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Physics Avoidance
Physics Avoidance
Essays in Conceptual Strategy

MARK WILSON

1
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/9/2017, SPi

3
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 To Winston and Kathleen

The rich profusion thee confounds, my love,

Of flowers, spread athwart the garden. Aye,
Name upon name assails thy ears, and each
More barbarous-sounding than the one before—
Like unto each the form, yet none alike;
And so the choir hints a secret law,
A sacred mystery. Ah, love could I vouchsafe
In sweet felicity a simple answer!
Gaze on them as they grow, see how the plant
Burgeons by stages into flower and fruit,
Bursts from the seed so soon as fertile earth
Sends it to life from her sweet bosom, and
Commends the unfolding of the delicate leaf
To the sacred goad of ever-moving light!
Goethe, “The Metamorphosis of Plants”1

1
Rudolf Magnus, Goethe as a Scientist, Heinz Norden, trans. (New York: Henry Shuman, 1949), p. 55–6.
 SUMM ARY CONTENTS

1. PRAGMATICS’ PLACE AT THE TABLE 1

2. PHYSICS AVOIDANCE 51

3. FROM THE BENDING OF BEAMS TO THE PROBLEM

OF FREE WILL 99

4. TWO CHEERS FOR ANTI-ATOMISM 136

5. THE GREEDINESS OF SCALES 201

6. BELIEVERS IN THE LAND OF GLORY 241

7. IS THERE LIFE IN POSSIBLE WORLDS? 287

8. SEMANTIC MIMICRY 324

9. A SECOND PILGRIM’S PROGRESS 362

 C O N T E NTS

Preface and Acknowledgments xi

1. PRAGMATICS’ PLACE AT THE TABLE 1

Appendix 1: The “Worlds” of Science and Common Sense 40
Appendix 2: Investigative Moods and Logical Reasoning 46

2. PHYSICS AVOIDANCE 51
Appendix 1: Initial/Boundary Condition Mimics 90
Appendix 2: Constraints and the Physics of Mechanism 94

3. FROM THE BENDING OF BEAMS TO THE PROBLEM OF FREE WILL 99

Appendix: The Problem of the Physical Infinitesimal 130

4. TWO CHEERS FOR ANTI-ATOMISM 136

Appendix: Hertz’s Challenge and the Underdetermination of Theory 196

5. THE GREEDINESS OF SCALES 201

6. BELIEVERS IN THE LAND OF GLORY 241

Appendix: The Origins of Conceptual Clashes I: Pressure 281

7. IS THERE LIFE IN POSSIBLE WORLDS? 287

Appendix: The Origins of Conceptual Clashes II: Force 320

8. SEMANTIC MIMICRY 324

9. A SECOND PILGRIM’S PROGRESS 362

Index Topic 423

Index Author 425
 PREFACE A ND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Despite its title, this book does not “avoid physics” in the sense of ignoring the topic
altogether. Rather it concerns itself with various stratagems for evading lengthy and
unreliable patterns of inference that we might otherwise confront in science. Here is our
basic prototype of “avoidance.” Wobbly Jack and Jill are perched on the top of their
proverbial hill, from which they will soon tumble. Where are they likely to land? In
theory, we might painfully calculate their downward trajectories bump by bump until
we reach a final landing place, but doing so requires an accurate assessment of hillside
topography, the elastic coefficients
pertinent to children, etc., as well
as a formidable computer. Such
reasoning pathways are notori-
ously prone to error, and great
care needs to be taken to insure
that one of our children will not
become launched into computa-
tional interstellar space through a
round-off error when they hit a
rock. In contrast, consider the pol-
icy of looking for the lowest points
of ground at the foot of the hill;
avoiding physics that is where they will both even-
tually tumble, we can assuredly decide. Although we cannot fully augur at which of
these lowest points they will be found, the predictions we can otherwise obtain through
avoidance reasoning are extremely reliable and easy to obtain. In the standard jargon of
applied mathematics, we have eschewed calculation of an evolutionary development
(their detailed but hard to compute trajectories down the hill) in favor of an estimation
of eventual equilibrium position (the locations where they can remain stationary). The
character of the reasoning employed differs considerably between the two cases, and I’ll
say that these two modes exemplify different forms of explanatory architecture.
In these contexts, the phrase physics avoidance signals the exploitation of a strategic
opportunity that allows us to resolve important physical questions in a practical manner.
My central purpose is to alert readers to the characteristic symptomatology of some of
these distinctive reasoning patterns.
Contemporary philosophical thinking blurs many of these architectural ingredients
together, wrapping distinct edifices within a poorly diagnosed envelope that I call Theory
T thinking (in tribute to the numerous T’s and T’’s that populate these abstracted
discussions). As a result, substantially different forms of explanatory motif get stuffed
xii Preface and Acknowledgments

