I thought I’d advertsie some blogs/blog posts which I’ve recently bumped into and thought worth sharing:

• Jonathan Ichikawa talks about Varieties of Modality at his blog There is Some Truth in That. I had to link to this because I’ve got a draft of a paper with the exact same title. I’ve just posted a new version here in fact.
• Bill Vallicella discusses Mereological Innocence and Composition as Identity at Maverick Philosopher.
• Finnish readers might find a couple of blogs interesting, firstly a blog by a philosophy student: Todellinen-tuonpuoleinen.
• Another one by a Finnish friend of mine, mostly on issues related to the society: Valmis maa. He also has two blogs in English, one is effectively a translation of the first, In a Complete World, the other deals with the entertainment industry: Entertainment Evolution
• Ben Burgis at (Blog&~Blog) recently wrote an interesting series of posts on the Liar Paradox.
• Finally I’d like to link to Edward Feser’s blog. Partly because he has been kind enough to link to my blog, and partly because some of the discussions in the comments to his posts are quite hilarious. His good but opinionated posts sometimes seem to attract a bunch of trolls.

I just saw an advert for this conference in Pisa, Italy, in the beginning of June. It looks fantastic, very impressive list of speakers, including E. J. Lowe, Peter van Inwagen, and John Heil for instance. I worked on universals when I was doing my Masters degree, but I haven’t really followed the discussion since. This conference would no doubt give a good idea about the current state of the debate, but the timing doesn’t really work for me — I’m travelling a lot this summer.

Anyway, the schedule is below, I wish I could attend!

Pisa, Scuola Normale Superiore – 5th-7th July 2010

Provisional Schedule

Monday (5th of July)

h. 14.30: Introduction

h. 14.50: Michael Loux (University of Notre Dame) : An Exercise in
Constituent Ontology

h. 16: Coffee Break

h. 16.15: Peter van Inwagen (University of Notre Dame): Relational
versus Constituent Ontologies

h. 17.30: Dean Zimmerman (Rutgers): Rehabilitating David Lewis’s
Arguments from Temporary Intrinsics

Tuesday (6th of July)

h. 9.15: Alex Oliver (Cambridge): Plurals and Properties

h. 10.30: Coffee Break

h. 10.45: Fraser Macbride (Cambridge): Russell on Relations

h. 12.00: Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra (Oxford): Leibniz On Properties

h. 13.15-14.45: Lunch Break

h. 14.45: John Heil (Washington, St. Louis): Universals?

h. 16.00: Coffee Break

h. 16.30: Sophie Gibb (Durham): Tropes and the Generality of Laws

Wednesday (7th of July)

h. 10: Jonathan Lowe (Durham): In Defence of Substantial Universals

h. 11.15: Coffee Break

h. 11.45: Gabriele Galluzzo (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa): For an
Aristotelian Understanding of Kinds and Properties

h. 13-14.30: Lunch Break

h. 14.30: Anna-Sofia Maurin (Lunds Universitet): States of Affairs and
the Exemplification Regress

h. 15.45: Coffee Break

h. 16.15: Robert Garcia (Texas A&M University): Categorial Gaps in Bundle Theory

The main bilding of the university, venue for the Graduate conference

Time for the second part of my Germany report. This concerns the combination of a graduate conference and research workshop with Scott Soames, entitled ‘Meaning, Modality and Apriority’. The events took place in Cologne 17-20 May 2010. Photos from both events are up in my Gallery. I gave a paper in the research workshop, with the title ‘The Metaphysical Status of Modal Statements’ (a slightly revised draft). Soames agreed with much of my criticism, although I was perhaps a bit provocatively pushing him closer to deflationism about modality than I was entitled to — in any case he conceded that the kind of essentialist picture that I sketched in the paper is on the right lines.

Scott Soames: Truth, Propositions and Possible World States

The organisation was top notch, although it was a pity that we couldn’t stay in the same venue for both events. I enjoyed all three events, but the conference marathon started to take its toll on me already during the graduate conference. The graduate conference included seven talks with dedicated comments and they were quite good in general, although I didn’t find any of the papers extraordinary. I think that on this post I will focus on Scott Soames’ keynote lecture and the discussion at the workshop rather than individual talks.

Soames has got two new books forthcoming very soon. One of them is entitled What Is Meaning?, the other Philosophy of Language. We got excerpts of both books before the workshop, and Soames talked about related matters in his keynote lecture as well. The topic is rather less interesting for me than Soames’ work on modality and apriority, but it was interesting to get this sneak preview and I think that there is something here that I could latch on to.

