Ep. 339: Brian Ellis on the Metaphysics of Science (Part Two)

0:08 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, episode 339, part 2. We've been discussing Brian Ellis's book the Philosophy of Nature a Guide to the New Essentialism. We had laid out his overall theory, how he's changing how we look at the laws of. Even the use of the term laws of nature. We want to focus on the behavior of distinction, natural kinds and natural kinds of processes.

0:35 Wes: So chapter two, he lays out his distinction between empiricist and realist perspectives of the world. And empiricism he's going to associate with what he's called passivism. It's passivism, not pacifism. He associates the two. They're anti metaphysical science in a way is grounded in linguistic conventions and you systematize observations and have more or less useful mental constructs and you refrain from doing this metaphysical speculation about underlying causes. So he talks about this guy Mach, and I don't think we have to go into huge detail about that really.

That's his foil obviously for saying that as an essentialist he takes underlying causes more seriously. And chemistry again is this paradigm. Atoms and molecules do exist and they take part in these interactive processes and they have properties that can be discovered. They're not just there by definition, linguistic convention. And then it's in the section starting on page 33 called the Natural kind structure of Reality that he will get into. What is it to be a natural kind? And this is where he gives some bullet points about what that is. Are there bullet points in my notes?

Are they bullet points in the original?

1:48 Christopher: They are, yeah. They're broken down into like numbers one through five.

1:51 Wes: I have this as page 33.

1:53 Mark: Yeah, I enjoyed the Name dropping. So Ernst Mach, like, that's the guy who came up with, like, why we call the speed of sound Mach 1, Mach 2. Is that the same guy or is this. I mean, is it. He's a physicist.

2:04 Wes: I'm just going to guess and say

2:06 Mark: no to the physics of shock waves.

2:08 Wes: Oh, then he must be. It must be. Yeah. Okay.

2:10 Mark: I thought that that guy's first name was Ernst. So, like, all right, Dylan, why are you not here? You can fill us in next time what an actual scientist thought of this Pierre Duhem that he talks about more as somebody who actually lays out in the philosophical history, hey, there is two different views about scientific theorizing. The one that sort of is descended from Hume and the other one that Ellis wants to argue for. Yeah. So it's always great when we read a contemporary person who is not just looking at sort of the greatest hits and comparing Descartes and Hume, blah, blah, blah, but, you know, what were.

The history of ideas goes through many, many more hands than we're ever going to touch on this podcast of somebody who has the patience to tell us what. Somebody who has systematically laid these things out as opposed to having to do some deep reading. I think there was at one point Ellis was like, what John Locke actually thought about. This is a matter for Locke scholars to figure out. But I just want to talk about the simplified view that I'm arguing against.

3:07 Wes: I actually got into some of this Locke stuff in reading papers about, because of course, he's the one who comes up with this idea of a real essence as opposed to the Aristotelian essences against which he was rebelling, and real essences specifically involving microstructure and then individual essences versus kind essences and the relationship between nominal essence and real essence. That's all Locke. And there's a lot of really interesting scholarship on exactly what he means by all those things.

3:34 Christopher: Just to paint the picture a little bit more, what you guys are talking about, he mentions, like, logical positivism and he mentions instrumentalism from Duhem and stuff. But essentially he kind of goes through this early part talking about the two sort of positions. One being, I guess you could roughly call anti realist in terms of science, where you're going to say, we have the scientific theories, but we're not going to really comment on the implied metaphysics or what our commitments are ontologically. We're just going to just sometimes say, shut up and calculate, I think is a famous quote from some scientists.

But essentially the focus is we're just Going to focus on the scientific theories and assume that they tell us what we can about nature, but we're not going to say they tell us anything that's true about the real world. They absolve themselves of making any comments on that. I think he even says that he started off with this kind of disposition, instrumentalism, which reminded me of like Dewey. John Dewey is a big proponent of this kind of instrumentalist view in science. And he said that through his interaction with working with chemistry and working with some physics, he started to become more of a strongly opposed the empiricist and positivist view, as he thought, like Wes was saying that science does in fact successfully reveal stuff about the underlying structure of reality, that we can actually say science is giving us at least approximately true statements about reality.

And so he kind of uses chemistry as his jumping off point for why he thinks scientific realism is a better take.

4:52 Mark: These are not just metaphors that are shorthand for a bunch of data.

4:56 Wes: Yeah. So it's on page 24 that he says science should actually get at hidden causes and the underlying structure of reality. Sort of the metaphysical layer. The metaphysical layer happens to be right. Yeah. So these scientific entities like atoms, subatomic particles, he'll say essentialism is still on 24, but it takes underlying causes more seriously. Chemistry is a paradigm because chemical interaction theories, they're about real causal processes. It's not just, oh, this is our construct to explain what's happening or abstract model theories, like at Newton, there really are molecules and they really are interacting in these certain ways.

