New Waves in Metaphysics

A volume of new essays forthcoming in the "New Waves in Philosophy" series from Palgrave-MacMillan.

Now available for purchase from Macmillan or Amazon.com.

Abstracts:

Ross Cameron, "Quantification, Naturalness, and Ontology"

Quine said that the ontological question can be asked in three words, 'What is there?', and answered in one, 'everything'. He was wrong. We need an extra word to ask the ontological question: it is 'What is there, really?'; and it cannot be answered truthfully with 'everything' because there are some things that exist but which don't really exist (and maybe even some things that really exist but which don't exist). In this paper I try to explain this idea, and I argue that it allows us to accept a radically minimal ontology without embracing an error-theory about everyday discourse.

Sara Rachel Chant, "Two Composition Questions in Action"

The dominant approach in the philosophy of collective action is to take individual action as a model for deriving an account of collective action. Since individual intentions are often thought to be necessary for individual action, such philosophers as Michael Bratman, J. David Velleman, and Margaret Gilbert have assumed that collective intentions are necessary for collective action. In this chapter, I will begin by discussing two ways in which one may model an account of collective action after the most promising accounts of individual action. I will then go on to argue that the second way - modeling collective action after individual aggregate action - has been overlooked and highlights important issues concerning compositionality and indispensability arguments in metaphysics. Ultimately, I argue that attending to these related problems leads to insights into the metaphysics of collective action.

Joshua Glasgow, "Another Look at the Reality of Race"

Whether or not race is real in large part comes down to what we mean by "race." In this paper, I defend the claim that race is not real by attending to the bedrock semantic premises at issue in the debate over race's metaphysical status. I focus on the claim that, if those who think that race is real want to engage (most) others in the race debate, they will have to show that the folk concept of race picks out something in the world. This seems to hamstring both biological realism, since the folk concept does not appear to pick out any biological reality, and those who say that race is a real social construction, since the folk concept of race appears to be committed to race being something biological, rather than social.

Allan Hazlett, "Brutal Individuation"

This paper describes and defends "brutal individuation": the view that the facts of individuation, persistence, and destruction are necessary and admit of no further explanation. In particular, they admit of no further explanation in terms of essential properties.

Neal Judish, "Bringing Things About"

Here are two widely endorsed claims about human action:
(C1) Actions, as opposed to mere happenings, are produced, brought about, initiated, by the agents whose actions they are.
(C2) For any action A (except, perhaps, some basic acts such as volitions), A is constituted by a sequence of events, whether psychical or physical or both.
The second claim is expressive of 'naturalism' about human action, and the first one expresses something about the nature of action or the concept of action or both. Yet there appears to be a tension between these theses: how can a sequence of events involving an agent amount to the agent's initiating an action; how can a series of happenings constitute a doing? In §1 I examine and motivate the apparent conflict between (C1) and (C2). In §2 I consider and reject three attempts to resolve this conflict. In §3 I present a novel dissolution of the problem. There I argue that the seeming incompatibility of (C1) and (C2) may be diagnosed as a special case of the conceptual gap between the first-person and the third-person perspectives, but that the conceptual irreducibility of 'bringing things about', which results from the deployment of phenomenal concepts in our thinking about human action, does not entail that human action cannot consist in suitably related event causes. Finally, in §4, I note some consequences of this result for causal indeterminist varieties of libertarian free will.

Uriah Kriegel, "Interpretation: Its Scope and Limits"

According to interpretivism, all there is to having an intentional property is being best interpreted as having it. I present a regress-or-circularity argument against this. In §1, I elucidate interpretivism, and in §2, I present the argument against it.

Doug Kutach, "Empirical Analyses of Causation"

Conceptual analyses can be subdivided into two classes, good and evil. Empirical analysis is the good kind, which is routinely practiced in the sciences. Orthodox analysis is the malevolent version that plagues philosophical discourse. In this paper, I will clarify the difference between them, provide some reasons to prefer good over evil, and illustrate how their difference plays out in the metaphysics of causation. By conducting an empirical analysis of causation rather than an orthodox analysis, one can segregate the genuine metaphysical problems that need to be addressed from the many pseudo-problems that have long dogged traditional accounts of causation.

Rae Langton and Chris Robichaud, "Ghosts in the World Machine? Humility and Its Alternatives"

Alyssa Ney, "Are There Fundamental Intrinsic Properties?"

In this paper, I show that despite interesting arguments to the contrary, the properties of fundamental physics are intrinsic. As it turns out, the properties that appear on most philosophers' lists of the kind of fundamental properties physics posits, momentum, charge, spin, quark color, and so on, do look to be extrinsic. Nevertheless, we have no reason to be concerned that the fundamental physical properties are not intrinsic. For the properties on that list aren't the most fundamental properties of current physics. Thus, we have no reason at this time to fear that we cannot know the intrinsic natures of things, how they are in themselves. The paper begins by distinguishing several senses of intrinsicness, and then examines the status of intrinsic properties in two areas of fundamental physics: quantum mechanics and the theory of the strong interaction, quantum chromodynamics.

Mari Mikkola, "Is Everything Realative? Anti-Realism, Truth, and Feminism"

This paper takes issue with feminist views that eschews objectivity: minimally, the view that there is an objective gap between what is the case and what we take to be the case. Doing so fosters radical relativism that is politically bad news for feminism, and, I contend, objectivity must be retained. However, some anti-realist feminists like Catherine MacKinnon, who take truth to be a social construct and relative to a perspective or conceptual scheme, don't intend to argue for relativism. This being so, I will explore whether there is something to be said for feminist anti-realism. In particular, I will explore whether Hilary Putnam's 'internal realism' can help block relativism that anti-realist feminism appears to generate. I will conclude that 'internal realism' cannot undercut relativism that threatens anti-realist feminism.

Kristie Miller, "The Nature of Mathematical Objects: Minimialism and Modality"

Jay Odenbaugh, "On the Very Idea of an Ecosystem"

In this essay, I consider several different issues. First, I examine how token ecosystems are individuated by ecologists. Second, I examine whether ecosystems or more specifically their components can have functions. Third, many ecologists and conservationists have taken to talking of "ecosystem health." Some treat this as mere metaphor but others construe it literally. The notion of ecosystem health is intimately tied to the notion of ecosystemic functions. However, the notion of a "healthy" or "diseased" state requires norms of performance which is noticeably absent on a systemic functions view. In summary, I offer an extended argument there are mind-independently existing ecosystems which have functions but which are neither healthy nor diseased.

Carolina Sartorio, "The Prince of Wales Problem for Counterfactual Theories of Causation"

On the face of it, counterfactual accounts of causation can easily accommodate causation by omission. For outcomes can counterfactually depend on omissions just like they can counterfactually depend on "positive" causes. This appears to be a prima facie advantage of counterfactual views of causation over other views, given what I call "the inadequacy fact about positive causes" (the fact that positive causes are sometimes intuitively inadequate to account for the occurrence of outcomes). I argue, against this appearance, that the ability to accommodate causation by omission is not even a prima facie advantage of counterfactual views. For, even if those views can let omissions be causes, they violate the original motivation for accepting causation by omission: the inadequacy fact about positive causes. The problem generalizes: it is a problem for any theory, causal or not, that attempts to account for the contribution of omissions in counterfactual terms.