I won’t go into this in much detail, but basically Soames is defending a realist account on the nature of propositions: he thinks that propositions are ‘event types instances of which are events in which agents perform cognitive acts that are inherently representational’. Soames defends the view in some detail against the traditional Frege-Russell account on one hand and a modern deflationary view of propositions on the other hand. However, he does not really elaborate what the ontological status of propositions is according to his view. I tried to get into the bottom of this by asking whether he thinks that propositions have an existence independently of the agents’ cognitive acts. There are some problems with either answer to this question. If propositions do have an independent existence, how and where exactly do they exist? Are they abstract objects? Is there a Platonic realm of propositions? If they do not have an independent existence, then it seems that propositions just come in and out of existence according to the cognitive acts of the agents, which might have undesirable consequences as well.

Soames replying to comments

Be that as it may, more needs to be said regardless of how one might answer this question. Soames, though, wishes to remain non-committal: he said that he’s happy to commit to non-existing propositions and it seemed as if he might be willing to conceive of them as abstract objects of some kind. When pushed towards Platonism, Soames becomes a little bit uneasy, as it, understandably, strikes him as mysterious. So, I think that we can ask more from Soames in this regard, and it might also be an interesting project to examine the ontological options available to him.

Another theme that came up in the workshop was Soames’ view that we can quantify over non-existents. Basically this is based on a substitutional rather than an objectual reading of the existential quantifier. The difference can be illustrated by considering the sentence ‘There is at least one thing which is F’. On an objectual reading, the sentence is true just in case some object in the domain of discourse is F, whereas on the substitutional reading the sentence is true just in case there is some true sentence of the form ‘a is F’, where ‘a’ is a singular term (this is how Lowe puts it).

My talk at the research workshop: The Metaphysical Status of Modal Statements

Now, I was rather surprised and pleased at the same time that Soames is a proponent of the substitutional reading, as I am also more sympathetic to it, as are E. J. Lowe and Kit Fine. Now, since Soames thinks that we can can quantify over non-existents, the question arises: what can we know about non-existent objects? Can we know something about their essential properties? I put this question to Soames, and he said: yes, we must be able to know something about the essential properties of non-existents. This indeed seems to be an obvious requirement, as otherwise we wouldn’t be able to individuate them. Here I am reminded of Lowe’s saying ‘essence precedes existence’. My interest in this is that Soames seems to be very close the the Lowe-Fine view of essence here, or it would at least be fairly easy to push him towards that direction, which is good news of course!

So much for that. Numerous other issues came up during the events and I really enjoyed most of the discussion. But I’d like to keep these blog posts at least reasonably brief, so this will have to do for now. I think that I will return to these two mentioned themes at some point though.

Next up: a more general, non-philosophical report of my trip to Germany, and some more photos.

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.

Another interesting conference coming up: Because II organised by the Phlox research group in Berlin and the eidos research group in Geneva (where I was visiting in November-December 2009). The first Because conference was organised in Geneva in 2008. I submitted a paper, but unfortunately didn’t get to go. I’d love to go to this one, as the keynote speaker is Kit Fine once again. However, this conference focuses specifically on grounding and other forms of non-causal explanation, and I don’t really have a paper on this topic at the moment. We’ll see if I can come up with something before the deadline of June 6th. The conference itself takes place in Berlin between August 30th and September 1st. The original call for papers follows:

Fabrice Correia and Benjamin Schnieder, together with the research groups phlox and eidos, invite submissions on grounding and non-causal explanation for the conference Because II. The con­fe­rence is a follow-up to Because, which took place in Geneva in 2008. The keynote lecture will be given by Kit Fine. Further invited speakers will be announced in due course.

Issues that may be addressed include, but are not limited to:

* Accounts of Grounding
* Varieties of Non-causal Explanations
* The Semantics of ‘Because’
* Applications of Notions of Grounding and Non-causal Explanation (e.g. in the Debates on Dependence, Truthmaking, Constitution)
* General Issues About Explanation

Submissions should consist of longer abstracts, not exceeding 1.000 words. The abstract should outline the topic and the main arguments of the paper. The deadline for submissions is the 6th of June 2010. Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by the 4th of July 2010. From the submissions, six papers will be selected for the conference. The accepted papers should be made available (through the conference webpage) to all participants two weeks before the conference. Presentations should not take longer than 40 minutes.

Phlox will provide accommodation for the selected speakers; additionally, they will receive a mo­de­rate travel grant.

