Huw Price

I once stood staring at a map in a large US airport, looking for an ATM. Next to me a couple also stared at the map, trying to figure out where in the airport they were. “Sheesh!” said the male at last, pointing to the red dot and the words ‘You are here’ in the key beside the map: “We’re way over here, right off the map!” Jenann Ismael’s understanding of red dots lies very much at the other extreme, but self-location – the task that couple were engaged in, however haplessly – is the unifying theme of The Situated Self. In Ismael’s hands, it is a thread that turns out to tie together a remarkable range of topics. Imagine being taken on a tour of your own home town, weaving in and out through various neighbourhoods, familiar and less so, and ducking between them via surprising paths and shortcuts. (“This next to that? Who knew!”) The Situated Self is that kind of book – an exhilarating and often demanding excursion, startling in its breadth and the ways it relates seemingly unconnected topics. Although the route of Ismael's tour is often highly original, the vehicle itself has a familiar shape, at least in outline. Ismael builds a chassis to specifications due especially to John Perry, fits it out to her own requirements, and then shows us where it can take us. Mostly, I found the excursion convincing, as well as fascinating. In what follows, I shall take up one case in which I was not convinced, and then raise an issue about another destination – somewhere in the same vicinity, apparently – and ask whether Ismael’s bus takes us there, too. First, though, to the fundamentals, as Ismael develops them

It is often objected that the Everett interpretation of QM cannot make sense of quantum probabilities, in one or both of two ways: either it can’t make sense of probability at all, or it can’t explain why probability should be governed by the Born rule. David Deutsch has attempted to meet these objections. He argues not only that rational decision under uncertainty makes sense in the Everett interpretation, but also that under reasonable assumptions, the credences of a rational agent in an Everett world should be constrained by the Born rule. David Wallace has developed and defended Deutsch’s proposal, and greatly clarified its conceptual basis. In particular, he has stressed its reliance on the distinguishing symmetry of the Everett view, viz., that all possible outcomes of a quantum measurement are treated as equally real. The argument thus tries to make a virtue of what has usually been seen as the main obstacle to making sense of probability in the Everett world. In this note I outline some objections to the Deutsch-Wallace argument, and to related proposals by Hilary Greaves about the epistemology of Everettian QM. (In the latter case, my arguments include an appeal to an Everettian analogue of the Sleeping Beauty problem.) The common thread to these objections is that the symmetry in question remains a very significant obstacle to making sense of probability in the Everett interpretation.

It has been suggested that some of the puzzles of QM are resolved if we allow that there is retrocausality in the quantum world. In particular, it has been claimed that this approach offers a path to a Lorentz-invariant explanation of Bell correlations, and other manifestations of quantum "nonlocality", without action-at-a-distance. Some writers have suggested that this proposal can be supported by an appeal to time-symmetry, claiming that if QM were made "more time-symmetric", retrocausality would be a natural consequence. Critics object that there is complete time-symmetry in classical physics, and yet no apparent retrocausality. Why should QM be any different? In this note I call attention to a respect in which QM is different, under some assumptions about quantum ontology. Under these assumptions, the option of time-symmetry without retrocausality is not available in QM, for reasons intimately connected with the fundamental differences between classical and quantum physics (especially the role of discreteness in the latter).

In the opening line of his essay ‘On Truth’, Francis Bacon ticks off Pontius Pilate for not giving the subject its due time and gravity—‘“What is truth?”, said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.’ If Pilate had stayed for an answer, he would have been waiting a long time—four centuries after Bacon, and twenty after Christ, the jury is still out. But things do seem to have been moving along quite nicely, this past century or so; and as Pilate might note with satisfaction, he himself has been getting a better press. Perhaps Nietzsche’s extravagant compliment was a mixed blessing: Nietzsche declared (‘as offensively as possible’, as Will Durant [1929: 25] put it) that..

