Friction

What if vision, working memory, and consciousness are not the real joints of the mind, but just the words psychology happens to have inherited? My links: h ttps://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Henry Taylor is Associate Professor at the University of Birmingham, and his work has focused on various issues in metaphysics, mind, cultural robotics, and more. Check out his book, "Natural Kinds and the Science of Perception"! https://academic.oup.com/book/62599 https://a.co/d/0gUPbopl 2. Book Summary Taylor develops a property-cluster account of natural kinds tailored to psychology and states it as a sufficient condition, PNK: if a kind’s members instantiate a cluster of properties that co-occur non-accidentally, and the kind earns its keep in prediction, explanation, generalization, or discovery, it’s a psychological natural kind. Two commitments anchor the view — natural kinds are the kinds that serve science’s epistemic goals, and kindhood isn’t up to us, since the clustering has to answer to worldly structure. He deliberately strips the metaphysical commitments that homeostatic, causal, and stable cluster views carry, then defends the resulting liberality: the objection that PNK needs a supplementary mechanistic or causal explanation of the clustering is answered by distinguishing cases, and Block’s necessary-property objection gets a separate reply. Long-term memory serves as the worked example. Chapter 4 isolates the Eliminativist Claim — that a psychological term failing to pick out a natural kind should be dropped — motivates it via the epistemic privilege natural-kind terms enjoy, concedes that non-natural-kind terms can still be useful, and ends up defending a qualified version. The applications are where the framework does real work, and the results are non-uniform. Dorsal and ventral streams each come out as natural kinds — each a non-accidental property cluster with genuine epistemic payoff — which Taylor uses against scepticism about the two visual streams hypothesis. But that success generates a negative result one level up: because dorsal and ventral episodes differ so sharply, visual episode is not a cluster kind at all, but at best disjunctive — vision as jade. Working memory fares better. Taylor characterizes it via five properties (persistence duration, interaction with attention, manipulation of information, interfacing faculties, capacity), argues from partial-report and change-detection results that psychological explanations depend on their co-occurrence, and concludes it is both a natural kind and an explanatorily powerful one, contra recent scepticism about its unity. Chapter 8 then turns this on the unconscious-working-memory literature: the experiments don’t establish unconscious working memory, and the better reading is that in each case it’s vague whether the system involved is working memory. An appendix shows the cluster view is compatible with three major theories of vagueness. The closing chapters extend the method to prelinguistic infants, where verbal report and task instructions are unavailable. The proposal is deliberately theory-last: harvest markers of consciousness from adults, look for them in infants, and infer consciousness when enough co-occur — with natural kinds supplying the justification for that inference, and Taylor arguing the approach beats theory-first alternatives. He works through the complications honestly (behavioural vs. neuroscientific markers, the absence of any uncontroversial marker, detecting and correcting misleading ones, gradual emergence). Chapter 10 applies this to the early-vs-late emergence dispute between Bayne et al., Passos-Ferreira, and Taylor and Bremner, identifying two candidate clusters: an early one (third trimester to ~3 months: McGurk effect, default mode network, P3b-like ERP to global oddballs, endogenous attention, pain markers) and a later one (~1 year: protodeclarative pointing, means-ends reasoning, memory-based imitation). He declines to adjudicate, arguing instead that the evidence is genuinely muddy and that the natural-kinds machinery is what could resolve it — including the case where consciousness turns out to be associated with several cluster kinds rather than one, a jade -like outcome the framework can absorb without collapsing. 3. Interview Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 00:49 - Natural kinds 04:38 - Perception 07:01 - Philosophy of mind 16:32 - Psychological natural kinds 24:10 - Essentialism 32:39 - Cluster views 40:22 - Worry 47:20 - Induction 49:36 - Vagueness 58:55 - Eliminating kinds 1:05:03 - Visual episodes 1:08:01 - Introspection 1:10:42 - Infant consciousness 1:15:35 - Practical difficulties 1:21:13 - Further research 1:24:56 - Main takeaway 1:26:21 - Value of philosophy 1:31:11 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

When a lump of clay becomes a statue, does one thing get a new job, or does a brand-new thing come into being? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Justin Mooney is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at College of the Holy Cross, and his work has focused on metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and more. Check out his recent book, "Phases of Objects"! https://academic.oup.com/book/62226 https://a.co/d/0eL5AfF9 2. Book Summary Phases of Objects by Justin Mooney (Oxford University Press, 2026) is a work of analytic metaphysics defending a controversial view Mooney calls “phasalism”: the thesis that material objects are not permanent members of their kinds but can survive changes from one kind to another, so long as such changes violate no generic requirements on identity and persistence that hold for all material objects regardless of kind. This directly opposes what Mooney takes to be contemporary orthodoxy—”substantialism,” the widely-held and usually unexamined assumption that objects belong to their kinds permanently and essentially. His entry point is the classic puzzle of the statue and the lump of clay: whereas most solutions treat the statue and the clay as either identical or as two coincident objects, Mooney argues they are one and the same object, with the lump merely coming to “be” a statue in the same way a human person comes to be an adult by maturing. Being a statue, on his view, is a phase the clay passes through, not a new substance. The book builds this position out into a general metaphysics of material objects across five chapters. After laying methodological and metaphysical groundwork and distinguishing phase sortal changes (where the object before and after are numerically identical) from substance sortal changes (where they are distinct), Mooney proposes a phasalist criterion of identity—a broadly spatiotemporal account of persistence conditions—and tests it against a range of cases. He then deploys phasalism against the standard coincidence puzzles that motivate rival theories, arguing it handles sortal changes, gradual material turnover, undetached parts, and fission and fusion cases. A further chapter tackles “sameness relations,” where he defends the surprising pairings of identity without sameness and sameness without identity, showing how his framework accommodates our ordinary talk about objects being “the same” in various respects. The final chapter turns to what phasalism means for persons. Mooney argues his metaphysics pairs most naturally with animalism—the view that each of us is identical to a human organism, with personhood itself being a phase sortal property the animal comes to instantiate once sufficiently psychologically developed. From his general spatiotemporal criterion he derives a criterion of identity for human persons and applies it to the hard cases at the edges of a life: fertilization, the early embryo, twinning, and the fetus at the beginning, and persistent vegetative states, death, and decomposition at the end, closing with brain-transplant thought experiments. Throughout, Mooney is explicit that his aim is a partial defense—developing phasalism, drawing out its virtues, and rebutting objections—rather than a knockdown argument that it should be preferred to every rival, positioning the view as a serious and unjustly neglected competitor in the metaphysics of material objects. 3. Interview Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 00:53 - Background to book 06:25 - Sortals 10:56 - Radical change 13:04 - Methodology 18:46 - Deflationary views 25:42 - Substantialist views 34:12 - Path to phasalism 39:16 - Pluralism 44:42 - Criterion of identity 49:20 - Spatiotemporal continuity 54:21 - Counterexample? 1:00:52 - Another case 1:06:39 - Advantage of substantialism? 1:08:10 - Fission 1:12:35 - Sameness relations 1:18:58 - Relative identity 1:21:40 - Christian theology 1:25:37 - Main takeaway 1:26:27 - Value of philosophy 1:29:13 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

