Friction

What if only the present moment exists, and everything you call the past or the future is, strictly speaking, nothing at all?My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestMark Balaguer is professor of philosophy at Cal State LA, and his research has covered a wide range of topics, including metaphysics, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, philosophy of logic, free will, and metaethics.Check out his book, "How to Be a Presentist"!https://global.oup.com/academic/product/how-to-be-a-presentist-9780197845714https://a.co/d/009UAUtC2. Book SummaryBalaguer’s book sets out to develop and defend an original version of presentism — the view in the philosophy of time that only present objects exist, with no past or future objects in the inventory of reality. Crucially, Balaguer is not arguing that presentism is true; his project is the more modest one of showing that presentism is a live, defensible position and that, if there is a fact of the matter at all, the question of its truth is an open empirical one rather than something settleable by armchair metaphysics. The book is organized around three classical objections to presentism: the ontological-commitment objection (that true sentences like “Obama admires Gandhi” seem to require past objects to exist), the truthmaking objection (that truths about the past need something in reality to make them true), and the special-relativity objection (that physics rules out a privileged “now”).The first part of the book lays metaphilosophical groundwork, arguing against trivialism, against necessitarianism about metaphysics, and in favor of an “anti-metaphysicalist” stance on which presentism, if factual, is a contingent empirical hypothesis rather than something knowable a priori. Part II then mounts the defense proper. Against the ontological-commitment objection, Balaguer endorses a sweeping “FAPP-ist” error theory: the relevant ordinary and scientific sentences about past or future objects are, strictly speaking, false, but they function fine “for all practical purposes.” Against the truthmaking objection, he develops a position he calls nothingism, on which past-tense sentences that presentists count as true don’t have truthmakers because they aren’t really making claims about reality at all. Against special relativity, he constructs a relativized presentism compatible with the relativity of simultaneity, avoiding any appeal to a privileged frame. He also takes on subsidiary worries about time travel and change.The book’s most distinctive move comes in Part III, where Balaguer pushes presentism toward what he calls metaphysically minimal or timeless presentism. Here he argues — surprisingly, given the near-universal assumption that presentists must endorse the A-theory — that presentists should reject the existence of time itself, of times (including the present time), of temporal passage, and of metaphysically substantive A-facts (facts about something being past, present, or future). On the resulting picture, talk of time is best treated as a useful fiction layered over a more fundamental notion of intrinsic change, yielding a presentism that is ontologically lean, empirically respectable, and stripped of the heavy metaphysical machinery usually thought to come with the view. The overall result is a defense of presentism that is at once more concessive (presentism is not proven, just shielded from refutation) and more radical (presentism without time) than standard treatments in the literature.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introductio00:57 - Overview of book02:47 - Substantive dispute06:31 - Non-factualism09:15 - Substantialese13:58 - Understanding the difference21:40 - Contingent thesis28:35 - A posteriori identities41:10 - Scientism47:55 - Ontological commitment objection53:39 - Relevance of physics1:00:25 - FAPP truth1:05:03 - Truthmakers objection1:08:19 - Potential reply1:17:45 - Present truthmakers?1:19:43 - Abandon physicalism?1:20:54 - Swamp world1:22:17 - The actual world and modal realism1:36:26 - Nothingism1:38:40 - Claims about reality1:42:27 - Understanding the claims1:53:16 - Counterfactuals2:04:09 - Understanding modality2:16:53 - Special relativity2:26:53 - Avoiding anti-realism and eternalism2:39:43 - Lean view2:45:19 - What is time?2:49:43 - William Lane Craig2:52:06 - Summary of view2:54:24 - Future work2:56:08 - Temporal phenomenology3:01:11 - Value of philosophy3:03:31 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

What if simply having something consciously present to mind already counts as a form of knowledge, and helps explain not just perception, but beauty, emotion, and moral life?My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestMatt Duncan is Professor of Philosophy at Rhode Island College, and his work has focused on metaphysics, epistemology, and mind, including the nature of experience and experiential knowledge.Check out his book, "Present to the Mind: Acquaintance and Its Significance"!https://academic.oup.com/book/62315https://a.co/d/0i7cd8zC2. Book SummaryIn Present to the Mind, Matt Duncan develops and defends a Russellian-style notion of ‘acquaintance’: an especially direct form of conscious awareness we bear to things present in experience, such as colors, sounds, pains, smells, and other phenomenal features. The book begins from a striking question about when your ‘epistemic day’ starts. Against the orthodox view that perceptual knowledge arrives only after experience gives rise to belief, Duncan argues that conscious awareness itself already puts us in touch with reality in a knowledge-involving way. The book is organized around three main claims: acquaintance exists, acquaintance is a form of knowledge, and acquaintance is deeply significant in human life.The middle of the book argues first that several forms of acquaintance are real, and then that acquaintance is not just epistemically useful but itself a distinctive kind of knowledge. Duncan’s core idea is that some knowledge of things is constituted by conscious awareness rather than by belief: in perception, you do not first see, then believe, then know; rather, you can see and thereby know. From there he develops an account of ‘knowledge of things’ that is meant to work across different theories of experience, and he argues that acquaintance plays a foundational epistemic role by helping justify beliefs and underpinning much empirical knowledge, even if it is non-propositional.The final chapters broaden the project beyond epistemology. Duncan argues that acquaintance is aesthetically significant because genuine aesthetic appreciation depends on conscious awareness of aesthetically relevant features; emotionally significant because acquaintance with affective experience helps us know and appreciate the value of people; and morally significant because what we are able to notice and know is intertwined with moral character, producing a reciprocal moral-epistemic relationship. So the book’s overall message is not just that acquaintance is a defensible theoretical posit in philosophy of mind and epistemology, but that it is a basic feature of how we encounter beauty, respond to others, and live morally. Duncan’s concluding thought is that acquaintance matters every day, from ordinary perception all the way to our deepest forms of appreciation and care.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction00:36 - Overview of book03:30 - Bertrand Russell07:30 - Directness08:57 - Objects of acquaintance14:03 - Strong vs. weak acquaintance17:24 - Naive realism22:34 - Mind24:14 - Argument for weak acquaintance26:10 - Absolutely strong acquaintance27:53 - Doubt test30:05 - Fallibility31:22 - Certainty37:33 - Hallucination43:06 - Modal acquaintance44:56 - Coextensive?47:30 - Essence acquaintance50:49 - Properties55:02 - Knowledge57:00 - Varieties of knowledge58:51 - Argument for acquaintance knowledge1:00:47 - Semantics1:05:24 - Knowledge without belief1:11:40 - Other animals1:13:09 - Vagueness1:18:11 - Theory of knowledge1:23:01 - Subconscious acquaintance1:27:05 - Foundationalism1:34:59 - Moral significance1:40:03 - Rationality of perception1:42:50 - Summary1:44:22 - Value of philosophy1:45:31 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

If life as a whole has no ultimate point, what kind of meaning can still make it worth living?My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestRivka Weinberg is Professor of Philosophy and Mary W. and J. Stanley Johnson Chair in the Humanities at Scripps College. Her work has focused on metaphysics and ethics, especially on meaning/purpose and bioethics.Check out her book, "The Meaning of It All: Ultimate Meaning, Everyday Meaning, Cosmic Meaning, Death, and Time"!https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-meaning-of-it-all-9780197758021https://a.co/d/0gsQDkWN2. Book SummaryIn The Meaning of It All, Rivka Weinberg argues that many disputes about life’s meaning stay confused because they fail to distinguish different senses of ‘meaning’. She separates three kinds: ‘Ultimate Meaning’, ‘Everyday Meaning’, and ‘Cosmic Meaning’, and also distinguishes several aspects of meaning, such as value, significance, impact, explanation, purpose, and point. Her boldest claim is that ‘Ultimate Meaning’—the point of living a life as a whole—is impossible for beings like us. A point, she argues, is a valued end external to the activity it justifies; but since a human life contains all of one’s projects, values, and aims, there is nothing outside the enterprise of living one’s life that could serve as its final point. So life as a whole is, in that specific sense, pointless, even though many things within life are not.That bleak conclusion does not, however, lead Weinberg to nihilism. The second major part of the book argues that ‘Everyday Meaning’ is real, abundant, and objective rather than merely subjective: love, truth, beauty, morality, achievement, and worthwhile engagement can genuinely make a life meaningful, and people can be mistaken both about what matters and about whether their lives are well spent. She also argues that ‘Cosmic Meaning’ is often overrated. Even if there were God, miracles, an afterlife, or some grand cosmic purpose, that would not solve the problem of ‘Ultimate Meaning’, and it might not add nearly as much significance as people hope. Cosmic purpose, eternal bliss, or communion with the divine may sound impressive, but Weinberg thinks they do less philosophical work than many assume.The final movement of the book shifts from meaning in general to death and time. Weinberg argues, against a common view, that death is not the main thing that either gives life meaning or takes it away. Rather, time is the real double-edged condition of meaningful life: it is what makes narrative shape, risk, effort, achievement, and change possible, but it is also what erodes all of these things. Hence her ‘time-meaning conundrum’: we need time for meaning, yet time steadily wears meaning down. Her concluding outlook is tragic but not hopeless. We cannot escape this condition, and ‘living in the moment’ is not a real solution; instead, the best response is to engage deeply in everyday goods, attend properly to past, present, and future, and accept suffering and loss as part of what a meaningful human life inevitably involves.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction00:44 - Overview of book03:52 - Meaning of ‘meaning’05:59 - Ultimate meaning10:14 - God13:24 - Skeptical worries16:47 - Religious practice20:14 - Everyday meaning22:38 - Sources of meaning27:18 - Subjective response28:29 - Cosmic meaning34:04 - Scale39:49 - Transience45:54 - Death51:09 - Eternity55:28 - Practical significance59:00 - Value of philosophy1:01:28 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

Where do norms come from: from transcendent reason, or from the customs, practices, and forms of life through which human beings become normative creatures?My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestJay Garfield is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Smith College and Harvard Divinity School, and Professor of Philosophy at Melbourne University. He work has focused on Buddhist philosophy, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, ethics, cross-cultural work, and more.Check out his book, "Norms and Nature: A Humean Account of the Sources of Normativity"!https://global.oup.com/academic/product/norms-and-nature-9780197839768https://a.co/d/05nsMQRP2. Book SummaryIn Norms and Nature, Jay Garfield argues that the central philosophical question is where normativity comes from: whether norms are grounded in something transcendent, as in broadly Kantian approaches, or instead arise immanently out of human life itself. He frames this through the Euthyphro problem and then broadens it by drawing on Daoist and Buddhist traditions, using them to ask not just whether norms are discovered or made, but also whether they come from “above” in the form of principles or from “below” in patterns of human practice. Garfield’s overall answer is resolutely neo-Humean: norms are real and authoritative, but their source lies in custom, convention, and the natural and social forms of life through which human beings become normative creatures.The book’s middle argument is that this Humean naturalism does a better job than neo-Kantian transcendentalism of explaining both the origin and the authority of norms. Garfield insists that the normative domain is unified across ethics, epistemology, language, politics, and related practices, even if those domains differ in content. He then develops an account of custom as both biological and social, tracing its evolution phylogenetically and ontogenetically: human beings are not simply rule-followers by abstract reason, but animals whose hypersociality, trust, language, and inherited practices generate the normative space they inhabit. In that sense, normativity is neither an illusion nor a mysterious extra ingredient added to nature; it is a natural, emergent feature of human life.In the final part, Garfield applies this framework to particular domains—especially language, knowledge, ethics, and politics—and then turns to personhood itself. His picture is that to be a person is to be formed within a web of shared meanings, customs, and mutually reinforcing social practices that both shape us and are sustained by us. The result is a conception of human beings as thoroughly natural creatures whose normative lives are nonetheless fully real and binding. So the book is not just an argument about Hume versus Kant; it is a broader attempt to explain what it is to be human as a socially constituted, norm-governed being without collapsing into nihilism or crude relativism.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction00:49 - Overview of book04:51 - Unity of norms09:08 - Further source?14:11 - Transcendent views19:38 - Why listen to God?22:28 - Religious communities25:58 - David Hume33:23 - Language and norms34:33 - Other animals37:16 - Authority of norms43:04 - Worry44:53 - Moral intuitions50:52 - Moderate relativism54:37 - Open question argument57:41 - Political norms1:03:53 - Normative skepticism1:09:30 - Cross-cultural work1:10:46 - Trust1:14:16 - What is a norm?1:15:04 - Value of philosophy1:15:59 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

What are intuitions, and are they indispensable to our knowledge?My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestMarc Moffett is associate professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, and his work has focused on epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and metaphysics.Check out his book with Cambridge Elements, "The Indispensability of Intuitions"!https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/indispensability-of-intuitions/6F7C18793C39B08507716DD934E4C6A2https://a.co/d/0bsB4MX12. Book SummaryMarc A. Moffett’s The Indispensability of Intuitions argues that rational intuitions are not mystical or mysterious, but rather a ubiquitous and essential feature of human cognition. Defending a stance called “moderate dogmatism,” Moffett contends that intuitions serve as basic sources of evidence alongside perception and introspection. He posits that rejecting the role of intuitions would undermine our knowledge on a massive scale, rendering them epistemically indispensable for almost all knowledge, whether a priori or a posteriori.A central part of Moffett’s argument involves rejecting the prevalent idea that the epistemic weight of intuitions (and other “seemings”) relies on a specific “presentational phenomenology” or conscious “feel”. Through thought experiments involving “Cartesian zombies,” he demonstrates that phenomenological properties are not what confer epistemic justification. Instead, he introduces the Attitudinal Theory of Presentationality (ATP), which characterizes presentational states by a unique cognitive posture—specifically, an involuntary “apprehending-as-actual” of certain contents. This non-phenomenological approach successfully addresses skepticism, such as Timothy Williamson’s “Absent Intuition Challenge,” by showing that intuitions can rationally guide our doxastic inclinations without requiring a distinct, introspectively obvious phenomenology.Building on this non-phenomenological foundation, Moffett demonstrates the widespread payoff of his theory by linking intuitions directly to concept application. He explains that philosophical thought experiments, such as the famous Gettier cases, rely on these concept-application intuitions to guide our judgments. Furthermore, Moffett expands his scope to argue that acts of explicit inference, as well as the higher-level presentational contents of normal perceptual experiences, fundamentally rely on the application of concepts, and therefore on intuitions. Consequently, intuitions are not just tools for abstract philosophy, but are intimately integrated into nearly all of our everyday cognitive functioning.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction00:54 - What are intuitions?03:06 - Absent intuition worry06:55 - John Bengson08:22 - Terminological dispute12:20 - Methodological worry14:53 - Moderate dogmatism18:38 - Foundationalism23:10 - Internalism26:39 - Blindsight30:10 - Zombie argument36:52 - Rejoinder43:09 - Non-phenomenal presentational dogmatism45:48 - Upshot47:47 - Another rejoinder51:48 - Indispensability55:46 - Are intuitions needed?59:47 - Intuitions as content-determining1:02:07 - Animal concepts1:06:10 - Inferences1:08:39 - Inference without reckoning1:10:59 - Philosophy without intuitions?1:14:14 - Ethics1:17:29 - Perceptual experience1:23:54 - Value of philosophy1:27:32 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

If Wittgenstein is right, the mystery of “private experience” doesn’t point to hidden inner objects or an incommunicable language of sensation, but to a philosophical picture that makes our ordinary talk about pain and perception look far more puzzling than it is.My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestMichael Hymers is Munro Professor of Metaphysics at Dalhousie University, Canada and his work has focused primarily on Wittgenstein, 20th-Century philosophy, epistemology, philosophy of language.Check out his book with Cambridge Elements, "Wittgenstein on Private Language, Sensation and Perception"!https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/wittgenstein-on-private-language-sensation-and-perception/BC7058BF509740A839271C98B084F176https://a.co/d/05nGUE5I2. Book SummaryMichael Hymers argues that Ludwig Wittgenstein’s discussion of private language in Philosophical Investigations §§243–315 is best read not as “the” Private Language Argument (centered on the diary passage at §258), and not as an attempt to prove that language is intrinsically social. Instead, the book presents Wittgenstein’s treatment as a cluster of arguments, examples, and reminders whose central target is a picture: the temptation to treat sensations and perceptual experiences as private objects located in a private “phenomenal space,” and to model sensation-words on an “object-and-name” scheme. Hymers frames this as continuous with Wittgenstein’s earlier work (including The Big Typescript) and with his shift away from assumptions carried over from the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus about how naming works. Methodologically, the book emphasizes Wittgenstein’s therapeutic/clarificatory aim: dissolving philosophical confusion by giving an overview of our “grammar,” rather than issuing deep theses or scientific-style explanations.A large part of the book (roughly its middle sections) explains why the “private object in phenomenal space” picture is unstable, and why it makes the very idea of a private sensation-language look deceptively natural. Hymers traces Wittgenstein’s doubts to the earlier critique of sense-data and of treating visual or tactile “space” as if it worked like physical space—where measurement, re-identification, and objecthood behave very differently. He then distinguishes “ordinary” privacy (e.g., the mundane fact that pains are my pains in the sense that I’m the one who manifests them) from stronger “superprivacy,” and separates epistemic privacy (who can know) from ontological privacy (what sort of thing a pain is). Against the idea that first-person authority rests on privileged inner access to private objects, Hymers highlights Wittgenstein’s alternative: first-person present-tense psychological utterances (“I am in pain,” etc.) function paradigmatically as expressions or avowals rather than as reports based on observation, so their asymmetry with third-person claims is grammatical, not a deliverance of a private epistemic channel.In the latter half, Hymers organizes the interpretive landscape around several “waves” of reading Wittgenstein’s anti–private-language materials—moving from verification/memory worries, to problems about private ostensive definition, to rule-following, and finally to broader “stage-setting” concerns (what has to be in place for something to count as naming, attending, or grasping a rule at all). Key thought experiments are used to pry us away from the object-and-name model: the “human manometer” shows that even if a diary-sign ‘S’ correlates with a bodily measure, it can become pointless to insist on a hidden inner act of correctly identifying the sensation—suggesting that the “misidentification” knob is ornamental if sensations are treated as detached inner objects. And the “beetle in a box” at PI §293 is presented as the most explicit pressure against thinking that sensation-words get their meaning by privately baptizing inner items: if the term belongs to a shared practice, the private “thing in the box” is not what gives it its role, and treating sensations as if they were objects is precisely the misleading picture doing the damage. The epilogue’s upshot is not behaviorism or the denial of experience, but a diagnostic: the philosophical “problem” is generated by a grammatical fiction that holds us captive, and Wittgenstein’s aim is to restore clarity about how our sensation- and perception-talk actually works.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction01:06 - Overview of element03:39 - Methodology09:31 - Interpreting Wittgenstein13:57 - Private language18:01 - First wave: skepticism22:17 - Second wave: definition27:22 - Third wave: social34:10 - Wittgenstein on Kripke37:22 - Fourth wave: stage-setting49:23 - Pains and sensations52:52 - Problem for private languages54:23 - Difference from second wave56:46 - Objections1:01:31 - Avoiding behaviorism1:07:00 - Inverted spectrum1:14:17 - Infallibility1:17:07 - Objection1:21:55 - Upshots1:25:15 - Value of philosophy1:26:33 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

