Tag
Philosophy
4 posts tagged Philosophy, newest first.
Four dimensions, same problem
A paper on Sider's four-dimensionalist treatment of the Ship of Theseus. Written as a state and a transition function, the four-dimensional view turns out to need exactly what the three-dimensional causal unity account needs, so it inherits that problem rather than escaping it.
The mathematics physics actually needs
A paper on Field's nominalism: if mathematics is only a conservative shortcut, its axioms could be chosen freely. Quantum mechanics needing complex numbers suggests they cannot, and the consistency the argument rests on cannot be proved.
Causation is contested only at the edges
A paper on Godfrey-Smith's proposal to treat causation as an essentially contested concept. The boundary really is blurry, but the ordinary use is stable enough that courts agree on most of it, which is not how a contested concept behaves.
Truth at the limit of a moving method
A paper on Quine against Peirce: defining truth as what inquiry converges on needs a notion of one theory being nearer than another. Statistics can supply that, and the standards deciding what counts as a method still move underneath it.