Metaphysics is Boring When You Know the Answers

[gusl]

"Metaphysics is Boring When You Know the Answers", via MR:

While I sympathize with this, I don't agree with everything he said:

Modal statements about fundamental kinds (”gold might have had a different atomic weight”) may be grammatical but are not meaningful.

I'm not sure what he means by "fundamental kind", but counterfactuals like the above example can say a lot about the speaker's beliefs about causal relationships, or in this case about our universe's parameter settings.

I'm now thinking that what he meant was "atomic number", since that is what defines a gold atom.

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What is the meaning of the word "pace", as in "pace Lewis"?

Comments

[bhudson.livejournal.com]

Atomic weight makes as much sense as atomic number in that setting: the former refers to the number of nucleon (protons + neutrons) of the common isotope (unless another isotope is mentioned), whereas the latter is just the number of protons.

"Pace" normally means "dead" (from the latin peace, as in "rest in").

[spoonless.livejournal.com]

I think gustavolacerda's point is that if the number of protons were different, it wouldn't be Gold, whereas if the number of neutrons were different, it still would be. So the two statements are quite different.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

Yes, exactly.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

"Pace Person" is sometimes used in academic writing.

I found one dictionary that says: "by permission of".

[easwaran.livejournal.com]

The way I've normally seen it used in philosophical writing is basically as a synonym of "contra", so "X is true, pace Lewis", means something like "X is true, regardless of whatever silly things Lewis might have tried to say to convince you that it was false".

[bhudson.livejournal.com]

OED concurs: "With due deference to (a named person or authority); despite."

I'm totally off my rocker, apparently.

[bhudson.livejournal.com]

For those who don't have an OED by their computerside: derives from "pace tanti viri dixerim" (roughly translates as "peace, great man, but let me say...")