Are gender and sexuality really two neat boxes, or are they better understood as positions in a multidimensional space where people can differ by degree rather than kind?My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestKevin Richardson is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Duke University, and his work has focused on metaphysics, language, and social reality.Check out his book, "The End of Binaries: How Gender and Sexuality Come in Degrees"!https://academic.oup.com/book/61709https://a.co/d/04PYhWSf2. Book SummaryKevin Richardson’s The End of Binaries: How Gender and Sexuality Come in Degrees argues that many contemporary fights over gender and sexuality are fueled by an overly rigid “binary” picture—one that treats people as cleanly classifiable into just two genders (male/female) and two orientations (straight/gay). The book begins by emphasizing the real-world stakes of this picture—how the gender binary is defended not only by conservatives but also, in some contexts, by “gender critical” feminists, and how those defenses show up in social practices and legislation. Against this background, Richardson proposes a different organizing framework: instead of asking which category someone belongs to, we should think of gender and sexual orientation more like “where you live” in a space—something that can be described coarsely (city/state) or very precisely (GPS coordinates), depending on the conversational purpose.The core metaphysical proposal is the “spatial theory.” On this view, we should distinguish gender itself from gender categories: gender is an underlying space of features, while categories like man, woman, and non-binary are socially recognized regions within that space; likewise for sexual orientation and sexual-orientation categories. Thinking spatially makes it straightforward to explain “in-between” and hard-to-classify cases: indeterminacy arises because people often use the same terms to organize overlapping regions, and scalar variation is fundamental—one can be a man (or gay/straight) to a greater or lesser degree, rather than only “all-or-nothing.” The book also uses this framework to explain why crisp definitions of gender/orientation categories are so elusive: categories are structured around prototypes (central examples) rather than necessary-and-sufficient conditions, and our difficulty in defining them is compared to the difficulty of verbally specifying an exact geometric shape.Building on the same model, Richardson argues that sexual orientation categories are constructed by communities organizing social life around certain regions of sexual-orientation space and “conferring” category-status by resemblance to prototypes; the result is that our standard labels can be much coarser than the underlying reality they’re trying to track. He also connects the metaphysics to language and politics: disputes like “Trans women are women” are treated as negotiations over which gender “perspectives” (bundles of norms) a community will coordinate on, so meaning-talk and social-world-making are tightly linked. In the concluding “Binary Abolition” discussion, the book rejects both (i) simply eliminating all categories and (ii) replacing binaries with hyper-granular “micro-categories,” recommending instead a positive project of spatial abolition: learning to think and talk in ways that reflect the underlying spaces, with more context-sensitive and purpose-sensitive ways of “locating” ourselves socially—just as we do when describing physical location.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction00:42 - Overview of book05:01 - Semantics vs. ontology10:18 - Descriptive vs. prescriptive14:50 - Gender binaries20:47 - Biological binaries25:07 - Gender norms32:47 - Linguistic constraints37:15 - Social accounts47:07 - Haggling usage53:07 - Spatial theory of gender59:38 - Simplicity vs. informativeness1:07:12 - Gender kinds1:12:53 - Vagueness1:23:14 - Abolitionism1:27:15 - Social issues1:34:47 - Making progress1:41:01 - Value of philosophy1:44:50 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

1. GuestDaniel Nicholson is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at George Mason University, and his work has focused on the philosophy of science, and in particular biology and life sciences.Check out his book with Cambridge Elements, "What is Life? Revisited"!https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/abs/what-is-life-revisited/E6B3EA136720CF50C9480ADB8F41A6F4https://a.co/d/5aBcmau2. Book SummaryDaniel Nicholson’s What Is Life? Revisited reassesses Erwin Schrödinger’s famous 1944 book What Is Life?—a work that’s widely cited but, Nicholson argues, rarely engaged with carefully—and asks how well Schrödinger’s core ideas have held up. Nicholson reconstructs Schrödinger’s main argument, then evaluates it via two extended critiques (of the “order-from-order” and “order-from-disorder” principles), before turning to the book’s historical influence on molecular biology and (using archival sources) Schrödinger’s deeper motivations for writing it.On Nicholson’s reconstruction, Schrödinger’s central move is to contrast the statistical “order-from-disorder” explanations common in physics and chemistry with a distinctively biological “order-from-order” picture: biological regularities, he thinks, depend on microscopic structural order in hereditary material being amplified into macroscopic organismic order. He proposes that genes must be extraordinarily stable because they are solid-state structures—an “aperiodic crystal” whose nonrepetitive organization can encode a “meaningful design” rather than a simple periodic pattern. On this basis, Schrödinger treats the organism as a kind of “clockwork” mechanism and even suggests that biology may involve “other laws of physics” (not a rejection of physics, but new non-statistical principles suited to living matter). He also offers his influential thermodynamics discussion: organisms avoid equilibrium by importing free energy—his famous (if controversial) talk of feeding on “negative entropy.”Nicholson’s bottom line is that Schrödinger’s emphasis on rigidity, specificity, and a gene-centered “order-from-order” program powerfully shaped molecular biology’s self-image—helping to normalize an engineering-style, deterministic picture of the cell (e.g., “molecular machines,” wiring-diagram thinking, and circuit-like pathway depictions). But Nicholson argues that much of this inherited picture is increasingly in tension with experimental work that foregrounds stochasticity, dynamical flexibility, and non-classical self-organizing processes—pushing researchers toward more statistical (rather than purely mechanical) explanatory strategies. Finally, Nicholson contends that to understand Why Schrödinger framed biology this way, we should see What Is Life? as part of Schrödinger’s broader fight against the orthodox (Copenhagen) interpretation of quantum mechanics: his biological proposals were, in effect, entangled with an attempt to defend a more deterministic worldview and to oppose Bohr-inspired extensions of quantum indeterminacy into biology. The payoff of rereading Schrödinger now, Nicholson suggests, isn’t that the book is straightforwardly right, but that it clarifies how we arrived at our current image of the cell—and how that image may be due for revision.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction00:32 - Background03:26 - Why did he write it?08:19 - Biological order14:08 - Order from disorder17:37 - Not applicable to life20:27 - Hereditary substance22:58 - Gene-centric view31:35 - Entropy39:12 - Negative entropy41:24 - New laws48:51 - Modern developments51:26 - Determinism and free will1:03:09 - Helpful aspects1:04:42 - Lessons to learn1:13:11 - Value of philosophy1:20:20 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

What is error, and what is scientific error? Douglas Allchin explores the various types of scientific errors, how to identify them, and how to do science in light of them.My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. AuthorDouglas Allchin is an AAAS Fellow and Resident Fellow at the Minnesota Center for the Philosophy of Science, and his work has primarily focused on the history and philosophy of science.Check out his book, "Toward a Philosophy of Error in Science"!https://global.oup.com/academic/product/toward-a-philosophy-of-error-in-science-9780197827673https://a.co/d/iobiDIc2. Book SummaryDouglas Allchin’s Toward a Philosophy of Error in Science argues that scientific error shouldn’t be treated as an embarrassing sideshow to “real” science, but as something integral to how science actually learns and progresses. Instead of assuming that good methods straightforwardly yield reliable knowledge, Allchin urges a systematic “philosophy of error” that tracks how a claim can be justified at one time and later become unjustified—i.e., how changes in evidence, framing, and reasoning can overturn what once looked reasonable.The book develops an “inventory” of error types across three layers of scientific justification. At the observational layer, errors can stem from material contamination, instrument problems, sampling and measurement misframing (like small samples, proxies, or confounders), and observer effects and biases. At the conceptual layer, mistakes arise in inference and interpretation—overgeneralization, faulty assumptions, confirmation bias, and culturally inflected biases, alongside a meta-risk Allchin calls “epistemic hubris” (the idea that these pitfalls only happen to other scientists). At the social layer, scientific discourse and institutions can also entrench errors (through weak vetting, communal biases, or distorted incentives), even though—ideally—organized skepticism and reciprocal criticism are supposed to help filter mistakes.Finally, Allchin focuses on how errors are actually found and remedied: they don’t “announce themselves,” and there’s no single ‘error-correction method’—correction can be slow, uneven, and sometimes driven by contingencies rather than a tidy mechanism. Against the comforting slogan that science is simply ‘self-correcting,’ he argues we should be more explicit about when and how peer review and replication succeed or fail, and then manage error more deliberately. A key payoff is rethinking what counts as epistemic progress: “negative knowledge” (learning what’s not the case, and why) is still genuine knowledge, and improving reliability often means actively probing for hidden sources of error rather than only accumulating confirming evidence.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction00:56 - Overview of book02:12 - Error09:08 - Uncertainty11:42 - Epistemology13:33 - Vagueness17:38 - First layer of error: raw data29:30 - Second layer of error: conceptual50:25 - Third layer of error: social1:10:46 - Recognizing error1:22:34 - Resolving error1:26:10 - Humans and history1:29:18 - Useful biases1:36:03 - Negative knowledge1:41:49 - Pessimistic meta-induction1:47:42 - Value of philosophy1:50:23 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

What is discrimination, and what makes it wrongful?My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. AuthorKasper Lippert-Rasmussen is professor in political theory at University of Aarhus, Denmark. His work has focused primarily on applied and normative ethical issues.Check out his Cambridge Element, “Wrongful Discrimination”!https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/wrongful-discrimination/6E0371A0B8D60E14E657153706F6F3EChttps://a.co/d/fjqivMb2. Book SummaryLippert-Rasmussen’s Wrongful Discrimination asks what “discrimination” is and, more importantly, what makes it wrongful when it is. He starts by distinguishing mere (generic) discrimination—just differentiating—from “group discrimination,” where people are treated differently because they’re seen as members of socially salient groups (race, gender, religion, etc.). He then maps key varieties of group discrimination (especially direct vs. indirect, plus structural patterns), and stresses that “wrongful” and “morally impermissible” can come apart: discrimination can wrong someone even in cases where (all things considered) an act might still be permissible, and vice versa.The core of the book is a critical survey of three leading families of explanations for wrongfulness: harm-based views, disrespect-based views, and views that tie wrongfulness to sustaining or expressing relations of social inequality (a “social equality”/relational-egalitarian approach). Lippert-Rasmussen argues that each can explain many paradigm cases of wrongful direct discrimination, but each runs into serious trouble once you press on hard cases—e.g., cases that look wrongful without straightforward harm, or cases where harms are present but don’t seem to generate a complaint in the right way.He then uses three especially important “non-paradigmatic” domains—indirect discrimination, implicit-bias discrimination, and algorithmic discrimination—to test these theories. The upshot is pessimistic about any single master explanation: these phenomena often don’t fit neatly under standard categories (prompting proposals like a third category beyond direct/indirect discrimination), and they expose systematic gaps in harm-, disrespect-, and social-equality accounts as usually formulated. Overall, he concludes that the prospects for a monistic theory of what makes discrimination wrongful are dim, and that we may need a more pluralistic (or significantly revised) framework.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction00:43 - What is “discrimination”?07:17 - Irrelevant features10:48 - Framing the project18:43 - Socially salient groups23:44 - Connection with the law26:49 - Empirical research28:04 - Vagueness33:12 - Political beliefs35:07 - Direct and indirect discrimination38:14 - Worry about indirect discrimination43:35 - Statistical discrimination46:24 - Different category?48:41 - Structural discrimination52:40 - Wrongful discrimination55:09 - Rejoinder1:03:02 - Harm-based accounts1:06:53 - Respect-based accounts1:11:11 - Intent 1:13:19 - Equality-based accounts1:19:16 - Monistic accounts1:23:05 - Value of philosophy1:27:10 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

What is the mind, and how do we address the hard problem?My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestJoseph Mendola is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. His work covers a range of topics, including ethics, metaphysics, and mind.Check out his book, "The Neural Structure of Consciousness!"https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/neural-structure-of-consciousness/C7CDE1BEC7582CBE10F6875F56D5EBE0https://a.co/d/3xmkBMz2. Book SummaryJoseph Mendola’s The Neural Structure of Consciousness tackles the “hard problem” by asking how phenomenal features of experience (especially sensory qualia) relate to the physical features of the nervous system, aiming for a physicalist, internalist account that uses color experience as the central test case. The guiding idea is that the rich apparent structure of what we experience—e.g., the way colors stand in relations of similarity, opposition, and inclusion—can be explained by the real modal structure of the neurophysiology that makes those experiences possible: which neural states are available as alternatives, how they exclude or entail others, and how that “space of possibilities” is built into our visual system. Mendola frames this as a “MOUDD” approach: explaining sensory qualia by matching the modal structure of experience to the modal structure of the underlying neurophysiology, while treating many of the “properties” experience seems to present (like phenomenal colors “out there” on objects) as in significant respects illusory.A core commitment of the book is a version of the “whole nervous system” model: rather than locating consciousness in some sharply bounded neural correlate, Mendola argues (with qualifications) that the relevant nervous-system-wide organization bridging sensory receptors and action is what constitutes sensory phenomenality. In detail, he proposes that each particular quale (e.g., a specific red-at-a-location) is constituted by a distinct “modal filament” that links stimulation to action within a fixed background, where the filament is individuated modally (by how it can vary and what alternatives it rules in/out), not necessarily by a single spatial pathway or by representational “information content.” This framework is then used to make sense of introspection and the feel of experience without leaning on standard representationalist machinery, by stressing how actual neural states and their “real possibilities” can be dynamically relevant to what we do and say.The later chapters broaden the application: from color to other senses, then to the layered structure of visual space (including the way experience can attribute properties both to a “visual field” and to robust external objects), and finally to temporal experience, causal experience, and the sense of robust particularity. In discussing time, Mendola engages Husserl-style retentional structure (retention/primal impression/protention) and argues that any adequate view must respect the phenomenology of motion and temporal content in experience. The concluding material confronts familiar anti-physicalist challenges (the “explanatory gap,” bats, zombies, inverted spectra, and Mary) and responds in part by emphasizing differences in concepts and cognitive access: e.g., Mary’s “new knowledge” is cast as acquiring an experience-based concept and learning a coreference claim rather than learning an extra nonphysical fact.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction00:54 - The hard problem06:51 - Dualism10:06 - Panpsychism12:44 - Panpsychist rejoinders15:28 - Modal structure24:13 - Modal structure of neurophysiology27:22 - Description-sensitivity32:00 - Identity34:52 - Type identity theory36:27 - Boltzmann brains39:17 - Correlations vs. identity43:54 - Phenomenal concepts45:56 - Zombies and inverts50:07 - A priori reasoning51:47 - Color experience57:38 - Are colors real?1:02:39 - Other senses1:04:41 - Unity of consciousness1:09:41 - Unconscious mental states1:12:29 - Animal consciousness1:15:48 - Vagueness1:16:55 - Functionalism1:20:48 - Artificial intelligence1:21:28 - Paul Thagard's approach1:25:51 - Progress1:27:11 - Value of philosophy1:28:32 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

What is deception, and can it occur without an intention to mislead, especially when the person being deceived is oneself?My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy1. GuestVladimir Krstić is Assistant Professor at the United Arab Emirates University, and his work focuses on philosophy of mind, language, philosophy of deception.Check out his book with Cambridge Elements!https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/deception-and-selfdeception/F245F27D1A823DB21CC24B9C2D161C7A2. Book SummaryVladimir Krstić argues that the main puzzles about self-deception come from starting with the wrong theory of interpersonal deception. Traditional “intentionalist” accounts say deception requires an intention to mislead; when that model is applied to self-deception, it generates classic paradoxes (roughly: you’d have to knowingly trick yourself).His alternative is a functional account: something counts as deceptive when its function is to mislead—so deception (including self-deception) may be intentional, but it needn’t be, and crucially it’s never merely accidental or a simple mistake. This functional framework is meant to unify human deception, self-deception, and biological deception under one analysis.On the self-deception side, he applies the same functional idea to explain familiar “motivated” cases (e.g., rationalizing away distressing evidence) without requiring intention to self-deceive, and he suggests a practical marker: self-deception often shows up as a motivated departure from one’s normal standards—being “not oneself.” He also argues against the idea that self-deception must be beneficial or adaptive; some forms can be neutral or even harmful, so it calls for case-by-case treatment.3. Interview Chapters00:00 – Introduction00:50 – Overview of the book11:09 – Intention17:58 – Is deception always wrong?29:25 – Functional account36:29 – Function43:08 – Sci-fi case48:13 – Vagueness53:45 – Objections57:51 – Self-deception1:02:15 – Function and self-deception1:09:12 – Semantics1:17:27 – Value of philosophy1:24:33 – Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

If quantum mechanics forces us to rethink what a “measurement outcome” even is, can experiments still count as genuine evidence for any scientific theory?My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestEmily Adlam is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Chapman University and her work focuses on physics, especially quantum physics, and the philosophy of physics.Check out her book, "Saving Science from Quantum Mechanics: The Epistemology of the Measurement Problem"!https://global.oup.com/academic/product/saving-science-from-quantum-mechanics-9780197808856https://www.amazon.com/dp/0197808859/2. Book SummaryEmily Adlam’s Saving Science from Quantum Mechanics argues that the quantum ‘measurement problem’ isn’t just a puzzle about what exists (wavefunctions, worlds, collapses, etc.), but a threat to the epistemology of science—our right to treat experimental outcomes as evidence. She frames the central demand as a kind of “closing the circle”: a viable physical story of measurement should be coherent with the idea that measurement outcomes genuinely provide information about what’s measured. Against the background of ordinary assumptions about measurement (value-definiteness, veracity, unique outcomes, shareable records, reliable memory), quantum mechanics and results like contextuality make it hard to keep the whole intuitive package, which means some “solutions” risk making scientific knowledge fragile or even impossible.The book then evaluates leading families of responses to the measurement problem by asking whether they preserve empirical confirmation. For Everettian (many-worlds) approaches, Adlam emphasizes the “probability problem” as an epistemic problem: if we can’t explain why observed relative frequencies should confirm the theory, Everettian QM risks empirical incoherence—undermining the very evidence that would support it. She also examines “observer-relative” approaches (including perspectival/neo-Copenhagen, relational QM, and possibly QBism), characterized by universal unitary dynamics plus unique outcomes that are nevertheless relativized to observers; a key worry is that this picture strains the expectation that different observers can straightforwardly share and align records of outcomes.Stepping back, Adlam’s through-line is that you don’t get to quarantine these issues inside “interpretation”: changing our conception of measurement reshapes what counts as evidence for any scientific theory, since no theory is empirically confirmed without observation and measurement. She uses this lens to assess Bayesian/decision-theoretic moves and their limits for “sceptical” hypotheses like multiverses, where even the relevant priors may be ill-defined without a broader belief-revision story. And she presses that some stances—e.g. “intersubjective QBism” that severs the link between quantum states/probabilities and observed frequencies—would drain quantum mechanics of empirical content and thus of confirmation.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction00:54 - The measurement problem05:14 - Shut up and calculate07:00 - Different senses of "measurement"09:11 - Bootstrapping10:18 - Relevance to scientific practice13:18 - Quantum bayesianism17:46 - Many worlds20:05 - Recovering the Born rule32:21 - Bohmian mechanics36:09 - Probability37:58 - All-at-once laws42:54 - Anti-Humeanism45:12 - Superdeterminism48:56 - Naturalness50:15 - Retrocausality54:33 - Primitive ontology57:51 - Fundamentality1:01:41 - Consistent histories1:04:38 - Saving quantum mechanics1:07:25 - Making progress1:08:38 - Value of philosophy1:10:20 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

