display all the ideas for this combination of texts
12 ideas
14952 | Things are constructs for tracking patterns (and not linguistic, because animals do it) [Ladyman/Ross] |
Full Idea: Individual things are constructs built for second-best tracking of real patterns. They are not necessarily linguistic constructions, since some non-human animals almost certainly cognitively construct them. | |
From: J Ladyman / D Ross (Every Thing Must Go [2007], 4.5) | |
A reaction: Delighted to see animals making an appearance. Fans of language-based metaphysics please note. If they are fictional constructs, why do they do such a good job of tracking? What generates the 'superficial' appearance that there are objects? |
14950 | Maybe individuation can be explained by thermodynamic depth [Ladyman/Ross] |
Full Idea: Scientists have developed principles for understanding individuation in terms of the production of thermodynamic depth. | |
From: J Ladyman / D Ross (Every Thing Must Go [2007], 4.5) | |
A reaction: [They cite J.Collier for this view] Interesting, even though I don't really understand 'thermodynamic depth'. Ladyman and Ross reject it, but there is a whiff of a theory of individuation from within physics. |
14946 | There are no cats in quantum theory, and no mountains in astrophysics [Ladyman/Ross] |
Full Idea: At the quantum scale there are no cats; at scales appropriate for astrophysics there are no mountains. | |
From: J Ladyman / D Ross (Every Thing Must Go [2007], 4.2) | |
A reaction: I don't find this convincing. Since cats are made of quantised entities, they do exist in that world, but are of little interest when trying to understand it. Similarly, astrophysicists hardly deny the existence of mountains! |
14927 | Physics seems to imply that we must give up self-subsistent individuals [Ladyman/Ross] |
Full Idea: There is growing convergence among philosophers of physics that physics motivates abandonment of a metaphysics that posits fundamental self-subsistent individuals. | |
From: J Ladyman / D Ross (Every Thing Must Go [2007], 3.4) | |
A reaction: They cite fermions as an example, which only seem to be given an identity by the relations into which they enter. It is a bit cheeky to simultaneously offer this idea, and despise van Inwagen and Merricks for the same object nihilism. |
14944 | There is no single view of individuals, because different sciences operate on different scales [Ladyman/Ross] |
Full Idea: There is no single account of what individuals there are because, we argue, the special sciences may disagree about the bounds and status of individuals since they describe the world at different scales. | |
From: J Ladyman / D Ross (Every Thing Must Go [2007], 3.8) | |
A reaction: This seems to deny that nature has actual joints, and so seems to me to be a form of anti-realism (which they would deny). Why shouldn't there be a single view which unites all of these special sciences? |
14928 | Things are abstractions from structures [Ladyman/Ross] |
Full Idea: Individual things are locally focused abstractions from modal structure. | |
From: J Ladyman / D Ross (Every Thing Must Go [2007], 3.4) | |
A reaction: I am a fan of the role of abstraction in our understanding of the world, despite my limited progress in trying to explicate the idea. I can't decide whether or not there are any things. A bit basic, that! |
13276 | The unmoved mover and the soul show Aristotelian form as the ultimate mereological atom [Aristotle, by Koslicki] |
Full Idea: Aristotle's discussion of the unmoved mover and of the soul confirms the suspicion that form, when it is not thought of as the object represented in a definition, plays the role of the ultimate mereological atom within his system. | |
From: report of Aristotle (works [c.330 BCE]) by Kathrin Koslicki - The Structure of Objects 6.6 | |
A reaction: Aristotle is concerned with which things are 'divisible', and he cites these two examples as indivisible, but they may be too unusual to offer an actual theory of how Aristotle builds up wholes from atoms. He denies atoms in matter. |
13277 | The 'form' is the recipe for building wholes of a particular kind [Aristotle, by Koslicki] |
Full Idea: Thus in Aristotle we may think of an object's formal components as a sort of recipe for how to build wholes of that particular kind. | |
From: report of Aristotle (works [c.330 BCE]) by Kathrin Koslicki - The Structure of Objects 7.2.5 | |
A reaction: In the elusive business of pinning down what Aristotle means by the crucial idea of 'form', this analogy strikes me as being quite illuminating. It would fit DNA in living things, and the design of an artifact. |
14892 | The idea of composition, that parts of the world are 'made of' something, is no longer helpful [Ladyman/Ross] |
Full Idea: It is no longer helpful to conceive of either the world, or particular systems of the world that we study in partial isolation, as 'made of' anything at all. …Our target here is the metaphysical idea of composition. | |
From: J Ladyman / D Ross (Every Thing Must Go [2007], 1.1) | |
A reaction: This is argued by them from the point of view of fundamental physics as the provider of our basic metaphysics about the world. Personally I really really want to know what electrons are made of, but I know no one is going to tell me. They may even laugh. |
14949 | A sum of things is not a whole if the whole does not support some new generalisation [Ladyman/Ross] |
Full Idea: A nostril, a city and a trumpet solo is not a real pattern, because identification of it supports no generalisations not supported by identification of the three conjuncts considered separately. | |
From: J Ladyman / D Ross (Every Thing Must Go [2007], 4.4) | |
A reaction: This is a nice try at offering a criterion for unity, but I doubt whether it will work, because an ingenious person could come up with wild generalisations. These three combined make possible a charming new line of poetry. |
14951 | We treat the core of a pattern as an essence, in order to keep track of it [Ladyman/Ross] |
Full Idea: We focus on diagnostic features of real patterns that we can treat as 'core', which reliably predict that our attention is still tracking the same real pattern. These are Locke's 'essence of particulars', or Putnam's 'hidden structures'. | |
From: J Ladyman / D Ross (Every Thing Must Go [2007], 4.5) | |
A reaction: They seemed to be ashamed of themselves for proposing this, and call it a 'second-best' epistemological device. They seem to imply that they are useful fictions, but why shouldn't the hidden structures be real? They might both identify and explain. |
14958 | A continuous object might be a type, with instances at each time [Ladyman/Ross] |
Full Idea: Why should not 'Napoleon' be a type, of which 'Napoleon in 1805' and 'Napoleon in 1813' are instances? | |
From: J Ladyman / D Ross (Every Thing Must Go [2007], 5.6) | |
A reaction: That is very nice. That might be a view that suits presentism, where the timed instances never co-exist, and so have the sort of abstract existence that we associate with types. |