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Ratiocination

Metaphysicians and their Examples


I'm struck with the ubiquity of certain case-studies in the literature. It's hard to do any reading in the metaphysics of material objects, for example, without running into one case or another involving a chair, a table, or a pencil. This is perhaps unsurprising (what else would an academic philosopher discuss?). But I think it's funny, too. =)

Spaced out Souls


Many have thought that there is some problem with causal commerce between immaterial souls and material bodies. In his latest book, Jaegwon Kim attempts to say what such a problem might be. The conclusion of Kim's Pairing Argument is that causal commerce between immaterial souls and material bodies (henceforth, "soul-body interaction") is conceptually impossible, incoherent, or unintelligible. I don't know what Kim means when he says this; I can think of at least four interpretations. Kim might thereby charge soul-body interaction with contradictoriness, epistemic impossibility, inconceivability, or metaphysical impossibility. But on its face, the Pairing Argument does not aim to or in fact establish either the contradictoriness or epistemic impossibility of soul-body interaction.

My task in this post, then, shall be to question the soundness of one reading of the Pairing Argument. I offer considerations that suggest the possibility of soul-body interaction. My project is modest; I do not aim to show that substance dualism is true (I suspect it is not), or that soul-body interaction obtains. I argue only that such interaction is metaphysically possible.

A pairing relation is a relation, in virtue of which, some particular thing (and not another) causes some effect; we might say that where two intrinsically alike things are equally good candidates for being the cause of some effect, the pairing relation explains which one in fact is. Because of its explanatory role, a pairing relation must be in some sense prior to a causal relation. Kim is right to say that we must not explain the possibility of soul-body interaction by appealing to a pairing relation which in turn employs such interaction. In interpret the Pairing argument to claim that soul-body interaction is impossible. My reconstruction:

THE PAIRING ARGUMENT

  1. If it is possible that c causes e, then, necessarily, there is some pairing relation R such that possibly, cRe.
  2. Necessarily, a relation R is a pairing relation only if R is a spacial relation.
  3. Necessarily, no immaterial entity stands in a spacial relation.
  4. So, necessarily, no immaterial entity stands in a pairing relation (2, 3).
  5. So, where c or e are immaterial entites, it is not possible that c causes e (1, 4).

The argument is valid, and if sense can be made of a pairing relation, premise 1 seems true. Kim is right, too, I think, to say that spacial relations are the only candidates for serving as pairing relations; I can think of none better fit for the job, at least. But I contest premise 3, and I shall argue for the possibility of souls in space.

Kim anticipates this maneuver, considering the prospect of bringing souls into space as extensionless geometric points. Kim finds this unpromising:

If my soul, as a geometric point, is in my body, it must be either in the top half of my body or its bottom half. If it's in the top half, it must be either in its left or right half, and so on, and we should be able to corner the soul into as small and specific a region of my body as we like.

I do not know what the argument in this passage and its context might be. But there is undoubtedly a puzzle in the vicinity, and it can be sidestepped with the addition that souls are not in space as geometric points, but rather as extended but immaterial entities. My suggestion leads naturally to the following: an immaterial soul M (as opposed to some other immaterial soul, say) and material body B causally interact in virtue of M and B exactly occupying the same region of spacetime.

Note that this construal of the pairing relation meets one of Kim's desiderata, in that it need not employ the concept of causal interaction. Indeed, it seems prior (in the relevant sense) to such interaction. Now take Kim's paradigmatic problem scenario:

There are two souls, A and B, and they perform an identical mental act at time t, as a result of which a change occurs in material substance M shortly after t. We may suppose that mental acts of the kind involved generally cause physical changes of the sort that happened in M, and, moreover, that in the present case it is the soul A's action, not soul B's, that caused the change in M. Surely such a possibility must exist. But ask: what relation might serve to pair soul A's action with the change in M, a relation that is absent in the case of soul B's action and the change in M? That is, what could be the pairing relation in this case?

We have an answer to Kim's question. A caused the change in M because A exactly occupies the same region of spacetime as M. B occupies another region of spacetime, and hence did not cause the change in M.

Kim may object to my proposal in several ways: First, if souls are extended in space, "why aren't souls just material objects, albeit of a very special, and strange, kind?" I respond that extension entails neither physicality nor materiality. It is plausible to think that the physical, whatever else it is, must not be fundamentally mental. (See Jessica Wilson's forthcoming paper in Philosophical Studies for a defense of this). But souls, whether extended in space, points in space, or otherwise, are fundamentally mental, and hence not physical. Similarly, it's plausible to think that the material, whatever else it may be, must be built up of physical entities (eg, perhaps a material object just is a sufficiently large collection of physical parts with certain chemical properties). It's clear that souls are not such, and hence not material either.

Second, what of co-location? If souls are located, what is to keep one soul from exactly occupying a region of spacetime as another (intrinsically indiscernible) soul? And in such a case, how might we pair one soul and not the other as the cause of some activity in a body occupying the same region of spacetime? Kim suggests that the substance dualist must employ a principle saying that no two souls can exactly occupy the same region of spacetime, a principle analogous to the inpenetrability of matter. Kim further argues that there is little reason to believe such a principle is true. I grant this point.

But I think the defender of soul-body interaction can do without such a principle. Given certain assumptions, in fact, she should reject it. Take a sort of folk substance dualism according to which there are ghosts and their ilk in this material world: immaterial substances which nonetheless occupy regions of spacetime and exert causal influence on the material world. Now say that one of these ghosts exactly occupies the region of spacetime that my soul and my body also occupy. When my body moves, we may not resort to our pairing relation to explain why it is that it's my soul, and not the ghost, that caused my body to move. It seems that there is no fact of the matter about which of us caused the body to move, in fact. And this is the right answer, I think, for such a scenario matches nicely with the folk notion of possession by a ghost.

What the substance dualist needs to exonerate soul-body interaction is not a principle according to which the co-location of souls is impossible; she only needs that such co-locations are not frequent at the actual world. The vast majority of soul-body interaction can be explained by use of the pairing relation, even if there are outlying cases where such explanation is not forthcoming. It is at least possible that co-location of souls is rare. And that is enough.

I may be unfairly reading Kim's Pairing Argument. Perhaps he does not mean to argue that soul-body interaction was impossible. If this is the case, I can make no sense of his constant use of language suggesting that immaterial entities cannot enter into causal relations. And if his suggestion is not that soul-body interaction is impossible, it's hard to see the force of it. If he means only to argue that we have little reason to believe in soul-body interaction, his case is weak. After all, substance dualists think they have reason to think that humans are (at least partly) immaterial souls; Kim does not address any of these arguments in his book. And to substance dualism, the objector need only add that the mental is causally efficacious, a premise that Kim vigorously agrees with. If we have good reason to believe these two theses, we have good reason to believe in soul-body interaction.

The most charitable reading I can give Kim, then, is that his Pairing Argument claims that soul-body interaction is impossible. In this light, the Pairing Argument is not a bad one; at least, it clarifies the committments of substance dualism. But it is unsound.

Nietzsche Family Circus


This site pairs a Family Circus comic pane with a random Nietzsche quotation. Hilarity ensues. HT.

Personal Identity


Your memories are your self. If your memories live, then you're alive

-Orson Scott Card (character: Miro), Children of the Mind

Writing


One of my tasks as a student is learning to write good philosophical prose. This is a skill which is rarely, if ever, taught directly; one does not see (say, in a course catalog) classes dedicated to writing philosophy. This is unfortunate, I think.

In academic philosophy, one’s “form” of writing is often connected with one’s “content.” Here’s why. Good philosophy just is (with a few qualifications) good, hard thinking about some subject. And, as they say, writing is thinking. A way to think clearly and clearly transmit thought to others is to write. Becoming a good philosopher, then, may have more to do with learning how to write well than one might otherwise suppose.

All of this to say, I have a few favorite philosophers, and a few favorite philosophical writers. They often coincide. Here are some things I’ve observed about one of them:

Trenton Merricks is perhaps the best youngish philosophical writer I’ve come across. His prose is witty, fun to read, and above all, clear. Merricks is willing to break those standard “rules” of writing that sometimes obfuscate. For example, he’ll begin many paragraphs or sentences with conjunctions. Or use sentence fragments. These two devices serve a clarifying purpose. Beginning a sentence with a conjunction can make it clear what the connection is between the sentence in question and previous sentences. And sentence fragments add a conversational zing to his style. Despite the fact that Merricks writes to an academic audience (eg, analytic metaphysicians), one can read his book Objects and Persons (some thoughts about the book) in just a few hours. Now that is good prose.

Metaphysics of Hyperspace


This review of Hud Hudson's The Metaphysics of Hyperspace is worth reading; the book certainly sounds like a fun one.

Modality


Is this the way it has always been?
Could it ever have been different?

-David Gilmour (Pink Floyd), "A New Machine Part 1," A Momentary Lapse of Reason

Even though it was impossible, at least it was conceivable, it could be imagined, and therefore it might just be real

-Orson Scott Card (character: Wang-mu), Xenocide

Citations


Now this is a neat tool; enter the ISBN of a book, and it spits out a citation in MLA, APA, AMA, or Chigago/Turabian format.

Metaphysics


One thing I like about my field is that I can work anywhere. At Wal-Mart, in bed, getting a haircut, whatever else is on my plate, I can still think about stuff and sometimes even make progress on a philosophical problem or two. =)