Philosophy of Film and Media

Where it sits

Under VI. Philosophy of X. Borders 5.2 Philosophy of art, 5.6 Art and morality, 4.2.3 Rhetoric, 6.16 Philosophy of technology.

The rival answers

Key figures

Connections

→ 5.2, 5.6 · ↔ 4.2.3, 6.16, 5.8, 3.3.4 · ◇ film realism, formalism, film as philosophy, medium theory · ○ Modern; Table 10 The Turn — Second Cases on Contested Nodes Every node marked △ carries a second case that pulls against the first. Not a counterargument — the cards already have those. A second case: the same question, different particulars, where a reader comfortable with their first answer finds it harder. The Turn — Second Cases on Contested Nodes 1.3.4 QUALIA The turn. Mary is not a scientist but a congenitally blind woman who has read everything about vision, and a treatment restores her sight at forty. Neurologists can tell you in advance, in detail, what she will and will not be able to do — she will struggle with faces and depth for months, and she will see colour immediately. Does she learn a new fact, or acquire a new ability? The original case makes the ability response look like evasion. This one makes it look obvious, because we have a well-documented account of exactly what changes. A reader whose intuition holds across both is on firmer ground than one whose intuition holds only in the room. 1.7 FREE WILL The second turn. Suppose a man commits a violent assault. Scans afterwards reveal a tumour pressing on his orbitofrontal cortex; it is removed; the behaviour stops entirely. Years later the behaviour returns, and so has the tumour. Suppose we excuse him. Now ask what made the difference: the tempting answer is we could see it. Every position on the bar has to say whether a cause we can point to is different in kind from one we cannot, and the thought experiment tests whether judgments of responsibility track the principle involved or merely the visibility of the causal pressure. 1.8 NATURAL THEOLOGY The turn. A man survives a plane crash that kills everyone else. He says it was providence. A statistician points out that someone had to be the survivor, and that the survivor is the one available to draw a conclusion. Most readers side with the statistician here and feel the pull of design in the cosmological case. The difference cannot be improbability, since both are improbable. It is that in the crash we know the reference class and in the cosmos we do not. Which is either the decisive objection to fine-tuning arguments or a reason to think the cases are genuinely unlike — and a reader should decide which, having felt both. 1.10 META-METAPHYSICS The turn. A patient is in a persistent vegetative state. The family asks whether he is still alive; the hospital asks whether he is still a person; the lawyer asks whether he is still a party to the contract. The same structure — when does a thing composed of parts cease to be that thing — and nobody finds it verbal. If the table case shows the dispute is about language, this one has to show the same, and almost no reader will accept that it does. Deflationism has to say why the two differ. Because one matters is not a metaphysical answer, and saying so is the sharpest way to feel the force of the realist position. 2.2.5 REVELATION The turn. A community holds a text to require something the surrounding society finds abhorrent, and the community's own scholars say the demonstration against it is not conclusive. The conflict rule now does no work, because it only operates where a matter is demonstrated. Ibn Rushd and Maimonides both saw this and both accepted the consequence: on undemonstrated matters the literal reading stands. That is the position at its strongest and its most uncomfortable, and a card that gives only the accommodating case has not shown the reader what the rule commits them to. 3.3.1 BIOETHICS The turn. Two cases, and a reader should sit with whichever is harder for them. For the reader the violinist persuaded. A couple learn at thirty weeks that their child will be born deaf. They want a termination. Almost everyone's intuition shifts here, and the honest question is what shifted it — gestational age, the reason given, or a view about which lives are worth living that they did not know they held. All three are available and they lead in different directions. For the reader the violinist did not persuade. A woman's pregnancy will, with certainty, kill her. The foetus will not survive her death. Nobody is saved by refusing. Most people who hold that the right to life is decisive still permit this, which means they already hold that some consideration can outweigh it. The question is which, and whether the principle that licenses it stops where they want it to stop. The Turn — Second Cases on Contested Nodes Both turns do the same thing: they show that almost nobody holds a pure version of the position they identify with. That is not an argument for any view. It is the reason this node carries △. 3.3.5 WAR The turn. A bomber pilot is ordered to destroy a munitions factory. The strike is proportionate, discriminate in intent, and will kill roughly two hundred civilians in adjacent housing as a foreseen but unintended consequence. The munitions will otherwise kill several thousand soldiers. Double effect permits it. Anscombe, who developed the modern account of double effect, thought this kind of reasoning had been used to license almost anything — and she opposed Oxford's honorary degree for Truman over precisely this, at real cost to herself. So here is the hard part: the doctrine and its most rigorous modern defender come apart on the case. Either the criteria are being misapplied, or a criterion that permits this was never as constraining as it looked. Just-war theory is sometimes presented as a licence and sometimes as a constraint. Vitoria used it against his own crown's conquest, at 6.4. Anscombe used it against her own country's ally. It functions as a constraint only when someone is willing to apply it against their own side, which is a fact about its users rather than about the theory. 4.4 NON-CLASSICAL LOGICS The turn. A legal threshold: a person is a child until their eighteenth birthday, and an adult from that moment. Nobody thinks a person is 0.6 adult at 17 years and 7 months. The law draws a sharp line through a vague phenomenon on purpose, and everyone understands why. So the question is not whether vagueness is real. It is whether our concepts are vague or only our evidence — and whether a sharp line drawn for a reason is a distortion or the correct treatment. Epistemicism looks absurd in the heap case and sensible in this one, which is worth noticing before choosing. 6.4 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY The turn. A stateless person spends eleven years in a camp. No jurisdiction claims them; no authority binds them; nobody's laws apply. Every account of legitimacy on the bar is satisfied — they consented to nothing and nothing was imposed. Almost nobody thinks this is freedom. Which suggests that the question what makes authority legitimate is not the only question, and possibly not the most urgent one: being subject to no authority turns out to be worse than being subject to an imperfectly justified one. That is not an argument for any position on the bar. It is a reason to notice the bar was built around one worry. 6.4.1 DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE The turn. A woman inherits a fortune built three generations ago through expropriation that was legal at the time and is now universally condemned. Every transfer since has been voluntary and untainted. Nozick's entitlement theory says holdings are just if they arose through just acquisition and just transfer. Here the transfers are clean and the acquisition was not. He acknowledged that a theory of rectification was required and never supplied one. So the reader who found Chamberlain persuasive now has to say what rectification looks like — and any answer will impose a pattern, which was the thing the argument was against. Meanwhile the reader who found Chamberlain unpersuasive has to explain why the basketball player's earnings differ from the inheritance, if provenance does no work at all. 6.17 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE The turn. A woman has a progressive neurological condition. Over twenty years her neurons are replaced, one at a time, by functionally identical silicon units. Each replacement preserves every input-output relation exactly. At no point does her behaviour change, and at no point does she report anything different. At what point did she stop understanding? If the answer is never, functionalism holds and the Chinese Room has to be wrong about something. If the answer is gradually, there was a period when she was half-conscious and could not tell. If the answer is at some particular neuron, say which. Searle's intuition is strong in the room and weak here, and Chalmers built the fading-qualia argument on exactly that asymmetry. The Turn — Second Cases on Contested Nodes 6.29 GENDER The turn. A sports federation must write an eligibility rule. It could use chromosomes, hormone levels, developmental history, legal status, or self-identification. Each criterion produces a different set, each excludes someone the others include, and the federation must choose one. Someone holding the biological analysis and someone holding the identity-based analysis can agree on this rule, for different reasons, and two people sharing an analysis can disagree about it sharply. The metaphysics underdetermines the policy. That is worth knowing before assuming that an opponent on policy holds a particular metaphysics, or that agreement on metaphysics settles a policy. It usually does neither. 6.30 RACE The turn. A public health service is deciding whether to record race in patient records. Against recording: the categories have no biological basis, recording them risks reintroducing discredited assumptions into clinical reasoning, and a doctor who sees a racial label may reason from it in ways that harm. For recording: documented disparities in outcome exist, they cannot be measured without the category, and a service that stops recording loses the only instrument that shows the disparity. Both arguments are made by people committed to racial justice. Appiah's eliminativism supports the first; Haslanger's constructionism supports the second — and neither follows from the metaphysics alone, because the question is what a category is for in a particular institution. This is the clearest case in the book where a metaphysical dispute has direct practical stakes and the practical answer does not follow from the metaphysical one. A reader who wanted the metaphysics settled in order to settle the policy will find that it does not work, and that is the most useful thing this node can tell them. Spectrum 1.1 — What Kinds of Thing Exist Spectrum 1.1 — What Kinds of Thing Exist 1 · Node answered 1.1 Ontology. What is there? 