Well, let's get started then. You can all hear me, right? Okay, well, thank you for coming to the session today called Summing Up the Summit. This is really a chance to let you all know about this event that we had a month ago in D.C., but really the sequence of events that led us there and led to the development of this thing called the OpenSSF Mobilization Plan. I am joined on this panel by a number of esteemed esteemed guests. Here's that max-headroom glitching going. Why don't I start with Amelie Cron. Amelie, you're a special fellow with the Atlantic Council, but could you go deeper in your background and tell us just more about you and what you're doing with the AC, but have done before? Yeah, so let me see. 27 years in the technology space, but actually getting into it from OpenSource way back prior to college, so I've been really tied to this community since the early 90s at this point, but also been an advocate in and out of the private and public sector. I've spent, it was a decade in as a federal employee with a stint, breaking between that for Disney and a couple of companies since then, but I was anywhere from starting out as an engineering grunt to having to put all this stuff together to architecture primarily along the security side of the things and right now as a, I guess it would be the technology relationship manager if you want to do an office-based thing for a large gaming company. So, but doing a lot of writing on the side because this is an interest area that not only do I have a vested personal interest in, but professionally, I think it's a good area for folks who have the skills and interest in very backgrounds to participate in. Thanks, thanks. And you and I both testified on a house committee panel right before this event. It was like this crazy week on May 11th, it was, right? The house science committee. They were asking about security and open source code. That was a lot of fun. Yeah, it was. Yeah, it's surprising to get testimony in within a five-day window, so that was always fun too. And I also have next to me, Trey Her. Trey works at the Atlantic Council as well. Trey's a coworker of Omely's. Trey, could you introduce yourself and let folks know about both what you're doing at AC, but also maybe a little bit of context for the work that you're doing. Yeah, sure. So, hi everybody, I'm Trey. I run the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council. AC's a foreign policy national security think tank based in Washington, DC. And our team works on technology policy, geopolitics and InfoSec, sort of the crossover of the three. Omely is one of our fellows who's doing this work with us on open source. We have been working on software supply chain issues since 2019, trying to profile this as an important supply chain policy issue, trying to put some data together on attacks that we've seen, vulnerability disclosures that could have led to attacks that were interesting for our community and with conjunction with Brian and some of the other folks at OpenSF, this year and next we'll be doing some work on trying to bring more policy attention and hopefully help into the work that the mobilization streams are doing, as well as some ongoing security projects across open source as well. And I think for anybody who's here who's not necessarily as directly involved with OpenSF, we're really hoping to broaden the community of maintainers and developers and repo owners who are engaged in the policy process. So for folks that maybe haven't been in policy before interested in it, want to see how to get involved, please feel free to shoot us a note or find me after the talk, because there'll be a lot to do in the next, I don't know, 10 years, but at least the next year and a half. Now, Trace played an integral role in the last six months in the development of both the plan and the event and some of our thinking in this space. But somebody who's been with the OpenSF project longer than I have, who's been with the Linux Foundation for quite a while as well, is David Wheeler. And David, could you introduce yourself as well and kind of give a little bit of a background of the brief background of the OpenSF, kind of where it came from. And also your background is very much in the Washington area and you have some insight into kind of engagement with government as well, don't you? Yeah, so David Wheeler, I actually joined the Linux Foundation in April 2020, and we will make adjustments. So I've been working in open-source software or developing secure software for literally decades. As far as the, you ask, what is my role? My title says I'm the director of open-source supply chain security and what is the exact, does that mean? That means basically I'm a subject matter expert that goes around, I'm a developer, subject matter expert that goes around to various foundations with the Linux Foundation trying to help develop more secure software that we all around the world depend on. A significant part of my work is spent with OpenSF, with various, whatever can be done to help, including, Brian mentioned this mobilization plan. I think you and I had like a 10 hour Zoom call trying to turn all the wonderful ideas from individuals into something that looked like a cohesive whole. And in fact, I think, I'm happy with the result. Where did OpenSSF come from? Fundamentally, a lot of people have been concerned about security and, well, security and software in general, and including open-source software. Because open-source software is still software, it's not immune to the problems of software. And so at that time, there were a number of different groups. There was the CII Core Infrastructure Initiative, there was Jossi, there was another group called the OSSC. I can't remember all of them, what these acronyms stand for. But there were three different groups of organizations all interested in improving the state of security and open-source software. And it really didn't make any sense to have three different groups. There were some overlaps between even some of the members. And so, hey, let's get all together, one place, work on a common goal. And so that's really the origin story of the OpenSSF is getting all together so we can all collaborate and address these issues that are of concern to everybody. Thank you, David. And so let me also give a little bit of a background then on what led us to now, or what led us to at least to the May meeting. And by the way, I'm Brian Bellenorff, executive director of OpenSSF. Like David, I work for the Linux Foundation. I'd actually been with the Linux Foundation for five years and kind of parachuted into the OpenSSF community in September because they were frankly doing some really cool things. And it was about that pivot point where it was, all right, let's see what we can do going from kind of an ad hoc informal collection of great ideas and actually some great content and a couple of projects to a funded project that can go out and tell the world about what it's doing, recruit more efforts, recruit more people to come in and do something really ambitious. But up until that point and even at that point in September, the OpenSSF was kind of like other Linux Foundation projects where the role for the Linux Foundation was very much to act. You could think of it as like air traffic controller, convener, facilitator. It's still up to all of the people who show up to do something, right, to build the thing.  And maybe they find, you know, millions and millions of users like Kubernetes has. Maybe they find 10 really important users and that sustains them, right? But generally speaking, the Linux Foundation just tries to support whatever community it is that's willing to show up. We don't think like a software company which is let's go out and, you know, get 80% of the market for this thing and drive everyone top down that way. It's all very bottoms up. But there was this thing that happened in December that I think galvanized a lot of folks' attention on the questions of not just the security of open source software in terms of vulnerabilities and the rate that they get fixed, but also are there weaknesses in the supply chain? Then maybe it's unfair to kind of overemphasize the log for shell compromise and things that had come before. And in some cases since, you know, compromises in JavaScript libraries that are widely used but maintained by one person. But there is this sense in December of a mad scramble ruining lots of people's holidays to go and just understand where am I running log for J? Let alone am I vulnerable to it? Let alone how do I get it fixed and get out there? And the kind of people asking that question weren't just the CISOs of companies large and small. It was people like the National Security Council. In fact, we got a letter as some companies did and the Apache Software Foundation did, kind of, sorry, inviting us to a conversation. When you get a letter from the White House inviting you to a conversation, it's a little bit intimidating, right? But the framing of the letter was all about, we're concerned. Are you all okay? Is this business as usual? Which, you know, no one expects software to be bug free. But, you know, this is like if you were building, if you are building the bridges and highways of the digital world, you know, this is like a truck rumbling by and a bridge falling and us going, oops, let's just build the bridge again. So the question was, are there systematic improvements? Are there systematic things that are wrong about the open source process? The way we've all depended upon the largesse of companies and the individual selflessness of developers to build things that now run our digital bridges and highways, but more importantly, are there things that could be targeted improvements that particularly the government could be helpful with? Even if it's just a focused attention on this, let alone start to make some investments. And to give due credit, this administration had started to make some of those, send some of those signals, start to make some of those investments. In May, they issued, of last year, they issued something called executive order 14.028, which called for a whole lot of different things among them, the further adoption of software bill of materials and Alan Friedman here, it deserves a lot of credit for making good on that promise. You probably even fed a little bit into the EU itself. Okay, but really starting to raise the awareness of the importance of some systematic improvements, not open source specific, but here's some things that we might need to do. But in January this meeting, it really was about open source software. And we all had to kind of be honest, open source software was developed at a time when there was a lot of, when open source development was high trust, when the community was smaller, when it was still not too far beyond Dunbar's number, which is 150 people, right? That any individual could keep in their head social connections and you kind of could reasonably had a chance of meeting people involved in the software you're building on top of or your downstream users in aggregate and a lot depended upon those interpersonal relationships to build the trust between components that led us to overall reliable software. And even that scaled a little bit. A lot of people decided to use the Linux kernel because they saw that Linus himself was a little bit of a badass and had his problems, but like he and the community around it generally developed a reputation for delivering, taking security seriously and delivering quality software. But that doesn't work when you're 40 million components out there, when there's thousands of dependencies being included into things now, when a lot of those are one person projects on and on. So we had this meeting, it was a six hour Zoom call. Some of us flew out