Ep. 340: Brian Ellis on the Implications of Essentialism (Part Two)

0:07 Wes: Okay. Welcome to part two of our discussion of Brian Ellis's 2002 book, the Philosophy of A Guide to the New Essentialism. We left off discussing necessity and possibility, and I think we could finish up that discussion and then touch on the problems of idealization and then the ontological problem, if we want to wrap that up before we get into implications. So the idea is that essentialism helps us explain the necessity of the laws of nature by way of natural kinds and essential properties. It's just by the nature of things that because they are that way, that the laws have to be what they are.

And it leads to some very counterintuitive ideas. Like for instance, that there's the strong necessity in the sense that a law of nature, if it's true, and if it's a law in this world, it must be true in all possible worlds. Am I characterizing that right? And if I am, are people satisfied with that or does that seem fishy?

1:11 Dylan: The only qualification you have to make is for all possible worlds that are like our world.

1:16 Wes: Yes, we could imagine another world with a different ontology, including different kinds of matter, with different natures, different dispositions and causal powers.

1:25 Christopher: Let me just make sure that we're saying the right thing, just because I think I get what you're saying. But so just metaphysical necessity in this Sense is the universe is set up with natural kind structure. And all possible worlds would have this structure.

1:39 Dylan: Let's just be careful. We can still always use our imagination to imagine a world that doesn't exist. That's all I'm saying. And so the constraint here is that the possible world move is one where we imagine all the entities in this world are the same as the ones in our world, but they happen to act in a different way. Water is not water and stuff like that.

2:01 Wes: The way he puts it on page 110 is anything that is true of anything in virtue of its essential nature must be true of it in all worlds in which it exists.

2:11 Dylan: In which. Which it exists.

2:12 Wes: This is the qualification that Dylan is alerting. Alerting us.

2:15 Christopher: If water exists, it's h. Yeah, I see. The microstructure will always be the same.

2:19 Wes: Yeah, absolutely.

2:19 Dylan: But that doesn't keep us from imagining a world in which there are different laws or not. It's just that that world doesn't exist.

2:25 Wes: To have the different laws, we would have to have different substances, different dispositional properties, different natures, different natural kinds.

2:32 Christopher: It couldn't serve as a counterfactual or anything like that. My thought is that he's saying, just like we talked about how imagination is not going to be a test of

2:40 Dylan: possibility, a reliable test, but it's not the only test. Right, sure.

2:44 Christopher: Just the capacity to imagine.

2:46 Dylan: Yeah, absolutely, yes. And so it ends up being a constraint. So imagination isn't the denominator out of which we extract. There are more constraints on it than just our ability to imagine it.

2:58 Wes: So if we want to imagine a different possible world with different laws, we have to start from the ground up. We can't just say, oh, here are the things, they are what they are independent of what they do, independent of what the laws are, and we can make whatever rules for them we like. We can make electrons live by whatever rules we like in our imagination. No, they're not electrons. If they don't have certain dispositional properties, they don't live by certain rules. So if we do want to do this imagination thing, we have to start at the microstructural level.

We have to start from the ground up. It does run against the intuitions of, I think, a lot of philosophers to say that there's this sort of strict kind of natural necessity. I haven't had time to think of any objections to this. And I wonder what the literature is on this and what fights people are having about it. Because I get the sense that probably giving up. This idea of logical necessity as involving what can be imagined at the macro level is probably, probably not something that philosophers are keen on doing.

3:59 Dylan: You're not giving it up, you're just constraining it more. You're saying that logical necessity is not the primary gatekeeper for thinking about the ontology of the world.

4:09 Wes: Well, you're fatally constraining it because of the epistemic problem. So epistemically anything is possible epistemically. If we don't know that it's not possible, if we don't know the microstructure of the world then yeah, it's possible. We can imagine that the statue sprouts wings and flies away, but we can't ever know what it's possible to imagine is really possible. Right. Because we're always trying to figure out the real natures of things and dig down into the microstructure of the world. And that's a never ending task. So this is something he says is a real problem for essentialism.

4:46 Christopher: I think it's even worth maybe reading it. 114 and it's the footnote and it says there is a serious problem here for essentialists. For real possibility would appear to be unknowable. There is no problem about knowing what is epistemically possible for all we know. But how could we go from there to find out what is really possible? Further research may reveal that what we thought was possible is really impossible. Continuing on. But it would seem that no amount of research short of practical demonstration can show that what is epistemically possible is also really possible. This is the essentialist problem of knowledge.

5:14 Wes: And he gets into that more in chapter seven in the philosophical implication section.