What if the deepest question about “you” isn’t whether you’re the same person over time, but which future life it’s actually rational for you to anticipate and care about as your survival?My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestTrenton Merricks is Commonwealth Professor of Philosophy at the University of Virginia, and his work focuses primarily on metaphysics, but also religion, epistemology, language and mind. In this interview, we discuss his book, "Self and Identity".2. Book SummaryIn Self and Identity, Trenton Merricks argues that a lot of debate about “personal identity” mixes together two different questions. The first is his What Question: what it is for a future person to have, at that future time, what matters in survival for you. His answer is that survival-relevance is constituted by what it’s appropriate for you to first-personally anticipate and to have future-directed self-interested concern about—where “appropriate” is a distinctive, non-evidential and non-moral norm. He also insists we shouldn’t conflate what matters in survival with what matters to you about the future in general (friends, projects, agency, etc.), since that conflation can distort arguments about survival.The second is his Why Question: what relation to a future conscious person explains why that future person will have what matters in survival for you. Merricks’s headline view is: identity is not what matters in survival, but identity delivers what matters in survival—i.e., numerical identity is (on his favored endurance picture) the right kind of explanation for why survival obtains. He then defends both the sufficiency and the necessity of personal identity for survival, targeting Parfit-style fission reasoning in particular and arguing that (depending on one’s metaphysics of persistence) Parfit’s argument can be blocked; he also rejects the idea that unbranching psychological connectedness/continuity is sufficient for personal identity (and so for what matters in survival).Chapters 4–6 then stress-test rival “psychological” answers to the Why Question—views that tie survival to having the same self (values/desires/projects), the same self-narrative, or forms of agential / narrative continuity—and Merricks argues these proposals mishandle cases of deep transformation (including being “turned” into someone evil in a way that seems bad for you without being merely like ceasing to exist). Finally, Chapter 7 applies the framework to personal immortality (“the hope of glory”): immortality is framed as there always being someone who will have what matters in survival for you, and Merricks uses his earlier claims to respond to familiar worries—e.g., that survival comes in degrees, or that immortality would inevitably be tedious.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction00:44 - Self and Identity04:25 - What and why questions07:25 - Semantics12:29 - Normative issues13:29 - What matters in survival18:36 - Numerical identity21:04 - More conditions?22:42 - The past24:35 - Permanent comatose30:49 - Memory wipe36:05 - Psychological continuity37:25 - Puzzles of identity40:47 - Persistence and eternalism46:43 - Relative identity53:42 - Sci-fi cases58:17 - Other views1:00:24 - Non-reductionism1:05:51 - Examples1:10:55 - Vagueness1:14:37 - Narrative accounts1:18:32 - Christian theology1:25:03 - A puzzle1:27:32 - Value of philosophy1:29:25 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

Can brains build consciousness? In this interview, Paul Thagard argues that they can, and explains his approach.My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestPaul Thagard is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Waterloo and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Cognitive Science Society, and the Association for Psychological Science. His work focuses on cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of science and medicine.Check out his book, "Dreams, Jokes, and Songs: How Brains Build Consciousness"!https://academic.oup.com/book/60618https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FHQJ3KCS/2. Book SummaryPaul Thagard’s Dreams, Jokes, and Songs: How Brains Build Consciousness develops a neuroscientifically grounded, mechanism-based theory meant to explain not just “ordinary” perception, sensation, emotion, and thought, but also the especially puzzling, highly structured forms of experience that show up in dreaming, humour, and music. The core proposal is the “NBC” theory: conscious experience arises from interactions among Neural representation, Binding, Coherence, and Competition—where coherence is understood as constraint satisfaction and competition governs which representations win out for attention and interpretation.After laying out NBC and illustrating it with simpler cases (e.g., how brains build perceptual and bodily experiences and integrate them into unified “compound” consciousness), Thagard uses it to explain three marquee domains. Dreaming is treated as a product of the same mechanisms, aiming to explain why dreams are common, emotionally charged, continuous with daily life yet sometimes bizarre, and still feel intensely “what-it’s-like” (his term “zing”) even when they don’t make ordinary sense. Humour is explained via a characteristic dual shift: incoming words/images trigger an initial interpretation and emotional response, then a change prompts a second interpretation and response, and recognizing that shift yields surprise and laughter. Musical experience is explained as the brain binding basic note-representations into higher-order structures like melody, rhythm, and harmony, then binding these with other modalities (movement, words, visuals, emotion), with competition helping music “break through” into conscious attention.The later chapters broaden the same framework to other conscious domains (e.g., religion, morality, sports performance, romance, and the effects of drugs), and argue that any full theory must handle time consciousness: the brain represents time using “time cells,” binds these into larger “memory units,” and uses coherence and competition to produce an experienced sense of duration and temporal flow. Thagard also evaluates animal consciousness and asks about machine consciousness, arguing that current large language models (including ChatGPT) can be impressive without having felt perceptions, sensations, or emotions, partly because they lack the kind of world- and body-involving understanding central to his story. Finally, he connects the theory to a broader mind–body view he calls “coherent materialism” (or “cohmaterialism”), on which genuinely minded systems are rare because they require tightly coupled hardware/software that coherently satisfies constraints of time, space, energy, and history.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction00:51 - Overview of book04:57 - Qualia08:12 - Illusionism11:53 - Neural representation14:58 - Representation18:14 - Binding22:40 - Coherence26:58 - Emotions28:49 - Competition31:18 - Getting consciousness38:13 - Emergence40:27 - Additional mechanisms42:50 - Correlates vs. identity48:00 - Explanatory breadth50:53 - Dreams55:59 - Global workspace theory58:27 - Other approaches1:01:46 - Animal consciousness1:05:41 - Vagueness1:08:37 - Functionalism and AI1:16:14 - Coherent materialism1:18:37 - Thought experiments1:22:30 - Mary's room1:25:22 - Future research1:27:57 - Value of philosophy1:30:01 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

If we ever make first contact, the hard part might not be sending a message across space, but working out whether aliens do science in anything like our sense, share concepts like number and explanation, and could actually understand what we mean by “physics.”My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestDaniel Whiteson is an experimental particle physicist and professor of Physics and Astronomy at University of California, Irvine. His work focuses on the analysis of high-energy particle collisions. He co-hosts a podcast about the Universe (Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe).Check out his new book with Andy Warner, "Do Aliens Speak Physics?: And Other Questions about Science and the Nature of Reality"!https://www.amazon.com/dp/1324064641/2. Book SummaryIn Do Aliens Speak Physics? Daniel Whiteson (with Andy Warner) asks what it would take—not just to find intelligent aliens, but to have a meaningful scientific exchange with them. The organizing idea is an “extended Drake equation”: beyond the usual probabilities of life and intelligence, we have to ask what fraction of alien civilizations do something like experiment-driven science (fscience), what fraction of those we could communicate with at all (fcommunication), and then whether we’d even share enough conceptual overlap to ask and answer the “same” scientific questions.The middle of the book is a tour of the ways those terms might collapse. Even if aliens are curious, their “science” might not look like ours; even if we can exchange signals, translating meanings could be brutally hard; and even math—often treated as the obvious shared language—might not function as a universal bridge if aliens don’t carve the world into countable objects the way we do. The authors use vivid hypotheticals to press the point that what feels “obvious” to us can hide deep assumptions (about counting, representation, and what matters), and those assumptions can reshape what we notice and what questions we even think to ask.In the later chapters, they argue that—even granting shared questions—there’s no guarantee of the kind of grand, final alien “answer” we fantasize about. Human physics already looks like a patchwork of domain-specific approximations that don’t neatly sew into one overarching quilt, and there can be multiple incompatible “stories” that fit the same observed data, suggesting a Rashomon-style underdetermination that aliens might resolve differently (or not at all). The upbeat conclusion is that this isn’t just a downer about SETI: thinking through alien science is a way of spotting our own hidden commitments and keeping alternative conceptual paths alive—so the exercise teaches us about our science and our minds, even if no perfectly compatible alien colleagues ever show up.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction01:55 - Overview of book04:29 - Illustrations05:31 - Extended Drake equation08:31 - Navigators11:44 - Different physics14:28 - Communication21:25 - First contact24:50 - Mathematics29:33 - Vagueness33:12 - Indispensability35:57 - Ontology plus dynamics39:21 - Arbitrary conventions41:20 - Varieties of life48:06 - Friendly?49:16 - Common concepts52:51 - Learning about ourselves54:11 - Progress1:00:03 - Value of philosophy1:02:39 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

Can a Bayesian look at fine-tuning make “design” less compelling, and do Grim Reaper-style infinity puzzles really show that an infinite past is impossible?My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestGraham Oppy is Professor of Philosophy at Monash University, and specializes in Philosophy of Religion.2. Interview SummaryIn this interview, Friction speaks with Graham Oppy about two big clusters of issues: a Bayesian way of framing fine-tuning arguments, and how (if at all) Benardete/“Grim Reaper” style paradoxes support causal or temporal finitism. On fine-tuning, Friction sketches a strategy that starts from probabilistic constraints—roughly, that “design” shouldn’t get a higher prior than non-design, and that life-permittingness/fine-tuning isn’t (or needn’t be) more expected on design than on non-design—so that updating on a life-permitting universe won’t, by itself, drive you toward design. Oppy presses on how the hypothesis space is being carved up and what background assumptions are doing the work, noting that fine-tuning defenders often treat “design” as a family of more specific hypotheses—some of which might assign high likelihood to fine-tuning (the “more batter on the design side” idea). A related thread Oppy raises is an “inscrutability” worry: given a designer’s vast option space, it may be hard to say what fine-tuning should even be likely on design, which complicates the likelihood comparisons that fine-tuning arguments rely on. The conversation also touches on how conditioning on extremely specific facts about “these exact parameters” can generate counterintuitive results about what should have been expected a priori, and Oppy connects this to “many-gods” style worries familiar from Pascal’s Wager debates.In the second half, Friction and Oppy turn to Benardete-style setups: infinite sequences of would-be interveners arranged at times approaching a limit, which can make it seem like an outcome must occur even though no particular intervener is ever the one who triggers it. Friction outlines a common finitist dialectic: if an infinite past/regress would allow a Grim Reaper scenario (often via a “patchwork” recombination principle), and if Grim Reaper scenarios are impossible, then infinite pasts/regresses are impossible too. Oppy focuses much of his skepticism on the linking step—especially the idea that you can “piece together” regions from different possible worlds to build the paradox—because the relevant dispositions and actions don’t obviously survive that kind of cut-and-paste. He also emphasizes that there are plenty of coherent infinite-sequence stories that don’t generate contradiction (he offers simple toggle-style examples), which undercuts the claim that infinity as such forces paradox. And a recurring diagnosis is that many paradox presentations under-specify what happens at the crucial infinite-limit case—so the sense of impossibility may come from an incomplete story rather than a genuine contradiction.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction01:18 - Bayesian fine-tuning argument02:30 - Design vs. non-design hypotheses03:52 - Two probability constraints05:17 - Oppy’s first reaction07:24 - Conditional probabilities questioned10:11 - Does design predict life?11:16 - Purely a priori reasoning15:16 - Causation vs. design16:36 - Probability19:54 - Background22:33 - Simplicity27:41 - Skeptical theism and fine-tuning28:22 - Life-permitting vs. fine-tuned31:39 - Comparing specific hypotheses37:55 - Simplicity and divine complexity39:28 - Necessary beings and the universe43:30 - Intuitions and priors46:52 - Stalking-horse objection49:52 - Background knowledge and updating51:34 - Double-dipping concern55:44 - Grim reapers1:01:41 - Patchwork principle1:10:54 - Thomson’s lamp analogy1:14:33 - Toe-regrowing variant1:22:12 - Lewis and patchwork1:23:41 - Intrinsic powers1:26:27 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

What if Kant is right that real freedom is not doing whatever you feel like, but choosing principles you can rationally endorse and then living by them?My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestKaren Stohr is Ryan Family Chair Professor of Metaphysics and Moral Philosophy at Georgetown University, where she is also a Senior Research Scholar in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics. Her work focuses on ethics. In this interview, we focus on her book, "Choosing Freedom: A Kantian Guide to Life".2. Book SummaryKaren Stohr’s Choosing Freedom is a practical guide to living “freely” in a Kantian sense: not doing whatever you feel like, but governing yourself by principles you can rationally stand behind. She emphasizes that the book is not about becoming more like Kant or constantly asking “What would Kant say?”; it’s about using Kant’s insights to illuminate hard-to-notice features of our moral lives and help you live by your own standards. Stohr also frames the book as a short tour of Kant’s systematic ethics followed by lots of attention to the everyday “trees” Kant actually wrote about—things like gossip, friendship, and dinner parties—because Kant meant ethics to guide real life. Kantian freedom, on this telling, often requires self-constraint: exercising autonomy means “getting a grip on ourselves” so we can live according to rationally defensible principles rather than being yanked around by impulse and procrastination.The early chapters lay out the Kantian basics: morality is grounded in reason rather than shifting feelings, and the categorical imperative is presented through three connected ideals—equality, dignity, and community. Stohr stresses that Kant isn’t only about isolated individual choice: the “kingdom of ends” picture highlights how our communities shape our moral lives and how morality asks us to build social relations on the equal value of persons. In the “moral assessment” sections, she connects this framework to knowing and judging ourselves (and others), urging forms of charitable interpretation that keep us from using other people’s flaws as a way to feel superior, and redirecting attention back to our own moral work. Along the way, she squarely acknowledges Kant’s moral failures—especially racist and sexist views—while arguing that Kant’s own framework contains powerful resources against dehumanization, beginning with a strict duty to treat every human being with dignity.Most of the book applies the theory to character, goals, and social life, organized into parts on vices, life goals, socializing, and looking forward. Stohr explains Kantian vices as “monsters” that live inside us and “enslave us from the inside,” warping our reasoning and making it harder to recognize and follow our duties—hence chapters on servility, arrogance, contempt, gossip/defamation, mockery, deceitfulness, and drunkenness. She then turns to constructive practices (self-improvement, resilience, reserve, beneficence, gratitude) and to the moral texture of friendship, love, manners, and even hosting: for Kant, good social rituals can cultivate both understanding and “fellow-feeling,” helping us practice respect in community. The final chapters emphasize hope as a duty-like orientation toward moral progress: we’re to work toward better ethical community (and even peace) by sustained effort, grounding optimism in the idea that people can keep trying to be better than they were yesterday.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Intro00:43 - Overview of Choosing Freedom03:03 - Making Kant accessible06:08 - Everyday Kantian ethics06:56 - Freedom and rationality10:16 - Acting irrationally12:39 - Human nature and evil16:36 - Can evil be rational?20:58 - The categorical imperative21:44 - Universal law formulation25:55 - Exceptions and universalization30:48 - Humanity formulation34:30 - Ends and dignity37:44 - Kingdom of ends41:38 - Perfect vs imperfect duties46:29 - Conscience and moral assessment51:55 - Reflecting on conscience52:24 - Vices and virtues53:06 - Duty not to lie57:53 - Lies and omissions1:00:14 - Civility and manners1:02:59 - Moral improvement1:06:39 - Teaching ethics1:09:54 - Philosophy as practice1:13:09 - Value of philosophy1:16:34 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

If causation is not fundamental, what keeps reality from turning into chaos with things randomly popping into existence, and does the kalām’s claim that whatever begins to exist has a cause really explain the order we see?My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestDan Linford is lecturer at Old Dominion University, Department of Philosophy & Religious Studies. His work focuses on physics and the philosophy of physics, philosophy of religion.2. Interview SummaryIn this interview, Dan Linford discusses his paper “Without microphysical causation, just anything cannot begin to exist just anywhere,” motivated in part by debates around the causal principle often associated with the kalām cosmological argument. He frames the core question as whether the order we observe in the universe really requires causation—specifically, whether “whatever begins to exist must have a cause”—or whether there are non-causal ways to explain why we don’t see arbitrary “raging tigers” popping into existence out of nowhere.A major focus is a traditional line of support for the causal principle that Linford labels the Hobbes–Hume–Edwards–Pryor principle (HPP): roughly, if the causal principle were false, we’d lack a good explanation for why things don’t begin to exist at arbitrary times, places, in arbitrary numbers, and of arbitrary kinds. Linford and the host also pause on how strong the causal principle is supposed to be (mere accident vs physical/metaphysical necessity), and note that once you add extra metaphysical commitments (the interview uses the A-theory of time as an example), the principle can become either harder to justify or even vacuously true in a way that won’t do the work causal-principle defenders want.Linford then develops an alternative picture—drawing on “neo-Russellian” themes—on which causation isn’t fundamental to microphysics (for Russell-style reasons like time-symmetry), but causal talk remains useful in the special sciences for identifying “effective strategies” (a Cartwright-inspired point about intervention vs mere correlation). The upshot is that even if microphysical causation fails, it doesn’t follow that “anything goes”: what can begin to exist is still constrained by nomic (law-based), metaphysical, and logical principles, and those constraints can underwrite explanations of why tigers (etc.) don’t pop into existence. He also addresses a familiar objection to Humean-style views—why expect an “ordered continuation” of the mosaic rather than chaos—by appealing to Lewis-style similarity/“closeness” considerations (and related constraints on probability talk), arguing that the standard HPP-based worry doesn’t straightforwardly land.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Intro00:30 - Overview04:40 - How strong is the causal principle?10:15 - The Hobbes-Edwards-Prior (HEP) principle16:20 - Expecting chaos vs. no explanation20:35 - What if explanation just runs out?23:37 - Neo-Russellianism32:30 - Fundamental physics36:13 - Time asymmetries in fundamental physics?40:49 - The main challenge to Neo-Russellianism44:23 - Do microphysical things "begin to exist"?51:33 - Law-based explanations without causation57:22 - Are laws more mysterious than causes?1:03:41 - The Neo-Humean response1:14:35 - Where does metaphysical explanation end?1:17:37 - Theological connections and brute facts1:21:45 - Final thoughts1:22:14 - Value of philosophy1:24:30 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

