Scientific realism and idealizations

Roy Sorensen and Michael Weisberg talk about the subject here.

My comments and questions:

“If pigs can fly, then phlogiston causes fire.” This statement is vacuously true. If Sorenson is correct, all claims/theories in science which depend on idealizations are similarly vacuously true since the antecendent is false. Now Sorensen says at 42-43 minute mark that there has to be some “premises” which are added to render certain claims/theories less accurate or correct. But this is not clear and it seems to me to be a little too imprecise to make much sense of his supposition theory.

In any case, I suspect it will not appease realists and may be ammunition for the instrumentalist and other anti-realists that all theories, true or otherwise (under more intuitive notions of scientific truth which seems to be about the world and which are true or false simpliciter and not true under logical material implication with an added false supposition as antecendent), in science or otherwise are similarly vacuously true even if they happen to be less or more accurate, etc, under some premise. In this way, no theory is really true in a more robust sense required by the realist because they will always be vacuously true under some (false) idealization.

What I am missing from Sorensen’s account here?

Abortion

I argued previously in a post that some forms of abortion may be morally permissible because the fetus or embryo at certain times of termination is not a person. However, some cases where the fetus is a person may also warrant the right of the woman to abort. Just what are these cases? When her life is in danger and when the pregnancy is due to rape or incest has been the common scenarios given to justify abortion on a rights based justification. Jarvis-Thomson has argued that in the case of rape, it is permissible even if the fetus is a full-fledged person.

But it seems to me that even though we can argue that arguments like Thomson's work to justify that pregnant women are not obligated to keep the fetus alive, the arguments do not justify the intentional killing of the fetus or even letting die (when it surpasses the time when it develops into a person) by other people.

Consider this thought experiment:

You wake up to find that a terrorist has attached you to another innocent victim to a bomb. The bomb will go off if you or the other victim try to disarm to escape from the bomb. The bomb will disarm itself in 9 months time automatically but for that time, you will have to be attached to it with your partner. The costs of being so attached are considerable to you. You will lose your ability to move about, etc, and there are health costs as the bomb and being attached to another persons is very burdensome on the body (not to mention the stress of being attached to a live bomb!). Now there is another way for you to disarm the bomb; you may kill your partner which will, by some elaborate mechanism, disarm it. This has a certain small risk of setting off the bomb and killing you as well by setting off the bomb. Some may wish to take that risk and they may have the right to even if it means certain death for your partner. That seems to be the conclusion of Thomson's argument and you may argue on similar lines for your actions if you so chose to kill your partner. But the question is, is it permissible for someone else, an expert on bomb disarmament in such scenarios, to intervene and help you kill your partner so that you will not have to endure the whole 9 months?

It seems that you can argue that no one has a right to so intervene though you may have the right to disarm the bomb yourself and thus causing the death of your partner, no one else has the right to intervene on your behalf. Any other individual may not have the right to "take sides." Analogously, it may not be permissible for abortion doctors to perform them after the crucial period required for person-hood, on behalf of the pregnant woman even if she has the right to terminate the pregnancy herself. This is a very unfortunate situation for her to find herself in for the obvious reasons but I can see no way around this analogy to justify abortion with the help of doctors, etc. I think the analogy holds for rape but probably also for abortion based on health concerns of the woman.

Double Rainbows

In a previous post, Carl mentioned the conundrum of whether two people can really see the same rainbow. This is really interesting because the look of rainbows, their "position" and "shape," etc are dependent on the perspective of the viewer. Just what exactly are we looking at when we look at a rainbow? Is the rainbow "just in our heads"? My feeling is that for rainbows, it really is just in one's head because I don't think there is anything substantive and definitive enough (either as a physical object or event or whatever) there for the term 'rainbow' to really "attach" to. Perhaps rainbows are like mirages, etc, only they can induce roughly the same images in different people in the same position at around the same time.

My review of Unrprincipled Virtue

By Nomy Arpaly here.

Conjoined twins and pain

Wittgenstein once said that it may be possible for two different people to feel numerically the same pain. His example is that of conjoined twins (PI, SS 253). Consider two attached at the hip. They share a piece flesh joining their hips and associated nerve endings in that region of their bodies. A painful jab in that region should be felt by both twins since the associated nerve endings are shared. W uses this example to show that even something as private as pain is not inherently so. Many philosophers think that pain and other phenomenological experiences are by their very nature private but does W's example prove this view wrong?

It doesn't seem so if reductionism is true. For if pain is just some neuro-chemical activity in a region of the brain, say C1 of the somatosensory cortex, then since the twins have their own brains, they would experience their own pains. Even if reductionism is false, if mental properties like pain supervenes on physical properties such as brain regions and their associated neuro-chemical activities or those of entire neural networks, W's counter example still seems to fail. Consider a neural network composed of the nerve endings both twins share in the flesh connecting their hips together which we'll call N. N is attached to two different peripheral and central nervous systems. Each network only shares one region of overlap, namely, N, but are two different systems because they comprise different parts other than N. Overall activity in both systems would also be different.

So if pain is either reducible or supervenes on these different physical systems, they are not identical to each other.

To my mind, W does not deny the truth of either reductionism or mind-body supervenience. The only way to save W's "counter example" as far as I can see is if pain is severely localized to a single region of the body (where it is actually felt) but that seems highly implausible. Consider phantom limb pain where people feel pain where they once had limbs. People who experience this kind of pain experience it in their "phantom" limbs. The pain is thus "all in their heads." Alternatively, pain for these conjoined twins may be reduced or supervened on both their networks together. But that also seems unlikely.

My review of Epistemic Injustice

By Miranda Fricker here.

Beliefs and Aliefs

In this video between Eric Schwitzgebel and Tamar Gendler, we have Gendler arguing for her famed distinction between beliefs and aliefs. Schwitzgebel argues that the distinction if a false dichotomy and that real beliefs are too complex, nuanced, and that there are too many gray areas between Gendler's beliefs and her aliefs to be so analysed. I am convinced that Gendler's analysis is insightful and useful to epistemology. But Schwitzgebel does make some interesting points. One thought experiment that I thought up that may help his case is the following:

Regina is a scientist who knows all about zombies in her post apocalyptic zombie infested world. She has a sister whom she loves dearly called Clair. Clair is bitten by a zombie and will turn into one herself soon (as the virus causing zombihood is highly contagious). Regina knows all about this and knows (a fortiori believes) that Clair will turn to a zombie. Clair does and Regina is faced with a harrowing moment where her sister is coming after her to eat her brains. Regina can either shoot the zombie that was at one time her sister knowing full well that that is not her sister but a zombie. She is not not under a delusion nor is she suffering from any other form of psychological pathology but she can not shoot the zombie because of the zombies likeness to her sister. The zombie kills and eats Regina's brain.

When a dramatic example like this is given, it would seem to my intuitions (and I would imagine many others) that it is indeterminate whether Regina believes in a robust sense of the word whether her sister is a zombie even though Regina is a scientist of zombies and knows all about them.

Though Gendler's examples are cherry-picked or "idealized" in her own words (and this example does seem to show a cherry-picked example on the other extreme), I still think that the belief-alief distinction is insightful.