Friction

About Friction

On this podcast, I interview philosophers and other academics on fascinating philosophical and philosophy-adjacent topics. fric.substack.com (https://fric.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Philosophy

Category

education · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

7 May 2024

Latest episode

18 Aug 2026

Latest episodes

105 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   18 Aug 2026

   155. Henry Taylor | Mind and Natural Kinds

   What if vision, working memory, and consciousness are not the real joints of the mind, but just the words psychology happens to have inherited? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. (http://ttps://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.) 1. Guest Henry Taylor is Associate Professor at the University of Birmingham, and his work has focused on various issues in metaphysics, mind, cultural robotics, and more. Check out his book, "Natural Kinds and the Science of Perception"! https://academic.oup.com/book/62599 (https://academic.oup.com/book/62599) https://a.co/d/0gUPbopl (https://a.co/d/0gUPbopl) 2. Book Summary Taylor develops a property-cluster account of natural kinds tailored to psychology and states it as a sufficient condition, PNK: if a kind’s members instantiate a cluster of properties that co-occur non-accidentally, and the kind earns its keep in prediction, explanation, generalization, or discovery, it’s a psychological natural kind. Two commitments anchor the view — natural kinds are the kinds that serve science’s epistemic goals, and kindhood isn’t up to us, since the clustering has to answer to worldly structure. He deliberately strips the metaphysical commitments that homeostatic, causal, and stable cluster views carry, then defends the resulting liberality: the objection that PNK needs a supplementary mechanistic or causal explanation of the clustering is answered by distinguishing cases, and Block’s necessary-property objection gets a separate reply. Long-term memory serves as the worked example. Chapter 4 isolates the Eliminativist Claim — that a psychological term failing to pick out a natural kind should be dropped — motivates it via the epistemic privilege natural-kind terms enjoy, concedes that non-natural-kind terms can still be useful, and ends up defending a qualified version. The applications are where the framework does real work, and the results are non-uniform. Dorsal and ventral streams each come out as natural kinds — each a non-accidental property cluster with genuine epistemic payoff — which Taylor uses against scepticism about the two visual streams hypothesis. But that success generates a negative result one level up: because dorsal and ventral episodes differ so sharply, visual episode is not a cluster kind at all, but at best disjunctive — vision as jade. Working memory fares better. Taylor characterizes it via five properties (persistence duration, interaction with attention, manipulation of information, interfacing faculties, capacity), argues from partial-report and change-detection results that psychological explanations depend on their co-occurrence, and concludes it is both a natural kind and an explanatorily powerful one, contra recent scepticism about its unity. Chapter 8 then turns this on the unconscious-working-memory literature: the experiments don’t establish unconscious working memory, and the better reading is that in each case it’s vague whether the system involved is working memory. An appendix shows the cluster view is compatible with three major theories of vagueness. The closing chapters extend the method to prelinguistic infants, where verbal report and task instructions are unavailable. The proposal is deliberately theory-last: harvest markers of consciousness from adults, look for them in infants, and infer consciousness when enough co-occur — with natural kinds supplying the justification for that inference, and Taylor arguing the approach beats theory-first alternatives. He works through the complications honestly (behavioural vs. neuroscientific markers, the absence of any uncontroversial marker, detecting and correcting misleading ones, gradual emergence). Chapter 10 applies this to the early-vs-late emergence dispute between Bayne et al., Passos-Ferreira, and Taylor and Bremner, identifying two candidate clusters: an early one (third trimester to ~3 months: McGurk effect, default mode network, P3b-like ERP to global oddballs, endogenous attention, pain markers) and a later one (~1 year: protodeclarative pointing, means-ends reasoning, memory-based imitation). He declines to adjudicate, arguing instead that the evidence is genuinely muddy and that the natural-kinds machinery is what could resolve it — including the case where consciousness turns out to be associated with several cluster kinds rather than one, a jade-like outcome the framework can absorb without collapsing. 3. Interview Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 00:49 - Natural kinds 04:38 - Perception 07:01 - Philosophy of mind 16:32 - Psychological natural kinds 24:10 - Essentialism 32:39 - Cluster views 40:22 - Worry 47:20 - Induction 49:36 - Vagueness 58:55 - Eliminating kinds 1:05:03 - Visual episodes 1:08:01 - Introspection 1:10:42 - Infant consciousness 1:15:35 - Practical difficulties 1:21:13 - Further research 1:24:56 - Main takeaway 1:26:21 - Value of philosophy 1:31:11 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe (https://fric.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

2. 

