Samuel
@KimptonNye
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Philosophers are generally more squeamish about necessity than possibility. But why?! My new paper, forthcoming in JAPA, investigates
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Philosophers get a hard time for saying “plausibly X”, “intuitively Y”, etc. But it seems to me that they are just being honest about their contentious assumptions where others (/other disciplines) would try and obscure these or think of them as objective facts.
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Philosophers, scientists and sci-fi authors are *obsessed* with alternative possibilities...what if I told you that there are no such things?!
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I love analytic philosophy but I also find it kind of hilarious that, according to many within the discipline, it’s most pivotal point in recent history was some guys saying that it is necessary that water is H2O.
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Most philosophy of science is purely deferential to science. But why? Philosophers seem well placed to clear up scientists’ conceptual confusions, tease out their contradictions and offer novel interpretations of science. I think phil sci should be more critical of science.
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Even professional philosophers disparage majoring in philosophy, the cool route is to do a degree and ideally a PhD in some science and then just nonchalantly turn your hand to philosophy and sort out all the confusions of the phil majors.
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“Don’t pursue a PhD or an academic career unless you are independently wealthy” was frequently heard and sounded like reasonable advice (though I didn’t heed it) when I was a student. Looking back it seems more like a cynical attempt to keep the out the riff-raff.
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It’s cool how Hume’s pithy point about causation made Kant malfunction and produce his incomprehensible corpus that birthed continental philosophy.
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The film “Yesterday” but for philosophy where everyone forgets the work of Saul Kripke and a struggling contingently employed philosopher becomes rich and famous by telling everyone that it’s necessary that water is H2O.
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Sure, scientifically informed metaphysics is good. But have you tried metaphysics informed science?
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Philosophers in like the 70’s: “can we be realists about trees, chairs, and the like?”
Philosophers now: “here’s what there objectively is: natural properties, moral facts, grounding, governing laws, conscious particles, propositions, essences…”
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I’ve decided to create a podcast! It’s called “Condensed Matter”, the tagline is “condensing recent work in metaphysics and the philosophy of science down to what matters”. Here’s the current web link: (1/9)
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The aim of science is to *do* cool things. The aim of philosophy is to *say* cool things.
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Sometime writing philosophy seems so petty, like I know that what I’m arguing has absolutely no significance to anything of any importance but I’ll spend hours and hours trying to fortify it against all possible objections anyway.
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I wish that instead of all this humblebragging academics were more like boxers or rappers and went around just straight up saying they are god’s gift.
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My paper “Laws of Nature: Necessary and Contingent” is now published online and open access with The Philosophical Quarterly! (Thread!)
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Which philosophical view do you find just so plausible that you've become immune to the possibility of counterexamples and instead take every implication of the view to be an interesting discovery about how the world is?
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Philosophers calling logic a science is like video gamers saying they do e-sports.
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Is the midlife crisis still a thing? Seems that this was a boomer phenomenon. For later generations, being in your 20s and 30s is such a bleak struggle and midlife still so hectic so there are no golden years to have a nostalgia crisis over even if you did have the time.
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“Only a discipline whose proper subject-matter is the fundamental structure of reality as a whole can have the authority to adjudicate whether the theories and findings of one empirical science are consistent with those of another. And that discipline can only be metaphysics.”
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Funny how the biggest puzzle in metaphysics is still: what the hell are we even doing when we do metaphysics?
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Is it common to think that the question of free will is an empirical one? Seems to me that this is a paradigm "philosophical" question that turns on how we conceptualize the world and our place in it.
I'm agnostic on the topic of free will. It's ultimately an empirical question, but I'm not persuaded that we yet know enough about the brain to rule it out.
@SamHarrisOrg
#Philosophy
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My theory: nothing exists. Really nothing at all, not even simples. It scores infinitely high on ontological parsimony, swamping other considerations and thus winning any cost-benefit analysis. Therefore it must be true.