Is the hard problem of consciousness a real problem, or a question that dissolves once you take physicalism seriously? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest David Papineau is Professor of Philosophy at King's College, London, and his work has focused on epistemology, metaphysics, the philosophy of science, and mind. 2. Interview Summary Papineau opens by characterizing physicalism via Kripke’s creation metaphor: once God has arranged all the material stuff, the work is done — no further act is needed to install minds. On defining “physical,” he takes the via negativa: whatever isn’t fundamentally mental or vital. He concedes this is cheap but insists it’s adequate for the mind-body problem, since the interesting conclusion is just that the mental is identical to something non-mental; Alyssa Ney has convinced him that a general physicalism about everything owes more (roughly, a few mathematically characterizable basic quantities). He also flags his student Jonathan Emery’s line that one needn’t argue for universal causal closure at all — the relevant question is whether everything going on inside our heads is physical — and grants the point is reasonable, while noting the physicalist still needs a non-question-begging characterization of “brain process” broad enough to cover glia, fields, and whatever physics hasn’t found yet. On the hard problem, he simply rejects the presupposition: brain processes don’t give rise to consciousness; they are consciousness, as H2O arrangements don’t give rise to water. Identities need no explanation — he retells Block’s Twain/Clemens anecdote — and the same applies to generic consciousness if it turns out identical to global workspace activity or reentrant loops. Chalmers’ residue reduces to a tractable question about the reference of phenomenal concepts, settled empirically. He disowns functionalism as a metaphysical mess (second-order role properties can’t be pains, since pains occupy the roles), preferring generic first-order physical properties on the determinable/determinate model, and treats metaphysically necessary supervenience as an artifact of Jackson and Chalmers needing a single common commitment to attack. He then presses the consequence most physicalists flinch at: consciousness is vague like intelligence, with genuine borderline cases among animals and AI systems — Tye found this incredible enough to turn panpsychist. His own response is to decouple the issues, per his paper “Consciousness Is Not the Key to Moral Standing”: the clustered features that make consciousness matter morally in us come apart in other creatures, so moral standing should be settled first and consciousness bracketed, contra Birch’s precautionary framing. The final stretch tracks the anti-physicalist dialectic from the knowledge argument through the two-dimensional argument to the current revelation-based versions (Goff, Nida-Rümelin, Liu), which Papineau credits for isolating the real load-bearing premise once the bad inference from semantic to epistemic directness is discarded. His objection is ontological and blunt: he cannot identify any proposition you acquire by introspecting pain beyond that pain is pain. Comparative knowledge (yellow resembling orange more than red) is fine; “knowing what it’s like” isn’t knowledge — the cup doesn’t thereby know what whiteness is like. He extends the complaint to Russellian monist quiddities: instantiating a property and being able to name it confers no information about it. On causal closure he declines the appeal to authority and rests on the historical evidence — the collapse of vital and nervous forces, intracellular electrochemistry, Hodgkin-Huxley — plus Sean Carroll’s argument that brain-localized forces at those energy scales would have shown up in colliders, while acknowledging Emery finds holes in it and conceding that bare miraculous interference violating energy conservation falls outside Carroll’s argument’s reach. A brief exchange on whether phenomenal concepts are twin-earthable (he thinks not, though tentatively) precedes his closing remark that philosophy’s value lies in the fact that some humans can’t help being puzzled by puzzling things. 3. Interview Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 01:00 - What is physicalism? 07:07 - Too broad? 11:16 - Mind physicalism 19:13 - The hard problem 26:05 - Explaining identities 31:04 - Supervenience physicalism 37:37 - Supervenience and identity 42:12 - Martian pain 46:05 - Vagueness of the mental 51:03 - Moral issue 1:03:53 - Partial consciousness 1:06:34 - Properties 1:20:07 - Objecting to anti-physicalist arguments 1:24:54 - Revelation 1:33:57 - Causal closure 1:45:16 - Twin Earth? 1:49:15 - Value of philosophy 1:50:11 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

What if introspection isn’t an inner eye watching your own mind, but simply what rationality requires of you? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy . 1. Guest Daniel Stoljar is Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University, and his work has focused on philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, metaethics, metaphysics, and metaphilosophy. Check out his recent book, "The Introspection Principle: Rationalism about Knowledge of Consciousness"! https://academic.oup.com/book/63008 https://a.co/d/0gWXxovb 2. Book Summary Daniel Stoljar’s The Introspection Principle: Rationalism about Knowledge of Consciousness sets out to explain what introspection is — defined nominally as the distinctive way we come to know or reasonably believe that we’re in psychological states that are conscious — and to defend a single unified theory of it. The theory is the rationalist account , built around the titular principle: if you are in a conscious state, you should believe that you are, ceteris paribus and given background conditions. Two theses do the work. First, that this is a genuine principle of rationality , on a par with principles enjoining you to believe the obvious consequences of your beliefs, to coordinate belief with perception, and to act on your beliefs. Second, that you have a capacity for introspection iff you abide by it. Introspective belief is thus the manifestation of a rational disposition, and introspective knowledge is introspective belief that amounts to knowledge — so consciousness turns out to be built into the content of rationality. The first four chapters lay the groundwork. Chapter 2 defends an inclusive notion of a conscious state — one having enough of phenomenal character, awareness, attention, cerebral celebrity, and poise — against the more familiar exclusive (phenomenal, higher-order, access) definitions, while allowing rival theories to help themselves to exclusive notions if useful. Chapter 3 states the principle and fields twenty preliminary questions; chapter 4 contrasts it with the perceptual/inner-sense tradition, endorsing Shoemaker’s critique. The diagnostic offered there structures the whole book: rivals divide into those that accept the principle but embellish it unnecessarily (acquaintance theories, perceptual theories, the “simple” account of Smithies and Peacocke), and those that reject it and thereby become implausible (Shoemaker’s constitutivism, inferentialism). Stoljar positions himself as a synthesis of Armstrong and Shoemaker that departs from both — the connection between conscious state and introspective belief is normative necessity, not metaphysical or natural necessity, and the principle is wide-scope rather than narrow-scope, so it doesn’t collapse into the truth principle. The remaining thirteen chapters function as a case book, each applying the account to a standing problem: Dretske’s evidence problem (solved via a warrant/evidence distinction), Evans on transparency and Moore on diaphanousness (both accommodated by taking introspectable states to be access conscious), acquaintance, the truth principle, Shoemaker on necessity, privileged access (accepting Byrne’s “different from” thesis while rejecting “better than”), Williamson’s anti-luminosity argument (defused by distinguishing exceptionless from generic luminosity, with only the latter required), Sosa on negative introspection (handled via second-order total-state contents), McKinsey’s externalism incompatibility (rebutted by treating externalism as a posteriori and contingent), Nisbett and Wilson on inference, revelation — which Stoljar rejects, and uses to argue against Kammerer and Frankish’s illusionism — and finally the cogito, where he claims both Descartes and Hume come out partly right, against Cassam’s triviality charge. The concluding argument is abductive rather than direct: the rationalist account earns its place by explaining this whole cluster of puzzles at once, where rivals were each engineered for one. 3. Interview Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 00:50 - Introspection 03:42 - Perceptual accounts 09:44 - Mental objects 13:34 - Conscious states 16:43 - Inference 23:56 - Consciousness 32:34 - Vagueness 38:31 - Theories of consciousness 39:23 - Illusionism 47:53 - Rejoinder 54:10 - Theory-laden? 56:32 - Rationality 1:06:18 - How broad is rationality? 1:14:34 - Dretske challenge 1:21:53 - No evidence by introspection? 1:25:14 - Rationality of perception 1:30:28 - Acquaintance accounts 1:39:13 - Response 1:41:31 - Undergeneration worry 1:45:56 - Unified account 1:54:54 - Future development 1:57:32 - Value of philosophy 1:59:19 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