5:19 Dylan: Yeah, maybe you guys can help me with this a little bit because I don't completely get why this is a problem. Because it just seems to me that it ends up being. You have to go out in the world and find out and you end up revising in some cases your ontology. What the things are in the world prove out to be right based upon how you observe how the world works.

5:42 Christopher: Yeah, but you're obviously not going to be able to step outside of whatever scientific program you have and check and see if you're done and you've uncovered and.

5:48 Dylan: Well, of course not. But this kind of thing gets my hackles up. Right? Because philosophers who have this kind of objection. It makes me feel like you just don't understand. The fact is that we don't know everything there is to know about the world. And you're not going to just get your head out of your ass.

6:04 Wes: I mean, obviously, Ellis doesn't have his head as us on this issue. The problem is it's really a problem about saving the idea of logical possibility, which has been philosophically important as a thinking tool, and grounds the project of logical analysis, which he will say has to change. So unfortunately, it's not, of course, that analytic philosophers don't know that all these things have to be discovered. It's just that they have this flawed idea of the distinction, on Ellis's view, the distinction between logical possibility and logical necessity and physical necessity.

And that has informed the way they approach philosophy, doing these conceptual analyses and semantic analyses, when that's not workable. In a way, Dylan, I'm sympathetic that it gets your hackles up, because it's part of the shock that I experienced going to the University of Texas and thinking, why are these people talking about language? They should be talking about reality. What is. What is just analyzing language going to actually tell you? It's bizarre, but it's taken me many years to formulate to understand in a deeper way how one objects to that approach.

And Ellis give some more specific reasons for objecting to that kind of approach.

7:16 Dylan: Yeah, there's a lot of pejorative ways in which people, scientists in particular, might criticize something like postmodernism, for instance, or whatever, or certain parts of language philosophy where you say, well, gravity is just another way of speaking about the world, just like any number of other logical possibilities. And the response would be something like, well, okay, if that's true, why don't you just go throw yourself out the window and just see how that goes for you. And that's a kind of pejorative way to put this point, right? Is that, yes, you can imagine, well, if I jump out the window, it might be the case that gravity stops working or that I end up being the kind of entity that can fly away and fly through the window and, you know, not go crash into the ground.

But the fact that you're not going to go jump out the window to test that out is some indication that you're not even thinking about the world that way. You're not even actually in the way in which you interact with the world. You're being disingenuous when you say that it's just language. That's a version of the way in which my hackles get up about it. It's part of what Ellis is pointing out, I think, is that even putting aside the essentialism part, the notion of objective Facts that they exist in some status. And I think the way he gets to thinking about them makes them more powerful is something that we already do.

And that this notion that you have this carte blanche about the possible worlds,

8:42 Wes: imagination is important in counterfactual conditioning.

8:45 Dylan: Sure.

8:46 Wes: And reasoning. So what if this were the case, then what would happen? So thought experiments and all that.

8:51 Dylan: Absolutely. It happens all the time.

8:52 Wes: Philosophers don't like modal talk to be basic in the same way that they don't want dispositions to be basic, they want categorical properties to be basic. They don't want potentiality to be basic, they want actuality to be basic. So I kind of misspoke earlier talking about Aristotle, because Aristotle wants actuality to be basic, true, in a certain way. So at 115, Ellis gets into the way in which philosophers want to reduce modal properties to non modal properties and say they supervene on them. They think there's something fishy talking about necessary, impossible, and everything that exists is just what is what exists.

So you get these kind of analytic pictures of the world just consisting of all the facts that there are. And I don't want to talk about what might be, what will be, what could be, what necessarily will be. That seems a little bit spooky. So that's one motivation for doing what Lewis does, which is to say, well, okay, then all the possible worlds do exist. An even spookier solution, in Ellis's opinion. In my opinion as well, a silly solution. So it's not driven by the same sorts of things that continental philosophers are driven by. It's not that type of silliness in a way.

It's a hyper scientific kind of silliness, wanting to talk about existence solely in terms of what exists and exists as a property, as we're used to experiencing it on, on the macro level and not as a, hey, this thing is disposed to behave in this way necessarily. Disposition necessity. These things are hard to explain purely in terms of what exists right here and now.

10:29 Dylan: Back to that being and becoming thing, the notion that things that exist can't have their dispositions, what they potentially can do as part of their essence.

10:38 Christopher: Yeah, it feels like a lot of analytic philosophy just kind of went with Plato instead of Aristotle. They were like this transient stuff isn't legit, it's not real. They just felt uncomfortable talking about those things because they can kind of almost grasp, like a static object with no intrinsic. I feel like they feel more comfortable with that. Almost like it's less anxiety producing.

