jenann ismael | Johns Hopkins University (original) (raw)

Papers by jenann ismael

Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness, edited by Shan Gao, Oxford University Press, 2022

Humean Laws for Humean Agents, edited by Christian Low, Michael Hicks and Sigried Jaag, Oxford University Press, 2023

I give reasons for being disillusioned with Humeanism, the view that laws and chances are reducib... more I give reasons for being disillusioned with Humeanism, the view that laws and chances are reducible to patterns in the mosaic of actual fact.

Oxford Handbook on the Philosophy of Mind, edited by Uriah Kriegel, Oxford University Press, 2023

The visual imagination is one of our most powerful tools in helping us think through abstract pro... more The visual imagination is one of our most powerful tools in helping us think
through abstract problems in physics and it plays an especially prominent
role in spacetime physics, but it is also behind some of the most trenchant
misunderstandings about what physics tells us about the nature of time.
This chapter is about the images of time coming out of physics and the
philosophical confusions to which they give rise.
It is not a new idea that philosophical problems can have their roots in
mental pictures. This is a theme in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. I am
interested here both to make the confusion explicit and to explain the
powerful grip it has on the imagination.

Time and Science, edited by Remy Lestienne and Paul Harris, World Scientific Publishing, 2023

Determinism is a centrally important notion for physics: it links time to laws and connects event... more Determinism is a centrally important notion for physics: it links time to
laws and connects events along spatial surfaces to events along the temporal dimension. It has also played an important role in philosophical discussions. These mostly take place in a non-relativistic setting. I examine what happens to determinism in a relativistic context and argue against some of the common philosophical assessments of its implications

Interface Focus 13: 20220081. , 2023

The most immediately salient asymmetry in our experience of the world is the asymmetry of causati... more The most immediately salient asymmetry in our experience of the world is the
asymmetry of causation. In the last fewdecades, two developments have shed
new light on the asymmetry of causation: clarity in the foundations of statistical
mechanics, and the development of the interventionist conception of
causation. In this paper, we ask what is the status of the causal arrow, assuming
a thermodynamic gradient and the interventionist account of causation?
We find that there is an objective asymmetry rooted in the thermodynamic
gradient that underwrites the causal asymmetry: along a thermodynamic gradient,
interventionist causal pathways—scaffolded intervention-supporting
probabilistic relationships between variables—will propagate influence into
the future, but not into the past. The reason is that the present macrostate of
the world, in the presence of a low entropy boundary condition, will screen
off probabilistic correlations to the past. The asymmetry, however, emerges
only under the macroscopic coarse-graining and that raises the question of
whether the arrow is simply an artefact of the macroscopic lenses through
which we see the world. The question is sharpened and an answer proposed.

Time: A Very Short Introduction

Isaac Newton’s theory of motion was superseded by Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity. By th... more Isaac Newton’s theory of motion was superseded by Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity. By the early 20th century, it was clear that there was something wrong with Newton’s theory. Newton’s theory together with Maxwell’s newly proposed equations of electromagnetism predicted that the speed of light should depend on the motion of the observer, but experiments found that the velocity of light is independent of the motion of the observer. Einstein proposed the special theory of relativity in 1905 which merged space and time into a four-dimensional structure known as spacetime. Ten years later he proposed the general theory which extended the special theory to include gravity. With Einstein’s theories, an ancient philosophical debate between Heraclitus and Parmenides on change as the fundamental character of time was revived.

Time: A Very Short Introduction explores questions about the nature of time that have been at the... more Time: A Very Short Introduction explores questions about the nature of time that have been at the heart of philosophical thinking since its beginnings: questions like whether time has a beginning or end, whether and in what sense time passes, how time is different from space, whether time has a direction, and whether it is possible to travel in time. These questions passed into the hands of scientists with the work of Isaac Newton when the structure of space and time became connected to motion and included the subject matter of physics. This VSI charts the way that the history of physics, from Isaac Newton through Albert Einstein’s two revolutions, wrought changes to the conception of time. There are parts of physics that are in a state of confusion, but this strand of development is a story of philosophical illumination and conceptual beauty. The discussion here provides an opportunity to see what distinguishes the methods of physics from those of philosophy. It brings together phy...

