Wolfgang Schwarz

You're right that there's a problem here. If one takes intuitions about the adicy of properties/predicates to have strong evidential value, then there's a problem about 'uncle'. I think for Lewis intrinsics are a bigger problem because they are connected to change, and perhaps to naturalness. But in my impression (more from talking to people than the literature) there isn't really a consensus on what the problem of temporary intrinsics is.

You should check out Ryan Wasserman's paper, titled "The Problem of Temporary Extrinsics". It's currently unpublished, but available online at his webpage.

http://fas-philosophy.rutgers.edu/~wasserman/homepage.html

Hm. I don't think Wasserman addresses the question I'm interested in. He argues that if the perdurantist solution is to carry over to the temporary extrinsic property of being a philosopher it leads to exactly the same problems as the endurantist solution.

I don't find his argument very convincing though, mostly because it crucially depends on the assumption that stages of persons can't themselves be persons. I don't see why not (i.e. I don't see why "person" is temporally maximal). Moreover, even if this were true, it doesn't sound too implausible to me that persons are strictly speaking not philosophers simpliciter but only philosophers at times. In fact, I'd say that sounds quite intuitive. (I also don't understand how restricting quantifiers can turn a polyadic property into a monadic property, as Wasserman claims in ?4).

Anyway, Wasserman doesn't discuss the general problem of temporary extrinsics. I'm not even sure one couldn't find problems similar to the one he discusses in which only intrinsic properties figure. I think it is clear that the perdurantist answer can't account for all temporary extrinsics. To use the example from my other post, the fact that the big bang (Cambridge-)changed from being unknown in 1900 to being well-known in 1960 can hardly be explained by reference to temporal parts of the big bang existing in 1900 and 1960 respectively. Another example, familiar from McTaggart, is the "change" from an event being present to it being past. A perdurantist has to have something more to say about change than just his temporal parts story. (And if "being a philosopher" were a problem, he could perhaps use this "something more" to account for that case as well.)

BTW, I don't think any of this is a problem for perdurantism. Endurantists too have to say something about extrinsic change. And most endurantist accounts of intrinsic change also don't easily carry over to all such cases. But none the worse for that. One might say that extrinsic and in particular Cambridge change really seems to be different from intrinsic change, so why must a single account explain both?

Still, whatever has to be said for extrinsic change over and above the ordinary perdurantist and endurantist stories may perhaps be applied to intrinsic change as well. But oddly nobody (except perhaps Lowe) seems ever to have done that.

I actually asked Lewis about this once. He maintained that the key intuition in the debate was that shape is a property, not a relation. That is, having a certain shape is a matter of how something is in and of itself, independent of anything else. Being an uncle, however, is obviously a relation. Whether something is an uncle depends on what else exists. If being an uncle turns out to be a relation to persons AND times, that not such a big surprise, since we already know it's relational anyway. But if being bent, for example, turns out relational, that's a problem. So I guess his claim was that we need to respect the intuition that shapes really are properties and that we don't need to respect the intuition (if it is one) that being an uncle is a two-place relation rather than a three-place relation. I'm not saying this is a plausible position, but it's the position Lewis wanted to take.

Ryan, many thanks for the comment! I suspected something like this, though I think it makes Lewis's position look even less convincing.

(I'm a bit embarrassed about the dismissive tone of my comments on your paper, which I only read very superficially. I guess I should be more careful talking about people who might actually drop by a few days later...)

Can I just say I'm stunned how bad my tournament picks have been? I can still do OK as long as I get the next like 30 games right, but ugh. Oh well, here's some interesting links while I watch my bracket turn to dust. John Holbo on imaginative resistance. Wo on the problem of temporary extrinsics. David Edelstein says that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is the best movie he's seen in a decade. It looked OK from...