What if the point of punitive damages isn’t just to punish wrongdoers, but to tell victims their dignity actually counts? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy . 1. Guest María Guadalupe Martínez Alles is Associate Professor of Law at Sturm College of Law, and her work has focused on the philosophy of law. Check out her recent book, "Torts and Retribution: The Case for Punitive Damages"! https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/torts-and-retribution/6C2E6812DA1D2071DA90DA286FC70285 https://a.co/d/06f7e0Kb 2. Book Summary María Guadalupe Martínez Alles’s Torts and Retribution: The Case for Punitive Damages (Cambridge University Press, 2025) sets out to build what she argues has long been missing from tort scholarship: a thorough, cross-jurisdictional theoretical justification for the retributive dimension of tort law, as embodied in punitive damages. She observes that punitive damages sit awkwardly between civil and criminal law—awarded in private lawsuits yet explicitly punitive and noncompensatory—and that the dominant camps in tort theory have mostly avoided reckoning with this. Rights-based and corrective-justice theorists tend either to dismiss punishment as an anomaly or to force it into a compensatory framework, while law-and-economics accounts simply collapse punishment into deterrence. Against this backdrop, Martínez Alles takes the “punishment and deterrence” formula seriously by reconstructing it as “retribution and deterrence,” arguing that stripping punitive damages of their retributive content would gut them of something essential, and that the real question is how retribution and deterrence interact rather than which one to choose. The book’s central contribution is a framework she coins Relational Retribution , developed across its four parts (the place of punishment in torts, the retributive rationale, retribution in the mass-market setting, and why tort law specifically is the right venue). Rather than grounding punitive damages solely in the “just deserts” owed for a defendant’s reprehensible conduct, Relational Retribution shifts attention to the relationship between wrongdoer and victim and to the victim’s own motivations for seeking a punitive award. Drawing on empirical work in cognitive and social psychology, decision-making research, and moral philosophy’s discussion of “reactive attitudes,” she reconceives the tort victim—not as an abstract figure seeking mere restoration to a prior state, but as a value-laden moral agent responding to wrongs that threaten their dignity, autonomy, and worth. On this reading, victims pursue punitive damages less for private vengeance than for denunciation and value affirmation : punitive damages become a mode of moral communication that condemns the wrongdoer, affirms the victim’s equal moral standing, and reinforces society’s other-regarding values. Martínez Alles extends this framework to contemporary mass-market contexts—product liability, risk regulation, and new technologies—recasting punitive damages there as retributive sanctions for violations of collective societal trust. She also directly confronts the standard objection that punitive damages represent a dangerous “privatization” of the state’s monopoly on punishment, reframing the issue not as whether citizens may punish one another but as a choice between channeling punishment through privately initiated yet judicially regulated processes (tort law) versus publicly controlled ones (criminal law). The book closes by defending the distinctive significance of both the tort victim and the tort process , portraying tort litigation as a legitimate, complementary forum—alongside criminal and regulatory institutions—where communities air harms, assign accountability, and refine shared standards of conduct. Ultimately, it invites tort and criminal law scholars alike into a broader conversation about the forms punishment can take in democratic societies beyond the confines of criminal law. 3. Interview Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 00:49 - Overview of book 10:17 - Punitive damages 12:10 - Prevalence 16:16 - Main theories 20:24 - Unified theory 24:01 - Conceptual engineering 28:15 - Retributive intuitions 33:08 - Relevance of emotion 41:42 - Other approaches 47:21 - Relational retribution 51:29 - Benefits of approach 54:14 - Aggravated damages 1:00:54 - Practical change 1:02:36 - Mass market wrongs 1:07:54 - Principled motivations 1:12:27 - Culpability of companies 1:18:49 - AI harms 1:26:22 - Tort reforms 1:29:42 - Summary 1:31:14 - Value of philosophy 1:33:46 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

What if the flow of time is an illusion, and the past, present, and future all exist together right now? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy . 1. Guest Kristie Miller is the Challis Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney and co-director of the interdisciplinary Centre for Time. Her work has focused on metaphysics, especially as it relates to time, temporal passage, identity, and agency.Check out her recent book, "Life in Four Dimensions: A Defence of the Block Universe Theory"! https://academic.oup.com/book/62313 https://a.co/d/04YERGhM 2. Book Summary Life in Four Dimensions: A Defence of the Block Universe Theory argues for the block universe view of time—the thesis that reality is a four-dimensional spacetime block in which all events (past, present, and future) exist, with no objective, non-perspectival fact about which events are “really” present. On this static picture, what exists never changes and nothing has the property of being objectively present; talk of past, present, and future is merely talk about where events sit relative to one’s own location. The author’s central target is not dynamical theories of time themselves (presentism, the growing block, the moving spotlight), but a specific family of arguments against the block view, which he calls the General Inference-to-the-Best-Explanation (IBE) argument: the world seems to us as though time robustly passes, the best explanation for this seeming is that time really does pass, and therefore time passes. Rather than taking the usual “gaps” route—conceding the world seems dynamical but explaining that seeming away—the book defends the bolder “no gaps” approach, contending that we live in a block universe and that it seems to us as though we do . What distinguishes the book methodologically is its blend of analytic argument with experimental philosophy: the author reports over forty empirical studies, conducted with collaborators, probing what he terms the “manifest temporal image”—how time actually seems to ordinary people—rather than relying on armchair pronouncements about how things collectively seem. After laying out a precise version of the block view in Chapter 1 (built on two theses, “No Change in Existence” and “No Objective Present,” plus assumptions about spacetime drawn from general relativity), the book works through four variants of the IBE argument. Chapters 2–4 attack the Experiential version, defending “deflationism”—the claim that we do not in fact have experiences as of robust passage—and arguing it better explains people’s reported temporal seemings. Chapter 5 takes on the Conceptual version, presenting evidence that our time-related concepts would not fail to be satisfied in a block world; Chapter 6 addresses the Attitude/Preference version (tensed emotions like relief and dread, and future-biased preferences), arguing what makes such attitudes fitting are perspectival facts that obtain in block worlds too; and Chapter 7 examines the Belief version, marshalling data showing considerable population-level variation in what people actually believe about passage. Having dismantled each route from “seemings” to dynamism, Chapter 8 goes on the offensive, offering a positive IBE for the block view—arguing it better explains our asymmetric knowledge of past versus future—and contending that robust temporal passage is explanatorily redundant, doing no genuine work (including no work in explaining the asymmetry of physical processes). Since positing passage explains nothing, the author concludes, we ought not posit it, and should accept the block view. The overall achievement is twofold: a sustained defense of a static, four-dimensional metaphysics of time, and a demonstration—of interest even to those unmoved by the block view—that many influential arguments in the metaphysics of time, all of which lean on claims about how time seems , rest on empirical assumptions that the actual evidence about human temporal experience does not support. 3. Interview Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 01:02 - What is the “block universe”? 08:57 - Overview of book 13:26 - Experimental work 18:42 - Folk intuitions 23:42 - Methodological concerns 32:15 - Sampling bias 45:27 - Is the dispute substantive? 58:21 - Experiential argument 1:16:46 - Possible contents 1:27:52 - Rejoinder 1:31:45 - Contingency vs. necessity 1:37:48 - Further response on content 1:43:01 - Temporal bias 1:52:13 - My thoughts 2:00:30 - Skeptical charge 2:07:09 - Special relativity 2:13:20 - Balaguer’s approach 2:16:16 - Parsimony 2:21:52 - Balaguer on truthmaking 2:28:01 - Summary 2:29:36 - Value of philosophy 2:32:15 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

What if only the present moment exists, and everything you call the past or the future is, strictly speaking, nothing at all? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Mark Balaguer is professor of philosophy at Cal State LA, and his research has covered a wide range of topics, including metaphysics, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, philosophy of logic, free will, and metaethics. Check out his book, "How to Be a Presentist"! https://global.oup.com/academic/product/how-to-be-a-presentist-9780197845714 https://a.co/d/009UAUtC 2. Book Summary Balaguer’s book sets out to develop and defend an original version of presentism — the view in the philosophy of time that only present objects exist, with no past or future objects in the inventory of reality. Crucially, Balaguer is not arguing that presentism is true ; his project is the more modest one of showing that presentism is a live, defensible position and that, if there is a fact of the matter at all, the question of its truth is an open empirical one rather than something settleable by armchair metaphysics. The book is organized around three classical objections to presentism: the ontological-commitment objection (that true sentences like “Obama admires Gandhi” seem to require past objects to exist), the truthmaking objection (that truths about the past need something in reality to make them true), and the special-relativity objection (that physics rules out a privileged “now”). The first part of the book lays metaphilosophical groundwork, arguing against trivialism, against necessitarianism about metaphysics, and in favor of an “anti-metaphysicalist” stance on which presentism, if factual, is a contingent empirical hypothesis rather than something knowable a priori. Part II then mounts the defense proper. Against the ontological-commitment objection, Balaguer endorses a sweeping “FAPP-ist” error theory: the relevant ordinary and scientific sentences about past or future objects are, strictly speaking, false, but they function fine “for all practical purposes.” Against the truthmaking objection, he develops a position he calls nothingism , on which past-tense sentences that presentists count as true don’t have truthmakers because they aren’t really making claims about reality at all. Against special relativity, he constructs a relativized presentism compatible with the relativity of simultaneity, avoiding any appeal to a privileged frame. He also takes on subsidiary worries about time travel and change. The book’s most distinctive move comes in Part III, where Balaguer pushes presentism toward what he calls metaphysically minimal or timeless presentism. Here he argues — surprisingly, given the near-universal assumption that presentists must endorse the A-theory — that presentists should reject the existence of time itself, of times (including the present time), of temporal passage, and of metaphysically substantive A-facts (facts about something being past, present, or future). On the resulting picture, talk of time is best treated as a useful fiction layered over a more fundamental notion of intrinsic change, yielding a presentism that is ontologically lean, empirically respectable, and stripped of the heavy metaphysical machinery usually thought to come with the view. The overall result is a defense of presentism that is at once more concessive (presentism is not proven, just shielded from refutation) and more radical (presentism without time) than standard treatments in the literature. 3. Interview Chapters 00:00 - Introductio 00:57 - Overview of book 02:47 - Substantive dispute 06:31 - Non-factualism 09:15 - Substantialese 13:58 - Understanding the difference 21:40 - Contingent thesis 28:35 - A posteriori identities 41:10 - Scientism 47:55 - Ontological commitment objection 53:39 - Relevance of physics 1:00:25 - FAPP truth 1:05:03 - Truthmakers objection 1:08:19 - Potential reply 1:17:45 - Present truthmakers? 1:19:43 - Abandon physicalism? 1:20:54 - Swamp world 1:22:17 - The actual world and modal realism 1:36:26 - Nothingism 1:38:40 - Claims about reality 1:42:27 - Understanding the claims 1:53:16 - Counterfactuals 2:04:09 - Understanding modality 2:16:53 - Special relativity 2:26:53 - Avoiding anti-realism and eternalism 2:39:43 - Lean view 2:45:19 - What is time? 2:49:43 - William Lane Craig 2:52:06 - Summary of view 2:54:24 - Future work 2:56:08 - Temporal phenomenology 3:01:11 - Value of philosophy 3:03:31 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

