Friction

How did a little-known 17th-century physician help shape Cartesian philosophy after René Descartes by trying to complete its account of the mind, the body, and their union?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Steven Nadler is Vilas Research Professor and the William H. Hay II Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His work focuses on 17th century philosophy, and he has a variety of published works in this area.

Check out his book, "The Good Cartesian: Louis de La Forge and the Rise of a Philosophical Paradigm"!

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-good-cartesian-9780197671719

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0197671713

2. Book Summary

Steven Nadler’s The Good Cartesian tells the story of how Louis de La Forge—a young provincial physician—helped René Descartes’s philosophy become a dominant “new” paradigm in the decades after 1650. Nadler opens with the broader French and European backdrop: institutional anxiety about “philosophical novelties” and the way Cartesianism was increasingly seen as a threat to traditional Scholastic frameworks, especially in sensitive theological contexts. Against that setting, Nadler argues that La Forge’s role has been underappreciated: not only is he a key early figure in debates about occasionalism, but he is also central to how second-generation Cartesians tried to complete, correct, and extend Descartes’s system while still presenting themselves as faithful disciples.

The book then reconstructs La Forge’s life, networks, and projects in detail, showing how a thinker working far from Paris nonetheless became deeply involved in the Cartesian movement—through local intellectual milieus, ties to Cartesian promoters, and access to manuscripts and correspondence. Nadler portrays La Forge as “the most loyal of all Cartesians,” someone who wanted to articulate not just what Descartes said but what Descartes would have said if he’d lived longer, done more anatomical work, and absorbed later scientific developments. The heart of Nadler’s historical case is that there had never been a single sustained study of La Forge’s main contributions: (i) his role in illustrating and commenting on the first French edition of Descartes’s Traité de l’homme (1664) and (ii) his own Traité de l’esprit de l’homme, which aims to finish Descartes’s account of the human being by treating the mind and its relation to body.

Finally, Nadler offers a chapter-by-chapter philosophical analysis of what La Forge actually adds to Cartesianism—especially in philosophy of mind and causation: the nature of the Cartesian mind, the mind–body union, occasionalist explanations, the mechanics of bodies, mind–motion interaction, and the structure of ideas and volitions. A central theme is La Forge’s attempt to demystify “union” by treating it as a stable, law-like reciprocity between mental and bodily states grounded in God’s instituted order, not as some further metaphysical glue; on this view, union persists as long as the relevant capacities for coordinated interaction remain. In the conclusion, Nadler argues that La Forge’s overall position is subtle: while bodies (as mere extension) are passive and so push La Forge toward strong divine-causation claims about bodily motion, La Forge simultaneously insists that the mind is active and (in an important sense) causally efficacious over its own thoughts and volitions—yielding something closer to a “conservationist” picture for the mind than a fully thoroughgoing occasionalism.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:59 - Overview

04:03 - Historical factors

06:35 - Importance of other figures

08:11 - Eucharist

13:36 - Louis de La Forge

15:27 - Treatise on Man

19:04 - Commentary

21:04 - Motivation

21:54 - What is a “good Cartesian”?

27:19 - Treatise on the human mind

33:32 - Causation

37:24 - Occasionalism

40:48 - Partial occasionalism

42:13 - Why does only God have this power?

47:33 - Is the view coherent?

50:00 - Other potential contributions

51:39 - Pineal gland

55:01 - Immortality of the soul

57:33 - Value of philosophy

59:27 - Conclusion

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

How far can arguments like the Grim Reaper paradox, divine conceptualism, and the problem of evil really take us in deciding whether theism is philosophically credible?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Alex Malpass's work focuses on philosophical logic, philosophy of time, philosophy of physics, and more. His website is https://useofreason.wordpress.com/, and he runs the Thoughtology YouTube channel.

2. Interview Summary

Alex explains that his route into philosophy was basically driven by curiosity: as a kid he read a book of “great philosophers,” latched onto Socrates as a model of irreverent questioning, and then just kept following whatever topics struck him as interesting. He emphasizes that he approaches philosophy as an independent hobby—doing it because it’s fun rather than because he’s representing an institution or defending a fixed “doctrinal” package—so he’s comfortable treating big debates (including the ‘fine-tuning argument’) as open-ended problems where you can explore multiple frameworks without having to “take a view on everything.”

