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Sui Generis-Ness, Parsimony and Innocence the (Meta)2Physics of Parthood

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Sui Generis-Ness, Parsimony and Innocence the (Meta)2Physics of Parthood Sui Generis-ness, Parsimony and Innocence The (Meta)2physics of Parthood Fabio Ceravolo Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds School of Philosophy, Religion and the History of Science July, 2018 i The candidate confirms that the work submitted is his own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. The right of Fabio Ceravolo to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. ©2018 The University of Leeds and Fabio Ceravolo ii Acknowledgements No matter how valuable, none of what follows would have been remotely conceivable without the enduring support of Steven French and J. Robert G. Williams, who found me an enthusiastic neophyte and turned me into a (more) careful arguer. As the outcome of innumerable and unquantifiably fruitful discussions, this dissertation owes to them any substantial claim it manages to establish. For trivialities and outright mistakes, on the contrary, I deem myself entirely responsible. Very special thanks deserve also my examiners, Darren Bradley and Katherine Hawley, for being among the first readers of the final manuscript. It goes without saying that this work will only have a chance at making broader impact thanks to Darren’s and Katherine’s challenging feedback. Further, having kept in touch with them from an early stage of writing contributed greatly to shape my ideas. Darren organised frequent workshops on the topic of theory choice in metaphysics, which kept me updated on the forthcoming literature and provided chances to discuss it with some of the most influential writers in the field. Katherine supported my application for a four-months visiting scholarship at St. Andrews’ Arché centre – one of the most formative experiences of my academic life – and even after I returned to Leeds she was always happy to spend time discussing my latest writings. This possibility of frequent interaction was especially motivating for two reasons. First, as the reader will notice, my strategy in the second part of the thesis (Chapters 6 – 10) owes much to “Ontological Innocence”, a paper Katherine published in 2014 shortly before I begun studying for my PhD. Second, I am indebted to ideas Katherine presented in a panel discussion at the Ninth International Conference of the German Society for Analytic Philosophy (GAP 9) in 2015. This time the subject is the relationship between metaphysics and science and particularly how to approach metaphysical questions with methods constrained and informed by reputable scientific knowledge. The question I approach asks about the structure of part-whole relations (in a sense we will have time to clarify) and an early, guiding idea I iii found in Katherine’s talk was that answering this question requires a detour through meta-metaphysical topics. We need to ask, for example, whether relations retrieved in advanced science, whose properties seem to reveal surprising new features of the way a part relates to its whole, count as relations of part-whole in a literal and non-metaphoric sense (Chapters 2, 3). These meta-metaphysical preliminaries to using science in theorising about the part- whole relations are so important as to informing my thesis’ title, which reveals that what follows is a work in (Meta)2physics. An exponent follows ‘Meta’ to indicate our aim of invoking science to uncover surprising features of part- whole relations, which metaphysics alone cannot discover. Moreover, the second power of (Meta) is ‘metameta-‘, which indicates the importance of the meta-metaphysical route for pursuing the former aim. To continue, I am indebted to a number of exceptional philosophers, whose comments greatly enhanced the outlook of this work. To my eyes, these figures boldly lead the discipline “where no one has gone before” or most certainly will in the very near future. Thanks, therefore, to Kenneth Aizawa, Claudio Calosi, Christina ‘Squared Cee’ Conroy, Javier Cumpa, Ilaria Canavotto, Jonathan Diettrich, Robert DiSalle, John Divers, Mauro Dorato, Joaquim Giannotti, Carl Gillett, Brigitte Falkenburg, Kit Fine, Suki Finn, Akiko Frischhut, Micheal Huemer, Naoaki Kitamura, James Ladyman, Joseph Melia, D. Hugh Mellor, Kohei Morita, Alyssa Ney, Andrea Raimondi, Juha Saatsi, Thomas Sattig, Theodore Sider, Jonathan Schaffer, Jeroen Smid, Alistair Wilson and Jessica Wilson. To a similar extent I am grateful to the entire graduate community at Leeds and St. Andrews, with a honourable mention to my most frequent philosophical interlocutors: Callum Duguid, Douglas Earl, Jade Fletcher, James Fraser, Will Gamester, Lewis Hickley, Alice Murphy, Simon Newey, Robert Pezet, Nahuel Sznajderhaus and Nick Tusker. For its financial support through three of my four years at Leeds, my highest gratitude goes to The University of Leeds, whose 