What if simply having something consciously present to mind already counts as a form of knowledge, and helps explain not just perception, but beauty, emotion, and moral life? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy . 1. Guest Matt Duncan is Professor of Philosophy at Rhode Island College, and his work has focused on metaphysics, epistemology, and mind, including the nature of experience and experiential knowledge. Check out his book, "Present to the Mind: Acquaintance and Its Significance"! https://academic.oup.com/book/62315 https://a.co/d/0i7cd8zC 2. Book Summary In Present to the Mind , Matt Duncan develops and defends a Russellian-style notion of ‘acquaintance’: an especially direct form of conscious awareness we bear to things present in experience, such as colors, sounds, pains, smells, and other phenomenal features. The book begins from a striking question about when your ‘epistemic day’ starts. Against the orthodox view that perceptual knowledge arrives only after experience gives rise to belief, Duncan argues that conscious awareness itself already puts us in touch with reality in a knowledge-involving way. The book is organized around three main claims: acquaintance exists, acquaintance is a form of knowledge, and acquaintance is deeply significant in human life. The middle of the book argues first that several forms of acquaintance are real, and then that acquaintance is not just epistemically useful but itself a distinctive kind of knowledge. Duncan’s core idea is that some knowledge of things is constituted by conscious awareness rather than by belief: in perception, you do not first see, then believe, then know; rather, you can see and thereby know. From there he develops an account of ‘knowledge of things’ that is meant to work across different theories of experience, and he argues that acquaintance plays a foundational epistemic role by helping justify beliefs and underpinning much empirical knowledge, even if it is non-propositional. The final chapters broaden the project beyond epistemology. Duncan argues that acquaintance is aesthetically significant because genuine aesthetic appreciation depends on conscious awareness of aesthetically relevant features; emotionally significant because acquaintance with affective experience helps us know and appreciate the value of people; and morally significant because what we are able to notice and know is intertwined with moral character, producing a reciprocal moral-epistemic relationship. So the book’s overall message is not just that acquaintance is a defensible theoretical posit in philosophy of mind and epistemology, but that it is a basic feature of how we encounter beauty, respond to others, and live morally. Duncan’s concluding thought is that acquaintance matters every day, from ordinary perception all the way to our deepest forms of appreciation and care. 3. Interview Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 00:36 - Overview of book 03:30 - Bertrand Russell 07:30 - Directness 08:57 - Objects of acquaintance 14:03 - Strong vs. weak acquaintance 17:24 - Naive realism 22:34 - Mind 24:14 - Argument for weak acquaintance 26:10 - Absolutely strong acquaintance 27:53 - Doubt test 30:05 - Fallibility 31:22 - Certainty 37:33 - Hallucination 43:06 - Modal acquaintance 44:56 - Coextensive? 47:30 - Essence acquaintance 50:49 - Properties 55:02 - Knowledge 57:00 - Varieties of knowledge 58:51 - Argument for acquaintance knowledge 1:00:47 - Semantics 1:05:24 - Knowledge without belief 1:11:40 - Other animals 1:13:09 - Vagueness 1:18:11 - Theory of knowledge 1:23:01 - Subconscious acquaintance 1:27:05 - Foundationalism 1:34:59 - Moral significance 1:40:03 - Rationality of perception 1:42:50 - Summary 1:44:22 - Value of philosophy 1:45:31 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

If life as a whole has no ultimate point, what kind of meaning can still make it worth living? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy . 1. Guest Rivka Weinberg is Professor of Philosophy and Mary W. and J. Stanley Johnson Chair in the Humanities at Scripps College. Her work has focused on metaphysics and ethics, especially on meaning/purpose and bioethics. Check out her book, "The Meaning of It All: Ultimate Meaning, Everyday Meaning, Cosmic Meaning, Death, and Time"! https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-meaning-of-it-all-9780197758021 https://a.co/d/0gsQDkWN 2. Book Summary In The Meaning of It All , Rivka Weinberg argues that many disputes about life’s meaning stay confused because they fail to distinguish different senses of ‘meaning’. She separates three kinds: ‘Ultimate Meaning’, ‘Everyday Meaning’, and ‘Cosmic Meaning’, and also distinguishes several aspects of meaning, such as value, significance, impact, explanation, purpose, and point. Her boldest claim is that ‘Ultimate Meaning’—the point of living a life as a whole—is impossible for beings like us. A point, she argues, is a valued end external to the activity it justifies; but since a human life contains all of one’s projects, values, and aims, there is nothing outside the enterprise of living one’s life that could serve as its final point. So life as a whole is, in that specific sense, pointless, even though many things within life are not. That bleak conclusion does not, however, lead Weinberg to nihilism. The second major part of the book argues that ‘Everyday Meaning’ is real, abundant, and objective rather than merely subjective: love, truth, beauty, morality, achievement, and worthwhile engagement can genuinely make a life meaningful, and people can be mistaken both about what matters and about whether their lives are well spent. She also argues that ‘Cosmic Meaning’ is often overrated. Even if there were God, miracles, an afterlife, or some grand cosmic purpose, that would not solve the problem of ‘Ultimate Meaning’, and it might not add nearly as much significance as people hope. Cosmic purpose, eternal bliss, or communion with the divine may sound impressive, but Weinberg thinks they do less philosophical work than many assume. The final movement of the book shifts from meaning in general to death and time. Weinberg argues, against a common view, that death is not the main thing that either gives life meaning or takes it away. Rather, time is the real double-edged condition of meaningful life: it is what makes narrative shape, risk, effort, achievement, and change possible, but it is also what erodes all of these things. Hence her ‘time-meaning conundrum’: we need time for meaning, yet time steadily wears meaning down. Her concluding outlook is tragic but not hopeless. We cannot escape this condition, and ‘living in the moment’ is not a real solution; instead, the best response is to engage deeply in everyday goods, attend properly to past, present, and future, and accept suffering and loss as part of what a meaningful human life inevitably involves. 3. Interview Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 00:44 - Overview of book 03:52 - Meaning of ‘meaning’ 05:59 - Ultimate meaning 10:14 - God 13:24 - Skeptical worries 16:47 - Religious practice 20:14 - Everyday meaning 22:38 - Sources of meaning 27:18 - Subjective response 28:29 - Cosmic meaning 34:04 - Scale 39:49 - Transience 45:54 - Death 51:09 - Eternity 55:28 - Practical significance 59:00 - Value of philosophy 1:01:28 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

