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8 Comments
Johnathan Diagama.
10/3/2014 09:46:05 am
I was wondering what you think about Sider's objections raised to existence monism (according to Sider, they apply just as well mutatis mutandis to priority monism as you defended it). In particular I'm curious about what you'd say regarding his first objection:
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Johnathan Diagama
10/3/2014 10:14:24 am
Sorry, the roman numeral i reason that the pluralist gives should say there are 4 pixels (I changed the math from the original to make it simpler).
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Sheng-Yao Cheng
10/3/2014 10:18:05 am
There is a really good and short paper called "Monism and statespace: a reply to Sider" by David M. Cornell. It not only counters the objection made by Sider, it further attacks Sider's "intuitive" position. In the paper, Cornell explains each of these pixel states is a mode of the screen, i.e. a way the screen can be (a common monist description). There are 10 possible pixel states/modes for a 2x2 resolution screen. Cornell further argues that if a person think of those pixels as separate/independent entities, she cannot account for various notions such as mostly, barely, etc. For example, in a 4x4 resolution screen and 14 of the pixels are on, a monist can say the screen is mostly on. If only 2 of the pixels are on, a monist can say the screen is barely on. Mostly and barely are notions that require you to think of the screen (which is composed of pixels) as a whole. A person who thinks each pixel is a fundamental entity can only tell you how many pixels are on and where they are located. Thus, Sider's position fails to account for those "holistic" properties about the world.
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Sheng-Yao Cheng
10/3/2014 10:20:03 am
2^4 possible states so 16 instead of 10.
German Diagama
10/7/2014 06:46:13 am
I think that Cornell's response is adequate, but he seems to be missing an important distinction between that kinds of brute facts available to the monist and those available to the pluralist. In a different paper (monism and statespace structure), sider refers to "scientifically ultimate facts". The facts about statespaces in screenworld, for sider, are grounded in scientifically ultimate facts. Namely, facts about photons, or whatever the fundamental physical entities in screenworld are. The monist can't have a completely scientific grounding story, however. Even given the kindness of quantum mechanics to a holistic or monist metaphysics, ultimate facts of a quantum mechanical sort (such as that this point of spacetime takes on field value V) still make reference to sub-world entities (points in a spacetime manifold, vectors in it, and so on). This entities can be metaphysically grounded in distributional properties of the cosmos, as Cornell prefers, but that is what Sider refers to as a "sketchy" grounding story. It is odd that the ultimate facts should be so mysterious as facts researched by metaphysicians, rather than those of fundamental physics.
German Diagama
10/7/2014 06:57:38 am
Your response, on the other hand, doesn't fail to make an important distinction. However, I'm not sure it carries a lot of weight. You probably meant "sider's account fails to explain as well as monism does the fact that we think about whether a screen and its distributional properties before we think of its parts and their individual features". It seems to me more important that an account makes fundamental scientific, rather than abstract metaphysical facts, than that it explains the priority of certain concepts in our minds well. That seems like a job for psychology, not metaphysics.
German Diagama
10/7/2014 06:59:00 am
Also I wish there was an edit button, but its a fair trade considering the badass thread UI here!
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Sheng-Yao Cheng
10/8/2014 04:37:11 am
You brought up some very good points. I have two concerns I would like to raise. First, in general it's not very convincing to say that since fundamental physics says that x and y are fundamental entities, therefore, monism cannot be true or is unlikely to be true. In other words, to claim that x and y are "scientifically ultimate facts" is too strong. The reason is because even physicists disagree on what the fundamental entities are. Nevertheless, you can say since it's at least possible that the fundamental entities are x and y, therefore, in those cases monism would not be able to provide a satisfactory account of the reality.
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