into inadequate pigeon holes, producing considerable con-

fusion in the aftermath.1 In doing so, we lose sight of the
granular detail required to understand how practical sci-
ence strategically adapts itself to fresh tasks. Many of
the telltale symptoms of distinct reasoning architectures
are already familiar to applied mathematicians, and I hope
to introduce their discriminations to a wider audience in
this book.
As such, this is largely a work within the philosophy of
science, with a special emphasis on how various pieces of
mathematical apparatus should be fitted together in cap-
turing a worldly behavior effectively (“harmonize” is a
word I will frequently utilize to this purpose). But the
chief ambition of these essays is not to persuade other
avoiding intractable reasoning philosophers that they should imitate the narrow veins of
science-based inquiry I pursue, but to free them from the shackles of pseudo-scientific
folklore that hamper their own explorations across the far-extended territories of
philosophy. Contemporary writers have come to believe that they must claim to “follow
the scientific method” in their deliberations, even when they pursue projects that seem
suspiciously a priori. I don’t approve of their armchair apriorism, but the methodological
apologetics aren’t necessary either, for they stem from misrepresentations of working
science. In a related vein, the sweeping portrait of “theory” ingrained within conven-
tional Theory T thinking has discouraged direct study of the subtle explanatory land-
scapes that characterize both practical science and our everyday modes of description, to
such an extent that the worthiest insights of the great diagnosticians of twentieth-century
philosophy (J. L. Austin and the later Wittgenstein) are commonly dismissed as unsys-
tematic and lacking in rigor. “They haven’t supplied a proper theory,” the complaint
runs. In truth, a legitimate demand for “theory” amounts to nothing more than “tell me
something helpful.” However, it is true that that the precautions ingrained within that
canny hodgepodge of folk wisdom that we call “common sense thinking” often
resemble—and anticipate—the formalized reasoning architectures encountered within
the cleverest forms of scientific physics avoidance. Our appreciation of the cultivated
subtleties of common sense thinking can be increased, I think, from a recognition of the
fact that many varieties of well- documented scientific strategy operate along rather
similar lines. I will be therefore pleased if these ruminations encourage other writers to
directly cultivate the descriptive policies that underpin our everyday modes of practical
discourse, without any need to examine strings, rubber bands, and seesaws in the detail
provided here.
At the present moment, however, any effective deflation of pseudo-scientific meth-
odology must probably begin on the Theory T side of the ledger, because that’s where

1
Insofar as I can determine, these same T-laden propensities have been perpetuated within the sinews of possible
world thinking, as championed by the late David Lewis. See Essay 6 for more on this theme.
 Preface and Acknowledgments xiii

the restrictive tenets of which I complain obtain their ersatz credentials. Sometimes the
best way to combat pseudo-scientific prejudice is simply to evoke concrete scientific fact.
That, essentially, is my project in these essays. Unfortunately, the practices that most
effectively reveal the deficiencies of Theory T thinking are subtle in their internal
contours, and the sledding within some of these essays may sometimes get a bit
bumpy. Some of these expository jolts merely reflect poor writing on my part, but
other intricacies appear simply because nature has made it so—the paths of reasoning it
tolerates with respect to our physical surroundings are crooked and cannot be made
straight. Indeed, a significant part of my narrative task lies in explaining why easy things
often rely upon tricky rationales. Without qualms, baffled readers should skim lightly
over any turgid passages that impede their advance, for I think that my central morals
can be adequately grasped without mastering every kink in every example that I present.
A recurring thread running throughout the book is the necessity of approaching
conceptual innovation in a manner that is biologically plausible and computationally
feasible. We are, after all, creatures of relatively small brain, and the physical world casts
descriptive opportunities our way that are varied in strategic character with little regard
for our inferential limitations. Often the key to adaptive
success is to find ways to re-engineer a familiar reasoning
scheme A into a fresh routine that addresses task B in a
swift and relatively painless manner. The results often
provide significant computational advance cloaked in con-
ceptual muddle, for the strategies that underpin policy
B can be quite different from those that rationalize
A. We can discover a worthy routine while misdiagnosing
its underlying rationale, just as we can nimbly execute card
tricks, without understanding why they succeed (the latter
often requires deep mathematics).
Many of these basic issues are outlined in a preliminary
manner within Essay 1, but many readers may prefer
jumping directly into the waters of any of the subsequent
essays, for immediate swimming is often more appealing
than long disquisitions on dry land. Every essay in this parlor tricks with reasoning
volume began life as a self-sustained lecture, and every one can be read, ad libitum, apart
from the others. Doing so entails some degree of repetition and cross-referencing across
chapters, but the results are preferable, I think, to my previous literary production
(Wandering Significance2), which blossomed into a pink enormity through an overly
earnest attempt to thread a linear narrative through very variegated territory. Virtually
nothing appearing here has been published before.3
That is not to say that the themes explored across these essays do not align with one
another fairly tightly, and most of them are organized around one of the many puzzles

2
Mark Wilson, Wandering Significance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
3
Portions of Essay 5 appeared in “Stitching Together a Language for Science,” Analytic Philosophy 56(4) (2015).
xiv Preface and Acknowledgments