Where do norms come from: from transcendent reason, or from the customs, practices, and forms of life through which human beings become normative creatures? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy . 1. Guest Jay Garfield is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Smith College and Harvard Divinity School, and Professor of Philosophy at Melbourne University. He work has focused on Buddhist philosophy, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, ethics, cross-cultural work, and more. Check out his book, "Norms and Nature: A Humean Account of the Sources of Normativity"! https://global.oup.com/academic/product/norms-and-nature-9780197839768 https://a.co/d/05nsMQRP 2. Book Summary In Norms and Nature , Jay Garfield argues that the central philosophical question is where normativity comes from: whether norms are grounded in something transcendent, as in broadly Kantian approaches, or instead arise immanently out of human life itself. He frames this through the Euthyphro problem and then broadens it by drawing on Daoist and Buddhist traditions, using them to ask not just whether norms are discovered or made, but also whether they come from “above” in the form of principles or from “below” in patterns of human practice. Garfield’s overall answer is resolutely neo-Humean: norms are real and authoritative, but their source lies in custom, convention, and the natural and social forms of life through which human beings become normative creatures. The book’s middle argument is that this Humean naturalism does a better job than neo-Kantian transcendentalism of explaining both the origin and the authority of norms. Garfield insists that the normative domain is unified across ethics, epistemology, language, politics, and related practices, even if those domains differ in content. He then develops an account of custom as both biological and social, tracing its evolution phylogenetically and ontogenetically: human beings are not simply rule-followers by abstract reason, but animals whose hypersociality, trust, language, and inherited practices generate the normative space they inhabit. In that sense, normativity is neither an illusion nor a mysterious extra ingredient added to nature; it is a natural, emergent feature of human life. In the final part, Garfield applies this framework to particular domains—especially language, knowledge, ethics, and politics—and then turns to personhood itself. His picture is that to be a person is to be formed within a web of shared meanings, customs, and mutually reinforcing social practices that both shape us and are sustained by us. The result is a conception of human beings as thoroughly natural creatures whose normative lives are nonetheless fully real and binding. So the book is not just an argument about Hume versus Kant; it is a broader attempt to explain what it is to be human as a socially constituted, norm-governed being without collapsing into nihilism or crude relativism. 3. Interview Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 00:49 - Overview of book 04:51 - Unity of norms 09:08 - Further source? 14:11 - Transcendent views 19:38 - Why listen to God? 22:28 - Religious communities 25:58 - David Hume 33:23 - Language and norms 34:33 - Other animals 37:16 - Authority of norms 43:04 - Worry 44:53 - Moral intuitions 50:52 - Moderate relativism 54:37 - Open question argument 57:41 - Political norms 1:03:53 - Normative skepticism 1:09:30 - Cross-cultural work 1:10:46 - Trust 1:14:16 - What is a norm? 1:15:04 - Value of philosophy 1:15:59 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

What are intuitions, and are they indispensable to our knowledge? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy . 1. Guest Marc Moffett is associate professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, and his work has focused on epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and metaphysics. Check out his book with Cambridge Elements, "The Indispensability of Intuitions"! https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/indispensability-of-intuitions/6F7C18793C39B08507716DD934E4C6A2 https://a.co/d/0bsB4MX1 2. Book Summary Marc A. Moffett’s The Indispensability of Intuitions argues that rational intuitions are not mystical or mysterious, but rather a ubiquitous and essential feature of human cognition. Defending a stance called “moderate dogmatism,” Moffett contends that intuitions serve as basic sources of evidence alongside perception and introspection. He posits that rejecting the role of intuitions would undermine our knowledge on a massive scale, rendering them epistemically indispensable for almost all knowledge, whether a priori or a posteriori . A central part of Moffett’s argument involves rejecting the prevalent idea that the epistemic weight of intuitions (and other “seemings”) relies on a specific “presentational phenomenology” or conscious “feel”. Through thought experiments involving “Cartesian zombies,” he demonstrates that phenomenological properties are not what confer epistemic justification. Instead, he introduces the Attitudinal Theory of Presentationality (ATP), which characterizes presentational states by a unique cognitive posture—specifically, an involuntary “apprehending-as-actual” of certain contents. This non-phenomenological approach successfully addresses skepticism, such as Timothy Williamson’s “Absent Intuition Challenge,” by showing that intuitions can rationally guide our doxastic inclinations without requiring a distinct, introspectively obvious phenomenology. Building on this non-phenomenological foundation, Moffett demonstrates the widespread payoff of his theory by linking intuitions directly to concept application. He explains that philosophical thought experiments, such as the famous Gettier cases, rely on these concept-application intuitions to guide our judgments. Furthermore, Moffett expands his scope to argue that acts of explicit inference, as well as the higher-level presentational contents of normal perceptual experiences, fundamentally rely on the application of concepts, and therefore on intuitions. Consequently, intuitions are not just tools for abstract philosophy, but are intimately integrated into nearly all of our everyday cognitive functioning. 3. Interview Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 00:54 - What are intuitions? 03:06 - Absent intuition worry 06:55 - John Bengson 08:22 - Terminological dispute 12:20 - Methodological worry 14:53 - Moderate dogmatism 18:38 - Foundationalism 23:10 - Internalism 26:39 - Blindsight 30:10 - Zombie argument 36:52 - Rejoinder 43:09 - Non-phenomenal presentational dogmatism 45:48 - Upshot 47:47 - Another rejoinder 51:48 - Indispensability 55:46 - Are intuitions needed? 59:47 - Intuitions as content-determining 1:02:07 - Animal concepts 1:06:10 - Inferences1:08:39 - Inference without reckoning 1:10:59 - Philosophy without intuitions? 1:14:14 - Ethics 1:17:29 - Perceptual experience 1:23:54 - Value of philosophy 1:27:32 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

