Transcript from the Video above:
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[
Kane B] I'm a
constructivist about all objects
I would say that hands tables chairs planets and so on these objects
exist only relative to particular perspectives and
they exist in virtue of the fact that we are kind of arbitrarily drawing lines and drawing boundaries in particular ways
we make concrete objects up
how this applies to abstract objects is I would say
just as we can construct concrete objects we can similarly construct abstract objects
to explain this in a bit more detail
the first thing to say is that
concrete objects are really weird they're really bizarre there's
all sorts of philosophical problems that that can be pushed against the existence of concrete objects
- The problems of vagueness
the problem of The Many
under what circumstances two objects compose a further object
causal problem with concrete objects
for example there are
problems of vagueness
if I take a hand
the hand has certain boundaries and
then I can say like this this is there's like an atom here that is part of the hand
then there's an atom here that's part of the arm not part of the hand
but then where exactly is the line between hand arm
there's going to be some sort of Point as you as you kind of move up where it's just not at all clear whether or not something whether or not there's an atom counts as being part of the hand
similarly you can consider at what point if you were to make changes to a hand
we can imagine like altering a hand atom by atom
imagine like a series of objects where you start with this hand then you alter it atom by atom until you end up with a scrambled egg and
then the question is like again Where's the Line like when does it stop being a hand
where in that sort of series of changes do we go from this is a hand to this is not a hand
this is problem of vagueness
another problem is
the problem of The Many
the problem with the many is if you take my hand we say that if we say that there's a hand here then there's going to be some set of atoms that is identical with that hand
I mean presumably like the reason why there's a hand here is because there's a set of atoms or I don't know other parts or whatever that that make up this hand
but there's going to be trillions of other sets of atoms that differ minutely from that initial set of atoms and those trillions of other sets of atoms seem to have like perfectly equal legitimate claims to being hands
if you take the set of atoms that constitute this hand then you take one atom away what you end up with is a set of atoms that has a totally legitimate claim to being a hand I mean that set of atoms is is there right
there's basically trillions of sets of atoms that all have perfectly legitimate claim to being a hand
we seem to end up with this conclusion that if there's a hand here then there's actually trillion of hands here that’s a bit strange
there are philosophical problems about under what circumstances two objects compose a further object
like do the objects need to be in contact are they actually need to have physical contact with each other is it enough for there to be some sort of other type of influence or maybe there's some sort of functional role that the two parts play and that's what makes them a further object
there's actually even
a causal problem with concrete objects because a lot of the ordinary objects of perception like hands you might argue are causally redundant because whatever like if I say I'm perceiving a hand then I give some sort of causal model for this it's not quite true to say that light hits the hand then bounces off the hand hits my eyes right
I mean what's happening strictly speaking at least on the standard physicalist model is you have photons that are interacting with atoms just on the surface of the hand then that's bouncing off in it the point is that any kind of anything that you claim any kind of causal claim that's made about what this hand is doing it seems that that's preempted by the causal powers of the atoms that compose the hand
actually the hand itself just doesn't have any causal role it's causally redundant
these are just some of the philosophical problems that that arise when we start thinking about concrete objects
cont...