Barry Loewer - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Barry Loewer

<jats:p>Phenomena of one kind 'supervene on' phenomena of another kind just in case... more <jats:p>Phenomena of one kind 'supervene on' phenomena of another kind just in case differences with respect to the first kind require differences with respect to the second. G.E. Moore claimed that beauty supervenes on non-aesthetic properties: if one painting is beautiful and another is not, there must be some relevant non-aesthetic difference between them. Supervenience seems to offer the possibility that a property may depend on other properties, without being explicable in terms of them. Contemporary philosophers of mind have employed the idea to capture the relation that appears to obtain between mental and physical properties.</jats:p>

Harvard University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2023

It is widely, although perhaps mistakenly, believed that the contemporary heir to Hume's metaphys... more It is widely, although perhaps mistakenly, believed that the contemporary heir to Hume's metaphysics is David Lewis. Lewis developed and defended a view he calls "Humean Supervenience" (HS) which holds, as Hume is said to have held, that there are no necessary connections in nature. 1 According to Lewis the world consists of a distribution throughout the entirety of space-time of instantiations of "perfectly natural properties/quantities." 2 Lewis tells us that perfectly natural properties/quantities are intrinsic to the points or point sized individuals they instantiate and are categorical. By this he means that a property instantiated in one space time region places no restriction on what properties can be instantiated in entirely distinct regions. So, any perfectly natural properties instantiated in distinct regions are co-possible. The assumption that all perfectly natural properties are categorical enables Lewis to formulate a principle of recombination according to which given a space-time every mathematically possible way of combining instantiations of perfectly natural properties to fill the space-time is a possible world and every possible world is such a

Themes from the Philosophy of Jaegwon Kim

Philosophical Studies, 1978

John Searle and his critics, 1991

JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY, 1988

Perceptions present objects as red, as round, etc: in general as possessing some property. This i... more Perceptions present objects as red, as round, etc: in general as possessing some property. This is the" perceptual content" of the title, and the article attempts to answer the following question: What is a materialistically adequate basis for assigning content to what are, after all, neurophysiological states of biological organisms? The thesis is that a state is a perception that presents its object as F if the biological function of the state is to detect the presence of objects that are F. The theory contrasts with causal and informational theories, ...

Synthese, 1987

Page 1. BARRY LOEWER FROM INFORMATION TO INTENTIONALITY Arabella believes that her cat, Glendower... more Page 1. BARRY LOEWER FROM INFORMATION TO INTENTIONALITY Arabella believes that her cat, Glendower, wants to go out. ... This is the problem of intentionality. ...

The “Consequence Argument” has spawned an enormous literature in response. The most notable of th... more The “Consequence Argument” has spawned an enormous literature in response. The most notable of these is David Lewis’ based on his account of counterfactuals. My excuse for adding to this literature is while Lewis’ diagnosis of the argument is on the right track the account of counterfactuals he relies on to rebut the argument is, as I will argue, defective. I will develop a response that is in some ways similar to Lewis’ but differs in that it is based on a different and better account of counterfactuals which itself is based on an approach to statistical mechanics that goes back to Boltzmann and has more recently been developed by David Albert in his book Time and Chance. This account, which Albert and I refer to as “the Mentaculus”, provides a framework for explaining and connecting the various so called “arrows of time” including those of thermodynamics, causation, knowledge, and influence. It is the last of these arrows that is key to my response to the consequence argument. If ...

Arabella believes that her cat, Glendower, wants to go out. Her belief has representational and s... more Arabella believes that her cat, Glendower, wants to go out. Her belief has representational and semantic features. It is about Glendower; it represents him as wanting to go out, and it has truth conditions. Her belief also has causal and rationalizing powers. She opens the door because she believes Glendower wants to go out. If we think that Arabella and other believers are physical entities we are led to wonder how it is possible for a physical thing, whether it is composed of cells or micro chips, to have beliefs, desires and other propositional attitudes. This is the problem of intentionality. It has prove d to be a very difficult problem. The source of the difficulty is that intentional and semantic concepts, reference, truth conditions, meaning etc. make no appearance in biological or physical theory. Additionally, beliefs have a normative dimension. They are assessible as correct or incorrect, rational or irrational. But the descriptions which occur in physical theory apparent...

Readings On Laws Of Nature

A Companion to the Philosophy of Language

Synthese

This paper develops an account of the metaphysics of fundamental laws I call "the Package Deal Ac... more This paper develops an account of the metaphysics of fundamental laws I call "the Package Deal Account (PDA)" that is a descendent of Lewis' BSA but differs from it in a number of significant ways. It also rejects some elements of the metaphysics in which Lewis develops his BSA. First, Lewis proposed a metaphysical thesis about fundamental properties he calls "Humean Supervenience" (HS) according to which all fundamental properties are instantiated by points or point sized individuals and the only fundamental relations are geometrical spatial and temporal relations between these. While the BSA does not require HS Lewis seems to hope that it is true. In contrast, the PDA is not committed to HS or even to the fundamental arena in which fundamental properties are instantiated possessing geometrical structure and thus is able to accommodate relations and structures found in contemporary physics that apparently conflict with HS. Second, although Lewis' BSA doesn't require HS his Humeanism does require that fundamental properties are categorical. In contrast, the PDA allows for the possibility that fundamental properties are individuated in terms of laws and so are not categorical. Third, the PDA expands and develops the criteria for what counts in favor of a candidate system with more attention to the criteria employed by physicists in evaluating proposed theories. Fourth and most importantly, unlike Lewis' BSA, the PDA does not presuppose metaphysically primitive elite properties/quantities that Lewis calls "perfectly natural" properties/quantities or presuppose a metaphysically preferred language whose terms denote such properties/quantities. It replaces Lewis' account with an account on which natural properties are not metaphysically prior to the laws but are elements of a package that includes a fundamental arena that plays the role of space-time as well as fundamental laws and properties. By doing so it responds to some epistemological and metaphysical issues that have been raised regarding natural properties and their role in the BSA. In sum, the PDA goes further in explicating the notion of laws in terms of the aims and practices of science especially fundamental physics rather than in terms of prior metaphysics. I begin by reviewing Lewis' account of perfectly natural properties and his Humean BSA of laws.