If Wittgenstein is right, the mystery of “private experience” doesn’t point to hidden inner objects or an incommunicable language of sensation, but to a philosophical picture that makes our ordinary talk about pain and perception look far more puzzling than it is. My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy . 1. Guest Michael Hymers is Munro Professor of Metaphysics at Dalhousie University, Canada and his work has focused primarily on Wittgenstein, 20th-Century philosophy, epistemology, philosophy of language. Check out his book with Cambridge Elements, "Wittgenstein on Private Language, Sensation and Perception"! https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/wittgenstein-on-private-language-sensation-and-perception/BC7058BF509740A839271C98B084F176 https://a.co/d/05nGUE5I 2. Book Summary Michael Hymers argues that Ludwig Wittgenstein’s discussion of private language in Philosophical Investigations §§243–315 is best read not as “the” Private Language Argument (centered on the diary passage at §258), and not as an attempt to prove that language is intrinsically social. Instead, the book presents Wittgenstein’s treatment as a cluster of arguments, examples, and reminders whose central target is a picture: the temptation to treat sensations and perceptual experiences as private objects located in a private “phenomenal space,” and to model sensation-words on an “object-and-name” scheme. Hymers frames this as continuous with Wittgenstein’s earlier work (including The Big Typescript) and with his shift away from assumptions carried over from the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus about how naming works. Methodologically, the book emphasizes Wittgenstein’s therapeutic/clarificatory aim: dissolving philosophical confusion by giving an overview of our “grammar,” rather than issuing deep theses or scientific-style explanations. A large part of the book (roughly its middle sections) explains why the “private object in phenomenal space” picture is unstable, and why it makes the very idea of a private sensation-language look deceptively natural. Hymers traces Wittgenstein’s doubts to the earlier critique of sense-data and of treating visual or tactile “space” as if it worked like physical space—where measurement, re-identification, and objecthood behave very differently. He then distinguishes “ordinary” privacy (e.g., the mundane fact that pains are my pains in the sense that I’m the one who manifests them) from stronger “superprivacy,” and separates epistemic privacy (who can know ) from ontological privacy (what sort of thing a pain is ). Against the idea that first-person authority rests on privileged inner access to private objects, Hymers highlights Wittgenstein’s alternative: first-person present-tense psychological utterances (“I am in pain,” etc.) function paradigmatically as expressions or avowals rather than as reports based on observation, so their asymmetry with third-person claims is grammatical, not a deliverance of a private epistemic channel. In the latter half, Hymers organizes the interpretive landscape around several “waves” of reading Wittgenstein’s anti–private-language materials—moving from verification/memory worries, to problems about private ostensive definition, to rule-following, and finally to broader “stage-setting” concerns (what has to be in place for something to count as naming, attending, or grasping a rule at all). Key thought experiments are used to pry us away from the object-and-name model: the “human manometer” shows that even if a diary-sign ‘S’ correlates with a bodily measure, it can become pointless to insist on a hidden inner act of correctly identifying the sensation—suggesting that the “misidentification” knob is ornamental if sensations are treated as detached inner objects. And the “beetle in a box” at PI §293 is presented as the most explicit pressure against thinking that sensation-words get their meaning by privately baptizing inner items: if the term belongs to a shared practice, the private “thing in the box” is not what gives it its role, and treating sensations as if they were objects is precisely the misleading picture doing the damage. The epilogue’s upshot is not behaviorism or the denial of experience, but a diagnostic: the philosophical “problem” is generated by a grammatical fiction that holds us captive, and Wittgenstein’s aim is to restore clarity about how our sensation- and perception-talk actually works. 3. Interview Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 01:06 - Overview of element 03:39 - Methodology 09:31 - Interpreting Wittgenstein 13:57 - Private language 18:01 - First wave: skepticism 22:17 - Second wave: definition 27:22 - Third wave: social 34:10 - Wittgenstein on Kripke 37:22 - Fourth wave: stage-setting 49:23 - Pains and sensations 52:52 - Problem for private languages 54:23 - Difference from second wave 56:46 - Objections 1:01:31 - Avoiding behaviorism 1:07:00 - Inverted spectrum 1:14:17 - Infallibility 1:17:07 - Objection 1:21:55 - Upshots 1:25:15 - Value of philosophy 1:26:33 - Conclusion This is a public episode. 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Are gender and sexuality really two neat boxes, or are they better understood as positions in a multidimensional space where people can differ by degree rather than kind? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy . 1. Guest Kevin Richardson is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Duke University, and his work has focused on metaphysics, language, and social reality. Check out his book, "The End of Binaries: How Gender and Sexuality Come in Degrees"! https://academic.oup.com/book/61709 https://a.co/d/04PYhWSf 2. Book Summary Kevin Richardson’s The End of Binaries: How Gender and Sexuality Come in Degrees argues that many contemporary fights over gender and sexuality are fueled by an overly rigid “binary” picture—one that treats people as cleanly classifiable into just two genders (male/female) and two orientations (straight/gay). The book begins by emphasizing the real-world stakes of this picture—how the gender binary is defended not only by conservatives but also, in some contexts, by “gender critical” feminists, and how those defenses show up in social practices and legislation. Against this background, Richardson proposes a different organizing framework: instead of asking which category someone belongs to, we should think of gender and sexual orientation more like “where you live” in a space—something that can be described coarsely (city/state) or very precisely (GPS coordinates), depending on the conversational purpose. The core metaphysical proposal is the “spatial theory.” On this view, we should distinguish gender itself from gender categories : gender is an underlying space of features, while categories like man , woman , and non-binary are socially recognized regions within that space; likewise for sexual orientation and sexual-orientation categories. Thinking spatially makes it straightforward to explain “in-between” and hard-to-classify cases: indeterminacy arises because people often use the same terms to organize overlapping regions, and scalar variation is fundamental—one can be a man (or gay/straight) to a greater or lesser degree, rather than only “all-or-nothing.” The book also uses this framework to explain why crisp definitions of gender/orientation categories are so elusive: categories are structured around prototypes (central examples) rather than necessary-and-sufficient conditions, and our difficulty in defining them is compared to the difficulty of verbally specifying an exact geometric shape. Building on the same model, Richardson argues that sexual orientation categories are constructed by communities organizing social life around certain regions of sexual-orientation space and “conferring” category-status by resemblance to prototypes; the result is that our standard labels can be much coarser than the underlying reality they’re trying to track. He also connects the metaphysics to language and politics: disputes like “Trans women are women” are treated as negotiations over which gender “perspectives” (bundles of norms) a community will coordinate on, so meaning-talk and social-world-making are tightly linked. In the concluding “Binary Abolition” discussion, the book rejects both (i) simply eliminating all categories and (ii) replacing binaries with hyper-granular “micro-categories,” recommending instead a positive project of spatial abolition : learning to think and talk in ways that reflect the underlying spaces, with more context-sensitive and purpose-sensitive ways of “locating” ourselves socially—just as we do when describing physical location. 3. Interview Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 00:42 - Overview of book 05:01 - Semantics vs. ontology 10:18 - Descriptive vs. prescriptive 14:50 - Gender binaries 20:47 - Biological binaries 25:07 - Gender norms 32:47 - Linguistic constraints 37:15 - Social accounts 47:07 - Haggling usage 53:07 - Spatial theory of gender 59:38 - Simplicity vs. informativeness 1:07:12 - Gender kinds 1:12:53 - Vagueness 1:23:14 - Abolitionism 1:27:15 - Social issues 1:34:47 - Making progress 1:41:01 - Value of philosophy 1:44:50 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

1. Guest Daniel Nicholson is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at George Mason University, and his work has focused on the philosophy of science, and in particular biology and life sciences. Check out his book with Cambridge Elements, "What is Life? Revisited"! https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/abs/what-is-life-revisited/E6B3EA136720CF50C9480ADB8F41A6F4 https://a.co/d/5aBcmau 2. Book Summary Daniel Nicholson’s What Is Life? Revisited reassesses Erwin Schrödinger’s famous 1944 book What Is Life?—a work that’s widely cited but, Nicholson argues, rarely engaged with carefully—and asks how well Schrödinger’s core ideas have held up. Nicholson reconstructs Schrödinger’s main argument, then evaluates it via two extended critiques (of the “order-from-order” and “order-from-disorder” principles), before turning to the book’s historical influence on molecular biology and (using archival sources) Schrödinger’s deeper motivations for writing it. On Nicholson’s reconstruction, Schrödinger’s central move is to contrast the statistical “order-from-disorder” explanations common in physics and chemistry with a distinctively biological “order-from-order” picture: biological regularities, he thinks, depend on microscopic structural order in hereditary material being amplified into macroscopic organismic order. He proposes that genes must be extraordinarily stable because they are solid-state structures—an “aperiodic crystal” whose nonrepetitive organization can encode a “meaningful design” rather than a simple periodic pattern. On this basis, Schrödinger treats the organism as a kind of “clockwork” mechanism and even suggests that biology may involve “other laws of physics” (not a rejection of physics, but new non-statistical principles suited to living matter). He also offers his influential thermodynamics discussion: organisms avoid equilibrium by importing free energy—his famous (if controversial) talk of feeding on “negative entropy.” Nicholson’s bottom line is that Schrödinger’s emphasis on rigidity, specificity, and a gene-centered “order-from-order” program powerfully shaped molecular biology’s self-image—helping to normalize an engineering-style, deterministic picture of the cell (e.g., “molecular machines,” wiring-diagram thinking, and circuit-like pathway depictions). But Nicholson argues that much of this inherited picture is increasingly in tension with experimental work that foregrounds stochasticity, dynamical flexibility, and non-classical self-organizing processes—pushing researchers toward more statistical (rather than purely mechanical) explanatory strategies. Finally, Nicholson contends that to understand Why Schrödinger framed biology this way, we should see What Is Life? as part of Schrödinger’s broader fight against the orthodox (Copenhagen) interpretation of quantum mechanics: his biological proposals were, in effect, entangled with an attempt to defend a more deterministic worldview and to oppose Bohr-inspired extensions of quantum indeterminacy into biology. The payoff of rereading Schrödinger now, Nicholson suggests, isn’t that the book is straightforwardly right, but that it clarifies how we arrived at our current image of the cell—and how that image may be due for revision. 3. Interview Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 00:32 - Background 03:26 - Why did he write it? 08:19 - Biological order 14:08 - Order from disorder 17:37 - Not applicable to life 20:27 - Hereditary substance 22:58 - Gene-centric view 31:35 - Entropy 39:12 - Negative entropy 41:24 - New laws 48:51 - Modern developments 51:26 - Determinism and free will 1:03:09 - Helpful aspects 1:04:42 - Lessons to learn 1:13:11 - Value of philosophy 1:20:20 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

