Huw Price

This piece builds a discussion of themes from Rorty, Davidson, and Ramberg on two pieces of mine from 1999. One piece is 'Location, location, location' (LLL), my AAP Presidential Address that year. The other is 'Truth as convenient friction' (TCF), written for a conference with Rorty at ANU, and later published in the Journal of Philosophy. LLL is previously unpublished, but is reproduced as Section 2 here, with minor modifications. Section 3 is then in three parts. §3.1 begins with an objection to my conclusions in LLL, based on Davidson’s remarks about externalism and triangulation. I don’t claim that Davidson would endorse this objection. On the contrary, it is clear that he would not—and partly for reasons that Ramberg emphasises, in criticising Rorty’s interpretation of Davidson. In §3.2 those reasons link to Rorty’s invocation of Davidson, in response to TCF. I argue that this move backfires for Rorty, supporting the main claim of TCF. I realised recently that in responding to Rorty on this point, I could have appealed to Bernard Williams’s (2002) characterization of ‘imaginary genealogy’. For this, Williams’s model is Edward Craig’s genealogy of the concept of knowledge (Craig, 1990). Yet, citing Davidson, Williams declines to seek what TCF claims to offer, a genealogy of truth itself. In §3.3 I argue that TCF thus has lessons for Williams and Davidson, as well as for Rorty.

This is a draft Introduction for a collection of seventeen of my previously-published essays. The collection is forthcoming from OUP, with the title Making Modals: Pragmatic Perspectives on Probability, Causation, and Decision. The Table of Contents included lists the original sources of the remaining pieces, with links to online copies. Five of the essays are co-authored, with Peter Menzies, Brad Weslake, and Yang Liu (x3). The last section of this chapter (§16) explains the way the remaining chapters are grouped in the volume, with notes on their contents.

In his influential book _Making Things Happen_ (2003) and elsewhere, James Woodward has noted some affinities between his own interventionist account of causation and the view defended by Peter Menzies and Huw Price in ‘Causation as a Secondary Quality’ (_British Journal for the Philosophy of Science_, 1993), but argued that the latter view is implausibly ‘subjective’. This chapter discusses Woodward’s criticisms. It argues (i) that the Menzies and Price view is not as different from Woodward’s own account as he believes; (ii) that insofar as it is different, it has some advantages whose importance Woodward misses; and (iii) that the Menzies and Price view lacks some elements whose importance Woodward rightly stresses. It also argues that when properly characterized, the ‘subjectivity’ of the Menzies and Price view survives unscathed—and that Woodward’s interventionism is stronger for embracing it.

Simon Blackburn’s expressivism is distinctive in two ways: first, his repeated insistence that Humean expressivism is not simply an option in the ethical case—it is attractive in many other domains, as well; second, his defense of the distinctive version of the expressivism that he calls ‘quasirealism’. This chapter considers a question at the intersection of these themes: does quasirealism have even wider application than Blackburn envisages? Should it be ‘globalized’, to a universal theory about declarative uses of language? The chapter argues that expressivism of the kind that Blackburn favours, or at any rate a variety of pragmatism recognizably descended from it, does have good claim to be a global view; but that this turns out to be compatible with a sympathetic reinterpretation of the intuitions that seemed to favour a more local view.

This chapter explores the location of John McDowell’s recipe for philosophical tranquility with respect to certain other positions in contemporary philosophy. It is argued that McDowell’s development of his quietism faces a dilemma. On the one hand, the way he distances himself from various other philosophical positions threatens to push him toward a position even more anti-theoretical than his own, a position from which distinctions McDowell himself wants to draw can’t be seen. To avoid this, however, McDowell must recognize the philosophical value of a ‘sideways’-on view of linguistic practice—albeit not a _metaphysical_ sideways-on view. The argument proceeds in part via a discussion of Sellars’ views.

Critics object that the Everett view cannot make sense of quantum probabilities, in one or both of two ways: either it cannot make sense of probability at all, or it cannot explain why probability should be governed by the Born rule. David Deutsch has attempted to meet these objections by appealing to an Everettian version of Savage's rational decision theory. Deutsch argues not only that an analogue of classical decision under uncertainty makes sense in an Everett world; but also that under reasonable assumptions, the betting odds of a rational Everettian agent should be constrained by the Born rule. Deutsch's proposal has been defended and developed by David Wallace, and in a different form by Hilary Greaves. This chapter offers some objections to the Deutsch–Wallace–Greaves argument, focussing in particular on the supposed analogy with classical decision under uncertainty.

One of the most public episodes of gatekeeping in modern science was the case of so-called ‘cold fusion’. At a news conference in 1989 the electrochemists Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons announced that they had found evidence of nuclear fusion in palladium electrodes loaded with deuterium. There was worldwide interest. Many groups sought to reproduce the results, most unsuccessfully. Within months, the prevailing view became strongly negative. The claims of Fleischmann and Pons came to be regarded as disreputable, as well as false. As the Caltech physicist David Goldstein put it, cold fusion became ‘a pariah field, cast out by the scientific establishment’ (Goldstein 1994). The case would already be interesting for students of gatekeeping if the story had ended at that point. Even more interestingly, however, the field survived and persisted. It has been enjoying a modest renaissance, with recent government funding both in the US and the EU. This piece offers an opinionated introduction to cold fusion as a case study of scientific gatekeeping, discussing both its early and recent history.

