Cause and Effect III

So we return to last week's subject: why not accept the views of Wesley Salmon?

There is an obvious motive in their favor. They exclude much of what we intuitively think of as "magical thinking." If I do X over here and Y happens waaaaay over there: is this enough to dub X the cause of Y? Salmon says emphatically no. It is not even enough to assert that as a coherent hypothesis. One needs spatio-temporal continuity. X was in contact with A which was in contact with B ... which produced event Y way over there.

Enough with the magic thinking. Do your homework! Come up with at least a hypothetical continuity! That is what Salmon has to say to us. And it seems useful advice. "Useful," remember, is a word of high praise from a pragmatist.

But, gravity remains the great conundrum here. It certain seems that the sun is acting upon the earth across a vacuum, and independent of anything passing from the one location to the other. Einstein tells us to think of this as a property of space-time itself: masses bend it. S space-time serves to give certain facts within space and time ... spatio-temporal continuity.

Sorry, but with due respect that sounds inadequate to me.

I don't know whether Salmon addressed gravity explicitly but, thinking in his spirit, we might say that precisely this is what has motivated the search for a particle that CARRIES gravity. A graviton.

The search has not gone well: [gr-qc/0601043] Can Gravitons Be Detected? (arxiv.org)

That so many bright minds pursue the graviton without success suggests to me that it may be necessary to uncouple causation from spatio-temporal continuity after all. So Wesley Salmon doesn't have the final say here.

That will be the end of my meditations on the subject for now, though. When I have more to say, you can be assured, I will say more.

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti

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Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave. First, Plato is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability. I only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers

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John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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