for the Zoom call because it was like, it was to be in person and then all Macron happened and so we flew home. But it was a six hour Zoom call at the end of which, they basically prompted us in the private sector to come up with steps that might solve it because we certainly talked about here's what we're doing at the OpenSSF, our peer member organizations that were there said, yeah, there's a bunch of great ideas, but the thing was thrown back to us, how do you go from good ideas and even rough consensus and running code to actually solving these problems? So we took that back a little bit. Things got a little bit complicated in February and March, one country invaded another, but we kept asking the White House, like, do you wanna have a follow-up meeting to kind of continue this conversation? And in about early April, they said, yeah, why don't we do this? And how about you guys convene it for us because we're busy, but we'll come and we'll bring the same level of people that we had attend the last meeting, we'll support you in doing this, but we'd kind of like an update. Have you all taken some of these goals and these issues seriously? And so starting in like early April, we in the OpenSSF scrambled a little bit and started to try to take these different ideas, some of them based on existing projects like Sigstore and Salsa and kind of the problems they solve, but some of them asking based on that conversation, are there new things that we could be doing? Things like, where is the center of gravity around incident response in open source projects? How do you help a project that is under resourced but gets a kind of a notification of a really bad vulnerability? How do you help them walk through the guide that we've created for coordinated vulnerability disclosure? And yet, there are certain skills that presumes, there are political communication skills, coordination skills that maybe call for the kind of thing we have in other areas you've perhaps heard of P-Cert. What does the P stand for in P-Cert? Product security incident response teams. That kind of exists out there, but no one's really doing that for open source or if they do, it's kind of ad hoc and it's not well advertised. How do you scale up things like third party code audits, right? And other things that we know tend to lead to better software. So we kind of assembled a set of 10 different ideas and pulled together volunteer teams around those 10 to say, can we take this for more than just a one sentence or one paragraph description into a reasonable body of work, a reasonable plan that looks at one level deeper at what are some targets? What are some existing efforts that we could build upon? What are some, how would we measure success in this? And then based on all that, what's the first tranche at what's like the minimum viable team, a minimum viable product really, that over the course of a year or two years could deliver on some major impact on that issue, right? And that, those teams that kind of all scrambled to develop a three to five page or plan, some of them deeper, more detailed than others, some of them with much larger dollar figures than the other. Now in that January meeting, by the way, we had said if we do this, it could cost billions of dollars because like that's, it's a, it could be a lot of work, right? But the value we create would be even higher. I should note that it cost $700 million for Equifax to pay the fine on the breach that happened, was it 2018, 17? Due to their lack of updating Apache struts, they were like a couple months behind, weren't they, or something like that? And so if one breach for one company is a $700 million fine, what's the economic value of having prevented that for that one company, for N number of companies, for the industry as a whole, it could be large. So we pulled these teams together. We asked them, not that money is no object, but what budget would allow you to actually have an impact? We added it all up and it came to $70 million in year one, $80 million in year two across these 10 different plans, which is like both an ambitious number when you think about the size and money associated with open source, but also really affordable compared to the impact that we think we would have. So we pulled together this meeting to kind of roll the plan out, to release it publicly, had folks there in DC. And our point of going back to DC, it wasn't to go and say to the White House, like, could you write us a check? Just write the check and we will solve the open source security problem, right? First off, we kind of don't think that's how procurement works and I do want to talk a little bit about that. But secondly, to try to find ways for the investments the government is already making to align well with what we wanted to do. And to be clear, this was not a US government driven plan. The plan itself says nothing about US government shall do this or needs to do this or that we do this to align with that standard or this executive order or whatever, but does try to lay out a template for if we do all work together in line or efforts, here's the impact we could have. So the plan has now been out. We've been talking a lot about it and a couple of the teams have started now taking the next step in honing those plans. First off, it's very much a draft. It's still version zero dot nine dot one. Just to make it clear that this stuff was going to be a work in progress. One thing that we did get in that May meeting was a commitment from our existing number of organizations, about six of them, towards $30 million in pledges against that $150 million number. Now we still have to, in each of these 10 different streams, come up with an investable plan, right? It very much is like a startup. You have to say, here's a credible set of targets and here's what it's going to take and whether the Linux Foundation acts as the coordination for that or somebody else, we'll work the details out. We won't start the plan all at once. We'll probably start a couple streams early and then my hope is that by the end of this year we get eight of those 10 running in some way, maybe all 10, but that's now the hard work, the sausage making, I think, to actually get the stuff implemented. But I'm really excited about where we got and we've already received some interest from other governments in having a similar conversation. So with all of that put together and set, now we are trying to figure out how to work with government to go forward with this, but also now take an honest step back. This was a sprint by many of these teams, including the two-day kind of 16-hour Zoom call sprint between David and I to try to align those things. We took a whole lot of liberties and a lot of it is kind of throwing things on the wall, but some of that perhaps doesn't mesh cleanly with the reality of how things are actually gonna work on the ground. So I'd kind of like to throw to the panel and maybe Trey, I could start with you. When you read the plan, and you did contribute a couple pieces of it, deeply appreciated that, what were the things that perhaps you saw that were either missed opportunities or places we could have done more with the plan? Yeah, no, appreciate that. I think a credit to OpenSSF, this was something pulled together. It was a way to scope mitigation of a software, set of software risks that I think hadn't really been done at that level before. It's one of the challenges that we're trying to address us, and I think OpenSSF is trying to address with a mobilization plan, is this is not vendor specific, it's not vertical specific, it really is across the ecosystem. And so these are significant interleaving sources of risk in how you build software, how you attribute software, how you attest to the security of software that affect a massive diversity of programs and packages. So two things I think that were hopeful to try to help you guys grow on, and I think maybe nudge on in the next year and a half is, one, we recognize that all 10 of these aren't gonna succeed in the same way. And we recognize that there are a finite number of contributors, there's a finite amount of resources inside of this community now to do this kind of very sophisticated security engineering. So of the 10, where do we need to start? What's gonna have the greatest impact relative to the risk that we see today? And of the 10, which is most likely to succeed against its stated goals? And I think those are two different questions. Answering them in parallel is gonna be a really important process for this community as we go forward. And it's an area where I think having some government demand signals is gonna be useful as a way of understanding the space. Not because what we're doing with the mobilization plan needs to be responsive entirely to what the US government or the Japanese government or the French government wants, but because they're a consumer for this kind of information, they are an assessor of this kind of risk. So they're a stakeholder in this community as we go. So I think that's one area that's really thinking about prioritization. The second thing that I think about though is a lot of the folks in this room, how do you all plug into this? How do you take the efforts, maybe the spare volunteer time you have, the existing program and security work that you're doing, either with a company or as an independent, and plug into these 10 work streams? Because these are really, I think the word stream is very helpful. They're guides, they're the opening of a conversation. They're a place to channel resources time and energy. And as we're thinking about this from the policy standpoint, how can we help the US government and other entities understand where the gaps are? Where are volunteer energies naturally gonna concentrate? Where are the parts that are missing? What's the stuff that's just hard to get a lot of PR press for, hard to get a lot of company effort for, places where resources aren't necessarily being flowed in that same way to support these streams? And so I think the other aspect of this is really thinking about for you all, how can you help? How can you contribute? Where do you plug into this? And so I think that's somewhere that all the work streams are gonna need to be thinking about more aggressively is how do I get people involved in this process? Thanks, Dre. Amelie, based on the parts of the plan that you've seen and the conversations that we had with the House Committee on Science the day before the plan was released, and looking at the questions that they asked, do you think there's parts of this plan that are responsive to concerns of folks like beyond the people we had in that room? And what do you think, put yourself back in those situations where you were working inside government. If the private sector came up, came to you with this plan and said, we want to engage with your organizations in the role out of this, what would have been your reaction to it? Like, how do you think it was received within the executive branch, within agencies? Well, thinking back to the time where the first major wake-up call was, and this was mentioned in a testimony which was the Heartbleed incident back in 2014, that was kind of the first, oh my gosh, open source software exists, and the reactivity to it was was to send out a data call to find out what web servers it was, because it was open SSL. So the literacy of what open source software was, but what it contributed has definitely increased over time. My first interactions with that committee was way back in 1998 on my second job out of college and did some stuff and they were amazed that I had a laptop and all sorts of stuff. So having folks on the panel there that were versing in AI and machine learning and former software developers and whatnot was a benefit. But thinking about talking about