The first major topic is the ‘Grim Reaper paradox’ (presented as a descendant of a “Benedetti/Benedetti paradox” in the transcript): Alex walks through how you can set up an infinite sequence of “reapers” (or triggers) arranged so that any given event is prevented by an earlier one, and yet there’s no first event—pushing you toward an inconsistent description of what happens. He discusses why this is often taken to be evidence against an actually infinite past, and he engages an objection that uses a kind of “copy-and-paste”/recombination principle (if one reaper-scenario is possible, why not infinitely many?), explaining how the paradox is meant to show that certain infinite constructions you might have thought were coherent actually aren’t.

From there the conversation broadens into several connected philosophy-of-religion disputes. On abstract objects, he discusses the move to ‘divine conceptualism’—treating things like mathematical truths as ideas in God’s mind—and sketches a critique that leans on intentionality: if thoughts are essentially about something, then we still owe an account of what a “divine thought” is about without silently reintroducing the very abstracta we were trying to explain. He then turns to the problem of evil and “perfect being” expectations, arguing that re-describing evil as a privation (often associated with Augustine) doesn’t really touch the evidential force of suffering, and he discusses what a “defense” needs to accomplish (logical consistency rather than plausibility) while also criticizing aspects of traditional Christian narrative like inherited guilt. He also touches modal issues (including ‘modal collapse’ and skepticism about God knowing counterfactuals for merely possible situations), and ends with remarks about Alvin Plantinga–style evolutionary worries: he’s cautious about quick debunking stories, stressing that rationality looks like a gradual capacity that can be repurposed and amplified culturally over time. Summary based on the provided transcript.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:46 - What got you into philosophy?

03:28 - Grim Reaper paradox

13:34 - Omniscience and infinity

16:16 - Lord of non-contradiction

25:15 - Other divine conceptualist views

27:30 - Non-propositional knowledge

29:26 - Platonism and naturalism

36:10 - Intentionality of phenomenal states

36:52 - Divine simplicity

37:45 - Principle of sufficient reason

47:26 - Argument against Christianity

55:20 - Privation theory of evil

1:01:00 - Transworld depravity

1:10:55 - Evolutionary argument against naturalism

1:21:50 - Act and potency

1:28:30 - Is "existence" a predicate?

1:29:58 - Free will

1:35:22 - Conclusion

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

Can the strange “odd universe” result be defused by rethinking how parts, wholes, and counting fit together, rather than by giving up on common-sense mereology?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Meg Wallace is Associate Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at the University of Kentucky, and specialize in metaphysics and ontology.

Check out her book, "Parts and Wholes"!

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C94RMGVM

2. Book Summary

In Parts and Wholes, Meg Wallace uses the “odd universe argument” as a hook: from a small package of seemingly intuitive assumptions about parthood, composition, and counting, you can (purportedly) derive a priori that the universe contains an odd number of things—a conclusion that feels both wild and philosophically revealing. She treats that “something has gone weirdly wrong” reaction as a diagnostic tool: it pushes us to locate which assumption (or background method) is responsible, and Section 1 supplies the needed toolkit—basic mereology plus plural-logic resources for talking carefully about “the parts, taken together” versus “the whole.”

Section 2 turns to two big structural questions: composition (building up) and decomposition (breaking down). On the composition side, Wallace frames the Special Composition Question (SCQ) and walks through the familiar triad: universalism (“always” compose), nihilism (“never” compose), and moderation (“sometimes” compose). Universalism threatens to look “ontologically explosive,” but she sketches ways it can be tamed—e.g., by identifying the right sums with ordinary objects, or by pairing it with a view that preserves parsimony (eventually, her favored route goes through composition-as-identity). Nihilism gets its standard “arranged mug-wise” style defense and the idea that ordinary talk can still work without rampant error theory, while also facing serious worries about self-defeat if there are, strictly speaking, no speakers, utterances, or other composites. Moderation is initially tempting, but Wallace presses the familiar problems: proposed conditions for composition can look arbitrary or anthropocentric, and once vagueness/jumpiness enters, you risk getting a pervasive indeterminacy about how many things there are. On the decomposition side, she asks whether reality bottoms out in finitely many simples (one of the odd-universe assumptions), infinitely many simples, or gunk; and she shows how changing these “all the way down” options can generate further surprising cardinality results (e.g., pressures toward uncountably many objects).