What is error, and what is scientific error? Douglas Allchin explores the various types of scientific errors, how to identify them, and how to do science in light of them. My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy . 1. Author Douglas Allchin is an AAAS Fellow and Resident Fellow at the Minnesota Center for the Philosophy of Science, and his work has primarily focused on the history and philosophy of science. Check out his book, "Toward a Philosophy of Error in Science"! https://global.oup.com/academic/product/toward-a-philosophy-of-error-in-science-9780197827673 https://a.co/d/iobiDIc 2. Book Summary Douglas Allchin’s Toward a Philosophy of Error in Science argues that scientific error shouldn’t be treated as an embarrassing sideshow to “real” science, but as something integral to how science actually learns and progresses. Instead of assuming that good methods straightforwardly yield reliable knowledge, Allchin urges a systematic “philosophy of error” that tracks how a claim can be justified at one time and later become unjustified—i.e., how changes in evidence, framing, and reasoning can overturn what once looked reasonable. The book develops an “inventory” of error types across three layers of scientific justification. At the observational layer, errors can stem from material contamination, instrument problems, sampling and measurement misframing (like small samples, proxies, or confounders), and observer effects and biases. At the conceptual layer, mistakes arise in inference and interpretation—overgeneralization, faulty assumptions, confirmation bias, and culturally inflected biases, alongside a meta-risk Allchin calls “epistemic hubris” (the idea that these pitfalls only happen to other scientists). At the social layer, scientific discourse and institutions can also entrench errors (through weak vetting, communal biases, or distorted incentives), even though—ideally—organized skepticism and reciprocal criticism are supposed to help filter mistakes. Finally, Allchin focuses on how errors are actually found and remedied: they don’t “announce themselves,” and there’s no single ‘error-correction method’—correction can be slow, uneven, and sometimes driven by contingencies rather than a tidy mechanism. Against the comforting slogan that science is simply ‘self-correcting,’ he argues we should be more explicit about when and how peer review and replication succeed or fail, and then manage error more deliberately. A key payoff is rethinking what counts as epistemic progress: “negative knowledge” (learning what’s not the case, and why) is still genuine knowledge, and improving reliability often means actively probing for hidden sources of error rather than only accumulating confirming evidence. 3. Interview Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 00:56 - Overview of book 02:12 - Error09:08 - Uncertainty 11:42 - Epistemology 13:33 - Vagueness 17:38 - First layer of error: raw data 29:30 - Second layer of error: conceptual 50:25 - Third layer of error: social 1:10:46 - Recognizing error 1:22:34 - Resolving error 1:26:10 - Humans and history 1:29:18 - Useful biases 1:36:03 - Negative knowledge 1:41:49 - Pessimistic meta-induction 1:47:42 - Value of philosophy 1:50:23 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

What is discrimination, and what makes it wrongful? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy . 1. Author Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen is professor in political theory at University of Aarhus, Denmark. His work has focused primarily on applied and normative ethical issues.Check out his Cambridge Element, “Wrongful Discrimination”! https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/wrongful-discrimination/6E0371A0B8D60E14E657153706F6F3EChttps://a.co/d/fjqivMb 2. Book Summary Lippert-Rasmussen’s Wrongful Discrimination asks what “discrimination” is and, more importantly, what makes it wrongful when it is. He starts by distinguishing mere (generic) discrimination—just differentiating—from “group discrimination,” where people are treated differently because they’re seen as members of socially salient groups (race, gender, religion, etc.). He then maps key varieties of group discrimination (especially direct vs. indirect, plus structural patterns), and stresses that “wrongful” and “morally impermissible” can come apart: discrimination can wrong someone even in cases where (all things considered) an act might still be permissible, and vice versa. The core of the book is a critical survey of three leading families of explanations for wrongfulness: harm-based views, disrespect-based views, and views that tie wrongfulness to sustaining or expressing relations of social inequality (a “social equality”/relational-egalitarian approach). Lippert-Rasmussen argues that each can explain many paradigm cases of wrongful direct discrimination, but each runs into serious trouble once you press on hard cases—e.g., cases that look wrongful without straightforward harm, or cases where harms are present but don’t seem to generate a complaint in the right way. He then uses three especially important “non-paradigmatic” domains—indirect discrimination, implicit-bias discrimination, and algorithmic discrimination—to test these theories. The upshot is pessimistic about any single master explanation: these phenomena often don’t fit neatly under standard categories (prompting proposals like a third category beyond direct/indirect discrimination), and they expose systematic gaps in harm-, disrespect-, and social-equality accounts as usually formulated. Overall, he concludes that the prospects for a monistic theory of what makes discrimination wrongful are dim, and that we may need a more pluralistic (or significantly revised) framework. 3. Interview Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 00:43 - What is “discrimination”? 07:17 - Irrelevant features 10:48 - Framing the project 18:43 - Socially salient groups 23:44 - Connection with the law 26:49 - Empirical research 28:04 - Vagueness 33:12 - Political beliefs 35:07 - Direct and indirect discrimination 38:14 - Worry about indirect discrimination 43:35 - Statistical discrimination 46:24 - Different category? 48:41 - Structural discrimination 52:40 - Wrongful discrimination 55:09 - Rejoinder 1:03:02 - Harm-based accounts 1:06:53 - Respect-based accounts 1:11:11 - Intent 1:13:19 - Equality-based accounts 1:19:16 - Monistic accounts 1:23:05 - Value of philosophy 1:27:10 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

What is the mind, and how do we address the hard problem? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy . 1. Guest Joseph Mendola is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. His work covers a range of topics, including ethics, metaphysics, and mind. Check out his book, "The Neural Structure of Consciousness!" https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/neural-structure-of-consciousness/C7CDE1BEC7582CBE10F6875F56D5EBE0https://a.co/d/3xmkBMz 2. Book Summary Joseph Mendola’s The Neural Structure of Consciousness tackles the “hard problem” by asking how phenomenal features of experience (especially sensory qualia) relate to the physical features of the nervous system, aiming for a physicalist, internalist account that uses color experience as the central test case. The guiding idea is that the rich apparent structure of what we experience—e.g., the way colors stand in relations of similarity, opposition, and inclusion—can be explained by the real modal structure of the neurophysiology that makes those experiences possible: which neural states are available as alternatives, how they exclude or entail others, and how that “space of possibilities” is built into our visual system. Mendola frames this as a “MOUDD” approach: explaining sensory qualia by matching the modal structure of experience to the modal structure of the underlying neurophysiology, while treating many of the “properties” experience seems to present (like phenomenal colors “out there” on objects) as in significant respects illusory. A core commitment of the book is a version of the “whole nervous system” model: rather than locating consciousness in some sharply bounded neural correlate, Mendola argues (with qualifications) that the relevant nervous-system-wide organization bridging sensory receptors and action is what constitutes sensory phenomenality. In detail, he proposes that each particular quale (e.g., a specific red-at-a-location) is constituted by a distinct “modal filament” that links stimulation to action within a fixed background, where the filament is individuated modally (by how it can vary and what alternatives it rules in/out), not necessarily by a single spatial pathway or by representational “information content.” This framework is then used to make sense of introspection and the feel of experience without leaning on standard representationalist machinery, by stressing how actual neural states and their “real possibilities” can be dynamically relevant to what we do and say. The later chapters broaden the application: from color to other senses, then to the layered structure of visual space (including the way experience can attribute properties both to a “visual field” and to robust external objects), and finally to temporal experience, causal experience, and the sense of robust particularity. In discussing time, Mendola engages Husserl-style retentional structure (retention/primal impression/protention) and argues that any adequate view must respect the phenomenology of motion and temporal content in experience. The concluding material confronts familiar anti-physicalist challenges (the “explanatory gap,” bats, zombies, inverted spectra, and Mary) and responds in part by emphasizing differences in concepts and cognitive access: e.g., Mary’s “new knowledge” is cast as acquiring an experience-based concept and learning a coreference claim rather than learning an extra nonphysical fact. 3. Interview Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 00:54 - The hard problem 06:51 - Dualism 10:06 - Panpsychism 12:44 - Panpsychist rejoinders 15:28 - Modal structure 24:13 - Modal structure of neurophysiology 27:22 - Description-sensitivity 32:00 - Identity 34:52 - Type identity theory 36:27 - Boltzmann brains 39:17 - Correlations vs. identity 43:54 - Phenomenal concepts 45:56 - Zombies and inverts 50:07 - A priori reasoning 51:47 - Color experience 57:38 - Are colors real? 1:02:39 - Other senses 1:04:41 - Unity of consciousness 1:09:41 - Unconscious mental states 1:12:29 - Animal consciousness 1:15:48 - Vagueness 1:16:55 - Functionalism 1:20:48 - Artificial intelligence 1:21:28 - Paul Thagard's approach 1:25:51 - Progress 1:27:11 - Value of philosophy 1:28:32 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