that emerge when we attempt to explicate how the loose bundle of descriptive tech-
niques called “classical physics” applies so effectively to the macroscopic world about us.
In my initial plottings, I had expected to frame this collection around a long survey
article entitled “What is ‘Classical
Physics’ Anyway?”, portions of
which have been published else-
where.4 I eventually decided that
this preface wasn’t necessary. How-
ever, it is within the applicational
contexts of traditional classical
mechanics that I first recognized
the importance of asymptotic con-
nections across characteristic scales
(Essays 1 and 5) and the conceptual
confusions that often follow in their
wake.
In brief, here is a summary of
contents. roadmap to the book ahead
Essay 1 (“Pragmatics’ Place at the Table”) argues for the importance of investigative
context as an important vehicle for reasoning compression, supporting the varied
explanatory architectures that allow us to capture the physical world in tractable
terms. This essay recapitulates the central argument of Wandering Significance in
variant terms.
Essay 2 (“Physics Avoidance”) distinguishes some fundamental classes of explanatory
architecture following the discernments of applied mathematics. In my opinion, descrip-
tive philosophy of science would be greatly improved if these diagnostic tools were
more widely employed. These distinctions will frequently reappear in other essays.
Essay 3 (“From the Bending of Beams to the Problem of Free Will”) outlines how
Leibniz’s strange metaphysical views stem from mathematical concerns intimately
linked to the methodological considerations of Essay 5. His insights have proved helpful
to me in other essays and have guided me to a better appreciation of what “metaphysics”
should be about.
Essay 4 (“Two Cheers for Anti-Atomism”) is another historically oriented chapter
focusing upon Pierre Duhem’s methodological insights with respect to classificatory
words such as “temperature.” This essay is long and detailed because Duhem directs our
attention to a complicated range of subtle facts about the applicational range of thermal
vocabulary. To its detriment, contemporary philosophical thinking with respect to
linguistic reference seems largely unaware of considerations of this type, so providing
a somewhat lengthy résumé of Duhem’s concerns strikes me as a worthy expositional
project. The conclusions reached are strongly complementary with the themes of

4
Robert Batterman, ed., Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Physics (New York: Oxford University Press,
2013).
 Preface and Acknowledgments xv

other chapters. Again, this essay is intended as a tribute to another major influence upon
my thinking.
Essay 5 (“The Greediness of Scales”) outlines the working architectures of modern
multiscalar modeling techniques, in a manner that extends the discussion of investigative
context from Essay 1. Concrete organizational proposals of a multiscalar character help
us recognize the distortions and vagaries endemic within standard Theory T thinking.
Essay 6 (“Believers in the Land of Glory”) criticizes contemporary metaphysics’ tacit
reliance upon the coarse categories of Theory T thinking, which has misdirected
philosophical attention away from the puzzles of applied mathematical technique that
originally concerned Leibniz and other historical authorities.
Essay7 (“Is There Life in Possible Worlds?”) examines the topsy-turvy manner in
which thinking about causation in contemporary “possible world” terms inverts the
practical considerations that rationalize appeals to counterfactual possibility within
effective science. The essay also emphasizes the role of reliability within any “science”
worthy of the name. A possible link to Wittgenstein’s later thought is sketched as well.
Essay 8 (“Semantic Mimicry”) supplies my central exemplar of how “easy things rely
upon tricky supportive rationales.” It concentrates upon the long-vexed problems of
describing a continuous material in a coherent way. This is probably the most technic-
ally demanding of the essays.
Essay 9 (“A Second Pilgrim’s Progress”) criticizes contemporary formulations of
“naturalism” from the perspective of applied mathematics, especially in regard to
mistaken presumptions about the role that set theory plays within its deliberations.
Although these assorted essays emphasize the many varieties of strategic architecture
that science and common sense utilize in addressing nature’s descriptive challenges,
I write as neither a pluralist nor an anti-realist.5 Instead, I see myself as reviving older
strains of skeptical concern with respect to our abilities to reason thoroughly about our
surroundings in mathematical ways. John Locke writes:
Reason, though it penetrates into the depths of the seas and earth, elevates our thoughts as
high as the stars and leads us through the vast spaces and large rooms of this mighty fabric,
yet it comes far short of the real extent of even corporeal being, and there are many
instances where it fails us.6

5
e.g. in the vein of Nancy Cartwright, How The Laws of Physics Lie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983).
Although Cartwright’s writings correctly highlight inferential patterns to which philosophers should pay greater attention,
she generally supplies them with a gloss diametrically opposite to that I would favor. For example, she correctly observes
that productive inferential pathways leading to useful empirical conclusions often hinge upon the order in which various
limits are taken. But she then characterizes these behaviors as the typical “put up jobs” that physicists supply when they
deceptively pretend that they have captured the “dappled world” within a unified physical framework. In contrast,
I regard those same limit-sensitive behaviors as characteristic of the asymptotic techniques for which applied mathemat-
icians have developed compelling rationales for their frequent appearances within inferential practice. The notion that
there is anything “deceptive” or “idealized” about their invocation strikes me as altogether misguided. This is not to say
that many mysteries about how asymptotic techniques store data still remain. But these merely strike me as agenda items
for further research, not grounds for philosophical despair.
6
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 681.
xvi Preface and Acknowledgments

