December 13, 2006

Nida-Rumelin on grasping phenomenal properties

One of the most interesting papers in the Alter and Walter collection is Martine Nida-Rümelin's "Grasping Phenomenal Properties", which gives a new argument against the materialist thesis that phenomenal properties are physical properties. Nida-Rümelin's argument uses the two-dimensional apparatus at various points in an auxiliary role, but she argues that her argument requires weaker and less controversial assumptions than my two-dimensional argument.  Here I'll look into this a bit.  (It might be worth looking at these two papers first, if you're not familiar with the issues.)

Nida-Rümelin's argument runs roughly as follows.

(1) A person who grasps a property via two distinct concepts is in a position to rationally judge that those concepts are necessarily coextensive.

(2) Phenomenal properties are grasped via phenomenal concepts.

(3) Any physical property can be grasped via a physical concept, by someone with relevant physical background knowledge.

(4) No amount of physical background knowledge puts one in a position to rationally judge that a phenomenal concept and a physical concept are necessarily coextensive.
______________________

(5) No phenomenal property is a physical property.

Continue reading "Nida-Rumelin on grasping phenomenal properties" »

May 02, 2006

Soames APA session

The Central APA author-meets-critics session on Scott Soames' book on two-dimensionalism took place a couple of days ago.  Scott's response to my paper is not currently online (update: it's now online).  I've put online a response in turn where I summarize a few of the things Scott said and respond.

The upshot of the discussion of Scott's critical arguments was that Scott agreed that a number of them don't apply to the epistemic two-dimensionalist view that I hold (though he thinks they apply to the view in The Conscious Mind).  His view seems to be that since epistemic two-dimensional semantic values aren't "semantic" contents in his sense (roughly, built into the specification of a public language), he's less concerned to argue against them.  My view is that they can play all the relevant explanatory and analytic roles that I want them to play whether they are "semantic" in this sense or not, so that the core of two-dimensionalism ends up being untouched.

As for the discussion of Scott's positive view, unsurprisingly he resisted the suggestion that it can be seen as a sort of two-dimensionalism.  The central point of resistance is that he denies the analog in his system of the two-dimensionalist principle E5 from my paper: that a proposition is a priori iff it is true at all epistemically possible world-states.  He thinks that the principle is usually true, but not in the key cases involving 'actually' that I raised in the paper: the proposition [P if actually P] is a priori but false in some epistemically possible world-states.

In discussion I said that I think this view is vulnerable to a criticism analogous to one that Scott raised for Bob Stalnaker.  Bob's view holds that when someone believes that a given paperweight (one that is actually made of wood) is made of plastic, she really endorses epistemic possibilities where some other paperweight is made of wood.  Arguing against Bob, Scott says this seems incorrect: surely she endorses epistemic possible (though metaphysically impossible) world-states with respect to which this paperweight is made of plastic.  The principle seems to be that when one believes a proposition, one thereby endorses world-states where that very proposition is true, and excludes those where it is false.  The same presumably goes for knowledge, and for a priori knowledge: when one knows a priori that P, one thereby rules out a priori world-states where P is false.  But then it follows that if P is a priori knowable, any world-state where P is false can be ruled out a priori, so are not epistemically possible.  So something like principle E5 follows.  Scott needs to deny the thesis that when one believes/knows that P, one thereby excludes world-states in which ~P: although the thesis usually holds, it is false in the special case where P is of the form [Q iff actually Q], and perhaps in other related cases involving 'actually'.  I think this leads to special pleading of the sort that Scott criticized in Bob's view, and undermines some of the coherence and power of the framework of epistemically possible worlds.  The view also opens up a few other cans of worms, discussed in my response.  So I think that a version of the view that accepts something like E5 is much better.

In any case, I note that attenuating the link between apriority and the first dimension by rejecting E5 in certain special cases doesn't suffice to undermine the interpretation of the view as a sort of two-dimensionalism.  After all, most of the 2D systems of the 1970s (Kaplan, Stalnaker, Evans, Davies and Humberstone) have only an attenuated link here that holds in some cases but not others.  So Soames' attenuation of E5 is consistent with seeing the view as at least as two-dimensionalist (in the broad sense) as these paradigmatic versions of the view.  There's a lot more on issues in the vicinity in my response.

February 03, 2006

Scott Soames' Two-Dimensionalism

At the meeting of the Central Division of the APA in Chicago this April, there will be an author-meets-critics session on Scott Soames' book Reference and Description: The Case Against Two-Dimensionalism, with Bob Stalnaker and me as critics and Soames replying.  I've put online my paper for that session: "Scott Soames' Two-Dimensionalism" (the official version for the session is a somewhat abridged version of this).  As the title suggests, one focus of the paper is the portion of the book where Soames turns out, surprisingly enough, to be a sort of two-dimensionalist himself.  There are also some bits responding to Soames' arguments on issues related to descriptivism and context-dependence.  There's not much overlap with my posts from last year on attitude ascriptions, as all that got much too long.  Instead that material has been incorporated into a new paper on a Fregean account of propositions and attitude ascriptions, which I'll be posting here shortly.

October 10, 2005

The Two-Dimensional Argument Against Materialism

I've put a new paper online: "The Two-Dimensional Argument Against Materialism".  An abridged version is forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Mind (edited by Brian McLaughlin), and the whole thing is forthcoming in my book The Character of Consciousness, to be published next year by Oxford University Press.  A fair amount of the material is recycled from my other papers in this vicinity in the last few years, but some of it is new.  This paper is intended to be the definitive version of the two-dimensional argument, being maximally explicit about details and replying to many of the objections that have been raised in the literature in the last ten years or so.  This version is a draft (I have to submit it fairly soon), and there are probably mistakes here and there. Any comments would be appreciated.

March 07, 2005

Soames Chapter 10: De re attitude ascriptions

In the interest of completing the response to Soames' arguments against my analysis of attitude ascriptions, here's a post on Chapter 10. Unlike most of the previous chapters, this chapter is available online (in a slightly older version).  In the first part of the chapter, he gives arguments against "strong" and "weak" two-dimensionalism, mostly focusing on attitude ascriptions.  These arguments correspond pretty closely to the arguments I responded to in the ASU commentary, which shows how my analysis can deal with the various problem cases.  In the last part of the Chapter (pp. 313-324 of the book, and pp. 30-38 of the online version), he gives some further arguments against the "hybrid" view, which is his label for the view that I hold, focusing especially on some issues about de re attitude ascriptions.  I'll address these arguments here.

Continue reading "Soames Chapter 10: De re attitude ascriptions" »

March 05, 2005

Soames Chapter 9: More attitude ascriptions

I've fallen behind on posting about the Soames book, due to various distractions.  I've written up partial entries on Chapter 8 (on Jackson) and on the first half of Chapter 9 (on me), and hope to get back to those shortly.  But for now I'll post about the second half of Chapter 9, which is about my account of attitude ascriptions.  One reason is that I'm giving a talk at UCLA on Wednesday on Soames on 2D, which will probably cover some combination of the material in this entry and the entry on Chapter 7, plus maybe a bit of the ASU talk.

In this chapter Soames gives four detailed arguments against my account.  There are more arguments against it in Chapter 10, but here I'll concentrate on the first four. If you haven't read it already, you might look at the entry on Chapter 7 for background on my analysis.

Continue reading "Soames Chapter 9: More attitude ascriptions" »

February 16, 2005

Soames Chapter 7: Attitude Ascriptions

Chapter 7 of Soames' Reference and Description begins the third and by far the longest section of the book (comprising about 200 pages), devoted to a critique of the "ambitious two-dimensionalism" attributed to Frank Jackson, David Lewis, and me.  (Previous entries: introduction, chapter 4 on Kripke and Kaplan, chapter 5 on Stalnaker. Chapter 6 on Davies and Humberstone was postponed until Martin Davies returns from UCLA in April.)  In this chapter, Soames lays out the main theses of what he takes to be the two main versions of ambitious two-dimensionalism: "strong" and "weak" two-dimensionalism.

