Ontological Conventionalism and Relativism

Several metaphysical debates have typically been modeled as oppositions between a relationist approach and a substantivalist approach. Such debates include the Bundle Theory and the Substratum Theory about ordinary material objects, the Bundle (Humean) Theory and the Substance (Cartesian) Theory of the Self, and Relationism and Substantivalism about time. In all three debates, the substantivalist side typically insists that in order to provide a good treatment of the subject-matter of the theory (time, Self, material objects), it is necessary to postulate (...) the existence of a certain kind of substance, while the other side, the relationist one, characteristically feels that this is an unnecessary expense and that one can get the job done in an ontologically cheaper way just with inter-related properties or events. In this paper I shall defend the view that there is much less of a disagreement between relational ontologies and substantival ontologies than it is usually thought. I believe that, when carefully examined, the two sides of the debate are not that different from each other, in all three cases of pairs of views mentioned above. As we will see, both the relational side and the substantival side work in the same way, suffer from and answer the same objections, and are structurally extremely similar. It will be an important question – one that I shall discuss in detail, and that is indeed the main point of interest for me in this paper – whether this means that the two sides of the debate are somehow 'equivalent' or not, and what 'equivalent' could mean. (shrink)

Elimination controversies are ubiquitous in philosophy and the human sciences. For example, it has been suggested that human races, hysteria, intelligence, mental disorder, propositional attitudes such as beliefs and desires, the self, and the super-ego should be eliminated from the list of respectable entities in the human sciences. I argue that eliminativist proposals are often presented in the framework of an oversimplified “phlogiston model” and suggest an alternative account that describes ontological elimination on a gradual scale between criticism of empirical (...) assumptions and conceptual choices. (shrink)

Tim Button explores the relationship between minds, words, and world. He argues that the two main strands of scepticism are deeply related and can be overcome, but that there is a limit to how much we can show. We must position ourselves somewhere between internal realism and external realism, and we cannot hope to say exactly where.

ABSTRACT of The Flying Termite by L.L. Katona -/- In this book I would like to show the term “intelligence“ has a universal, non-anthropomorphic meaning. We can perceive intelligence in dogs, dolphins or gorillas without understanding of it, but intelligence can be also seen in many other things from insects and the Solar System to elementary particles or the rules of a triangle. But that doesn’t mean intelligence comes from Intelligent Design, yet alone a Designer, they seems to be the (...) “state of things” in the Universe. One of the most known law of the triangle is “the measures of the interior angles of a triangle in Euclidean space always add up to 180 degrees.” The question is this law exists without any existing triangle, or not? If there is an encrypted program in DNA, what determines which living being will be a chameleon or a cat, where this program lies? Whether in the DNA itself? But DNA also programmed. Where is the program of a computer? You may say in the hard drive or in the head of the programmer. But the hard drive or the head of the programmer is just the vehicle of the program; when you dissect a computer or a programmer’s head you will not find the program, just the diodes or cells connected by pack of orders. And you won’t see the orders in them. In my book I want to show the works of this elusive intelligence with some interesting contradictions between causality, determinism, teleology, and dependent formation through biology, mathematics and logic. If I need to summarize my idea I can use the following parable. A priest and an atheist are playing with a beach ball in a pool, in a two-dimensioned plane. They are rod-people with a circle. What they can’t perceive is this plane is a part of a three-dimensioned world, where the wind is blowing, so they can’t understand why the ball disappearing continuously, and why it comes back at another point randomly. Both of them have a hint, the ball is a sphere, and the space is three-dimensioned, but instead of trying to work in team to understand this curious phenomena of the Beach Ball, they’re using the old method: insulting each other. (shrink)

This paper argues that Davidson's argument against conceptual schemes fail against so-called "Applied Relativisms", i.e. theories of conceptual relativism found outside philosophy such as Whorf's. These theories make no metaphysical claims, which Davidson seems to assume. Ultimately, the misunderstanding (and resulting strawman argument) illustrates (the effect of) differences in conceptual schemes more than that it undermines it.

According to conventionalist accounts of personal identity, persons are constituted in part by practices and attitudes of certain sorts of care. In this paper, we concentrate on the most well-developed and defended version of conventionalism currently on offer (namely, that proposed by David Braddon-Mitchell, Caroline West, and Kristie Miller) and discuss how the conventionalist appears forced either (1) to accept arbitrariness concerning from which perspective to judge one's survival or (2) to maintain egalitarianism at the cost of making “transfiguring” decisions (...) such as Pascal's Wager rationally intractable. We consider three ways the egalitarian conventionalist could make these choices tractable and show that each one comes at significant cost to the view. We end the paper by considering whether accepting arbitrariness would be a better move for the conventionalist and conclude that, even here, she runs the risk of transfiguring choices being rationally intractable. (shrink)

This paper assesses an argument against the representationalist tradition in anthropology: the tradition of reporting how a cultural group represents the world. According to the argument, anthropologists working within this tradition cannot take the concepts of those they study seriously. I defend the representationalist tradition against this argument.