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I like it when philosophers are open and curious about the limitations of their views. Many are like this but many aren’t. I can only think there are too many incentives (publishing, grants, job interviews) to take a silly debate club attitude to philosophy that’s hard to shake.
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Why don’t more philosophers fall prey to conspiracy theories? After all, many of them genuinely think that we don’t have free will, that we don’t know we aren’t brains in vats, that science doesn’t get the truth…
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Philosophy and science just are continuous, whether you like it or not.
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I'm looking for citations of people who deny that truths of mathematics and logic are necessary. Any suggestions? Thanks :)
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“Results revealed significant shifts away from ‘physicalist’ or ‘materialist’ views”. Don’t do drugs kids.
The published version of our paper Psychedelics alter Metaphysical Beliefs is now live in Scientific Reports 1/n
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Remind me: what do correspondence theorists think is the thing to which their theory of truth corresponds?
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Book news:
@tobytfriend
and I have signed a contract with
@CambridgeUP
to write a book for the Cambridge Elements series. Look out for "Dispositions and Powers", coming late 2022!
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Two Dogmas has featured on several undergrad courses that I’ve taught on, including courses for first years and open to non-phil majors. This seems kinda absurd. It’s a technical paper with so many idiosyncratic historical quirks motivating it.
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It’s very nice to see the hard copy of our book “Dispositions and Powers”. But you can access the thing for free forever online here: check it out for an overview of cutting-edge work on the metaphysics of dispositions and powers!
@tobytfriend
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Just found this cool old Collingwood metaphysics book in a charity shop. Anyone recognise the previous owner by any chance?
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Imagine God came down and kindly gave us one hint about the philosophy of mind, which was this: “it is absolutely necessary that an atom-for-atom duplicate of you has conscious experience”.
Would that help in any way?
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False. Philosophers are people who have very strong and very true intuitions on the basis of which they choose to ponens or tollens.
Philosophers follow the arguments wherever they may lead.
Apologists have already settled on a conclusion and look for arguments to support it.
Be a philosopher, not an apologist.
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New pod ep! I ask James Ladyman about his "An Apology for Naturalized Metaphysics". We discuss the nature of truth, disagreement in metaphysics and in science, conceptual conservatism and innovation, breaking free from the manifest image and much more!
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It’s crazy to think that there are people out there who have literally never agonised over whether a statue and the lump of clay that it is made of are identical.
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Aren’t we all pragmatists when doing philosophy? We take philosophical theories to be justified/true if they work for us, i.e., solve puzzles, unify, etc. Even the correspondence theorist is a pragmatist because they think that correspondence theory works better than alternatives
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The idea that panpsychism is some sort of acute affront to science is very strange to me. Philosophy isn’t science. So what?
@timcrane102
I just caught you on In Our Time. A hard listen! The quasi-mystical, anti-scientific adulation for panpsychism seems out of place in the 21st century… thank you for talking sense.
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I’ve had a great semester teaching the Philosophy of Medicine and Epistemology and have been privileged to discuss some fascinating controversies in these areas with fantastic students. Here are some of the questions we tackled: (1/4)
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This is one of those incredible papers that reminds me why I love philosophy
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If Lewisian modal realism were true, would facts about the multiverse be necessary or would they be contingent?
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What’s wrong with saying that ALL possibilities are epistemic? Do we really need objective/worldly possibility?
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Has anyone argued for/expressed scepticism about real disagreement in philosophy? Something like the idea that apparent philosophical disagreement always results from misunderstanding/talking past each other? I think I might be sympathetic to this.
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Detailed “signposting” seems to be a relatively recent phenomenon in academic philosophy writing, and one I mostly welcome. But the point of this tweet is to draw attention to the worry that it is sometimes a little overdone.
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I reckon that if a manuscript is sufficiently substantive and well-written that a cogent counterargument to it may be formulated, then it is probably worth publishing.
