Statues and Lumps of Clay

We’re going to soon be getting into a really fascinating discussion in my Metaphysics and Epistemology course having to do with material object metaphysics. One fascinating case raises a host of philosophical issues. The “statue and clay” example has been discussed for centuries. Here’s how Carroll and Markosian spell it out in their book An Introduction to Metaphysics.

“Suppose that on Monday you bring home a lump of clay and place it on your workbench. Then on Tuesday morning you carefully fashion the clay into a beautiful statue of a snowy owl, which remains in your workshop for all your friends to admire... But suppose that on Wednesday you wake up in a bad mood and decide that you don’t like the snowy owl after all. So that morning you squash it back into an amorphous lump of clay”

How many objects are there on your workbench on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday? Does the number change over these days? In other words, are the clay and the owl the same thing or are they, alternatively, two distinct objects?

Ted Sider puts one of the problems raised by this case as follows. (This might as well be this week’s paradox. Please suggest a solution to this.)

(1) Before the sculptor's action, a lump of clay exists and after the sculptor's action a statue exists.

(2) The lump of clay continues to exist after the sculptor's actions.

(3) The statue comes into existence when the sculptor makes it.

(4) The lump of clay and the sculpture have different properties after the sculptor's actions: one existed before the sculptor's action, and one did not. (This follows from (1), (2), and (3).)

(5) If x and y have different properties at the same time, then x ≠ y. (This is called Leibniz’s Law - see here for a robust discussion of this principle.)

(6) The statue ≠ the lump of clay. (This follows from (4) and (5).)

(7) The statue and the lump of clay occupy the same location at the same time.

(8) Two distinct objects never occupy the same location at the same time.

(9) The statue = the clay. (This follows from (7) and (8).)

(10) Therefore, The statue = the clay and the statue ≠ the lump of clay. (This follows from (6) and (9).)

Of course, the statue can't be identical to the clay and also not identical to the clay. So what went wrong? Which premise(s) of the argument should we reject?

McTaggart on the unreality of time

We discussed a famous paper by John McTaggart called "The Unreality of Time" in my Metaphysics and Epistemology class. It can be a very confusing paper and so I thought I'd post some resources that might help clarify his argument. There are some resources on youtube like this and this. There are a number of class notes posted online. One has to be careful when using these--some are more reliable than others--but you might check out this and this. Probably the best place to start is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy or the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (links are provided on the left-toolbar of this blog).

Are the laws necessary?

We've been wrestling with a variety of interesting issues associated with laws of nature in my Metaphysics and Epistemology class. For those of you that are interested in reading more about the topic, the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a fairly good entry. The entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is more thorough. Section 8 of the latter has a very concise blurb on the material we discussed today having to do with necessitarianism and the references throughout the entry will be very useful if you're working on a paper related to laws.

Of special note in the SEP entry is the following passage:

"Two reasons can be given for believing that being a law does not depend on any necessary connection between properties. The first reason is the conceivability of it being a law in one possible world that all Fs are Gs even though there is another world with an F that is not G. The second is that there are laws that can only be discovered in an a posteriori manner. If necessity is always associated with laws of nature, then it is not clear why scientists cannot always get by with a priori methods. Naturally, these two reasons are often challenged. The necessitarians argue that conceivability is not a guide to possibility. They also appeal to Saul Kripke's (1972) arguments meant to reveal certain a posteriori necessary truths in order to argue that the a-posteriori nature of some laws does not prevent their lawhood from requiring a necessary connection between properties. In further support of their own view, the necessitarians argue that their position is a consequence of their favored theory of dispositions, according to which dispositions have their causal powers essentially. So, for example, on this theory, charge has as part of its essence the power to repel like charges. Laws, then, are entailed by the essences of dispositions (cf., Bird 2005, 356). As necessitarians see it, it is also a virtue of their position that they can explain why laws are counterfactual-supporting; they support counterfactuals in the same way that other necessary truths do (Swoyer 1982, 209; Fales 1990, 85–87)."

So necessitarians might defend their position by claiming: (a) conceivability does not entail possibility and/or (b) the a posteriori nature of some laws does not prevent their lawhood from requiring a necessary connection between properties. You might consider writing one of your short papers on one of these attempts at defending necessitarianism.

Here might be a good place to air some ideas about these two lines of defense. Comments about (a) or (b) are welcome.

Friday Paradox:

Zeno put forward a number of paradoxes. The upshot of many of them is that motion is impossible. This is a pretty startling conclusion, but his reasons seem fairly plausible.

Suppose I want to go out to eat and I decide to walk to the restaurant. Let A be my house and B be the restaurant. In order for me to get from A to B, I must cover half the distance between them. So I must get to point C. But in order for me to get from A to C, I must cover half of that distance. So I must get to point D. But in order for me to get from A to D, I must cover half of that distance. So I must get to point E... you get the idea. The issue is that there are an infinite number of "halves" that I have to traverse and so I'll never be able to get the full distance. How can one ever traverse an infinite number of points? So I can never actually get to the restaurant. Of course, we can generalize this and so it looks like all movement is impossible. So, contrary to the way things appear, nothing is really moving!