the SBOM everywhere, for me, my contributions when I was at the office of management budget during the Heartbleed incident, something like an SBOM would have been very useful for the response. That is definitely something that, with a historical eye towards that, that would have been useful. It wouldn't have taken me to say, hey, these libraries exist in your cell phones, exist in networking equipment, other applications because they were compiled in, they weren't, I don't think people at the time were really aware of the prevalence of open source software because it didn't, much like SBOM there, was like, it wasn't an ingredients list. No one had an idea, even in commercial software, what existed. Now, because with Log4j and a couple of other incidents since then, folks are realizing that even the commercial vendors are liberally picking from the open source ecosystem to kind of rapidly increase capabilities and features of not only the software that they're selling in embedded devices like your smart TVs and stuff at home, but also anytime someone accesses a cloud provider, a lot of that infrastructure, that digital infrastructure that's there is all based on open source software components and whatnot. And when those things go down, that root cause analysis is one of the biggest challenges there because you're having to kind of work through all those dependencies. So, say Amazon goes out, then they're looking at what service it was and then what software supports that service. And if it's based on a bunch of open source libraries, who do you got to contact to basically fix those vulnerabilities or those issues? And that's one of those challenges I don't think necessarily got conveyed very well, but we're at the first step here. To Congress understand that code is infrastructure at this point in time. And to treat it like your roads, your waterways, the rest of your transportation systems, your power delivery, even equating it to say, the whole issues with ransomware with the colonial pipeline issue, say we had an incident roughly earlier this year where you had an open source developer that was frustrated with not getting paid and decided to kind of put a message in a library. How do you kind of control that process and build that trust as well? And I don't think that awareness still exists at this point. It's still, you know, because we're tickling this more and more of that awareness is starting to come out. And I think that's gonna be the biggest challenges are those next steps. And also, you know, my big thing with government is even though it has a significant size to it, it can't be everywhere all the time. People don't scale well and the government doesn't really scale well. You know, you can see that for stuff. You know, we have natural disasters and whatnot. There's a finite amount of resources that can be applied. It's just a matter of where the best points are to kind of reinforce the comments that Trey and Brian made. You know, I think there was a moment that was, there was one moment where it was like the enterprise world realized they could use open source code legitimately. I mean, people had been using it quietly under the covers for a long time, even before that moment. But then it was like, all right, there's companies like IBM and Red Hat, now obviously part of IBM. But others who were starting HP and others who said, okay, this is goodness, we'll incorporate it in. And then there was a distinctly later moment by a couple of years at least where you started to see them return patches. I'd say actually IBM very early on in the Linux and Apache communities, but en masse this recognition that use was a two way street, that as a user, you're always gonna find insufficiencies, bugs, improvements to docs, and that as a first order principle of use, being able to contribute back upstream to open source is important. I don't know that we've ever gotten there with at least the US federal government as a first order principle that if agencies use externally developed open source code, they should contribute back upstream. But I wonder if we're about to see a change in that. And I mean, the optimist in me, right? I wonder if we're about to see perhaps a recognition that as a national security thing, investing in the underlying security of again, bridges and highways and code is a critical infrastructure argument. At least I was hearing tendrils of that in the conversations we had with them. Is that just optimism speaking or is it to me or is that something of substance? Let me actually ask, that is a follow up to Omelie. Cause that. I was gonna say, just the NSA has entered the chat, kind of thing where it commits to the tree where you didn't see them before.  And now, you know, I don't know of anybody who actively uses SE Linux because it was such a pain to kind of configure, but it solved a particular problem. Now, you know, I know having been at Omelie right around the time they were doing the open source policy, that was the biggest difficulty we had, which was to find the right levers to get people to contribute back. It wasn't that there weren't CTOs and CIOs and developers within the federal government that didn't want to. It just that there wasn't a process or mechanism or governance behind that.  So it is literally, there's an inertia that needs to be overcome, both on the public and private sector. And it's just a matter of someone, sometimes it's just a matter of willpower and somebody to kind of champion that. And I think that's probably mirrored across a lot of organizations. David, David, by the way, co-authored the, or wrote the original open sources COTS memo, which allowed so many people at least in the DOD to justify, hey, we can use this stuff. Like it's just like commercial off the shelf. It was a 2009 DOD policy and open source software. And, but you're right, that was actually one of my earlier presentations that got into that policy and got me involved in some of that quick comments. We already are seeing occasional release from governments. I mean, not just US government, but governments as open source software. You may have heard of the internet, you know, that's due to both development of protocols and development of open source and release. Most of, you know, you're either using one of those open source, you know, stacks or another stack that was written after looking at those open source ones.  There's more, but that said, Brian, what you said earlier is absolutely true. The amount of contribution back from, certainly from the US government, it's far below what it could and I would argue should be. There are cases where it makes sense not to, but there's formal cases where, you know, they're shooting themselves in the foot by not participating and collaborating. And although I know a little less about other governments, I suspect that's true for many other governments as well, because as you mentioned, you know, this is not a US only problem, this is a global challenge and we need to work globally for it. Well, I wanna pull us back to the plan a little bit. And I do wanna leave some time for a couple of questions as well, if any of you have them. But, and I apologize, I don't think we had the time to go through like all 10 of them and give enough of a presentation to help you understand each of them, but I certainly wanna highlight a few of them as noteworthy, but you can go get the plan from the OpenSF website, of course. But, David, what's your take on which of the streams you think we might, well, first off, are most fundable, like are the ones that we can get, could most likely get started with most quickly, and then the ones that are perhaps ripest for collaboration with government? Well, as far as that first question, we actually work hard to make sure that all those streams were things that we could do in the near term. We weren't trying to create, hey, do this research and in 30 years, maybe something will pop out. They're all very much, you can at least have a basic idea of what they do. I would say, for example, the six-door streams is particularly straightforward, in part because it's very specifically focused and that makes it easier to execute. But I think all of them can, we can at least get started on. I mean, the education piece, we've already done some work. I think there's some clear steps forward. And really, I think that's true for all of them. I think after a certain point, there's a yes, you need to plan, but you need to actually start executing instead of just admiring and creating better plans. There's the saying, plans are irrelevant, planning is essential, right? Or no plan survives first contact with the enemy. I don't know who the enemy is in this case, but let me highlight one of them then, which is the one we called S-bombs everywhere in stream number nine. And it wasn't just about echoing, hey, S-bombs are important, let's throw money at it. It was also about trying to say, the kind of future that I think we want is one where software bill of materials are assembled continuously throughout the supply chain, starting as far upstream as you can by default by the development tools, so that it's a minimal lift for developers to pick up. And it is something that is pervasively created and easily created all the way through, rather than the alternative, which it seems like we're trending towards in some places where S-bombs are assembled at the very end as a certificate to hit a certification checklist. And because it's a lot of work to do it at the end, the companies that do it see that as a proprietary value rather than as something that's ubiquitous and frankly open source, right? And to do that, the logic was, well, we should be investing in tooling that embeds it into the build tools and the infrastructure and makes it easy, makes them easy to validate. The challenge there is that there's a couple of different formats with adoption out there. And Alan Sissa very helpfully told us, any of these formats will work, so use them all. But, which is kind of like saying, hey, DNS, there could be two or three of them. But so what it actually triggered though was a bunch of us in the S-bomb community saying, well, what do we have in common? Is there a greatest common denominator to the security use cases and the security metadata that's worth tracking? And could we find a way to have convertibility between these different formats around some core data attributes and a taxonomy so that you could use these different formats to some degree interchangeably, right? And it's hard to do in practice, but if we could channel investment into tooling, that would make that easier to at least validate different languages, different formats like SBDX, CyclingDX, then that would avoid us having to get into a holy war of one format overall, right? So that's where the streams actually served as an opportunity to have some provocative conversations about the right strategy, right? And that I found one of the most valuable parts of it. Now, government doesn't have to help us fund that work, but given the role that not only executive order 14.08 to 8 played in that, but also things we've seen out of the Department of Health and Human Services around S-bombs for medical devices, right? That we see potentially in other regulated industries or in the automotive industry, they're starting to talk a lot about this as well. I have a lot of confidence that they can create the poll for what otherwise would just be a checklist nice to have bureaucratic kind of thing, but I still think it's up to us in the open source community to figure out how to create the supply on that side to meet that demand. Any other thoughts though that come specifically from the S-bomb kind of stream and things that practically will have to do to get that launched and any other possibilities you see