I've launched this thread in the hope that we can discuss – if, of course, the gentleman in question is willing - some of the ideas arising from a very interesting paper by Haris.
If you wanted, dear Haris, we could perhaps upload it on the file-sharing utility; if not, the different ideas you mention are in themselves worthy of discussion. Indeed, I think they could bring together some of the disparate topics we've been discussing on various boards (it might even be possible to generate a little of the "cross-disciplinary research" that RG was set up for…).
As to the title of the thread (for those less familiar with the somewhat recherché notions of analytic metaphysics):
Mereology is the "formal or logical study of the part-whole relation" – putting it very simply, it claims to give a rigorous account of the relation between 'things' and the 'things that make them up' - though some consider it comes at too high an ontological cost. In this case, I'd suggest the Wikipedia entry, which gives a good introduction to the formal theory (though it doesn't discuss the metaphysical implications).
The simplest definition of supervenience is due (if I remember rightly) to Davidson: "a set of properties M supervene on another set of properties P if there can be no change in M without there being some change in P". Thus, a mental property is said to 'supervene on' a physical property – early defenders of the thesis frequently associated these properties with 'states of the brain'. The Wikipedia entry's ok, but the Stanford entry (by Karen Bennett and Brian McLaughlin) is very complete.
As to time – well, Augustine said it all : "what, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks me, I do not know". Otherwise, I'd suggest (with my characteristic and much-appreciated modesty) the brief summary of the various topics in the philosophy of time I posted under the "space & time" thread (Wikipedia's pretty sparse, but Stanford has a plethora of good articles – I'd suggest Ned Markosian's "Time" as a starter).
Anyway, what d'you say, Haris: can we discuss your article (please)?
Haris' paper deals with the possible incommensurability of different explanations, and particularly when commensurability depends on reduction. This would impact the commonly-held view that physical science –and particularly particle physics - has some claim to 'primacy' among both scientific and more general accounts of the world.
I'll post Haris' article in the file manager tomorrow; in the meantime, and before any discussion of Haris' arguments, I'd like to give an alternative view (on which, as it 'appens, I'm presently working). Interestingly, and given a superficial first reading of Haris' paper, the distinction between the views would seem, in part, to turn on a difference in the underlying assumptions about time. I need to re-read the paper, particularly the first part, before I can say with any certainty whether the temporal question has any impact on the overall thrust of the argument (though it *is* usually telling in arguments that involve the intrinsic/extrinsic distinction, as does Haris').
[For those who'd like to investigate further the ideas from Quine I mention below, the Wikipedia entry gives a sufficient basis. I'll be developing the ideas in a paper that (at some time) I'll place on the file manager]
As I said, I'm working towards the problem from another direction (Quine's 'ontological relativity') in which the preference for the conceptual scheme of 'science' is a *methodological* choice. According to Quine's account, there's little doubt that our choice of conceptual scheme (and thus our ontology) depends very largely on our 'preferences'; furthermore, these 'preferences' are largely determined by the pragmatic ends of our investigation. Foucault will find information about the mind in an investigation of madness; but his conceptual scheme is such that his understanding of "madness" has been elaborated in contrast to the conceptual scheme of pre-cognitive pathology and his understanding of mind is related to conceptual schemes that are entirely divergent from the underlying conceptual schemes of analytic philosophy of mind. The neo-Quinean response to this 'complexification' of conceptual schemes is not to evoke *relative incommensurability* but *intertranslation*. We can't just 'translate' or 'traduce' Foucault in the language of Davidson (even though he was a contemporary) – we have to examine the conceptual schemes from which both were working. In the case of Foucault, we have to take into account Freud, but also the phenomenology of Husserl; in the case of Davidson, Skinner; but also the antipsychologism of Frege and Russell. So, to 'translate' Foucault's conceptual scheme, we must also 'translate' those of Husserl and Frege (and at this point, we can begin to grasp the distinctions – we can examine the discussions in the correspondence between the two, and can see where their divergences arise). Evidently, at each stage the indeterminacy of the translation increases, until we have conceptual schemes that are apparently incommensurable (we could see this as a 'noise-to-signal' relation).