What, if anything, happened before the Big Bang, which origin story is right, and what future observations could finally decide between them?My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestsPhil is a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Socieity, science popularizer, and runs the excellent YouTube channel "Phil Halper", aka Skydivephil. Niayesh Afshordi is professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Waterloo. He is also a founding faculty member at the Waterloo Centre for Astrophysics and an Associate Faculty in the Cosmology and Gravitation group at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.2. Book SummaryBattle of the Big Bang argues that what most people call “the Big Bang” is really two things: a well-tested story about a very hot early universe, and a much less secure story about an initial “bang” or singular beginning. The authors frame the hot early universe as “science’s earliest memory,” while emphasizing that cosmologists are now trying to recover an even earlier “lost memory,” using new physics rather than just extrapolating familiar laws backwards forever. They set the stage with a brisk history of cosmological thinking and with the central puzzle: the standard picture explains a lot about how the universe evolves, but it does not straightforwardly tell us what (if anything) happened before the Big Bang, or what replaces the would-be singularity.The middle of the book is a guided tour through today’s rival “origin stories,” presented as a genuine competition with strengths, weaknesses, and lots of unfinished business. Using inflation and its offshoots as one major contender, the authors then explore a sequence of alternatives: multiverse ideas, Hawking-style “no boundary” beginnings, string-theoretic scenarios like colliding branes and string-gas phases, loop-quantum-gravity-inspired “big bounce” pictures, cyclic models, “born from a black hole” proposals, varying-speed-of-light approaches, holographic cosmology, and even self-creation/time-loop possibilities. A recurring theme is that the singularity is widely treated as a sign that our two great frameworks, quantum mechanics and general relativity, cannot both be straightforwardly applied at the earliest times, so any serious account has to confront quantum gravity head-on, even though there is no consensus (and sometimes “too many answers”) about what that looks like in detail.In the final stretch, the book turns from “what might have happened” to “how could we ever know,” stressing the limits of what current headline instruments can actually tell us about the beginning. The authors note that even spectacular observatories like JWST are not designed to see back to the origin itself, and that the cosmic microwave background is the oldest light we can directly observe, so ordinary telescopes hit a hard wall; to probe earlier than that, we likely need new “messengers,” especially primordial gravitational waves, and better ways of squeezing evidence out of subtle imprints on the sky. They also reflect on the sociology of foundational disputes, warning that scientific consensus is not the same thing as popularity, and that the “battle” can sometimes resemble factional conflict more than dispassionate evaluation. The upshot is deliberately modest: nobody yet knows what happened at the Big Bang, but the path forward is clearer than it used to be, because future observations could rule whole classes of models in or out.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction00:54 - Impetus for the book07:12 - Historical background09:01 - The Big Bang15:22 - The meaning of “nothing”15:43 - Quantifier vs. noun sense of nothing18:22 - Almost nothing scenarios23:37 - How theories bear on cosmic origins28:47 - Concerns about multiverse theories29:10 - Testability of multiverse models34:05 - String theory and brane theory39:25 - Could there be time before time?39:59 - Limits of temporal concepts43:43 - Two-direction time models50:05 - Other models54:01 - Are we on the cusp of a new cosmic revolution?1:01:31 - Favorite cosmological models1:04:36 - Connections to theology and the Kalam1:09:30 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

What happens to our laws about pregnancy, parenthood, and abortion when “gestation” can be shared, transferred, or even moved outside the human body by new biotechnology?My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestElizabeth Chloe Romanis is Associate Professor in Biolaw in the Durham Law School as well as in the Durham Centre for Ethics and Law in the Life Sciences, and her work focuses on healthcare law and bioethics.Check out her book!https://global.oup.com/academic/product/biotechnology-gestation-and-the-law-9780198873785https://www.amazon.com/dp/01988737862. Book SummaryIn Biotechnology, Gestation, and the Law, Elizabeth Chloe Romanis argues that debates about reproduction are often built on shaky concepts, and that this matters once new technologies make “ordinary” assumptions about pregnancy and birth start to wobble. A central move is to separate pregnancy (a state of being) from gestation (a generative process), and to show how legal thinking slides between incompatible pictures, sometimes implicitly treating the fetus as part of the pregnant person, but more often treating the pregnant person as a “container.” This conceptual work is not just metaphysical housekeeping: it exposes the background assumptions that structure current legal schemas and shape how people’s lives are regulated.Building on that foundation, Romanis proposes treating “technologies enabling gestation” as a genus that includes surrogacy, uterus transplantation (UTx), and ectogestation, and she argues that the law’s focus on “assisted conception” is a poor fit for regulating this very different procreative enterprise. She then tracks how existing frameworks can blunt the technology’s transformative potential by trying to force new modalities of gestation to mimic “natural” procreation, a pattern tied to deeper forms of biological essentialism and a tendency to privilege the binary, two-parent nuclear family. On sex and gender, she argues that these technologies can be equality-enhancing for marginalized groups, but that it is a mistake to treat them as a simple “solution” for women’s equality; the more radical potential lies in “unsexing” generative labour and disrupting the assumption that gestation is inherently female.Later chapters apply this framework to parenthood and abortion. Romanis examines why gestation has been used to anchor legal motherhood, and how that rationale becomes unstable once gestational work can be divided across people and machines (as in partial or complete ectogestation), creating new puzzles about who counts as a legal parent and when parental rights and responsibilities should begin. She emphasizes the importance of keeping clear boundaries that protect pregnant people, including carefully distinguishing entities undergoing extra-uterine gestation from fetuses, precisely to avoid expanding fetal-centred regulation of pregnancy. Finally, she argues that technologies enabling gestation do not change the morality of abortion when the harms of unwanted pregnancy are centred, but they are likely to generate politically motivated pressures on abortion provision because much ectogestation literature frames abortion as “the problem” rather than recognizing it as a response to unwanted pregnancy.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction01:03 - Overview02:43 - Pregnancy vs. gestation05:50 - Conceptual engineering08:19 - Fetal relationship13:13 - Legal metaphysics14:43 - Gradual part-whole views19:22 - Biotech and gestation22:39 - Social and legal issues25:59 - Uterus transplants30:23 - Social narratives36:44 - Biological essentialism42:50 - Legal motherhood49:03 - Biotech and abortion58:53 - Abortion and metaphysics01:01:04 - Reforming abortion law01:11:36 - Value of philosophy01:14:16 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

What if the most important thing about acting together is not that our individual intentions line up, but that it can genuinely change how the world shows up to us through a first-person plural perspective?My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestDan Zahavi is professor of philosophy and the director of the Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen and is editor-in-chief of the journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, with Shaun Gallagher. His work focuses on phenomenology, philosophy of mind and cognitive science.Check out his book, "Being We: Phenomenological Contributions to Social Ontology"!https://academic.oup.com/book/59446https://www.amazon.com/dp/019289448X2. Book SummaryZahavi’s Being We argues that debates about ‘collective intentionality’ miss something central if they focus only on how individual intentions line up. The phenomenological tradition, he claims, forces us to take seriously the *qualitative* character of doing things together: feeling, thinking, and acting “as part of a we” can transform one’s sense of self, one’s relation to others, and one’s experience of the world. On this view, *we*-perspectives and *we*-experiences are not optional add-ons to an already complete theory of mind; they are genuine explananda that constrain what we can plausibly say about selfhood and social cognition.In Part I (“We and I”), Zahavi tackles the “primacy” question: does the first-person plural precede the first-person singular, or vice versa? He argues that talk of a we requires plurality and differentiation, and that we-experiences presuppose (rather than erase) the self–other distinction; attempts to derive phenomenal consciousness or basic subjectivity from communal life don’t succeed. That doesn’t mean sociality is irrelevant to selfhood, but it does mean we need careful distinctions between cultural/conceptual accounts of the self and the minimal first-personal “for-me-ness” of experience—because an irreducible plurality of perspectives is exactly what makes distinctive forms of being-with possible in the first place.Parts II and III then explain how we-ness is built up through concrete interpersonal relations and can take multiple forms. Zahavi emphasizes empathy and second-person engagement as ways of encountering another that preserve otherness while enabling coordination and mutual “contact,” and he distinguishes this from mere imaginative perspective-taking; this sets the stage for his analysis of shared emotions and why “affective sharing” needs clearer criteria than simple emotional contagion or matching feelings. Finally, he maps “varieties of we,” moving from intimate dyads and triads to thicker communal and national identifications: larger-scale wes are highly mediated, shaped by norms and institutions, and often sustained through “us–them” demarcation—sometimes actively orchestrated by political forces—so understanding we-formation also means understanding the risks of overly exclusive group identification.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction01:07 - Overview04:12 - Phenomenology10:29 - "I" and "we"13:03 - Worry17:12 - Individualist bias25:33 - Semantic variance27:13 - More empirical research29:26 - Individual and social aspects33:49 - Data38:05 - Husserl44:27 - Primacy51:49 - Higher order theories of consciousness59:40 - Vagueness1:07:36 - Group membership1:12:39 - Empathy1:19:17 - Collective intentionality1:23:00 - Technology1:28:55 - Artificial intelligence1:31:45 - Value of philosophy1:35:05 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

What are laws of nature, do they govern the universe or merely summarize it, and what do those answers imply about induction, chance, and time’s arrow?My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestBarry Loewer is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University and the director of the Rutgers Center for Philosophy and the Sciences. In this interview, we explore philosophical issues related to laws of nature and related topics.2. Interview SummaryBarry Loewer begins by situating the very idea of “laws of nature” historically: people have long noticed regularities, and often tied them to theology, but the modern notion of simple mathematical laws that describe motion and form the aim of physics really crystallizes in the 17th–18th centuries (especially in Descartes, influenced by Galileo). On that early picture, laws were not just descriptions but part of how God “governed” inert matter, since matter itself was taken to be passive. This historical backdrop sets up the interview’s central contrast between “governing” (non-Humean) and “systematizing” (Humean) conceptions of laws.Loewer then develops the Humean line through David Lewis’s “best system” idea: take the total distribution of fundamental properties across spacetime, and the laws are whatever axioms best systematize it by balancing simplicity and informativeness. He contrasts this with Maudlin-style governance using a vivid joke: on the governing view, God sets initial conditions + laws and can “go on vacation,” whereas on the Humean view God would have to create the whole history “all at once,” and we later extract the best system from it. The conversation then turns to why many philosophers resist Humeanism: they want something to “hold the universe together,” and they worry that if laws are mere regularities then induction becomes unjustifiable; Loewer replies that Hume shows there’s no guarantee of induction anyway—science is inherently risky—and he brings in Goodman’s “grue” problem to show that even stating the induction problem correctly requires constraints on which predicates/generalizations count as projectible.In the final stretch, the interview broadens into the metaphysical question behind Loewer’s book-title riff on Hawking: what “breathes fire into the equations,” i.e., why this universe and this lawlike structure at all—and what the world (and knowers like us) must be like for physics to succeed. Loewer suggests physics can’t itself answer “why there is a universe” or “why there are laws,” since any such explanation would already presuppose laws (a theological answer might be possible, but it wouldn’t be a scientific one). He then connects laws to chance and time via the Albert–Loewer “Mentaculus” program: add a “Past Hypothesis” that the universe began in a very low-entropy state, combine it with the dynamical laws and a Boltzmann-style probability measure, and you get a package that yields objective chances and explains time’s arrow—what he calls a “probability map of the universe.”3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction00:45 - Development of views about laws15:15 - Two schools26:37 - Popularity of non-Humean views30:15 - Induction38:15 - Further issues with induction49:28 - What breathes fire into the equations?1:01:25 - Background to the Mentaculus project1:04:15 - Time1:10:20 - Statistical mechanics1:14:32 - Putting the Mentaculus package together1:22:52 - Value of philosophy1:35:57 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

If humans are as irrational and “automatic” as some psychologists suggest, why does explaining what people believe and want still feel like the best way to understand what they do?1. GuestEmma Borg is Professor at the Institute of Philosophy, School of Advanced Studies, University of London, although before that was for a long time Professor at the University of Reading. Her work focuses on the philosophy of language, mind, and cognitive science. In this interview, we focus on her recent book, "Acting for Reasons: In Defence of Common-sense Psychology".Check out her book!https://academic.oup.com/book/58959https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DNCYHXC5/2. Book SummaryEmma Borg’s Acting for Reasons: In Defence of Common-sense Psychology argues that the familiar ‘common-sense psychology’ (CP) framework—explaining action via contentful mental states like beliefs and desires—remains broadly vindicated despite recent experimental and theoretical backlash. Borg characterizes CP as combining (i) a claim about action generation (typically, behaviour is caused “in the right way” by an agent’s reasons) and (ii) a claim about action understanding (typically, we explain and predict others by attributing mental states and inferring what those states should lead them to do). The book’s central aim is to resist the increasingly popular conclusion that “common-sense psychology is wrong” and to show that CP’s reach is much broader than “high days and holidays” cases of explicit deliberation.The first half of the book takes on the Heuristics-and-Biases-inspired attacks on CP’s picture of decision-making. Borg distinguishes two strands: the No Reasons challenge, where heuristics are treated as automatic, “gut-feel” processes that bypass reasons altogether, and the Insufficient Reasons challenge, where people do consult reasons but in a biased, evidentially thin, or otherwise irrational way. She argues that defining heuristics as reasons-insensitive (or inferring that from their “fast, automatic” feel) is a mistake, and that much of the empirical case for endemic irrationality relies on contentious interpretations and methodological pitfalls (including concerns tied to replication, stability, and ecological validity). Overall, Borg’s conclusion on this side is that widespread heuristic reasoning does not by itself undermine CP’s general assumption of individual rationality and reasons-responsiveness.The remainder of the book turns to CP’s second component—how we understand other people—and targets “deflationary” alternatives that try to explain social cognition without robust belief–desire attribution (e.g., behaviour-reading, mirror-neuron stories, “submentalizing,” or more “minimal” mentalizing). Borg argues that fully behaviour-reading approaches face serious empirical and theoretical problems, and that mid-ground views still don’t justify demoting CP to a niche role. Her final position is that deflationary resources may at most supplement CP (for certain developmental or special-purpose explanations), but they don’t supplant CP as the central, everyday framework for making sense of intentional action—so, taken together, the book concludes that common-sense psychology is broadly vindicated.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction00:47 - Overview of common-sense psychology02:50 - Further consequences of view06:38 - Intuitive view10:51 - Kahneman and Tversky18:35 - "No reasons" challenge23:36 - "Insufficient reasons" challenge29:39 - Vagueness34:25 - Introspectable properties challenge41:37 - Unconscious action47:18 - Reasons-sensitivity52:41 - Semantic issue57:28 - Response to insufficient reasons1:06:57 - Useful fictions1:13:40 - Why read the book?1:17:32 - Value of philosophy1:19:54 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

How can Nyāya philosophy teach us to argue better, spot bad reasoning, and still live well amid uncertainty?My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestMalcolm Keating is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Smith College. His work focuses primarily on Indian philosophy. In this interview, we focus on his book, "Reason in an Uncertain World: Nyāya Philosophers on Argumentation and Living Well".Check out his book!https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DG5ZTTCP/https://global.oup.com/academic/product/reason-in-an-uncertain-world-9780197634257Check out his page!https://www.youtube.com/@UCtmzNhD4qq9HZYKkqBV3C8A2. Book SummaryReason in an Uncertain World argues that Nyāya philosophers offer something modern “critical thinking” usually doesn’t: a unified picture of how reasoning and argumentation connect to living well. Keating starts from the fact that we now face an overwhelming stream of claims and controversies, and while people often look to “ancient wisdom” for emotional stability, they look elsewhere for tools to sort truth from fiction. Nyāya, he argues, can do both: it treats reasoning skills and debate practices as socially embedded ways of getting to truth and as crucial for leading happy, virtuous, meaningful lives.The first half of the book develops Nyāya’s epistemology as a response to uncertainty and suffering. Chapter 1 sets the historical stage and introduces the Nyāya thought that understanding (especially epistemology) can relieve pain and suffering, orienting inquiry toward an “excellent” human goal; Keating illustrates this with Nyāya reflections on duḥkha and the attraction of a final state without pain and suffering. Chapters 2–6 then build a toolkit of “ways of knowing” (including perception, inference, and testimony), highlighting the idea of “certification” (reflectively checking that one really knows), the structure and varieties of inference (and how counterfeit inferences arise through pseudo-reasons), how to evaluate testimony and handle conflicting reports, and how doubt—especially doubt arising from controversy—can be a rational trigger for further inquiry rather than a skeptical dead-end.The second half turns from knowing to arguing: how people should (and often do) reason together when disagreements become interpersonal. Nyāya distinguishes truth-seeking “discussion” from competitive formats like disputation (aimed at victory), and Keating uses that contrast to analyze fallacies, equivocations, misleading objections, and the “points of defeat” that explain how someone can lose a debate even without directly refuting their view. The closing chapter draws the ethical lesson: because real debates often mix truth-seeking with ego, politics, and high stakes, Nyāya thinkers sometimes allow even morally serious arguers to use less-than-ideal argumentative tactics in special circumstances—while still treating reasoned discourse as a practice that shapes (and is shaped by) character and virtue.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction00:59 - Overview of book02:27 - Modern relevance10:34 - Background of Nyāya20:00 - Perception25:44 - Concerns with perception31:38 - Inference36:40 - Probabilistic inferences42:38 - Testimony50:04 - Reasoning errors58:34 - Doubt1:07:56 - Debate and argumentation1:15:00 - Wrangling1:18:55 - Living well1:25:04 - Value of philosophy1:28:56 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

Can anything be genuinely about the world, or is intentionality just a useful way of organizing our thoughts and talk?My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestAmir Horowitz is head of the PPE program and professor at the Open University of Israel. His work covers a range of topics, but especially the philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and language.Check out his recent book, "Intentionality Deconstructed: An Anti-Realist Theory"!https://global.oup.com/academic/product/intentionality-deconstructed-9780198896432https://www.amazon.com/dp/01988964332. Book SummaryHorowitz’s Intentionality Deconstructed argues for intentional anti-realism: the view that intentionality (aboutness, reference, “think-about,” etc.) is not merely absent from the world, but cannot be instantiated because the very concept is “inherently flawed,” making the thesis a necessary, conceptual, a priori one rather than an empirical eliminativist proposal. He begins by focusing on how we could ever settle questions of reference/content in the first place, using disputes surrounding the Gödel–Schmidt case in experimental philosophical semantics to motivate the claim that neither armchair intuitions nor theoretical “constraints” can genuinely determine reference. The core idea is that you can’t extract an intentional “function” from a representation itself (anything “encoded” would still require interpretation), and the concept of reference is too neutral to privilege one candidate relation over others.The middle of the book is largely negative: it targets prominent ways of securing intentionality. Against the phenomenal intentionality thesis (roughly, that phenomenology alone constitutes intentional directedness), Horowitz argues that no intrinsic mental property—including phenomenal character—can do the grounding work required, and that “intrinsic intentionality” makes explicit a tension (intrinsicness vs transcendence) that cannot be resolved. He then attacks naturalistic reduction strategies: even if minds/languages stand in many causal/informational relations to the world, the reductive naturalist must explain what makes one of them the semantic/intentional relation, and Horowitz argues that the needed justification is unavailable—mere stipulation (“identify R with aboutness”) won’t get realism off the ground.Having cleared the ground, Horowitz develops intentional anti-realism in detail. The negative thesis is that content ascriptions “in themselves” lack truth conditions, but he pairs this with a practice-dependence account: relative to a scheme/practice of content ascription, such ascriptions can be true/false—e.g., “Gödel” can “refer” to Gödel under a causal-historical practice or to Schmidt under a descriptivist practice, while outside any practice the right answer is “to no one.” He then explains why content talk can still be useful and often successful: content ascriptions carry logico-syntactic messages (structural commitments) that can be true/adequate even if their semantic “aboutness” message is not, and the predictive/explanatory payoff of folk psychology can be attributed to these structural patterns rather than to real intentional properties. Finally, he addresses objections like the “success” argument and the “cognitive suicide” worry by treating “claim that/believe that” talk as rhetorical/“quoted” within a radical revisionary framework, and he closes with an Ockham-style moral: since intentional properties are dispensable and unsupported, we should reject their instantiation altogether.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction00:39 - Overview03:48 - Irrealism and anti-realism04:57 - Concrete and abstract07:31 - What is intentionality?14:15 - Primitivism19:00 - Relations23:54 - Phenomenal intentionality28:20 - Representationalism31:23 - Introspection and intuition37:46 - Too skeptical?47:40 - Empirical research57:23 - Arguments against intentionality1:04:09 - Another option?1:15:58 - Truth1:19:35 - Success of intentional theories1:23:33 - Challenges1:31:12 - Value of philosophy1:33:38 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

