Abstract
What would be sufficient to show of some apparently higher-level property that it is ‘nothing over and above’ some complex configuration of more basic properties? This paper defends a new method for justifying reductions by demonstrating its comparative advantages over two methods recently defended in the literature. Unlike its rivals, what I’ll call “the semantic method” makes a reduction’s truth epistemically transparent without relying on conceptual analyses.
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Notes
Jackson (1998).
By “a truth” here I mean a true sentence. The difference, then, between basic and non-basic truths when they share a truth-maker is a difference in vocabulary. Basic truths are truths expressed in the basic vocabulary (plus connectives) alone.
For more on this way of framing the issues, see Jackson (1998).
Jackson (1998) pp. 3–4.
Jackson and Chalmers also mark a distinction of this kind in their (2001).
There’s a surface complication here that needs to be set aside. What about worlds that are physical duplicates of the actual world, but not minimal duplicates? Why think that in those worlds everything that is P is also H? There are two ways we could think of such worlds. First, we could think of such worlds as excluded from evaluation for the purposes of stating the physicalist’s distinctive commitment. On this way of thinking, the necessity of (∀x) (x is P ⊃ x is H) is it’s truth at all worlds that are minimal physical duplicates of the actual world. Or, we could think of it as a requirement on a world W’s counting as a physical duplicate of our own, whether minimal or not, that all of the physical laws that obtain at the actual world are preserved in W. If that is so, then for any H, if H is a higher-order physical property fully determined by the pattern of instantiation of the primary physical properties, as physicalism’s truth requires, any world that is a physical duplicate of the actual world, whether minimal or not, should yield the same H-truths. There may be additional H-truths in worlds that are physical duplicates, but not minimally so. But the presence of non-physical ‘extras’ that don’t, by hypothesis, interfere with the operation of the physical laws, shouldn’t effect of duplication of the actual H-truths, if physicalism is true. I myself prefer this second way of thinking of the relevant necessity, but the first way is an option.
This is assuming pace Sydney Shoemaker that the laws of nature are not themselves metaphysically necessary. For Shoemaker’s discussion, see his (1997).
Of course, if we think that laws of nature are metaphysically necessary, we might reject these counterfactuals. But metaphysically necessary connections between distinct existences would just be another case in which simplicity is question-begging.
Jackson (1998) p. 59.
Ibid. p. 51.
Ibid. p. 57.
For an argument for this claim, see Gertler (2002).
See their (2001).
See, for example, Chalmers (1996).
Some may dispute that this premise expresses an analysis. Since I’m not here defending the analytic method, whether or not it is is not important. What is important is what the example illustrates.
It might seem like there should be a rigidifying operator (“actually”) in this second premise. But here, the claim in premise two is like the claim expressed by “Michael Jordan is tall”. Both are contingent with the actual world as the default world of evaluation. To evaluate the truth of each at each counterfactual world Wn, we go and see how things are at Wn, not at the actual world.
This treatment of the solidity case roughly reflects Jackson’s discussion. See his (1998, Ch. 1).
But see footnote 12 for an important caveat.
See Kripke (1972).
The metaphysical necessity of ‘water is H2O’ is guaranteed in the usual, Kripkean way, i.e. by the presence of two rigid designators flanking the ‘=’.
Here and throughout I use corner quotes to indicate that it is the orthographic sequence referred to.
See their (2001) p. 349.
This is also the Block and Stalnaker (1999) view.
Again, the metaphysical necessity of ‘water is H2O’ is guaranteed in the usual, Kripkean way, i.e. by the presence of two rigid designators flanking the ‘=’.
Given the necessity in #1, we don’t need to worry about Block and Stalnaker’s (1999) possibility of ghost water blocking the inference from #1 and #2 to #3.
More carefully, in the solidity case, the vindicating entailment warrants
$$ \begin{aligned}{} & ({\text{3}}){\text{ An object}}'{\text{s solidity is constituted by the lattice - like array of the molecules that comprise it,}} \\ & {\text{ given that array}}'{\text{s causal powers and the laws it enters into}}{\text{.}} \\ \end{aligned} $$The entailment itself plus the Kripkean assumption about how we describe counterfactual worlds then warrants
$$ \begin{aligned}{} & ({\text{S}}){\text{ }}\square (\forall {\text{x}})({\text{x has L }}({\text{and L has the causal powers and enters into the laws that it does at the actual}} \\ & {\text{ world}}) \supset {\text{x is solid}}) \\ \end{aligned} $$Finally, (S) itself is taken as the first premise in locating entailments for the solidity truths.
See her (2002) p. 28.
I say “arguably” since some deny this. See Yablo (2002).
One might object here that the a posteriori semantic premises vindicating entailments rely upon somehow themselves rely upon a priori analyses. (Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for Philosophical Studies for this suggestion.) Nothing I’ve said here decisively rules out this possibility. However, absent an argument showing how those a posteriori premises must universally rely on analyses, this isn’t yet a real objection, so much as the form of one. For the possibility to be live, the details of that objection would need to be spelled out.
This objection was posed by Jackson in conversation.
For McLaughlin’s defense of the claim that contingent identities are appropriately reductive, see his (2003).
This objection is attributed to the ‘Block and Stalnaker side’ on the grounds that it mirrors one of their objections to conceptual analysis.
There are a number of other objections that Block and Stalnaker consider against the Jackson and Chalmers conceptual analysis requirement and there is not sufficient space here to show that none of them translate into objections against the present account. It will have to suffice to note that several of their arguments don’t really target the conceptual analysis thesis, that conceptual analysis is necessary for showing how e.g. the mental is nothing over and above the physical and hence closing the apparent gap between them. Rather, they target the view that conceptual analysis plus microphysics (in the case of physicalism) are sufficient for closing the gap. But how this matter is to be resolved is not something I need to take a stand on here. What’s important is that on the present account the gap is closed in the first instance by reductions and then by the locating entailments they license, when vindicated, not by the vindicating entailments themselves. The punchline is that the Block and Stalnaker objections are here avoided by rejecting the view that the non-basic truths are located among the basic ones by being entailed from conceptual truths and basic truths alone which is, after all, the real target of many of their objections.
For a discussion of the role the semantic method might play in settling the dispute between the dualist and the physicalist, see Dowell (forthcoming).
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Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Brie Gertler, Frank Jackson, and Brian McLaughlin and to an anonymous referee for Philosophical Studies for very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Thanks also to Sean Foran, Thomas Polger, Gideon Rosen, David Sobel, and David Velleman for helpful discussions of the ideas raised here.
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Dowell, J. Serious metaphysics and the vindication of reductions. Philos Stud 139, 91–110 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-007-9104-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-007-9104-1