with working with government? Obviously, you've already mentioned, tooling, tooling, tooling, we need to make this as easy as possible, as default as possible. I don't think it's going to be instantaneously done in a day. I think there is a fundamental challenge with S-bombs specifically because it's not something that traditionally we've done, we mean the software development community and what's, I guess, worse in a sense is it's primarily a help to the end user. It's not necessarily as, it's something the developer does to help the ones downstreams, not necessarily to themselves. Yeah, I see Alan going, the problem is we need, there's an incentives challenge and we really need to try to help incentivize and bring down the barriers to application. And I'll throw one more question to, oh, Amelie, you wanted to comment on that too. Yeah, I actually had an entire Twitter thread because I woke up inspired this morning on this, but, and I think this may appeal because I tagged Alan about 7,000 times in it, but. Alan is the fifth Beatle on this panel, by the way. Yeah, he's definitely said. But having come from done an executive level thing as a CIO and a CTO and a background in decision science, one of the biggest things that is a gap between, cool, we've got a tool or we've got a format or some type of interchange, something or other, where that, and I think Dave touched on this about the end user, the end user also needs to be a decision maker. So if you have a CTO looking at reports of S-bombs, the idea is like, well, how bad is my risk of using this? There's a lot of times you just can't tear it out when you highlight, hey, I've got a bunch of vulnerable libraries, it's stuff you may have bought, it's stuff you may have built. So providing that in a format or having tooling that gives you that kind of ability to score and do an assessment there is that next level up that needs to occur. So a lot of this is really good because the work plan addresses more at that technical engineering level, but the next step for all this is then that extra level of engagement to senior leaders who are the ones literally writing the checks and making those decisions about like, hey, we're gonna do this mission support thing, whether it be, I'm gonna be using government terms basically align with the business operations of the mission here, what kind of capabilities can I have if I need to use this and no one else provides it, what is the risk and what kind of mitigations I need to put in place? And that's where a well-defined S-bomb that has tags, extra fields, if you look at the standards and stuff like that that being proposed can actually provide some extra value. So that's how you can kind of use that to sell that up to folks who are in the position of writing the checks, pushing the buttons up for you. Thanks, Emily. We have time for one question.  I was actually flagged that she had a question. Does anyone out there have a question? Oh, yes. Thank you very much. I'll just repeat for Emily and others' sake. So what was your name? Raven, thank you very much. Raven works at the Smithsonian. She works on open source software. Smithsonian is quasi-governmental. Government educational and non-governmental. Government educational. And her point was that there isn't yet a culture of IP give back, that IP is seen as something you lock down. And it feels like there's still either a culture shift, a mindset shift that needs to happen. I mean, Trey, do you see that as well? Do you see places where that is changing? Are there parts of government changing faster? Well, so I think there's two things that are really important about this. And you've hit on one of them, which is at the moment, government still treats open source as a product that they buy and use. And so the expectation of, I bought it, it's mine, right? Still really locks in. And I think, Emily, to your point about the anonymous large global media company, right, that went through these challenges, there's a cultural shift that's gonna take place at the organizational level about defining what open source is. It's a change that will have to be reflected in policy. But I think the higher level part of this is shifting to the discussion about open source as infrastructure as opposed to product. And where there is understanding, by policy makers, by the executives who run these agencies, by Congress, when there are portioning budgets and making rules about procurement, where they recognize that it's in the national interest to see commits back upstream, to see contributions back into the ecosystem, that it's helping not just other agencies, but it's actually pushing back into the private sector. It's driving economic value. That's where a lot of that sea change is gonna come. And I think that's part of the conversation that you all and that we need to be a part of is, you're not buying products anymore, you're supporting the roads and the bridges that everybody is using. But that's absolutely a shift. Yeah, if I can quick. One quick, yeah. Yeah, quick. So if you're working specifically with the U.S. government, there are some key things you need to understand about how the FAR and the DFARS work. She probably does already. Okay, that's fine. And if you do that, that's wonderful. And also the folks who work with, which you may not. All too often, the issue is that who holds the copyright? The question is who holds which rights? So you need to track that down. Some organizations, for example, the Department of Defense, they actually have a formal policy that says we encourage release back if there's a good reason to do so. And one of those is to make it so that the future versions will have the fixes. Because otherwise, project forks come up all over the place, people have to fix it 50, 70 times. So there's very good reasons to avoid it. And the problem is really, I think in part, a matter of education of various decision makers. And Amelie, we're right at time. Any closing thoughts from you on other guidance that you could give to folks in government or to government in general about encouraging kind of givebacks and participation in big efforts like open SSF, the mobilization plan, others? Yeah, promises that it won't bite much. You know, what she mentioned from the Smithsonian was that it is a culture change. I know that was the biggest, you know, change, sea change I saw from interacting with government originally, which was, you know, I don't trust it because I don't trust the lineage of it. It could come from China, Russia, whatever. Any of those folks that the DSS doesn't like us to work with. But understand, you know, I think Ava commented on my Twitter feed, this thing about trust the process, not the person. I want to give her credit for that. Or them credit for it, sorry, for an ounce. And that's the key thing is understand, you know, for the automation that it does have eyes on, it does get checked. If we get these work streams in place where there's third party code audit, which allows that independence of, you know, not just trusting that person or maybe where they're from, but the process that builds the trust and that builds the scaffolding that's gonna be required for governments both the US and elsewhere to basically consume it without the fear. And that part takes then into that culture change because there's no second guessing, much like we have with FedRAM, which is it goes through a FedRAM process and then yet another agency goes and basically refed ramps it. So, you know, to de-dupe the work, that's the key thing about building that trust and following these things within the work streams. Thank you, Amelie. Thank you, David. Thank you, Trey. Thank you, Raven. And yeah, that's it for our session. Thank you all very much.


Hello, I'm JJ Joaquin and welcome to Philosophy and What Matters, where we discuss things that matter from a philosophical point of view. Joining me in this episode is my good friend, Martin Vacek, chair of analytic philosophy at the Slovak Academy of Sciences, and we will talk about metametaphysics. Now, metaphysics is often described as the philosophical study of the fundamental structure of reality. Traditionally, it is first philosophy, science of things that do not change in the science of first principles and ultimate causes of things. But how should we conduct such a study? Could we ever arrive at the fundamental structure of reality? Now, asking these questions lead us to metametaphysics, a brewing philosophical industry that tackles epistemic and methodological questions about doing metaphysics. Now, guiding us through metametaphysics and why it matters is Jonathan Schaffer, distinguished professor of philosophy at Dr. Pierce University. Hello, Professor Schaffer, welcome to Philosophy and What Matters. Hi, thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. Okay, so before getting into the main topic, let's first discuss your philosophical background. So how did you get into philosophy? Well, when I was in high school, I was into debate. That was my passion in high school. I thought I would be a lawyer. And then I got to college and I took an intro to philosophy course and I got hooked. I remember coming home during the winter break of my second year in college and realizing that I was of my own free will, reading my school books. And that's how I knew I was hooked and I've just kept going ever since. Okay, so who influenced you to pursue an academic career in philosophy? Well, in many ways, my father is really sort of the main person who influenced me in that way because he comes from a kind of family of academics. His father is a physics professor, his sister is a math professor. And so my father always had a kind of great reverence for academia. He used to say of the men who he really respected that so and so as a scholar and a gentleman. So I thought maybe I could at least be one of the two. And then going forward, when I got to Rutgers, Tim Modlin, Barry Lauer, Brian McLaughlin were huge influences on the intellectually, but I'd say the person who influenced me most of all was David Lewis, who I encountered when I sat in on some courses at Princeton. I mean, he was one of the most brilliant and clear minded thinkers I've ever encountered. It was just stunning to be in a room with him. But also he showed such charity and kindness towards his students that he is a role model for me and as a teacher, as well as a philosopher. So David Lewis, so what inspired you to go to the ANU, Australian National University? Right. So, well, after I graduated from Rutgers, I took a job at the University of Houston and then I was at the University of Massachusetts Amherst for about six years. And then my friend, David Chalmers sent me an email saying they had an opening and asked if I might be interested. And it just seemed like such an exciting adventure to travel around the world and be with such an amazing group of people. Yeah, so let's go now to our main topic, some metaphysics. You are one of the best metaphysicians that we have around, but let's get a handle of what metaphysics is first. How is metaphysics different from other disciplines like sciences, for example, physics and other branches of philosophy like the symbology or ethics? That's really a great question. And I've come to think that there's a particular sort of inquiry that most deeply interests me, which is inquiry into the nature and structure of reality. And you're sort of alluding to this idea of the fun, what's fundamental and the structure of reality, what depends on that. So I'd like to say that that's a call that inquiry into what grounds what. And I think of that as the kind of inquiry that I find most fascinating and it connects to the sciences in so far as we think maybe that physics is most fundamental at our world. So that might give us some guidance