Can ethics be fully naturalistic while still explaining why moral reasons genuinely have authority over us?My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestDavid Copp is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of California, Davis, and his work has focused on moral and political philosophy.Check out his new book, "Ethical Naturalism and the Problem of Normativity"!https://global.oup.com/academic/product/ethical-naturalism-and-the-problem-of-normativity-9780197601587https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DPGFFK2W2. Book SummaryDavid Copp frames the book around what he takes to be metaethics’ central puzzle: the ‘problem of normativity’. He wants a theory-neutral grip on what needs explaining when we say that reasons, oughts, and values are ‘normative’, and he treats this as a problem not just for ethical realism in general, but especially for ‘ethical naturalism’. The worry is straightforward: if normative facts are what would make basic moral claims true, it’s hard to see how such facts could fit into a world that we learn about through experience and science—since it doesn’t look like experience (ordinary or scientific) can simply reveal that (say) torture is wrong or compassion is a virtue.To make the dispute precise, Copp develops an ‘empirical criterion’ of the natural: roughly, a property counts as natural only if no synthetic truth about its instantiation is ‘strongly a priori’—so, for the naturalist, substantive basic ethical truths (if any) must be empirically defeasible. He then maps the space of ethical naturalisms: non-reductive views (often cast in terms of grounding/supervenience) versus reductive views, and within reductionism, ‘analytic’ versus ‘non-analytic’ versions—where he explicitly favors the non-analytic, metaphysical-analysis approach. Along the way he argues that to take the normativity problem seriously, it’s not enough to say ethical facts are natural (or grounded in natural facts); we need some reductive story of what ‘robust normativity’ itself consists in.The second half of the book tests concrete proposals: he reviews several substantive naturalist options (including Cornell-style views, the Canberra Plan, neo-Humean and neo-Aristotelian approaches, and his ‘Pluralist-Teleology’) and then answers major objections (the ‘is/ought gap’, Parfit-style challenges, and the “just too different” intuition). A recurring verdict is that non-reductive naturalisms like Cornell Realism may be compatible with naturalism, but they don’t by themselves deliver a philosophically satisfying account of robust normativity, because they don’t provide the needed reductive explanation of what normativity is. Copp presents ‘Pluralist-Teleology’ as the most promising route: very roughly, basic ethical truths are grounded in facts about which systems of standards would best help humans solve different ‘problems of normative governance’—with morality tied in particular to the ‘problem of sociality’ and an ‘ideal moral code’ understood in those terms.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction01:39 - Overview of book05:59 - The problem of normativity12:59 - Normativity19:17 - Formal vs. robust normativity22:53 - Robust normavity30:41 - Authoritativeness35:35 - Categorizing theories41:18 - Empirical research50:39 - Normative conceptualism54:05 - Analytic naturalism1:09:32 - Plausible normative theories1:15:10 - Parity thesis1:18:50 - Nominalism1:24:14 - Metaphysical naturalism1:28:51 - Non-naturalist realism1:33:00 - Non-primitivist non-naturalism1:37:37 - Error theory1:41:13 - Non-cognitivism1:46:37 - Disunified moral semantics1:50:12 - Natural properties1:54:26 - Metaphysical characterization1:56:24 - Counterexamples?2:01:10 - Nature of normative properties2:05:54 - What are these properties?2:07:55 - Relation between natural properties and ethical properties2:13:47 - Supervenience2:21:48 - Frank Jackson’s direct argument2:27:55 - Subjectivist neo-Humeanism2:34:39 - Is it realist?2:38:37 - Neo-Aristotelian naturalism2:43:37 - Potential objections2:49:03 - Pluralist teleology2:53:05 - Desire-dependent again?2:59:11 - Is-ought gap3:04:34 - Bilgrami’s pincer argument3:16:51 - “Just too different” objection3:23:03 - Upshots3:26:21 - Value of philosophy3:29:03 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

Craige Roberts explains how formal semantics and pragmatics model meaning by tracking context, presupposition, and modality to show why what we say depends so deeply on discourse structure.My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestCraige Roberts is Professor Emerita at the Department of Linguistics of Ohio State University. Her work has focused on the philosophy of language, primarily on formal semantics and pragmatics.2. Interview SummaryCraige Roberts is introduced as a leading figure in formal semantics and pragmatics, with work on topics like modal subordination, anaphora, and the way context shapes interpretation. In the interview, the emphasis is repeatedly on using explicit, formal tools (in the Montague-style tradition the host flags) to build increasingly good models of linguistic data—models that make predictions you can test and then refine.A central thread is how Roberts thinks about the semantics/pragmatics boundary: rather than treating pragmatics as an unstructured “everything else,” the discussion treats it as something that can itself be modeled, especially once you track context, discourse goals, and what counts as an appropriate contribution in conversation. This comes out as the host contrasts “more ‘formal’ approaches” with speech-act frameworks (with John Searle as the reference point) and presses on whether there’s any deep tension here. A related point that’s explicitly highlighted is that for certain expressions—like epistemic modals—you can’t just “read off” the relevant domain without knowing the conversational setting.From there, the conversation spotlights several of Roberts’s hallmark topics: the possible-worlds way of modeling propositional content (the host frames this in a Stalnaker-style key and asks how much metaphysics about “possible worlds” the framework really commits you to), and how that connects to context dependence in modal talk. The host also brings up her work on presupposition “triggers” and “projection,” and then pivots to the broader philosophy-adjacent question of how (or whether) we can infer ontological commitments just from the semantics of natural language—where Roberts is described as comparatively conservative about what semantics alone can settle.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction00:33 - Overview of field20:01 - Pragmatic vs. formal semantics53:59 - Searle’s taxonomy58:29 - Speech act theory1:06:51 - Formal pragmatics1:13:59 - Propositions1:23:45 - Necessary propositions1:35:49 - Probabilities1:41:23 - Might and must1:56:44 - Presupposition and projection2:20:39 - Existential language2:25:38 - Open challenges2:37:56 - Amazing capacities2:42:53 - Value of philosophy2:46:57 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

Can sentence meaning be built up locally from the meanings of words and their modes of combination, without positing a separate intermediate “logical form” to do the interpretive work?My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestPolly Jacobson is Professor of Linguistics at Brown University, where she has been a professor for many years. Her work focuses on linguistics and formal semantics, and especially on the formal tools needed to model the syntactic and semantic systems of natural languages.2. Interview SummaryAfter the introductions, Polly Jacobson (Brown University) and the host of Friction move straight into compositionality: the idea (roughly) that sentence meanings are determined by the meanings of their parts plus the rules for putting those parts together. Jacobson treats some compositionality as non-negotiable, but emphasizes that the real controversies concern how much compositionality natural language exhibits, what the composition rules are, and how the topic developed into a live research program rather than a slogan.From there, the interview centers on Jacobson’s “direct compositionality” approach by contrasting it with an “indirect” picture where syntax first generates an intermediate representation (often described as a kind of “logical form”) and semantics interprets that representation afterward. The direct-compositional alternative aims to avoid that intermediate interpretive layer and keep syntax and semantics working in tighter tandem. This leads into the “degrees” or “types” of direct compositionality: at the strong end, syntax is (in a sense) “blind” to structure and semantics does the interpretive work; at weaker ends, syntax is allowed more operations—without collapsing back into the idea that it’s merely producing a logical form for semantics to read off.A recurring payoff claim is that direct compositionality helps preserve local interpretation—making it clearer how meaning can be built up step-by-step without global “repair.” In that spirit, they discuss why an operation like infixation (letting substrings/phrases combine in more flexible ways) might be needed to prevent a syntax–semantics mismatch where some structural piece “should” get an interpretation but can’t under stricter locality constraints—while also noting how quickly things could become unwieldy if the system allowed unlimited iterations of such operations. The conversation also links the view to processing considerations: if humans don’t wait until the end of a sentence to interpret it, a direct-compositional framework can look like a natural fit, whereas denying it may require extra theory to explain incremental understanding. The interview closes with Jacobson on open problems and on the broader value of theorizing about language—even if models idealize a messy phenomenon, there’s real intellectual and explanatory value in trying to understand complex systems better.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction00:45 - Direct compositionality09:45 - Misconception12:46 - Direct vs. indirect compositionality22:02 - Cross-serial dependencies and infixation32:07 - Example with infixation35:48 - Motivation for direct compositionality40:07 - Language without direct compositionality?51:26 - Language processing56:48 - Complicated syntax and direct compositionality1:00:15 - Degrees of direct compositionality?1:01:00 - What more might be needed?1:06:41 - Donkey sentences1:11:58 - More motivations for direct compositionality1:15:08 - Analogy to logic1:17:26 - Idioms and locality1:26:13 - Challenges to view1:28:17 - Value of linguistics1:32:47 - Idealization1:34:54 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

What really makes a behavior a social norm, and how can measuring people’s expectations about what others do and approve of help us change it?My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestCristina Bicchieri is the S.J.P. Harvie Professor of Social Thought and Comparative Ethics in the Philosophy and Psychology Departments at the University of Pennsylvania, professor of Legal Studies in the Wharton School, and director of the Master in Behavioral Decision Sciences program and the Philosophy, Politics and Economics program.2. Interview SummaryBicchieri starts by pushing back against how loose and “catch-all” talk of social norms can be—especially definitions that treat a norm as simply “what people commonly do.” Instead, she frames social norms as genuinely social rules of behavior: shared within a group (sometimes local, sometimes society-wide) and “alive” in the sense that they’re sustained by what people expect of one another. On her view, two kinds of expectations matter—empirical expectations about what others do, and normative expectations about what others think one ought to do—and a behavior counts as governed by a social norm only when people’s preference to comply is conditional on those expectations. A key selling point is that this makes norms testable: you can measure the relevant expectations and the conditionality, which in turn makes norm talk more predictive and scientifically usable.From there she emphasizes both the psychology and the methodology. Psychologically, she notes that many everyday norms function like default rules: we often follow them automatically because they coordinate social life and spare us constant deliberation (her example is familiar “greeting” behavior like handshaking). Methodologically, she’s interested in detecting conditionality rather than just asking people what they personally endorse. So she stresses the importance of specifying the relevant reference group, then measuring empirical and normative expectations (via surveys), and then using vignette designs to reduce “experimenter demand” and to see whether predicted behavior shifts across different combinations of “most people do X” and “most people approve of X.” Those off-diagonal cases let her test what happens when descriptive and normative signals conflict—and she reports that, in her data, descriptive/empirical expectations typically “win the day”: when people believe most others do something, that tends to guide what they’ll do even if they also think most others don’t approve.A big theme in the latter part of the interview is application: if policymakers want to shift behavior, they need a clearer picture of the “cognitive plumbing” behind how people interpret social information. She treats “norm nudging” as a kind of black box—sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t—and points to systematic asymmetries in the inferences people draw from descriptive vs. approval messages, depending on whether the behavior is seen as positive or negative. She also highlights how crucial it is to target the right reference network: in a successful intervention aimed at curbing antibiotic overprescribing, the message was framed around what the majority of doctors in London do, so recipients couldn’t dismiss it as irrelevant. At the same time, she warns that you can’t design good interventions if you misclassify behaviors: in work for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on open defecation in India, she found it wasn’t a social norm at all but a widely shared custom, which changes what it would take to replace it with a toilet-usage norm. She also connects this to why norm change is hard: trendsetters and tipping points exist, but thresholds are difficult to know in advance, so we can often explain change better than we can predict it. Finally, she notes that messaging can backfire when it clashes with what people observe locally—prompting a “pragmatic” (suspicious) rather than “semantic” (straightforward) interpretation—before closing with a defense of philosophy’s analytic mindset as a real asset for doing this kind of careful conceptual and empirical work.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction01:00 - What are social norms?05:23 - Formal definition12:42 - Context16:14 - Beliefs19:52 - Empirical research28:34 - Inferences and norm nudging32:20 - Historical development36:04 - Game theory40:56 - Norms and normativity44:28 - Changing social norms49:49 - Too broad?52:42 - Upshots of account56:50 - Open questions1:00:12 - Value of philosophy1:01:52 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

A probing conversation with Graham Oppy on why classical arguments for God often fail to establish their intended conclusions, and on how pragmatics, metaphysics, and Bayesian reasoning shape debates in philosophy of religion.My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestGraham Oppy is Professor of Philosophy at Monash University, and specializes in Philosophy of Religion.2. Interview SummaryGraham Oppy (a philosophy of religion professor at Monash University) begins by describing how he lost his childhood Christianity around age 12–13, then—after reading Bertrand Russell’s autobiography as a teenager—decided he wanted a life in philosophy. From there, several questions press him on “existential inertia” and classical theistic arguments: he says the label covers different theses, but in the basic sense—if something exists at a time and nothing intervenes to destroy it, it continues to exist—he accepts it (not as a special force, just as the idea that things don’t pop out of existence without a cause or reason). In a related exchange about agency, he’s skeptical of “agents without mechanisms,” arguing that positing such a category is theoretically costly (it multiplies kinds of agents without clear explanatory payoff), whereas ordinary organisms act via mechanisms, and our intuitions about “mechanism-free” agency are both fallible and malleable. He also flags a physicalist/identity-theory picture on which mental states just are brain states, dissolving certain “mysteries” about mind–body correlation.On religious language and theological discourse, he dismisses A. J. Ayer–style verificationism as self-undermining, and he’s likewise unconvinced by some later “Wittgensteinian” moves in philosophy of religion. A concrete example he uses is Norman Malcolm’s famous line that it can be conversationally odd to say “I believe” when one knows; Oppy follows H. P. Grice in treating this as pragmatics (a norm of being maximally informative), not as evidence that knowledge fails to entail belief. He also notes that the thought that God-talk is “meaningless” because “God” lacks meaning is now rarely defended in academic philosophy, though he mentions Michael Martin as flirting with the idea. And he emphasizes that theological traditions diverge sharply over whether we can form any positive conception of divine attributes: he contrasts approaches associated with Thomas Aquinas (and some early Muslim thinkers) with post-Reformation Protestant traditions that treat “omnipotence,” “omniscience,” and “perfect goodness” as more literally and directly graspable. Stepping back, he suggests philosophy of religion is plural and somewhat siloed: he points to both analytic and continental work (including colleagues and Jacques Derrida–influenced strands), but doubts there will be much integration given how far apart the subfields’ aims and methods can be.When the discussion turns to what counts as a “good case” for theism, he recommends thinking in a cumulative-evidence style associated with Richard Swinburne: rather than expecting a single knockdown proof, you weigh a wide range of considerations (evil, the existence of the universe, and so on), and many of the relevant “data” will overlap across different theistic religions. On specific doctrines, he argues that even if one claims God’s omniscience is “non-propositional,” it still appears to commit you to the truth of a vast range of propositions, so the maneuver may not change as much as advertised. On classical arguments, he distinguishes (i) whether a conclusion is actually a logical consequence of the premises from (ii) whether the premises are true; and he reiterates his view (from Arguing About Gods) that, at least for the first three of Aquinas’s Five Ways, the intended conclusion does not follow from the stated premises (and he’s unsure, on the spot, how much he said about the fourth and fifth). Finally, in a later exchange about Bayesian reasoning, he voices familiar worries about “subjective Bayesianism”: in empirical domains with lots of data, priors (within limits) tend to wash out, but in data-poor areas, demanding precise numerical credences can feel arbitrary because we lack the kind of evidence that would drive convergence.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction00:14 - What got you into philosophy01:11 - Existential inertia04:53 - Ultimate causal explanations15:34 - Psychophysical harmony22:11 - Religious language27:05 - Religious epistemology35:48 - God's knowledge37:46 - Validity of the five ways40:01 - Understanding God42:20 - Ignosticism48:04 - Continental philosophy of religion53:02 - Fracturing of academia/education57:45 - Fine-tuning1:03:40 - Subjective bayesianism1:06:46 - General model of inquiry1:10:02 - Münchhausen trilemma1:15:43 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

Can getting more information ever make a rational agent worse off, not better, once you factor in real-world costs, group disagreement, and the way inquiry can change the very decision you face?My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestTed Seidenfeld is Herbert A. Simon University Professor of Philosophy and Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University, and his work focuses on decision theory, statistics, and related topics.2. Interview SummarySeidenfeld frames the conversation around a classic decision-theoretic result associated with Jack Good: in a simplified Bayesian/expected-utility setting, if there is an experiment whose possible outcomes would rationally lead you to act differently, then (given a “free” chance to learn) it is instrumentally rational to delay and gather that information, since it has expected value precisely by guiding action. But his main aim is to stress that this is a mathematical theorem with substantive assumptions, and once you relax them the “value of information” conclusion can flip: additional information can, by your current lights, predictably make decision-making worse rather than better.He then walks through several ways those assumptions fail. One route is social: if the “agent” is really a group with multiple probability/utility perspectives, new evidence can surface latent disagreements and turn prior unanimity into polarization, forcing compromises that both parties regard as worse than the pre-inquiry choice, which raises the question of whether inquiry is worth it when it predictably destabilizes collective action. Another route concerns what counts as ‘cost-free’ information: if your utilities include valuing uncertainty (the theater mystery example), information can be costly simply by spoiling an experience. He also emphasizes ‘moral hazard’ and ‘act–state dependence’, where the very act of setting up or pursuing inquiry changes the relevant state of the world (or your future dispositions), so dominance-style reasoning breaks down and the Good-style theorem no longer applies.The discussion later uses Newcomb’s paradox as a case study: Seidenfeld notes that two-boxing looks dominant unless you are prepared to endorse choice-dependent conditional probabilities (the “reverse” conditionals), and he argues that a predictor’s track record by itself does not automatically justify those probabilities. He presses the point with a market/auction thought experiment about selling ownership of the “one-box” outcome, meant to test whether the purported conditionals genuinely guide action. From there he pivots to a deeper worry about agency: too much self-knowledge (for example, knowing you are an expected-utility maximizer with fixed probabilities/utilities) threatens the idea that you face live options at all, and he is skeptical about assigning probabilities to your own acts in a decision problem. He finally situates these tensions historically via Kenneth Arrow and Leonard J. Savage, suggesting that attempts to generalize Bayesian rationality from individuals to cooperative groups (even under a unanimity constraint) run into impossibility-style pressures that leave “compromise” looking unstable unless you relax parts of the Savage framework.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction00:45 - Is ignorance bliss?11:22 - Cost-free information16:22 - Sample case19:27 - Moral hazard27:20 - Newcomb’s problem38:25 - Dominance argument44:07 - Deliberation and prediction48:32 - Causalist rejoinder50:32 - Variation55:27 - Paying to avoid cost-free information59:19 - Simpson’s paradox1:07:57 - Group decisions1:22:58 - Imprecise preferences1:25:21 - Imprecise credences1:27:52 - Other models1:39:01 - Causal bayesian networks1:43:49 - What does caustion add1:48:57 - Relevance1:51:27 - Backward intervention1:54:02 - Application to groups1:59:27 - Sleeping beauty problem2:10:02 - Thirder argument2:14:12 - Halfer solution2:15:55 - Ambiguity of ‘’now’‘2:18:00 - Betting odds2:26:00 - Value of philosophy2:29:57 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