Section 3 argues (with “a healthy bias”) for composition as identity (CI) and uses it to reframe what looked like runaway ontological commitments: if the whole just is the parts (in the relevant plural sense), then universalism can be “ontologically innocent,” double-counting worries dissolve, and familiar puzzles about coincidence and overdetermination lose their bite. But CI attracts “numerical” objections (cardinality, counting-style arguments, and puzzles involving “is-one-of” plus Leibniz’s Law), and Wallace’s core reply is methodological: our standard, singular way of counting bakes in the very “extra object” result that makes CI look impossible, so we should reconsider how numerical predicates attach—moving away from singular counting toward an alternative (she discusses “relative counting”). In the Conclusion she makes her preferred diagnosis explicit: accept simples, unrestricted composition (universalism), and count—but deny that count commits us to singular counting—and accept CI (rejecting “composition is not identity”), which blocks the odd-universe derivation.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:40 - Book on mereology

02:45 - Odd universe argument

10:35 - Finitely many simples?

16:14 - Unrestricted composition

25:52 - Different senses of “object”

28:30 - Composition as identity

35:46 - Different properties

41:18 - Perdurantism

45:35 - Modal parts

50:05 - Worries

55:57 - Modal views

59:52 - Indeterminate constitution

1:03:26 - Problem of the many

1:10:20 - More objects?

1:18:21 - Value of philosophy

1:19:55 - Conclusion

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

What makes a scientific category more than a convenient label, and when do our classifications really track the causal structure of the world?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Muhammad Ali Khalidi is Presidential Professor of Philosophy at City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center. His work focuses on the philosophy of science, particularly cognitive science and social science, as well as some work on classical Arabic-Islamic philosophy.

Check out his book in Cambridge Elements on "Natural Kinds"!

https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/natural-kinds/8CA215EA3A1878FC4856B84E28F4C447

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1009005065

2. Book Summary

Khalidi argues that science can’t even get off the ground without classifying its subject matter, and that a central aim of scientific taxonomy is to carve reality “at the joints” by identifying categories that correspond to natural kinds. Adopting a broadly naturalist stance, the book treats scientific practice as a (defeasible) guide to what kinds there are, while still allowing that scientists can misclassify, over-lump, or over-split. The overall structure reflects that agenda: it first lays out metaphysical background (what “natural” amounts to, realism vs. anti-realism, and pluralism), then compares leading theories of kinds, then distinguishes different kinds of kinds, and finally tests the resulting framework on concrete scientific case studies.

In evaluating theories, Khalidi highlights a widely accepted constraint on bona fide scientific categories: projectibility—roughly, whether membership in the category supports nontrivial induction (e.g., from “x is beryllium” to further expectations about melting point, etc.). He then argues that traditional essentialism and even more recent “homeostatic property cluster” approaches can be too restrictive, especially when mechanisms are absent, multiple, or not what really explains a category’s stability. In place of these, he defends a “simple causal theory” (SCT): natural kinds correspond to clusters of properties, but what makes them non-arbitrary is that the properties are bound together by causal relations (in many possible structures), so kinds are the categories that figure in generalizations that “correctly describe the causal structure of the world.”

A major payoff of the SCT is its flexibility about pluralism and crosscutting: the world may support multiple overlapping classifications, so scientists (and philosophers) needn’t choose once and for all between lumping and splitting—one can legitimately “lump for some purposes and split for others,” depending on explanatory and predictive aims. Khalidi also broadens what can count as a real kind: besides “intrinsic” kinds, there are functional kinds grounded in stable causal-functional profiles even when intrinsic make-up varies. He likewise defends etiological (historical) kinds where common origins and trajectories explain present similarities and differences. And he argues that even interactive (mind-dependent) kinds can be real when they participate in robust causal regularities, despite being partly shaped by human classification and response. The closing case studies illustrate the method: “planet” comes out as a real kind (both functional and etiological), “pandemic” (as currently used) does not, and “autism” looks like a promising candidate though it may be an umbrella that lumps multiple kinds together.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

01:18 - Introducing natural kinds

04:47 - Realism and conventionalism

12:55 - Mixed views

19:27 - Folk discourse

25:05 - Conceptual engineering

27:49 - Science

30:52 - Degrees of naturalness

34:32 - How many kinds?