And that explains why when you do, let's say, what is it you do? A spark with hydrogen in the presence of oxygen and you get water, or however you make it. Right. You're giving these very, very specific causal explanations predicated on the existence of these entities. And it all kind of ceases to make sense if you say, well, all of these things are just constructs.

6:00 Christopher: Interestingly enough, he does say on page 26, he says, refocusing on chemistry quickly changed my mind about a number of things. First, it made the case for realism in at least this area, irresistible. It did not convince me that all theories should be understood realistically, which I thought interesting. I wondered to what extent, like how far is it just theories in physics and chemistry, but theories in biology or something? He might not be a realist about that. They don't tell us.

6:23 Wes: Well, certainly he's going to say social, ecological, economic, social systems. There are no natural kinds. And he's going to claim there are no natural kind clusters in those things, even in physics.

6:34 Mark: So our very first Philosophy of Physics episode, the Heisenberg. I think that quantum physics, like, the whole reason that there's a disagreement about how to actually understand the theory is because we can't visualize it and it makes no sense. And so that is the paradigm of the shut up and calculate. Like, we don't even have a metaphor that works. We just have some set of data that we can state via some very complicated formulae. End of story. That's not to say we shouldn't look for something deeper. We just don't have it yet.

7:06 Wes: Yeah, his criteria for natural kinds and essentialism are quite strict, as we mentioned before. And it's on this page, on page 26, that he gives these five elements. So the first is that the differences between natural kinds is real and absolute and not dependent in any way on our perspective, our interests, our cognitive capacities. It's not just that we're dividing up the world in a certain way because we are interested in it in that way or because our mental faculties are structured in a certain way. This is the way the world really is divided up. This is part of what interests me about essentialism. Something like this, I think, has to be true. We have to decide that at least some entities, they are what they are independently of our thoughts about them.

7:50 Mark: So are the 17 words for snow or what, however many are they natural kinds? I mean, we could investigate, but probably not.

7:57 Wes: And then categorically. The second criterion is natural kinds are categorically distinct. No gradual transitions, which is what rules out species. The distinctions are intrinsic based on the internal constitutions of things, not extrinsic. So one nominal classification, like the Northern lights, we associate that with a location that's an extrinsic property, not an intrinsic one. And we can't say that something can be a natural kind based on that type of property.

8:26 Christopher: Only internal constitutions. All right.

8:28 Mark: In some other possible world, the Northern Lights could be in the south.

8:32 Wes: Well, they are in the south as well, aren't they?

8:34 Christopher: I don't think so.

8:35 Seth: Wouldn't they be called the Southern lights?

8:37 Wes: Aren't they at both poles? That's where the magnetic field is weak. And you would expect that. You see, because I know the causal explanation, I can speculate, and probably I'm wrong, but I can still speculate.

8:49 Christopher: They're called different things, though. The Northern lights refer to specifically the aurora borealis in the north, and then the Southern lights, the ones in the south. So I guess it depends on what we were referring to. There when we said Northern lights can only be in the northern hemisphere.

9:01 Wes: Technically, I think what you're trying to say is that I was right about that. So.

9:06 Seth: So let me ask a question about just a point of clarification about thinking about the realness and absoluteness of these chemical. So the fact that hydrogen is what it is and argon is what it is, those two are absolute, distinct and defined by their essential properties which have to be cashed out in a language that at the very least we assume describes a world that is mind independent. Because the name hydrogen is not necessary, it's contingent. The actual physical layout and categorization using the periodic table of the elements is a convention.

The letters and numbers that we use to pick out elements are all conventions. And the only way we can actually describe them is with language. Meaning our understanding is mind dependent. But he's making a strong claim that it's mind independent in some form or fashion. I'm trying to understand what is the absoluteness and the realness piece of the chemical elements.

10:16 Christopher: You're right that it doesn't depend on our practices. Cognition, it's not contingent on those.

10:22 Wes: It's.

10:22 Christopher: It's stance independent would be why I would think it would be absolute and real. And we obviously can't step outside of our perspective and make sure that's right. And I don't think he thinks we can do that. I think that's what you talked about, Seth, is one of the reasons he might take this view of natural kinds is because he thinks that it does a lot of work explanatorily for us to think that these things exist really and absolutely and distinct from our cognition would be what it means for our metaphysics. And it aligns better with scientific realism, which he values.

10:54 Wes: We use language and linguistic conventions are conventions and we are subjects with cognitive faculties. And the only way we can access all this stuff is via those cognitive faculties. But all those dependencies don't change the fact that the world is the way it is independently of those faculties and independently of us. So that when we come to the world and we use these conventions to do what we do, we don't really ultimately have a choice about it. We can't say that actually hydrogen is argon and argon is hydrogen and oops. Actually, I like it better this way. Like we're rearranging furniture in our house. We're completely constrained now. We can use a different word, we can be speaking a different language. There are lots of ways in which conventions might vary. But the substance of what we're talking about, the states of affairs we're describing, we don't have a choice.