there, and it connects to epistemology in so far as, you know, we want to be able to know the answers to our questions and only engage in inquiries that we can have some reason where we can have some reasonable chance of knowing the answer. And though that said like this inquiry into what grounds what there's some sort of traditional metaphysical questions like, is there free will that maybe are separate from that. And maybe there's some sense in which inquiry into what grounds what also incorporates some scientific inquiry at like perhaps into physics and things like that. So I guess what I really want to say at the end of the day is metaphysics is a label and it can be a helpful label. But there's a certain point which I just want to know about the nature and structure of reality. Okay, so metaphysics go at that point. How is it different from science though so physics is about reality as well so it's about well structure of reality from an empirical point of view so how is metaphysics at least a philosophical side of metaphysics different from science. I would say it's, and this is a kind of Aquinian attitude that it's more as quite continuous with science. I guess I think, first of all that, you know, I mean obviously there's there's many sciences physics and chemistry and biology and we want to know not just, you know what sort of picture of reality these different sciences are giving us, but also how those different pictures hang together. And for me this is kind of taking us towards the idea that some things might be dependent on others so I'd like to think that there are, you know, chemicals, and maybe there are also subatomic particles. But you wouldn't have told the whole story, unless you also added that the chemicals are dependent on the subatomic particles in some, you know, interesting way to be explored. And also there's sort of these more general questions that the sciences don't pursue directly, which is, you know, what we often think of the world in terms of objects with properties, and questions about the general nature of objects and the general nature of properties are also part of questions that are about the fundamental structure of reality that aren't directly in, in the site of scientific inquiry. Okay, so, but there have been many complaints against metaphysics, at least fundamental metaphysics throughout the history of philosophy. So most notably, you have the logical positivists. So what are these complaints all about? Well, there's, I mean, there's a lot to complain about metaphysics really and philosophy generally I mean we don't really seem to answer many of our questions, if any of them. So, I guess I, I do want to say that I'm sympathetic to the prospect that there are general methodological or epistemological worries about what we're doing when we do philosophy, and whether we're to get anywhere in philosophical inquiry. I have a kind of a sort of practical exploratory attitude, which is, you know, I get, I get interested in questions. And sometimes I feel like I can find some reasons to prefer some answers to others. And then I just want to see how far we can get with that. And it may be that there's real limits to how far we can get but I don't think that's the kind of thing that can be determined in advance. So I want to quote some other philosophical thesis about, you know, what reality is like and our access to it that's itself a philosophical thesis and also to be explored. So I feel like they're all just different philosophical these season we have to just kind of explore what can get us to the most sort of overall explanatory picture in the end. There are like you mentioned, you mentioned the positivists and there are specific people have it various kinds of worries that are specific to metaphysics, specific to our epistemic access to the world or to our capacity to use language in a way that meaningfully distinguishes metaphysical pieces. So I mean, there are those words, I guess I do think that all of these worries kind of equally afflict inquiry into ethics and into philosophy of language itself. I mean, if you think for instance that there's limitations that are of us as finite creatures in, you know, knowing what the world outside us is like. It's hard to think that there also aren't the same limitations that we would face and knowing what what meaning and reference are in the philosophy of language that could guide that that could, you know, be, you know, part of a skeptical charge against metaphysical inquiry. I would take the view that there is real grounds for skepticism about philosophy generally our track record's not great. I don't believe that there are specific problems with metaphysics that don't afflict other parts of philosophy. Okay, so that's a cool thing to say. So metaphysics is not alone with this problem, the epistemic and methodological problem. So, okay, fair enough. But one interesting episode in 20th century metaphysics is the Quine-Karnap debate. So here's Quine, the youngster during that time, and Karnap, the old guard of logical positivism. But how should we understand this debate and how did it spark new life in metaphysics? Yeah, I mean, the Quine-Karnap debate has really, at least for a long time, been like at the center of the kind of textbook story of how metaphysics in this, you know, over the last maybe 50 to 70 years has gone. The textbook story is like, as you said, like there's the old guard positivist anti-metaphysics, anti-metaphysical champion, Karnap, and then there's the new blood, the supposedly pro-metaphysics Quine.  Yes, an inspiring story, but I think there's a lot that's not very accurate about the story. A main point is that both Quine and Karnap considered themselves pragmatists who opposed traditional metaphysics. And within their pragmatism, they had differences. Karnap, or Quine, is more of a wholist and rejects the analytic sympathetic distinction, and that allows him a way to get a methodology to answer questions about what there is. But from my perspective, this is actually something that's led into some of my own work and other people's work on grounding. From my own perspective, what's maybe most interesting about the Quine-Karnap debate is a kind of point of agreement that they have that they don't ever call into question. They both start off by saying that metaphysics is about what there is. And then they go on to have a debate over whether that's the kind of inquiry that we can get anywhere with or that's meaningful. I think there's something very puzzling about thinking that questions about like, do numbers exist? Those are the kind of questions that were supposed to be paradigmatic metaphysical questions. There's something very puzzling about seeing those questions as like these really hard, deep questions about the world. Because look, we all, I mean, everyone who's had any math education knows that there are prime numbers. Anyone would know that, well, there are two numbers between 7 and 10. And from the claim that there are prime numbers or that there are two numbers between 7 and 10, it just follows immediately that there are numbers. So it seems like it's just the claim that there are numbers is obvious consequence of some obvious truths. So if that's what metaphysics is about, it's puzzling that this is like a deep and interesting field of inquiry. So what I have thought instead is that metaphysics is more about this idea of fundamental structured reality. So if we get to particular issues like the status of numbers, I think the best way to understand the question or at least a deep and interesting question in that vicinity is, are numbers fundamental constituents of reality, or are they dependent. And if they're dependent, what are they dependent on? Are they dependent on our minds and our conceptual scheme? Are they mind dependent? Are they dependent on some sort of pre-numerical structures out in the world? So those are views that, you know, granting that there are prime numbers and there are numbers. That just leaves open whether numbers are fundamental entities or dependent on our minds or dependent in some other way. I feel I've defended the view that that's where at least a very interesting line of questions remains. I think Martin has a question about this. Martin, are you unmuted, I think, Martin? We can't hear you. Still muted. We can't hear you, man. Well, I'll ask a question for you, Martin. Is that all right? So Martin has a question about this side. So since it's like some philosophers have pointed out that fundamental existence questions like numbers are trivial. For example, as you mentioned, if there are two apples on my desk, there is a number two, and therefore there are numbers, or if there's a number between five and eight, there are numbers. There are numbers because six and seven are between five and eight. But what do they mean by this? So how would your idea of grounding again help us think about this kind of puzzle? It seems that existence questions would be trivial if we're just asking, are there numbers? Because we could have such arguments. So what's the punchline of the grounding theory? Right, great. Yeah, so I do think that the existence, at least most of the questions like the question about numbers that have been regarded as the central, that have been regarded as the central metaphysical questions, do numbers exist? I think those are mostly trivial questions. Where grounding is supposed to help, is it supposed to point us to something interesting, fascinating and deep that's left over? Once we settle that numbers exist, we've still left open whether they exist fundamentally, whether they're fundamental entities, or whether they exist dependently.  But that leaves open whether persons or take the mind and consciousness, we all probably all agree that minds and consciousness exists in our aspects of reality. But that leaves open whether we should think of a mind as a fundamental constituent of reality and the way that a dualist or an idealist might, or whether we want to think of mind as a dependent or human persons as dependent aspects of reality, a materialist might want to think about things. So, just like maybe shifting to the consciousness question can help see what I'm trying to do to that with the numbers question. With the consciousness question, I hope you can see that it's, I mean, it's obvious that there is consciousness, but there's still this deep question about whether consciousness is a fundamental ingredient of reality or perhaps dependent on the physical. And so I want to say with numbers that it's also obvious that there are numbers, but there's still this deep question of whether numbers are fundamental constituents of reality, or dependent on something else. Okay, so there's a kind of layering, or distinction between what's fundamental and derivative in your view. Okay, but can conclusions and metaphysics contribute to results in science. Probably not. I mean, in a certain sense, when you say results in science, I guess, I do think that there is a kind of continuous swath of inquiry. I do see, I think that, you know, philosophers of physics have often, I think, you know, made real contributions towards clarifying some of the foundational issues that are arising within physics like an interpreting quantum mechanics and issues like that. There's some interplay, but I think to be honest, often it's, it's the philosopher learning from the scientist and trying to, you know, take what they've learned about the theory and, you know, fit that into a metaphysical picture. That's the direction of learning typically goes that way, and very seldom goes back where the scientist goes like, oh, philosopher, I see what you've done and now I have to revise my equations to accommodate your philosophical theory. It doesn't seem. It doesn't happen. It won't happen. So