Wolfgang Schwarz

Lewis on meaning and fundamental O-terms

I thought after finishing my PhD thesis I would spend less time thinking and writing about Lewis for a change. But just then, Brian started his Lewis blog raising all kinds of interesting issues, like how to handle theoretical terms in multiply realised theories. I think Lewis's early suggestion to treat the terms as empty in those cases is much worse than he realised (than he realised even later, when he dropped the suggestion). I hope to say more about that later.

If it turns out that I'm Leverrier's wife

What would you say if it turns out that the watery stuff in our rivers and lakes doesn't actually consist of H2O, but of XYZ: would you say that water consists of H2O or XYZ?

What would you say if it turns out that you are Leverrier's wife living in 1845 and the heavenly body your husband calls "Neptune" is not a planet, but a spaceship: would you say that Neptune is a spaceship or a planet?

There's something odd about the second question.

I am disposed to assent to certain sentences under certain conditions, to "it's raining" if it's raining, etc. For each sentence, this determines a function from conditions -- sets of centered worlds -- to truth values. (If I am disposed to assent to S under condition C, that doesn't mean I assent to S in all C-worlds. I need only do so in the closest C-worlds. I am not disposed to assent to "it's raining" under the condition that it's raining and I am halluzinating that it doesn't rain.)

Some tricky counterfactuals

Sometimes, a counterfactual is true even though the consequent is false in the closest world where the antecedent is true:

1) If Hurricane Katrina hadn't hit the town with 200 km/h, completely destroying our house, we would be at home now, watching TV.

Presumably, at the closest worlds where Hurricane Katrina doesn't hit the town with 200 km/h and completely destroys the house, it hits the town a little faster or slower, still completely destroying the house. Even at the closest worlds where the hurricane doesn't completely destroy the house, it destroys it almost completely, still preventing the TV event.

Influence and Backwards Causation

About half a minute ago, I've poured tea into this cup. In a few seconds, I will take a sip. What if I had taken a sip a minute earlier? I wouldn't have taken a sip of tea from an empty cup: that is impossible. So there would have been tea in the cup a minute ago. How did it get there? Maybe I would have poured it in earlier. Or maybe it would have tunnelled directly from the pot into the cup. Or maybe the tea would have just materialized out of thin air. Some of these counterfactuals do not sound very plausible, but let's assume that for the kind of counterfactuals relevant to causation, they are all equally good so that there is no fact of the matter about how the tea got into the cup at the closest world where I take the sip a minute earlier: it does so differently at different worlds that are equally close. (See Lewis, "Counterfactual Dependence and Time's Arrow" for the standards of evaluating such counterfactuals, and "Are we free to break the laws?" for the indeterminacy of divergence miracles.)

Are logical truths true?

1. Hesperus is identical to Phosophorus.
2. By modal logic, .
3. Therefore, Hesperus is necessarily identical to Phosphorus.

1. Sometimes, one is obliged to do things that are not allowed.
2. By deontic logic, .
3. Therefore, sometimes one is obliged to things that are both allowed and not allowed.

1. Necessarily, if the moon essentially consists of green cheese, then it actually consists of green cheese.
2. By provability logic, .
3. Therefore, the moon essentially consists of green cheese.

1. It is now 20 seconds past 19:00 hours.
2. It is now 30 seconds past 19:00 hours.
3. If it is now 30 seconds past 19:00 hours, it is not now 20 seconds past 19:00 hours.
4. By propositional logic, .
5. Therefore, the moon is made of green cheese.

What's wrong with these arguments? They are invalid: their premises are true, their conclusion false. In each case, the fallacy is to assume that a principle valid in some formal system is also valid when translated into English.

Truthmaking and Analytic Combinatorialism

Roughly, the principle of recombination says that anything can coexist and fail to coexist with anything else. But that's too strong: things do have essential extrinsic properties; if Kripke's origin is essential to Kripke, Kripke cannot fail to coexist with his ancestors. However, a perfect intrinsic duplicate of Kripke could fail to coexist with Kripke's ancestors. So less roughly, the principle of recombination goes somehow like this:

For any things in any possible world there is a world which contains any number of perfect intrinsic duplicates of all those things and nothing else (i.e. nothing distinct from all these duplicates).

What is a perfect intrinsic duplicate? Something that has exactly the same intrinsic properties as the original. What is an intrinsic property? A property that belongs to objects independently of what exists and goes on around them. The instantiation of an intrinsic property in some region of a world is independent of the instantiation of intrinsic properties in other regions.

Narrow Content Defined Widely

Some philosophers seem to believe that narrow content must be defined without resort to external objects, leaving only bizarre options like phenomenalism, conceptual role semantics and global descriptivism. But that's wrong. Narrow content can and should be defined by external causal relations just like wide content.

By narrow content, I mean a kind of mental content that doesn't much depend on the subject's environment. Completely narrow content is altogether intrinsic to the subject. But hardly anyone believes in completely narrow content. The question is whether there is an interesting kind of content shared between my intentional states and the states of my twin on twin earth -- and those of swampman and those of a brain in a vat.

Beta-Blogger 4

I've been working on several other websites this summer, one of which needed a blog. After struggling with Wordpress for several hours, I gave up and worked a little more on my own script instead. So here's a new version.

Monadic and Intrinsic Properties

I believe that the so-called problems of intrinsic change and accidental intrinsic properties are real problems. But I believe that their names are misleading, and that they have nothing to do with whether or not we construe properties as sets of things or as functions from worlds and times to sets of things.

Suppose we do the latter, and we also endorse counterpart theory and temporal parts theory. The property of being bent is a function that maps world-time pairs to sets of things. These things are temporal parts of world-bound individuals, ordinary fusions of particle segments, just like us, except that they are smaller along the time axis and all bent. This is a perfectly reasonable and common-sensical view, I believe (but of course I'm biased), and I don't think Lewis has any reason to reject it as turning properties into relations. There is after all a simple equivalence between being bent construed as a function and being bent construed as a Lewisian set: the set is the union of the range of the function; the function indexes all members of the set by their world and time.

Blogger upgrade

I'm updating the software behind this weblog. If everything looks broken in the next half our or so, that's the reason.

Update: OK, done. If you notice any problems, please let me know.