At bottom, mathematics’ abilities to capture nature’s unfolding processes within its own
conceptual terms rest upon its capacities for supplying algorithms that can fill out pieces
of graph paper in a numerical manner, in hope of paralleling natural process in a helpful
fashion. Prosecuted naïvely, we already know that such efforts are doomed to failure,
because, inter alia, nature presents us with lots of mani-
folds that can’t be smoothly mapped to flat pieces of paper
(vide the problems of graphing a goose’s flight over a
curvaceous earth discussed in Essay 9). In this fashion,
our most basic modes of effective mathematical reasoning
must fall “short of the real extent” of natural process. But
this is hardly the end of the story, for clever mathemat-
icians have developed many sophisticated strategies for
stringing together patchworks of numerical approxima-
tion that allow us to feel that we have nonetheless “under-
stood nature” in a fully satisfactory manner, despite the
algorithmic limitations upon our concrete reasoning cap-
acities. Central to most varieties of this liberation from
John Locke
computational shortsightedness are the tools of set theory
and the differential calculus. But these appeals frequently introduce descriptive exag-
gerations of the sort highlighted as “the greediness of scales” problem in Essay 5. At
present, mathematicians repair these descriptive lapses through corrective doses of
asymptotic interconnection, following Oliver Heaviside’s maxim:
It is said that every bane has its antidote and some amateur biologists have declared that
the antidote is to be found near its bane.7
In this vein, applied mathematics has developed wonderfully illuminating explanations
for why our lot as limited creatures of nature is doomed to perpetual challenge, as well
as suggesting a wide array of clever reasoning architectures to work around these
obstacles. This evaluation of our computational predicament is not pluralist in the
usual philosopher’s sense; it merely supplies straightforward scientific explanations of
the diverse descriptive demands that make more impatient thinkers presume that we
should become pluralists or anti-realists. So the methodological moral I extract is: be
more patient and do not fall prey to extreme philosophical remedies.
But how far can we advance through these devious methods of conceptual repair and
what will the fabric of affected science look like in the future? I don’t know, and I doubt
that anyone else alive can supply reliable appraisals of this prognostic cast. Other
philosophers, however, believe that they have somehow established an Archimedean
perch from which this futuristic feat can be accomplished. Insofar as I can determine,
these illusions of confidence largely trace to our unfortunate heritage of Theory
T thinking, a simplistic methodology in which mathematical science allegedly supplies

7
Oliver Heaviside, Electromagnetic Theory, Vol. II (New York, Chelsea, 1971), pp. 31–2. The original context is
explained in Essay 5.
 Preface and Acknowledgments xvii

“processes” that parallel nature’s own in a tidily isomorphic fashion. In one fell swoop,
many of the detailed descriptive concerns that animated the great metaphysical writers
of the past get removed from the docket of philosophical attention. I hope that these
essays may assist in reversing these premature exclusions.
When Locke wondered about our capacity for understanding “the real extent of
corporeal being,” he worried skeptically about our ability to capture the varied phe-
nomena encountered amongst ordinary solids like wood and steel (cohesion, elasticity,
fracture, transmission of coherent work) within a unified and coherent conceptual
package. Most of my own examples focus upon the same congeries of descriptive
concern, but with the advantages of modern hindsight. Material science has made
great advances with respect to the behaviors of solids in the centuries since Locke
wrote, and important aspects of these historical developments have involved deep and
subtle revisions in how scientists think about the concepts and the capacities of applied
mathematics. We can now render “corporeal being” a far greater degree of representa-
tional justice than Locke anticipated, but we achieve this feat by catching the relevant
behaviors within more complex forms of conceptual netting than he could have possibly
envisioned. Insofar as I can see, a considerable percentage of contemporary philosophers
remain oblivious to these modernizing alterations and attempt to cobble by with
classical conceptions of “concept” very much like Locke’s own.8 A suitable corrective
is simply to return to Locke’s original physical concerns and ponder them afresh in light
of what we now know. Such, essentially, is the task of these essays.
Yet, as Locke and the other great British essayists and poets of his time emphasized,
we forever remain limited creatures of nature and can only provisionally evaluate our
capacities for understanding the world around us based upon the practical advances we
find ourselves able to make. Philosophers cannot serve as prophets any more effectively
than our fellow captives of nature, and we should not pretend otherwise. Neither
conceptual analysis nor transcendental musings nor a priori intuition can free us from
these empirical limitations. At best, we can assemble provisional progress reports with
respect to how matters presently appear. But doing so competently requires that we
attend to the complexities of explanatory landscape in a more detailed manner than is
common within philosophy today.
Such musings have led to an interest in the multiscalar techniques of modern
computing, and I was fortunate to have my friend Bob Batterman, independently
studying these topics, rejoin me on the Pittsburgh philosophy faculty a few years ago.
The fruits of unceasing conversations with Bob appear on every page of this book, even
when it is not evident to the untrained eye. I am further grateful to Bob for securing a
grant from the John Templeton Foundation that supported me as I struggled to
complete this fulsome manuscript.
A second central influence arrived with another import to our Allegheny banks, Jim
Woodward, whose insightful work on causation has greatly enhanced my recognition of

8
See Wandering Significance, Chapter 3, for more on the “classical picture of concepts.”
xviii Preface and Acknowledgments

the linguistic adjustments that open unexpected pathways from one form of computa-
tional architecture to another. Essay 6’s musings on “the early a priori” start here.
I have presented much of this material in a wide range of forums over several years,
and I fear that I cannot recall all of the kind folks who have offered me helpful advice.
But some of them are: James Allen, Jeremy Avigad, Gordon Belot, Robert Brandom,
Julia Bursten, A. W. Carus, Kathleen Cook, Josh Eisenthal, Sébastien Gandon, Brice
Halimi, Jeremy Heis, Jennifer Jhun, Jeff King, Peter Koellner, Michael Liston, John
MacFarlane, Alan Nelson, Jill North, Meghan Page, Kenneth Pearce, Christopher
Pincock, Mark Richard, Tom Ricketts, Robert Schwartz, Erica Shumener, Sheldon
Smith, Katie Tabb, and Jim Weatherall. As usual, I again thank my most faithful
respondents, Michael Friedman, Anil Gupta, Pen Maddy, George Wilson, as well as
my indulgent editor, Peter Momtchiloff.