scientists won't consult you, for example, in doing their experiments. No, you know, I, no, they shouldn't. They shouldn't. They should, they should, they should largely do their experiments. And, you know, I do think sometimes it can be inspired. I think it often is very, I think scientists are often deeply interested in the metaphysical inquiry and they can be inspired by a certain metaphysical on just to bring in a separate topic. I've also defended a kind of monistic idea that what's most fundamental is the cosmos as a whole, rather than individual particles. And I've had some, I think some really interesting conversations with physicists who inspired me, but also some of them have taken some inspiration from those ideas and used that kind of as a kind of guiding idea to try to, you know, come up with some more detailed physical theory so that there can be some something in that direction but it's not it's not that much. Okay, so let's go to metametaphysics. So metametaphysics is a growing field in 21st century philosophy. And you're part of this group that started a question about metametaphysics. But could you give us a picture of what the field is all about. Yeah, great. So metametaphysis is definitely a growing field. I mean, I guess, maybe the, the first thing to say about it is kind of an attempt to characterize what metaphysics is, and it's typically accompanied by a further question of whether whether metaphysics is any good, whether it's worth worth doing. That's the kind usually the kind of this is you'll get like a similar like metaphysics is about this. And this is a good thing or this is a bad thing or you know or you know. One of the things and this this came out and one of the first comments that I made is, I tend to think that at a certain point the notion of metaphysics is worth just dropping and there's just a lot of very particular questions that we might ask, many of those are together but not all of which do. So I would myself want to focus on these questions about the nature and structure of reality. I think those are fast. Those are questions that fascinate me. I hope they're worth pursuing though, you know, I think that these are the kind of things where one just has to pursue the question as far as one can and you don't find out whether it's worth pursuing. I was going to say you don't find out until the end but you don't even find out then you just you just keep going and maybe it inspires someone else to keep going. Okay, so let's have this. So you talk about free will a while ago and you're not concerned about free will you don't think that that's a kind of fundamental question. So what distinguishes a question that you think will be part of fundamental metaphysics and question in metaphysics is not really a fundamental question. All right, oh yeah, so I didn't mean to say that free will couldn't be incorporated in this only meant to say that some of the ways that the debate tends to go. Are just about things other than grounding like whether whether freedom is compatible with causal determinism or something like that questions of the compatibility of human freedom with certain physical images of the world I think are largely separate questions which isn't to say that they're not like fascinating and legitimate questions. Anyway, it's just to say that it's just it's just a different line of inquiry and it's, it gets considered to be part of metaphysics as well. Perhaps, I mean, who knows that I mean there's sort of certain historical reasons why that the sort of academic subdiscipline of metaphysics includes certain things are not others but I don't think that that always corresponds to kind of a deep joints and intellectual reality. Okay, so metaphysicians, if I may use the term are often divided into ontological realist and ontological anti realist so what is distinction all about. And which side are you leaning towards. So within meta metaphysics, the key distinction is I understand it between the realist and the anti realist is the realist are the people who think, hey metaphysics is worth doing. And the anti realist think it's garbage. So like we look, you know, people take up that there's like, there's all these traditional metaphysical debates like one debate that there's been a lot of discussion of late has been the, the the analogy debate which is like when you have a collection of things, under what conditions do they compose a whole special position question. As Peter von Wangen put it, some people say always every collection of things composes something. Some people say never. And some people say only under certain select conditions like maybe when the things are kind of connected and integrated enough maybe only then do they form a whole. If anyone who in is happy to engage in that debate and thinks one of those views might be right is a meta metaphysical realist because they, at least with respect to this debate, because they think this is a debate worth pursuing, whereas other people look at this debate and think this is garbage like and, and there's different ways that people can have this kind of anti realist reaction. For some people it's an epistemic reaction. How could we ever know which is the right answer. For other people it's more of a kind of philosophy of language kind of reaction there's this idea that we see in people like Eli Hirsch that in some sense it's just a verbal debate you could speak either way you could kind of speak a language in which you said that everything composes or speak a language and we said that nothing composes and kind of just translate back and forth between those languages in some way. So those are different sort of anti realist pictures that people would endorse. You asked about my own view, I, I call myself a kind of provisional realist provisional provisional, provisional, which which is that. And this is something I was mentioning earlier you know I look at these questions like whether you know under what conditions do departs compose a whole. Okay, I think I understand what this question means. I think some answers and think that doesn't seem good there seem probably shouldn't be problems with that and I can get myself to think oh I have some reasons to prefer some of these answers. And so that gets me into kind of this exploratory provisional mode of like, oh, let's see how far we can get into answering this question but I'm open to the idea that I'm especially open to the kind of epistemic doubts that maybe in the end, we're not going to. We don't have enough access to the world or aren't going to be able to know which answers ultimately correct or we just have to try. I like the professional so there's a kind of condition. So perhaps, given the provider that we could know this one. Here's my answer. Is that is that the idea of having that professional realism. It's even more modest than that. It's, I mean I don't even want to say here's my answer it's like okay to the best I've been able to consider the reasons bearing on the question. It seems to me that the balance of reasons favors this answer. That's kind of the attitude that I take. And I, one has never found every reason that can bear on the issue. And, you know, one just encounters new reasons as one talks to new philosophers or thinks through the issues more and you know so you have to be open to changing your mind and you may find a different argument you'd be open to arguments that you might think oh wait the balance of reasons now seems to have shifted. Yeah, I just like to the to the as with respect to the total reasons that I've encountered so far. The balance seems to favor this view, but I'm open to revising that as new reasons come on the table, and I'm open to thinking that reason really isn't going to be able to give us much of a reason to prefer any view in the end if it, you know, it might come out that way. Yeah, so Martin has a question. Can you use your mic now. Still not working. It's quite unfortunate man. Sorry Martin. Can you, can you try it. Maybe you could send a chat message. I have his question so I could ask it. Is that alright Martin. Sorry about this. It's 2am there. I'll just edit this part. Okay, so Martin asks metaphysicians usually talk about like you talked about balance of reasons but these are theoretical virtues as well as these are guides to metaphysics or to truth. Consistency or so many simplicity or explanatory power. So how can, or how should we understand these notions, these theoretical virtues. Great question I just want to emphasize that these are issues that arise not just in metaphysics, and not just in philosophy, but also in the sciences I mean, when scientists choose between competing theories they invoke matters of simplicity and elegance and other theoretical values in theory choice. So there is this very general reliance, I think in all areas of intellectual theorizing on reliance on theoretical virtues for theory choice. And then there is a divide you know how should we think of this one sort of view is that these theoretical virtues are truth conducive. The simpler theory for it to just to focus on simplicity as an example is more likely to be true. And another perspective is would be me and there's you can have more aesthetic perspective is just more beautiful or something like that. I tend to think that the more virtuous theories are more likely to be true. And that's the way that I myself would want to think of it is, if we think about what kind of credences over theories are rational theorizer must have. Here's a claim. She must, as it were, start life, biased towards the simpler, more elegant and overall more virtuous theories. And that's, I think that's just a condition on rationality that one prefers simpler theories. And if they prefer that means takes them to be more likely true. So simplicity, beauty, these elements will be part of our judgment. I heard somewhere like some Nobel Nobel Prize winners prefer neat, beautiful equations, because they really picture reality as it is. Well, yeah, about like a beautiful and elegant, whether it's an equation or statement or we know whatever form you're theorizing in that just feels right and deep. And then there's this great philosophical question about why should we prefer simpler theories. I couldn't reality be messy. Martin. Can you hear me now. Yes, we do. Okay, welcome back. Can we talk a bit more about the ontology ideology distinction because probably that's paves the way to theoretic virtues. So, the ontology ideology distinction as I guess I understand it is, if you think about our best theory of the world. There's various terms that our best theory might use. And I'd say any terms that that theory is using, we can speak of as being part of the ideology of the theory. But then there's going to be particular terms used in the theory that are referring terms. And those referring terms on at least a sort of fairly orthodox we kind of think of as a kind of model theoretic picture of reference on which terms referred objects in the world. Those referring terms are going to refer to things in the ontology to things in the world. So I think that ontology is what's in the world. The ontology is our best way to talk about it, which will include referring to the things in the world but might also include things like certain logical connectives that might not correspond to entities, and things like that like it might be that presumably our best theory will have to have like, you know, and and or and other, you know, and other other other other logical connectives in it but you could think that those are entities in some way but you might just think those are just those are just terms that we need to talk about the entities. I like the picture so you have the ideology, which is your body of language that talks about the ontology reality. Now, I think Ted Cider