10:59 Dylan: Yeah, it does make things easier. It's a little bit like Instead of having 25 equations and 25 unknowns, you have two equations and two unknowns. Talking about the way Ellis characterizes that idealization works, right. Is that, yes, it's a lot easier if you have a frictionless surface. Doing the calculation is a lot easier if you throw a ball through the air and try to calculate where it goes and you ignore the air and the wind and the size of the ball. Yes, it gets a lot easier.

11:25 Wes: Let's say how essentialism explains that. Because for Ellis, idealization isn't simplification, it's a reflection of the dispositional nature of things. So we say, for instance, a human might want to say, or a conventionalist might want to say, well, the world isn't that simple as your idealized equation or theory suggests. Things never actually work quite that way in the real world. You've just simplified. And Ellis would say, no, the idealizations reflect what the thing is disposed to do in the absence of all the other interfering contextual things that are going on, all the other causal influences. And it's important to know that even if we never see it, we got to know that that's what science is. We got to know how it's disposed to behave, even if we never see it behave exactly in that way.

12:07 Dylan: And honestly, going down that thought, take just the projectile. Right. Is you'd say that it has the intrinsic disposition to travel in this particular way, but it also will be able to be disturbed from that travel by other things. That's part of its disposition. Right. So it ends up being multi layered in that respect.

12:28 Seth: Yeah. And that's why he sort of points out the question for essentialists to determine, like what is the ontological status of dispositional properties? So he sort of highlights that that's an issue, but he doesn't come down fully on one side or another. I had the same. It's actually an interesting question to me. So one of my challenges with possible world semantics was the idea that there's a possible world that is identical to ours in every respect, except for this one blade of grass in Argentina is a millimeter bent. One direction versus the one in our world.

Right. That when you start talking about possible worlds, if you're talking about true possibility, you're proliferating. It becomes this completely unwieldy and ungainly thing. So the challenge for the essentialist, in talking about categorically essential properties, which atomic numbers, spin, half life, those sorts of things which we know clearly feel essential to the object, to the thing themselves and whatever. And then dispositional properties like dissolves in water, those feel tight and close where you want to be able to say, okay, that's the way it would react in the presence of some specific thing.

But like you said, Dylan, the disposition to be disturbed in a dispositional behavior itself, like, it has the disposition to continue moving once force is applied, and it will continue moving in the absence of anything impeding it, like friction. But it also has the disposition to be disturbed by any other thing in the universe that seems like it's too far to go. Do you know what I mean? Like, there's a sense in which we want to think about maybe bringing in Lakatos's. Was it Lakatos who had the idea of the. The core set of beliefs and that penumbra that there's essential properties, dispositional properties, that are tied specifically to other types of things that have essential properties that it interacts with.

And then this universe of, well, if you burned it, if it gets exposed to heat or a rock gets thrown at it or whatever, does somehow fall

14:33 Dylan: on the outside, makes me want to pursue Ellis's sort of really microscopic point of view. So if I think about inertia for a minute, that ends up being a characteristic of things that admit of gravity. So things that have mass tend to stay in motion until something else acts upon it. We end up parsing out the world into things that get affected by certain kinds of forces. We call them the fundamental forces in physics. But those really end up being things that have dispositions to act on something, and the only things that they can act on are things that have the ability to receive that action.

So things that admit of interacting by the electromagnetic force. In a physics class, you'd say if it can interact by the electromagnetic force, then it will, and it will have these kinds of behaviors. But that's the same as saying it has the disposition to receive electromagnetic interactions and has the disposition to generate them. But the same thing's true for the strong force that binds quarks together to form protons and neutrons and nuclei. It's the same thing that applies to the weak force, Same thing that applies to the gravitational force.

In the case of gravitational force, it turns out anything that has energy admits of gravitational force. But you're still parsing up the world in terms of things that have the disposition to generate and receive those kinds of interactions.

15:57 Seth: And in an important way, I was trying to get at, again, getting back to Ellis's, what are the things essentialists have to do. They have the hierarchical. They have different properties. They're going to have the challenge of trying to figure out what a dispositional property is. But what you point out, Dylan, is that the dispositional properties, if we're thinking about them analogously to possibilities, they're still very intimately tied to things and the essential properties of things. So there's almost a qualifier. X has these categorically essential properties.

X has the dispositional property to act in this way in the presence of Y. And the reason that it acts in that way in the presence of Y is because Y has categorical properties. As opposed to saying, I can imagine a possibility where the statue gets up and walks, or something like that. No, the language of dispositional properties ultimately relies upon essential properties. And I think that's one of the strengths of this account.

