Hey, this is the Partial Examined Life episode 384, part two, discussing Graham Harmon's

2018 book Object-oriented Ontology. We had given a sprawling overview of the parts that we

read and discussed most of chapter one.

We didn't really explain those key terms that he introduces about, really it's about reductionism.

So we've had a lot of reductionism in our podcast coverage over the years.

I was looking back at Carnap, for instance, Wittgenstein.

The idea that in an ontology, there's some things that are not real, maybe psychological

states, maybe mental states, we need to somehow reduce them. So like reduce the mental

of the physical. Carnap and Wittgenstein in his tractatus, wanted to reduce philosophical project as reducing the inco-hate

massive creation, including the tables and chairs and things that we, the macroscopic

objects, reduce them to something more basic, whether it be atoms or strings or molecules.

So instead of just calling that all reduction, he wants to call it, well, it's undermining if it's moving

you toward a smaller thing, but it could also be a more basic internal thing, but he also

then introduces this term overmining, where when you're reducing it to something phenomenal

or something merely social or something merely functional. And you're

saying, oh, what is this chair? A chair is just something that we, as pragmatists, we carve out

of the mass, the blooming, buzzing confusion, and we just make it an object because it's useful

for us. But really, all the chair is, is the function. It doesn't really matter what it's made of.

It is just, you know, what it is to us. Yeah, I think the difference, right, undermining is a reduction

to something that's not readily apparent to us, and overmining is a reduction to what is readily

apparent to what's epistemologically more basic. So undermining goes to

what's ontologically more basic, but not necessarily accessible to us directly. Overmining

...