38:45 - Uninstantiated kinds

44:19 - Other sorts of kinds

48:14 - Ontological commitment

50:42 - Arbitrariness

54:35 - Essentialism

59:42 - Vagueness

1:03:10 - His approach

1:06:31 - Causation

1:09:24 - Another approach

1:15:42 - Non-natural kinds

1:17:32 - Value of philosophy

1:20:17 - Conclusion

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

What does it take for a theory of being to earn its ontological commitments, and can we make sense of nonexistence, properties, and possibility without bloating our inventory of what there is?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Peter van Inwagen is John Cardinal O'Hara Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame, and is Research Professor of Philosophy at Duke University. He is well-known for his work in a variety of fields, but primarily metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of action.

Check out his book, "Being: A Study in Ontology"!

https://academic.oup.com/book/44876

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0192883968

2. Book Summary

Being: A Study in Ontology by Peter van Inwagen has a two-part aim: to lay out a meta-ontology (what we’re doing when we ask “What is there?” and how to answer it) and then to use that meta-ontology to do substantive ontology. He explicitly frames ontology as a systematic answer to “What is there?” and meta-ontology as reflection on the question and method; on his map of the book, Chapters I and V are meta-ontology, while II–IV (and VI) apply it to specific disputes. The meta-ontological stance is “deeply Quinean”: he’s willing to present it as (roughly) W. V. Quine’s view, sharply tied to how quantification works and how ontological commitment is extracted from what we accept.

With that Quinean methodology in hand, the middle of the book argues for several “anti-Quinean” ontological results (even while agreeing with Quine about non-existent things). In the Introduction he flags the central applications: whether there are things that “do not exist,” whether there are abstract objects, and whether modal discourse commits us to a realm of possibilities and possible worlds. On the abstract-object side, he pushes toward a picture in which properties and propositions are hard to avoid, and he develops a positive account of properties as “assertibles”: propositions are “saturated assertibles” (things that can be said, full stop) and properties are “unsaturated assertibles” (things that can be said of things). He then presses the consequences: if properties are assertibles, they are not literally “constituents” of concreta, and a lot of familiar metaphysical talk about properties (as parts, as perceivable constituents, as ontologically prior) is misguided. On the modal side, he shows how talk of truth, existence, and property-possession “in a world” can be handled by connecting worlds and possibilities tightly to propositions, rather than treating worlds as Lewis-style concrete “ways things could have been.”

The culminating move is Chapter VI’s “lightweight platonism,” which is meant to provide a single framework in which the earlier positions “can be placed.” In the book’s own summary, this is “lightweight” because the universals and other abstracta it accepts are causally inert: they have no causal powers and “explain nothing,” even if they can still figure in explanations the way numbers do in scientific reasoning. The result is a stark division of reality into (i) things that move and are moved, and (ii) things to which motion, causation, and change do not apply, with van Inwagen insisting that denying the second category would force him into contradiction given the commitments he thinks our best theorizing incurs.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

01:23 - Development of views

04:20 - Existence and being

07:51 - Technical vs. ordinary language

11:09 - Holes

14:18 - Paraphrase

20:17 - Negative existentials

22:19 - Fiction

29:05 - Having and holding

34:25 - Worry

39:20 - Attempt at paraphrase?

41:25 - Indefinable?

45:00 - Non-Meinongian paraphrase

51:03 - Platonism

53:56 - Fictionalism

58:16 - Effective theories

1:03:55 - Properties

1:08:25 - Modality

1:11:28 - Another approach

1:16:15 - Value of philosophy

1:17:36 - Conclusion

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

Can a stripped-down naturalism really match theism’s explanatory ambitions, or does it secretly inherit the very mysteries it’s meant to avoid?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Graham Oppy is Professor of Philosophy at Monash University, and specializes in Philosophy of Religion.

2. Interview Summary

Oppy opens by stressing that debates about God rarely turn on a single knockdown proof, and he thinks there are no convincing arguments for God (or against) that should force assent. Still, he thinks some arguments are instructive and carefully built: he says he recently published a long paper on Thomas Aquinas’s First Way, and argues that you can make it deductively valid only by weakening the conclusion, whereas the stronger Thomistic conclusion needs extra premises. He adds that he finds ontological arguments especially interesting, and wrote a book-length study cataloguing different kinds of them. When asked who presents the strongest case for theism, he points to Richard Swinburne, praising The Existence of God as a well-constructed cumulative-case presentation, even though he remains unconvinced by it.

