I Asked The Process Philosopher Matt Segall to Correct the Public Record. He Started Another Debate With Me Instead. The Public Record Remains Uncorrected.

He acknowledged the misattribution, but the original article remains uncorrected, the dependent critique unrevised, and the questions I actually asked still unanswered.

has already acknowledged the central attribution error in his response to me.

In his erratum, Matt wrote that he had “collapsed the two-way conditional structure” of my argument and my “explicit agnosticism regarding the primitive intrinsic character of causality.” He also acknowledged that this collapse should have been identified as his own argumentative move rather than attributed to me.

I appreciated that admission.

What I asked for next was not another round of metaphysics. It was a correction of the public record.

Substack Repost Notice: This is an archival copy of my substack post. Some formatting may not display correctly on our website. See the original post here: https://sweetlyrational.substack.com/p/i-asked-the-process-philosopher-matt

Matt’s original article, Experience Is Not a Predicate, was partly a response to my essay I Wanted Erik Svensson’s Argument for Physicalism to Be Stronger. So I Tried to Build One Myself. After reading his response, I documented the attribution problem in detail in “Experience Is Not a Predicate”: I Never Made the Argument He Rebutted. My Question Remains Unanswered.

That longer article was deliberately documentary. I put my wording beside Matt’s reconstruction, preserved the conditionals and qualifications, and traced where an open question had become a position attributed to me.

After Matt conceded the error, I wrote a shorter follow-up: Process Philosopher Matthew Segall Admitted He Attributed a Position to Me That I Did Not Hold. Why Is the Argument Still Standing?.

That article ended with a specific request.

I asked Matt to correct the original article itself by removing or revising the passages that attribute positions to me that I did not hold.

I asked him to re-audit the criticisms that depended on those attributions and revise or withdraw whatever no longer survived the correction.

I asked him to place a clear correction at the top of the article, before new readers encountered the mistaken reconstruction.

And because the original article had already been distributed to his subscribers, I asked him to publish the correction through the same subscriber channel, clearly stating what he had misattributed, what I had actually argued, and what parts of the original critique required revision.

My wording was explicit:

“I am not asking you to retract your disagreement with me. I am asking you to correct the public record, then disagree with the position I actually argued.”

As of this writing, that requested repair has not happened.

The original article has not been revised in the way I asked. The misattributing passages have not been removed or rewritten. The dependent critique has not been publicly re-audited. A correction has not been placed at the top of the article before the disputed framing. And the correction has not been sent through the same subscriber channel that distributed the original article.

Instead, Matt began another philosophical argument.

In a new response, he wrote:

“my sense of what’s transpired at this stage is that you are reading my critique as a claim about your ontology”

He then argued that the form of my question itself presupposes that experience is a predicate or detachable characteristic.

That is a separate argument. It may be worth debating. We have, in fact, continued debating it.

But it does not perform the correction I asked for.

It is also worth recording that this newer objection was not answering a position I had only clarified afterward. In the article Matt was responding to, I had already distinguished his withdrawn attribution from his surviving categoreal objection. I had already stated that the factorization itself might fail. I had already written that analytical distinguishability does not imply ontological separability. I had already said that if subtraction changes the target, the comparison should move to whole rival accounts instead.

When Matt raised the predicate objection again, I pointed those passages out directly in the same thread:

“I repeatedly leave open that the factorization itself may fail.”

“I explicitly state that analytical distinguishability does not imply ontological separability.”

“My framework says that if subtraction changes the target, stop subtracting and compare whole rival accounts instead.”

Matt replied, “Helpful clarifications,” and the discussion moved into the content required of whole rival accounts, powers theories, dispositional causation, and Whitehead’s identification of actuality with felt inheritance.

That discussion is continuing.

I am deliberately not adjudicating it here.

This article concerns a much simpler question: what did I ask Matt to do after he admitted that his original article attributed a position to me that I did not hold, and did he do it?

The answer is straightforward.

I asked for the error to be corrected where the error appears.

I asked for the downstream argument to be re-audited.

I asked for the correction to appear before new readers encounter the misattribution.

I asked for the people who received the original article to have a realistic opportunity to receive the correction through the same distribution channel.

And then I invited Matt to disagree with me as strongly as he wanted.

Instead, the original public record remains substantially as it was, while our philosophical disagreement has moved into another branch.

Those are two different tasks.

A new argument does not revise an old attribution. A reply in a comment thread does not alter the wording that thousands of earlier readers already received. An erratum does not automatically tell prior readers what changed, and it does not by itself determine which dependent arguments survive the admitted error.

That was the entire reason for my request.

When an argument has been built against a position its author later acknowledges was misattributed, the correction has to propagate far enough to reach the argument that depended on it.

I am not asking Matt to agree with me.

I am not asking him to stop defending Whitehead.

I am not asking him to concede that my philosophical argument succeeds.

I am asking for something prior to all of that: correct the position attributed to me in the article, publicly identify what changed, re-audit what depended on the mistake, and give the audience that received the error a realistic chance to receive the correction.

Then we can keep the debate going.

In fact, we already are.

But the philosophical debate moving forward does not make the provenance problem disappear behind us.