11:45 Mark: I was thinking about water specifically, how. Yeah, okay, this is a paradigm case of water is H2O. But what counts as water in a given circumstance, like if it's chlorinated water, is it still water? Yes, because it still serves the purpose that we have for it, even though it's not water. Actually, it's water plus some other stuff. If you ask what is in this glass, is it just water? No, it has some other things in it. So adding chlorine and then, as opposed to the particular South Park episode, talking about a water park called Pi Pi's Splashtown that is so infected with urine, like, let's not even call it water anymore, even though it's still probably mostly water. Like just as much water percentage wise as was in a merely chlorinated water. But the quality of the impurity matters.

12:32 Christopher: Yeah, I mean, there's all sorts of arguments about H2O and the identity there, about whether it needs to be a liquid, because obviously H2O doesn't have to be. And obviously a single molecule of H2O is not necessarily the same as water and doesn't have a temperature, doesn't have at least a single instance of the molecule, doesn't things like that. People make sorts of arguments about whether the identity relation works and stuff like that.

12:52 Wes: We can get into epistemological quandaries in which we are tempted by idealism or transcendental idealism. Some sort of Kantian picture. I saw on some podcasts. There's some neuroscientist or physicist or something who basically wrote a whole book in which he's advocating Kantianism. I haven't heard Kant come up once, but basically he's discovered that we have a user interface to the world. The deep level structure is just code or something like that, or something analogous to code, so. Or information. But okay, great. But even if we get lured into that sort of picture, we have to be able to say there are these correlations between our phenomena and the world of appearances as we experience it in whatever deep level structure there is in things of themselves.

So we might think we're looking at things through a veil of illusion or through some sort of veil. But what's important is that the internal structure of our experience be correlated strongly to the internal structure of something out there. And the idea is here that when we're talking about things like hydrogen and water, we are talking about things that are real mind independently, regardless of Whether if I had different cognitive faculties, they'd look different to me or something like that.

14:08 Seth: What I wanted to get to was, I think it's condition four, which talks about the hierarchicalness. So there's the mind independentness. It's not a social theory. It doesn't rely on social definitions and constructs. Right. It's real, it's absolute, it's differentiated. And then he says it's hierarchical. Because if you look at what defines a chemical element, it's going to be an electron structure, a mass, some characteristics that are actually hierarchically lower. All the chemicals are made up of the same stuff, and that stuff is not a chemical.

14:39 Wes: So atoms and molecules. Right?

14:41 Seth: Atoms and atoms and molecules.

14:42 Wes: Molecules are higher up on the hierarchy or whatever.

14:44 Seth: Yeah. Or lower, whichever you look at it. Or lower.

14:47 Wes: Yeah.

14:47 Seth: Right. And so there's a sense in which it's a derivatively true statement to say that they could not be different and they are the way they are if ultimately they're simply configurations of more basic natural kinds, which are, you know, atoms and particles of some sort. And so my question was, could we imagine that the full set of the periodic table is the set of all possible chemicals that could be created and combined out of atoms and particles in the appropriate way? I mean, I'm sure we discover or develop new things. So that was kind of where I was driving, was can we really only talk about the most fundamental natural kinds, the ones lowest on the hierarchy, as having that necessity and absoluteness and distinctness?

Or does he think, and I just don't know enough about science to know that as far as we go up the chain, as long as we maintain those criteria and we don't get to species kind or biological kinds or whatever, we're still within that realm. So we're entitled to call those things natural kinds. Yeah.

15:50 Christopher: I think he does want to say that molecules do still fit that criteria, even if fundamental particles all the way up to maybe molecules. It felt to me like he was saying all of those could be natural kinds.

16:03 Wes: Protein is right. Isn't that the paradigm for a really, really complex molecule? What's a good protein to talk about? Does anyone there have specific favorite protein?

16:11 Mark: Maybe you're getting into his next section on fixed and variable. Variable natural kinds.

16:15 Christopher: Yeah, maybe more complex wouldn't work anyway.

16:17 Wes: The question is whether these very, very complicated molecules, like proteins, are they natural kind. I mean, yeah, there are lots of good questions we could ask, but where's the cutoff point?

16:26 Christopher: I guess?

16:26 Mark: Right. He introduces this concept of a variable Natural kind that we still want to say is a natural kind, but yet things actually can be different about it between the different instances of it, which seems. So crystals is the example that he gives. I don't know if proteins would work.

16:40 Christopher: So that would be an example of something that'd be a natural kind, but maybe doesn't have an essence.

16:43 Wes: Right. I think he says that there are essential properties, but their causal capacities and powers can be modified. So a copper sulfate, for instance, has certain essential properties that are going to say the. The same or even copper itself. Just. Let's talk about copper. Right. So because it can be stressed and lose its resilience. So as a kind of mass, not down at the atomic level, what is copper composed of?

