Friction

Can quantum “spookiness” be explained without nonlocal action if we take seriously the idea that later measurement choices can constrain earlier physical states?

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

1. Guest

Huw Price is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Bonn and an Emeritus Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. His work has covered a wide range of topics, including metaphysics, physics and time, causation, probability, decision, language, and more.

2. Interview Summary

Huw Price’s conversation ranges across the foundations of quantum theory, the nature of causation, and a broadly pragmatist stance toward metaphysics. He lays out the familiar problem: Bell-type correlations tempt us toward “spooky” nonlocal influence, but if we allow a correlation between measurement settings and underlying variables, two broad strategies open up. One is a common-cause story often labeled “superdeterminism”; the other is a genuinely retrocausal or “input-dependent” approach, where later measurement choices influence earlier physical states, so the apparent nonlocality can be replaced by a “zigzag” influence that stays within light cones. Price argues this is attractive partly because it can preserve relativity by avoiding spacelike action and privileged frames, even if it still feels counterintuitive in a “temporal nonlocality” sense.

From there, Price connects retrocausality to a more general point about what we should demand from “causation.” He notes that some philosophers treat forward-directedness as definitional, but he emphasizes that causation’s link to rational agency (means–ends reasoning) is at least as central, and he invokes Michael Dummett’s discussion of whether it even makes sense to deliberate “for the sake of” the past. Dummett’s idea of “quasi-causation” (a deliberately loosened notion) becomes a template for how retrocausality might be intelligible without forcing a terminological fight over the word “cause.” He also ties this to decision-theoretic themes, using simple cases to illustrate how an agent’s deliberative standpoint partitions the world into what’s held fixed versus what’s treated as choice-sensitive, a partition that usually tracks past versus future but need not do so in exotic setups.

On the metaphilosophical side, Price frames his “neo-pragmatist / expressivist” approach as shifting attention from metaphysical structure to the role our concepts play for creatures like us: for causation, the illuminating questions are psychological/functional (“why do we think this way?”) rather than ontological (“what is the relation?”). He’s especially skeptical about familiar “heavy-duty” metaphysical disputes, suggesting that questions like whether tables are “really” collections of particles, or whether ordinary objects are spacetime-extended worms versus wholly present at instants, often lack an interesting fact of the matter and can dissolve into interchangeable frameworks. He then criticizes a two-stage “Canberra/Cambridge Plan”-style methodology (Ramsey-sentence first, then hunt for realizers) on the grounds that it leans on robust semantic notions like reference, truthmaking, and coreference in ways that risk indeterminacy or circularity for a naturalist. He closes by defending philosophy’s value as a transferable toolkit of careful distinctions and conceptual scrutiny, especially at the foundations of other disciplines like physics, alongside its broader normative and social contributions.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:45 - Quantum mechanics and retrocausality

08:02 - Still spooky?

11:48 - Superdeterminism

13:52 - Causation

24:22 - Decision and causation

27:39 - Deliberating over the past

33:25 - EDT and the past

37:27 - Retrocausality and free will

40:07 - Pragmatism

46:07 - Metaphysical questions

51:41 - Modern metaphysics

56:03 - Value of philosophy

58:59 - Conclusion

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What if the biggest mistakes in debates about gender come from treating “gender identity” as one unified thing, instead of a cluster of different feelings, traits, and social norms that can come apart?

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

1. Guest

Ray Briggs is professor of philosophy at Stanford University, and their work has focused on a range of topics, including chance and decision theory, epistemology, ethics, and gender. This interview was recorded with audio only.

Check out their book with B. R. George, "What Even is Gender?"!

https://www.routledge.com/p/book/9780367513214

2. Book Summary

In What Even Is Gender?, Ray Briggs and B. R. George argue that the familiar question “what is gender?” invites confusion, because there isn’t one thing that answers to the name “gender” (or “gender identity”). Instead, mainstream discourse (including lots of well-meaning “trans 101” framings) tends to conflate a cluster of distinct social, material, and psychological phenomena—conflations that can make trans and gender-nonconforming lives unintelligible and can smuggle in hidden assumptions about what trans legitimacy is supposed to require. The book’s project is therefore largely conceptual: to diagnose where our ordinary talk goes wrong and to engineer a clearer alternative framework that can better represent the variety of lived experience and the political demands of trans liberation.