So, there are 'conceptual schemes' for which translation towards "our" conceptual scheme becomes so indeterminate – so approximate – that we cannot really be certain of grasping the 'meaning' of certain terms, expressions, etc. In such extreme cases, from the point of view of one conceptual scheme the other is 'false', and the entities over which it quantifies 'non-existent'. Preference for one scheme or another is determined by cultural and personal criteria, but neither can enforce a claim to being 'the most appropriate account of the world' - a 'best-candidate theory' is only best candidate if you accept the conceptual scheme by which it is justified. Quine's choice of conceptual scheme – that of physical science – is motivated by an implicit philosophical query: can we adopt the physical scientist's methodological assumption of the reality and mind-independence of the physical world as a guide to metaphysics? The 'scientific' conceptual scheme is chosen, as I said, for methodological rather than dogmatic reasons.
Quine is also a pragmatist. While the indeterminacy of translation renders uncertain the 'meaning' of expressions even within one language, the pragmatics of their use (their context, their relation to behaviour) comes to the rescue – language use is a matter of belonging to a certain 'community of practice', of developing certain behaviour which is determined by 'shared' experience. The distance between conceptual schemes is also a function of the limits of the 'corrective' function of the pragmatic component: evidently, the greater the divergence in everyday experience of the world, the fewer points on which developed behaviour will coincide.
The pragmatic turn also provides the neo-Quinean with an 'anchor' in the physical world. In the famous 'gavagai' example (cf. "Word and Object", 1960, pp. 51-2), the vocable "gavagai!" accompanied by an act of ostension in the presence of "a rabbit" (our term) could have one of various meanings : "Lo, a rabbit!", in our sense, but also "Lo, a stage of a rabbit!", "Lo, brief temporal segments of a rabbit!", "Lo, undetached rabbit parts!", or even (as one academic pointed out) "Hand me my bow and arrows!" or "It's going to rain!" (for all we know, the native has a cultural belief that seeing a rabbit at this time of day is a sign of rain). Nonetheless, and whatever his beliefs about persistence or the pragmatic object of his utterance, we know that it bears *in some way or another* on the contents of a certain region of space at a certain time, and on beliefs concerning that contents. However tenuous or vague, the beliefs underlying the use of the expression "gavagai!" bear some relation to 'whatever it is' that occupies a certain region of space and time.
A mise en garde : We can't assume that the native constructs entities in time and space as we do – thus we cannot conclude that his "gavagai!" designates a three-dimensional object that is wholly present at each instant, as is the common understanding of the designation of our "Lo, a rabbit!". His language might name things differently according to the time at which they are seen, to give a simple example, or name entities that are complexes of temporal stages ("Lo, the temporal part of a rabbit which coincides with a temporal part of me!"). The relation between his understanding of space and time and ours might be tenuous indeed, and we must question the most basic of assumptions. Nonetheless, the Quinean translator takes it to be a fundamental characteristic of human languages that *deictics* (acts of ostension, demonstratives, personal pronouns, adverbs like 'here' and 'now') function by delimiting some region of space and time, however vague the limits might be.
From this admittedly limited opening – that certain responses to sensory stimulation are somehow linked to the contents of space and time – we have the first stage of a common conceptual scheme. How far the opening will allow us to found the possibility of effective - if not efficient - translation from the native's language to ours depends on the distance between our respective conceptual schemes (and particularly in the fundamental area of our beliefs about space and time). The ontologies of our own conceptual schemes, and of those of our wider epistemic and cultural communities, are more easily recast in terms of 'reference' to (the contents of) regions of space and time, as we share certain assumptions about the way things occupy space and time. [A common example of this would be the physicalist location of mental events as occurring at the time and place occupied by the subject's body; like most common examples, it oversimplifies too greatly to be of any material aid. This is, of course, pertinent to the present thread.]
Indeed, the spacetime criterion is so central that some have characterised the neo-Quinean position as simply the view that an object exists iff it is located in space and time. While fundamentally correct, the view has developed greatly since Quine; and particularly with respect to the more recent philosophy of time that has developed since Lewis. Furthermore, Quine is more subtle, in that he also allows that spacetime can be cut and carved to give objects to the guise of all our physical ontologies – and this was the sense of my initial comment on the ill-fated 'Word and Object' thread.
These remarks are general, and I give neither argumentation nor – more tellingly – counter-argument. I'll try and finish off the piece on Quine's "Things and their Place in Theories" I keep talking about to give a fuller treatment of the ideas I've introduced here.
Haris' paper is now available - you should see it in the file manager on the group's front page...
I hope to be able to make some comments over the weekend (if anyone's listening...)
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