Tom Swann Notes From Meetings With Jason
I’m going to use this page to write up thoughts following on from my meetings with Jason. And for Jason’s occaisional note taking during. I’ll make pages here in order to organise material and then link to them from the front page. No doubt my attempts to organise things will soon start working against me.
{[green Quotations by Tom unless otherwise attributed. Discussions by Tom and Jason. ]}
2/4/09
“What reasons do we have for thinking that normativity can or should be causal?”
Maybe normativity is essential but, despite that, not causal. Compare with various Kantian things which are supposedly essential but not causal. By “essential” I mean e.g. necessary for semantics.
Normative notions are reasons for agents, but not reasons for e.g. physics. Parallel with motivations of organisms vs. things that we see as fully explanatory of organisms’ actions (never mind evolutionary reasons).
3/3/09
“What really interests me … is the relationship between methodological naturalism and metaphysical naturalism.”
Tom Swann Naturalism Methodologically Metaphysically
“People talk about the manifest image and the scientific image, but they tend not to notice that the scientific image is manifest to us.”
Tom Swann How The Scientific Is Manifest
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Evolutionary psychology is meant to explain how we are, but we first need to know (properly!) how we are.
Evolutionary psych and rationality: do the details of the evolutionists’ explanations actually contribute much to the hard problem, which is the problem of naturalising normativity, or the is/ought problem, or something like that (?)
Does the closure of the physical (if true) limit the range of possible types of causation? Machamer et al on mechanism; recent edited collection on causation, edited by Huw Price and Richard Corry (“Causation, Physics and the Constitution of Reality: Russell’s Republic Revisited”).
#THESIS
Paradigm cases of things that (perhaps) can’t be described naturalistically: - rationality - conscious experience - {[red also maybe agency ]} — Katrina Hutchison quotes Thomas Nagel as saying, “My doing of an act ’ or the doing of an act by someone else ’ seems to disappear when we think of the world objectively. There seems no room for agency in a world of neural impulses, chemical reactions, and bone and muscle movements. Even if we add sensations, perceptions, and feelings we don’t get action, or doing ’ there is only what happens.”
#What is physics? Types of definition: - functional stuff — hard to spell out - extrapolation of what physicists do - 3rd person as opposed to 1st person — too broad brush - physical science is meant to be non-normative … or at least describe non-normative things … or something — “causes are constitutively non-normative”, maybe (see Menzies and Price); laws (see van Fraassen, “Laws And Symmetry”)
“If you abandon normative notions from nature, and you think a physicist is in nature, then you’ve just undermined the presuppositions of your argument … of any argument. [On this view] you have to give an account of what makes an argument good without appealing to normativity.”
understanding normative discourse without presupposing normative features of the world — Horgan?
“An extreme form of naturalism … leads to supervenience fundamentalism.”
Question: Will there be time to look at normativity AND argue for a particular view of closure?
“A lot of philosophers are happy for there to be no boundary; and a lot of philosophers really need there to be a sharp boundary between what philosophy does and what science does.”
#literatures causation — huge literature and probably not the main topic determinism — meaning of terms still contentious but less so - As you go, you’ll have to be decide what you mean by causation and determinism
#metaphors Smart — nomological danglers work being done (by the physical)
Papineau — example of conservation of mass/energy; argues that it’s for empirical reasons that closure has become entrenched
Daniel Stoljar manuscript on physicalism: physicalism performs an intellectual function. Not primarily sociological. Unifies problems as placement problems