17:06 Mark: I mean, it's an element. So.

17:08 Wes: So. Right, right. It is an element.

17:10 Seth: Hang on, I've got a page open here where I'm. I'm looking at these things. Yes. Copper symbol Cu, atomic number 29.

17:19 Wes: So embarrassing. I'm thinking of bronze. Right?

17:21 Seth: Oh, yeah, it has.

17:22 Wes: So, so it's. Right, so copper is an element, you know, once it becomes a mass of atoms and it can have a certain amount of resilience, it can be stressed and lose that resilience. So it does have an invariable central properties, I assume associated with the fact that it's an element. But at that level it also has some properties accidentally. It's an odd example because it sounded like we wanted our elements to be non variable natural kinds.

17:48 Seth: So I thought what you were just saying there is that particular piece of copper has accidental properties, but it's accidental to that particular compound thing that it has been stressed or been melted or what have you. But that doesn't change the essential element of the copper in it.

18:06 Wes: This is a complication that came up in our Stewart Umphrey episode because on the one hand when we talk about copper, we're talking about an atom. On the. On the other hand, we're talking about these particulars.

18:16 Seth: Yeah.

18:16 Christopher: Like actual copper in the world versus mass items.

18:20 Wes: Yeah.

18:20 Mark: I don't think this is any different than the water discussion that I was

18:24 Wes: sure makes sense, right? That's true.

18:26 Christopher: Yeah.

18:27 Mark: But this was a nice transition to biological kinds. He starts talking on page 28. If there are any biological kinds, they would have to be variable kinds. For all plants and animals have variable causal powers and capacities. They learn and adapt. Their causal powers wax and wane, so they cannot be assimilated to the natural kinds of chemistry or particle physics, whose powers are determined by their intrinsic natures. Nevertheless, There are many good reasons to believe that the biological species are not natural kinds, even though there would appear to be natural distinctions between them that suggest they are. So they, they fail the categorical distinctness test and they lack distinctive real essences, which I don't know that we've talked about that last point in the list yet.

19:06 Christopher: Oh yeah, the last criterion, which is the chemical elements and compounds have essential properties. Elements are compounds, which would mean what exactly are they?

19:14 Wes: Atomic molecular structures, which would mean they'd

19:16 Christopher: be necessary, I guess metaphysically, he says at the bottom.

19:20 Mark: 29. The lack of distinctive real essences for biological species is not so easy to demonstrate, since we do not have ready access to the intrinsic natures of things and very little access to the intrinsic natures of members of extinct species. However, the overwhelming biological evidence is that the intrinsic natures of animals and plants, their genetic constitutions show exactly the same variability as the animals and plants do themselves. Animals of the same species have similar genetic constitutions, and if you have different species of different ones. But the genetic constitution of organisms are rarely, if ever the same, even within the same species.

19:54 Wes: With species we see things chunked in general quite nicely. Although I'm sure scientists can come up with lots of examples of very closely. Right, so cats and dogs are both carnivora, but we don't see a whole spectrum of in between cat dog type animals. But presumably we can think of that as having happened during the ancestry. Right? So we have to imagine that there's the spectrum that happened over evolutionary time. And even though it happened over time, it's still a problem. So we could think of a hypothetical world in which all those intermediate species exist. So we have just a continuum between cats and dogs. Every form in between exists. How confusing would that be? We might be less prone to think of species as natural.

20:42 Mark: A special kind of super villain of Dr. Moreau type whose goal is, is completely to just get the full variation of cat dogs out there.

20:53 Wes: But what he does say is we can think of species as natural kind clusters, which is why they look often so very close to being natural kinds. And so I think I've already gone through that with gene identity and micro species. So he'll end up saying human beings are members of a natural kind cluster. We think of each of ourselves as sui generis. Right? We have our own unique genetic constitutions. We are a species of one. If we want to think of species as a natural kind or a natural kind of one. But there's significant overlap with other human beings such that we can call it a natural kind cluster.

21:26 Mark: I think you should start ident saying I identify as gen identical or something just to confuse people.

21:32 Wes: I said that that was my big opening.

21:34 Christopher: He did say that he was that.

21:35 Mark: Yeah, exactly.

21:37 Seth: My pronouns are sui and

21:43 Mark: what's your conjugate it? Objective gaze.

21:47 Seth: I don't know. I was like halfway into it I realized we.

21:51 Wes: My pronouns are swee, sweet swim, sweet swim.

21:55 Mark: Ecological, social systems. He gets into that. Like natural kinds analysis become much less interesting. There are no natural kinds that satisfy the strict criteria applicable to chemical kinds. So yeah, if you thought that this was going to have. Again, I'm interested to see what he thinks the philosophical implications are here because a lot of the arguments against social construction in favor of natural kinds, you would want to apply it to even social group dynamics. And he just wants, at least in this text, nothing to do with that at all.

