New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Spinoza vs Jonathan Schaffer [Open vs Closed Systems.]

In a forthcoming paper (I heard a version of it here), Jonathan Schaffer offers the following argument:

1. Leibnizian substance: Something is a substance if and only if it evolves by the fundamental laws
2. Russellian laws: The cosmos is the one and only thing that evolves by the fundamental laws
3. Spinozan monism: The cosmos is the one and only substance (from 1 and 2)

As Schaffer is well aware, there is lots of irony in all of this. (At NewAPPS we have discussed Russell's reservations about Spinoza several times here, here, and also Jeff. [Recall also Russell's debts to Boole on Clarke vs Spinoza; and Stebbing on Spinoza.]) Now, my objection to this argument is inspired by my reading of Spinoza's so-called "Letter on the Infinite," but what follows is not meant to be a historical argument (or a gotcha, 'you got the history wrong' moment). Recall that I read Spinoza as claming that characterizing and grasping substance as such does not involve our ordinary scientific 'utensils' (e.g., measures, mathematics, laws of nature), but rather concepts like essence and eternity. Mathematical physics can only give a partial view of substance as such. Now one reason for this is that mathematical physics of Spinoza's day, treats some part of nature as a closed system (governed by its own 'conservation' rules/laws). Moreover, Spinoza would deny that  fundamentally the universe evolves. For, applying temporal concepts to the universe is, however useful it may be, always a less than fully adequate conceptualization of the universe.

What happened to Philosophy of Social Science after Ernest Nagel (1961)?

The hazards of trying to draw conclusions about all of science, by focusing narrowly on physics were learned at the end of the last century. However, including biology and chemistry are only the beginning, not the end, of the project of trying to develop a more well-rounded picture of science.--Alisa Bokulich

The quoted passage is from a terrific NDPR review by Bokulich that Catarina discussed yesterday. Bokulich notes that "Conspicuously absent from this list are any of the social sciences." Bokulich goes on to call attention to the works of four recent leading philosophers of social science--all of which happen to be women. [By the way, when later in the review Bokulich calls attention to the lack of representation of women in the volume (and the lack of focus on philosophy race/feminism) she does not refer back to her earlier discussion. This justifies Catarina's claim that Bokulich should be praised for the "elegant way" in which these issues are raised. ]

As the epigraph to this post suggests, our current understanding of the development of philosophy of science is that we are "trying" to develop it away from an exclusively physics focus to other sciences during the last few decades. (It was gratifying to read Bokulich's claim that philosophy of economics is "thriving.") But this leaves me with a puzzle: if one opens Ernest Nagel's (1961) The Structure of Science, one notes that three out of fifteen of chapters are exclusively focused on philosophy of social sciences and history. These together comprise 25% of the text. (This understates the situation because  earlier chapters also discuss relevant material. There is is also a chapter on biology, by the way.) So, half a century ago one the most widely cited works in the philosophy of science (although probably unread these days unless one is interested in Nagel-reduction) by one of the professional leaders of the discipline (who arguably invented analytical philosophy as a category) at one of the then  elite departments already was offering a "well-rounded" picture of science. How come this was not the norm in the profession?

How Good Was Stebbing . . . Really?

Eric admires Susan Stebbing because she was a philosopher who spoke out against the authority of science. I am not so convinced that her stance was all that admirable. I am all for challenging scientists when their philosophy is confused. I am much less keen on setting up common sense as a competitor of science. This is what Stebbing did, and I am less than clear why Eric would endorse this aspect of her program.

Stebbing was a common sense philosopher, and sometimes an ordinary language philosopher. Her attacks on the authority of science were a reaction to its presumed displacement of every day thought. Her famous put-down of Arthur Eddington is an excellent example. Eddington had written that wooden chairs and tables were not solid, since they are mostly composed of “empty space.” Stebbing replied that chairs and tables are paradigms of what we mean by the word ‘solid’. To deny their solidity is simply to misuse the language. (This is “the argument from the paradigm case” famously mocked by Ernst Gellner in his wonderful book, Words and Things.) Why would Eric endorse such a piece of arrant snobbery?