One of the outstanding achievements of recent cosmology has been to offer some prospect of a unified explanation of temporal asymmetry. The explanation is in two main parts, and runs something like this. First, the various asymmetries we observe are all thermodynamic in origin – all products of the fact that we live in an epoch in which the universe is far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Second, this thermodynamic disequilibrium is associated with the condition of the universe very soon after the Big Bang – the essential point being that in the rapidly expanding universe of the time, gravity is able to create organisation much faster than other processes can destroy it. The stars, galaxies and other forms of organisation we find in the present universe are all products of this early period. Such concentrated energy sources themselves make possible the kinds of asymmetric phenomena with which we are most familiar, such as life itself. If this explanation proves to be right it will surely rank as one of the most impressive achievements in the whole of natural philosophy. Where else do we find this breathtaking scale, this extraordinary conjunction of fundamental physics, the first moments of Creation, the possibility of life and the basic character of human experience? And it is very much a contemporary achievement: even if its roots go back on one side to the investigation of time asymmetry in nineteenth century statistical mechanics, and on the other to Hubble's discovery in the 1920's of the expansion of the universe, the body of the picture has only begun to be filled in in the last twenty or thirty years. This fascinating story has recently been given some well-deserved publicity in Stephen Hawking's bestseller, A Brief History of Time – well-deserved, not least, because Hawking himself is responsible for a considerable part of the story as it presently stands

Lecture I begins with a distinction between two themes in philosophical naturalism. The first theme takes science to be our best guide to what there is, the second takes it to be our best guide to the nature of our own thought and talk. Thus the first theme ('object naturalism') motivates a scientifically-constrained metaphysics, while the second ('subject naturalism') motivates a scientifically-constrained philosophy of language and philosophical psychology. The lecture discusses a sense in which these two themes may conflict: in particular, a sense in which subject naturalism may undermine a presupposition of object naturalism. The presupposition in question is the assumption that belief, judgement and assertion are 'referential', or 'representational', in some theoretically robust sense. In showing that this assumption is itself open to naturalistic challenge, the lecture identifies a little-recognised vulnerability in popular forms of (object) naturalism. The remaining lectures aim to show, first, what conception(s) of representation might replace the assumption in question; and second, what the project of philosophical naturalism looks like, in the light of these changes. Lecture II begins with the so-called bifurcation thesis -- the view that speech acts into descriptive and non-descriptive categories. The lecture advocates a different bifurcation, between two notions of representation: an 'external', world-tracking notion, and an 'internal', inferentialist notion. I argue that traditional representationalism confuses these notions. Lecture III outlines a conception of the project of naturalistic philosophy, in the light of this new bifurcation thesis. The recognition that not all representations in the inferential sense need be representation in the world-tracking sense permits a new pluralism within the former class: a pluralism about the functions of representation (in the former sense) in the lives of natural creatures in a natural environment. I emphasise that this kind of pluralism is orthogonal to familiar programs for pluralism in the philosophy of science. It involves a new dimension of variability, that conventional representationalism simply hides from view.

Bertrand Russell’s celebrated essay “On the Notion of Cause” was first delivered to the Aristotelian Society on 4 November 1912, as Russell’s Presidential Address. The piece is best known for a passage in which its author deftly positions himself between the traditional metaphysics of causation and the British crown, firing broadsides in both directions: “The law of causality”, Russell declares, “Like much that passes muster in philosophy, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm.” To mark the lecture’s centenary, I offer a contemporary view of the issues Russell here puts on the table, and of the health or otherwise, at the end of the essay’s first century, of his notorious conclusion.

In the first chapter of From Metaphysics to Ethics, Frank Jackson begins, as he puts it, ‘by explaining how serious metaphysics by its very nature raises the location problem.’ (1998, p. 1) He gives us two examples of location problems. The first concerns semantic properties, such as truth and reference: Some physical structures are true. For example, if I were to utter a token of the type ‘Grass is green’, the structure I would thereby bring into existence would be true ... How are the semantic properties of the sentence related to the non-semantic properties of the sentence? Where, if anywhere, are the semantic properties of truth, content and reference to be found in the non-semantic, physical or naturalistic account of the sentence?’ (1998, p. 2) Jackson notes two possible answers to questions of this kind. The first denies that there are any such semantic properties.

