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Philosophy in Practice Volume 12 — Spring 2018 California State uniVerSity, loS angeleS Department of philoSophy Philosophy in Practice VOLUME 12 – SPRING 2018 Cover Art: Photo of mural at Union Station, Los Angeles © Copyright 2018 by CSULA Philosophy Department. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a data base or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Individual copyright reverts to the authors upon further publication of their articles. CONTENTS Acknowledgments ..................................iv Faculty ...........................................v Professor Spotlight: Mark Balaguer ...................vii Articles: Persistent Beliefs Troy Polidori ............................... 1 Modal Fictionalism and the Problem of Incompleteness David Fonth ............................... 16 Logical Pluralism and its Collapse Problems Taylor A. Dunn ............................ 36 The Low-Entropy Past Still Requires Explanation Katelyn Rogers ............................ 46 Anarchy and Disclosure Bryan Knittle .............................. 59 Introspection and Cognitive Phenomenology Drew Patterson ............................ 81 An Aristotelian Approach to Quantum Mechanics Gil Sanders ................................94 Privacy: A Last Resort Fernando Cierra ...........................107 Simone de Beauvoir: Una Cuenta Para El Múltiplo Ana Arias .................................122 The Problem of Adjustment in the Philosophy of Mental Illness Sakib Ibne Shahriar .........................138 Regarding the Application of Charity Jeovany Aguilar ............................151 Contributors .....................................160 Philosophy Program Information ....................162 iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Philosophy in Practice is produced by students at California State University, Los Angeles. The editorial staff wishes to thank all the authors for submitting and refereeing articles, the faculty of the philosophy department for agreeing to supervise individual contri- butions, and the University for its generous financial support. EDITORS: Fernando Cierra Zack Ford Bryan Knittle Katelyn Rogers Sakib Ibne Shahriar FacULTY ADVISOR: Dr. Michael K. Shim iv CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, LOS ANGELES PHILOSOPHY FacULTY Talia Bettcher (2000– ), Chair, Ph.D. University of California, Los Angeles. History of Modern Philosophy, Philosophy of Self, Gender and Sexuality Mohammed Abed (2008– ), Ph.D. University of Wisconsin, Madison. Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy, Philosophies of Violence, Geno- cide and Terrorism Bruce Atta (1996– ), M.A. California State University, Los Angeles. Metaphysics, Epistemology, Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy Mark Balaguer (1992– ), Ph.D. City University of New York. Philosophy of Mathematics, Metaphysics, Meta-ethics, Philosophy of Language, Logic Jay Conway (2005– ), Ph.D. University of California, Riverside. 19th- 20th Century Philosophy, Modern Philosophy, Aesthetics, Social and Political Philosophy Richard Dean (2009– ), Ph.D. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Ethics, Kant’s Moral Philosophy, Applied Ethics Foad Dizadji-Bahmani (2013– ), Ph.D. London School of Economics, United Kingdom. Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Physics, Philos- ophy of Probability Ronald Houts (1983– ), Ph.D. University of California, Los Angeles. Metaphysics, Epistemology, Logic Keith Kaiser (2001– ), Ph.D. University of California, Los Angeles. Metaphysics, Philosophy of Mind Steven R. Levy (2005– ), Ph.D. University of California, Los Angeles. Epistemology, Metaphysics, Logic, Applied Ethics Henry R. Mendell (1983– ), Ph.D. Stanford University. Ancient Philos- ophy, History of Ancient Mathematics and Science, Philosophy of Science, Metaphysics David Pitt (2003– ), Ph.D. City University of New York. Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Language, Metaphysics v Joseph Prabhu (1978– ), Ph.D. Boston University. Philosophy of Reli- gion, 19th and 20th Century German Philosophy, Moral and Social Philosophy, Indian and Comparative Philosophy Sheila Price (1964– ), M.A. University of California, Los Angeles. Recent Philosophy, Comparative Religions, Medical Ethics, Environ- mental Ethics Michael K. Shim (2007– ), Ph.D. State University of New York, Stony Brook. 