The issue between Stebbing and Eddington has often been misunderstood.

Weekly philo of economics: Adam Smith, not-so-Newtonian, after all.

[I start with intellectual autobiography because, perhaps, my journey may serve as a warning to students who let the secondary sources do their thinking while reading primary sources.--ES]

One of the dogmas that I encountered and accepted uncritically when I started doing scholarship on eighteenth-century figures is that they were 'Newtonian.' This conceit wrecked my dissertation (on David Hume and Adam Smith) because I had to conclude that Hume either was an ignoramus or dishonest.

Later, by teaching Berkeley to very inquisitive Wesleyan undergraduates, I realized that very smart philosophers could be informed critics of Newton, and contest the authority of natural philosophy (this paper is the finding of my scholarly voice, which resulted in a more ambitious project.) I returned to Hume and started to see the un-Newtonian and anti-Newtonian aspects. In the wake of my more recent scholarship on Spinoza, I started to discern a whole eighteenth century debate over the application of mathematics to human affairs.

But Adam Smith was not touched by my revisionism. I continued to stand by my reading of the Wealth of Nations, and to see in Smith a very sophisticated Kuhnian-naturalistic defense of the Newtonian paradigm. After all, it was Smith's student, the great jurist-sociologist John Millar, who tagged Smith as the Newton of civil society. [Millar pairs Smith with Montesquieu, presumably to keep Hume out of the picture.]

Now, however, reflection on work by a young Argentinian visiting scholar, Leondro Stieben, and, especially, a fascinating manuscript-monograph on Adam Smith by the distinguished scholars Mike Hill and Warren Montag, which usefully compares Spinoza and Smith, has led me to reconsider Adam Smith. Consider the following paragraph:

I am still proud to be a philosopher

A couple of weeks ago I was invited to a speaker dinner by a faculty member in the physics department. We were told to show up at 6:30 pm at Pi, a local gourmet pizza restaurant and cocktail bar that has gone from hip to hipster in the past couple of years. This is also where I meet with my students after our Monday seminar. But this time it was just me and a group of physicists.

When I showed up at 6:30 I didn't recognize anyone. I mentioned the name of the person who had invited me to the Maitre'De. She referred me to a corner of the restaurant occupied by a group of people who didn't look like physicists at all. As I introduced myself, I already regretted acccepting the invitation. When they introduced themselves and told me about their projects, I contemplated my escape. None of it made any sense to me. But I nodded with a smile on my lips and pretended that I understood.

Then the person who invited me showed up with the speaker. I felt even more intimidated. Here I was: a philosopher, in the midst of a group of physicists, who exceeded me on the coolness scale by a factor of at least 200. Sure, I just joined the Center for Neurodynamics and I do have a few empirical projects in the oven. But to be honest, I don't know all that much about black holes or elementary particles. I am sure the "cool math" these folks were referring to was ... well, very cool. But I didn't even know what kind of math was the cool kind of math.

On the nature of physical probing.

During the last few weeks, NewApps has hosted several inter-connected discussions about the relationship between physics, metaphyisics, and philosophy of physics (and their histories) [see here and here as well as Jody Azzouni's intervention here. Azzouni's is a response to a forthcoming piece by Arntzenius & Dorr.]

Abe Stone has written a very provocative set of reflections on Azzouni and the whole dialectic here. There is a lot going in Stone, but his core point is that Azzouni's use of “actual physical probing,” begs the question. Now, there are two issues here.