Making a Difference presents fifteen original essays on causation and counterfactuals by philosophers and political theorists. Collectively, they represent the state of the art on these topics. The essays in this volume are inspired by the work of the late Australian philosopher Peter Menzies (1953–2015), who himself made a very great difference to our contemporary understanding of these matters. Topics covered include: the semantics of counterfactuals, agency theories of causation, the context-sensitivity of causal claims, structural equation models, mechanisms, mental causation, the causal exclusion argument, and free will. Contributors: Helen Beebee, Thomas Blanchard, David Braddon-Mitchell, Rachael Briggs, Nancy Cartwright, Christopher Hitchcock, Christian List, Cei Maslen, Peter Menzies, Daniel Nolan, Philip Pettit, Huw Price, Jonathan Schaffer, Brad Weslake, James Woodward.

Responding to Lewis’s (1976) defense of the consistency of time travel (TT), Horwich (1987) and Price (1996) claim that TT may nevertheless be shown to be improbable, due to its need for unlikely coincidences. Smith (1997, 2024) and Ismael (2003) reply, correctly, that this begs the question against TT. Where does this leave us, and TT itself? To put the issue in a broader frame, I note (i) a Lewis-inspired “defense” of Aristotelian mechanics against a famous argument by Galileo; and (ii) the relevance of the Duhem-Quine Thesis. With a range of comparison cases thus in view, TT may be assessed by the Quinean pragmatic standards for theory choice that Lewis elsewhere endorses. I conclude that it is not unreasonable to conclude that TT is highly implausible, despite the fallacy of a direct appeal to the unlikelihood of coincidences. By Lewis’s own standards, treating Quinean pragmatic virtue as a guide to truth, this amounts to an argument for the epistemic improbability of TT.

New types of artificial intelligence (AI), from cognitive assistants to social robots, are challenging meaningful comparison with other kinds of intelligence. How can such intelligent systems be catalogued, evaluated, and contrasted, with representations and projections that offer meaningful insights? To catalyse the research in AI and the future of cognition, we present the motivation, requirements and possibilities for an atlas of intelligence: an integrated framework and collaborative open repository for collecting and exhibiting information of all kinds of intelligence, including humans, non-human animals, AI systems, hybrids and collectives thereof. After presenting this initiative, we review related efforts and present the requirements of such a framework. We survey existing visualisations and representations, and discuss which criteria of inclusion should be used to configure an atlas of intelligence.

It is well-known that Bell’s Theorem and other No Hidden Variable theorems have a “retrocausal loophole”, because they assume that the values of pre-existing hidden variables are independent of future measurement settings. (This is often referred to, misleadingly, as the assumption of “free will”.) However, it seems to have gone unnoticed until recently that a violation of this assumption is a straightforward consequence of time-symmetry, given an understanding of the quantization of light that would have seemed natural to Einstein after 1905. The new argument shows precisely why quantization makes a difference, and why time-symmetry alone does not imply retrocausality, in the classical context. It is true that later developments in quantum theory provide a way to avoid retrocausality, without violating time-symmetry; but this escape route relies on the “ontic” conception of the wave function that Einstein rejected. Had this new argument been noticed much sooner, then, it seems likely that retrocausality would have been regarded as the default option for hidden variables theories (a fact that would then have seemed confirmed by Bell’s Theorem and the No Hidden Variable theorems). This paper presents these ideas at a level intended to be accessible to general readers.

In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (PMN) Rorty opposes representationalism about mind and language, and interprets Davidson as an ally. Yet Davidson insists that language and thought depend on speakers taking themselves to be subject to an objective standard of correctness, beyond themselves. Isn’t this mirroring, in some reasonable reading of Rorty’s metaphor? Yes, in my view, and there is more of a tension between PMN and Davidson than Rorty realises. But pragmatists can regard this objective standard as an artefact of our own linguistic practices, rather than as a norm imposed by the world in some stronger sense. In this piece I discuss the genealogy of such a hand-made mirror with reference to Davidson, Brandom, and Rorty himself.

Concepts employed in folk descriptions of the world often turn out to be more perspectival than they seem at first sight, involving previously unrecognised sensitivity to the viewpoint or 'situation' of the user of the concept in question. Often, it is progress in science that reveals such perspectivity, and the deciding factor is that we realise that other creatures would apply the same concepts with different extension, in virtue of differences between their circumstances and ours. In this paper I argue that causal concepts are perspectival in this way, and describe the 'situation' on which they depend in terms of an abstract characterisation of the viewpoint of a deliberating agent. I argue that this approach makes better sense than rivals of the apparent asymmetry and temporal orientation of the causal relation.

This chapter is an edited transcript of a panel discussion at the Truth 20|20 Conference. The discussion centers around a discussion between P.F. Strawson and Gareth Evans recorded for the Open University in 1973. In the ensuing discussion, Strawson’s and Evans’ comments on truth are compared both to Ramsey’s work on truth just before his death, and also to contemporary pluralist accounts. One of the major themes of the discussion is the distinction, suggested by Strawson and Evans, between a ‘thin’ notion of truth suitable for application across a variety of domains, and a more substantive notion appropriate for certain domains but not others. The panelists consider whether these two notions could be made to fit into a coherent overarching account, and whether the theory of truth is the right place to locate this ‘thin’/‘substantive’ distinction.

This essay is my contribution to a celebratory volume for Mr Peter Ho, former head of Singapore's Civil Service, from whom I learned the phrase ‘black elephant’. I reflect on four elephants among my own interests: in other words, big things (in my estimation), in clear sight but invisible to many eyes. They are: (i) retrocausality in quantum theory; (ii) child conscription and the monarchy; (iii) AI risk; and (iv) cold fusion. As I say in the piece, my little herd is big enough to make some comparisons – though this may be the only occasion on which they congregate in the same room.