surroundx wrote:

composition is a physical phenomenon

Every philosopher working in ontology I can think of implicitly denies this, i.e. accepts that constituent ontologies or complex immaterial minds composed of thoughts, beliefs, desires, etc. are at least conceptually coherent. 

There are also lots of developed mereologies that apply to both material and immaterial entities. (cf. Simons's Parts.)

I'm not sure how this is supposed to be an objection to my view/s.

Are you familiar with the ins and outs of truthmaker arguments?

Miguel wrote:

I think my thought has a propositional content which is causally relevant as a ground for other thoughts. My thought that "Socrates is a man" isn't just neurons firing, it has a propositional content (which I take to be a universal form) which plays a causal role in the conclusion "Socrates is mortal".

If there is no literal propositional content, or if there is propositional content but it is not causally relevant to my thoughts (per the causal closure of the physical), then my inferences are not valid and there is no reason, so it's self-defeating. None of my thoughts that "materialism is true" would have any causal relation to, or follow from, the actual meaning and propositional content of what I take to be evidence for the conclusion. My thought that "Socrates is mortal" was literally just caused by salts and electricity and not by virtue of the propositional content of previous thoughts about Socrates, which should serve as a logical ground for the conclusion. It's invalid.

But if propositional content is causally relevant (mental causation) then specified geographical location cannot be a requisite of causation.

There is no (universal) propositional content to your thought that "Socrates is a man". Rather, the content of the thought lies in the conjunction of the firing of the neurons and the rest of the body. After all one can imagine a particular pattern of neurons firing being different thoughts in different individuals (viz. given their differential neural environments). And while that might rid one of reason, dialectical soundness, dialectical validity etc. in your eyes, I see no reason to be so pessimistic.

Do you deny that the same firing of neurons can be different thoughts in different people?

John West wrote:

Every philosopher working in ontology I can think of implicitly denies this, i.e. accepts that constituent ontologies or complex immaterial minds composed of thoughts, beliefs, desires, etc. are at least conceptually coherent. 

There are also lots of developed mereologies that apply to both material and immaterial entities. (cf. Simons's Parts.)

Two basic responses. Firstly, "immaterial" is a purely negative predicate. Thus "immaterial composition" cannot confidently be touted as (fully) coherent because it is only a partial (or incomplete) concept. Even if I grant for the sake of the argument that nothing explicitly or implicity contradictory can be found in our understanding of "immaterial composition" that is no reason to think that the final, fully fleshed concept is equally free of incoherence. From the fact that the concept of a circle is perfectly coherent, it does not follow that a square circle is coherent. Now obviously there is a disanalogy there, but the point is that coherence cannot be extrapolated.

Secondly, immaterial composition is problematic to say the least. To take your example, what is the compositional relation between immaterial minds and their thoughts? To adopt some very basic mereological language, a whole is constituted of multiple parts. A mind with multiple thoughts is thus said to be a whole constituted of several parts, some or all of which are thoughts. But a merely causal relation is insufficient to establish immaterial composition.
And again, conjunctions can be non-natural and thus it does not follow that conjuncts must be parts. Moreover, composition is predicated upon asymmetry. For material entities, a necessary condition of composition might be said to be the differential size of a whole relative to any one of it's parts. For example, none of the constituent parts of my body is as big as my body. For immaterial entities, there is no such necessary condition that one can invoke. Because there is no relevant asymmetry between immaterial thoughts and the mind that "possesses" them.

John West wrote:

Are you familiar with the ins and outs of truthmaker arguments?

If you mean truth makers and truth bearers, then moderately so ("do all truth bearers require truth makers?", "what makes it true that x?", etc.)  I took it that you were somehow trying to undermine my own theory of truth. However, I don't see what that attempt is predicated upon, in part since I don't recall having either explicitly or implicitly ventured much of one in this thread. Besides my obvious penchant for attenuation, and thus my possible dispensation with truth as orthodoxly conceived.

surroundx wrote:

Miguel wrote:

I think my thought has a propositional content which is causally relevant as a ground for other thoughts. My thought that "Socrates is a man" isn't just neurons firing, it has a propositional content (which I take to be a universal form) which plays a causal role in the conclusion "Socrates is mortal".

If there is no literal propositional content, or if there is propositional content but it is not causally relevant to my thoughts (per the causal closure of the physical), then my inferences are not valid and there is no reason, so it's self-defeating. None of my thoughts that "materialism is true" would have any causal relation to, or follow from, the actual meaning and propositional content of what I take to be evidence for the conclusion. My thought that "Socrates is mortal" was literally just caused by salts and electricity and not by virtue of the propositional content of previous thoughts about Socrates, which should serve as a logical ground for the conclusion. It's invalid.

But if propositional content is causally relevant (mental causation) then specified geographical location cannot be a requisite of causation.

There is no (universal) propositional content to your thought that "Socrates is a man". Rather, the content of the thought lies in the conjunction of the firing of the neurons and the rest of the body. After all one can imagine a particular pattern of neurons firing being different thoughts in different individuals (viz. given their differential neural environments). And while that might rid one of reason, dialectical soundness, dialectical validity etc. in your eyes, I see no reason to be so pessimistic.

Do you deny that the same firing of neurons can be different thoughts in different people?

 
How does that get around the problem? If anything it even aggravates it, for you're pretty much admitting that the content of thoughts is irrelevant for the firing of neurons. And if you are biting the bullet that there is no universal propositional content to my thought that "Socrates is a man", then how can we say that my thought really is that "Socrates is a man", especially if the same neurons could be identified with a different thought? You're just opening the door to Kripke's plus and quus problem. Secondly, if there really is no universal propositional content, then how can both of us be thinking about the exact same thought ("Socrates is a man") in order to understand a syllogism that would apply anywhere at any time? If our thoughts don't have universal propositional content, then we are not even thinking and talking about the same thing, and what that would be w.r.t. "Socrates is a man" I have no idea. And of course, if it is not the same universal propositional content, we have no real non-question-begging reason to accept the syllogism we once did - it's a different syllogism, with no universal propositional content!

Thirdly, I have argued that not only our thoughts need to have universal propositional content, but they must be causally relevant to the formation of other thoughts. That is to say, we must deny the causal closure of the physical. In your view, my thought-consequent that "Socrates is mortal" is produced only by neurons by virtue of their physical activities. In other words, your thought that "every man is mortal and Socrates is a man" has nothing to do with the formation of your belief that "Socrates is mortal", since the belief is formed only as a result of physical causes, and not by virtue of the propositional content of the previous thoughts. But then this reasoning is invalid. My belief that Socrates is mortal MUST in part be caused by virtue of the propositional content of "every man is mortal, Socrates is a man" in a ground and consequent relation, and not simply as a series of physical causes involving salts and electricity. On your view, no one would ever make valid inferences, no one would ever reason. It is up to you to defend how we can have reason, dialectical soundness and validity, etc, if our thoughts have no universal propositional content and no thought ever causes another by virtue of their propositional content.

To make the same point in a different manner, let's consider an argument by William Hasker ("The Emergent Self"). What we are considering is the relationship between the physicalistic explanation of a person's belief ("she believes such-and-such because of such-and-such antecedent physical conditions") and the rational explanation of that same belief ("she believes such-and-such because she sees that it is supported by good reasons"). By the hypothesis, the physical causes are sufficient to produce the belief in question. But is the possession of good reasons *necessary*, under the given circumstances, to produce the belief in question? Let's consider the following counterfactual conditions:

(A) She would have accepted the belief if she had not seen that it was supported by good reasons.

(B) She would not have accepted the belief if she had not seen that it was supported by good reasons.

Would a possible world minimally changed from the actual world in which she doesn't see that her belief is supported by good reasons, be one in which she would not accept the belief? There are many ways in which the world could be changed just enough to satisfy the antecedent of the conditional, and in some of these she accepts the belief while in others she doesn't, and there is no basis for saying those in which she doesn't accept the belief are less changed from the actual world than those in which she does, and vice versa. But then A and B are both false and what we'd be forced to conclude would be that if she had not seen that the belief was supported by good reasons, then she might have accepted the belief, but it's also the case that she might not have accepted it. Under physicalism, the principles of sound reasoning have no relevance to determine what actually happens. But that's absurd. To avoid this counterfactual argument a materialist might say that the mental/rational states supevene on the physical states, but we might imagine the truths of supervenience being different than what they are, and so the same problem would come up again. We could even come up with a zombie world in which all physical facts hold, but there are no mental states as such, and then the problem we could still not decide whether A or B would hold in worlds minimally changed from the actual one.

More fundamental, however, is the fact that our thoughts must be caused by other thoughts by virtue of their propositional content and in accordance with the universal laws of logic, and not merely by virtue of physical causation. Even if the materialist could somehow escape the counterfactual problem, this issue would remain. And then we are forced to concede that geographical location is not a requisite of causation.

Last edited by Miguel (3/21/2018 1:36 pm)

I should probably flesh out the reason every philosopher that accepts the coherency of constituent ontologies implicitly denies the claim that “composition is a physical phenomenon”:

Suppose c is a thin particular and F is the property of extendedness. c's being F is extended, but c's not. c is just c. (The extended thing is to be identified with c's being F, not c.) So, if extendedness is necessary for physicality, c is a non-physical entity involved in composition.

Mutatis mutandis colouredness and extendedness, colouredness and “spatial qualifiedness”, etc. So if there are properties (in the sense opposed to substances), there are non-physical entities involved in composition.