Can we keep everything that makes mathematics rigorous by treating it as the study of possible structures, without committing to a mysterious realm of abstract objects?My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestGeoffrey Hellman is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota. His work focuses on the philosophy of mathematics, logic, science and metaphysics.2. Interview SummaryGeoffrey Hellman frames the philosophy of (pure) mathematics as a contest between a default “objectivist” or Platonist picture—where mathematics is about abstract objects—and a structuralist impulse that treats mathematics as primarily about patterns of relations rather than special entities. They note how, after Richard Dedekind and David Hilbert, this structuralist thought was often sidelined by approaches that re-centered “definite objects,” most notably in Principia Mathematica and related work by Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell. Hellman’s guiding complaint is the familiar epistemic worry: if mathematical objects are outside space, time, and causation, what could ground our knowledge of them—so the philosophical pressure is to keep what’s powerful in mathematics without buying a mysterious ontology.Against that background, the Hellman reconstructs the route to “modal structuralism” by weaving together historical foundations work and a modal turn. They highlight the need for a rigorous account of the structuralist idea that axioms characterize any system of objects interrelated in the right way (rather than a single privileged domain), an idea they connect to Howard Stein and especially to Hilary Putnam’s suggestion that foundations should explicitly use necessity/possibility talk—mathematics as the study of possible structures. They then use set theory as the main case study, sketching the standard ZFC story associated with Ernst Zermelo (plus choice) and Abraham Fraenkel (replacement), and motivating an “indefinite extensibility” picture: any given model can be extended to a bigger one, so there’s no coherent “standing outside” all of them at once.Finally, Hellman contrasts this with “face-value” Platonist structuralisms—especially Stuart Shapiro’s ante rem approach—and argues that they inherit a version of Paul Benacerraf’s permutation/uniqueness worries: even if you grant abstract positions, you can permute them (e.g., swap 2 and 3) and get an equally good “number structure,” with no non-arbitrary fact to pick the intended one. On the Hellman’s modal view, the point of arithmetic, set theory, etc. is preserved by talking only about what could exist (structures satisfying the axioms), not about a realm of abstract objects—making the view attractive to nominalist-leaning philosophers and close in spirit to functionalist attitudes about theoretical commitments.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction00:42 - Overview08:41 - History and development59:21 - Motivating the view1:25:38 - Modal structuralism1:48:53 - Proposed semantics1:54:30 - Other abstracta2:03:20 - Logical possibilities2:11:08 - Logical truths and nominalism2:20:36 - Compatibility with other views2:23:50 - Indispensability arguments2:37:47 - Non-classical mathematics2:58:30 - Classical mathematics with non-classical logic3:01:56 - Value of philosophy3:13:30 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

How did a little-known 17th-century physician help shape Cartesian philosophy after René Descartes by trying to complete its account of the mind, the body, and their union?My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestSteven Nadler is Vilas Research Professor and the William H. Hay II Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His work focuses on 17th century philosophy, and he has a variety of published works in this area.Check out his book, "The Good Cartesian: Louis de La Forge and the Rise of a Philosophical Paradigm"!https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-good-cartesian-9780197671719https://www.amazon.com/dp/01976717132. Book SummarySteven Nadler’s The Good Cartesian tells the story of how Louis de La Forge—a young provincial physician—helped René Descartes’s philosophy become a dominant “new” paradigm in the decades after 1650. Nadler opens with the broader French and European backdrop: institutional anxiety about “philosophical novelties” and the way Cartesianism was increasingly seen as a threat to traditional Scholastic frameworks, especially in sensitive theological contexts. Against that setting, Nadler argues that La Forge’s role has been underappreciated: not only is he a key early figure in debates about occasionalism, but he is also central to how second-generation Cartesians tried to complete, correct, and extend Descartes’s system while still presenting themselves as faithful disciples.The book then reconstructs La Forge’s life, networks, and projects in detail, showing how a thinker working far from Paris nonetheless became deeply involved in the Cartesian movement—through local intellectual milieus, ties to Cartesian promoters, and access to manuscripts and correspondence. Nadler portrays La Forge as “the most loyal of all Cartesians,” someone who wanted to articulate not just what Descartes said but what Descartes would have said if he’d lived longer, done more anatomical work, and absorbed later scientific developments. The heart of Nadler’s historical case is that there had never been a single sustained study of La Forge’s main contributions: (i) his role in illustrating and commenting on the first French edition of Descartes’s Traité de l’homme (1664) and (ii) his own Traité de l’esprit de l’homme, which aims to finish Descartes’s account of the human being by treating the mind and its relation to body.Finally, Nadler offers a chapter-by-chapter philosophical analysis of what La Forge actually adds to Cartesianism—especially in philosophy of mind and causation: the nature of the Cartesian mind, the mind–body union, occasionalist explanations, the mechanics of bodies, mind–motion interaction, and the structure of ideas and volitions. A central theme is La Forge’s attempt to demystify “union” by treating it as a stable, law-like reciprocity between mental and bodily states grounded in God’s instituted order, not as some further metaphysical glue; on this view, union persists as long as the relevant capacities for coordinated interaction remain. In the conclusion, Nadler argues that La Forge’s overall position is subtle: while bodies (as mere extension) are passive and so push La Forge toward strong divine-causation claims about bodily motion, La Forge simultaneously insists that the mind is active and (in an important sense) causally efficacious over its own thoughts and volitions—yielding something closer to a “conservationist” picture for the mind than a fully thoroughgoing occasionalism.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction00:59 - Overview04:03 - Historical factors06:35 - Importance of other figures08:11 - Eucharist13:36 - Louis de La Forge15:27 - Treatise on Man19:04 - Commentary21:04 - Motivation21:54 - What is a “good Cartesian”?27:19 - Treatise on the human mind33:32 - Causation37:24 - Occasionalism40:48 - Partial occasionalism42:13 - Why does only God have this power?47:33 - Is the view coherent?50:00 - Other potential contributions51:39 - Pineal gland55:01 - Immortality of the soul57:33 - Value of philosophy59:27 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

How far can arguments like the Grim Reaper paradox, divine conceptualism, and the problem of evil really take us in deciding whether theism is philosophically credible?My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestAlex Malpass's work focuses on philosophical logic, philosophy of time, philosophy of physics, and more. His website is https://useofreason.wordpress.com/, and he runs the Thoughtology YouTube channel.2. Interview SummaryAlex explains that his route into philosophy was basically driven by curiosity: as a kid he read a book of “great philosophers,” latched onto Socrates as a model of irreverent questioning, and then just kept following whatever topics struck him as interesting. He emphasizes that he approaches philosophy as an independent hobby—doing it because it’s fun rather than because he’s representing an institution or defending a fixed “doctrinal” package—so he’s comfortable treating big debates (including the ‘fine-tuning argument’) as open-ended problems where you can explore multiple frameworks without having to “take a view on everything.”The first major topic is the ‘Grim Reaper paradox’ (presented as a descendant of a “Benedetti/Benedetti paradox” in the transcript): Alex walks through how you can set up an infinite sequence of “reapers” (or triggers) arranged so that any given event is prevented by an earlier one, and yet there’s no first event—pushing you toward an inconsistent description of what happens. He discusses why this is often taken to be evidence against an actually infinite past, and he engages an objection that uses a kind of “copy-and-paste”/recombination principle (if one reaper-scenario is possible, why not infinitely many?), explaining how the paradox is meant to show that certain infinite constructions you might have thought were coherent actually aren’t.From there the conversation broadens into several connected philosophy-of-religion disputes. On abstract objects, he discusses the move to ‘divine conceptualism’—treating things like mathematical truths as ideas in God’s mind—and sketches a critique that leans on intentionality: if thoughts are essentially about something, then we still owe an account of what a “divine thought” is about without silently reintroducing the very abstracta we were trying to explain. He then turns to the problem of evil and “perfect being” expectations, arguing that re-describing evil as a privation (often associated with Augustine) doesn’t really touch the evidential force of suffering, and he discusses what a “defense” needs to accomplish (logical consistency rather than plausibility) while also criticizing aspects of traditional Christian narrative like inherited guilt. He also touches modal issues (including ‘modal collapse’ and skepticism about God knowing counterfactuals for merely possible situations), and ends with remarks about Alvin Plantinga–style evolutionary worries: he’s cautious about quick debunking stories, stressing that rationality looks like a gradual capacity that can be repurposed and amplified culturally over time. Summary based on the provided transcript.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction00:46 - What got you into philosophy?03:28 - Grim Reaper paradox13:34 - Omniscience and infinity16:16 - Lord of non-contradiction25:15 - Other divine conceptualist views27:30 - Non-propositional knowledge29:26 - Platonism and naturalism36:10 - Intentionality of phenomenal states36:52 - Divine simplicity37:45 - Principle of sufficient reason47:26 - Argument against Christianity55:20 - Privation theory of evil1:01:00 - Transworld depravity1:10:55 - Evolutionary argument against naturalism1:21:50 - Act and potency1:28:30 - Is "existence" a predicate?1:29:58 - Free will1:35:22 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

Can the strange “odd universe” result be defused by rethinking how parts, wholes, and counting fit together, rather than by giving up on common-sense mereology?My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestMeg Wallace is Associate Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at the University of Kentucky, and specialize in metaphysics and ontology.Check out her book, "Parts and Wholes"!https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C94RMGVM2. Book SummaryIn Parts and Wholes, Meg Wallace uses the “odd universe argument” as a hook: from a small package of seemingly intuitive assumptions about parthood, composition, and counting, you can (purportedly) derive a priori that the universe contains an odd number of things—a conclusion that feels both wild and philosophically revealing. She treats that “something has gone weirdly wrong” reaction as a diagnostic tool: it pushes us to locate which assumption (or background method) is responsible, and Section 1 supplies the needed toolkit—basic mereology plus plural-logic resources for talking carefully about “the parts, taken together” versus “the whole.”Section 2 turns to two big structural questions: composition (building up) and decomposition (breaking down). On the composition side, Wallace frames the Special Composition Question (SCQ) and walks through the familiar triad: universalism (“always” compose), nihilism (“never” compose), and moderation (“sometimes” compose). Universalism threatens to look “ontologically explosive,” but she sketches ways it can be tamed—e.g., by identifying the right sums with ordinary objects, or by pairing it with a view that preserves parsimony (eventually, her favored route goes through composition-as-identity). Nihilism gets its standard “arranged mug-wise” style defense and the idea that ordinary talk can still work without rampant error theory, while also facing serious worries about self-defeat if there are, strictly speaking, no speakers, utterances, or other composites. Moderation is initially tempting, but Wallace presses the familiar problems: proposed conditions for composition can look arbitrary or anthropocentric, and once vagueness/jumpiness enters, you risk getting a pervasive indeterminacy about how many things there are. On the decomposition side, she asks whether reality bottoms out in finitely many simples (one of the odd-universe assumptions), infinitely many simples, or gunk; and she shows how changing these “all the way down” options can generate further surprising cardinality results (e.g., pressures toward uncountably many objects).Section 3 argues (with “a healthy bias”) for composition as identity (CI) and uses it to reframe what looked like runaway ontological commitments: if the whole just is the parts (in the relevant plural sense), then universalism can be “ontologically innocent,” double-counting worries dissolve, and familiar puzzles about coincidence and overdetermination lose their bite. But CI attracts “numerical” objections (cardinality, counting-style arguments, and puzzles involving “is-one-of” plus Leibniz’s Law), and Wallace’s core reply is methodological: our standard, singular way of counting bakes in the very “extra object” result that makes CI look impossible, so we should reconsider how numerical predicates attach—moving away from singular counting toward an alternative (she discusses “relative counting”). In the Conclusion she makes her preferred diagnosis explicit: accept simples, unrestricted composition (universalism), and count—but deny that count commits us to singular counting—and accept CI (rejecting “composition is not identity”), which blocks the odd-universe derivation.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction00:40 - Book on mereology02:45 - Odd universe argument10:35 - Finitely many simples?16:14 - Unrestricted composition25:52 - Different senses of “object”28:30 - Composition as identity35:46 - Different properties41:18 - Perdurantism45:35 - Modal parts50:05 - Worries55:57 - Modal views59:52 - Indeterminate constitution1:03:26 - Problem of the many1:10:20 - More objects?1:18:21 - Value of philosophy1:19:55 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

What makes a scientific category more than a convenient label, and when do our classifications really track the causal structure of the world?My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestMuhammad Ali Khalidi is Presidential Professor of Philosophy at City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center. His work focuses on the philosophy of science, particularly cognitive science and social science, as well as some work on classical Arabic-Islamic philosophy.Check out his book in Cambridge Elements on "Natural Kinds"!https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/natural-kinds/8CA215EA3A1878FC4856B84E28F4C447https://www.amazon.com/dp/10090050652. Book SummaryKhalidi argues that science can’t even get off the ground without classifying its subject matter, and that a central aim of scientific taxonomy is to carve reality “at the joints” by identifying categories that correspond to natural kinds. Adopting a broadly naturalist stance, the book treats scientific practice as a (defeasible) guide to what kinds there are, while still allowing that scientists can misclassify, over-lump, or over-split. The overall structure reflects that agenda: it first lays out metaphysical background (what “natural” amounts to, realism vs. anti-realism, and pluralism), then compares leading theories of kinds, then distinguishes different kinds of kinds, and finally tests the resulting framework on concrete scientific case studies.In evaluating theories, Khalidi highlights a widely accepted constraint on bona fide scientific categories: projectibility—roughly, whether membership in the category supports nontrivial induction (e.g., from “x is beryllium” to further expectations about melting point, etc.). He then argues that traditional essentialism and even more recent “homeostatic property cluster” approaches can be too restrictive, especially when mechanisms are absent, multiple, or not what really explains a category’s stability. In place of these, he defends a “simple causal theory” (SCT): natural kinds correspond to clusters of properties, but what makes them non-arbitrary is that the properties are bound together by causal relations (in many possible structures), so kinds are the categories that figure in generalizations that “correctly describe the causal structure of the world.”A major payoff of the SCT is its flexibility about pluralism and crosscutting: the world may support multiple overlapping classifications, so scientists (and philosophers) needn’t choose once and for all between lumping and splitting—one can legitimately “lump for some purposes and split for others,” depending on explanatory and predictive aims. Khalidi also broadens what can count as a real kind: besides “intrinsic” kinds, there are functional kinds grounded in stable causal-functional profiles even when intrinsic make-up varies. He likewise defends etiological (historical) kinds where common origins and trajectories explain present similarities and differences. And he argues that even interactive (mind-dependent) kinds can be real when they participate in robust causal regularities, despite being partly shaped by human classification and response. The closing case studies illustrate the method: “planet” comes out as a real kind (both functional and etiological), “pandemic” (as currently used) does not, and “autism” looks like a promising candidate though it may be an umbrella that lumps multiple kinds together.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction01:18 - Introducing natural kinds04:47 - Realism and conventionalism12:55 - Mixed views19:27 - Folk discourse25:05 - Conceptual engineering27:49 - Science30:52 - Degrees of naturalness34:32 - How many kinds?38:45 - Uninstantiated kinds44:19 - Other sorts of kinds48:14 - Ontological commitment50:42 - Arbitrariness54:35 - Essentialism59:42 - Vagueness1:03:10 - His approach1:06:31 - Causation1:09:24 - Another approach1:15:42 - Non-natural kinds1:17:32 - Value of philosophy1:20:17 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

What does it take for a theory of being to earn its ontological commitments, and can we make sense of nonexistence, properties, and possibility without bloating our inventory of what there is?My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestPeter van Inwagen is John Cardinal O'Hara Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame, and is Research Professor of Philosophy at Duke University. He is well-known for his work in a variety of fields, but primarily metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of action.Check out his book, "Being: A Study in Ontology"!https://academic.oup.com/book/44876https://www.amazon.com/dp/01928839682. Book SummaryBeing: A Study in Ontology by Peter van Inwagen has a two-part aim: to lay out a meta-ontology (what we’re doing when we ask “What is there?” and how to answer it) and then to use that meta-ontology to do substantive ontology. He explicitly frames ontology as a systematic answer to “What is there?” and meta-ontology as reflection on the question and method; on his map of the book, Chapters I and V are meta-ontology, while II–IV (and VI) apply it to specific disputes. The meta-ontological stance is “deeply Quinean”: he’s willing to present it as (roughly) W. V. Quine’s view, sharply tied to how quantification works and how ontological commitment is extracted from what we accept.With that Quinean methodology in hand, the middle of the book argues for several “anti-Quinean” ontological results (even while agreeing with Quine about non-existent things). In the Introduction he flags the central applications: whether there are things that “do not exist,” whether there are abstract objects, and whether modal discourse commits us to a realm of possibilities and possible worlds. On the abstract-object side, he pushes toward a picture in which properties and propositions are hard to avoid, and he develops a positive account of properties as “assertibles”: propositions are “saturated assertibles” (things that can be said, full stop) and properties are “unsaturated assertibles” (things that can be said of things). He then presses the consequences: if properties are assertibles, they are not literally “constituents” of concreta, and a lot of familiar metaphysical talk about properties (as parts, as perceivable constituents, as ontologically prior) is misguided. On the modal side, he shows how talk of truth, existence, and property-possession “in a world” can be handled by connecting worlds and possibilities tightly to propositions, rather than treating worlds as Lewis-style concrete “ways things could have been.”The culminating move is Chapter VI’s “lightweight platonism,” which is meant to provide a single framework in which the earlier positions “can be placed.” In the book’s own summary, this is “lightweight” because the universals and other abstracta it accepts are causally inert: they have no causal powers and “explain nothing,” even if they can still figure in explanations the way numbers do in scientific reasoning. The result is a stark division of reality into (i) things that move and are moved, and (ii) things to which motion, causation, and change do not apply, with van Inwagen insisting that denying the second category would force him into contradiction given the commitments he thinks our best theorizing incurs.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction01:23 - Development of views04:20 - Existence and being07:51 - Technical vs. ordinary language11:09 - Holes14:18 - Paraphrase20:17 - Negative existentials22:19 - Fiction29:05 - Having and holding34:25 - Worry39:20 - Attempt at paraphrase?41:25 - Indefinable?45:00 - Non-Meinongian paraphrase51:03 - Platonism53:56 - Fictionalism58:16 - Effective theories1:03:55 - Properties1:08:25 - Modality1:11:28 - Another approach1:16:15 - Value of philosophy1:17:36 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

