper is a survey of our options in this regard. We can distinguish four approaches which are currently widely discussed: the Kripkean approach, the conservative approach, the conceptualist approach, and the essentialist approach. The differences between these approaches are best described by comparing their takes on the distinction between metaphysical and conceptual modality. The Kripkean approach holds that this distinction is genuine and that we are dealing with two different kinds of modality. The conservative approach, which is familiar for instance from Bob Hale’s work, challenges the role of metaphysical modality and suggests that logical necessity is the most fundamental type of modality, it is absolute. The conceptualist approach, most forcefully argued for by Frank Jackson and David Chalmers, also questions the distinction and suggests that metaphysical modality can be fully accounted for in terms of conceptual modality. Finally, the essentialist approach, defended especially by Kit Fine, suggests that conceptual and logical modality can be seen as species of metaphysical modality. I will also consider an alternative approach based on the essentialist approach, which takes metaphysical modality to be absolute in Hale’s sense.

You can download the paper for the survey bits, but what’s this crazy alternative approach..? Well, if we take the cue from the essentialist approach and consider logical and conceptual necessity as subspecies of metaphysical necessity, as Kit Fine suggests in his ‘Varieties of Necessity’ (2002), then I think we already have the tools for something a bit more radical. Firstly, we can rule out all extra-metaphysical possibilities — that is, possibilities such as water being XYZ, when we consider water to be essentially H20 — as pseudo-possibilities. What this means in practice is that there is no stronger type of necessity than metaphysical necessity; in fact, metaphysical, conceptual and logical necessity would all seem to be equally strong. But I think that we can go even further, and indeed that we must go further if we wish to maintain that conceptual and logical necessity are useful notions at all: otherwise it seems that we might just as well talk only about metaphysical modality. But if we reserve the notion of metaphysical modality to those modal truths which are not true in virtue of either the definitions of concepts or the laws of logic, and similarly for conceptual and logical modality, we get a rather surprising picture about the relationships between different kinds of possibility:

Metaphysical, Logical, Conceptual, and Physical Possibility

What makes this interesting is that, according to the line suggested above, the picture for necessity is exactly the same. This is obviously a rather strange and seemingly contradictory result, but there may be a way to accommodate it. The idea is that only metaphysical modality is fundamental, but there is still use for the notions of conceptual and logical modality exactly in the same sense as there is use for the notions of physical or biological modality. So, according to this picture, different subspecies of metaphysical modality should be considered as concerning the natures of specific subsets of the set of all things. Hence, conceptual modality concerns things that are possible or necessary in virtue of the natures of concepts, and only them. Specifically, although it would commonly be considered that something like ‘It is possible to travel faster than light’ is conceptually possible, according to this picture this is not strictly correct: the possibility of travelling faster than light is not ruled out by the natures of concepts, but nor do the natures of concepts make it possible to travel faster than light. For something to qualify as a conceptual possibility, it has to be made possible by the nature of concepts in this positive sense. A similar analysis applies to logical possibility.

Well, this doesn’t really do justice to the idea, and I’m not quite sure that it even works, but the survey of other approaches that precedes this alternative picture in the paper might motivate the approach somewhat. There’s also a lot more to say about the status of logical modality here and I do go into it in some detail in the paper. If the idea is at all feasible, it would seem to require revamping modal logic as well — that’s something that I will not attempt.

I’ve just revised my paper on Euclidean Geometry and the A Priori. According to my statistics, the previous version has been downloaded a good few times, so apparently there is some interest regarding this topic. It might still require some further work, but my argument should be easier to follow now — the paper previously suffered from a lack of a clear target. My target is effectively contemporary views on a priori justification, such as the ones familiar from Albert Casullo and perhaps Laurence BonJour. I don’t tackle their views in any detail, but rather argue generally against the idea that a priori justification and knowledge are empirically defeasible, that is, the idea that further empirical evidence could defeat a priori justification. The single most influential problem for the opposing view, namely that such empirical defeaters are not possible, is the case of Euclidean geometry. A fairly commonly accepted view at the moment is that Euclidean geometry was indeed justified a priori, but once it turned out that the actual geometry is Riemannian rather than Euclidean, the original justification was defeated by empirical evidence. My argument can be outlined as follows:

1. A priori justification (and knowledge) is empirically indefeasible.
2. Cases like Euclidean geometry appear to suggest that this is not the case, hence the commonly accepted conception of a priori justification takes it to be empirically defeasible.
3. I want to keep (1), so (2) needs to be addressed somehow.
4. To do this, we must distinguish between the apriority of a proposition and the truth of a proposition.
5. Even though the judgements that we make concerning the truth of a proposition are empirically defeasible, a priori justification is not.
6. A priori justification concerns the metaphysical possibility of the proposition.