   4 Aug 2026

   154. Justin Mooney | Phases of Objects

   When a lump of clay becomes a statue, does one thing get a new job, or does a brand-new thing come into being? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. 1. Guest Justin Mooney is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at College of the Holy Cross, and his work has focused on metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and more. Check out his recent book, "Phases of Objects"! https://academic.oup.com/book/62226 (https://academic.oup.com/book/62226) https://a.co/d/0eL5AfF9 (https://a.co/d/0eL5AfF9) 2. Book Summary Phases of Objects by Justin Mooney (Oxford University Press, 2026) is a work of analytic metaphysics defending a controversial view Mooney calls “phasalism”: the thesis that material objects are not permanent members of their kinds but can survive changes from one kind to another, so long as such changes violate no generic requirements on identity and persistence that hold for all material objects regardless of kind. This directly opposes what Mooney takes to be contemporary orthodoxy—”substantialism,” the widely-held and usually unexamined assumption that objects belong to their kinds permanently and essentially. His entry point is the classic puzzle of the statue and the lump of clay: whereas most solutions treat the statue and the clay as either identical or as two coincident objects, Mooney argues they are one and the same object, with the lump merely coming to “be” a statue in the same way a human person comes to be an adult by maturing. Being a statue, on his view, is a phase the clay passes through, not a new substance. The book builds this position out into a general metaphysics of material objects across five chapters. After laying methodological and metaphysical groundwork and distinguishing phase sortal changes (where the object before and after are numerically identical) from substance sortal changes (where they are distinct), Mooney proposes a phasalist criterion of identity—a broadly spatiotemporal account of persistence conditions—and tests it against a range of cases. He then deploys phasalism against the standard coincidence puzzles that motivate rival theories, arguing it handles sortal changes, gradual material turnover, undetached parts, and fission and fusion cases. A further chapter tackles “sameness relations,” where he defends the surprising pairings of identity without sameness and sameness without identity, showing how his framework accommodates our ordinary talk about objects being “the same” in various respects. The final chapter turns to what phasalism means for persons. Mooney argues his metaphysics pairs most naturally with animalism—the view that each of us is identical to a human organism, with personhood itself being a phase sortal property the animal comes to instantiate once sufficiently psychologically developed. From his general spatiotemporal criterion he derives a criterion of identity for human persons and applies it to the hard cases at the edges of a life: fertilization, the early embryo, twinning, and the fetus at the beginning, and persistent vegetative states, death, and decomposition at the end, closing with brain-transplant thought experiments. Throughout, Mooney is explicit that his aim is a partial defense—developing phasalism, drawing out its virtues, and rebutting objections—rather than a knockdown argument that it should be preferred to every rival, positioning the view as a serious and unjustly neglected competitor in the metaphysics of material objects. 3. Interview Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 00:53 - Background to book 06:25 - Sortals 10:56 - Radical change 13:04 - Methodology 18:46 - Deflationary views 25:42 - Substantialist views 34:12 - Path to phasalism 39:16 - Pluralism 44:42 - Criterion of identity 49:20 - Spatiotemporal continuity 54:21 - Counterexample? 1:00:52 - Another case 1:06:39 - Advantage of substantialism? 1:08:10 - Fission 1:12:35 - Sameness relations 1:18:58 - Relative identity 1:21:40 - Christian theology 1:25:37 - Main takeaway 1:26:27 - Value of philosophy 1:29:13 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe (https://fric.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

3. 