Chapters 2 and 3 build the book’s core “map” of what the authors call the ‘sex/gender system’. Chapter 2 replaces the overly unified notion of ‘gender identity’ with a more fine-grained account in terms of ‘gender feels’: self-situating attitudes toward different gendered traits, organized (for their purposes) into sexed biology, gendered behavior, and gender categories. This helps explain why different subjective “feels” can come apart (and why lumping them together causes practical and political misunderstandings). Chapter 3 then shifts from subjective attitudes to public structure, distinguishing different kinds of social norms that link categories, biology, and behavior; it treats many of these norms as obvious targets of feminist and queer critique, while warning that some “abolitionist” rhetoric slides illicitly from opposing oppressive norms to condemning the categories or behaviors the norms are about.

Chapters 4 and 5 turn from diagnosis to guidance: Chapter 4 argues that we should treat people’s self-reports of ‘gender feels’ as deserving default trust—presuming sincerity, competence, coherence, and moral respect—unless we have specific reasons to depart from those defaults, and it critiques common patterns of dismissing trans subjectivity. Chapter 5 defends a political principle of ‘gender self-determination’: in general, we should categorize people according to their sincerely expressed wishes rather than outsiders’ projections, and this requires treating gender categories as irreducible (not settled by biology, behavior, or the norms society imposes), without that irreducibility collapsing into circularity or mysticism. The conclusion frames many recurring confusions as a kind of “essentialism” that mistakes contingent links (between traits, norms, and feels) for constitutive necessities; the authors urge “less essentialism, more imagination,” emphasizing both the real variety already present in human lives and our collective power to change gender norms and the rules by which category membership gets socially administered.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:44 - Target audience

02:23 - Descriptive vs. prescriptive

06:23 - History and cross-cultural comparison

12:48 - Idealizing gender

15:00 - Gender as a single thing?

19:07 - Gender traits and feels

26:30 - Gender identity

31:34 - Vagueness of gender language

33:17 - Developing categories

35:55 - Second-order gender feels

38:26 - Gender norms

41:24 - Feels and norms

43:14 - Abolitionism

53:53 - Semantic trade-offs

56:15 - Another case for abolitionism

59:45 - Too many categories?

1:03:39 - Self-determination

1:05:14 - Circular?

1:10:22 - Reductive definitions

1:11:35 - Uninformative account?

1:16:11 - My general descriptive view

1:24:38 - Term haggling

1:26:02 - How this might help trans people

1:27:24 - Value of philosophy

1:29:44 - Conclusion

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Can mathematics be indispensable to science without forcing us to believe in a realm of abstract objects?

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

1. Guest

Michael Resnik is Professor Emeritus at UNC Chapel Hill, and his work has focused on the philosophy of mathematics, logic, decision theory, and more.

2. Interview Summary

Michael Resnik begins by discussing the indispensability strategy associated with W. V. Quine and developed in an influential way by Hilary Putnam: if our best scientific theorizing essentially uses mathematics, then (given standard views about truth and ontological commitment) we end up committed to mathematical objects. Resnik emphasizes a practical, discourse-focused version of the point: to use the mathematics in scientific (and scientific-adjacent) reasoning, we typically have to assert mathematical claims, and that assertion is what drives commitment—even in idealized modeling or in theories we suspect are literally false. He illustrates this with a simple geometrical case about comparing travel routes (New York → Pittsburgh → DC vs. New York → DC): once you model cities as points and appeal to a theorem about triangles, you’ve already imported mathematical structure and quantification over geometrical entities.

From there, the interview turns to structuralism and why Resnik has moved toward a non-ontological form of it. Structuralism, on his view, is best treated as a guiding slogan—mathematics studies patterns/structures, and mathematical “objects” (like numbers) don’t have any identity beyond their place in a structure. He sketches several ways philosophers have tried to make that slogan precise, ranging from set-theoretic reductions to views that locate structural instantiation in the physical world, and then to more explicit “positions-in-structures” accounts (e.g., Stewart Shapiro) and modal structuralism (e.g., Geoffrey Hellman). What pushes him away from settling on a single ontology is his appeal to ontological relativity, underwritten by what he calls the “same size theorem”: roughly, if a theory has a model at all, it can be reinterpreted with a model in any domain of the same cardinality—so the most we can robustly preserve across reinterpretations is structure, not a unique answer to “what the objects really are.”