Pittsburgh, 2016
 1
PRAGMATICS’ PLACE
AT THE TABLE
Lessons from Multiscalar Science

[O]ur common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found worth
drawing, and the connections they have found worth drawing, in the lifetimes of
many generations: these surely are likely to be more numerous, more sound, since they
have stood up to the long test of the survival of the fittest and more subtle, at least in
all ordinary and reasonably practical matters, than any that you or I are likely to
think up in our arm-chairs of an afternoon—the most favored alternative method.
J. L. Austin1

(i)

spoiling the party

1
“A Plea for Excuses” in Philosophical Papers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 130.
2 Pragmatics’ Place at the Table

Warning! This essay will shift rather dramatically between the uncomfortably lofty and
the disconcertingly nitty-gritty, for it will eventually discuss the behavior of granite and
steel in more detail than is customary within a philosophical essay.2
Let us begin with some of the uncomfortably lofty issues. Consider Wittgenstein’s
old slogan: “Meaning is use.” Jaunty aphorisms such as this serve as philosophy’s form of
Rorschach test: their explication reveals more about the psychology of their interpreter
than they encode in their own right. With that understanding, I’ll develop my own gloss
on its content here.
But let me first explain why I have positioned the present essay first in this collection.
At heart, I consider myself a philosopher of language, interested in the question, “Why
will an evolving descriptive practice sometimes fall into strange forms of conceptual
confusion, despite the fact that its practitioners have not recognized that they have made
any obvious kind of blunder?” The richest traditions of twentieth-century common sense
philosophy (epitomized by J. L. Austin) maintained that these anomalies arise because
effective real-life usage is controlled by subtle contextual factors that we often overlook.
But the unsystematic character of the discussions provided by Austin’s school strike
most modern readers as too haphazard to qualify as a plausible account of linguistic
practice. How could one ever learn a language as irregularly framed as that?
It turns out, however, that contextual dependencies of the sort highlighted by the
common sense philosophers are also active within a properly operating physical science.
Recent progress in the multiscalar modeling of complex materials (such as steel or
granite) stems from the realization that scientific success can be achieved only if the
descriptive vocabularies utilized are subjected to a carefully monitored set of contextual
restrictions, not wholly unlike the specialized “usages” of the common sense school.
These modern computational recipes factor a complicated problem into a nested set of
discrete investigations, which supply a collection of localized contexts that embedded
terminologies can subsequently exploit with great efficiency. I believe that the divisions
of linguistic labor exemplified within these modeling schemes supply us with excellent
illustrations of how the loose appeals to “usage” characteristic of the ordinary language
school can be formalized in a precise and systematically learnable manner. The purpose
of this chapter is to explicate the basic nature of these structural advantages.
But let us first rehearse the considerations that have lead many contemporary
philosophers to reject the appeals to “use” characteristic of the old British school. In
this vein, consider Jerry Fodor’s brusque objection to the notion that pragmatically
inflected usage can play any significant role within the story of language:
Thought about the world is prior to thought about how to change the world. Accordingly,
knowing that is prior to knowing how. Descartes was right and Ryle was wrong. Why,
after all these years, does one still have to repeat these things?3

2
John MacFarlane once introduced me as follows: “There are some at the University of Pittsburgh who remain loyal
to the heritage of Wilfrid Sellars, but Wilson is loyal to its heritage of steel.”
3
Jerry A. Fodor, LOT 2: The Language of Thought Revisited (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 14. A more
exacting treatment of allied themes can be found in Jeffrey King and Jason Stanley, “Semantics, Pragmatics and the Role of
Semantic Content” in Zóltan Gendler Szabó, ed., Semantics versus Pragmatics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
 Pragmatics’ Place at the Table 3

Articulated in less tendentious terms, the argument runs:

1. Tasks that require language for their successful execution generally demand that
articulated stretches of individual sentences get laid down in dialogues. This is
the linguistic level at which pragmatic purpose (“meaning is use”) should
normally display itself.
2. But the individual sentences within these dialogues must be understood first
before the purpose of the larger groupings to which they belong can be
adequately recognized.
3. Parsing these component sentences in turn rests upon a foundation of lexical
grasp and grammatical recursion.
4. These recursive processes of semantic recognition must transpire before the
pragmatic purpose of a dialogue can be grasped, by which time the primary
“meanings” of its component sentences must be firmly locked in place.
Thus: Thought about the world is prior to thought about how to change the world.
I agree with Fodor that popular accounts of pragmatic relevance that appeal loosely to
unsystematic notions of context cannot address these objections adequately.4 The lines
of thought pursued in this essay follow a different path. To keep their reasoning
practices within practical bounds, engineers divide a modeling task into a collection of
more or less independent algorithms, controlled by an external register that monitors
the overarching strategic purposes to which the localized results eventually contribute.
We follow similar policies of strategic guidance in everyday discourse as well, for
essentially the same reasons. If we hope to understand the complicated patterns in
which physical terminologies attach themselves to the world within real-life speech, we
must first appreciate the remarkable linguistic efficiencies that accrue to the contextual
factors we shall survey. On this same basis, we will also
appreciate the methodological shibboleths recommended
by Fodor and others should be firmly resisted.
But what do I mean by a “register of investigative pur-
pose”? In an everyday context, roughly the sorts of back-
ground rationale we request when Mrs. Antony in the film
Strangers on a Train natters on with no clear end in view.
“Where are you going with this line of thought?” we politely
enquire. Here are some typical answers we might anticipate: Mrs. Antony
1. “Oh, I was trying to establish a general conclusion about politics by arguing by
reductio ad absurdum employing generic representatives ‘Hugo’ and ‘Jill’ to stand
in for typical Republican and Democratic voters.”
2. “Oh, I am trying to uncover some useful auxiliary lines that will allow us to see
the proper geometrical relations between these triangles.”
3. “I’m trying to figure out where the bank robbers are likely to stop when they get tired.”