In motivating my case, I use some material which I developed in my draft ‘The Notion of Logical Truth’; mainly in the form of an analogy between the distinction of pure/applied geometry and truth in a model/truth in the world. Anyway, see the actual paper for the details of the argument. The ideas that I develop here go back to my very first published journal article, ‘A New Definition of A Priori Knowledge: In Search of a Modal Basis’, where I used Euclidean geometry as an example. This time I’ve actually looked at the details of Euclidean geometry to back up my case.

I have once again revised one of my papers which has been looking for a home for quite some time. It’s called ‘Truthmaking and Realism’, and it’s getting longer and longer: now at 11k words. The motivation comes from recent literature concerning truthmaking, especially the OUP book Truthmakers: The Contemporary Debate, edited by Helen Beebee and Julian Dodd (2005). Several authors in the volume suggest that truthmaking is not compatible just with realism, but also with pragmatism and idealism, and thus does not help in defending realism in general. I take this point and suggest that in fact the wider applicability of the truthmaker principle only strengthens the realist’s case, for all that is needed is a plausible way to account for our realist intuitions concerning truth.

To defend this conclusion, I take one of the most influential critiques of realism, which has been advocated by Hilary Putnam, Michael Dummett, and Nelson Goodman; they all share some basic assumptions about realism and its problems. The objection is essentially that realism cannot account for truth. There is an important background assumption here, which is that realism is committed to the correspondence theory of truth. Putnam’s famous model-theoretic argument challenges the correspondence theory by claiming that there will be infinitely many correspondence relations between words and things, and hence indeterminacy ensues as we cannot pick out the intended correspondence. Michael Devitt, in his Realism and Truth (1997), has forcefully argued against the connection between realism and truth, and I take his point, but my argument goes roughly as follows:

1. Let us assume that the Putnam-Dummett-Goodman objection against realism combined with the correspondence theory holds.
2. This does not mean that realism automatically fails, because it is independent of the correspondence theory, as Michael Devitt has argued.
3. We still need an account of truth which is compatible with realism and does not succumb to the Putnam-Dummett-Goodman objection.
4. Truthmaking is such an account of truth, as it is compatible across ontologies, including realism.
5. The combination of realism and truthmaking can stand against the Putnam-Dummett-Goodman objection.

The part that I have revised mostly concerns the Putnam-Dummett-Goodman critique. I’ve added several passages that support my analysis. I still have some reservations about Dummett’s role in all this, because I found passages which suggest that he doesn’t consider realism to be committed to the correspondence theory, such as the following:

The correspondence theory of truth is often claimed as essential to realism. This is evidently false, since Frege was undoubtedly a realist but rejected the correspondence theory. The correspondence theory is also often confused with a truth-conditional meaning-theory, which is the natural extension of the classical two-valued semantic theory that we have taken as characteristic of realism. A properly constructed meaning-theory rightly seeks to characterise the concepts of truth and meaning simultaneously, whereas the correspondence theory took meaning as already given. It is an analogous mistake to regard the principle that, if a statement is true, there must be something in virtue of which it is true, is peculiar to realism. On the contrary, it is a regulative principle which all must accept. (Dummett, The Logical Basis of Metaphysics, 1991: 331).

Still, Dummett here endorses a ‘regulative principle’, which bares remarkable similarity to the truthmaker principle, and this is really all I need for my argument: if the Putnam-Dummett-Goodman critique does not undermine truthmaking, and we have some independent reasons to think that truthmaking is a good starting point for a theory of truth, then the Putnam-Dummett-Goodman critique loses its strength.

I will not go into the details of truthmaking here, and in fact I don’t go very deeply into them in the paper either, but my preferred formulation of the truthmaker principle is as follows:

(TM*) Necessarily, in all possible worlds where [p] is true, there exists something alpha that makes [p] true.

The angled brackets indicate a proposition. The idea is that this principle is compatible across ontologies, but still manages to capture the core idea and plausibility of truthmaking. See the paper for details, any comments are welcome.

I was pleased to hear recently that a volume edited by my friend Philip Goff, who is currently at the University of Hertfordshire, has been accepted for publication by Palgrave-Macmillan. The volume is called ‘Spinoza on Monism’ and it combines historical work on Spinoza with contemporary work on monism. What makes me especially happy about it is that myself and a colleague of mine from Durham, Donnchadh O’Conaill (who has his viva today!) are also contributing a joint paper to the volume. Our contribution is entitled ‘Priority Monism and Conceptual Pluralism’, and is effectively a reply to Jonathan Schaffer’s (who is also contributing) paper, ‘Monism: the Priority of the Whole’. Other contributors include Terry Horgan and Galen Strawson.