In the final portion, Resnik pivots to logic and defends a comparably deflationary stance: logic has a descriptive side (studying validity relations in a mathematically precise way) but its normative side—talk about what we ought to infer or what counts as a good argument—shouldn’t be conflated with psychology, and may be closer in spirit to something like “applied ethics.” He then distinguishes ordinary acceptance of particular logical claims from logical realism about “logical truth” as an objective, practice-independent status; his “logical anti-realism” denies that further realist step, and he’s open to a kind of logical non-cognitivism on which some familiar logical utterances function more as tools for regulating inferential practice than as straightforward fact-stating claims. He closes with a meta-philosophical note: philosophy matters (and philosophy of math in particular) because it trains clarity about abstract, often-vague questions—even when the “final” metaphysical picture remains elusive.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:54 - Indispensability arguments

10:22 - Against Quine

12:10 - Indispensability and scientific anti-realism

14:49 - Balaguer and denying the truth of theories

19:34 - A world without mathematical entities

22:50 - Folk discourse

30:41 - Structuralism

43:01 - Structuralism and ontological relativity

44:21 - Same size theorem

50:05 - Changes to view

51:51 - What are structures?

54:14 - Foundations

56:30 - Realism and structuralism

1:01:17 - What structures are there?

1:05:21 - Epistemic concern

1:09:35 - Logic as normative/descriptive

1:20:05 - Logical anti-realism

1:26:42 - Logical non-cognitivism

1:30:21 - Motivation for view

1:31:49 - Necessity of mathematics

1:34:04 - Value of philosophy

1:36:05 - Conclusion

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What does it mean for something to be “true in a fiction,” and why might even the category of “art” be a historically contingent way of organizing aesthetic practices?

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

1. Guest

Kendall Walton is Emeritus Charles Stevenson Collegiate Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Art and Design at the University of Michigan. His work has focused on the philosophy of art, as well as other issues in the philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and language.

2. Interview Summary

Kendall Walton lays out his core idea about “truth in fiction”: roughly, a proposition is fictional in a given context when it is to be imagined (in a normative, “prescribed” sense) as part of properly engaging with that work or practice. He emphasizes that “fictional worlds” aren’t limited to novels and films: they can arise in fleeting, ordinary social moments wherever there are local prescriptions about what to imagine—like people lying in a meadow informally “adopting” a rule about whether a cloud counts as a bear or an elephant. Walton also downplays the importance of drawing a sharp boundary between works of fiction and nonfiction (since many cultures or contexts may not treat that as central), while insisting that it often does matter which propositions are true-in-the-fiction. When the interviewer asks about “pretense” theories, Walton is broadly sympathetic but prefers “imagination” because it covers passive cases (e.g., simply looking at a picture) as well as more active, game-like pretending; he also admits we still lack a fully general account of what imagining is.

A big part of the discussion is about pressure points for simple tests like “to be imagined = fictional.” Walton highlights how background knowledge helps generate many implicit fictional truths via something like a “reality principle” (e.g., if a story presents someone as a normal human, then—should the question arise—lots of ordinary facts about humans come along for free), while still allowing that these truths differ radically in importance to the work. At the same time, he stresses that a work can mandate imaginings that are not true in the relevant fictional world: for instance, to interpret an embedded picture inside a painting (his Vermeer/Cupid example), viewers may have to imagine Cupid even though (strictly speaking) the larger painting only makes it fictional that there is a picture of Cupid. Similarly, one might have to imagine something odd (like a “golf ball nose”) to see what’s being depicted or pointed out, even though that proposition isn’t true “in the picture as a whole.” Walton’s solution is to distinguish different clusters or nested fictional worlds—separating what’s true in the primary fiction from what’s required to grasp an internal representation or a local interpretive task.