   28 Jul 2026

   153. David Papineau | Mind is Physical

   Is the hard problem of consciousness a real problem, or a question that dissolves once you take physicalism seriously? My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy. (https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.) 1. Guest David Papineau is Professor of Philosophy at King's College, London, and his work has focused on epistemology, metaphysics, the philosophy of science, and mind. 2. Interview Summary Papineau opens by characterizing physicalism via Kripke’s creation metaphor: once God has arranged all the material stuff, the work is done — no further act is needed to install minds. On defining “physical,” he takes the via negativa: whatever isn’t fundamentally mental or vital. He concedes this is cheap but insists it’s adequate for the mind-body problem, since the interesting conclusion is just that the mental is identical to something non-mental; Alyssa Ney has convinced him that a general physicalism about everything owes more (roughly, a few mathematically characterizable basic quantities). He also flags his student Jonathan Emery’s line that one needn’t argue for universal causal closure at all — the relevant question is whether everything going on inside our heads is physical — and grants the point is reasonable, while noting the physicalist still needs a non-question-begging characterization of “brain process” broad enough to cover glia, fields, and whatever physics hasn’t found yet. On the hard problem, he simply rejects the presupposition: brain processes don’t give rise to consciousness; they are consciousness, as H2O arrangements don’t give rise to water. Identities need no explanation — he retells Block’s Twain/Clemens anecdote — and the same applies to generic consciousness if it turns out identical to global workspace activity or reentrant loops. Chalmers’ residue reduces to a tractable question about the reference of phenomenal concepts, settled empirically. He disowns functionalism as a metaphysical mess (second-order role properties can’t be pains, since pains occupy the roles), preferring generic first-order physical properties on the determinable/determinate model, and treats metaphysically necessary supervenience as an artifact of Jackson and Chalmers needing a single common commitment to attack. He then presses the consequence most physicalists flinch at: consciousness is vague like intelligence, with genuine borderline cases among animals and AI systems — Tye found this incredible enough to turn panpsychist. His own response is to decouple the issues, per his paper “Consciousness Is Not the Key to Moral Standing”: the clustered features that make consciousness matter morally in us come apart in other creatures, so moral standing should be settled first and consciousness bracketed, contra Birch’s precautionary framing. The final stretch tracks the anti-physicalist dialectic from the knowledge argument through the two-dimensional argument to the current revelation-based versions (Goff, Nida-Rümelin, Liu), which Papineau credits for isolating the real load-bearing premise once the bad inference from semantic to epistemic directness is discarded. His objection is ontological and blunt: he cannot identify any proposition you acquire by introspecting pain beyond that pain is pain. Comparative knowledge (yellow resembling orange more than red) is fine; “knowing what it’s like” isn’t knowledge — the cup doesn’t thereby know what whiteness is like. He extends the complaint to Russellian monist quiddities: instantiating a property and being able to name it confers no information about it. On causal closure he declines the appeal to authority and rests on the historical evidence — the collapse of vital and nervous forces, intracellular electrochemistry, Hodgkin-Huxley — plus Sean Carroll’s argument that brain-localized forces at those energy scales would have shown up in colliders, while acknowledging Emery finds holes in it and conceding that bare miraculous interference violating energy conservation falls outside Carroll’s argument’s reach. A brief exchange on whether phenomenal concepts are twin-earthable (he thinks not, though tentatively) precedes his closing remark that philosophy’s value lies in the fact that some humans can’t help being puzzled by puzzling things. 3. Interview Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 01:00 - What is physicalism? 07:07 - Too broad? 11:16 - Mind physicalism 19:13 - The hard problem 26:05 - Explaining identities 31:04 - Supervenience physicalism 37:37 - Supervenience and identity 42:12 - Martian pain 46:05 - Vagueness of the mental 51:03 - Moral issue 1:03:53 - Partial consciousness 1:06:34 - Properties 1:20:07 - Objecting to anti-physicalist arguments 1:24:54 - Revelation 1:33:57 - Causal closure 1:45:16 - Twin Earth? 1:49:15 - Value of philosophy 1:50:11 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe (https://fric.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

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