Quine’s desert is generally contrasted with Meinong’s jungle, as a sober ontological alternative to the exuberant luxuriance that comes with the latter. Here I focus instead on the desert as a sober metaphysical alternative to the Aristotelian garden, with its tidily organized varieties of flora and fauna neatly governed by fundamental laws that reflect the essence of things and the way they can be, or the way they must be. In the desert there are no “natural joints”; all the boundaries (...) we find are lines we have drawn, artificial fencings that merely reflect of our own demarcations, our classifications, our desperate need to ward off the flux and meet an excusable but ungrounded demand for order and stability. The desert returns a picture of reality that is radically anti-realist. And yet the picture does not amount to a form of irrealism. The desert is out there and is what it is regardless of how we feel. And it is not completely structureless. It’s just that the structure it has is very thin and does not correspond to the sort of structure that so-called metaphysical realists—and scientific realists alike—tend to attribute to it. (shrink)

Fictionalism in ontology is a mixed bag. Here I focus on three main variants—which I label after the names of Pascal, Berkeley, and Hume—and consider their relative strengths and weaknesses. The first variant is just a version of the epistemic Wager, applied across the board. The second variant builds instead on the fact that ordinary language is not ontologically transparent; we speak with the vulgar, but deep down we think with the learned. Finally, on the Humean variant it’s the structure (...) of the ontological inventory, not its content, that may turn out to involve fictional elements. That is, for the Humean the fiction lies, not in the reality of common-sense ontology, but in the laws—of unity, identity, causation, etc.—in terms of which we articulate our experience of that reality. In the end, this is the kind of fictionalism that I find most interesting, sensible, and tenable. And I argue that it is even compatible with the sort of “naive” realism we have all come to appreciate in the work of Paolo Bozzi, to whom the paper is dedicated. (shrink)

In this paper, I provide an interpretation of ontological aspects of Kuhn's theory of science.

This paper argues that Sextus Empiricus’s Pyrrhonism is a form of relativism markedly different from the positions typically referred to by this term. The scholars who have explored the relativistic elements found in Sextus’s texts have claimed that his outlook is not actually a form of relativism, or that those elements are inconsistent with his account of Pyrrhonism, or that he is confusing skepticism with relativism. The reason for these views is twofold: first, when employing the term ‘relativism’ one hardly (...) has in mind the sort of relativist stance adopted by the Pyrrhonist; and second, those scholars have misinterpreted Sextus’s relativistic remarks. The purpose of this paper is to show that he adopts a ‘phenomenological’ kind of relativism that is compatible with his account of Pyrrhonism. (shrink)

Nāgārjuna, vissuto in India attorno al primo secolo dopo Cristo, è certamente una delle figure più importanti del pensiero buddhista. In una delle sue opere principali, le ‘Strofe sulla via di mezzo ’, egli elabora in modo compiuto la nozione di ‘vuoto’, che diverrà uno dei concetti fondamentali di tutto il buddhismo successivo, dando vita alla ‘scuola del vuoto’, la quale avrà grande fortuna in Tibet, Cina e Giappone. Per vuoto non si intende certo il nulla, bensì l’inconsistenza rivelata dal (...) reale quando considerato alla luce della critica di Nāgārjuna. Tale critica si esplica innanzitutto sul piano del linguaggio, e possiede quindi una evidente dimensione pragmatica. Il ‘vuoto’ nāgārjuniano sarà allora non solo una non-ontologia, ma anche una non-predicazione, che ammetterà però il giudizio, e quindi la determinazione, solo ed esclusivamente dal punto di vista della prassi del dire. Al linguaggio non è richiesto di parlare dell’essere, bensì di testimoniare, attraverso la propria inconsistenza, dell’assoluta coincidenza di essere e non-essere. (shrink)

This is the published version of a talk on meta-ontology in a conference of a multidisciplinary research project on "logic and sensibility". It argues against univocalism about "existence" and for a variety of perspectivism.

This paper defends the idea that there must be some joints in reality, some correct way to classify or categorize it. This may seem obvious, but we will see that there are at least three conventionalist arguments against this idea, as well as philosophers who have found them convincing. The thrust of these arguments is that the manner in which we structure, divide or carve up the world is not grounded in any natural, genuine boundaries in the world. Ultimately they (...) are supposed to pose a serious threat to realism. The first argument that will be examined concerns the claim that there are no natural boundaries in reality, the second one focuses on the basis of our classificatory schemes, which the conventionalist claims to be merely psychological, and the third considers the significance of our particular features in carving up the world, such as physical size and perceptual capabilities. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that none of these objections succeed in undermining the existence of genuine joints in reality. (shrink)