A recurring theme is that many “cosmological” moves look dialectically symmetric: whatever explanatory pressure you feel about a first cause, a beginning, or an initial explanatory posit arises just as much for the naturalist as for the theist. In response to contingency arguments, he’s happy (in principle) to grant talk of a “necessary being” so long as it’s identified with the initial, fundamental part of causal reality on a naturalistic picture. He also presses a familiar worry (associated with Peter van Inwagen): if you start from something necessary and claim “all contingency” comes from it, you still owe an account of whether the link is necessary or contingent, and either answer threatens the intended contingency/necessity contrast. Relatedly, when people build modalized explanatory principles into “new” cosmological arguments, he notes that the contingency of the God–world relationship can reintroduce pressure for explanation of God’s creating (or of God) rather than cleanly stopping the regress.

On methodology, Oppy says he’s skeptical that a Bayesian framework is doing the real work in many cumulative cases; he prefers an ‘argument from dominance’ where naturalism wins by being simpler while (he claims) not being explanatorily worse once the “evidence” is partitioned appropriately. This connects to a more general ‘Occam’s razor’ stance: when two theories do the same explanatory work, adding extra entities (like God) without added explanatory payoff is something you should reject, not merely remain agnostic about. He applies the same measured attitude to theological doctrines: he thinks the Arguing About Gods posture is “suspend judgment unless pushed,” and while he’s open to the coherence of the Trinity (a low bar, in his view), it remains hard to make sense of outside the tradition. He also discusses Pascal-style prudential arguments, warning that “choose to believe” is psychologically suspect and that infinite-utility setups can collapse comparisons, and he’s similarly deflationary about the “hard problem” of consciousness, endorsing an identity-theory line in the spirit of J. J. C. Smart.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:10 - Aquinas’s first way

01:06 - Best argument for God

02:41 - Theistic literature

04:53 - Contingency argument

07:19 - Kalam cosmological argument

11:46 - Act and potency

13:54 - Cosmological arguments and modality

20:16 - Bayesian analysis of theism

23:32 - Consciousness

25:15 - Artificial intelligence

26:45 - Spacetime

28:13 - God and space

29:31 - Divine simplicity and monotheism

32:59 - Pascal’s wager

37:36 - Principle of sufficient reason

39:45 - Causal series

43:50 - Coherence of the trinity

45:06 - Simplicity and agnosticism

50:07 - Account of modality

51:49 - Rasmussen’s argument

59:02 - Mathematical entities

1:01:21 - Platonism

1:05:19 - Causal origin

1:09:23 - Arbitrary limits

1:12:25 - Classical theism

1:14:27 - Divine simplicity

1:17:10 - Unities and unifiers

1:21:56 - Holism and reductionism

1:23:23 - Conclusion

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

How can sentences still represent the world if their meanings are grounded not in reference but in the practical rules that govern how we use and accept them?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

José Zalabardo is a Spanish-British philosopher who works on epistemology, metaphysics, and related areas. He is a professor of philosophy at University College London.

Check out his book, "Pragmatist Semantics!"

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/pragmatist-semantics-9780192874757

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C1W1BTLF

2. Book Summary

In Pragmatist Semantics: A Use-Based Approach to Linguistic Representation, José Zalabardo starts from the intuitive idea that many declarative sentences represent the world, and asks what grounds their meanings—what facts make it the case that a sentence has the meaning it does. He frames the central dispute as a contest between representationalism (meanings are grounded in language–world relations like reference) and pragmatism (meanings are grounded in patterns of use). A key target is what he calls the RR assumption: that any sentence that represents things as being a certain way must have a representationalist meaning ground. He then develops “open-question” style arguments—first in ethics and then (more centrally for his project) in semantic discourse about truth, meaning, and propositional attitudes—to motivate the claim that attempts to give representationalist meaning grounds for these discourses run into serious trouble (e.g., by undermining the idea that their core predicates have referents).

Zalabardo’s positive proposal is that we can reject RR: a sentence can still be genuinely representational even if its meaning ground is pragmatist. The general template is to explain meaning in terms of acceptance procedures—roughly, the actual rules/practices by which speakers regulate when to accept or reject sentences of a discourse. He illustrates the template across the “problem” discourses: for belief/desire ascriptions, he starts from Daniel Dennett’s Intentional Stance and treats its behaviour-prediction role as central to how we regulate acceptance of attitude ascriptions. He also argues that we should drop (as meaning-grounding) appeals to what an agent ought to believe/desire, and instead characterize our predictive practice in a way that explains our bias toward attributing true belief (via a “default” predictive strategy and a more sophisticated fallback). For meaning and truth ascriptions, he develops a pragmatist account that draws on W. V. O. Quine and Donald Davidson on radical interpretation, and he treats disquotation as central to how we regulate truth ascriptions.

A major remaining challenge is what he calls the problem of harmony: if a sentence represents a determinate state of affairs (or a predicate a determinate property), how can a use-based meaning ground be sufficient to secure that representational target rather than some deviant alternative? His strategy is to use abstraction principles: identify the referents of pragmatist-grounded predicates (and the states of affairs associated with pragmatist-grounded sentences) via equivalence/synonymy conditions generated by the relevant acceptance/ascription procedures. With that in hand, he broadens the picture in the final chapter (“The Primacy of Practice”), arguing that pragmatist resources aren’t just a patch for a few troublesome discourses but point toward a more general account of linguistic representation—one on which our access to reference and representational contents is systematically mediated by practice.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:53 - Overview of book

03:36 - Open question arguments

11:17 - Moorean shift

13:10 - Vagueness

17:25 - Other representationalist approaches

20:25 - Motivating pragmatic position

25:20 - Open questions?

28:47 - Contrasting with representationalism

31:15 - Comparison with Wittgenstein

35:20 - Messiness of natural language

43:40 - Other areas of discourse?

49:53 - Sharp distinction?

55:01 - Disagreement

1:04:01 - Non-propositional?

1:06:43 - Other parts of speech

1:09:51 - Belief and desire

1:19:25 - Belief without expectation of manifestation

1:22:09 - Akrasia

1:26:06 - Gerrymandered attributions

1:28:56 - Example

1:33:50 - Hybrid model

1:36:45 - Familiarity

1:44:31 - Projection

1:49:20 - Is ascription relative?

1:51:25 - Meaning vs. meaning ascription

1:57:33 - Other interpretive procedures

1:59:11 - Generalizations

2:01:11 - Coextensive terms

2:05:15 - Truth ascriptions

2:09:13 - Theories of truth

2:12:35 - Properties

2:17:13 - General meaning grounds

2:19:02 - Complexity of theory

2:23:44 - Harmony

2:29:24 - Remaning difficulties

2:33:07 - Value of philosophy

2:35:23 - Conclusion

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

Why do people sometimes refuse to update on clear evidence, and what would a properly functioning epistemology say we ought to believe when the evidence is right in front of us?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Mona Simion is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Glasgow where she is also deputy director of the COGITO Epistemology Research Centre. Her work focuses on a range of topics, including epistemology, ethics, language, and feminist philosophy.

Check out her book, "Resistance to Evidence"!

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1009298526

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/resistance-to-evidence/147AC15A7EA89095A820FF16B1D0525A

2. Book Summary

In Resistance to Evidence, Mona Simion (University of Glasgow) argues that a central epistemic problem of our time is not just believing on insufficient evidence, but failing to believe (or suspending) when sufficient, undefeated evidence is easily available—a distinctive kind of epistemic failure she calls ‘resistance to evidence’. She frames this as “positive epistemology”: a project aimed at articulating epistemic obligations to update and form beliefs in response to available evidence (a counterpart to the familiar evidentialist worry associated with W. K. Clifford). The first part of the book links philosophical normativity with the empirical literature and offers a taxonomy of resistance cases (spanning testimony, perception, inference, bias, motivated reasoning, etc.), then pressures standard accounts of what evidence one has (and of permissible suspension, responsibility, and vice) for lacking the resources to explain why paradigmatic resistance is epistemically impermissible.

The second part builds Simion’s positive alternative: an epistemology grounded in proper function. Our cognitive systems, she proposes, have an epistemic function of generating knowledge, and epistemic norms “drop out” of that function; on this picture, resistance to evidence is an input-level epistemic malfunction—a failure to take up the right inputs (evidence and defeat) that the system could have easily taken up. She then develops a unified framework: evidence is understood as knowledge indicators—facts one is in a position to know that raise the evidential probability of a proposition for the subject—so resistant agents malfunction by failing to uptake these indicators. Likewise, defeaters are ignorance indicators—facts one is in a position to know that lower the evidential probability of the proposition (and so can undermine justification when ignored). With these pieces in place, she argues that permissible suspension and doxastic justification should be explained in terms of whether the relevant belief/suspension is produced by properly functioning knowledge-generating processes that appropriately respond to knowledge and ignorance indicators.

The final part draws broader lessons. First, even if epistemic justifiers can be treated as epistemic “oughts,” Simion argues this doesn’t imply that epistemic life is riddled with genuine dilemmas; rather, it yields a more modest picture on which the epistemic domain (like other normative domains) often involves conflict without widespread dilemma. Second, she applies the framework to scepticism, engaging neo-Moorean responses to arguments associated with G. E. Moore and debates involving Fred Dretske, Timothy Williamson, and Jim Pryor; she proposes a “new” radical neo-Mooreanism on which the sceptic’s stance counts as resistance to evidence, yet can still seem somewhat reasonable because it involves impermissible suspension while nevertheless satisfying certain contrary-to-duty epistemic obligations. Finally, she offers a distinctive account of disinformation with practical implications: disinformation needn’t be false, but is (roughly) content disposed to generate ignorance in a context under normal conditions—so purely fact-checking strategies will systematically miss many disinformation mechanisms. In her concluding policy-oriented remarks (with Cambridge University Press in view), she argues that effective interventions must often focus on polluted epistemic environments—e.g., improving the quantity and quality of reliable evidence flow (including trusted sources) and, for more isolated malfunction cases, supporting cognitive flexibility training to reduce rigid resistance.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

01:07 - Purpose of book

06:03 - Varieties of evidence resistance

09:25 - Unified account

15:07 - Williamson’s reply

18:19 - Ideal epistemic agents

22:30 - Problems with ideal agents

29:18 - Blameless resistance?

37:59 - Epistemic error and blame

39:43 - Semantic issues

46:23 - Vagueness

47:36 - Evidence and defeat

1:02:03 - Functional account

1:12:19 - Compatibility with other accounts

1:16:59 - Resistance to evidence

1:23:45 - Sufficiency

1:32:28 - Natural language

1:37:27 - Shiftiness

1:43:21 - Worry for view

1:54:22 - Inquiring vs. updating

1:58:13 - Fallibilism

2:04:44 - Defeater defeaters

2:08:59 - Getting probability one

2:13:30 - Information and disinformation

2:19:55 - Ignorance

2:25:30 - Value of philosophy

2:29:39 - Conclusion

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

Can chemistry really be reduced to physics, or do concepts like elements and the periodic table show that it has its own irreducible structure?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Eric Scerri is a lecturer at UCLA, and focuses on chemistry, the philosophy of chemistry, and science more generally.

2. Interview Summary

Eric Scerri argues that philosophy of chemistry arrived relatively late partly because chemistry sits so close to physics in the usual “hierarchy of the sciences,” which encourages the popular thought that chemistry is “nothing but” physics—and so not in need of its own philosophical scrutiny. He suggests that the right question isn’t whether chemistry is or isn’t reduced to physics (as if it were all-or-nothing), but how far reduction goes and in what sense, since both scientific practice and philosophical models of reduction have shifted over time. On his picture, the most sensible stance is to talk about “degrees” of reduction that can increase as molecular quantum chemistry advances, rather than expecting a clean yes/no verdict.

A major theme is the concept of a chemical element: Scerri emphasizes that “element” is used in (at least) two senses—an element as a simple substance (often associated with Antoine Lavoisier) and an element as a more abstract bearer of properties (revived in Dmitri Mendeleev’s thinking about the periodic system). He illustrates the abstract sense by noting that pointing to “carbon” on the periodic table is not pointing to diamond or graphite (or any particular isotope), but to something that underlies them all—something that can be characterized in modern chemistry chiefly by atomic number. He then uses the sodium/chlorine → sodium chloride case to argue that the familiar simple substances can “disappear” in compounds while the elements persist in the abstract sense, which helps explain chemical novelty. Scerri adds that this dual usage is often left implicit (even by IUPAC), and that chemical education tends to foreground orbitals and electron configurations so early that students may lose contact with the ordinary chemical character of substances.

On the periodic table, Scerri discusses the “left-step” proposal that moves helium into group 2 on electronic-configuration grounds, and he defends the idea that (beyond mere representational convenience) it can still make sense to ask which table is most fundamental. This connects to his broader view of reduction: he distinguishes epistemological reduction (always partial and a matter of degree) from ontological reduction, where he favors a “unity of science” picture on which chemistry is not a free-floating realm apart from physics—so reduction is more a direction than an achievable final goal. Methodologically, he leans instrumentalist about theoretical posits like orbitals—useful mathematical constructs rather than the kind of thing one literally “images”—and he’s skeptical of philosophical debates that ignore how working scientists treat things like laws and bonding. Finally, he stresses a broadly evolutionary picture of scientific change, where even apparent revolutions have extended build-ups, detours, and pragmatic rule-breaking that matter more than tidy, armchair reconstructions. Transcript:

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:52 - Neglected field?

