Of an abstract theory what is a posit made of?
Joseph Wright of Derby, A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery, 1766
Whether a theory’s unseen posits are earned by its predictions — and what is left holding a pattern when they are not.
These are conversations, not finished essays. Each page gives the questions as they were asked and the answers as they were given, with the research reports they produced, the sources they lean on, and a map of the argument.
They run as one line of inquiry: whether the unseen posits of a theory are earned by what it predicts, whether physics and the humanities build them the same way, and what is left holding a pattern when prediction turns out to settle nothing.
Quentin Meillassoux is cited throughout, so a chapter-by-chapter study guide to his After Finitude follows the conversations, with a dialogue that tests his argument from inside the correlationist circle.
Money against gravity, Popper and the humanities, and the question the rest of the series answers.
Where the project began: money against gravity, Popper and the humanities, the anatomy of an abstract theory, four research reports, Psillos, and a machine that predicts without posits — twenty-three questions and their answers
Whether physics and the humanities share one architecture for their posits, and where that architecture breaks.
A research run on one question: whether physics and the humanities share one architecture for their posits, and where that architecture breaks — one request and the report it produced
A critical reading of the earlier answers to the anatomy question, and the research prompt that led to the essay on getting it right without a hidden world — four questions and their answers
What predictive success earns a theory, what it cannot settle, and what survives an endless regress of observers.
The research run that produced the essay on getting it right without a hidden world: the report in full, a plain summary of it, and Goodman’s riddle — three questions and their answers
Whether a theory’s unseen posits are earned by its predictions: gravity, a mango tree, Meillassoux, hegemony and the invisible god, and a review of two research reports — nine questions and their answers
An endless tower of brains in vats, and what still refers to one act of eating a cake at every level — four questions and their answers
Meillassoux’s After Finitude, read chapter by chapter and then argued with from inside the correlationist circle.
An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency
Solipsism, Meillassoux’s After Finitude, and the brain that sees itself.
