Category Archive

Here is something I’ve been thinking about, probably 29 years too late. There’s a certain sort of argument for externalism that goes roughly as follows:

We look at subject S in context C1 and ascribe to them a content clause A. We then imagine S in C2. In that case it would be inappropriate to use A, for reasons to do with the wider social world of A in C2. So, it is the status of the wider social world that controls our ascriptions of content clauses.

There is, of course, an extra step or two needed. (i) We need to hold that when we ascribe distinct content-clauses we are ipso facto attributing distinct mental states. Then we get the result that social environment controls which mental contents we will attribute. (ii) I suppose we also need to hold that it does so legitimately, i.e. that we are inclined in these cases to say that As contents differ that’s because they do differ.

The above argument is Tyler Burge’s in his ‘Individualism and the Mental’ as I read it. I’m sure that people have made the points I’ve just made in the intervening years, but I’d be interested if anybody who happens to be reading this can point me to where.

I’ve been thinking about teleosemantics recently, and reading David Papineau’s 2001 paper ‘The Status of Teleosemantics, or How to Stop Worrying about Swampman’ (Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 79(2):279–289). There was something in it I found odd:

“Wherever the normativity of content comes from, it can’t be from biology, since biology deals only in facts, not prescriptions. Nor is it plausible that biology offers the only way of discerning genuine truth and satisfaction conditions among the large disjunctions of possible causes for beliefs and possible effects of desires.”

To be entirely accurate, he is speaking of other peoples’ views at this point. Immediately afterwards he goes on to endorse these sentiments, though. My question would be, if he accepts this sort of thing is he still a teleosemanticist at all? It looks like the project has been abandoned. If teleology isn’t giving us normativity then why are we interested in it in philosophy of language?

I think I’m going to spend this evening listening to Saul Kripke’s address to the inaugural conference at the centre named for him at CUNY. It’s hard to think of a bigger honour for a philosopher, not just an eponymous conference but a whole institution.

I think that hearing a talk is going to be especially interesting because, while I’ve spent a lot of time with the very conversational style of Naming and Necessity, I don’t believe I’ve actually heard his voice before.

I gave a presentation on David Lewis’ ‘What Experience Teaches’ this morning. He makes use of the notion of information in quite a specialised way and it seems pretty important to his discussion of Jackson’s ‘Knowledge Argument’ against materialism. Some issues came up that I thought I’d mention here in case anybody has any helpful thoughts.

The picture of information Lewis paints is of something that narrows down the possible worlds that might be actual. If we take a simple case, when I learn that the Earth has one moon I am getting information. I know that I am not in one of the worlds where it has any number of moons not equal to one. Lewis goes in for this quite strongly, as he denies that anything that repeats previous information under a new guise can count as information. If it doesn’t eliminate any new possibilities then it is not just not new information but it’s not really information at all. At least that’s how I read him.

I had a thought about this. On this picture it would seem that what is, and is not, information is relative to what a particular person already knows. If I have read a book with the same content as the book you’re now recommending to me, then the book does not (for me) contain information. It might for someone else.

Is this really a consequence of Lewis’ view, and would it matter if it was?

I thought I would post about this because I like the word. It denotes the view, apparently held by David Chalmers, that all matter has mental properties. At least in some latent form.

It occurred to me to wonder what exactly makes this view distinct from pretty much any view of the mind that’s held today. Suppose that I have mental properties, and suppose that that’s something to do with my brain in some significant way. My brain is made up of molecules. Each molecule could, I presume, be replaced with another (token-)identical molecule and the whole thing would carry on working. So it looks like any molecule has the property of being a potential component of a system that has mental properties. I would have thought that most people will agree with all that, so is everybody a panprotopsychist?

This is on David Chalmers’ site already, but I like it enough to reproduce it. I find it funny that so many serious philosophers spend so much time talking about zombies.