Mark Hopwood

speaker

1,269 appearances 31 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2009 last heard Sep 2014

Mark Hopwood’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Elucidations · Episode 17: Brandon Fogel discusses mechanism and causation · 8 Nov 2010 podcast

So it's interesting to me that this resistance to the idea of action at a distance seems to be pretty stubborn. matched

Even if it gets quelled to a certain extent by the sheer power of some theory and what we can do with it, it pops back up later. matched

We keep on being worried about it. matched

Something that you said earlier that I guess might explain that, I'd like to go back to, which is this idea that you might worry that if we allow action at a distance, then we introduce real problems into the idea of giving explanations of things at all. matched

It looks like now matched

If we can have action at a distance, well who's to say that all of the phenomena that we see around us right now aren't being caused by something at some great distance where we're not aware of exactly what the connection is? matched

It begins to look like the very explanations we give are somewhat arbitrary and provisional. matched

So matched

Is that the right way to think about it, that that's the fundamental worry that keeps on cropping up in relation to action at a distance? matched

So one philosophical question that one might raise about all of this is the question of matched

Exactly what's going on when we do science and when we do philosophy. matched

One pretty intuitive view is to say that the world's out there, it is a certain way, and it kind of tells us how it is, or at least we go about discovering how it is. matched

And we just build up our knowledge of it. matched

We get better about it, we know more and more about it. matched

But it seems like one of the themes that's come up for us is this idea that matched

before we begin to work out how the world is, we need to have certain assumptions about how it must be, certain principles from which we start. matched

So it's not possible for something to come from nothing, there must always be a sufficient reason. matched

Maybe you could say something briefly about that. matched

Should the kind of stories that we've been talking about lead us to think that this picture of the world simply informing us about itself through the practice of science is naive? matched

Is it really always gonna be the case that we bring certain assumptions with us and those assumptions themselves can't be justified? matched

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