4
The suggestions of the so-called free enrichment school strike me as helpful, but as too irregularly framed to address
our parsing concerns fully.
4 Pragmatics’ Place at the Table

Unlike Mrs. Antony, most of us monitor our ongoing progress in purposive reasoning
as we think things through (my talk of “registers” captures the mental machinery we
employ to keep track of our investigative intentions). We communicate these projects to
others through locutions such as: “Let’s see what happens if we give an opponent the
benefit of the doubt,” “Let’s see what happens if we enclose the triangle between two
parallel lines,” “Let’s first catalog the possible escape routes,” etc. And we terminate
these same stretches of investigative search by remarks such as “We’ve now found that
our opponent’s views lead inexorably to a contradiction, hence . . . ,” “Accordingly, we
learn that these two areas are forced to be equal,” “All of these routes ultimately trace to
a hacienda on old US 99, so let’s send some troopers out there,” etc. Such are the guiding
locutions of language management that are absent within Mrs. Antony’s aimless dis-
quisitions. We learn the rudiments of these communica-
tive structures at the same time as we acquire the other
significant aspects of language. When Mother teaches us
the meaning of “steel,” she simultaneously instructs us in
strategies for reasoning about such materials in a rudi-
mentary way, including the mastery of discourse direct-
ives such as “Let’s consider what happens when we look
at the metal under a microscope.” I claim that many
aspects of classificatory reference can be adequately
understood only through recognizing the profound
semantic contributions supplied by these compartmental- parental instruction
ized registrations of strategic context.
Allied forms of mental structuring have been actively studied within cognitive
science, sometimes with important carry-overs into linguistics proper, but Fodor’s
generative concerns do not appear to have been directly confronted in these terms.
But the present essay will not make its case for “use” in this exact vein, but will argue
instead from the perspective of effective language design: if we lacked tools for keep
track of our shifting investigative purposes, we would find ourselves unable to reason
about many common forms of everyday circumstance, due to their intractable com-
plexities.5 We are not supernatural intellects; we forever remain the evolved descend-
ants of humble hunter-gatherers, who must cobble together and redirect our modest
computational inheritance in the pursuit of more sophisticated objectives. Philosophers
often proceed on the presumption that we possess bigger brains and inferential skills
than we do, able to juggle descriptive parameters and computational processes far
beyond our actual capacities. But with a limited stock of words and smallish brains,
we must forever seek roundabout strategies that allow us to handle the extremely large
range of challenges that we confront within science and everyday practice (such
workaround tactics are called “strategies of physics avoidance” in Essay 2). The multi-
scalar methods we shall survey in this essay beautifully illustrate how descriptive

5
Some philosophers like to argue by transcendental deduction but I prefer brute engineering necessity.
 Pragmatics’ Place at the Table 5

problems of an otherwise insurmountable complexity can be conquered by breaking the

task at hand into a set of local investigations whose relationships to one another are
carefully monitored by a set of markers that keep track of investigative intent.
As we’ll see, within a suitably structured discourse, vocabularies such as “force” and
“pressure” frequently adjust their physical significances to reflect the evanescent inves-
tigative purposes to which these words currently contribute. From the perspective of
reducing computational complexity, these subtle reorientions in referential attachment
can prove enormously beneficial, but they can easily baffle the observer who has not
appreciated the efficiencies offered by these contextualized adjustments in meaning. In
this manner, the contextual shifts characteristic of multiscalar modeling supply excellent
prototypes for understanding the sensitivities to usage to which common sense philo-
sophers such as J. L. Austin appealed.
A second factor often contributes to conceptual puzzlement. In other essays, we’ll
find that many of the stock reasoning practices of the modern physicist or engineer have
gradually evolved over time through silent processes of trial-and-error tinkering with
pre-established investigative methods. These cobbled together routines can be easily
passed along to later generations through instructions such as “At this point, you should
shift your investigative focus to a lower scale size and compute as follows.” But learning
how to execute a complicated sequential routine and appreciating its underlying
strategic rationale are two different things. If we fail to grasp the latter, we will find
ourselves unable to properly appreciate why our descriptive vocabularies adjust their
referential foci from one investigative context to the next. In this manner, significant
conceptual puzzles have often appeared within the history of science, arising as the
accidental side products of otherwise beneficial forms of linguistic advance. Our chief
task in these essays is to understand the developmental mechanisms that generate these
natural confusions.
Of course, philosophers like Austin originally pursued far bigger philosophical game
than unraveling the funny behaviors of words like “force” and “pressure.” In these
essays, however, we will largely confine ourselves to physical examples, with occasional
side remarks reaching to considerations beyond. Philosophy must first liberate itself
from the anti-pragmatic straitjacket in which Fodor and others have locked its move-
ments. What better way to do that than to appeal to the well-understood computational
policies that have so significantly advanced the capacities of modern engineering?