Physics takes for granted that interacting physical systems with no common history are independent, before their interaction. This principle is time-asymmetric, for no such restriction applies to systems with no common future, after an interaction. The time-asymmetry is normally attributed to boundary conditions. I argue that there are two distinct independence principles of this kind at work in contemporary physics, one of which cannot be attributed to boundary conditions, and therefore conflicts with the assumed T (or CPT) symmetry of microphysics. I note that this may have interesting ramifications in quantum mechanics.

Like coastal cities in the third millennium, important areas of human discourse seem threatened by the rise of modern science. The problem isn't new, of course, or wholly unwelcome. The tide of naturalism has been rising since the seventeenth century, and the rise owes more to clarity than to pollution in the intellectual atmosphere. All the same, the regions under threat are some of the most central in human life--the four Ms, for example: Morality, Modality, Meaning and the Mental. Some of the key issues in contemporary metaphysics concern the place and fate of such concepts in a naturalistic world view.

The status and respectability of alethic modality was always a point of contention and divergence between naturalism and empiricism. It poses no problems in principle for naturalism, since modal vocabulary is an integral part of all the candidate naturalistic base vocabularies. Fundamental physics is above all a language of laws; the special sciences distinguish between true and false counterfactual claims; and ordinary empirical talk is richly dispositional. By contrast, modality has been a stumbling-block for the empiricist tradition ever since Hume forcefully formulated his epistemological and ultimately semantic objections to the concepts of law and necessary connection. (, Lecture , §).

Wittgenstein is often thought to have challenged the view that assertion is an important theoretical category in a philosophical view of language. One of Wittgenstein’s main themes in the early sections of the Investigations is that philosophy misses important distinctions about the uses of language, distinctions hidden from us by ‘the uniform appearances of words.’ (1968, #11) As Wittgenstein goes on to say: It is like looking into the cabin of a locomotive. We see handles all looking more or less alike. (Naturally, since they are all supposed to be handled.) But one is the handle of a crank which can be moved continuously (it regulates the opening of a valve); another is the handle of a switch, which has only two effective positions, it is either off or on; a third is the handle of a brake-lever, the harder one pulls on it, the harder it brakes; a fourth, the handle of a pump: it has an effect only so long as it is moved to and fro. (1968, #12) Few contemporary philosophers share Wittgenstein’s evident familiarity with cabin of a steam locomotive, and in general, most of us are increasingly remote from all but the most superficial understanding of the underlying functions of the tools on which we rely. So we are perhaps even more prone to the mistake that Wittgenstein thinks that philosophy makes with respect to language, that of regarding it as one tool rather than many: ‘Think of the tools in a tool-box: there is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a screw-driver, a rule, a glue-pot, glue, nails and screws.—The functions of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects.’1 (1968, #11)

This paper suggests a novel reinterpretation of the mathematical core of Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory, and hence a new route to the conclusion that the temporal asymmetry of classical electromagnetic radiation has the same origin as that of thermodynamics. The argument begins (Sec. 2) with a careful analysis of what the apparent asymmetry of radiation actually involves. Two major flaws in the standard version of the Wheeler-Feynman treatment of radiative asymmetry are then identified (Secs. 4–5), and the proposed reinterpretation is described (Sec. 6). This avoids the two flaws previously mentioned, and also the problematic dependence of radiation on cosmological structure

A number of writers have been attracted to the idea that some of the peculiarities of quantum theory might be manifestations of 'backward' or 'retro' causality, underlying the quantum description. This idea has been explored in the literature in two main ways: firstly in a variety of explicit models of quantum systems, and secondly at a conceptual level. This note introduces a third approach, intended to complement the other two. It describes a simple toy model, which, under a natural interpretation, shows how retrocausality can emerge from simple global constraints. The model is also useful in permitting a clear distinction between the kind of retrocausality likely to be of interest in QM, and a different kind of reverse causality, with which it is liable to be confused. The model is proposed in the hope that future elaborations might throw light on the potential of retrocausality to account for quantum phenomena.