20th Century Continental Philosophy, Phenomenology, Husserl, Modern Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Language Kayley Vernallis (1993– ), Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley. Moral Psychology, 19th and 20th Century Continental Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy, Ethics, Aesthetics, Gender and Sexuality EMERITUS PROFESSORS Thomas Annese (1961–1992), Epistemology, Modern Philosophy Sharon Bishop (1967–2004), Ethics, Political Philosophy, Philosoph- ical Psychology, Feminist Ethics Donald Burrill (1962–1992), Ethics, Philosophy of Law, American Philosophy Ann Garry (1969–2011), Feminist Philosophy, Philosophical Method- ology, Epistemology, Applied Ethics, Wittgenstein, Philosophy of Law Ricardo J. Gómez (1983–2011), Philosophy of Science and Tech- nology, Philosophy of Mathematics, Kant, Latin American Philosophy George Vick (1967–1997), Metaphysics, Phenomenology, Existen- tialism, Philosophy of Religion, Medieval Philosophy vi PROFESSOR SPOTLIGHT: MARK BALAGUER The first thing I learned upon sitting down to interview Dr. Mark Balaguer is that we are both army brats. Mark was born on Fort Bragg in North Carolina, lived in Hawaii and then Chicago, attended middle school in Stuttgart, Germany, and then returned stateside to complete high school in Sparta, New Jersey. Unsurprisingly (at least to a fellow army brat) Mark described himself as being a very philosophical kid. By the time Mark happened into taking a philosophy class during his undergrad at CU Boulder, he recognized the thoughts being expressed by philosophers as mirroring his own. Mark lit up with excitement in front of me as he described the first time he read Descartes’ Meditations. The first medita- tion, Mark explained, was all about what can be doubted. Reading philosophers like Descartes would inspire Mark’s later interest in a particular question: whether or not there are abstract objects. The question of abstract objects fits into an overlap between philosophy and mathematics, the two areas of study Mark pursued during his undergraduate degree. Mark would go on to write his doctoral dissertation in philosophy on this same question regarding abstract objects while studying at the Graduate Center at City University of New York. His decision to pursue an academic career in philosophy turned on his love for writing, creativity, and, as he described it to me, “techy stuff.” Mark had considered a career as a writer, perhaps vii writing fiction, but he found himself attracted to problems in meta- physics and was excited about trying to determine what could be said about these problems, if anything. Mark found a niche for himself as a professor at California State University Los Angeles, where he’s spent his time investi- gating questions of meta-ontology, meta-metaphysics, and what he calls “philosophy of philosophy.” Mark explained to me that after his initial attraction towards metaphysics, he found himself feeling uneasy about the problems being tackled in metaphysics. So, his focus shifted from trying to answer the questions of meta- physics to asking whether there was something wrong with the questions themselves. In asking this, Mark discovered that getting the right view of metaphysics required taking a step back and first getting the right view about meta-metaphysics. In other words, a lot of metaphysical questions needed to be approached not by trying to figure out what the fact of the matter is, but rather by trying to figure out whether there is a fact of the matter, and if so, what kind of fact it might be. I asked Mark about the kinds of projects and writings that he’s done. He told me first about his book Platonism and Anti- Platonism in Mathematics. Here, Mark first presents the Platonic view that math deals with abstract objects; second, he presents the anti-Platonic view that math does not deal with abstract objects; third and finally, he argues that there’s no right answer, because there’s no fact of the matter about whether abstract objects exist. In another book of his, Free Will as an Open Scientific Problem, Mark argues that questions regarding free will boil down to empir- ical questions, the most important of which is the question of whether human beings have libertarian free will. Mark contends that this central question can only be answered via neuroscience research that does not yet exist, and as such, the question of free will remains both open and scientific. There’s a third book that’s still in the making; in this work, Mark traverses through a number of metaphysical questions and argues that these questions either decompose into being factually empty—no fact of the matter exists to answer them—or the questions are actually empirical ones. He viii leaves open a third category for logical or modal questions but focuses in on giving admittedly anti-metaphysical responses to metaphysical questions. When I got around to asking Mark why he thinks philos- ophy is important and why he does it, he gave me an answer that I probably should have expected from someone who has spent years subverting typical philosophical methods and approaches. Mark
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