(ii)
Before we look into a typical scientific example, let us first remind ourselves of how
swiftly we shift our investigative focus within our everyday reasonings. Suppose that we
wish to rob a certain bank in Montrose, California. General wisdom in the design of
geographical information systems recommends that we divide our problem into inves-
tigative stages to be addressed sequentially: First ask, “What is the shortest route to the
6 Pragmatics’ Place at the Table

bank?” and then determine

how should we pilot our
way to the target along that
path? In Stage 1, we will
consult some kind of topo-
graphic map in computing
the shortest route, generally
by weighing the comparative
merits of a collection of
prima facie possibilities.6 At
this initial stage in our inves-
tigation, we want to register
the streets of Montrose in a
minimalist fashion, omitting Stage 1
most of the details of the sur-
rounding landscape, for such clutter will only impede our calculations. But when
this planning task is completed, we need to prepare a set of driving instructions
so that we find our way to the bank. So in a second stage of mental cogitation, we
must import some of this previ-
ously excluded data into our
stage 1 plan, relying upon some
expanded database akin to Goo-
gle Street View. The final result
will be a list of piloting instruc-
tions such as “Keep driving until
Cazzette’s Children’s Store
comes into view.”
Observe that we instinctively
consult these distinct investiga-
tive stages, when we are asked
a question like “Where’s Cazz-
ette’s Children’s Store?” The
answers we regard as appropri-
ate usually reflect the current
stage of our geographical
Stage 2
thinking:

6
It is worth remarking that we humans seldom execute this optimality search as a computer would, but prefer
drawing a conventional map on a piece of paper and scanning it with our eyes. Why? My guess is that we have inherited
excellent “geometrical fact estimators” from our hunter-gatherer ancestors originally devised for computing preferred
paths across a landscape. We have learned to redirect these skills with respect to shortest route estimation by substituting
a conventional map for a natural environment. Homo sapiens’ remarkable capacities for the plastic redirection of pre-set
routines reoccur within Lesson VI below. The general consideration that possibility spaces need to be kept small and
targeted comprises the central theme of Essay 7.
 Pragmatics’ Place at the Table 7

(a) At the corner of Market and Honolulu (topographic mode)

(b) Wait a few minutes; it’ll be right in front of you (piloting mode).
In this manner, our tacit awareness of current investigative purpose affects the
manner in which we parse a simple question. I find it striking that we make such
adjustments in our everyday thinking extremely swiftly without overtly noticing that we
have done so.7 In the pages ahead, any sequential succession of shifting investigative
strategies of this ilk will be called a cognitive architecture. Accordingly, the “architecture”
of our bank robbery plotting reflects a simple two stage process. The multiscalar
arrangements we shall investigate in the pages ahead are more complicated, involving
various feedback interconnections between different computational stages.
Let’s now see how a suitably selected architecture can
vastly reduce the syntactic demands upon data registra-
tion. Here’s a simple illustration. How can we keep the
storage requirements of a digital photograph within rea-
sonable bounds? Consider the exquisite object illustrated
(a Tubaphone #9 banjo), captured in two standard pictor-
ial modes (TIFF and JPEG formats, respectively). The
compressed photo on the right only employs about 15%
of the data points utilized on the left.8 How is this possible?
Answer: compressed formats store their data in the hier-
archal manner of a good strategy for winning Twenty
Questions: they ask very broad, large-scale questions at
first (“Are you a fictional character?”) rather than immedi- data compression
ately considering
very detailed spe-
cifics (“Are you
George Harvey
Bone in Hangover
Square?”). Simpli-
fying somewhat,
TIFF images
encode their data
straightforwardly
on a pixel by pixel
basis, requiring a
large number of
data points in the partitioned forms of data compression

7
In an allied manner, we rarely notice the edits in a Hollywood movie like The Incredible Shrinking Man despite the fact
that they frequently shift perspective radically.
8
6,291,988 bytes versus 428,587 bytes in the representations I originally consulted. By the time you see them, dear
reader, the photos will have become subjected to further forms of compression and may have once again become equal!
8 Pragmatics’ Place at the Table

process. Compressive schemes instead ask an initial series of broad questions Q1, which
then incite a follow-up round of finer grained questions Q2 depending upon the response
to Q1, and so on through a nested array of further queries Q3, Q4, etc.9 To keep track of
these interdependencies, we often list the questions posed within a segregated front-end
register (Q1, Q2, Q3, . . . ), followed by an enumeration of their respective answers
(A1, A2, A3, . . . ).
Representational tactics of this general nature can be called multiple register schemes,
in analogy to the practice of writing polyphonic music in separate staves, such as
the three clefs in which organ music is written. Here the lowest pedal clef captures
the slowly altering harmonic environment (tonic, dominant, relative minor, . . . )
against which the
faster moving melo-
dies of the two upper
registers unfold. Hav-
ing established a firm
chordal context in this
divided manner, the
multiple register scheme
higher registers can
vary rather freely in their melodic contents, trusting to the fact that the parallel bass
line articulates the harmonic environment that allows auditors to keep track of the
piece’s musical movements.
In our how-to-rob-a-bank circumstances, we plotted out our schemes in two distinct
stages (topographic versus piloting) and observed that questions like “Where’s
Cazzette’s Children’s Store?” are answered differently according to the investigative
“pedal register” currently active. More formally, experts in Geographical Information
Systems (GIS) have learned that storing geographical data differently within distinct
registers greatly shortens computational endeavor.10
But my favorite exemplars of the manner in which we exploit contextual registers
within our everyday thinking are provided by the directive instructions we employ to
convey shifts in investigative focus, such as:
Let’s now see what happens if we give our opponent the benefit of the doubt
or
In order to reach general conclusions about politics, let’s let “Hugo” and “Jill” respectively
designate typical Republican and Democratic voters.