110th Anniversary Scholarship I was awarded in 2014. I am also thankful, more specifically, to the iv University’s School of Philosophy, Religion and the History of Science for a number of travel grants, which I could avail myself of to attend exceptionally formative events in the UK, USA, Europe and Canada. A final set of acknowledgements relates less to my daily academic surroundings but is by no means less important. I am grateful to The University of Leeds’ Japanese Society and the European Network of Japanese Philosophy for quenching my thirst for symbols with more symbols. To them I say, vowing perpetual friendship: 私たちは誰でも他者との一体感を切望する何かをう ちに秘めている (deep within us lies a will for oneness with others). As it happens, example sentences from online dictionaries can conceal great wisdom1. I owe much professionally and as a person to my friends at EF - Education First: Martina Argine, Rob Arnsmar, Karlie Bertram, Kat Insull, Nora Johnsson, Bryan and Mickey Lao, Lea Le Nabec, Laura Salonen, Joshua Webster, Alice Zentilomo and many others. They all taught me to ‘sparkle’ and not to compromise on my personality in return for monetary rewards. This is the same lesson I learned from some brilliant pieces of song writing, particularly by my friend Ichiko Aoba and The Jezabels. Despite seven years spent away from my hometown, my closest friends never failed to support me. For this I wish to thank you, members of the Oἶδα Council of Milan, who luckily came into existence at closeby places and times: Pietro Barbini, Guido Beduschi, Dario and Bianca Bonetti, Arianna Cardella, Vincenzo Cirillo, Alessandro De Cia, Lorenzo Foletto, Bianca Giacobone, Gianluca Meneghel, Elia Nigris, Alesia Preite and Ayurzana Purevdorj. Last, far from the kind of acknowledgement that demands justification, I would like to dedicate this thesis to Francesca and Enzo, whose parental patience exceeds the limits of pure reason, and to Yuqing, who clears away the darkness like moonlight from the skies. 1 “他者” (tasha), In: JapanDict (© 2016), available at: https://www.japandict.com/他者. v Abstract A metaphysical naturalist could find the following combination of claims attractive. First, part-whole and composition in physics are sui generis and lack some of the ‘core’ features we ascribe to these concepts and their worldly satisfiers in first-order metaphysics. Second, having agreed that some physical objects of interest satisfy sui generis concepts and/or relate by sui generis relations, none among these objects satisfies a classical concept or relate by a classical part-whole relation (e.g. the concept or relation of mereological part). The first claim I read as one of ‘appropriation’: the structural relations between physical objects of interest are sui generis and yet they pertain to the mereological kind. The second I read as one of ‘elimination’: metaphysically abstracted part-whole (or composition) has no instances in well- regarded physical domains. The dissertation argues for appropriation and against elimination. For appropriation, because current physics sanctions relata of part-whole relations (or at least satisfiers of part-whole concepts) that clash with intuitive, seemingly analytic principles for part-whole, e.g. the Antisymmetry postulate (x and y are mutual parts only if identical). Against elimination, because whether these objects of interest to physics also relate by ‘canonical’ part-whole (with the intuitive principles) is largely a question of parsimony. One removes instances of the canonical relations because these are not needed to account for the composition of objects that already relate by the non-canonical ones. But some of these relations at least (such as mereological part-whole) resist the pressure from parsimony, for they come at no cost once the objects already relate non-canonically (e.g. in opposition to the Antisymmetry postulate). The latter we can argue for in (at least) two ways: 1. canonical and non-canonical part-whole are members of a single kind, 2. canonical part-whole is of a kind with identity. Given either view and a preference for theories with minimal kinds, instances of the canonical relation do not increase a theory’s profligacy, because their kind is already instanced in a theory of objects that relate non-canonically. My preference is for the latter view. vi Table of Contents Introduction 1 1. General Composition Question and core principles 7 1.1 Composition and Part-whole 7 1.2 General composition and part-whole questions 8 1.3 Partial and full answers 9 1.4 The conceptual and empirical tasks 11 1.5 The conceptual and the empirical I: 15 undeserving satisfiers 1.6 The conceptual and the empirical II: 16 unfamiliar features 1.6.1 The target concepts 17 1.6.2 Core principles 20 1.7 Alternative core-periphery distinctions 21 1.8 Do we need naturalistic evidence against the 26 core? 1.8.1 Antisymmetry and Idempotence 26 1.8.2 Weak Supplementation (a primer) 28 1.9 Conclusion 31 2.
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