First, in his piece Azzouni had offered two examples (one "a non-scientific example" and another "more scientific" [neither pretending to be genuine scientific]). Now the nub of these examples is this: the first example focuses on how the Arntzenius & Dorr technique imposing internal structure on objects, while the second examples explains why imposing structure on the spacetime between objects is objectionable. [I am partially quoting earlier private correspondence with Azzouni.] But what matters about the examples is not a metaphysical commitment to "big or little balls" (and anything that deviated from them being "spooky") as Stone suggests, but rather that they bring out the way in which Arntzenius & Dorr impose extra structure that does not seem capable of guiding future science (and is unmotivated by either existing science or by what has come to be known as 'nominalism'). [I apologize to Robbie Williams by not couching these comments in terms of his very interesting analysis of the dialectic: ]

Second, if I understand him rightly, Stone believes by contrast that the topological structure that Arntzenius and Dorr introduce can be amenable to (suitably re-interpreted and transformed) physical theory. And if I understand him rightly Stone thinks such philosophical theorizing is both desirable and necessary for the progress of science (something that brings him close to Michael Friedman's dynamics of reason, I think--but maybe I am being misled by their shared Kantianism) if it can help us think anew about what the nature of the empirical is.

I agree with the spirits of Stone's remarks here (I am all for letting a thousand flowers bloom in such matter), but it would be nice to know in what sense the Arntzenius/Dorr approach does indeed help us think afresh about what physical probing is, or can be.

Why is co-authoring rare in philosophy?

My sister is now finishing her PhD in medium-energy nuclear physics. Over the past 3.5 years that she has been involved in this research, she has never written a single-authored paper. Indeed, of most of the papers she collaborated on she is not first author, but one of about 10 or so members of her lab. In the sciences, this is a fairly modest number of co-authors, since papers with 50 or even 100 and more authors are not exceptional (the trend towards huge numbers of co-authors, however, seems to be leveling off).

So we can say that co-authoring is the norm in physics, indeed in most of the sciences. I am not aware of quantitative analyses, but philosophy, like other humanity, is still mainly a single-author enterprise (in the interest of full disclosure: I do tend to co-author most of my work). A quick glance at the latest entries in PhilPapers shows that the majority of papers in professional philosophy journals is written by single authors: of the first 100 entries of the New Papers section, only 15 are by two or more authors.

I think co-authoring is on the rise in philosophy, but there is still a lot of resistance to the practice.

Is Philosophy of Physics always history of Physics?

Steven French suggests, yes. Steve gives two reasons: i) it's so hard to keep up with 'the cutting edge'; ii) unless we're doing something semi-sociological, there are good reasons not to go there [the cutting edge]. Readers comments welcome.

Physics just is part of the history of philosophy!

In recent blogging, Mohan Matthen has been challenging folk committed to History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) to articulate a way in which general philosophy of science (GPOS) can be properly philosophical within HPS (see also here and elsewhere). To simplify: he points out that i) much GPOS has been drifting into philosophy of some particular science (PoX) or, ii) in so far as it is interested in epistemic issues, it should become a sub-species of epistemology. I challenged ii here, and found the subsequent exchange with Mohan and David Wallace very illuminating. But I was left admitting that my position lacked resources to prevent the slide into PoX with a focus on internalist conceptual analysis. As a response, I have been developing concepts that allow me to re-conceive philosophy, and its history as well as its complex relationship with the sciences. 

Luckily, one of the most exciting young philosophers of physics, Katherine Brading, rides in to the rescue! Below I quote from the concluding, stirring paragraph of a paper she presented at a recent conference on Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science. She offers a program for HPS in which the history of science X can be viewed as a contribution to ongoing philosophy. I have come close to this position when I insist that my approach to the philosophy of economics is a recovery of the shared history of economics and philosophy (recall this blog; or this one) in order to do philosophy, but without Brading's boldness. Brading's position needs to be developed (she needs to stop relying on the deep/superficial distinction), of course, but it offers the start of a viable alternative to Mohan's position. I quote Brading's concluding paragraph, which presents her approach *by way of contrast with a passage by Tim Maudlin (in which he describes the view she is attacking; it is unclear if Maudlin endorses the view) that she quotes*, in full without further comment:

"The official part of my paper ends there, but given the title and stated goals of this conference, I cannot  resist a comment on the manner in which philosophers should engage with physics. Very often, philosophers of physics work on “interpretations” of theories in physics, and work their way back from these towards philosophical questions. Here is an example of a philosopher of physics [Maudlin--ES] describing this work:11

"Physics provides theories which typically consist of a mathematical formalism and some procedures for applying that formalism to particular concrete situations. But both the formalism and the procedures may admit of alternative ontological interpretations. It may not be clear, for example, which part of the mathematics corresponds to real physical magnitudes and which is an  artefact of arbitrary choices of units of gauges. It may not be clear which mathematical models represent real physical possibilities, and which do not. And it may not be clear which pairs of  mathematical models represent the same physical situation. All of these problems confront even the philosopher who tries to take, for example, the Theory of Relativity ‘at face value’." [The accompanying footnote reads: "11Maudlin, in Loux and Zimmerman (eds.), 2003, pp. 461-2. I quote Maudlin here not as an example of a philosopher of physics who endorses this approach, but because of the clear description he gives of the approach, and the fact that his description appears in a metaphysics handbook."--ES]

This is one possible approach, of course, and there is important conceptual work to be done here, but I do not think it is the most profound philosophically. An alternative is to begin with the deepest of our philosophical questions, and to use the development of physics read as a contribution to philosophy to explore how these questions are transformed, re-worked, addressed, and sometimes rendered non-questions. One does not “help oneself” to a philosophically shallow formalism, and then attempt to do
philosophy: one sees physics as a part of the history of philosophy, and engages it on those terms. That is what I have tried to do here."

Weekly Philo eco blog: Statistics as a guide to concept formation?

Testing and confirmation are way too easy in economics.

A lovely paper that documents this claim is: "Robert S, Goldfarb,  1997. "Now You See It, Now You Don't: Emerging Contrary Results in Economics," Journal of Economic Methodology, vol. 4(2): 221-44, December." (See also another paper by Goldfarb.)

This is due, I think, to the over-reliance on statistical technique absent fruitful/constraining background theory (that helps pins down the uncertainty in and variance of  major parameters). In economics there are few very enduring quantitative results (and that also pin down major parameters). Too much economic research is sensitive either to changes in our understanding of the relevant data-set and ‘improved’ statistical technique or to changes in social circumstances that have made old claims outdated (because, as I suggested in my comment on Boulding last week, economics may have a reflexive relationship with 'objects' studied).  Below I quote (without accompanying footnotes and bibliography) from my first published paper in the philosophy of economics that targets the obsession over testing/confirmation (and the accompanying *abuse* of statistical technique, but for the record: I am not critical of statistics or econometrics as such!). When I wrote the passage below I was ignorant of much of 20th century economics, although as the larger paper reveals, I was struck that the economists I was reading were very worried about underdetermination in context of research (without it being motivated by holism or confirmation).  

Methodological crisis in physics since 1980...and what philosophy of physics (and economics) can do

En Passant, in a discussion on the Leiter blog, David Wallace (a prominent philosopher of physics), makes the following important observation: "Perhaps putting aside post-1980 particle physics as a special case, it's pretty uncontroversial that the methodology of physics is effective at achieving physics' goals, and that the results delivered by physics are basically correct (where "correct", for non-realists in philosophy of science, doesn't have to be read as "true"). The sheer extent of the successes of physics in experimental test and in technological application means that physicists can be fairly uncritical about their methodology...[snip] Economics is not remotely in the same position of methodological security as physics; hence, good economists should probably be a lot more conversant with the history of their discipline than good physicists. (If you believe Paul Krugman, failing to be historically informed is a significant part of what's wrong with Chicago-style modern economics.) And post 1980s particle physics is arguably going through a slow-motion methodological crisis precisely because the strong evidential base that used to ground the subject has largely dried up."

Let me leave aside economics until the last sentence of this pece (for, historical ignorance is a widespread sin in the discipline, not exempting Krugman). Wallace is not alone in his claim about particle physics. I heard John Norton express a similar sentiment in conversation about a year ago; as I reported before here, Eric Curiel has published on this, and (as the eminent Dutch philosopher of physics, Fred Muller, reminded me this morning, Lee Smolin wrote a book about it. The sane parts of what follows is indebted to Muller. I offer two observations.