This wonderful clip explains another of Zeno's paradoxes (sometimes called "Achilles and the Tortoise") quite well. It has quite a bit in common with the one I describe above and the visual representation of the issue might be helpful.

Now, of course, most of think motion is possible. So the trick is identifying where Zeno's argument went awry.

Good luck and enjoy the weekend!

David Lewis, the Philosophical Conservative

Steve Pyke is a photographer that took a number of philosophers' pictures. He asked many of them to provide a few sentences about their approach to philosophy. David Lewis was one of them. He remarked:

"I am philosophically conservative: I think philosophy cannot credibly challenge either the positive convictions of common sense or the established theses of the natural sciences and mathematics."

In a famous book of his called Counterfactuals, Lewis writes:

"I believe, and so do you, that things could have been different in countless ways. But what does this mean? Ordinary language permits the paraphrase: there are many ways things could have been besides the way they actually are. I believe that things could have been different in countless ways; I believe permissible paraphrases of what I believe; taking the paraphrase at its face value, I therefore believe in the existence of entities that might be called ‘ways things could have been.’ I prefer to call them ‘possible worlds’" (page 84).

We discussed Lewis' ideas about possibility in my Metaphysics and Epistemology class. His view was that possible worlds are real and that they're just as real as the actual world. Here and here are more information about this view (now called modal realism).

Is Lewis' view philosophically conservative? Does he depart from the "positive convictions of common sense"? It doesn't seem conservative/like common sense to me. Of course, this doesn't show that his view is false. It's just not something that someone like my mother would propose as an explanation of possibility.

We only briefly touched on this in class, but a possible paper topic can be found here. I wonder what your thoughts are regarding modal realism and whether you think some alternative theory about possibility is more plausible. (This would likely have to be the long paper due at the end of the term, since it requires so much stage-setting and exposition.)

Here's one of the pictures that Pyke took of Lewis:

Did Socrates' death cause his wife to be a widow?

I'm teaching a class celled Metaphysics and Epistemology this semester. One of the books for the class is by John Carroll and Ned Markosian and it's entitled An Introduction to Metaphysics. A number of students found the example of the passage below perplexing (this appears on page 29):

"When Socrates drank the hemlock and died in the Athenian prison, his wife, Xanthippe, became a widow. Did Socrates' death cause Xanthippe to become a widow?... Many philosophers find this conclusion unacceptable. The worry is that any relation holding between these two events is bound not to be of the tangible/physical sort one normally expects causation to be. The connection seems to be too much a conceptual matter. To drive home this point, sometimes it is argued that, since Xanthippe was not in the prison with Socrates, his death could not have caused her to become a widow. She became a widow the instant he died. Since there is no instantaneous causal action at a distance in a world like ours where no signals travel faster than light, his death didn't cause her widowhood."

If I were taking the class, I'd be tempted to write one of my papers on something related to this example. There are some fascinating questions that are raised in this short passage. Can there be instantaneous causation at a distance? Does causation require a "tangible/physical" bond between two events? If she became a widow the instant he died, then what (if not his death) caused this effect?

I'm hoping readers will make some suggest some answers to these questions and shed some light on these issues.

Friday Paradox:

We often say that certain things don't exist. Santa, unicorns, Sherlock Holmes, and Atlantis are a few examples. But consider the sentence "Unicorns do not exist." This sentence seems to have a subject-predicate form in that there is a subject--unicorns--to which a predicate or property--non-existence--is being attributed. Consider other subject-predicate sentences: Sarah is tall. John doesn't like mushrooms. Liza does not have a car. By saying that these various people have these various properties, we are implying that these people exist. But aren't we then doing the same thing when we say of unicorns that they do not exist. Aren't we saying that unicorns have a certain property; namely, the property of non-existence? If so, then what are we talking about that have this property but unicorns? There has to be a subject of the sentence. Here's another way to put this: To be able to truly claim of an object that it doesn't exist, it seems that one has to presuppose that it exists, for doesn't a thing have to exist if we are to make a true claim about it?

Causes vs. Background Conditions

Consider a typical case of causation. Lucy strikes a match to light her grill. It's a beautiful sunny day and there's not a hint of wind. Not surprisingly, the match ignites and she is able to start her grill. I take it that it is the striking of the match that causes it to light.

But there are (what some might call) background conditions that are required for the match to light, like the presence of oxygen and a lack of rain and gusty winds. If the match were wet, then it wouldn't light. And if it were too windy, it wouldn't light. So here's an interesting question: Do the background conditions (also) cause the match to light? This might sound odd. We don't say things like "The striking of the match and the presence of oxygen caused the match to light."

Various theories of causation seem to entail that we should say that these background conditions count as causes (See, for example, David Lewis's view in his essay "Causation" and J.L. Mackie's view in his book The Cement of the Universe, among others). Some folks take the above to be a direct challenge to such theories while others bite the proverbial bullet and simply insist that such background conditions are indeed causes. What do you think about this?

If you think the background conditions are not causes, how exactly do you distinguish between the two and explain why these background conditions aren't causes?

If you think they are causes, then how do you explain our practice of not treating them as such? Why are so many people tempted to say that there's a metaphysical difference between causes and mere background conditions? How do you show that this is a mistake?