Can a stripped-down naturalism really match theism’s explanatory ambitions, or does it secretly inherit the very mysteries it’s meant to avoid?My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestGraham Oppy is Professor of Philosophy at Monash University, and specializes in Philosophy of Religion.2. Interview SummaryOppy opens by stressing that debates about God rarely turn on a single knockdown proof, and he thinks there are no convincing arguments for God (or against) that should force assent. Still, he thinks some arguments are instructive and carefully built: he says he recently published a long paper on Thomas Aquinas’s First Way, and argues that you can make it deductively valid only by weakening the conclusion, whereas the stronger Thomistic conclusion needs extra premises. He adds that he finds ontological arguments especially interesting, and wrote a book-length study cataloguing different kinds of them. When asked who presents the strongest case for theism, he points to Richard Swinburne, praising The Existence of God as a well-constructed cumulative-case presentation, even though he remains unconvinced by it.A recurring theme is that many “cosmological” moves look dialectically symmetric: whatever explanatory pressure you feel about a first cause, a beginning, or an initial explanatory posit arises just as much for the naturalist as for the theist. In response to contingency arguments, he’s happy (in principle) to grant talk of a “necessary being” so long as it’s identified with the initial, fundamental part of causal reality on a naturalistic picture. He also presses a familiar worry (associated with Peter van Inwagen): if you start from something necessary and claim “all contingency” comes from it, you still owe an account of whether the link is necessary or contingent, and either answer threatens the intended contingency/necessity contrast. Relatedly, when people build modalized explanatory principles into “new” cosmological arguments, he notes that the contingency of the God–world relationship can reintroduce pressure for explanation of God’s creating (or of God) rather than cleanly stopping the regress.On methodology, Oppy says he’s skeptical that a Bayesian framework is doing the real work in many cumulative cases; he prefers an ‘argument from dominance’ where naturalism wins by being simpler while (he claims) not being explanatorily worse once the “evidence” is partitioned appropriately. This connects to a more general ‘Occam’s razor’ stance: when two theories do the same explanatory work, adding extra entities (like God) without added explanatory payoff is something you should reject, not merely remain agnostic about. He applies the same measured attitude to theological doctrines: he thinks the Arguing About Gods posture is “suspend judgment unless pushed,” and while he’s open to the coherence of the Trinity (a low bar, in his view), it remains hard to make sense of outside the tradition. He also discusses Pascal-style prudential arguments, warning that “choose to believe” is psychologically suspect and that infinite-utility setups can collapse comparisons, and he’s similarly deflationary about the “hard problem” of consciousness, endorsing an identity-theory line in the spirit of J. J. C. Smart.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction00:10 - Aquinas’s first way01:06 - Best argument for God02:41 - Theistic literature04:53 - Contingency argument07:19 - Kalam cosmological argument11:46 - Act and potency13:54 - Cosmological arguments and modality20:16 - Bayesian analysis of theism23:32 - Consciousness25:15 - Artificial intelligence26:45 - Spacetime28:13 - God and space29:31 - Divine simplicity and monotheism32:59 - Pascal’s wager37:36 - Principle of sufficient reason39:45 - Causal series43:50 - Coherence of the trinity45:06 - Simplicity and agnosticism50:07 - Account of modality51:49 - Rasmussen’s argument59:02 - Mathematical entities1:01:21 - Platonism1:05:19 - Causal origin1:09:23 - Arbitrary limits1:12:25 - Classical theism1:14:27 - Divine simplicity1:17:10 - Unities and unifiers1:21:56 - Holism and reductionism1:23:23 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

How can sentences still represent the world if their meanings are grounded not in reference but in the practical rules that govern how we use and accept them?My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestJosé Zalabardo is a Spanish-British philosopher who works on epistemology, metaphysics, and related areas. He is a professor of philosophy at University College London.Check out his book, "Pragmatist Semantics!"https://global.oup.com/academic/product/pragmatist-semantics-9780192874757https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C1W1BTLF2. Book SummaryIn Pragmatist Semantics: A Use-Based Approach to Linguistic Representation, José Zalabardo starts from the intuitive idea that many declarative sentences represent the world, and asks what grounds their meanings—what facts make it the case that a sentence has the meaning it does. He frames the central dispute as a contest between representationalism (meanings are grounded in language–world relations like reference) and pragmatism (meanings are grounded in patterns of use). A key target is what he calls the RR assumption: that any sentence that represents things as being a certain way must have a representationalist meaning ground. He then develops “open-question” style arguments—first in ethics and then (more centrally for his project) in semantic discourse about truth, meaning, and propositional attitudes—to motivate the claim that attempts to give representationalist meaning grounds for these discourses run into serious trouble (e.g., by undermining the idea that their core predicates have referents).Zalabardo’s positive proposal is that we can reject RR: a sentence can still be genuinely representational even if its meaning ground is pragmatist. The general template is to explain meaning in terms of acceptance procedures—roughly, the actual rules/practices by which speakers regulate when to accept or reject sentences of a discourse. He illustrates the template across the “problem” discourses: for belief/desire ascriptions, he starts from Daniel Dennett’s Intentional Stance and treats its behaviour-prediction role as central to how we regulate acceptance of attitude ascriptions. He also argues that we should drop (as meaning-grounding) appeals to what an agent ought to believe/desire, and instead characterize our predictive practice in a way that explains our bias toward attributing true belief (via a “default” predictive strategy and a more sophisticated fallback). For meaning and truth ascriptions, he develops a pragmatist account that draws on W. V. O. Quine and Donald Davidson on radical interpretation, and he treats disquotation as central to how we regulate truth ascriptions.A major remaining challenge is what he calls the problem of harmony: if a sentence represents a determinate state of affairs (or a predicate a determinate property), how can a use-based meaning ground be sufficient to secure that representational target rather than some deviant alternative? His strategy is to use abstraction principles: identify the referents of pragmatist-grounded predicates (and the states of affairs associated with pragmatist-grounded sentences) via equivalence/synonymy conditions generated by the relevant acceptance/ascription procedures. With that in hand, he broadens the picture in the final chapter (“The Primacy of Practice”), arguing that pragmatist resources aren’t just a patch for a few troublesome discourses but point toward a more general account of linguistic representation—one on which our access to reference and representational contents is systematically mediated by practice.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction00:53 - Overview of book03:36 - Open question arguments11:17 - Moorean shift13:10 - Vagueness17:25 - Other representationalist approaches20:25 - Motivating pragmatic position25:20 - Open questions?28:47 - Contrasting with representationalism31:15 - Comparison with Wittgenstein35:20 - Messiness of natural language43:40 - Other areas of discourse?49:53 - Sharp distinction?55:01 - Disagreement1:04:01 - Non-propositional?1:06:43 - Other parts of speech1:09:51 - Belief and desire1:19:25 - Belief without expectation of manifestation1:22:09 - Akrasia1:26:06 - Gerrymandered attributions1:28:56 - Example1:33:50 - Hybrid model1:36:45 - Familiarity1:44:31 - Projection1:49:20 - Is ascription relative?1:51:25 - Meaning vs. meaning ascription1:57:33 - Other interpretive procedures1:59:11 - Generalizations2:01:11 - Coextensive terms2:05:15 - Truth ascriptions2:09:13 - Theories of truth2:12:35 - Properties2:17:13 - General meaning grounds2:19:02 - Complexity of theory2:23:44 - Harmony2:29:24 - Remaning difficulties2:33:07 - Value of philosophy2:35:23 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

Why do people sometimes refuse to update on clear evidence, and what would a properly functioning epistemology say we ought to believe when the evidence is right in front of us?My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestMona Simion is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Glasgow where she is also deputy director of the COGITO Epistemology Research Centre. Her work focuses on a range of topics, including epistemology, ethics, language, and feminist philosophy.Check out her book, "Resistance to Evidence"!https://www.amazon.com/dp/1009298526https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/resistance-to-evidence/147AC15A7EA89095A820FF16B1D0525A2. Book SummaryIn Resistance to Evidence, Mona Simion (University of Glasgow) argues that a central epistemic problem of our time is not just believing on insufficient evidence, but failing to believe (or suspending) when sufficient, undefeated evidence is easily available—a distinctive kind of epistemic failure she calls ‘resistance to evidence’. She frames this as “positive epistemology”: a project aimed at articulating epistemic obligations to update and form beliefs in response to available evidence (a counterpart to the familiar evidentialist worry associated with W. K. Clifford). The first part of the book links philosophical normativity with the empirical literature and offers a taxonomy of resistance cases (spanning testimony, perception, inference, bias, motivated reasoning, etc.), then pressures standard accounts of what evidence one has (and of permissible suspension, responsibility, and vice) for lacking the resources to explain why paradigmatic resistance is epistemically impermissible.The second part builds Simion’s positive alternative: an epistemology grounded in proper function. Our cognitive systems, she proposes, have an epistemic function of generating knowledge, and epistemic norms “drop out” of that function; on this picture, resistance to evidence is an input-level epistemic malfunction—a failure to take up the right inputs (evidence and defeat) that the system could have easily taken up. She then develops a unified framework: evidence is understood as knowledge indicators—facts one is in a position to know that raise the evidential probability of a proposition for the subject—so resistant agents malfunction by failing to uptake these indicators. Likewise, defeaters are ignorance indicators—facts one is in a position to know that lower the evidential probability of the proposition (and so can undermine justification when ignored). With these pieces in place, she argues that permissible suspension and doxastic justification should be explained in terms of whether the relevant belief/suspension is produced by properly functioning knowledge-generating processes that appropriately respond to knowledge and ignorance indicators.The final part draws broader lessons. First, even if epistemic justifiers can be treated as epistemic “oughts,” Simion argues this doesn’t imply that epistemic life is riddled with genuine dilemmas; rather, it yields a more modest picture on which the epistemic domain (like other normative domains) often involves conflict without widespread dilemma. Second, she applies the framework to scepticism, engaging neo-Moorean responses to arguments associated with G. E. Moore and debates involving Fred Dretske, Timothy Williamson, and Jim Pryor; she proposes a “new” radical neo-Mooreanism on which the sceptic’s stance counts as resistance to evidence, yet can still seem somewhat reasonable because it involves impermissible suspension while nevertheless satisfying certain contrary-to-duty epistemic obligations. Finally, she offers a distinctive account of disinformation with practical implications: disinformation needn’t be false, but is (roughly) content disposed to generate ignorance in a context under normal conditions—so purely fact-checking strategies will systematically miss many disinformation mechanisms. In her concluding policy-oriented remarks (with Cambridge University Press in view), she argues that effective interventions must often focus on polluted epistemic environments—e.g., improving the quantity and quality of reliable evidence flow (including trusted sources) and, for more isolated malfunction cases, supporting cognitive flexibility training to reduce rigid resistance.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction01:07 - Purpose of book06:03 - Varieties of evidence resistance09:25 - Unified account15:07 - Williamson’s reply18:19 - Ideal epistemic agents22:30 - Problems with ideal agents29:18 - Blameless resistance?37:59 - Epistemic error and blame39:43 - Semantic issues46:23 - Vagueness47:36 - Evidence and defeat1:02:03 - Functional account1:12:19 - Compatibility with other accounts1:16:59 - Resistance to evidence1:23:45 - Sufficiency1:32:28 - Natural language1:37:27 - Shiftiness1:43:21 - Worry for view1:54:22 - Inquiring vs. updating1:58:13 - Fallibilism2:04:44 - Defeater defeaters2:08:59 - Getting probability one2:13:30 - Information and disinformation2:19:55 - Ignorance2:25:30 - Value of philosophy2:29:39 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

Can chemistry really be reduced to physics, or do concepts like elements and the periodic table show that it has its own irreducible structure?My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestEric Scerri is a lecturer at UCLA, and focuses on chemistry, the philosophy of chemistry, and science more generally.2. Interview SummaryEric Scerri argues that philosophy of chemistry arrived relatively late partly because chemistry sits so close to physics in the usual “hierarchy of the sciences,” which encourages the popular thought that chemistry is “nothing but” physics—and so not in need of its own philosophical scrutiny. He suggests that the right question isn’t whether chemistry is or isn’t reduced to physics (as if it were all-or-nothing), but how far reduction goes and in what sense, since both scientific practice and philosophical models of reduction have shifted over time. On his picture, the most sensible stance is to talk about “degrees” of reduction that can increase as molecular quantum chemistry advances, rather than expecting a clean yes/no verdict.A major theme is the concept of a chemical element: Scerri emphasizes that “element” is used in (at least) two senses—an element as a simple substance (often associated with Antoine Lavoisier) and an element as a more abstract bearer of properties (revived in Dmitri Mendeleev’s thinking about the periodic system). He illustrates the abstract sense by noting that pointing to “carbon” on the periodic table is not pointing to diamond or graphite (or any particular isotope), but to something that underlies them all—something that can be characterized in modern chemistry chiefly by atomic number. He then uses the sodium/chlorine → sodium chloride case to argue that the familiar simple substances can “disappear” in compounds while the elements persist in the abstract sense, which helps explain chemical novelty. Scerri adds that this dual usage is often left implicit (even by IUPAC), and that chemical education tends to foreground orbitals and electron configurations so early that students may lose contact with the ordinary chemical character of substances.On the periodic table, Scerri discusses the “left-step” proposal that moves helium into group 2 on electronic-configuration grounds, and he defends the idea that (beyond mere representational convenience) it can still make sense to ask which table is most fundamental. This connects to his broader view of reduction: he distinguishes epistemological reduction (always partial and a matter of degree) from ontological reduction, where he favors a “unity of science” picture on which chemistry is not a free-floating realm apart from physics—so reduction is more a direction than an achievable final goal. Methodologically, he leans instrumentalist about theoretical posits like orbitals—useful mathematical constructs rather than the kind of thing one literally “images”—and he’s skeptical of philosophical debates that ignore how working scientists treat things like laws and bonding. Finally, he stresses a broadly evolutionary picture of scientific change, where even apparent revolutions have extended build-ups, detours, and pragmatic rule-breaking that matter more than tidy, armchair reconstructions. Transcript:3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction00:52 - Neglected field?04:36 - Elements08:31 - Too abstract?09:46 - Advantages of abstract view12:04 - Atomic number enough?14:38 - Chemical education22:10 - Periodic table27:01 - Best table?30:20 - Helium33:14 - Historical development38:38 - Orbitals40:08 - Chemical bonding45:55 - Theoretical reduction49:12 - Limitations of reduction51:48 - Orbital filling53:50 - Ontological reduction54:52 - Ontological levels58:56 - Ideal theory1:00:24 - Prospects of reduction1:01:44 - Other issues in philosophy of chemistry1:04:52 - Laws1:08:31 - Metaphysics1:09:19 - History of chemistry1:12:12 - Scientific revolution1:15:30 - Value of philosophy1:17:08 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

Can we keep the predictive power of mathematics in science while refusing to believe in mathematical objects at all?My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestMary Leng is a professor at the University of York, specializing in the philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of science.2. Interview SummaryMary Leng begins by laying out her ‘mathematical functionalist’ (or fictionalist-leaning) view: ordinary mathematical talk looks like it’s about objects—numbers, functions, real-valued magnitudes, infinitely many primes—but she thinks we shouldn’t automatically read that surface grammar as a commitment to a realm of abstract entities. In the interview’s opening framing (including her background in philosophy of mathematics and science and her book Mathematics and Reality), she contrasts this stance with more realist options like Platonism and with structuralist approaches that try to treat mathematics as “about” abstract structures rather than particular objects.A central motivation, she says, is epistemic: the standard “negative characterization” of mathematical objects (not spatiotemporal, not causal, not mental, etc.) makes it hard to give any satisfying story about how we could know truths about them—yet mathematical knowledge is supposed to be among our most secure. So her proposal is to rethink what we’re doing when we do mathematics: instead of aiming at literal truths about abstract objects, we speak as if there are such objects and investigate what would be the case if there were. Along the way she presses familiar trouble for robust Platonism—like “embarrassment of riches” (many distinct set-theoretic reductions can equally play the natural-number role), and the way working mathematicians tend to be relaxed about identity conditions (they don’t worry whether “2” is this set or that set so long as the axioms are satisfied). She also locates herself on the “revolutionary” side of the revolutionary/hermeneutic divide: even if mathematicians often proceed as if they’re talking about objects, that doesn’t settle what the best philosophical interpretation or reform should be.In the later part of the conversation, the focus shifts to science: why mathematical language is so effective, and whether that effectiveness supports realism about mathematical objects. Leng argues that much of mathematics’ role in empirical theory is representational—letting us index and describe patterns in concrete reality—so it’s not surprising that scientific practice could keep working even if there were no mathematical objects “behind” the discourse. That thought underwrites her resistance to “no-miracles”-style arguments for mathematical entities (including a recurring thought experiment about mathematical objects “popping in and out of existence” without affecting successful science). She does grant that mathematics sometimes seems explanatory, and discusses examples meant to push that point (like prime-number life cycles in cicadas), but she maintains that the best lesson is structural: the explanation can run via the way concrete systems instantiate patterns to which theorems apply, without requiring numbers themselves to be causally or ontologically doing explanatory work.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction00:32 - Mathematical fictionalism09:03 - Characterizing platonism13:42 - Revolutionary vs. hermeneutic17:13 - Empirical semantics22:06 - Ontological commitment27:58 - Thick and thin discourse34:46 - Thin objects42:36 - Progress49:46 - Chess example52:42 - Benacerraf55:03 - Structuralism59:44 - Are structures objects?1:03:10 - Irrelevance of abstracta?1:09:43 - Acausal but not independent?1:16:03 - No miracles argument1:22:06 - Making a difference1:31:33 - Explanation without truth1:34:38 - Value of philosophy1:38:48 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

Can quantum “spookiness” be explained without nonlocal action if we take seriously the idea that later measurement choices can constrain earlier physical states?My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestHuw Price is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Bonn and an Emeritus Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. His work has covered a wide range of topics, including metaphysics, physics and time, causation, probability, decision, language, and more.2. Interview SummaryHuw Price’s conversation ranges across the foundations of quantum theory, the nature of causation, and a broadly pragmatist stance toward metaphysics. He lays out the familiar problem: Bell-type correlations tempt us toward “spooky” nonlocal influence, but if we allow a correlation between measurement settings and underlying variables, two broad strategies open up. One is a common-cause story often labeled “superdeterminism”; the other is a genuinely retrocausal or “input-dependent” approach, where later measurement choices influence earlier physical states, so the apparent nonlocality can be replaced by a “zigzag” influence that stays within light cones. Price argues this is attractive partly because it can preserve relativity by avoiding spacelike action and privileged frames, even if it still feels counterintuitive in a “temporal nonlocality” sense.From there, Price connects retrocausality to a more general point about what we should demand from “causation.” He notes that some philosophers treat forward-directedness as definitional, but he emphasizes that causation’s link to rational agency (means–ends reasoning) is at least as central, and he invokes Michael Dummett’s discussion of whether it even makes sense to deliberate “for the sake of” the past. Dummett’s idea of “quasi-causation” (a deliberately loosened notion) becomes a template for how retrocausality might be intelligible without forcing a terminological fight over the word “cause.” He also ties this to decision-theoretic themes, using simple cases to illustrate how an agent’s deliberative standpoint partitions the world into what’s held fixed versus what’s treated as choice-sensitive, a partition that usually tracks past versus future but need not do so in exotic setups.On the metaphilosophical side, Price frames his “neo-pragmatist / expressivist” approach as shifting attention from metaphysical structure to the role our concepts play for creatures like us: for causation, the illuminating questions are psychological/functional (“why do we think this way?”) rather than ontological (“what is the relation?”). He’s especially skeptical about familiar “heavy-duty” metaphysical disputes, suggesting that questions like whether tables are “really” collections of particles, or whether ordinary objects are spacetime-extended worms versus wholly present at instants, often lack an interesting fact of the matter and can dissolve into interchangeable frameworks. He then criticizes a two-stage “Canberra/Cambridge Plan”-style methodology (Ramsey-sentence first, then hunt for realizers) on the grounds that it leans on robust semantic notions like reference, truthmaking, and coreference in ways that risk indeterminacy or circularity for a naturalist. He closes by defending philosophy’s value as a transferable toolkit of careful distinctions and conceptual scrutiny, especially at the foundations of other disciplines like physics, alongside its broader normative and social contributions.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction00:45 - Quantum mechanics and retrocausality08:02 - Still spooky?11:48 - Superdeterminism13:52 - Causation24:22 - Decision and causation27:39 - Deliberating over the past33:25 - EDT and the past37:27 - Retrocausality and free will40:07 - Pragmatism46:07 - Metaphysical questions51:41 - Modern metaphysics56:03 - Value of philosophy58:59 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

What if the biggest mistakes in debates about gender come from treating “gender identity” as one unified thing, instead of a cluster of different feelings, traits, and social norms that can come apart?My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestRay Briggs is professor of philosophy at Stanford University, and their work has focused on a range of topics, including chance and decision theory, epistemology, ethics, and gender. This interview was recorded with audio only.Check out their book with B. R. George, "What Even is Gender?"!https://www.routledge.com/p/book/97803675132142. Book SummaryIn What Even Is Gender?, Ray Briggs and B. R. George argue that the familiar question “what is gender?” invites confusion, because there isn’t one thing that answers to the name “gender” (or “gender identity”). Instead, mainstream discourse (including lots of well-meaning “trans 101” framings) tends to conflate a cluster of distinct social, material, and psychological phenomena—conflations that can make trans and gender-nonconforming lives unintelligible and can smuggle in hidden assumptions about what trans legitimacy is supposed to require. The book’s project is therefore largely conceptual: to diagnose where our ordinary talk goes wrong and to engineer a clearer alternative framework that can better represent the variety of lived experience and the political demands of trans liberation.Chapters 2 and 3 build the book’s core “map” of what the authors call the ‘sex/gender system’. Chapter 2 replaces the overly unified notion of ‘gender identity’ with a more fine-grained account in terms of ‘gender feels’: self-situating attitudes toward different gendered traits, organized (for their purposes) into sexed biology, gendered behavior, and gender categories. This helps explain why different subjective “feels” can come apart (and why lumping them together causes practical and political misunderstandings). Chapter 3 then shifts from subjective attitudes to public structure, distinguishing different kinds of social norms that link categories, biology, and behavior; it treats many of these norms as obvious targets of feminist and queer critique, while warning that some “abolitionist” rhetoric slides illicitly from opposing oppressive norms to condemning the categories or behaviors the norms are about.Chapters 4 and 5 turn from diagnosis to guidance: Chapter 4 argues that we should treat people’s self-reports of ‘gender feels’ as deserving default trust—presuming sincerity, competence, coherence, and moral respect—unless we have specific reasons to depart from those defaults, and it critiques common patterns of dismissing trans subjectivity. Chapter 5 defends a political principle of ‘gender self-determination’: in general, we should categorize people according to their sincerely expressed wishes rather than outsiders’ projections, and this requires treating gender categories as irreducible (not settled by biology, behavior, or the norms society imposes), without that irreducibility collapsing into circularity or mysticism. The conclusion frames many recurring confusions as a kind of “essentialism” that mistakes contingent links (between traits, norms, and feels) for constitutive necessities; the authors urge “less essentialism, more imagination,” emphasizing both the real variety already present in human lives and our collective power to change gender norms and the rules by which category membership gets socially administered.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction00:44 - Target audience02:23 - Descriptive vs. prescriptive06:23 - History and cross-cultural comparison12:48 - Idealizing gender15:00 - Gender as a single thing?19:07 - Gender traits and feels26:30 - Gender identity31:34 - Vagueness of gender language33:17 - Developing categories35:55 - Second-order gender feels38:26 - Gender norms41:24 - Feels and norms43:14 - Abolitionism53:53 - Semantic trade-offs56:15 - Another case for abolitionism59:45 - Too many categories?1:03:39 - Self-determination1:05:14 - Circular?1:10:22 - Reductive definitions1:11:35 - Uninformative account?1:16:11 - My general descriptive view1:24:38 - Term haggling1:26:02 - How this might help trans people1:27:24 - Value of philosophy1:29:44 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

Can mathematics be indispensable to science without forcing us to believe in a realm of abstract objects?My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestMichael Resnik is Professor Emeritus at UNC Chapel Hill, and his work has focused on the philosophy of mathematics, logic, decision theory, and more.2. Interview SummaryMichael Resnik begins by discussing the indispensability strategy associated with W. V. Quine and developed in an influential way by Hilary Putnam: if our best scientific theorizing essentially uses mathematics, then (given standard views about truth and ontological commitment) we end up committed to mathematical objects. Resnik emphasizes a practical, discourse-focused version of the point: to use the mathematics in scientific (and scientific-adjacent) reasoning, we typically have to assert mathematical claims, and that assertion is what drives commitment—even in idealized modeling or in theories we suspect are literally false. He illustrates this with a simple geometrical case about comparing travel routes (New York → Pittsburgh → DC vs. New York → DC): once you model cities as points and appeal to a theorem about triangles, you’ve already imported mathematical structure and quantification over geometrical entities.From there, the interview turns to structuralism and why Resnik has moved toward a non-ontological form of it. Structuralism, on his view, is best treated as a guiding slogan—mathematics studies patterns/structures, and mathematical “objects” (like numbers) don’t have any identity beyond their place in a structure. He sketches several ways philosophers have tried to make that slogan precise, ranging from set-theoretic reductions to views that locate structural instantiation in the physical world, and then to more explicit “positions-in-structures” accounts (e.g., Stewart Shapiro) and modal structuralism (e.g., Geoffrey Hellman). What pushes him away from settling on a single ontology is his appeal to ontological relativity, underwritten by what he calls the “same size theorem”: roughly, if a theory has a model at all, it can be reinterpreted with a model in any domain of the same cardinality—so the most we can robustly preserve across reinterpretations is structure, not a unique answer to “what the objects really are.”In the final portion, Resnik pivots to logic and defends a comparably deflationary stance: logic has a descriptive side (studying validity relations in a mathematically precise way) but its normative side—talk about what we ought to infer or what counts as a good argument—shouldn’t be conflated with psychology, and may be closer in spirit to something like “applied ethics.” He then distinguishes ordinary acceptance of particular logical claims from logical realism about “logical truth” as an objective, practice-independent status; his “logical anti-realism” denies that further realist step, and he’s open to a kind of logical non-cognitivism on which some familiar logical utterances function more as tools for regulating inferential practice than as straightforward fact-stating claims. He closes with a meta-philosophical note: philosophy matters (and philosophy of math in particular) because it trains clarity about abstract, often-vague questions—even when the “final” metaphysical picture remains elusive.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction00:54 - Indispensability arguments10:22 - Against Quine12:10 - Indispensability and scientific anti-realism14:49 - Balaguer and denying the truth of theories19:34 - A world without mathematical entities22:50 - Folk discourse30:41 - Structuralism43:01 - Structuralism and ontological relativity44:21 - Same size theorem50:05 - Changes to view51:51 - What are structures?54:14 - Foundations56:30 - Realism and structuralism1:01:17 - What structures are there?1:05:21 - Epistemic concern1:09:35 - Logic as normative/descriptive1:20:05 - Logical anti-realism1:26:42 - Logical non-cognitivism1:30:21 - Motivation for view1:31:49 - Necessity of mathematics1:34:04 - Value of philosophy1:36:05 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

What does it mean for something to be “true in a fiction,” and why might even the category of “art” be a historically contingent way of organizing aesthetic practices?My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestKendall Walton is Emeritus Charles Stevenson Collegiate Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Art and Design at the University of Michigan. His work has focused on the philosophy of art, as well as other issues in the philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and language.2. Interview SummaryKendall Walton lays out his core idea about “truth in fiction”: roughly, a proposition is fictional in a given context when it is to be imagined (in a normative, “prescribed” sense) as part of properly engaging with that work or practice. He emphasizes that “fictional worlds” aren’t limited to novels and films: they can arise in fleeting, ordinary social moments wherever there are local prescriptions about what to imagine—like people lying in a meadow informally “adopting” a rule about whether a cloud counts as a bear or an elephant. Walton also downplays the importance of drawing a sharp boundary between works of fiction and nonfiction (since many cultures or contexts may not treat that as central), while insisting that it often does matter which propositions are true-in-the-fiction. When the interviewer asks about “pretense” theories, Walton is broadly sympathetic but prefers “imagination” because it covers passive cases (e.g., simply looking at a picture) as well as more active, game-like pretending; he also admits we still lack a fully general account of what imagining is.A big part of the discussion is about pressure points for simple tests like “to be imagined = fictional.” Walton highlights how background knowledge helps generate many implicit fictional truths via something like a “reality principle” (e.g., if a story presents someone as a normal human, then—should the question arise—lots of ordinary facts about humans come along for free), while still allowing that these truths differ radically in importance to the work. At the same time, he stresses that a work can mandate imaginings that are not true in the relevant fictional world: for instance, to interpret an embedded picture inside a painting (his Vermeer/Cupid example), viewers may have to imagine Cupid even though (strictly speaking) the larger painting only makes it fictional that there is a picture of Cupid. Similarly, one might have to imagine something odd (like a “golf ball nose”) to see what’s being depicted or pointed out, even though that proposition isn’t true “in the picture as a whole.” Walton’s solution is to distinguish different clusters or nested fictional worlds—separating what’s true in the primary fiction from what’s required to grasp an internal representation or a local interpretive task.The interview then turns to aesthetics and the concept of art. Walton argues that aesthetics lacks a single “grand basic question” in the way ethics is often organized around “How should we live?”, and he describes recent aesthetics as an intellectually rich but somewhat ununified “hodgepodge” of topics. He adds a historical diagnosis: the Western category of “fine art” as a single unified genus is relatively late (he cites Oscar Kristeller’s claim that it emerges around 1750), which helps explain why theorists’ competing “definitions of art” can feel disconnected or like people are talking past each other. Even if the question “What is art?” mattered enormously in some settings (like the 1960s/70s New York avant-garde), Walton thinks it can be beside the point for understanding many other practices (e.g., Greek sculpture or Javanese gamelan), where you can study what the works do and how they matter without forcing them under a modern category. Methodologically, this ties into his sympathy for a kind of conceptual engineering: once we have the “data” of our practices and reactions, philosophy can aim to organize it more perspicuously—sometimes by revising or inventing concepts—rather than assuming the folk extension of “art” sets the target and then hunting for strict necessary-and-sufficient conditions.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction00:49 - Fiction08:28 - Fiction and vagueness10:50 - Pretense theory12:48 - Imagining18:59 - Fictions in fiction22:01 - Resolving problems23:59 - Broadest world29:26 - Bizarre fictions31:50 - Norms of fiction38:09 - Another issue40:18 - Reality principle43:15 - Varying norms45:52 - Aesthetics51:18 - What is art?55:42 - Is the dispute substantive?59:50 - Empirical psychology1:03:56 - Representation1:05:56 - Folk concepts1:12:32 - Conceptual engineering1:16:29 - Relevance to art1:19:11 - Dispensing with “art”?1:23:24 - Value theory1:26:17 - Empathy1:32:06 - Empathy by negation1:36:07 - Value of philosophy1:38:36 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

How should philosophers understand “information” in the digital age, and can thinking of ourselves as informational organisms reshape ethics, privacy, and the self?My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestLuciano Floridi is John K. Castle Professor in the Practice of Cognitive Science and Founding Director of the Digital Ethics Center at Yale University.2. Interview SummaryFloridi argues that a philosophy of information became unavoidable once “information” stopped being merely a silent tool philosophers used in the background and instead became a central object of inquiry in its own right—especially under the pressure of the digital/information revolution. He also emphasizes that philosophy shouldn’t be a purely descriptive exercise: it should help us make a difference in how we live and organize society (invoking Socrates as a model of philosophy with public stakes). To make sense of that ambition, he frames philosophy as an inescapable blend of model (how things are) and blueprint (how they should be), and he characterizes good theorizing as “conceptual design”: not just analyzing problems, but designing solutions under constraints—like designing different kinds of chairs for different purposes.A big chunk of the interview then clarifies what “information” even is. Floridi distinguishes the quantitative, engineering-oriented notion associated with Claude Shannon from richer notions that involve meaning: Shannon-style information can measure how many yes/no “answers to questions” a channel can carry, but by itself it doesn’t tell you what is being said or why it matters. From there he pushes a taxonomy that helps prevent people from talking past each other: we may mean information about the world (e.g., timetables), information in the world (signals embodied in physical systems), or information for the world (instructions/affordances for agents). And when the topic is semantic information about the world, he defends a truth requirement: well-formed, meaningful data that’s false is better classified as misinformation/disinformation—he illustrates this with the absurdity of a doctor “answering” a diagnosis by coin-flip. He also stresses that everyday looseness about words is fine, but philosophy/science need sharper distinctions.Finally, Floridi connects information to the self and to privacy. From an explicitly Immanuel Kant-inspired angle, he treats “what we are” talk as less helpful than asking how we should model ourselves given our epistemic situation and current historical conditions; today, he suggests, the most fruitful model is of humans as informational organisms. That shift dovetails with thinking in terms of networks rather than mechanisms: nodes don’t come first and then get linked—rather, nodes (including selves) emerge from patterns of relations. This, he says, reframes privacy away from a simple ownership/economics picture (“my data is my property”) and toward protecting the informational profile that partly constitutes personal identity and autonomy (e.g., against manipulation, coercion, or misuse). He closes with a direct call to philosophers—especially newcomers—to stop merely extending inherited frameworks and instead write the “new chapter” that the 21st century’s digital transformation demands.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction01:04 - What does “information” mean?07:34 - Conceptual engineering11:45 - Descriptive and prescriptive12:30 - Philosophy as conceptual design18:13 - Design vs. invention21:39 - Shannon information and more33:27 - Semantic information37:43 - Information and the self44:24 - Philosophy going forward45:59 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

Can fiction tell us genuine truths about the world and ourselves, or does it mainly invite us into a kind of structured pretense that can mislead as easily as it can illuminate?My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestManuel García-Carpintero is Professor of philosophy at the University of Barcelona. His work has focused on a variety of issues in and related to the philosophy of language, such as fiction, assertion, proper names, presuppositions, quotation, and more.2. Interview SummaryManuel García-Carpintero frames the interview around the classic Plato/Aristotle dispute about whether we can learn from fiction. He notes that ordinary audiences often treat fictions (especially “based on a true story” works) as conveying truths, and he uses examples like the biopic Rocketman and debates around the Chernobyl—including Masha Gessen’s piece in The New Yorker about the HBO series—to illustrate how viewers criticize “lies” even when something is openly fictionalized. He then draws a careful distinction between ‘truth in fiction’ (correctly stating what the story says) and the more contentious idea that fiction can communicate truths about the world or “the human condition” that go beyond the story’s explicit content. This is where the Plato/Aristotle contrast becomes vivid: Plato’s worry is that fiction can mislead, while Aristotle’s more optimistic line is that poetry can deliver more general, “philosophical” insight than history.The conversation then turns to ‘pretense theory’, the idea that fiction-making involves speakers acting as if they are asserting things while not genuinely asserting them—illustrated with cases like J. K. Rowling writing about wizards. García-Carpintero agrees this picture captures something important and explains why it became a mainstream approach (with roots traced to figures like Margaret MacDonald and J. L. Austin). He also connects pretense to ‘immersion’: the psychological sense of being “present” in a fictional world can be modeled as going along with a kind of narrated pretense (he uses Dr. Watson-style narration in Sherlock Holmes stories to make the pull of this model intuitive). But he argues pretense can’t be the whole story: lots of everyday pretending isn’t fiction, and some fictions (including self-undermining or “postmodern” cases) make it clear that no one is straightforwardly “telling you” facts—so we need a more positive account of fiction-making as a representational activity, with pretense functioning as a common tool rather than the essence.On the semantic side, he’s sympathetic to David Lewis’s possible-worlds framework as a modeling technique for the special discourse we use when we describe what a fiction says—without taking possible worlds to be “real”. Part of the attraction, he suggests, is that it pushes toward an abstract notion of content that can in principle be shared across languages and even across media (novel/film/theater), which helps make sense of adaptation and “faithfulness”. At the same time, he worries about Lewis-style implementations that effectively force a ubiquitous narrator/asserter into every fiction, and he discusses how principles for implicit content have to handle tricky phenomena like unreliable narrators—sometimes motivating probabilistic/conditional-probability ideas about what’s “taken for granted” in the story. Finally, on fictional entities and names, he pushes back on views that treat names like Emma Woodhouse as referring to abstract artifacts; instead, he treats the “artifact talk” (e.g., saying a character was created by Jane Austen) as derivative and emphasizes a presuppositional picture where names come with reference-fixing descriptive material—helping with “mixed” comparisons like Mickey Mouse vs. Nancy Pelosi, or liking Harry Potter more than Donald Trump, and with co-identification inside a fiction (Superman = Clark Kent).3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction01:17 - Importance of fiction08:52 - Truth in fiction13:37 - Pretense theory26:52 - David Lewis’s view38:37 - Issues with pretense theory44:15 - Fictional entities1:04:12 - Issue with Meinongianism1:07:10 - Graham Priest’s view1:18:12 - Another issue with Meinongianism1:20:46 - Likelihood in fiction1:39:04 - Reality principle1:41:13 - Coreferring names1:49:42 - Propositions1:58:22 - Fiction as falsehoods2:01:40 - Value of philosophy2:12:11 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

What if the biggest threat to good decisions isn’t a lack of intelligence, but a lack of the right reasoning tools and habits to spot bad arguments, weigh evidence, and update our beliefs?My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestSteven Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. His work has focused on language, cognition, social relations, and more.Check out his book, "Rationality: What it is, Why is Seems Scarce, Why it Matters"!https://a.co/d/02RdsyAT2. Book SummaryIn Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters, Steven Pinker argues that rationality should guide “everything we think and do,” especially in a moment when public life is awash in misinformation and shaky reasoning. The book is organized as a practical toolkit: after setting up the puzzle of how rational an animal we are, it walks through core “instruments of reason” (logic and critical thinking; probability; Bayesian updating; expected utility; signal detection; game theory; and correlation vs. causation), ending with chapters on what goes wrong and why rationality matters.Pinker’s diagnosis of why rationality can look scarce is that we mistake it for a single mental “power,” when it’s really a set of tools that work well only when they’re learned, cued, and applied to the right kinds of problems. He also emphasizes modern “reasoning traps”: people can be impressively capable in real-world settings yet still fall for distortions amplified by today’s information ecosystem, where falsehoods spread easily and grab attention. And he thinks part of the confusion comes from mixing two “modes of believing”—a reality mindset aimed at truth and evidence, and a mythology mindset that treats some cherished ideas (religious or national narratives, for instance) as insulated from ordinary truth-testing.Finally, Pinker’s case for why rationality matters is both urgent and concrete: we face large-scale threats (to health, democracy, and the planet) where solutions exist but persuading people to accept them is itself a rationality problem. The reasoning tools he surveys aren’t just classroom formalities; they’re meant to help us avoid personal and policy blunders by calibrating risk, evaluating claims, and making decisions under uncertainty. He also ties rationality to moral and social progress: historically, big improvements often begin with arguments that expose inconsistencies between what people already value and what they tolerate in practice—showing how “reasoners” are not just individual brains but members of communities that can revise norms when better arguments win out.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction01:04 - Rationality03:43 - Instrumentalism05:32 - Irrational goals09:28 - Expected outcomes12:15 - Rationality and morality17:20 - General outlook22:08 - Bayesian reasoning (audio improves here)27:08 - Hume28:16 - Priors31:56 - Vagueness35:37 - Expected utility37:10 - Newcomb’s problem41:07 - Decision theory49:45 - Causation53:47 - Higher-level causation55:56 - Improving rationality1:00:10 - Why does rationality matter?1:04:22 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe