Tag Archives: John Worrall

Structural Realism and Newman’s Objection: Three Arguments against Reference, Part 4

Posted on by under Perception, structural realism

It’s now time for me to make a small confession, which is that I don’t care very much really about Hilary Putnam’s late-career misadventures with “internalism.” When I first went off to philosophy grad school many long years ago, Reason, Truth, and History was still relatively new and much talked about. I obtained a copy, but I could never get past chapter one. His arguments entailed certain claims that seemed to be just too obviously wrong. They still seem so to me now, and I have emphasized them in previous posts in this series. One is that a brain in a vat would not be able to think about whether it was a brain in a vat, even though the phenomenology of its thoughts would be identical to that of a normal, embodied person thinking (apparently) about being a brain in a vat. That entails that the brain in a vat has no idea what it is thinking about outside its own mind—and by the same token that neither do we. Another is that no natural relation, whether causation or anything else, can determine the referents of our thoughts and percepts, so that—assuming we reject “Platonism”—we have to admit that our thoughts and percepts do not have mind-independent referents. As I say, these claims seemed obviously false, even silly. Neither did it seem like the best use of time to delve deeply into Putnam’s reasoning and try to sort out what was wrong.

On the other hand, I do care about structural realism, which I have come to think is true but which has been bedeviled in recent decades by an argument essentially similar to Putnam’s model-theoretic argument. It has been to better understand and reply to the argument against structural realism that I have at long last performed the examination of Putnam’s model-theoretic argument presented in the previous posts in this series.

In the present post, I explain the argument against structural realism—which by now can be seen in fact to present no great difficulty—and comment briefly on the abysmal state of current discussion of structural realism. (The whole paper on which these posts are based is available here. To return to the third post in the series, click here. To skip to the fifth and final post, click here.)

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The End of History (for Physics)?

Posted on by under Uncategorized

In a trio of blog posts from 2010 (see here, here, and here), Sean Carroll defends the striking claim that, as far as concerns the basic physical principles that underlie the phenomena of everyday life, physics has been completed.

[T]here’s no question that the human goal of figuring out the basic rules by which the easily observable world works was one that was achieved once and for all in the twentieth century.

That’s right: “once and for all.” If asked for the basic, underlying story about why a table is solid or why the sun shines or what happens when a person flexes a muscle, modern science gives its answers in terms of “the particles of the Standard Model, interacting through electromagnetism, gravity, and the nuclear forces, according to the principles of quantum mechanics and general relativity.” One hundred years ago, explanations by this story (i.e., body of theory) could not be given, because this story did not exist. “But—here’s the important part—one thousand years from now, you will hear precisely that same story.”

I think Carroll is right, and I think the philosophy of structural realism can help to illuminate why. The purpose of what follows is to explain these points.

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