2 · The axis How many kinds of stuff does your inventory need? One useful way to read the dispute is as an inventory question. Some positions pursue ontological parsimony; others accept a larger inventory because they regard the distinctions as irreducible. That is the variable. Not "how materialist are you" — which begs the question by making one end the default — but how many irreducible kinds you are forced to admit. Read this way the bar has a principled order, and the two ends are not opposites but the two ways of getting the list down to one. 3 · The bar Position Kinds admitted The one kind is Materialism 1 Physical Neutral monism 1 Neither mental nor physical Idealism 1 Mental Panpsychism 1, with two aspects Physical, with experience built in Property dualism 1 substance, 2 property kinds Physical, bearing non-physical properties Substance dualism 2 Mind and matter, irreducibly Pluralism Several No privileged reduction Note what this ordering reveals: materialism and idealism are neighbours, not opposites. Both are monisms. They differ over which single kind the list contains, and they share an opponent — anyone who says one kind will not do. 4 · The price of each move Move What you buy What you pay Toward one kind Parsimony; no unexplained relations between kinds Something has to be explained away — experience, or the external world Toward two kinds Both mind and matter taken at face value Elisabeth's question at 1.3.1: how do they interact Neutral monism Avoids privileging either Owes an account of the neutral stuff nobody has supplied Panpsychism No emergence problem for consciousness The combination problem: how small experiences make one The general shape: parsimony is bought with explanatory debt, and the debt falls at a different place for each position. Nobody escapes paying. Spectrum 1.1.2 — Universals and Particula… 5 · Off-axis. ◈ Entry Why it does not sit on the bar Dependent origination (Nagarjuna) Does not answer how many kinds; denies that anything has the independent existence the question presupposes Wujud metaphysics (Ibn Arabi) Reframes existence as one reality with degrees of manifestation, not a count of kinds The Nagarjuna entry matters for the whole spread. Asking how many kinds of thing exist assumes things have own-being — that they are what they are independently. Madhyamaka denies exactly that, so it is not a seventh position on the bar but a rejection of the bar's presupposition. 6 · Where the field sits Physicalism of some form is the majority position among professional philosophers, with property dualism the largest minority and panpsychism having grown from a fringe view to a seriously defended one over the past two decades. That is a report on a distribution, not an argument. Spectrum 1.1.2 — Universals and Particulars 1 · Node answered 1.1.2. Does redness exist, or only red things? 2 · The axis How much of the sharing is out there, and how much is in the sorting? Two things need explaining and every position trades one against the other. A tomato and a fire engine really do go together in a way a tomato and the number seven do not — that needs grounding. And whatever grounds it must not be so extravagant that you end up with an entity called redness floating outside space. The bar runs from putting everything in the world to putting everything in the sorter. 3 · The bar Position What grounds the sharing Where it lives Platonic realism A universal, existing independently Outside space and time Aristotelian realism A universal, wholly present in each instance In the things Trope theory Exactly resembling particular properties In the things, one per thing Conceptualism A concept In minds Resemblance nominalism Primitive resemblance relations Between the things Predicate nominalism Our applying the same word In the language Apoha (exclusion nominalism) No real universal is shared; classification works by excluding what does not fall under the term In the sorting, as exclusion 4 · The price of each move Move What you buy What you pay Toward realism A clean explanation of why the grouping is not arbitrary An entity that is wholly present in many places at once, which is strange Toward nominalism A lean inventory with no odd entities Owing an account of why our groupings work; "they just resemble" looks like a restatement Trope theory Keeps properties particular, avoiding multi-location Needs primitive exact resemblance, which realists say is the universal readmitted Conceptualism Locates the sharing where sorting happens Implies nothing was shared before minds, which most reject The structural point: realism explains the grouping and pays in ontology; nominalism saves ontology and pays in explanation. Every position on this bar is a different settlement of that one trade. Spectrum 1.1.1 — Things or Processes 5 · Off-axis None. Apoha belongs on the nominalist side of the bar because it denies real universals. What makes it distinctive is the mechanism: a term classifies particulars not by referring to a shared positive property, but by excluding what is other. 6 · Where the field sits Nominalism of some variety has been the default in analytic philosophy since Quine, with trope theory and Aristotelian realism both actively defended. Platonic realism retains a following, largely driven by 6.9's difficulty with mathematical objects. Spectrum 1.1.1 — Things or Processes 1 · Node answered 1.1.1 Substance theory. Is a river a thing or an event? 2 · The axis How much stability does your basic furniture have? Every position grants that the world contains both persistence and change. They differ over which is fundamental and which is derived — whether change is something that happens to stable things, or stability is a slow pattern in change. 3 · The bar

→ narrower questions · ↔ questions it borders · ◇ the positions, mapped in Part III of the book · ○ the eras and comparison tables (Parts IV and V)

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