Continue reading "Soames Chapter 7: Attitude Ascriptions" »

February 12, 2005

Poll: Two belief ascriptions

Time for an intuition poll.  Huey says to Dewey and Louie, "Let's stipulate that 'Lee' refers to the youngest Chinese spy, if there is one."  In fact there is a youngest Chinese spy, but Huey, Dewey, and Louie have had no direct or indirect interaction with this person.  In conversation with Louie, Dewey makes the following belief ascriptions, the first of which is de dicto and the second of which is de re:

(A1) Huey believes that Lee is the youngest Chinese spy, if anyone is.

(A2) Concerning Lee (the individual who is the youngest Chinese spy): Huey believes of him or her that he or she is the youngest Chinese spy, if anyone is.

Question: What are the truth-values of (A1) and (A2)?  Answers are welcome from anyone who is familiar with the difference between de dicto and de re attitude ascriptions.  Relatively pre-theoretical judgments are especially welcome, though I don't mind getting post-theoretical judgments if they're marked as such.  Comments along with the answers are welcome but optional.  These attitude ascriptions were discussed in my entry on Soames Chapter 4, but if you haven't read that entry already, it's probably best to decide on your answer before reading it.  I'm also interested to hear about people's intuitions about two analogous pairs of ascriptions in which 'believes' is replaced by 'knows', yielding (B1) and (B2), and by 'knows a priori', yielding (C1) and (C2).

February 10, 2005

Soames Chapter 5: Stalnaker's presuppositions

Chapter 5 of Soames' Reference and Description (previous entries: introduction and chapter 4) concerns Stalnaker's two-dimensional framework.  I'm by no means an expert on Stalnaker's system, but Bernard Nickel of MIT was there to help out. There are a few odd features of the chapter: Soames doesn't cite anything by Stalnaker after his 1978 paper 'Assertion', and expresses puzzlement at the relation between Stalnaker's and Kaplan's framework, even though this is something that's been clarified greatly in more recent literature.  Nevertheless, Soames raises an interesting problem for Stalnaker's framework that's worth addressing.

Stalnaker's use of the two-dimensional apparatus is intended in part to explain how utterances such as 'Hesperus is Phosphorus' can be informative.  On Stalnaker's general framework (simplifying slightly), an utterance is informative iff it reduces the "context set" -- the set of contexts compatible with the presuppositions of the speakers.  Here contexts are represented as possible worlds.  But the proposition expressed by 'Hesperus is Phosphorus' is true in all possible worlds.  If an utterance of 'Hesperus is Phosphorus' simply imposes the constraint that this proposition be true in all contexts in the context set, it won't narrow down the context set at all.  So it won't be informative.

Continue reading "Soames Chapter 5: Stalnaker's presuppositions" »

February 04, 2005

Soames Chapter 4: Kripke's error

The reading group on Scott Soames' Reference and Description: The Case Against Two-Dimensionalism (see this entry) has met twice so far. The first meeting covered chapters 1-3, which are mostly just background.  In chapter 3, Soames does consider one of Frank Jackson's arguments for descriptivism, remarking somewhat incredulously that if it works, it is a priori and irrefutable -- prompting Frank's response, "That's an objection?".  At the end of the chapter he also gives initial characterizations of "strong" and "weak" two-dimensionalism, both of which seemed fairly unrecognizable to the two-dimensionalists present. But all that is discussed in more detail later on in the book.

Things get going in chapter 4 on "Roots of Two-Dimensionalism in Kaplan and Kripke".  The main theme here is that while Kaplan and Kripke are the main heroes of the anti-descriptivist revolution, their work contains "errors, slips, and misleading suggestions" that gave too much encouragement to later two-dimensionalists.  Soames points to various errors, but the main "error" for both of Kripke and Kaplan is the suggestion that when a name or a 'dthat'-expression is introduced using a reference-fixing description, this can give rise to contingent a priori knowledge.

Continue reading "Soames Chapter 4: Kripke's error" »

January 22, 2005

Jackson's two-dimensionalism

An excellent conference on Concepts and Conceptual Analysis here at the ANU has just finished.  Lots of interesting talks -- David Braddon-Mitchell on fine-graining two-dimensionalism (into three-dimensionalism!) to handle a priori equivalent but cognitively distinct concepts, Laura Schroeter and John Bigelow on Against Apriori Reductions (arguing against Chalmers and Jackson 2001, by appealing to an "improv" model of concepts), and Anna Wierzbicka on her remarkable project of conceptually analyzing all linguistic expressions into 65 or so conceptual primitives that can be found in all languages.  Also I gave a talk on a different approach to primitive concepts (no paper yet, but here's a Powerpoint version).

Here I'll say a few words about Frank Jackson's talk, which set out his version of two-dimensionalism and made clear a number of differences with my version.  Frank complained that people sometimes assume that he believes everything I believe (except about consciousness), so it's useful to clarify the differences.

Continue reading "Jackson's two-dimensionalism" »

January 19, 2005

Soames on two-dimensionalism

Scott Soames' book Reference and Description: The Case Against Two-Dimensionalism was recently published by Princeton University Press (Amazon has the table of contents).  The book discusses various sorts of two-dimensionalism, but the heart of it is a critique of the sort of "ambitious two-dimensionalism" held by Frank Jackson and by me.  The book has a 70-page chapter arguing against my version of the view, as well as a lot of other relevant material.  There will be a reading group on the book in the coming weeks at the ANU (with Jackson and others involved too), and I'm supposed to be writing a critical notice of the book for Mind.  While working through the book, I'll probably post some reactions to this weblog.

It looks like two chapters of the book are online: Chapter 1 and an old version of Chapter 10.  Those who are interested and haven't seen it already might also look at my piece "Soames on Two-Dimensionalism".  This is a detailed handout from a symposium at Arizona State University last year, where I responded to two talks by Soames, which turn out to correspond fairly closely to Chapters 7 and 10 of his book.  The review article I linked to recently may also give some useful background.

The upshot of my Arizona State piece was that the versions of two-dimensionalism that Soames attacks are versions that no-one accepts (as far as I know), and certainly are quite different from the versions that I favor.  In particular, most of Soames' arguments against two-dimensionalism in those talks were really arguments against certain two-dimensionalist accounts of propositional attitude ascriptions, accounts that I take to be obviously false and that no-one has endorsed in print, to my knowledge.  The good news is that in the book Soames discusses other accounts of attitude ascriptions, in particular giving a number of further arguments against the account that I endorse.  I don't think that two-dimensionalism stands or falls with this (or with any) account of attitude ascriptions, but nevertheless I don't think Soames' arguments against it work.  I'll post something about those arguments in coming weeks, as well as about other more general considerations.

January 14, 2005

New paper: Two-Dimensional Semantics

I've put a new paper online: "Two-Dimensional Semantics".  The paper was written for  the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language, edited by Ernie Lepore and Barry Smith.  It's an overview article with a review of the two-dimensional frameworks of Kaplan, Stalnaker, Evans, and Davies and Humberstone, and a somewhat more detailed outline of the more recent sort of two-dimensionalism defended by me, Frank Jackson, and others.  Connoisseurs who keep up with all of the recent literature won't find too much that's new here, though the final section on objections and replies might be useful.  Those who are less familiar with these issues might find the article to be a useful starting point.

The article is a draft and I'll be revising it shortly.  Comments (on matters big or small, either here or by e-mail) are more than welcome.