has something on that as well so you need our coin for that matter you need to have a balance of your ideology and your ontology. If you have too much ontology, little ideology, and that's a bad theory. If you have too much ontology, sorry, ideology in a little ontology, then that's also bad theory. So where do you get the balance here. Yeah, so there's this kind of picture which we get from quine that ontology and ideology trade off in the sense that if you want to try and do without certain entities in your ontology. Often it just sort of, this is a kind of the kind of provisional thing where you just have to try it, and you see what happens, and it just happens that often, you have to introduce all sorts of new terms to get to avoid referring to, to certain entities that you didn't want to refer to. So that's the idea that there there there seems to be this kind of fairly consistent trade off between ontology and ideology. Okay, so how does you have a paper on Occam's razor, we're calling it Occam's laser instead of a razor. So it's a laser. So what's doing the work there in your, your, your idea and getting into the fundamental metaphysics. Occam's razor is this classical principle that says, don't multiply entities without necessity, and it's usually read by people as supporting kind of radically minimalist ontologies do you want to pause it as little as possible in the world so maybe we could, for instance just to illustrate like maybe we could just pause it subatomic particles and nothing else. No, nothing bigger no tables no chairs no persons, because hey if you know where all the particles are maybe in some sense that's, you know that's that's all you need to explain any to explain anything else. Whereas the laser is this rival principle that says, instead of saying don't multiply entities without necessity, it says don't multiply fundamental entities without necessity, but it allows that you can help yourself to believing in derivative metaphysics, and the basic idea as well. If you have the fundamental basis for something else that's something else kind of comes along for free from the from its fundamental basis, maybe a good way to see the difference between these views is to think is to bring an ideology to think about what these principles would look like with respect to ideology or conceptual economy. So you could have a principle that says, don't multiply ideology without necessity, or don't multiply concepts without necessity, or you could have a different principle that says, don't multiply primitive concepts without necessity, but help yourself to define concepts because if you can define them they're free. And I think if you think about how things go on the conceptual side. Well, our very best conceptual systems get by with a handful of primitive notions, they try to minimize the primitive notions, but they try to put those primitive notions to great use and in defining a wealth of defined notions on that basis. So you have a system, a compact system of primitives. So you're working with three primitive notions. And it turns out, oh hey, and you, and you've, you've discovered that you can, from those three primitive notions, define up these 10 interesting defined notions. And now you discover, oh, I can define up an 11th interesting defined notion. So you have a great, like a bit of progress for your theory hey you figured out how to define something else useful. But if you were worried about minimizing the number of concepts you'd have to think like, oh no, I've suffered a setback. I've admitted a new concept into my system, but rather the appropriate attitude there is this is great. I've kept my sparse basis of only three primitive concepts, and I've shown how to put them to more use. So we want to take the same attitude on the ontological side. We want to keep if we can a sparse and minimal basis of fundamental entities. But if we can put those fundamental entities to use in showing how they can ground further things like tables and chairs and chemicals and persons and minds, then that's a great advance. So I'd love to, you know, see a theory that posited a sparse I would say maybe I would say physical and I might also say kind of holistic or monistic basis, but use that sparse basis to give an account of all else that there is on that basis. So that needs to see your view grounding theory. So this is the big idea that you have and of course priority monism, but you have rivals as well. So Ted Sider has his view about fundamentality, which uses fundamental semantics or in reference magnetism to get at the fundamentals. So we have Dave Shaw versus crucibility thesis, and he's identifying the compact class of concepts that you use to derive everything else. But how is your view different from these proposed views in metaphysics. That's a really hard question and I can say a little bit but it's kind of scratching. This is just scratching the surface of some of the differences. So with Sider, I'd say, loosely speaking that the main differences, grounding is a little more ontological and his metaphysical semantics is a little more languagey. That's kind of back there right but that's a, and what I mean, maybe the, the best way to put it is in sort of a, the kind of upshots that these approaches tend to have. So Sider tends to go, he goes in for one of these very sort of radically minimalist ontologies he, he speculates that maybe all there, all that exists in the most fundamental sense that exists are just space time points and sets. And then when we get to claims like there are tables or there are persons. So he'll want to say that those claims are true in English, but he'll want to so just take, you know, you know, take like here is a cup. Sider will want to say that's a true claim of English, but he won't want to say that it's true because there's a cup in the world. Rather what he'll want to give us a kind of metaphysical semantic treatment of how the space time points have to be for that, for that English claim to come out true. Whereas on a ground theory, I just want to say there's a cup in the world. It's true, because, well, cup refers to this thing in the world and there is one in the, in the location. And that issue in the context. So, um, that's the, I think the primary difference between grounding theory and metaphysical semantics. And they tend to differ with respect to how much one puts in the ontology and how much one wants to handle in the on the semantic side of things. With respect to scrutability a kind of just like first pass at what Thomas is up to, is the idea of what's a kind of minimal. What's a kind of informational basis that you could use to figure out all there is all the all the information about the world. What packet of information could you use to recover the rest. And I would want to say as a metaphysician that among the things that needs to be in any packet of information you would use to recover or screwed the rest of the world, there need to be metaphysical principles. So to take the case of parts and holes, suppose you were given the information about where all the particles are. Would you know whether there were any tables. No, I think no, because unless you're also told when parts compose a whole. You don't know yet just from knowing where the particles are, whether you're in a kind of myriological neolist scenario on which there are just particles arranged table wise but no tables, or in a robust compositional scenario, in which in addition to the particles arranged table wise, there's also the table that they compose. This leads to a big difference with respect to philosophy of mind. So Chalmers puts his views to work among other things and defending a kind of dualist picture on which the physical isn't enough information to figure out what kind of conscious experience people are having. So I want to say, I actually agree with that, but just it's in the part whole case where I want to say well we also need to have metaphysical principles like when parts compose a whole to figure out whether there are any tables. I would want to say that in addition to the information let's say that where all the particles are some physical information. We also need principles about, in this case not principles about how parts compose holes, but principles about how physical systems generate minds to know where the minds are and what kind of experiences they're having. What I think grounding theory involves is these metaphysical principles that could be fed into a scrutability based if one wants and when fed into a scrutability base can be used to defend physicalism. Are you a physicalist. Yeah, I am. I'm not a dualist because, again, for Dave Chalmers he would take in the quality as part of the fundamental structure, then he'll derive everything else from there. So the physical the quality there. Actually his base is quite what do you call it ecumenical it's friendly to everyone you could arrange the stuff there. So grounding is your key idea, but grounding plus priority monism. What's that about. So, well priority monism is a particular claim made within a grounding theoretic framework about what's most fundamental at least to concrete reality. And so the claim the the priority monist claim is that among the concrete is that what's most fundamental to concrete reality is the cosmos as a whole. And you and I and tables and chairs and particles are derivative fragments of a unified whole. So there's a kind of perspective that a lot of people have that kind of flows naturally from this picture that I was kind of implicitly operating with on which it's sort of subatomic particles at the base that like that's what what's fundamental are a bunch of tiny little particles and bigger things are derivative from these particles. And got a quite standard picture that a lot of us have been trained under this kind of picture and says that the particles themselves are abstractions maybe from, you know, pervasive quantum fields. So this is ultimately kind of a physical question about what we should think is the physical basis of things so this is connecting out to the sciences where you know this does become continuous I think with physical inquiry. But from the monist perspective what's most fundamental is the cosmos as a whole as a single unified holistic entity. And other things are there and this is the priority or the ground theoretic aspect of the view so this isn't the kind of monism that says there is only the one and nothing else exists. Yeah, so I was thinking about pantheism here when you were talking about monism, but it's not the view. It's not your view. Right. Right now the monist view is, and there's different ways of being a monist so the particular maybe I should say the particular version of priority monism that I would go for is a is a is a physicalist view on which there's this physical cosmos that maybe began with the big bang with this explosion. And everything else is a kind of a fragment of this unified thing that exploded at the beginning and continues to evolve through time. But this is not the kind of space time warm that David Lewis was thinking about. So it's a big blob where we are all in. Well, I mean, even I mean on a Lewis picture, we can have space time worms for bigger and smaller things. So, I'm looking for a good prop here.  