17:01 Wes: Shall we turn to some of the philosophical implications in chapter seven? I mean, I think we've touched on them quite a bit.

17:07 Christopher: It might be worth reading a little bit from the. Is metaphysical necessity too strong?

17:12 Wes: Yeah. Okay, so that's the end of chapter six.

17:15 Christopher: I felt like it was a section that had kind of captured some of my thinking. That's one of the things that I thought all the way through was why exactly does it need to be metaphysically necessary? And what work does that do? Which, of course, we'll talk about in a sec. But I think it's worth reading maybe his sort of pseudo response to that which starts at the bottom of 121. Of course, the world might not be the kind of world we think it is, but the speculation trades on uncertainty and is therefore of an epistemic nature. Of course, it is epistemically possible that the world is a very different kind of world from the kind we think it is.

There might well be, for all we know, all sorts of monsters lurking in the dark or in the future yet to be discovered, which violates these laws. In which case we may have to conclude the world is truly and perhaps necessarily very different from the way we think it is. But epistemic possibility is not real possibility, and ignorance is not a source of knowledge. If you want to know what kind of world we actually live in. Therefore, what is true of all worlds of the same natural kind as ours, you have to rely on the best theories available to you.

That reminds me of what you were saying, Dylan, about jumping out the window. Essentially, it's got that same sort of vibe to it.

18:14 Dylan: I guess it's in line with people like Lakatos and maybe even something like Kuhn's also in terms of the progression of the ways in which we think about the world scientifically getting revised over time. And there's a lot of details to sort out that you have a dominant program, so you have a paradigm, and it is in asking a combination of epistemically possible questions. I guess I like epistemically possible questions better than logically possible because it ends up being constrained. Right. You constrain it to the things that you know, and that ends up being sort of what a research program is, articulating the epistemically possible, often to try to solve problems, especially if you're thinking about engineering problems, but maybe also problems in your understanding.

You investigate the epistemically possible in order to rule things out. And sometimes when you do that, you end up having to alter what is epistemically possible. Like the observations about electricity and magnetism were this way in the 19th century. Thermodynamics, radiation and the proliferation of particles, the development of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is just a gigantic example of a research program and a development of a new theory that led to new entities in the world as a result of exploring epistemic possibility and coming up with answers that didn't agree with what were part of your current paradigm.

19:42 Christopher: Yeah, so it sounds a lot like he's saying science may uncover that we have different natural kinds than we thought or things that were natural kinds, but whatever they are, they're still metaphysically necessary. The kinds.

19:53 Wes: Exactly. So this is the important point in this section, he starts out, While many philosophers may be sympathetic to the idea that the laws of nature are in some sense necessary and imminent in the world, they are likely to balk at the claim that they are metaphysically necessary. This seems far too strong, for it implies that the laws are true in all possible worlds, just as formal logical and analytic propositions are. How can the essentialists be in a position to assert such a thing? They may say, for example, that it is metaphysically necessary that every causal process is intrinsically conservative of energy and other universally conserved quantities.

Why? Because they would say it would not be a causal process of the global kind to which all events and processes occurring in this world belong, if it were not conservative of these quantities. But how do we know what kind of world we live in? What kinds of objects, events, or structures are possible in our kind of world? The fact is, we don't know. So, Chris, I mean, the point you're making is very important. And this kind of goes back to Aristotle's law of non Contradiction chapter. If we want to say there's a mind independent reality that we can make assertions about, something has to be a natural kind.

Something has to have an essential property. It may not turn out to be species, as Aristotle thought. We may have an incomplete theory or even a wrong or at least partially wrong theory, but we're always operating under that assumption that there is a nature to the thing. And unless there is a nature, unless there are essential properties, unless they're true in all possible worlds, then there is no mind independent reality. So I think that's an important point here in chapter seven. He'll say this necessity problem, you know, essentialism overcomes, that overcomes the idealization problem which Humeans have trouble dealing with.

And then he's going to want to defend essentialism as a kind of metaphysical view that we can only defend by appealing to its coherence, its simplicity, its usefulness. And I think that's what he kind of does for the rest of chapter seven. He's going to tell us about how it's going to improve our ability to philosophize. And that begins with challenging the project of logical analysis that's dominated analytic philosophy. It's 126. We talked a little bit about this dislike of modal language and the desperate attempt to say that there's all these real possible worlds.

22:11 Dylan: He has a nice summary about this, and the very end, maybe you just were characterizing it, Wes, but I really like the paragraph, the last paragraph in that section 9, 126. Most of these changes are required in order to accommodate the idea that the world consists not of essentially passive things, but of intrinsically active ones. One cannot, for example, think of a property as just a set of objects in some domain or other, as logicians in the Fregean tradition do, as though the property has no powers, but is just the way of classifying the objects in this domain.