Welcome the 106th edition of Philosophers’ Carnival — a gourmet selection of philosophy related blog posts from around the blogosphere.

The menu selections for tonight are arranged as follows:

The Hors D’œuvres: Moral Philosophy to be consumed before setting down at the table.
The Entrées: Some sautéed Epistemology.
The Main Courses: Slowly cooked Metaphysics.
The Desserts: A rather special mix of glazed Logic & Language.
The Digestives: Some Philosophy of Mind & Action to help with the digestion.
The Wine List: A true connoisseur’s take on wine with some Philosophy of Science.

Hors D’œuvres: Moral Philosophy

• Thom Brooks at The Brooks Blog wets our appetite with his paper ‘Punishment and British Idealism’, which discusses the work of philosophers such as Bernard Bosanquet, F. H. Bradley, and T. H. Green, and particularly their views on punishment — we are being told that there is an important overlap here between the views of these philosophers and other idealists. Comments on the paper are invited!
• Richard Chappell at Philosophy, et cetera discusses The Limits of Moral Theory over some appetiser drinks. And make those drinks strong, because he tells us that there is no moral theory which manages to guarantee the best possible outcomes even if its requirements are satisfied!
• Eric Michael Johnson at The Primate Diaries entertains us with a pre-dinner talk with the intriguing title ‘Why I Am Not A Humanist’, taking his cue from Bertrand Russell’s essay ‘Why I Am Not A Christian’. I won’t spoil the ending for you, but I’ll let you know that it has something to do with apes…

Entrées: Epistemology

• C. Bosco at Hammers of Flight starts our entrée assortment with a discussion of the Gettier cases and justification in the post Overlapping Arrows from Nowhere. He claims that the term ‘justification’ is problematic and that nothing is justified per se.
• Hans Bluedorn at the Fallacy Detective reminds us that something isn’t true simply because nobody has yet given any evidence to the contrary with this funny video: “Proof By Lack of Evidence” Fallacy.

Main Courses: Metaphysics

• Andrew Brenner at The Florida Student Philosophy Blog starts off our main meal options with some seafood straight from The Ship of Theseus. He discusses two arguments in favour of mereological nihilism — which would suggest that we can avoid the Ship of Theseus problem — and then responds to three objections to mereological nihilism.
• Massimo Pigliucci at Rationally Speaking offers another possibility for the main course, even though he thinks that not quite everything is possible: “Anything is possible.” No, not really. The gist is that an omnipotent god is logically impossible, but there is some very interesting discussion on the varieties of modality as well. A lively discussion is also going on in the comments section.
• Your host for tonight right here at ttahko.net would like to continue on the same note and offer a supplement on the Varieties of Modality. I invite comments to a draft paper of the same name, which is a survey of our options in interpreting varieties of modality, especially metaphysical, conceptual, and logical modality.
• Ross Cameron at metaphysical values changes the flavour towards abstract objects and offers An argument against Platonism. Interestingly, the argument relies heavily on certain supposed conceptual possibilities, such as ‘For everything that exists, it is conceptually possible that it not exist’.
• Martin Cooke at Enigmania offers another maths related dish with a post on Resolving Lévy’s paradox. The paradox concerns the logical possibility of arbitrarily selected real numbers and the upshot is that standard mathematics may be in trouble.
• Kenny Pearce at blog.kennypearce.net finishes the main course options with a post on How reductive theories of mental representation lead to phenomenalism, considering the plausibility of the argument according to which mental representation can be reduced to phenomenal content.

Desserts: Logic and Language

• Edgar Aroutiounian at The Florida Student Philosophy Blog starts the dessert options with an amusing cartoon from xkcd.com on the explosiveness of classical logic: Boom, there goes Classical Logic. The problem is of course that of everything following from a contradiction, and some discussion of our options follows.
• Peter Smith at Logic Matters has been putting up his notes about the work of a philosopher who did not eat so well: Gödel Without (Too Many) Tears. I recommend this introduction to Gödel’s theorems to anyone who, like myself, is not very mathematically competent.
• Andrew Bacon at Possibly Philosophy concludes out dessert choices with some notes about Interpreting the third truth value in Kripke’s theory of truth. Contrary to Kripke and one common view, according to which the third truth value is not really a truth value at all, he suggests that we can indeed view the third truth value as a third truth status.