And you might think, and this is the kind of non monistic or pluralist perspective that like the pages are more fundamental and the whole book is kind of some kind of construction based on the pages and the Mona and we can think of both of them as space time so there's the sort of the big fat worm, the little skinny worms or threads. And so from a Mona's perspective, we can think of shift metaphors a little bit. The cosmos is like a single integrated tapestry. And instead of thinking of the tapestry as built out of threads, we think of the threads as things that you can pull out abstract away from the tapestry but the tapestry comes first. Interesting. Martin, you have any follow up. Yes, I've got a question about the relation between grounding and modality. Can we reduce one to each other. I doubt it, but I'm more skeptical of the reduction of grounding to modality than I am of the reduction of modality to ground in. So, people thought and this was something that I see in people like my hero David Lewis, that notions of reduction and dependence could all were best understood in modal terms maybe in terms like in terms of supervenience in terms that like, you know, can't vary these without varying those. One of the main arguments that grounding theorists have given against that picture is the idea that grounding is hyper intentional and cuts finer than any modal distinction can cut. So, for instance, to go to the realm of pure sets. We might think that we say we believe in sets, and we think well there's the empty set. And there's also it's singleton, the set who's one and only member is the empty set. And if you think about the way sets get generated stage wise sort of starting from the empty set and then building up recursively from there. The empty set comes in at stage zero, and the singleton of the empty set gets generated out of the empty set at stage one. So it's natural from that kind of perspective to think that the singleton of the empty set is grounded in or dependent upon the empty set. But given that the pure sets exists at all worlds, you're never going to get any modal distinction between them they're just going to be like locked in constant across all worlds. So that's, I mean there's more to say but that's a kind of first pass reason for thinking that grounding is just cutting things more finely than any modal distinctions can cut. In the other direction we've seen people like keep fine talked about various reductions of modality. So what I've seen in all the attempts to reduce modality to grounding is there's the quantifiers involved are always possible list quantifiers that have to range not just over all the actual objects but over all the possible objects. I want to talk more about some of these particular theories. I haven't seen a way that satisfies me of trying to reduce modality to grounding that I doesn't that I don't think secretly uses, you know, modal notions of like possible objects. Yeah, we talk about impossible objects right. This is a different brand so if you plug in impossibilities there, how would grounding handle these things. So how would we speak of the grounds for impossible objects. Well, if you think that there are impossible objects. Then you've got this question of whether they're fundamental or whether they're grounded in anything deeper. And so one way I mean there's different ways of try one way that I've seen people try to construct impossible worlds, which would I guess be where the impossible objects are housed. One is by starting with the possible worlds and then like gluing them together, you know, doing various operations where you take like a plurality of possible worlds. And that would be a ground theoretic account of how you got the impossible objects out of the possible objects through those operations. We'd have to know where the possible objects came from. But one way of understanding impossible and impossibilia is from starting with the possibility and doing some doing some operations on. You know, the possible objects out of the possible objects through those operations, we'd have to know where the possible objects came from but you know again like you can treat them all as, you know, fundamental and it's kind of a modal realist perspective, or you could think the possible the merely possible and non actual objects as derivative and then we'd have to think about how that could work. The impossibilia is primitive, like grand priests perhaps. Okay, so as an active research area in philosophy, what do you think is metaphysics and meta metaphysics heading. Right, so it's hard to read the tea leaves, you know, but it's hard to know what the future holds. The surrounding has been at the center of meta metaphysical inquiry for a decade. People are still really interested in a fun, you know, you have to think that at some point people are going to move on to other topics, but it's it's hard to guess what's what's next. I think, if I have to guess I think one topic that I've seen a lot of people getting interested in that I myself have gotten quite interested in is social ontology, where people want to do something that maybe has among other things has some sort of practical application to sort of real world political issues and they want to get into the metaphysics of the social world. Yeah, gender class, how do you ground that to fiscal reality, perhaps, so I think that's a new project. Whether grounding is even the right tool there or that's a debate too. Okay, so on a more personal note, you've been one of the best philosophers that we had, so you have encountered a lot of things in your career. So what's your advice for those who want to get into or pursue an academic career in philosophy. So there's real cause famous advice to a young poet, which is basically, don't do it. And if you find that like, stop yourself and you really just have to, then run away again and still don't do it. And if you find you just can't stop doing it then okay. I mean, philosophy is hard. It's hard to get sort of get jobs in academia. It's very demanding intellectually. I think it's hard. But that said, I'd say that if you really have the passion and you sort of can't but do it, the main two things, my words of my main two words of wisdom are the first thing that I would say is to treasure the questions and not the answers because you're not going to get the answers but the questions themselves are fascinating so appreciate the questions for what they are. And the second maybe somewhat related piece of wisdom I'd pass on is enjoy the process and not the results. And what I mean by that is a lot of philosophy at the professional level is the craft of writing and revising papers. So a lot of your professional activity if you become an academic philosopher is going to be pouring over, you know, the seventh draft of a paragraph to try to get it to say the right thing. Learn to love that. Some people, you know, they find they find that arduous and hard to bear and they just want this like polish gem to emerge from their from them without without their revision work and maybe there's a few people whose minds are so extraordinary that that can happen. For most of us our best work only comes through an arduous revision process and so there's a craft of writing and revising to be practiced every day and you have to, you have to love that. What is a career in philosophy worth it. It was worth it for me it's been worth it for me I hope it will continue to be worth it for me. I've had an incredible experience I feel like I've had the opportunity to engage with some of the deepest questions in the world and speak to some of engage with some of the deepest minds. Wonderful. I also think I've been incredibly lucky and had a lot of privilege to get to where I am in philosophy. I don't know if I feel like whether it's worth it for everyone I don't, I don't know I think that might depend on how things go, but I wouldn't do it any other way myself. Thanks again Professor Shaffer for sharing your time with us. On behalf of Martin Vatschek, thank you. Thank you. Join us again for another episode of philosophy and what matters where we discuss things that matter from a philosophical point of view. Cheers.


Seth, for you, you got to go in early in that first half. What allowed you to kind of find your offensive flow? Just got some opportunities. We were moving the ball, sharing the ball. So we were running good offense. And I was trying to take advantage of it. That's pretty much it. And for the Charlotte Hornets, they went on that run that second half and changed things. What did you see that allowed them to go on their run? That kind of stagnant. Some bad defense led to bad offense and some bad offense led to bad defense. So it was just slowed down offensively. And I mean, they made us pay for the three-point line, dropping the ball, some man won. So we just got to stick to it for 48 minutes. Did you ever see your dad much when he's in town calling the games or really? That's like a pregame shed, it's upstage or wise. Yeah, he comes up to the house the night before. He hangs out.  You ever actually fired up to play against the Hornets as that's like folks that never did? Not really, it's fun when we're back at home when some of my family there get to come to the game. But I mean, it's played against them enough. Now it's kind of the usual. But it's always getting my dad's in the building, calling the games. I'm sure he has fun with it. On the Hornets broadcast, he said that your jumper reminds him more of his shop, more than your brother's stuff. I know you've seen a lot of film. You've seen it. Would you agree with that? I'd agree. I'd agree. I mean, a lot of our mannerisms are the same, I think our release form is a little different. But I think anything before and after looks very similar because we look alike and we move alike. So sometimes when I watch film, and I watch his old film, it's kind of scary too. Do you go to the garden last night to see Duke? No, no, I didn't get over there. Yeah, I didn't get over there. When I think they shot about 60% in the fourth quarter, in your mind was this, was that more just kind of you guys, human nature, taking your foot off the gas a little bit, you had a big early lead, 20-some odd points? I don't know what it was. I don't know. I said, some of my bad offense led to bad defense. We're playing slow, stagnant, and mid-shots, long rebounds. They getting out and playing fast. I mean, I think we've got to play good basketball for 48 minutes. I don't think it should be about just one night. We've got to play good basketball because we sneak out of here with a win tonight. That's not going to be good for the long haul. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you were on the floor when you guys went small when Kyrie went in and they came out. And it was, I think you, Kevin, Ky, Joe, and Royce, and Ky set the screen on Kevin. Had to dump off for the pull-off. Just what does it do when Kevin and Ky are doing a pick and roll together and you guys are kind of like being able to play off of them? I mean, they get a lot of attention. It's just we got to, when we go small like that, we should be able to get a good shot at every possession. I mean, they're going, if they show the multiple bodies, we got plenty of shooting, so we should get an open shot or they should be able to work one-on-one and get a high percentage shot at the same time. So we got to figure it out. I mean, we got to get better at it, just find a way to create good offense at every possession. I know that you guys are still getting guys back, you know, being healthy and hopefully getting back into the rotation. But, Jock, I mentioned how this home stand was very needed. Would you agree that it was been very needed time to get the practice and get that comfortability just being back home? We haven't had practice, but I don't know what I said, but it's good to get to take advantage of the schedule. We knew November was a tough schedule while it's first been on the road so much and you know, it's always going to come around in the NBA, come back to you, so these are important games no matter who we're playing against to not only get wins, but to get comfortable playing the brand of basketball and I mean, obviously, like you said, it's tough with guys in and out, but we got to figure it out as we go along.