If the causal powers of things are real properties, and I just want to comment, that phrase is a distillation of what the essentialist position is, that the causal powers of things are real properties, then things must be disposed to behave in certain ways in virtue of having those properties. The bearers of these properties must therefore stand in the relation of potential primary participant in a certain natural kind of process, a causal process. Such facts as these must somehow gain recognition in our formal semantics and logical analysis.

23:14 Seth: Yeah, I feel like this is kind of underplayed a little bit in the book. But he goes on, Dylan, from where you're reading, to talk about the whole notion of the correspondence theory of truth and the way in which the correspondence theory of truth relies on the concept of extensionality. All A's are B, you know, this notion of predication, which in turn requires, he claims, a human notion of necessity. And he says if we break that down, if we get rid of the Humean notion of necessity, if we basically say that extensionality and the use of modal semantics disappears, you throw away, I'm going to call it, it's logical, but it's linguistic in some sense too.

The logically ideal language that we use to represent a world of facts. If the world is not a world of facts and we can't use that logical language of extensionality to describe those facts, then either we have to reconceive of a correspondence theory of truth and our use of it, our approach to it, or we have to do away with it at all. This is like pretty earth shaking. This is not a minor thing. This is basically saying the philosophical program of the 20th century, at least in the Anglo American tradition, needs to be completely thrown away at this point.

We've climbed the ladder and now it's time to get rid of it. Right, Throw it away. It's significant. It's not an implication, you know, philosophical implication, it's a consequence. It's a significant consequence.

24:34 Dylan: Yeah.

24:34 Christopher: It does sort of feel like he's saying that the analytic program has been kind of handicapping itself by constraining the way it examines the world by examining our language and basically saying something like, look, how are we going to account for modality? Oh, we can use this possible world semantics. So what does this possible world semantics mean about our ontology? Are there real worlds? And he's saying, no, no, no, you guys are starting from the wrong point. We can have imminent modality in our understanding of the world right from the get go. I think he says on page 130 he talks about the Humean program as being nominalistic and imagining the world as these separate individuals without the intrinsic activity. And so there's some confusion about how we get modality. But his picture gives us modality at bottom.

25:16 Wes: Yeah, so modal statements must be basic. We can't just reduce everything to correspondence, to non modal truths. And we need this kind of rich ontology that includes dispositions and natural kinds

25:29 Seth: and well, that's interesting too. He's basically saying the whole semantics of saying there is an X, all X is P of X. Right. X has the property P. That's a visual and linguistic representation of the concept of inactive substance. That has things applied to it, and that's wrong. That's not the way the world is. Okay, great. And he uses chemistry as a paradigmatic counterexample to that. And yet mathematics uses that same structure and uses it successfully. You can have variables in mathematics. You don't have variables. Right. In chemistry, at least not in the same way.

You wouldn't do it the same way because chemical blocks. And so this takes us back to this program, the essentialist program of building a hierarchical structure that gets to a higher order entity or grouping that we can meaningfully put some explanatory juice on, so to speak. And it's really interesting. I mean, I feel like I'm sold on chemistry and biology, or at least insofar as biology is governed by chemistry. And I guess I'm sold on physics, insofar as physics and chemistry combine to impact biology.

26:40 Dylan: You're making a segue sort of en masse into the last two chapters, the one that we're on right now and the last one. Basically, as you go up in levels of hierarchy and sophistication, it seems to be clear that the things that we are using to categorize the world cease being natural kinds.

26:57 Wes: But they are sometimes natural kind clusters, right? Like species. So he gave us that way of imagining a species as a cluster of gene identical subspecies or microspecies, which probably will just be individuals. Every individual is a microspecies of one. And so reasoning about species will typically look like natural kind reasoning. Nature has done a good job of paring away all the intermediate cases in a lot of cases. So we're not seeing a whole spectrum of animals between dog and cat. If we did, it'll be an interesting world. And that's important to think about for the purposes of evaluating whether a species is a natural kind.

So as we encounter them in the world, they are very natural kind like. And in any case, they are grounded at another level on natural kinds, right? On particles and natural kind processes and all of that. So we expect all the regularities at the phenomenal level. Even if the boundaries are fuzzier, and even if the things that we're analyzing are not natural kinds, they're still susceptible to scientific analysis because they're constructed out of natural kind Legos fuzzier, but still regular and still real. And they derive their mind independent reality right from that lower level.

So it's not just a matter of our cognitive interests that we distinguish dogs and cats. It's not just relative to our conceptual scheme and blah, blah, blah, it's grounded in reality.