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I have a new paper forthcoming in Synthese: "Pandispositionalism and the Metaphysics of Powers". I argue that if powers are qualities that *ground* dispositions (the most promising account of powers imho) then ALL properties are powers. (Contra, notably,
@ajbirdbrain
) (1/2)
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I’ve never felt the force of the mind-body interaction problem. We don’t really *know* how physical things interact causally because we don’t know what causation is. I see no in principle additional difficulty for interaction between the physical and the mental (non-physical).
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I predict a post post modal turn where we realise that modality is all we needed after all.
Grounding is championed as a notion widely, if often only implicitly, used in philosophical practice, and as something that provides superior formulations of philosophical distinctions and theses. How much of this is warranted? Learn more:
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Part of me doesn’t even want to argue to persuade people to agree with my philosophical views because, well, they’re mine.
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RIP grounding
Upcoming book’s design.
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Why think (if you do) that observations from physics (e.g., of quantum phenomena) pose more troubling/important/etc. philosophical problems than do “everyday” observations (e.g., modal properties of statue and clay, persistence over time…) that typically motivate metaphysics?
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Philosophy has proved that science can’t prove anything. What has science proved? Oh yeah, nothing!
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Here’s a naive meta-ethics question I need help with: do those who believe in objective moral facts typically think that these are (or entail the existence of) some sui generis metaphysical entities in the way, e.g., Platonists about properties commit to universals?
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My hypothesis: most philosophers don’t really *believe* their philosophical views, they just “adopt” them.
Why don’t more philosophers fall prey to conspiracy theories? After all, many of them genuinely think that we don’t have free will, that we don’t know we aren’t brains in vats, that science doesn’t get the truth…
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Is there any consensus on where conspiracy theorists have gone wrong epistemologically? After all, the most passionate ones have lots of evidence, research etc. And their critics could just as easily be accused of, e.g, confirmation bias. What do they get wrong that we get right?
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You can’t prove anything or persuade anyone with arguments, so what’s the point? (Genuine question, I think arguments in the philosophy sense are good, but not sure why, exactly).
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I think that the biggest threat to free will isn’t determinism or anything else from physics (or psychology) but the need for alternative possibilities. I find *possibilities* hard to believe in whether or not determinism is true or our brains make us do stuff unconsciously (1/2)
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My paper ‘Reconsidering the Dispositional Essentialist canon’ is now forthcoming in Phil Studies! I argue that anti-Humeans should radically rethink their orthodox laws-properties package if they want to be genuinely explanatory and continuous with science. Penultimate draft 👇
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Submitted to a journal that made it clear they only give feedback on rejected papers that take longer than 6 months to review. They were kind enough to review and reject my paper in only 5 months and two weeks. Without any comments. More fool me.
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I wrote a more accessible version of my research on the metaphysics and logic of modality. How far do the bounds of possibility extend? How do logic and metaphysics interact? Does anything exist necessarily? Read all about it here:
Forking Paths
Samuel Kimpton-Nye on the philosophy and logic of what might have been
blogs.lse.ac.uk
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The AI alignment worry thing strikes me as a prime example of a priori philosophising gone ridiculously wrong: just because you can conceive of a super intelligent paperclip producer thirsty for human blood it doesn’t mean that such a thing is remotely possible or likely.
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New pod ep! “Metaphysics After Carnap: the Ghost Who Walks?”, Huw Price. Did Carnap kill metaphysics? Did Quine resurrect it? Is a pragmatist metametaphysics necessarily deflationary? Listen to find out!
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If you care about modality and are not a modal anti-realist, why not? There are lots of good anti-realist theories of modality out there, what is it that makes you go realist?
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@MichaelALewis10
This is what I think is so valuable about philosophy, it inspires a sort of humility.
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Is there any evidence of/research on academic ‘cartels’? Something like groups of academics who cite each other, and so get invited to review each other so that they can then recommend each other’s work for publication and thereby dominate journal pages?
