A Question about Brian Weatherson's Naturalness Constraint
On rereading Brian's counterexamples paper, I'm not so sure anymore I understand him correctly: Are the semantic values of predicates that are supposed to be fairly natural (unions of ranges of) C-intensions or (unions of ranges of) A-intensions? Philosophical analyses usually spell out A-intensions: they tell us that pain is what occupies the pain role, or that water is the watery stuff, not that pain is C-fiber firing and water H2O. So if the naturalness of semantic values speaks in favour of simple analyses, it should be naturalness of A-intensions. On the other hand, the fish example makes more sense if it is understood as talking about C-intensions (which would also match a suggestion sometimes made by Jackson, e.g. on p.95 of "From H2O to water", that we might analyse "water" as something like "the most natural kind roughly meeting such and such conditions"). The A-intension of "fish" presumably isn't all too natural, among other things it contains whales at worlds where the fishy animals of our acquaintance are mostly whales.