The interview then turns to aesthetics and the concept of art. Walton argues that aesthetics lacks a single “grand basic question” in the way ethics is often organized around “How should we live?”, and he describes recent aesthetics as an intellectually rich but somewhat ununified “hodgepodge” of topics. He adds a historical diagnosis: the Western category of “fine art” as a single unified genus is relatively late (he cites Oscar Kristeller’s claim that it emerges around 1750), which helps explain why theorists’ competing “definitions of art” can feel disconnected or like people are talking past each other. Even if the question “What is art?” mattered enormously in some settings (like the 1960s/70s New York avant-garde), Walton thinks it can be beside the point for understanding many other practices (e.g., Greek sculpture or Javanese gamelan), where you can study what the works do and how they matter without forcing them under a modern category. Methodologically, this ties into his sympathy for a kind of conceptual engineering: once we have the “data” of our practices and reactions, philosophy can aim to organize it more perspicuously—sometimes by revising or inventing concepts—rather than assuming the folk extension of “art” sets the target and then hunting for strict necessary-and-sufficient conditions.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:49 - Fiction

08:28 - Fiction and vagueness

10:50 - Pretense theory

12:48 - Imagining

18:59 - Fictions in fiction

22:01 - Resolving problems

23:59 - Broadest world

29:26 - Bizarre fictions

31:50 - Norms of fiction

38:09 - Another issue

40:18 - Reality principle

43:15 - Varying norms

45:52 - Aesthetics

51:18 - What is art?

55:42 - Is the dispute substantive?

59:50 - Empirical psychology

1:03:56 - Representation

1:05:56 - Folk concepts

1:12:32 - Conceptual engineering

1:16:29 - Relevance to art

1:19:11 - Dispensing with “art”?

1:23:24 - Value theory

1:26:17 - Empathy

1:32:06 - Empathy by negation

1:36:07 - Value of philosophy

1:38:36 - Conclusion

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How should philosophers understand “information” in the digital age, and can thinking of ourselves as informational organisms reshape ethics, privacy, and the self?

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

1. Guest

Luciano Floridi is John K. Castle Professor in the Practice of Cognitive Science and Founding Director of the Digital Ethics Center at Yale University.

2. Interview Summary

Floridi argues that a philosophy of information became unavoidable once “information” stopped being merely a silent tool philosophers used in the background and instead became a central object of inquiry in its own right—especially under the pressure of the digital/information revolution. He also emphasizes that philosophy shouldn’t be a purely descriptive exercise: it should help us make a difference in how we live and organize society (invoking Socrates as a model of philosophy with public stakes). To make sense of that ambition, he frames philosophy as an inescapable blend of model (how things are) and blueprint (how they should be), and he characterizes good theorizing as “conceptual design”: not just analyzing problems, but designing solutions under constraints—like designing different kinds of chairs for different purposes.

A big chunk of the interview then clarifies what “information” even is. Floridi distinguishes the quantitative, engineering-oriented notion associated with Claude Shannon from richer notions that involve meaning: Shannon-style information can measure how many yes/no “answers to questions” a channel can carry, but by itself it doesn’t tell you what is being said or why it matters. From there he pushes a taxonomy that helps prevent people from talking past each other: we may mean information about the world (e.g., timetables), information in the world (signals embodied in physical systems), or information for the world (instructions/affordances for agents). And when the topic is semantic information about the world, he defends a truth requirement: well-formed, meaningful data that’s false is better classified as misinformation/disinformation—he illustrates this with the absurdity of a doctor “answering” a diagnosis by coin-flip. He also stresses that everyday looseness about words is fine, but philosophy/science need sharper distinctions.

Finally, Floridi connects information to the self and to privacy. From an explicitly Immanuel Kant-inspired angle, he treats “what we are” talk as less helpful than asking how we should model ourselves given our epistemic situation and current historical conditions; today, he suggests, the most fruitful model is of humans as informational organisms. That shift dovetails with thinking in terms of networks rather than mechanisms: nodes don’t come first and then get linked—rather, nodes (including selves) emerge from patterns of relations. This, he says, reframes privacy away from a simple ownership/economics picture (“my data is my property”) and toward protecting the informational profile that partly constitutes personal identity and autonomy (e.g., against manipulation, coercion, or misuse). He closes with a direct call to philosophers—especially newcomers—to stop merely extending inherited frameworks and instead write the “new chapter” that the 21st century’s digital transformation demands.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

01:04 - What does “information” mean?