28:22 Dylan: Yeah, but you end up being able to parse out some of these things too. It seems to me you're going to be able to talk about mind independent pieces and what pieces are in fact affected by the way in which you're perceiving the world. This, to me, ends up being the way in which you analyze something like the bent stick in the river. Is the stick really bent or does it just look like it's bent? I mean, observational bias ends up becoming a component of thinking about this, because you can dissect your observations in terms of components that include your observational stance and what parts of the way in which the mind independent part of the world are interacting with the mind dependent part of the world.

Color is an example, or you have both. The fact of different ways of lighting affect the way in which the light that gets reflected off of a surface ends up showing up to you. And then you have your own faculties, your own potentialities that affect the way in which that gets interpreted for you in your own circumstance. As I said earlier, he goes this far as to say that this way of thinking about the world in terms of inherent dispositions, it's not the same as Aristotle's, but it leads you to understanding the world as richer, but also allows you to think more richly about the world and even have better answers to these problems of where the boundaries are between the way in which our dispositions are affecting our own perceptions of the world.

29:50 Wes: Well, Dylan, you're getting into the problem of emergence, which is an enormous complication for this whole account that he doesn't get into any detail about. And I'm hoping we'll do an episode eventually. And one form of emergence we can call epistemological emergence, which is this whole secondary qualities thing that we get from Galileo and Locke, the idea that color is not in the things themselves, but it's grounded in their microstructure, in their primary qualities. Right? In just this micro layer that Ellis is talking about. But the rest of it is in our heads essentially, it's just the way we are constituted to react to that which is not itself a completely unproblematic account.

And then the other accounts of emergence that we might call ontological, where we say, yes, water really does have this property of being clear or whatever phenomenal properties we want to talk about, it's not just in our heads, but it is emergent upon this micro level. So either way, whether it's one or the other or some mix of those two, the fact that we have these different layers of explanation from the macro level all the way down to the micro level is a big complication, especially because they're not reducible. Right. We can't say everything we want to say about biology by simply talking about the locations of particles or what particles are doing.

We would miss out on a lot if we did that. And we see this problem. This is really the upshot of this last chapter, which is that we're often talking about all this macro level stuff and we're trying to understand it at this one layer of reality. And then it gets even worse. If you add in psychology and sociology and economics and the social sciences, then it gets even fuzzier, which is not to say that it isn't ultimately grounded. Right. Little particles doing their thing and therefore not scientifically analyzable. It is to some extent, but to what extent?

How does that work? It's very murky.

31:41 Dylan: Well, I got thinking about Tomasello a lot when I was reading through this section. In the way in which our agencies of different levels of organisms are emergent phenomena based upon their dispositions, the idea that the level of social interactions that human beings have and the generation of the kinds of societies that human beings have are emergent phenomena based upon the dispositions that human beings have in their cognitive and agency capabilities. Which is the direction that Tomasello ends up going as an account of agency and account of human or animal hierarchy, but in this sort of essential realm is you'd end up doing something like saying, well, I'm going to do some theorizing about how societies work.

I might have something like economics or I might have sociology, and I'm going to engage in the kind of thinking that attributes powers and dispositions to different kinds of entities. But those are going to be, as Wes pointed out, just fuzzier things. In fact, they're not going to be natural kinds, and we're going to have to be very conscious of that fact. They're not going to be electrons and atoms anymore. They won't have essential natures.

32:50 Wes: But he will want to say there is such a thing as a human nature. And this is something that's been downplayed by social scientists and of course, by the humanities as well, treating everything as either a social construction or historical construction, which he associates with Marx. Whereas there are the many qualities of human beings that are determined. So many psychological and social qualities of human beings are the products of biological evolution, and they're relatively universal. And it's important to understand that you can't understand human beings without that.

And that extends even to natural differences between men and women, which are not just purely physiological, as social constructionists would have it, but also psychological and determined by evolution. He doesn't want to go pure evolutionary psych, bro, on us. And of course that doesn't have such a great reputation, but he's trying to modestly encourage us to not simply reject all that stuff out of hand. And I think he's right about that.

33:55 Christopher: One of the other big things that he thinks his picture of metaphysics does is it gets rid of the problem of induction. So it takes care of Hume's theory about inductive reasoning or whatever, which ties back to, I think, Hume's whole unnecessary connections thing. And actually, I think there's a better passage in chapter six that kind of gets to how his picture is on page 105. He kind of talks about Hume's disposition, that he kind of sees himself as a passive observer, watching billiard balls kind of go back and forth and how we experience the reality.