22:26 Christopher: Yeah, none of those are going to meet the criteria.

22:28 Seth: Yeah.

22:28 Christopher: That the well chemicals will meet.

22:30 Wes: Yeah, I don't think that's a very sophisticated account of that. Right. There's lots of social behaviors in animals that reflect the fact that they are part of a natural kind of cluster. It's not just their morphology, it's the behavior and their psychological dispositions. All that stuff goes into it. So if we think that gender for instance involves certain natural psychological dispositions that are secondary sex evolves secondary sexual characteristics associated with sex. In other words, the distinction between the social and the biological is not that cut and dried that we can make these sorts of statements.

That's a whole other argument. So I'd be curious, what if he had something very specific to say about this? I'd be curious to know what it is. But I think the upshot of that section is yes, it's much harder to talk about natural kinds. And again, it's not to say you can't talk about mind independent reality. It doesn't have to be a natural kind to be a classification that's well founded upon a mind independent reality. It's just that the discrete. Right. The things that are carved up mind independently are at the microstructural level and everything built on top of that is fuzzy at the phenomenal level.

At the nominal level it's fuzzy. The dynamical structure of the world, I guess.

23:41 Christopher: I mean this is sort of a rehash of the idea that things have dispositions and behaviors towards interacting with each other. And specifically the different natural kinds have to have distinct ways of behaving. They have different essential properties.

23:56 Mark: I see how this is a Direct outgrowth of Aristotle. But I just thought it was interesting, you know, in our final Aristotle discussion that even though Aristotle's been criticizing these folks who have inert things as their fundamental components and saying that can't be all the explanation because you have to get them moving somehow still his final version is that we have sort of inert things that gain their individual movements because they're striving toward the good or toward the unmoved mover. So it is actually a very much a divine command theory picture of law, which is not what Ellis is arguing for. That ironically, to have a picture of items that are dynamic in themselves is not to go back to an Aristotelian picture. At least, you know, in that respect.

24:44 Wes: Wait, why not?

24:46 Mark: Right? Isn't that. Well, the explanation for why individual substances seem to have dynamic is because there is an external thing, the unmoved mover, that is essentially magnetizing them and pulling them toward. Unless you just feel like, as Dylan said in our last discussion, this actually adds nothing to it. And you should just see them as I think Ellis is here in being inspired by Aristotle, as just each particle has, you know, a built in directionality

25:16 Wes: because the unmoved mover is not an efficient cause. It's not pushing anything around. So it's not like a law of nature in the traditional sense. And right. Things desire to be like the unmoved mover, like the good. It's the good. Essentially. It's a weird sort of explanation that we might think, okay, yeah, things actually are intrinsically dynamic and they're not getting that from the outside. Even if their internal dynamism comes from this desire type of explanation to go towards the unmoved mover.

25:45 Mark: You're right in that the unmoved mover can't choose to make the laws of nature different. It's unmoved. It does not suffer that problem of the other divine command theory versions.

25:56 Wes: But also if we say what the things in the universe are doing, their internal dynamism is by virtue of something which is analogous to desire. The desire is something they have intrinsically, even if it's for something outside of themselves. So it's not like extrinsic contingent laws of nature being imposed on them. They have intrinsic desire for the good and that's why they do what they do. That's a meta, meta level that's in a way trying to explain the dynamic structure of the world in terms of final cause. So you get to even a lower level below the dynamic, below the disposition.

26:32 Mark: Right, right. And Ellis says, specifically, I'm just cutting off final cause that's not going to play a role in any modern take on this, which makes me want us to go find a, you know, a good modern vitalist, you know, to argue against that. But no, no, we like vital causes.

26:47 Wes: All right.

26:47 Mark: Anything else about dynamic structure of the world, though?

26:50 Christopher: I guess it's worth pointing out that at the end of the section, the dynamical structure of the world, the reason he wants to sort of go over this. One of the things he talks about is when we get down to actions, interactions of fundamental particles, we find that these two all seem to belong to natural kinds, whether it's the decay of the neutron. He talks about electromagnetic radiation, all these things being kind of a distinct and special nature and activity of these natural kinds. And he'll say, for all these reasons, it is plausible to suppose that all of the events and processes that can occur in the world are instances of natural kinds.

The dynamic structure of the world thus appears to mirror its substantive structure, for both would seem to be natural kind structures. The reason he wants to characterize that world that way is because he thinks it's kind of pointing to what Wes is saying about the objectivity of facts from the natural kinds all the way up. We can kind of use this structure to combat forms of relativism and anti realism and things like that, which he seems to want to get rid of.

27:51 Seth: Absolutely. You know, I think it's worth just closing out this discussion on this topic to talk about, in a sense, the paradigmatic case for him of both an essential property and the dynamic nature of the world is decay. So you have an individual element that completely of its own accord, just by its essential nature, has a half life of whatever, however long it happens to be. And that indicates that there's a probability that it will do whatever decaying is in a certain period of time. That characteristic is not something that is, at least in no clearly intuitive way, something that's put upon it from elsewhere.