07:34 - Conceptual engineering

11:45 - Descriptive and prescriptive

12:30 - Philosophy as conceptual design

18:13 - Design vs. invention

21:39 - Shannon information and more

33:27 - Semantic information

37:43 - Information and the self

44:24 - Philosophy going forward

45:59 - Conclusion

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Can fiction tell us genuine truths about the world and ourselves, or does it mainly invite us into a kind of structured pretense that can mislead as easily as it can illuminate?

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

1. Guest

Manuel García-Carpintero is Professor of philosophy at the University of Barcelona. His work has focused on a variety of issues in and related to the philosophy of language, such as fiction, assertion, proper names, presuppositions, quotation, and more.

2. Interview Summary

Manuel García-Carpintero frames the interview around the classic Plato/Aristotle dispute about whether we can learn from fiction. He notes that ordinary audiences often treat fictions (especially “based on a true story” works) as conveying truths, and he uses examples like the biopic Rocketman and debates around the Chernobyl—including Masha Gessen’s piece in The New Yorker about the HBO series—to illustrate how viewers criticize “lies” even when something is openly fictionalized. He then draws a careful distinction between ‘truth in fiction’ (correctly stating what the story says) and the more contentious idea that fiction can communicate truths about the world or “the human condition” that go beyond the story’s explicit content. This is where the Plato/Aristotle contrast becomes vivid: Plato’s worry is that fiction can mislead, while Aristotle’s more optimistic line is that poetry can deliver more general, “philosophical” insight than history.

The conversation then turns to ‘pretense theory’, the idea that fiction-making involves speakers acting as if they are asserting things while not genuinely asserting them—illustrated with cases like J. K. Rowling writing about wizards. García-Carpintero agrees this picture captures something important and explains why it became a mainstream approach (with roots traced to figures like Margaret MacDonald and J. L. Austin). He also connects pretense to ‘immersion’: the psychological sense of being “present” in a fictional world can be modeled as going along with a kind of narrated pretense (he uses Dr. Watson-style narration in Sherlock Holmes stories to make the pull of this model intuitive). But he argues pretense can’t be the whole story: lots of everyday pretending isn’t fiction, and some fictions (including self-undermining or “postmodern” cases) make it clear that no one is straightforwardly “telling you” facts—so we need a more positive account of fiction-making as a representational activity, with pretense functioning as a common tool rather than the essence.

On the semantic side, he’s sympathetic to David Lewis’s possible-worlds framework as a modeling technique for the special discourse we use when we describe what a fiction says—without taking possible worlds to be “real”. Part of the attraction, he suggests, is that it pushes toward an abstract notion of content that can in principle be shared across languages and even across media (novel/film/theater), which helps make sense of adaptation and “faithfulness”. At the same time, he worries about Lewis-style implementations that effectively force a ubiquitous narrator/asserter into every fiction, and he discusses how principles for implicit content have to handle tricky phenomena like unreliable narrators—sometimes motivating probabilistic/conditional-probability ideas about what’s “taken for granted” in the story. Finally, on fictional entities and names, he pushes back on views that treat names like Emma Woodhouse as referring to abstract artifacts; instead, he treats the “artifact talk” (e.g., saying a character was created by Jane Austen) as derivative and emphasizes a presuppositional picture where names come with reference-fixing descriptive material—helping with “mixed” comparisons like Mickey Mouse vs. Nancy Pelosi, or liking Harry Potter more than Donald Trump, and with co-identification inside a fiction (Superman = Clark Kent).

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

01:17 - Importance of fiction

08:52 - Truth in fiction

13:37 - Pretense theory

26:52 - David Lewis’s view

38:37 - Issues with pretense theory

44:15 - Fictional entities

1:04:12 - Issue with Meinongianism

1:07:10 - Graham Priest’s view

1:18:12 - Another issue with Meinongianism

1:20:46 - Likelihood in fiction

1:39:04 - Reality principle

1:41:13 - Coreferring names

1:49:42 - Propositions

1:58:22 - Fiction as falsehoods

2:01:40 - Value of philosophy

2:12:11 - Conclusion

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What if the biggest threat to good decisions isn’t a lack of intelligence, but a lack of the right reasoning tools and habits to spot bad arguments, weigh evidence, and update our beliefs?

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

1. Guest

Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. His work has focused on language, cognition, social relations, and more.