We look at Schaffer’s reply to the so called ‘commonsense argument’ against monism due to Russell, who claimed that pluralism is favoured by commonsense. Schaffer argues that Russell’s case against monism is based on a misinterpretation: (priority) monism does not suggest that only one thing exists, but rather that only one thing is fundamental. Schaffer asks us to think of a heap; the grains of sand in the heap would seem to be prior to the whole, the heap. But a heap is not an integrated whole, rather, it is a mere aggregate. So, even if commonsense suggests that in the case of the heap the parts are prior to the whole, there may be other cases where the whole is prior to the parts, such as a circle and its semicircles—here commonsense would seem to suggest that the circle must be prior. Accordingly, Schaffer (p. 12) turns the commonsense argument to its head:

1. According to commonsense, integrated wholes are prior to their arbitrary portions.
2. According to commonsense, the cosmos is an integrated whole.
3. According to commonsense, the many proper parts are arbitrary portions of the cosmos.
4. According to commonsense, the cosmos is prior to its many proper parts.

We wish to challenge premise 3. Schaffer defends this premise as follows: ‘Commonsense appreciates that there are many ways to carve the world. Consider all the ways that one may slice a pie, or all the ways of drawing lines on a map. There seems no objective ground for carving things in just one way’ (p. 12). This line of thought bears some similarity to what Putnam and Dummett have suggested, i.e. the idea of conceptual relativity/pluralism and the view of reality as an amorphous lump, respectively. We suspect that there is something wrong with line of thought. The position Putnam and Dummett reject is roughly that there is a complete scheme (CS) – a way of carving up the universe such that (i) every portion so carved is independent of all and any parochial interests, and (ii) every object which can be said to exist is a portion so carved. No scheme can possibly meet both (i) and (ii) – in particular, there are many objects which exist but whose specifications are dependent on our parochial interests (e.g. interest rates, moral patients, nonrepresentational artwork, music).

This much is correct in the line of thought at hand, but even if we cannot have a complete scheme, we might be able to have something very much like it, call it a near-complete scheme (NCS) – a way of carving up the universe such that (i) every portion so carved is non-parochial, and (ii) every object which can be said to exist is either a portion so carved, or is ontologically dependent on some such portion or combination of portions. An NCS keeps the first part of the CS, but sacrifices the second, while nonetheless holding to an important asymmetry between the objects it picks out and the objects which other, parochial schemes pick out – it captures the sense we have that interest rates, music, moral patients and so on all depend for their existence on the existence of things which are not themselves interest rates, music or moral patients, and in many cases do not require the existence of interest rates etc. in order for themselves to exist.

We will offer two arguments in favour of a NCS: an ontological and a semantic one. The ontological argument suggests that there are dependency relations such that if certain macro-physical phenomena exist, such as nonrepresentational artworks, or indeed any such macro-physical objects, then there must be some underlying physical order – non-arbitrary micro-physical phenomena – which is necessary for the existence of those macro-physical objects. The semantic argument suggests that you can slice the pie in as many different ways as you like, but in order to be aware that what you are doing is slicing a pie which can be sliced in many other ways, your conception of the pie cannot be just ‘what I have when I put these slices together’ – precisely because you can slice the pie in many other ways, this description, while correct, isn’t sufficient – it fails to capture the independence of the pie from any particular way of slicing it.

The upshot of this paper is a clear challenge for Schaffer’s defence of priority monism against the commonsense argument. If we are right, it seems that the commonsense argument can stand its ground.

That’s effectively the abstract of the paper, but we still have to write it!

Here is the rather delayed report on my second modality talk in Geneva. At the moment I am in Finland, but getting here was rather more difficult than it should’ve been, as I was stuck in London for two days. Anyway, all is well now, and I’m looking forward to going back to Durham in early January.

The slides from my second talk are available here. The slides from the first talk are still here. In the second talk I first covered what I call the conceptualist approach to modality very briefly, it is familiar from the work of Chalmers, Jackson and Sidelle. The main topic was the essentialist approach, mainly due to Fine and Lowe. I won’t go into details here, but basically I tried to motivate two things.

Firstly, we should reserve the term ‘metaphysical necessity’ for only those necessities which are not also conceptually or logically necessary, as Lowe has suggested in his The Possibility of Metaphysics.

Secondly, I think that the role of logical modality in the essentialist picture is debatable; specifically, if we take Fine’s arguments for the independence of natural and normative modality in his ‘The Varieties of Necessity’ seriously, we may have some good reasons to think that logical modality is independent as well. This is because there may be examples of logical necessities which are metaphysically contingent (for someone who thinks that alternative logics are metaphysically possible), and this would violate Fine’s requirement that to be able to subsume a type of necessity under metaphysical necessity, the necessity in question must also be metaphysically necessary. This may seem like a longshot, but I for one do take the metaphysical possibility of alternative logics seriously, or at least regard it as an open question.

Well, that’s that for now, but I do hope to develop the material that I covered in these two talks, and perhaps combine them into a survey paper for Philosophy Compass.