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My paper "Reconsidering the Dispositional Essentialist Canon" now has page numbers and an issue in Phil Studies! I argue that orthodox Disp Essentialism is insufficiently explanatory and insufficiently continuous with science. (1/2)
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A big worry that I have about anti-metaphysics sentiment is that it closes one off the the possibility of discovering concepts that might be useful elsewhere.
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Best thing about academia is how young it makes you feel. You train for years and years to attain the highest possible qualification only to then continue to count as “junior” or “early career” for many many more years!
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"I am extremely grateful to the reviewer for their incredibly insightful and helpful comments. This commentary is clearly the work of an unparalleled genius in the field and I am honoured to have the oportunity to improve my manuscript based on their suggestions." Too much?
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This just arrived, I’m excited to get stuck in! Modality is what first got me hooked on philosophy (also democracy but, ya know, gotta pick a focus!) I still find modality a fascinating and incredibly puzzling topic that seems to permeate the entire discipline.
#MetaScienceReads
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My campaign on behalf of Humean Laws in an unHumean world continues! “How to be a powers theorist about functional laws, conservation laws and symmetries” is forthcoming in Phil Studies . A thread below, but here’s the headline news:
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Can hardcore actualism (aka dispositionalism about modality) validate S5? I think so. Read all about it my paper just out in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research . (Plus, look out for bonus content: why is there something and not nothing?).
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Laws of nature are pragmatic descriptions of possible property distributions. Or so say I. Here’s a response to my critic
@tobytfriend
forthcoming in The Philosophical Quarterly. A great opportunity to also touch explanation, the aim of science & modality!
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What are the main/most pressing objections to Humean metaphysics (roughly: everything supervenes on the spatiotemporal arrangement of qualitative properties) these days?
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I'm giving an online talk at the CLE seminar on metaphysics in two weeks' time. I'll be arguing that anti-realism about modality just cannot work. The whole argument is in the abstract (see link) so you can come well equipped with your knockdown arguments!
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I'm increasingly baffled by the non-modal conception of essence. What is the rule (of thumb will do!) for deciding when a property is merely necessary and when it gets to count as essential? I worry that appeal to "real definition" will only move the bump in the rug.
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Hard at work on “Dispositions and Powers” for the Cambridge Elements series. Not *just* tweeting about it, honest 😉
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I’m less convinced that pressure to publish has led to conservatism in philosophy than that it has led to those darn theoretical utility arguments/IBE’s becoming absolutely rife: they are way harder to concisely object to than good ol’ deductive arguments. But also way sillier.
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If metaphysics really is, or ought to be, continuous with science, what is its position in the “hierarchy” of the sciences: more fundamental than physics, less fundamental than biology or psychology, or somewhere else?
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it’s a pretty fascinating short paper.
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Why is structuralism anti-metaphysics and not just different metaphysics?
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Epistemology and metaphysics are increasingly engaged with and relevant to science, which is great, so (heat rising) why do we still need Phil sci as it’s own sub-discipline? When Phil sci is good, it’s primarily ep and/or met. And being relevant to science is no longer unusual.
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It’s a little known fact that the cover art on the Routledge Handbook of Modality is one of only a handful of documented sightings of an impossible world.
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The view that there are some propositions with no modal profile, e.g., true propositions that are neither contingent nor necessary, strikes me as at least as counterintuitive as the view that there are some propositions that are neither true nor false. Am I alone in this?
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I can count at least two contentious philosophical claims in this.
Any empirical fact, e.g. water is H2O. You know, the kind of stuff science, as opposed to philosophy, deals with (obviously, there's a grey area in between).
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If you think that a paper you are reviewing is so good that it should be published in an even “better” venue than the one you are reviewing it for should you try and communicate this to the author in your comments?
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Might start casually using “begs the question” to mean “raises the question” to virtue signal that I’m not just a philosophy nerd.
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Springer is offering me the chance to order a *poster* of my article 😂… for $68 😳
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