Times Literary Supplement, 2019

This is a readable essay on the problem of free will.

I discuss a rival program in metaphysics advocated and developed by Huw Price, that unites differ... more I discuss a rival program in metaphysics advocated and developed by Huw Price, that unites different strands of pragmatism in the philosophical literature (Ramsey, Brandom, Wittgenstein, e.g.). The Sydney Plan is anti-representationalist, anti-reductionist. It searches for practical accounts of different bits of discourse rather than metaphysical reductions.

Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science, 2017

Philosophical Review, 2016

In 1913 Bertrand Russell argued that contrary to what most of us presume, the causal structure of... more In 1913 Bertrand Russell argued that contrary to what most of us presume, the causal structure of the world is not fundamental, that is, that there is no temporally asymmetric relation of causal determination, production, or influence built into the fundamental fabric of reality. His argument was that causal notions had been eliminated from physics in favor of time-symmetric, fundamental laws. Causation should be pushed aside as a relic, he said, of a bygone era. Cartwright's (1983) influential critique of Russell's position convinced many that causal eliminativism, in the form that Russell defended it, is not supportable, because causal structure plays a functional role in practical reasoning that cannot be played by nomological relations. Causal pathways identify strategic routes to bringing about ends, and a law-like relationship between A and B does not entail that A-ing is a way of bringing B about. So, for example, bad breath is correlated with tooth decay as a matter of physical law (since both arise with the presence of bacteria in the mouth), but taking breath mints is a not a strategic route to preventing tooth decay. By making it clear that what Russell identified as the physical replacements could not play the functional role of causal beliefs in practical reasoning, Cartwright renewed interest in causal relations. There have been important developments in recent decades in understanding causal relations. There has been progress in understanding what causal claims add to structures like laws and probabilities. Formalisms have been developed for representing causal claims in science. Methods of causal inference and discovery have been developed. But among physicists and philosophers of physics, the dominant position on the ontology of causal relations remains that-contrary to what philosophers and scientists took for granted for centuries-causal structure is not part of the fundamental fabric of the physical world. This is the position that Frisch calls the "anti-causalist" position. His book is intended as a counterpoint to the prevailing anticausalism. His aim is, in his own words, "to show that, contrary to what appears to be the received wisdom among philosophers of physics, causal structures play a legitimate role in physics" (21). By causal structures, Frisch means asymmetric structures represented by directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) that play the practical role that Cartwright ident

Synthese, 2016

Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer Science +B... more Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer Science +Business Media Dordrecht. This e-offprint is for personal use only and shall not be selfarchived in electronic repositories. If you wish to self-archive your article, please use the accepted manuscript version for posting on your own website. You may further deposit the accepted manuscript version in any repository, provided it is only made publicly available 12 months after official publication or later and provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of publication and a link is inserted to the published article on Springer's website. The link must be accompanied by the following text: "The final publication is available at link.springer.com".

Philosophy of Science, 1999

ABSTRACT The Hard Problem of the mind is addressed and it is argued that physical-phenomenal prop... more ABSTRACT The Hard Problem of the mind is addressed and it is argued that physical-phenomenal property identities have the same status as the identification of an ostended bit of physical space and the coordinates assigned the spot on a map of the terrain. It is argued, that is to say, that such identities are, or follow from, stipulations which interpret the map.

Philosophy of Science , Vol. 82, No. 1 (January 2015), pp. 129-148, Jun 30, 2014

We review and discuss the recent monograph by David Wallace on Everettian Quantum Mechanics.

Analytic Philosophy, 2015

In Cosmological and Psychological Time, edited by Yuval Abrams, Springer., 2016

Time as experienced is said to have several properties that the physical image of time lacks. In ... more Time as experienced is said to have several properties that the physical
image of time lacks.
In this paper, I outline a strategy for bridging the gap between the time of everyday
experience and the time of physics that treats the Block Universe as a non-perspectival
view of History and shows how to recover the everyday experience of
time as a view of History through the eyes of the embedded, embodied participant
in it. I also address questions about whether features of our temporal experience like
passage and flow are properly thought of as illusory, the temptation to reify these
features in the absolute fabric of the universe, and the question of whether this strategy
takes passage seriously.

Synthese, 2015

Huw Price has argued that on an interventionist account of cause the distinction is perspectival,... more Huw Price has argued that on an interventionist account of cause the distinction is perspectival, and the claim prompted some interesting responses from interventionists and in particular an exchange with Woodward that raises questions about what it means to say that one or another structure is perspectival. I’ll introduce his reasons for claiming that the distinction between cause and effect on an interventionist account is perspectival. Then I’ll introduce a distinction between different ways in which a class of concepts can be said to depend on facts about their users Three importantly different forms of dependence will emerge from the discussion: (1) Pragmatic dependence on us: truth conditions for x-beliefs can be given by a function f0 of more fundamental physical structures making no explicit reference to human agents.
But there are any other number of functions (f2…fn) ontologically on a par with x and what explains the distinguish role f plays in our practical and epistemic lives are facts about us. (2) Implicit relativization: truth conditions for x-beliefs are relative to agent or context. The context supplies the value of a hidden parameter (’hidden’ in the sense that it is not explicitly represented in the surface syntax) that determines the truth of x-beliefs. (3) Indexicals: like implicit relativization except that the surface syntax contains a term whose semantic value is context-dependent I suggest that Price’s insights are best understood in the first way. This will draw a crucial disanalogy with his central examples of perspectival concepts, but it will refine the thesis in a way that is more faithful to what his arguments show. The refined thesis will also support generalization to other concepts, and clarify the foundations of the quite distinctive research program that Price has been developing for a number of years.

... Interventionism Recent work by Pearl, Woodward and others suggests 1 That interventions are a... more ... Interventionism Recent work by Pearl, Woodward and others suggests 1 That interventions are at the core of an understanding of causality 2 That the “Ptolemaic” view of interventions is problematic. Jenann Ismael & Huw Price Two Bits of Noûs From 1979 Page 27. ...

Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 2011

The intuitive difference between a system that choreographs the motion of its parts in the servic... more The intuitive difference between a system that choreographs the motion of its
parts in the service of goals of its own formulation and a system composed of a
collection of parts doing their own thing without coordination has been shaken
by now familiar examples of self-organization. There is a broad and growing
presumption in parts of philosophy and across the sciences that the appearance
of centralized information-processing and control in the service of systemwide
goals is mere appearance, i.e., an explanatory heuristic we have evolved to
predict behavior, but one that will eventually get swept away in the advancing tide
of self-organization. I argue that there is a distinction of central importance here,
and that no adequate science of complex systems can dispense with it.

Structures of many different sorts arise in physics, e.g., the concrete structures of material bo... more Structures of many different sorts arise in physics, e.g., the concrete structures of material bodies, the structure exemplified by the spatiotemporal configuration of a set of bodies, the structures of more abstract objects like states, state-spaces, laws, and so on. To each structure of any of these types there corresponds a set of transformations which map it onto itself. These are its symmetries. Increasingly ubiquitous in theoretical discussions in physics, the notion of symmetry is also at the root of some time-worn philosophical debates. This dissertation consists of a set of essays on topics drawn from places where the two fields overlap. The first essay is an informal introduction to the mathematical study of symmetry. The second essay defends a famous principle of Pierre Curie which states that the symmetries of a cause are always symmetries of its effect. The third essay takes up the case of reflection in space in the context of a controversy stemming from one of Kant&#39...