It's clearly an essential characteristic of that specific thing. But also it indicates if that thing just sits there in the absence of any other dynamic interaction or causal interaction with anything else in the world, it will decay, it will become. And so, in a sense, you know, becoming change is an inherent. You know, when he talks about the dynamic nature of the world, what he's saying is that change is inherent, it's imminent, as Wes said earlier, in the world. And so, you know, when you think about just starting all the way back from the oldest cosmologies, that we have, that always have a God that is the God of movement.

Without Eros, then there's no interaction between the other deities that will generate strife. That's appropriate for creating new kinds of gods and things like that. Every cosmology has a character in it that has that job.

29:28 Wes: At this level, we need becoming to generate being. We need dynamism. And partly is because we need to do at the level of nature what we do as individuals, which is develop habits. Electrons go around. When you're talking about dispositions, we're talking about habits. We can make a connection here to the ethics. Electrons go around nuclei by habit. It's a disposition or it's a habit. And that's what allows us to call it an entity. It's a being because it repeats itself. If it didn't repeat itself, it would fall apart. It wouldn't be a being. So dynamism creates the possibility of repetition, which creates the possibility of beings in a world like this.

Now, there's an alternative, right? If you could have a completely static world and say it was all just extension, or it's just one big block of SPAM world, and how would you say what a being is in that world except the one. Right. There's the whole block of spam, we could call that one thing. How could you point to any real mind independent beings? Because I can cut the spam up any way I like, or I can cut the extension up any way I like. You could say points or the tiniest bits of spam. Those are the only real beings because they're no longer divisible.

Indivisibility is a good candidate for finding real mind independent beings in the world. But apart from that, you have to have dynamism. Right. It creates indivisibility at a different level. Right. There's an indivisibility to an atom in the sense that. Or to a molecule in the sense that if you take something away from it and divide it, it loses the properties that it has. It's no longer water if you separate those atoms. So you get these emergent whole is greater than the parts, sets of properties that are in the sense indivisible units, which is to say they're killable, that can be eliminated by division.

This whole idea, and I think it's there in Aristotle, that dynamism is actually fundamental to being. It's not just like Plato. Oh, becoming is just this huge problem. It's actually needed to explain being.

31:24 Christopher: It also.

31:24 Wes: Yeah.

31:25 Christopher: Not to foreshadow too much about next time's discussion. But it could have implications for, you know, philosophy of mind stuff, which he talks about a little bit later on. Why that might seem weird if you thought it was just sort of causally inert substance. And then all of a sudden you have this agent of substance and you're trying to figure out how to reconcile those.

31:42 Mark: I assume you guys will talk more about chapter three next time. But at the very end of chapter three, what you're talking about is making me think of this, the ontology of facts. So early Wittgenstein, the world is made up of facts, facts that it's not individual points. It is the fact that this point is at this location, you know, some.

32:00 Wes: It's logical atoms. Yeah.

32:02 Mark: So he talks about that right at the end of chapter three, properties may be reduced to natural kinds of singular facts or states of affairs. So such singular facts or states of affairs are obviously very fundamental in ontology. Some philosophers have been so impressed by this possibility that they've sought to reduce everything to singular facts or states of affairs. However, it's beyond the scope of this book to investigate these systems.

32:22 Seth: Okay, well, he just didn't want to do a rehash of the history of logical positivism, which isn't even necessary.

32:28 Wes: So I agree, and maybe we talked about this a little bit. But his distinction between categorical and dispositional properties in Chapter 4 is very important because I think the categorical properties are the way in which that the passivist or the mechanist conceives of the world and his essentialism. I think what the most useful thing about this book is the way, again, in which dynamism becomes the fundamental layer and categorical static properties are not. And dynamic properties, dispositional properties, are not simply reducible to categorical properties.

So in other words, we can't just say, oh, you know, here's the way an electron is disposed to behave, and it's got to be reducible to what is the internal spatiotemporal structure of the electron? What does it look like inside? What are its components? Because if we do that, we have to talk about the dispositional properties of its components. We don't get anywhere by just saying, oh, look at this, the electrons made up a little square of quarter electrons or something like that. You can't just lay out these static structures as a way of explaining entities at the layer above it.

You need disposition. And therefore disposition has to be at the ground level if you want to avoid an infinite regress.

33:46 Mark: We already got into a number of points from chapter Three that I think there's some nuance to it, but just the fact that not all predicates are properties. You know, that we of course predicate refers to a thing in speech, whereas property refers to a metaphysical thing. But we still tend to think that, well, there is a corresponding property to every predicate. And then it raises problems like what about not being equal to four, is that a property? A real, you know, negations, absences, weird combinations of properties.

34:19 Christopher: Yeah, like the problem of negative existentials, that whole thing.

34:21 Mark: Right, right. Just that he wants to make a really definite say. No, no, actually most predicates do not correspond to real properties. They are just ways that the world can be cut up. And a lot of times you could even do it according to grue and bleen to flashback to our the Ways of Worldmaking episode where we talked about, you know, something that is green before time t, but is blue after time T. Like that is a way that one could cut up the world. It's not a very natural way, but there's no real. If you don't think that every predicate has a corresponding real property, then you're not worried by something like that. Like, of course we could cut it up in different ways.

34:57 Christopher: It's just.

34:57 Wes: But that doesn't mean that any predicate is true, right? So you can say lots of untrue things about the world. So your predicates are constrained if you want to make true predications. Even if your predicates are not natural kinds, some are true and some are false. Regardless, that would not be the case if there weren't this underlying natural kind structure to reality.

35:21 Seth: I actually think this is one of the stronger parts of the book is the discussion of propositional language where he talks about the whole nature of trying to build a language that could completely and consistently describe the world as states of affairs. Really explicitly pulls out the whole concept of predication on an X that has no intrinsic properties. It speaks to the notion of the biological kinds. This is like X is a horse. Does that mean horseness is a kind? Or you get diverted down all of these back alleys trying to torture the propositional construct and the whole notion.

And by the way, you have to come up with a convincing correspondence theory of truth to underlie it. This, to me was like one of the stronger parts where it's just very clear how that program is misaligned with what he's trying to do. And the criticisms we were talking at the beginning about, like, why does he think we need an essentialist approach to metaphysics, like prying us free from this 20th century legacy of logical positivism would be just one benefit. I mean, if that's all we accomplished, that would be valid, that would be helpful.

36:31 Wes: So this is always why I was so confused in grad school. It was one of the many reasons I never understood the logical positivist and linguistic philosophy model, because I always thought of the world in terms of the way that he's describing. And it just seemed madness to me to focus so much on language and semantics and all that stuff. I couldn't understand how you conclude you're talking about the world by doing that. So I get.

36:57 Christopher: He captures some of Wesson's intuitions.

36:59 Wes: Of Wesson's.

37:00 Christopher: Wesson. Wesson's intuition.

37:03 Wes: He captures the Wesson of my. It's the news.

37:09 Christopher: Exactly.

37:10 Wes: Essentialism. Yeah, set sensualism.

37:13 Mark: I want to read the horse section because I really like this. Is there, for example, a property of being a horse? This is bottom of 45. Most philosophers, perhaps even most essentialists, would answer yes, for certainly there are animals that are horses. And the predicate is a horse is true of this or that animal, although not of other animals. But it does not follow that there is a complex property, namely that of being a horse, which all and only horses have. One cannot legitimately infer the existence of a property of being a horse from the applicability of a predicate is a horse.

One does, it is true, have independent reasons for believing in the existence of horses. Their existence is not inferred just from the applicability of the predicate is a horse. But there seems to be a crossing of conceptual boundaries here. My worry is not about the reality of horses, but about the conceptualization of horses as instances of complex properties. In general, properties are inherent in things, but their instances are not the things themselves. If there is a property of being a horse, then its instances are the things that are supposed to have this property, namely the horses themselves.

If there is such a property, then it is, to say the very least, a very peculiar property.

38:15 Wes: Yeah, and likewise red. Right, likewise. Equally a secondary quality like red. He's going to want to say the same thing. And I mean, this gets us into. And this is why I want to do an episode on emergence. And lurking behind all of this is this distinction between different layers of reality, different explanatory layers that have some sort of relation to them. Not simple reducibility, but are macro level phenomena and the ways we classify them according to what Locke called nominal. This is what Ellis is calling Predicates. But, yeah, nominal essences are related to this underlying structure.

It sounds like what Ellis is saying is that if we want to talk about real properties, we are probably talking about physics and chemistry. Real properties, mind independent properties out there in the world. I doubt he would say much of what we're doing at our macro level captures that. So definitely not like these very complex ideas like Horse Locke would just say, this is. Yeah, this is just an idea with a nominal essence, and it doesn't mean it can't be true or not true. It's not some simple property in nature that we could just specify.

39:29 Mark: Horseness I know you're contrasting this with positivism. Carnap was a positivist. Right.

39:35 Christopher: Carnap's a little weird, though. Like, I guess I don't want to bring in a bunch of other reading, but from what I understand, he didn't quite align with the strictness of no participation in metaphysics. And he thought that we could have different metaphysics that we might try out and be a bit pragmatic about it.

39:49 Mark: Right. So his. His Aufbau project that we talked about explicitly and then Chalmers ran with it, says that there are basic facts that then all the rest of the facts are built on or constructed out of. And it seems like there is something that is very much compatible with Ellis's approach. Right. That when we get to the higher levels, it might be really complicated and very hard for us to lay out. So if we really want to say what is there in the world? What is our ontology then focusing on these intrinsic. Right. These dynamic. We can't say they're particles and we can't say that they are merely processes because they're sort of. I think he's trying to break down the distinction between a process ontology and an object ontology. They are processing objects that have structures and have causal dispositions and all this kind of stuff.