9
More sophisticated “wavelet” approaches to data compression employ nested sequences of contextually adapted
questions in more sophisticated manners than conventional JPEGs (which are largely based upon the Fast Fourier
Transform).
10
I. Heywood, S. Cornelius, Sarah Carver, and S. Carver, An Introduction to Geographical Information Systems
(Engelwood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 2006).
 Pragmatics’ Place at the Table 9

In doing so, we locate our unfolding ruminations within a shifting array of contextual
controls that might be called “investigative moods.” In the examples at hand, we alert
our audience to the fact that we plan to argue by reductio or that we intend to
substitute generic names for explicit quantifications. These announcements of investi-
gative mood reduce syntactic complexity11 and allow for significant reasoning compres-
sion as well—the technique gets a lot of pesky quantifiers, modal operators, and scope
restrictions out of the way so that the central combinatorial aspects of the reasoning can
move ahead in a simpler manner. Indeed, the Fitch lines employed within a standard
natural deduction system in elementary logic mark these stretches of investigative
mood explicitly (for interested readers, I outline the technique in Appendix 2). This
network of contextual markers keeps track our shifting reasoning tactics in the same
manner as the pedal clef of an organ score captures the shifting harmonic underpinnings
of the music. I believe that much of our everyday reasoning relies upon various forms
of these “pedal register” compressions. Present-day philosophy of language could
become more supple if its practitioners more warmly appreciated the substantive
reductions in syntactic complexity achievable through various policies of contextual
localization.
Accordingly, pragmatics (in the robust sense of practical objectives) gains its “place at
the table” through the manners in which our registrations of investigative strategy
enhance our other linguistic capacities, with respect to both data and reasoning com-
pression. To be sure, these considerations will scarcely exhaust all of the ways in which
the rough slogan “meaning is use” captures valuable insights into the workings of
language. Pace Fodor, however, the strategic factors upon which we will focus are
totally systematic in their contours, and their rudiments can be acquired within our
earliest days of linguistic instruction.

(iii)
Let us now turn to the extraordinary tactical compressions that have been achieved
within modern engineering through the deft employment of reasoning architectures
of a multiscalar design. Approached straightforwardly, complex physical scenarios
frequently involve far too many descriptive variables, arranged across a wide spectrum
of size and time scales, to submit to straightforward reasoning procedures. Clever
forms of “physics avoidance” workaround are needed to reduce these registration

11
Drawing upon Appendix 2, “Hugo and Jill agree in their liking for Mary” is a lot shorter than “Every male
Republican who has married some female Democrat that he likes is such that both of them will probably like whatever
presidential candidate appears in the second election cycle from now who has been endorsed by some previous Democrat
president admired by the female, provided that the candidate endorsed by that same president in the electoral cycle before
has not run a second time.”
10 Pragmatics’ Place at the Table
narration on multiple scales
demands to a practical dimension. Multiscalar
schemes achieve these objectives in a very instruct-
ive way.
Essay 5 (“The Greediness of Scales”) will revisit
these expository matters in greater detail. My pre-
sent objective is to extract several important phil-
osophy of language lessons from a brisker survey of
the subject.
As a simple example of a descriptive problem
involving a large number of syntactic param-
eters linked to size scale, consider the woeful
story of the Incredible Shrinking Man, the victim
of atomic radiation who gradually grows smaller
with each passing day. To capture this epic prop-
erly on film, its director (Jack Arnold) continually
adjusts his mise en scene to suit the size scale of
the principal events under review, rather than
staging the entire film at the ordinary human
scale of its opening scenes (in which case our
protagonist’s fierce encounter with the spider in
frame 4 would be scarcely noticeable). Employing
standard scientific jargon, I shall dub any mode of
descriptive depiction linked to a set of target
events in terms of the characteristic size scale at
which those events unfold as a Representative Vol-
ume Element (or RVE). With each, we can associate
a characteristic scale size, supplying a rough indi-
cation of the extent of the primary objects under
review. Thus the characteristic scale lengths of
our five Shrinking Man scenes displayed can be
rendered as:
1. RVE characteristic scale: 1 meter
2. RVE characteristic scale: 10 centimeters
3. RVE characteristic scale: 1 centimeter
4. RVE characteristic scale: 1 millimeter
5. RVE characteristic scale: 1 nanometer
We assemble the Shrinking Man’s saga by weav-
ing these localized RVE depictions together to gen-
erate a “completed story” (the scenes selected
frequently shift scale, when the director regularly
returns to an RVE choice suitable to the normal-
sized wife left behind). Large amounts of
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