Digestives: Philosophy of Mind & Action

• Avery Archer at The Space of Reasons starts off our digestive drinks with a discussion of Burge’s Alternative to M-rationalism. M-rationalism, which is short for ‘Motivational Rationalism’ suggests that ‘a psychological transition is rational only if the agent is motivated to complete the transition by her belief that it accords with a rational principle’ and this post suggests that Tyler Burge’s alternative to M-rationalism bears some similarity to R. J. Wallace’s M-rationalist account.
• David Chalmers at fragments of consciousness invites comments on his new paper The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis while we finish off our drinks. The paper discusses the supposed intelligence explosion that could happen if and when machines become more intelligent than humans.

Wine List: Philosophy of Science

• Terrance Tomkow at Tomkow.com has a vintage on offer: Darwin and his Defenders. This is a discussion of Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini’s What Darwin Got Wrong.
• Eric Schliesser at It’s Only A Theory wonders if mathematical models can help in choosing our wine (or at least our philosophy) in a post on Mathematical models and philosophical progress.
• Bryan W. Roberts at Soul Physics offers the final choice for a wine to accompany our meal with some amusing clips about Constructing the Ultimate Machine.

There you have it, some fine choices for your philosophical gourmet dining experience! Apologies to those whose entries were not included — there’s only so much one can eat. The next Philosophers’ Carnival will be hosted at Brains on April 26th. Submit your entry here. In the meanwhile, you’re always welcome to come back to ttahko.net!

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.

So far I haven’t really used this blog to publicize conferences or events, as I figured that most people who are interested follow the major blogs and mailing lists that list these events anyway. However, I figured that I might as well do it when I come across something interesting and worth publicizing. I believe that this conference might be such a case: Metaphysics: Aristotelian, Scholastic, Analytic. June 30 – July 3 2010, Prague, Strahov Monastery (Czech Republic). Prague is a lovely city, and a great place to have a conference.

The primary reason why I chose to publicize this event is my forthcoming volume on Contemporary Aristotelian Metaphysics. The idea is of course that this is the perfect event to publicize my book. In fact, two of the contributors, E. J. Lowe and David Oderberg, are among the keynote speakers. Michal Loux has also been invited, and I should’ve really asked him to contribute to my volume as well. Unfortunately I already had too many people when that occurred to me.

Here is the actual CFP:

Throughout the greater part of the twentieth century, both in the analytic and continental traditions, metaphysics was deemed to be passé. The last few decades, however, have witnessed a remarkable growth of interest among analytic philosophers in various traditional metaphysical topics, such as modality, truth, causality, etc. which resulted in the emergence of various forms of analytic metaphysics. The new forms of metaphysics differ from its traditional forms mostly in their methodology (we may notice various applications of contemporary formal logical techniques) and in the range of proposed solutions to particular problems. Besides these and other differences, however, there are also many similarities and there are even some who intentionally develop traditional metaphysical themes using the contemporary analytical methods. All these developments call for detailed exploration, which is the general goal of the conference Metaphysics: Aristotelian, Scholastic, Analytic. The conference aims to bring together leading analytic philosophers working in metaphysics and willing to explore relations between the traditional and contemporary concerns. The specific focus of the conference is a re-examination of Aristotelian-Scholastic metaphysics in contemporary setting. It is organized by the Catholic Theological Faculty of Charles University under the auspices of the Czech Academy Foundation. It takes place in the historical parts of the Strahov monastery near the Prague castle from June 30 to July 2, 2010.

CALL FOR PAPERS

* Papers are welcome on any of the topics indicated below.
* A short abstract of cca. 2500-3500 characters should be submitted to the Organizing Committee by April 15, 2010, by e-mail (if possible – see contacts above). The Peer-Review Board will select the papers to be presented at the Conference.
* Papers should be written in the English (preferred) or German language.
* The length of a paper should not exceed 25 minutes of reading time.

Papers selected by the Peer-Review Board will be edited and published as a supplement volume of the journal Studia Neoaristotelica.

TOPICS

* being and existence
* realisms vs. antirealisms
* truth, truthmaking, predication
* particulars and universals
* hylemorphism vs. mechanicism
* persistence through time
* the necessary and the possible
* the actual and the potential (powers, dispositions)
* propositions and states of affaires
* causes and explanation
* God

I do have one reservation about this conference: it is organized by the Catholic Theological Faculty of Charles University, and the peer review borad as well seems to consist of people working in theology departments. The suggested topics are clearly good though, and the keynote speakers are excellent, so I’m willing to give it the benefit of doubt. Anyway, I’ll probably submit something, if for no other reason then because it will be a great chance to let people know that there is a volume dedicated to this type of metaphysics coming out.

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.