04:36 - Elements

08:31 - Too abstract?

09:46 - Advantages of abstract view

12:04 - Atomic number enough?

14:38 - Chemical education

22:10 - Periodic table

27:01 - Best table?

30:20 - Helium

33:14 - Historical development

38:38 - Orbitals

40:08 - Chemical bonding

45:55 - Theoretical reduction

49:12 - Limitations of reduction

51:48 - Orbital filling

53:50 - Ontological reduction

54:52 - Ontological levels

58:56 - Ideal theory

1:00:24 - Prospects of reduction

1:01:44 - Other issues in philosophy of chemistry

1:04:52 - Laws

1:08:31 - Metaphysics

1:09:19 - History of chemistry

1:12:12 - Scientific revolution

1:15:30 - Value of philosophy

1:17:08 - Conclusion

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

Can we keep the predictive power of mathematics in science while refusing to believe in mathematical objects at all?

My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.

1. Guest

Mary Leng is a professor at the University of York, specializing in the philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of science.

2. Interview Summary

Mary Leng begins by laying out her ‘mathematical functionalist’ (or fictionalist-leaning) view: ordinary mathematical talk looks like it’s about objects—numbers, functions, real-valued magnitudes, infinitely many primes—but she thinks we shouldn’t automatically read that surface grammar as a commitment to a realm of abstract entities. In the interview’s opening framing (including her background in philosophy of mathematics and science and her book Mathematics and Reality), she contrasts this stance with more realist options like Platonism and with structuralist approaches that try to treat mathematics as “about” abstract structures rather than particular objects.

A central motivation, she says, is epistemic: the standard “negative characterization” of mathematical objects (not spatiotemporal, not causal, not mental, etc.) makes it hard to give any satisfying story about how we could know truths about them—yet mathematical knowledge is supposed to be among our most secure. So her proposal is to rethink what we’re doing when we do mathematics: instead of aiming at literal truths about abstract objects, we speak as if there are such objects and investigate what would be the case if there were. Along the way she presses familiar trouble for robust Platonism—like “embarrassment of riches” (many distinct set-theoretic reductions can equally play the natural-number role), and the way working mathematicians tend to be relaxed about identity conditions (they don’t worry whether “2” is this set or that set so long as the axioms are satisfied). She also locates herself on the “revolutionary” side of the revolutionary/hermeneutic divide: even if mathematicians often proceed as if they’re talking about objects, that doesn’t settle what the best philosophical interpretation or reform should be.

In the later part of the conversation, the focus shifts to science: why mathematical language is so effective, and whether that effectiveness supports realism about mathematical objects. Leng argues that much of mathematics’ role in empirical theory is representational—letting us index and describe patterns in concrete reality—so it’s not surprising that scientific practice could keep working even if there were no mathematical objects “behind” the discourse. That thought underwrites her resistance to “no-miracles”-style arguments for mathematical entities (including a recurring thought experiment about mathematical objects “popping in and out of existence” without affecting successful science). She does grant that mathematics sometimes seems explanatory, and discusses examples meant to push that point (like prime-number life cycles in cicadas), but she maintains that the best lesson is structural: the explanation can run via the way concrete systems instantiate patterns to which theorems apply, without requiring numbers themselves to be causally or ontologically doing explanatory work.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:32 - Mathematical fictionalism

09:03 - Characterizing platonism

13:42 - Revolutionary vs. hermeneutic

17:13 - Empirical semantics

22:06 - Ontological commitment

27:58 - Thick and thin discourse

34:46 - Thin objects

42:36 - Progress

49:46 - Chess example

52:42 - Benacerraf

55:03 - Structuralism

59:44 - Are structures objects?

1:03:10 - Irrelevance of abstracta?

1:09:43 - Acausal but not independent?

1:16:03 - No miracles argument

1:22:06 - Making a difference

1:31:33 - Explanation without truth

1:34:38 - Value of philosophy

1:38:48 - Conclusion

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe