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Recovering philosopher here. > Philosophical arguments about objects in “reality” having a certain metaphysical essence are somewhat dubious. Does wood really

by davnola 16y ago

Recovering philosopher here. > Philosophical arguments about objects in “reality” having a certain metaphysical essence are somewhat dubious. Does wood really have a wood-ness? (No, but certain types of wood have certain properties, especially when examined through human instruments.) I don't think anyone right now (in anglophone analytical philosophy) conflates predication with identity. But there is an interesting and far-reaching debate about so-called natural kinds (typically water, gold etc.). In fact a widespread view is that, after Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam, water does indeed have an essential wateriness beyond its surface characteristics. This has interesting consequences in philosophy of language and philosophy of mind (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/natural-kinds http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/natural-kinds). > Do I really have a fundamental me-ness? (No, my behavior and personalities are situation-dependent and have little to do with Zachary Burt the human being.) I've never met you, but I'm sure that your behaviour and personality has _something_ to do with you the human-being. Doesn't your body behave?! You may also be interested to know that many people have very different intuitions from yours. One in particular from John Perry, is roughly that first-person indexicals cannot be parsed out in terms of other descrptions (the essential indexical). > Indeed, any description of something has to be argued in such a way that it can be understood or articulated through the faculties of the Homo sapiens. In what way are descriptions argued?

ThomPete 16y ago
"But there is an interesting and far-reaching debate about so-called natural kinds (typically water, gold etc.). In fact a widespread view is that, after Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam, water does indeed have an essential wateriness beyond its surface characteristics. This has interesting consequences in philosophy of language and philosophy of mind " I have a hard time understanding what this characteristic would be that isn't emerging from our interpretation of reality rather than reality as such. Or am I missing something?
- davnola 16y ago
  I don't know, maybe you're having a deep insight! Roughly speaking, the idea is that water in our universe is essentially H2O. The intuition is that if we went to another universe where there was watery stuff that duck-typed as water but had underlying composition XYZ, it would not be water. Doesn't sound too controversial, but has interesting implications (e.g. it's an a posteriori necessity!). And there's also some interesting and powerful explications of "our universe" and "another universe" to do with the nature of counterfactuals. For an alternative take, see Dupré, John. (1995). The Disorder of Things. Harvard University Press. Introduces the delightful notion of "promiscuous realism"!
  - ThomPete 16y ago
    But water is simply interpretation of phenomena in a specific context. Even on a compositional level. H2o have more fundamental properties, that again themselves are interpretations. Unless you find out a way to be certain about your fundamentals. And that I am not sure you can.

by davnola 16y ago

ThomPete 16y ago

"But there is an interesting and far-reaching debate about so-called natural kinds (typically water, gold etc.). In fact a widespread view is that, after Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam, water does indeed have an essential wateriness beyond its surface characteristics. This has interesting consequences in philosophy of language and philosophy of mind " I have a hard time understanding what this characteristic would be that isn't emerging from our interpretation of reality rather than reality as such. Or am I missing something?

davnola 16y ago
I don't know, maybe you're having a deep insight! Roughly speaking, the idea is that water in our universe is essentially H2O. The intuition is that if we went to another universe where there was watery stuff that duck-typed as water but had underlying composition XYZ, it would not be water. Doesn't sound too controversial, but has interesting implications (e.g. it's an a posteriori necessity!). And there's also some interesting and powerful explications of "our universe" and "another universe" to do with the nature of counterfactuals. For an alternative take, see Dupré, John. (1995). The Disorder of Things. Harvard University Press. Introduces the delightful notion of "promiscuous realism"!
- ThomPete 16y ago
  But water is simply interpretation of phenomena in a specific context. Even on a compositional level. H2o have more fundamental properties, that again themselves are interpretations. Unless you find out a way to be certain about your fundamentals. And that I am not sure you can.