As a passive observer, you can see why he may have come to the conclusions that all events seem, quote, loose and separate. What reason do we have for believing one motion or change give rise to another? Then he goes on to say, quote, but now think of yourself as an active participant in the world, digging in the garden, starting the motor mower, being buffeted by the wind, getting wet in the rain, chopping down a tree, being hit by a falling branch, wheeling a barrow, and so on. Then events no longer seem loose and separate. On the contrary, one is constantly causing things to happen and being affected by them, either in reaction or independently, and so on and so on.

And I think that it does kind of situate his view really well, as opposed to Hume's, you know, us understanding that we're very clearly not causally inert and we're constantly involved in the activities and potentialities of the world. So he thinks his picture is going to say that there is a sort of natural kind structure to the world, that we cannot worry about the problem of induction because we know that these things have necessary connections. All we need to do is figure out what the natural kinds are. And so he thinks that gets rid of the problem.

35:27 Seth: I'm glad you brought that up, Chris. I have that same passage noted. That was the move the phenomenologists took, too, right? There's no view from nowhere. And he's basically saying the human position requires you to be the disinterested Cartesian ego, and that's just not the way we are. And interestingly the position he ascribes to, quote unquote, postmodernism of radical social construction, or radical relativism, whatever you want to call it, also has a similar criticism of the view from nowhere that we're always situated. And so it seems to me there's a way in which the concept of situationism, if you will, and essentialism could work very well hand in hand.

Like you could actually do a forensic, or call it a Foucaultian genealogy of the situatedness that has concepts, not just of analysis of the power dynamics that are inherent in the social, the family, whatever, but also, let's call them the causal dynamics that are inherent in the biology and the chemistry and the so forth. And you could blend those two things together to try to sketch out the limits that he points at, which is the limits of saying everything is constructed versus the limits of saying everything's determined. There is some middle ground, but it requires respectfully and intelligently and analytically looking at both sides in conjunction.

36:51 Wes: Chris, I'm glad you brought us back to this as well. I was making a note to myself earlier that we should make sure we don't miss this. And then we did. We did jump past it. And it actually sounds a lot like Schopenhauer to me. This whole problem of causality and the loose and disconnected things, that was a big motivation for German idealism. Kant's whole system is predicated on trying to solve this problem by saying, okay, the mind imposes it. It's one of the categories, and it's still objective in the sense that we then retrieve it from the phenomenal world.

And Schopenhauer came along and said, actually, we know it from the inside. We are causal beings in essence, and in fact, things in themselves are just causal dispositions. They are willing. We understand what causality is by virtue of our own agency and our own willing. And we know things in themselves by virtue of that, because that's what they are at bottom. I think Schopenhauer is saying something very similar to this idea that everything at bottom is dispositional. And when we experience our own agency, we are very close to experiencing things as they are.

So it's kind of reminiscent of Hegel, too, right? Hegel says, when we understand what Kant is calling the categories and logical structure of the world, which is to say, when we're understanding our own minds, the more we know our own minds, the more we know the world, they are deep reflections of the properties of the world. And so our consciousness and our agency is a deep reflection of the fundamentally dispositional nature of the world.

38:25 Christopher: Yeah. And he thinks that solves some issues in philosophy of mind.

38:27 Seth: Right.

38:28 Christopher: That's part of what he talks about. I mean, right at the top of 141, he literally says it does this, talking about the opposing view. It does this by portraying inanimate nature as intrinsically passive, and therefore as being prima facie incapable of acting except under the influence of external forces. And then to bring those images together, it needs to be recognized that the natural world is not intrinsically passive, but essentially active. It is a world in which all things have causal powers and are therefore agents of one kind or another. So the power of agency is not something unique to human beings or other living creatures. It is a pervasive feature of reality. And that sounds like what Dylan was talking about earlier. And then also. Yeah, the Schopenhauer. I mean, that's.

39:04 Wes: And I think this is kind of what panpsychists are on a bit about today. It's intuitively appealing to say, well, you can't have just these two very, very different things, mind and matter, and then somehow get mind out of matter at the macro level. There must be something at the micro level paired that reflects this distinction we see at the macro level. And so panpsychists will want to say, well, okay, these fundamental particles are conscious in a sense. They don't experience our kind of consciousness, of course, but they have whatever it is that, when it's more organized, becomes human consciousness.

And I think perhaps if we're convinced by Ellis, we might want to come along and say, yeah, they have potentiality, they have these dispositional properties, they have these causal capacities which are actually spooky things just like consciousness, and so are a good basis for consciousness.

39:57 Dylan: There's a thread that's going to become more complicated. Right. Is that the thing that I find myself disagreeing a bit with the characterization is that all dispositions are effectively kinds of consciousness, which is what is being implied with that account of panpsychism.

40:11 Wes: Well, I was trying to avoid saying that. I was giving my little spin on panpsychism to avoid that.

40:18 Christopher: Well, if the panpsychist instead said all things are agentive, to use Tomasello's phrasing, I feel like it might be a little more reasonable. Maybe that's a weaker form of it.

40:26 Wes: I would encourage people to look at Philip Goff. Panpsychists do have a very reasonable program that they're pursuing. It's not, however we might caricature it.

40:34 Dylan: Dispositions, I think, are going to end up being different than agentiveness and different than consciousness. And that the notion that an electron has a disposition, but then we're made up of electrons. I think this is where the emergence question comes in, right? Is it that, well, electrons, or all the fundamental particles in their dispositions, they hold within those dispositions the possibility of consciousness? Is that really what you want to say? Or is it that maybe that's true in some extrapolated way? But if for strong emergence. Strong emergence is the generation of entities that are more than the sum of their parts, that are those characteristics.

Something like consciousness as an emergent phenomenon is weakly held in the constituents underlying it. You can't get it without having the combination of things together. It's not held by the electron in its electron field as a strongly emergent property. You would say, well, it's a result of those interactions.

41:42 Wes: I feel like I accidentally trolled us into a conversation about panpsychism. I do want to discuss that in a future episode, and I think Mark feels like we already did to some extent in our consciousness episode. But I want to get into that more. And if we could get Philip Goff on as a guest, that would be great, because there is a sophisticated way to articulate that theory. And I'm not sure if my way of trying to connect it here to Ellis is exactly right, but. Any more closing thoughts?

42:08 Christopher: Do you guys walk away from this feeling like you think it's the case that electrons are metaphysically necessary? That's intuitive to you.

42:16 Wes: They're metaphysically necessary to my enjoyment of the world. I can say that personally. They are what they are. They have the properties that they have, necessarily. I mean, there's something that's bugging me about this that I can't articulate. Maybe it has something to do with the strong natural necessity. Overall, I like his account a lot. Let me put it this way. I wonder about what his interlocutors are saying in the literature. And this book that we read is more of a popularization. So he doesn't go into that. He has another, more academic book. So I'd be curious to see what the objections are and how he responds and all that. Because I can feel that they're there. I just don't know what they are.

42:56 Christopher: I definitely agree. I feel like, intuitively, the strong claim about metaphysical necessity, I didn't feel like, given his sort of what he calls an argument of display, like this is what my picture can do to resolve some of the issues in these different intellectual disciplines. And maybe it's because I'M not connected to them directly. I didn't feel like I walked away with, oh, yeah, your set of tools is a better set of tools than sort of abstaining. Because I still am going to be okay with intrinsic causal powers, a kind of necessity, but not one that extends to all possible worlds. It's unclear to me that we need to jump on board with that, specifically the strong claim. But maybe he'd still characterize me as an essentialist if I bought almost all of it.

43:33 Seth: I mean, he's working at an interesting intersection here, Right? He's simultaneously working in the philosophical tradition. So he's making traditional arguments, being deductive, establishing premises. And also he's talking about, well, what's the explanatory value of this relative to the other paradigmatic frameworks that are trying to explain the same thing? And look at what mine does, which is very Lakatosian slash pragmatic, scientific approach. I agree with you, Wes. I think it would be really interesting to see the more academic version of this and see where the objection, not just what the objections are, but where are they coming from?

Are they coming from philosophers, are they coming from scientists, or what have you. But it's extremely compelling. And if this was on my radar of topics to solve, the world as it is is good enough for me to answer your question, Chris. I don't give a shit about metaphysical necessity because I don't need anything other than what we've got to keep me occupied for the rest of my life. I don't need any possible worlds. And I like the idea that this, in some sense, just puts the kibosh on all that nonsense. But I was enthralled. I very much liked this, and I was surprised that I did.

44:41 Dylan: I thought it was great. I talked a lot already, so talked enough for two episodes.

44:45 Wes: Have we reached the end?

44:48 Dylan: Yes.

44:48 Christopher: Yeah, I'm good. I'm good. Thanks for inviting me on to participate in.

44:52 Wes: Thank you again, Chris.

44:53 Seth: Thanks, Chris.

44:53 Christopher: Really good book. Of course.

44:54 Wes: All right, so next time we're going to discuss Chuang Tzu. Thanks, everyone.

44:59 Seth: Thanks.

44:59 Dylan: Thanks.

45:00 Seth: Good night.

45:00 Dylan: Night.

45:01 Wes: Night.