What is deception, and can it occur without an intention to mislead, especially when the person being deceived is oneself? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy 1. Guest Vladimir Krstić is Assistant Professor at the United Arab Emirates University, and his work focuses on philosophy of mind, language, philosophy of deception. Check out his book with Cambridge Elements! https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/deception-and-selfdeception/F245F27D1A823DB21CC24B9C2D161C7A 2. Book Summary Vladimir Krstić argues that the main puzzles about self-deception come from starting with the wrong theory of interpersonal deception. Traditional “intentionalist” accounts say deception requires an intention to mislead; when that model is applied to self-deception, it generates classic paradoxes (roughly: you’d have to knowingly trick yourself). His alternative is a functional account: something counts as deceptive when its function is to mislead—so deception (including self-deception) may be intentional, but it needn’t be, and crucially it’s never merely accidental or a simple mistake. This functional framework is meant to unify human deception, self-deception, and biological deception under one analysis. On the self-deception side, he applies the same functional idea to explain familiar “motivated” cases (e.g., rationalizing away distressing evidence) without requiring intention to self-deceive, and he suggests a practical marker: self-deception often shows up as a motivated departure from one’s normal standards—being “not oneself.” He also argues against the idea that self-deception must be beneficial or adaptive; some forms can be neutral or even harmful, so it calls for case-by-case treatment. 3. Interview Chapters 00:00 – Introduction 00:50 – Overview of the book 11:09 – Intention 17:58 – Is deception always wrong? 29:25 – Functional account 36:29 – Function 43:08 – Sci-fi case 48:13 – Vagueness 53:45 – Objections 57:51 – Self-deception 1:02:15 – Function and self-deception 1:09:12 – Semantics 1:17:27 – Value of philosophy 1:24:33 – Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

If quantum mechanics forces us to rethink what a “measurement outcome” even is, can experiments still count as genuine evidence for any scientific theory? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy . 1. Guest Emily Adlam is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Chapman University and her work focuses on physics, especially quantum physics, and the philosophy of physics.Check out her book, "Saving Science from Quantum Mechanics: The Epistemology of the Measurement Problem"! https://global.oup.com/academic/product/saving-science-from-quantum-mechanics-9780197808856 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0197808859/ 2. Book Summary Emily Adlam’s Saving Science from Quantum Mechanics argues that the quantum ‘measurement problem’ isn’t just a puzzle about what exists (wavefunctions, worlds, collapses, etc.), but a threat to the epistemology of science—our right to treat experimental outcomes as evidence. She frames the central demand as a kind of “closing the circle”: a viable physical story of measurement should be coherent with the idea that measurement outcomes genuinely provide information about what’s measured. Against the background of ordinary assumptions about measurement (value-definiteness, veracity, unique outcomes, shareable records, reliable memory), quantum mechanics and results like contextuality make it hard to keep the whole intuitive package, which means some “solutions” risk making scientific knowledge fragile or even impossible. The book then evaluates leading families of responses to the measurement problem by asking whether they preserve empirical confirmation. For Everettian (many-worlds) approaches, Adlam emphasizes the “probability problem” as an epistemic problem: if we can’t explain why observed relative frequencies should confirm the theory, Everettian QM risks empirical incoherence—undermining the very evidence that would support it. She also examines “observer-relative” approaches (including perspectival/neo-Copenhagen, relational QM, and possibly QBism), characterized by universal unitary dynamics plus unique outcomes that are nevertheless relativized to observers; a key worry is that this picture strains the expectation that different observers can straightforwardly share and align records of outcomes. Stepping back, Adlam’s through-line is that you don’t get to quarantine these issues inside “interpretation”: changing our conception of measurement reshapes what counts as evidence for any scientific theory, since no theory is empirically confirmed without observation and measurement. She uses this lens to assess Bayesian/decision-theoretic moves and their limits for “sceptical” hypotheses like multiverses, where even the relevant priors may be ill-defined without a broader belief-revision story. And she presses that some stances—e.g. “intersubjective QBism” that severs the link between quantum states/probabilities and observed frequencies—would drain quantum mechanics of empirical content and thus of confirmation. 3. Interview Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 00:54 - The measurement problem 05:14 - Shut up and calculate 07:00 - Different senses of "measurement" 09:11 - Bootstrapping 10:18 - Relevance to scientific practice 13:18 - Quantum bayesianism 17:46 - Many worlds 20:05 - Recovering the Born rule 32:21 - Bohmian mechanics 36:09 - Probability 37:58 - All-at-once laws 42:54 - Anti-Humeanism 45:12 - Superdeterminism 48:56 - Naturalness 50:15 - Retrocausality 54:33 - Primitive ontology 57:51 - Fundamentality 1:01:41 - Consistent histories 1:04:38 - Saving quantum mechanics 1:07:25 - Making progress 1:08:38 - Value of philosophy 1:10:20 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe

What if the deepest question about “you” isn’t whether you’re the same person over time, but which future life it’s actually rational for you to anticipate and care about as your survival? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy . 1. Guest Trenton Merricks is Commonwealth Professor of Philosophy at the University of Virginia, and his work focuses primarily on metaphysics, but also religion, epistemology, language and mind. In this interview, we discuss his book, "Self and Identity". 2. Book Summary In Self and Identity, Trenton Merricks argues that a lot of debate about “personal identity” mixes together two different questions. The first is his What Question: what it is for a future person to have, at that future time, what matters in survival for you. His answer is that survival-relevance is constituted by what it’s appropriate for you to first-personally anticipate and to have future-directed self-interested concern about—where “appropriate” is a distinctive, non-evidential and non-moral norm. He also insists we shouldn’t conflate what matters in survival with what matters to you about the future in general (friends, projects, agency, etc.), since that conflation can distort arguments about survival. The second is his Why Question: what relation to a future conscious person explains why that future person will have what matters in survival for you. Merricks’s headline view is: identity is not what matters in survival, but identity delivers what matters in survival—i.e., numerical identity is (on his favored endurance picture) the right kind of explanation for why survival obtains. He then defends both the sufficiency and the necessity of personal identity for survival, targeting Parfit-style fission reasoning in particular and arguing that (depending on one’s metaphysics of persistence) Parfit’s argument can be blocked; he also rejects the idea that unbranching psychological connectedness/continuity is sufficient for personal identity (and so for what matters in survival). Chapters 4–6 then stress-test rival “psychological” answers to the Why Question—views that tie survival to having the same self (values/desires/projects), the same self-narrative, or forms of agential / narrative continuity—and Merricks argues these proposals mishandle cases of deep transformation (including being “turned” into someone evil in a way that seems bad for you without being merely like ceasing to exist). Finally, Chapter 7 applies the framework to personal immortality (“the hope of glory”): immortality is framed as there always being someone who will have what matters in survival for you, and Merricks uses his earlier claims to respond to familiar worries—e.g., that survival comes in degrees, or that immortality would inevitably be tedious. 3. Interview Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 00:44 - Self and Identity 04:25 - What and why questions 07:25 - Semantics 12:29 - Normative issues 13:29 - What matters in survival 18:36 - Numerical identity 21:04 - More conditions? 22:42 - The past 24:35 - Permanent comatose 30:49 - Memory wipe 36:05 - Psychological continuity 37:25 - Puzzles of identity 40:47 - Persistence and eternalism 46:43 - Relative identity 53:42 - Sci-fi cases 58:17 - Other views 1:00:24 - Non-reductionism 1:05:51 - Examples 1:10:55 - Vagueness 1:14:37 - Narrative accounts 1:18:32 - Christian theology 1:25:03 - A puzzle 1:27:32 - Value of philosophy 1:29:25 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe