To me many of the arguments in this article have analog arguments against some of the above positions. And i wondered whether you 1: disagree the arguments are analogous 2: think there are positive arguments for these positions that overcome the analogous arguments, where there isnt a analogous positive argument 3: you also reject the above positions
Here is an example of the kind of analogy i am thinking of, this is similar to the second paragraph under Causality. > This raises the issue that there are multiple theories with different unobservable structures expressing the same observations. For ontological minimality, we could say these are all valid theories (so there is no “further fact” of what is the real unobserved structure, in cases of persistent empirical ambiguity), though of course some have analytically nicer mathematical properties (simplicity) than others.
Regarding option 2, where there is some further argument such as being indispensable to our best scientific theories. Then it seems plausible that mathematics is indispensable. Which could be an example of an analogous positive argument.
Ah. I think first of all, it is possible to do ontology in a materialist-directed or idealist-directed way, and the original post is materalist-directed.
I get that the joint distribution over physical facts determines a joint distribution over observations, and we couldn’t observe further facts about the joint distribution beyond those implied by the distribution over observations.
I do feel there are a few differences though. Like, in the process of “predicting as if physics” we would be expanding a huge hidden variable theory, yet declaring the elements of the theory unreal. Also there would be issues like, how large is the mental unit doing the analysis? Is it a single person over time or multiple people, and over how much time? What theory of personal identity? What is the boundary between something observed or not observed? (With physicalism, although having some boundary between observed / not observed is epistemically relevant, it doesn’t have to be exactly defined since it’s not ontological; the ontology is something like an algebraic closure that is big enough to contain the state distinctions that are observed.)
I think maybe someone could try to make an idealist/solipsist minimal philosophy work but it’s not what I’ve done and it doesn’t seem easy to include this without running into problems like epistemic stability assumptions.
To me many of the arguments in this article have analog arguments against some of the above positions. And i wondered whether you
1: disagree the arguments are analogous
2: think there are positive arguments for these positions that overcome the analogous arguments, where there isnt a analogous positive argument
3: you also reject the above positions
Here is an example of the kind of analogy i am thinking of, this is similar to the second paragraph under Causality.
> This raises the issue that there are multiple theories with different unobservable structures expressing the same observations. For ontological minimality, we could say these are all valid theories (so there is no “further fact” of what is the real unobserved structure, in cases of persistent empirical ambiguity), though of course some have analytically nicer mathematical properties (simplicity) than others.
Regarding option 2, where there is some further argument such as being indispensable to our best scientific theories. Then it seems plausible that mathematics is indispensable. Which could be an example of an analogous positive argument.
Ah. I think first of all, it is possible to do ontology in a materialist-directed or idealist-directed way, and the original post is materalist-directed.
I get that the joint distribution over physical facts determines a joint distribution over observations, and we couldn’t observe further facts about the joint distribution beyond those implied by the distribution over observations.
I do feel there are a few differences though. Like, in the process of “predicting as if physics” we would be expanding a huge hidden variable theory, yet declaring the elements of the theory unreal. Also there would be issues like, how large is the mental unit doing the analysis? Is it a single person over time or multiple people, and over how much time? What theory of personal identity? What is the boundary between something observed or not observed? (With physicalism, although having some boundary between observed / not observed is epistemically relevant, it doesn’t have to be exactly defined since it’s not ontological; the ontology is something like an algebraic closure that is big enough to contain the state distinctions that are observed.)
I think maybe someone could try to make an idealist/solipsist minimal philosophy work but it’s not what I’ve done and it doesn’t seem easy to include this without running into problems like epistemic stability assumptions.