can it/ should it be the other way? ie good metaphysics a guide to the solution of problems in physics?

I don't think so. First philosophy is dead; Quine buried it.

However, good metaphysics is a guide to the solution of problems OF INTERPRETATION in physics; but then again, interpretation is a "metaphysical" activity.

mm i'm not sure i like talk of interpretation, or of separating the algorithm from the 'interpretation'. i think theories often bring ontological baggages with them, and that there's not much we can do about it. of course, there's the problem of underdetermination, but then i would attribute that to epistemological limitations. does this make sense?

Sklar, old fella; Sklar.

i know the name, Lawrence Sklar. care to elaborate though (a bit) so that other people may follow?

Haris, you really should read Sklar - it'll get the nasty taste of Feyerabend out of your mouth.

I'll come back to Sklar's actual remarks when I'm back on my own computer - I'm using Xanthippe's at the moment - I've got all me papers on mine

ok, take your best Sklar paper, send it to me and i'll try to attack him, just for the sake of the Grand Master himself (Feyerabend wrote some stuff about physics too)

Haris - I don't write papers ABOUT people, I just steal those ideas which best suit my own ends...

I quoted, or cited, Sklar just the other day - now what was it about?

no no i meant paper by Sklar, not about him

Ven - it's all a question of "myth", and a myth is generally a primitive causal explanation... and causation is probably the biggest myth of all.

mm not sure metaphysics would have much to say about monks or god-worshipping (though it may have things to say about identity and about gods). good to have you back, ven!

Careful, Haris - just go into your local Mind Body and Bullshit bookshop and look at what they class under "metaphysics"!

As for Friend Sklar - I'd suggest (1967) "Types of inter-theoretic reduction", The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 18 - I can't find the article on-line, but the general contents is discussed at Stanford :

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physics-interrelate/

thanks david, i'll look into the stanford article soon and come back to you!!

Ven - that comment is most inappropriate here - could you start a thread elsewhere?

So Haris, we can get back to the good Doctor Ladyman, perhaps...

The paper was good, but nowhere near as extreme as your remarks had led me to fear... many of the comments on the "science as a guide to metaphysics" debate were (as he acknowledges) prefigured in Hawley's paper. As to his comments on the impact of physics on our metaphysics, I must admit to finding Callender's "Finding ‘Real’ Time in Quantum Mechanics" more cogent : http://philosophy.ucsd.edu/faculty/ccallender/index_files/physics%20against%20tense.doc

If metaphysics is concerned with clarifying our intuitions about the world of our phenomenal experience, then it is highly unlikely that the presentist will find anything corresponding to his ultra-realist understanding of tenses in contemporary scientific theory, and there's little hope that he'll find it in any future refinement or development.

(THIS REMARK FOR HARIS : PRESENTISM IS REALISM ABOUT TENSE, so you should be dead set against it) Tense is, of course, a purely GRAMMATICAL notion - we're back to structure again, but I doubt whether Ladyman has done much work on grammars as modelling systems.

As for structural realism - well, the relations are real but the relata aren't. Basically, the "regularity" of the world is more "real" than individual quarks, atoms, tables, human beings etc. Seems reasonable enough when put like that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysics

Anyway, Haris - Ladyman. I'd agree that he's not a philosopher of physics in the sense of Callender or Pooley; however, I'm not really sure that I'd consider him to be a metaphysician, either.

Hawley, btw : http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~kjh5/OnlinePapers/ScienceAsAGuideToMetaphysics.pdf

i'll have to look into Callender and Pooley to see what you mean. i wouldn't consider James a metaphysician, and i think he'd be offended if you did call him that. i'll have to read at least one of the papers you've sent links to, just to make some sort of serious contribution to these threads. at the moment i'm just blagging it. i'm reading on rule-following and Kripke's sceptical paradox

If he isn't a philosopher of physics and he isn't a metaphysician, what the hell IS he?

BTW, you'd certainly do well to read Callender and Pooley - I posted a link to one of my favourite Callender papers; here's a nice one by Gibson and Poolley: http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00002845/

oh, i should've guessed that you would've found a cunning way to make me read about perdurantism :(

think i've got my Simon Blackburn to attack on rule-following!

to misquote George V, Bugger Blackburn!

I must admit that I read it years ago in a very bad French translation when I was still in Academia - I'd love to get my hands on the original, but it doesn't seem available on the web (at least, to those of us outside the Ivied Halls), and I've never got round to tracking it down in a collection...

"I have with my methodology identified an 8-step iteration from phi to a new constant possibly responsible for marrying nature's discontinuities and antipathies into coextensive agreements between the dualities inherent within unities"

Could you explain what you mean by "the dualities inherent within unities"?

When you speak of the "Newtonian world", I take it you're speaking of local macroscopic conditions. Surely such conditions are better described by special relativity? (even though we live in a "gravity well", we aren't really subject to general relativistic effects). The Newtonian model is inappropriate as it presupposes a privileged frame of reference ("the universal present") - unless, of course, you'd support a version of the Lorentz ether theory.

I get the feeling that that you're presupposing Humean supervenience - not an idea that finds much favour at the moment, and one can say much the same for reductionism. Certain, I think, would take issue with your statement "It really is entirely more accurate by all accounts to see it this way [that is, to see "the Newtonian world as a phenomen-ality that is actually governed by the unseen quantum world"]. This is a bottom-up approach to the world; but we could make equally good arguments for a top-down approach (spacetime is an atemporal block that can be "carved" according to the metaphysical and ontological requirements of whatever conceptual scheme we happen to adopt).

When dealing with the quantum level, we should bear in mind that at very low orders of magnitude (around the level of the Planck length/time) classical spacetime becomes grainy and might even "break down" (if, as string thory holds, there are "extra spatial dimensions" available at such levels). As far as comparison with our intuitive understanding of space and time is concerned, the "quantum world" more resembles a phase space than it resembles a Euclidean 3- or 4-space.

While our phenomenal experience integrates sense impressions of different kinds into an apparent "unity", can we be so certain that this reflects some aspect of a putatively unified mind-independent reality?

As to "1" and "0" being indistinct, isn't this rather a question of the logic we adopt? If we adopt bivalencve, we are restrained to bivalence; but we can indeed reject the excluded middle. At the moment I'm co-authoring a paper that draws on John L. Bell's work on infinitesimals -è if you don't know Bell's work, I'd suggest http://publish.uwo.ca/~jbell/New%20lecture%20on%20infinitesimals.pdf

Nonetheless, in a *structuralist* programme your remark might have a different sense. I'm afraid I've never paid much attention to Continental "thinking".

As to the stuff about Nature and Her Wonders, I'm none too comfortable with metaphor. Terms like "essence" require very careful handling - and imputing "method" to Nature strikes me as dangerously close to the pathetic fallacy...

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As far as I'm concerned, the most important questions in metaphysics generally have something to do with time, space, and composition...

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Could you explain further "all triadic dynamic systems (static triadic complexes can be original and pure--as triads) can be explicated metaphysically as four-fold."?

Thanks !

(Forgive my fragmented replies - I've got too may irons in too many fires at the moment)

Charles

Please forgive me - it's the end of the academic year and we're way under provision...

I hope to have a bit more time after the 14th July...

Western Ontario, friend Bell

By academic standards, I suppose I'm desperately overworked - but by the same standards (in France at least) I'm horribly overpaid. The private sector has its drawbacks and its benefits

True. I'm good at being patronising...