
Elucidations
Matt Teichman
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Top 10 Elucidations Episodes
Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best Elucidations episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to Elucidations for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite Elucidations episode by adding your comments to the episode page.

08/16/20 • 41 min
One of the foundational ideas behind philosophical logic is that when you say something, that has further implications beyond the single thing you said. Like, if I think ‘every single frog is green’ and ‘Fran is a frog’, then I am committed to thinking that Fran is green. I don't have to have actually thought to myself or said out loud that Fran is green—I'm just required to believe that Fran is green, given that I thought the first two things, and if I fail to believe that, I've made some kind of mistake. Like I haven't thought through all the consequences of my beliefs.
Modal logic studies how we reason about obligation and permission. For example, f I think that Bob is obligated to visit his parents for the holidays, it follows from that that he isn't permitted not to visit his parents for the holidays. (The term for this in philosophical logic is that obligation and permission are duals.) There are lots of inference patterns that pop up, some of them familiar and some of them surprising, the moment you start thinking about how the notions of ‘obligated to’ or ‘permitted to’ interact with notions like ‘if/then’ or ‘and’.
Free choice permission is a funny case where it feels like out in the wild, you would have to draw a certain conclusion from something you said, but our best formal, mathematical theory of obligation and permission tells us that you aren't allowed to draw that conclusion. So although the theory gets most other things impressively right, it seems to get this one thing wrong.
Here's the example. Imagine you're a customer at a cafe and a waiter says to you, ‘Since you ordered our prix fixe lunch menu option, you may have coffee or tea’. Translated into the terminology of obligation and permission, we could think of what the waiter said as ‘it is permissible for you to have either coffee or tea’. And there seems to be no way the waiter could think that and not thereby also be committed to thinking it is permissible for you to have coffee. If you're allowed to have either coffee or tea, then surely you're thereby allowed to have coffee. Right?
The problem is that the best available formal mathematization of how reasoning about obligation and permission works (believe it or not, this is given the humorous-sounding name normal modal logic) predicts that you are not allowed to draw that conclusion. So since it seems obvious that any rational person would draw that conclusion, but our theory predicts that you aren't allowed to draw it, that means the theory has a problem. The trouble is that revising the theory so as to correctly make that prediction is quite technically difficult, because most of the obvious things you might do to have it make that prediction have the side effect of breaking other aspects of it that work well.
In this episode, Melissa Fusco sketches out a highly original and ambitious approach to the puzzle, using a more sophisticated framework called two-dimensional modal logic. Two-dimensional modal logic is based on a subtle but interesting distinction between a statement that's automatically true the moment you start thinking about it, and a statement that is necessarily true, no matter what. It may sound a bit counterintuitive, but just wait till you hear the examples that Fusco gives! Trust me—her idea about how you can use that distinction to explain what's happening in the waiter example is super cool.
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02/10/16 • 31 min
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10/12/16 • 30 min
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01/21/23 • 39 min
This episode, Matt and Joseph sit down with Andrew Sepielli (University of Toronto) to talk about metaethical quietism. His new book on the topic, Pragmatist Quietism, is out now from Oxford University Press. Click here to listen to episode 145 of Elucidations.
Metaethical quietism is the view that ethical statements—or anyway, a large portion of the ethical statements we’re usually interested in—can’t be justified or disproved by statements from outside of ethics. There’s something autonomous about the topic of ethics (or rather, about a lot of ethics). Consider the question: in the scenario where a trolley is barreling down the track, on its way to clobber five people, and you have the ability to divert it to the other track where it will only clobber one, should you do so? According to quietists such as our guest, you can’t answer this question by asking metaphysicians or logicians for help. It won’t do to investigate whether moral facts are part of the furniture of the universe, or to study the grammar of words like ought. The only way you can answer a question like that is, well, whatever we usually do to answer ethical questions.
Why are philosophers often tempted to think we can turn to metaphysics, logic, or the philosophy of language to help answer ethical questions? Andrew Sepielli thinks it’s because we conflate two different kinds of ethical statements: the statements he calls deep and the statements he calls superficial. A deep statement is one such that, if you believe it, that belief can impact your mental picture of how things are laid out in the world and guide your action. The fancy word for this mental picture of how the world is laid out is non-conceptual representation. A superficial statement is one belief in which does not influence your non-conpceptual representation of the world. The questions that moral philosophers often write about—such as whether one should divert the trolley, or whether utilitarianism is true—are superficial, which is part of why you can only answer them from within ethics. But there are also deep moral questions, such as: will the party we’re thinking of going to be attended by a bunch of jackasses? When you ask that question, you’re deploying moral language—jackass, specifically, so it is definitely a moral question—but you’re also trying to find out which individuals are going to be at the party. And which individuals happen to be at the party is part of the information in your non-conceptual mental map.
In this episode, Sepielli argues that keeping track of when we’re having a superficial debate vs. when we’re having a deep debate can make it seem less mysterious how ethics could be its own autonomous area of inquiry. Tune in to see why he thinks this is the case!
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Episode 133: Aristotle discusses his philosophy
Elucidations
04/04/21 • 45 min
This month, Agnes Callard and I talk to Aristotle about his philosophy, including his work on physics, biology, and ethics. Featuring an introduction by our awesome intern, Noadia Steinmetz-Silber! Click here to download Episode 133 of Elucidations.
Not everyone is familiar with Aristotle’s work today, but the case could be made that science, political theory, logic, ethics, and philosophy exist in their current form largely due to the precedent he set. That said, in this episode, Aristotle opens by telling us a little about how the foundational assumptions made by a number of today’s scientists and philosophers differ from his. One distinctive feature of his work—both as compared to today’s intellectuals and as compared to his peers in 4th century B.C. Athens—was how his philosophy was meant to accommodate the possibility of different types of phenomena requiring totally different types of theoretical explanation.
Today, this is reflected in the fact that we have different departments for different sciences in universities. Like, we don’t have a ‘science’ department. We have a physics department that aims to explain the behavior of physical matter and energy, a biology department that aims to explain the behavior of living organisms, a chemistry department that aims to explain the behavior of chemical compounds, a psychology department that aims to explain the behavior of minds, an economics department that aims to explain the behavior of markets, and so on. Could all of these things be reduced to one fundamental science? Maybe, maybe not. It’s possible that there’s a way of, for example, reducing all of biology to physics, but if there is, we haven’t figured it out yet. Aristotle’s main thought here is that that’s fine. If we have to have separate scientific fields for physical matter and biological organisms, that isn’t necessarily a failure on the part of the hard sciences—it could just be that different types of entities in the world need different types of explanations.
Aristotle then observes that if you’re okay with the idea that there could be different types of phenomena that need to be explained in different ways, that goes along with believing that things can be created and destroyed. How come? Well, at the level of common sense, you and I would say that when a dog is born, the universe now has a new thing in it: this dog. But if you’re one of these ‘nothing exists other than fundamental physical particles’ people, you think that nothing is ever created or destroyed. It’s just that the atoms—or maybe the quarks and leptons—are just rearranging themselves, and the nickname we give that at the macroscopic level is that ‘a dog came into existence’. One of the main tasks that Aristotle set for himself was explaining how it makes sense to take talk of things being created and destroyed literally, at face value.
Join us as we discuss the ancient Greek perspective on causality, matter, biology, physics, and whether or not people have a purpose!
Matt Teichman
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Episode 114: Sally Haslanger discusses ideology
Elucidations
05/14/19 • 40 min
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10/13/18 • 47 min
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01/27/19 • 41 min
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Episode 108: Mariam Thalos discusses freedom
Elucidations
09/15/18 • 36 min
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03/30/23 • 39 min
In this episode, Matt sits down with Gaurav Vankataraman (Trisk Bio) to talk about how human memory is physically realized.
Where do your memories live? In the brain, right? They’re, like, imprinted there somehow? We often think of memories as analogous with recordings, like when you do an audio recording and the air vibrations get translated into an electrical signal which reorients the magnetic particles on some tape. But is that really how it works? Is the brain some tape waiting to get recorded to, or a hard drive waiting to get data written to it? We don’t exactly have definitive answers to those questions, but in this episode, our distinguished guest discusses a line of research into whether memories could be stored outside the brain, in RNA. He then notes that there is also a lot of RNA in the human brain itself, which means that a similar mechanism for storing memories could exist there as well.
This research, as it turns out, originated in some rather astonishing scientific work from the 1950s involving planarian flatworms. Planarian flatworms have the extraordinary ability to regenerate: if you cut one in half, each of the two halves can actually grow back into a new worm. At that time, there was some preliminary evidence to suggest that if a planarian flatworm learned something, and you cut it in half, when the half that didn’t have a brain grew back, it still retained what the original worm had learned. What the what? It could remember something even though it had a brand new brain? Those initial studies went through a period of being discredited, but in recent years a number of researchers have been exploring new, more rigorous evidence that something of this nature could be going on. Perhaps the flatworms could actually be storing some of their memories in their RNA or DNA, and perhaps RNA has the ability to preserve some of that information both in and outside of the brain.
In this episode, Gaurav Venkataraman argues that the RNA in the brain not responsible for making proteins (called non-coding RNA) has a specific type of mathematical structure that is particularly well-suited for transmitting information both fast and accurately. Not only that, but entities with that kind of structure transmit information more accurately the faster they transmit it. So the fact that RNA in the brain is structurally arranged in the way it is actually makes it a viable candidate for being sort of like the brain’s “software” for storing and manipulating memories.
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FAQ
How many episodes does Elucidations have?
Elucidations currently has 150 episodes available.
What topics does Elucidations cover?
The podcast is about Society & Culture, Metaphysics, Podcasts, Chicago, Philosophy, Interviews and Ethics.
What is the most popular episode on Elucidations?
The episode title 'Episode 128: Melissa Fusco discusses free choice permission' is the most popular.
What is the average episode length on Elucidations?
The average episode length on Elucidations is 38 minutes.
How often are episodes of Elucidations released?
Episodes of Elucidations are typically released every 32 days, 10 hours.
When was the first episode of Elucidations?
The first episode of Elucidations was released on Jul 6, 2009.
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