40:41 Seth: Wow, that's a good point. I didn't even think about that. This kind of blows that out of the water a little bit.

40:45 Christopher: Yeah. I thought of Whitehead versus Yeah. Where he's doing the. More like there are only events and then there's the substance ontology. And he's. Ellis does seem to be saying substances are these relational dispositions and things like this behavior. So it's like this middle ground almost. It's kind of hard to.

41:00 Mark: So there is something. But it's a sui generis kind of thing, is a monism of basic type that then everything else is built on and in a way that it would be the point of science insofar as you could deal with complex system to enumerate. So, you know, if Carnap is coming from logical positivism and he had some project that. Like that, and Ellis is dead set against logical positive and he has a project like that. Well, that's interesting to me.

41:24 Seth: Yeah, Well, I think actually. So now you both, the two of you, Chris and Mark, have put me on this idea. There is a point in his book, in the book, I don't know if it's later than what we read or if it's in somewhere in what we've read for this today, where he talks about the world conceived of as events. It's obviously related to the categorical properties, the dispositional properties. And then I can't remember. There's a third category of things. I can't remember what it is. But anyway, the point being that the essentialist needs to also be open to the idea that what's essential is that a kind isn't necessarily a thing, that the properties might be essential.

And then the event of properties X, Y and z coming together is what we then conceive of as an atom or as a. A proton or an electron or whatever. And that really there are no things, especially if you believe, you know, if we're getting mystical about mass and energy, that really it's simply just energy and mass activities that are governed by properties. And that's really all that the universe is. That's bizarre.

42:36 Wes: Yeah. These dispositional properties. He's going to argue in the section you're talking about, Seth, on categorical versus dispositional realism. Categorical realism is conceiving of things in terms of static things and structure and somehow explaining disposition and in a way analogous to the way we try to explain consciousness by appealing to matter. And he wants to reverse that in a way. And again, this is kind of analogous to panpsychism, but let's put dynamism right at the bottom. And he has some good arguments for that. So the fundament entities in nature turn out to be causal powers, capacities, propensities, potentiality, Aristotle, they're like.

43:20 Seth: Yeah.

43:20 Christopher: Ontologically primary to the. To the stuff.

43:23 Wes: Yeah. So power, energy. I don't know how else you would put it, but yeah, that seems certainly to be something akin to a process ontology.

43:31 Mark: Let's just say vibes.

43:33 Wes: Yeah. Yeah. I identify as a. An electron.

43:44 Seth: Zing.

43:44 Wes: Pretty close to.

43:45 Seth: All right.

43:46 Wes: That's my work.

43:47 Mark: That's a nice way to end. I had just a comment I wanted to make before Since I'm not going to be on the second part, I feel like we might have completed. There should be a volume that is printed for deprogramming your objectivist friend. So somebody that really likes Ayn Rand will give him some Nietzsche, let him get a more subtle take on ethics, get him some Nozick. For a more sophisticated take on the libertarianism, get him some. Some Scruton insofar as she has something to say about art. Scruton is going to be your great. Well, Ellis will fill the metaphysical portion.

Right. The literal Objectivism. The world is objectively there. Well, it is, but more on the base level that below any human concerns. And the relation to human concerns is a complex one. I think this is a great thing you could. You could foist on your friend who might be otherwise listening to the Leonard Peikoff podcast or whatever.

44:41 Seth: True.

44:41 Christopher: They probably really like the Essentialist name. So they'd probably be like, sure.

44:46 Mark: All right, so thanks for bringing this to our attention, Wes. Thanks, everybody, for listening. Thanks for showing up, Chris.

44:51 Wes: We'll.

44:51 Mark: We'll see you back on the next one.

44:53 Christopher: Thanks for having me.

44:54 Seth: Thanks, Chris.

44:55 Mark: Yeah, of course.

44:56 Wes: Thanks, Chris.

44:56 Christopher: Thank you, guys.

44:58 Mark: Let us know what else you. You want us to cover. Email us pl. Partialexaminedlife.com after. Okay, well, you know what we're doing next time we're doing more Ellis. We have some. Some Taoism. We are going to do some trans stuff within the next couple of months.

45:13 Wes: Plotinus, why are you skipping Plotinus?

45:15 Mark: Well, we haven't. We haven't actually put him back on the schedule, but yes, Plotinus.

45:19 Wes: Oh, we haven't. Oh, sorry. That's my fault. All right, the one. Let's get back to the one. Screw all these little tiny LS2 bumps. So.

45:28 Mark: So long, everybody. Good night.

45:29 Wes: Good night.

45:30 Seth: Good night.