Check out his book, "Rationality: What it is, Why is Seems Scarce, Why it Matters"!

https://a.co/d/02RdsyAT

2. Book Summary

In Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters, Steven Pinker argues that rationality should guide “everything we think and do,” especially in a moment when public life is awash in misinformation and shaky reasoning. The book is organized as a practical toolkit: after setting up the puzzle of how rational an animal we are, it walks through core “instruments of reason” (logic and critical thinking; probability; Bayesian updating; expected utility; signal detection; game theory; and correlation vs. causation), ending with chapters on what goes wrong and why rationality matters.

Pinker’s diagnosis of why rationality can look scarce is that we mistake it for a single mental “power,” when it’s really a set of tools that work well only when they’re learned, cued, and applied to the right kinds of problems. He also emphasizes modern “reasoning traps”: people can be impressively capable in real-world settings yet still fall for distortions amplified by today’s information ecosystem, where falsehoods spread easily and grab attention. And he thinks part of the confusion comes from mixing two “modes of believing”—a reality mindset aimed at truth and evidence, and a mythology mindset that treats some cherished ideas (religious or national narratives, for instance) as insulated from ordinary truth-testing.

Finally, Pinker’s case for why rationality matters is both urgent and concrete: we face large-scale threats (to health, democracy, and the planet) where solutions exist but persuading people to accept them is itself a rationality problem. The reasoning tools he surveys aren’t just classroom formalities; they’re meant to help us avoid personal and policy blunders by calibrating risk, evaluating claims, and making decisions under uncertainty. He also ties rationality to moral and social progress: historically, big improvements often begin with arguments that expose inconsistencies between what people already value and what they tolerate in practice—showing how “reasoners” are not just individual brains but members of communities that can revise norms when better arguments win out.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

01:04 - Rationality

03:43 - Instrumentalism

05:32 - Irrational goals

09:28 - Expected outcomes

12:15 - Rationality and morality

17:20 - General outlook

22:08 - Bayesian reasoning (audio improves here)

27:08 - Hume

28:16 - Priors

31:56 - Vagueness

35:37 - Expected utility

37:10 - Newcomb’s problem

41:07 - Decision theory

49:45 - Causation

53:47 - Higher-level causation

55:56 - Improving rationality

1:00:10 - Why does rationality matter?

1:04:22 - Conclusion

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Can formal semantics really explain meaning compositionally, or do intonation, context, and discourse do more of the work than we admit?

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

1. Guest

Barbara Partee is Distinguished University Professor Emerita of Linguistics and Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and her work has focused on formal semantics and language.

2. Interview Summary

Barbara Partee frames the interview around how to make the intuitive slogan of ‘compositionality’ precise: yes, sentence meaning depends on the meanings of parts and how they’re combined, but every term in that slogan (“meaning,” “part,” “combined,” “structure”) is theory-laden, so different formalizations yield different predictions. She illustrates how semantic considerations can adjudicate between syntactic analyses, using relative clauses: if “boy” and “who loves Mary” are both treated as predicates, composition can be simple set intersection—yielding “boy ∩ loves-Mary”—whereas building the definite “the boy” too early wrongly hardwires uniqueness and then can’t be “undone.” Along the way she credits insights from Richard Montague and notes parallels with W. V. O. Quine (including Quine’s Word and Object) about treating common nouns as predicates rather than names.

A major through-line is that many apparent counterexamples to ‘compositionality’ are really prompts to enrich what counts as “structure.” Partee points to intonation and focus as meaning-relevant (and often truth-condition- or presupposition-relevant): shifting stress in “John didn’t invite Mary to the party” changes what’s being denied, and similar effects show up with contrastive stress and “just anyone.” She also treats some constructions as having built-in “slots” that syntax doesn’t resolve, like genitives: “John’s team” contains an implicit relation variable (team John plays for/owns/writes about, etc.) that must be fixed pragmatically by context and shared expectations. This sets up her broader picture of semantics working in tandem with pragmatics and discourse—e.g., modeling how conversation updates a common ground, referencing work associated with Hans Kamp and Irene Heim on discourse and ‘context change’ perspectives.

In the latter part of the conversation she zooms out to what formal semantics has clarified over the decades: once you allow intermediate “open” structures (roughly, lambda-abstracts) rather than only closed sentences, quantification and scope phenomena stop looking like hacks and start looking systematic. She then uses anaphora puzzles—‘pronouns of laziness,’ donkey sentences, and the ‘paycheck’ pattern (traceable in the literature to Peter Geach and his Reference and Generality)—to show how natural language can require richer machinery than simple bound-variable models. Finally, she emphasizes both the strengths and limits of formal semantics: it excels at logical/structural effects (the kind that even large-scale statistical systems can miss, as in negation), but it can’t ignore lexical meaning entirely—illustrated by mass/count noun distinctions, cross-linguistic classifier strategies, and a lattice-based way of modeling why plurals and mass nouns pattern together.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:53 - Compositionality

08:11 - Idealization

13:50 - Relevance of idealizations

19:02 - Non-syntactic expression

24:43 - Genetives

28:41 - Pronouns of laziness

33:45 - Pragmatic pronouns

36:31 - Pragmatics

40:32 - Anaphoric and deictic

42:25 - Other sorts of pronouns

43:34 - Takeaways

47:35 - Progress in linguistics

59:14 - Time and tense

1:06:24 - Meaning

1:14:20 - Many and few

1:24:26 - Difficult puzzles

1:31:18 - Modal terms

1:33:30 - Value of linguistics

1:41:12 - Conclusion

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Is quantum mechanics a complete description of reality, or just a remarkably reliable calculation tool still waiting for a clear account of what actually exists?

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

1. Guest

Tim Maudlin is Professor of Philosophy at New York University, and his work has focused on the foundations of physics and science more generally, metaphysics, and logic.

2. Interview Summary

Maudlin argues that what physicists often teach as “quantum mechanics” is largely a predictive recipe—a mathematical procedure that outputs correct predictions but doesn’t yet tell you what the world is like. He illustrates this with familiar “electron orbital” diagrams: the same picture could be read as a smeared-out cloud, a long-exposure trace of a particle orbit, a kind of “bubbling” appearance, or even a composite over many atoms—yet the picture itself doesn’t settle which story is right. For Maudlin, that’s exactly the point: without an explicit ontology and dynamics, you don’t yet have a full physical theory, and “shut up and calculate” is (historically) a retreat from the earlier foundational demand—pressed by Albert Einstein and debated by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg—to say whether the wavefunction is complete.

A big chunk of the interview is spent clarifying what the wavefunction is supposed to represent. Maudlin stresses that the wavefunction is a mathematical object (a function), and the interpretive question is what physical reality—if any—it corresponds to. He sketches three broad options: it represents a real physical feature of an individual system, it encodes statistical features of ensembles, or it reflects an agent’s credences (as in quantum Bayesian approaches). On his view, the “quantum state” (whatever the wavefunction represents, if it represents anything physical) is unlike anything in classical physics, and it’s bound up with nonlocality: John Bell’s result is taken to show that the actual physics of the world cannot be causally local in Bell’s sense, so we should be prepared for genuinely novel kinds of physical structure.

From there, Maudlin frames the measurement problem as a forced choice: to avoid Schrödinger-cat-style “smeared” outcomes, you must deny at least one of three theses—(i) the wavefunction is complete, (ii) it always evolves linearly by Schrödinger evolution, or (iii) measurements have single definite outcomes. He’s especially skeptical of many-worlds programs that keep (i) and (ii) and then try to recover probabilities via decision theory; he treats this as the kind of “degenerating research program” Imre Lakatos warned about, and he’s unconvinced that bringing rational betting behavior into the story explains objective frequencies (as in work associated with Sean Carroll and David Wallace). By contrast, he presents pilot-wave theory (tracing Louis de Broglie and David Bohm) as a comparatively straightforward completion strategy—nonlocal, yes, but after Bell that becomes “a feature, not a bug”—and he also treats objective-collapse approaches as a clear alternative. He closes with a broadly Sellarsian point: properly understood, physics doesn’t (and can’t) just “undermine” the manifest image, because experimental evidence and ordinary descriptions remain indispensable to doing physics at all.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:40 - Quantum mechanics as a theory

07:00 - Shut up and calculate

11:02 - Wave-function realism

18:49 - What the wave-function represents

21:50 - Ontology

27:04 - Fields

32:20 - Probabilities

39:53 - Many-worlds

44:18 - Simplicity

47:00 - Recovering probabilities

50:49 - Preferred approach

55:08 - Pilot wave theory

1:04:23 - Manifest image

1:07:46 - Other ways of talking

1:13:29 - Scientific anti-realism

1:16:42 - Anti-realism and physics

1:20:28 - Modality

1:26:18 - Metaphysical possibility

1:31:30 - Essences

1:33:07 - Fundamentality

1:37:40 - Concepts

1:41:16 - Vagueness

1:49:59 - Making language precise

1:52:20 - Classical logic

1:53:04 - Value of philosophy

1:57:20 - Conclusion

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Can we actually solve philosophical disputes if we keep treating our inherited vocabulary as fixed, rather than asking how to redesign it to represent the world better?

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

1. Guest

Herman Cappelen is Chair Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hong Kong. His work has focused on a range of topics, including semantics, philosophy of mind, political philosophy, and artificial intelligence.

2. Book Summary

In Fixing Language, Herman Cappelen argues that a huge amount of philosophy (and plenty of non-philosophical inquiry) is best understood as ‘conceptual engineering’: the critical/constructive activity of assessing and improving our representational devices, rather than merely describing what our words currently mean. He frames this as an opposition between ‘representational complacency’ (taking inherited conceptual tools for granted) and ‘representational skepticism’ (treating it as a first-order intellectual task to ask whether our framing devices are defective and how to do better). The book’s opening parts map the terrain through a wide range of illustrations—explication in the Carnap/Quine tradition, Haslanger-style amelioration, revisionism about truth and morality, and more—then uses that map to motivate the need for a general framework rather than a pile of disconnected case-studies.

Cappelen’s positive proposal is what he calls the ‘Austerity Framework’, built around an externalist metasemantics. On this approach, any serious theory of conceptual engineering has to start with an account of how expressions get and change their semantic values, and Cappelen treats semantic change as broadly analogous to reference change. A striking upshot is that the usual mentalistic talk of “engineering concepts” is misleading: the framework doesn’t treat ‘concepts’ (as philosophers/psychologists standardly use that term) as the primary items being manipulated, and it predicts that the process is typically not under our control or even transparent to us, often remaining messy and inscrutable. He also uses this machinery to explain why philosophers are tempted by diagnoses of “incoherent” or “inconsistent” concepts while denying that such entities play the explanatory role they’re often assigned.

A major challenge for any revisionary project is how it can preserve continuity of inquiry rather than merely “changing the subject”—a worry Cappelen traces to Strawson’s objection to Carnapian explication and treats as a central constraint on engineering. His response leans heavily on ‘topic continuity’: the key question is when significant shifts in extension/intension still count (in context) as staying on the same topic, and he argues there’s no clean set of necessary and sufficient conditions here—more like an ongoing practice of contestation, negotiation, and genealogy than a tidy theory. He then contrasts his framework with alternatives that foreground ‘metalinguistic negotiation’ (debates about what words should mean) and with approaches that appeal to a term’s “function,” objecting that in many real disputes we care about torture (or freedom, etc.), not the fate of a particular English string, and that purportedly substantive “functions” often collapse into thin, disquotational ones. The concluding posture is deliberately revisionary and anti-foundational: Cappelen is skeptical of ‘bedrock’ concepts that can’t be engineered, urging instead the working hypothesis that “everything is in flux,” with no natural endpoint to conceptual engineering.

3. Interview Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

01:23 - Fixing language

06:18 - Conceptual engineering in history

08:38 - Descriptive and prescriptive traditions

11:31 - Motivations for conceptual engineering

14:58 - Concepts

20:38 - Semantic externalism

31:23 - Internalist rejoinder

35:17 - Meaning of meaning

40:39 - Lack of control

51:20 - Stipulating new uses

57:36 - Example

1:01:49 - Base and superstructure

1:06:42 - Meaning and use

1:16:27 - Limits of revision

1:23:38 - Relevance of conventions

1:27:59 - Issue with topic change

1:33:55 - Worldly effects

1:38:43 - Worry

1:43:51 - Upcoming books

1:48:37 - Value of philosophy

1:54:00 - 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