Every Thing Must Go - Metaphysics Naturalised: James Ladyman PhysPhil conference 2012, The University of St Andrews www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~qoi/physphil2012.htm
I find Ladyman’s lukewarm reductionism kind of odd. On an explicit level, he sounds like an anti-reductionist. But then he claims that physics has universal extension and it becomes hard to see why a structuralist would have to affirm these “higher level” ontologies. If an aggregate of structuralist atoms can explain why I decide to go out for a walk, what incentives does the structuralist have to say that there actually is something like an organism? Secondly, even if we take his claim that experiments haven’t falsified the idea that physics has universal extension at face value, what reason does that give to him to say that it in fact does? For a typical simple substance believing reductionist, there’s at least metaphysical precedent; they interpret science in this way which implicates there can be no non-reductive causes. But Ladyman emptied his ontology precisely of such elements, so what’s his reason? Aside from all that, I think the move he makes to basically dismiss the “what’s the difference between physics and math then?” criticism is really really bad. You set your whole metaphysical project as a connective tissue between different scientific theories, and then, when you actually have to clarify the notion of structure sufficiently to answer something like that (which I don’t even think is that hard of a question tbh) you just handwave it away by talking about how it’s unempirical or implying how metaphysical speculation should be avoided. My dude, you’re a metaphysician, you literally claim to undertake such a project here at the beginning. This is the kind of thing that structuralism as an account hinges on to even be intelligible, no less coherent or plausible. If these kinds of questions are avoided, what’s left to even differentiate OSR from ESR? The former is essentially reduced to anti-substance centric rhetoric, with really vague claims about how only structure exists.
i'm actually very curious about the question about the "difference between physics and math". i just read a paper by susan schneider, titled 'does the mathematical nature of modern physics undermine physicalism?' and now i'm going to learn about philosophy of math and 'abstract vs concrete' existents. i'm curious, what do you think are the differences, and how do we know? like, QFT is "absurdly" abstract, and the 'fundamental particles' of the standard model are "individuated" and exhaustively described by this math. what to make of that?
@@real_pattern I haven't studied QFT yet, but going off of what I've heard as well as how this is preceded by asking the same question for earlier fields like non-relativistic QM or classical electrodynamics, I think there exists a real bind (for the physicalist anyway) because there's no real notion we have of the "physical/real" side of things. There's a sense in which we experience everyday objects as substantial, and this carries over to the notion of bodies in classical mechanics. So, what I think happens is that there's a residue of a vague sense of "realness" when people start talking about more abstract principles which can't be reduced to bodies, like electromagnetic fields. The problem is that physics probably won't ever actually give satisfactory answers to these metaphysical problems. All a physicist needs to do is make and test mathematical formalisms that are accurate. And creating the formalisms doesn't require making sure they are metaphysically sensible. I think the chief advantage of structuralism is that it simply renders nature as just consisting in the relations math discloses. Of course, that just leaves the issues of: 1. arguing that OSR should sooner be taken to be true over ESR 2. saying what it is for a structure to, essentially, exist substantially
'If an aggregate of structuralist atoms can explain why I decide to go out for a walk, what incentives does the structuralist have to say that there actually is something like an organism?' Isn't any explanation arising from lower level 'atoms' rather deficient if we're considering, for example, the property of an organism. There can be a certain level of explanation that proceeds from lower-level 'atoms', but the explanations at the level of behaviorism (for scientists of animal behavior) or psychology (for scientists of human behavior) are so much richer and more explanatory, that it would be absurd to cut them out of our scientific knowledge or give them a lower level of ontological (or ontic?, not sure which term I should use here) reality. I think it's that simple, isn't it?
@@johnhausmann2391 ok. But doesn’t that mean that we can’t actually reduce the richer explanation to a poorer one? The simple point I made is that any novelty of an explanation would have to resist reductionism. And likewise a “novel explanation” reducible to a different one isn’t actually novel at all.
@@johnhausmann2391I don't think many of us would contest higher-level models (say at the level of behaviourism or biology) offering incredible explainability by way of abstraction. I think the question that we're contending is whether the models offer any import outside of utility or useful fictioning. In other words, is there a meaningful "substance" that underlies higher level ontologies or is it just a convenient way of partial bookkeeping? Partial because human culture has only taken an interest in a subset of the set of all possible empirical questions. For instance, it seems that I have the freedom to construct any kind of macro-category of objects such as an "Arbitraroid", which I define as any 1metre radius spherical volume of air containing the relative proportions of Nitrogen, Oxygen, Argon directly in front of me up to 3 decimal places. Any spherical pocket of air that satisfies this is deemed an Arbitraroid. This designation was arbitrary and I don't see why we should assign it special ontological status in the same way that I don't see why we should assign any existing category (like organism) special ontological status. It seems that reducibility offers a smaller set of metaphysical assumptions and is able to maintain full explainability. In principle we can explain all physical phenomena via fundamental physics (say taking QFT + GR as fundamental for now) but it's perfectly fine to concede the difficulty in modelling higher level phenomena due to computational intractability. Intractability though is entirely independent, which is why a reductionist metaphysics is entirely compatible with our intuition that there is great utility in constructing higher-level models of the world if you recognize the utility and go no further.
