In section 24.D of his "Replies and systematic expositions" in the Schilpp volume, Carnap argues that every theory can be split into a component "representing the factual content of the theory", and another component serving as "analytic meaning postulates [...] for the theoretical terms". In fact, he doesn't speak about every theory, but it seems that what he says is true in general.
Take everything you believe about water, and call that your water theory. Your theory presumably contains things like "water fills our lakes and rivers", "water boils at around 100 °C under normal conditions", "water consists of H2O", and so on. All that is plainly empirical. Now the factual component of your theory, according to Carnap, is its Ramsey sentence: the theory with all occurrences of "water" replaced by a variable and prefixed by an existential quantifier binding that variable. The analytic meaning postulate then is the material conditional of the Ramsey sentence as antecedent and the theory itself as consequent. Let's call that the Carnap conditional of the theory.
Tim Williamson argues that no interesting conditions are such that if they obtain, then one is in a position to know that they obtain. I'll try to show that his argument fails for all conditions for which one can only non-inferentially believe that they obtain if they really do obtain. It seems to me that many interesting conditions -- probably including feeling cold and knowing that one feels cold -- are of this kind. I haven't checked the secondary literature, so what I'm going to say is probably old. Anyway, here goes.
There's been some comment spam here recently. I've made a few changes so that if your comment contains markup or an URL, you'll now have to confirm the (first) submission. Hope that doesn't cause any problems.
Long ago, I worried about how the Ramsey-Carnap-Lewis account of theoretical terms could be applied to predicates. I noticed two reasons why Lewis's proposal to just turn the predicates into singular terms ("Instead of [...] 'F ---', for instance, we can use '--- has F-hood'", HTDTT p.80) is no good: first, it entails that completely false theories, say about witches or gods, leave their theoretical predicates undefined, whereas in fact those predicates are clearly empty (and thus defined); second, the proposal can turn consistent theories into inconsistent theories. This second problem can be generalized: For many predicates, there is no corresponding property that could be denoted by a singular term. Exactly which predicates these are depends on one's theory of properties, but "having parts", "being self-identical", "being a set" and "being a property" are generally good candidates, besides of course "not instantiating oneself".
The semester has now ended and I've returned to working on some long overdue stuff. (More on that soon.)
One thing that has kept me busy during the semester was the philosophy of language course (German) that I've taught. Obviously, this got way out of control. (I wrote 100 pages of handouts because I was so dissatisfied with the available textbooks. I missed two things in particular: applications of results from semantics and philosophy of language to other areas of philosophy (e.g., how the discovery of rigid designation and a posteriori necessity provided the basis for things like type-B materialism and Cornell realism), and an intelligible sketch of how all the different parts of the subject fit together: Grice's analysis of meaning, Kripke's observations about names, Lewis's theory of convention, Montague's model-theoretic semantics, etc. I'm not sure if in the end I did that better, but I've definitely learned a lot in that seminar.)
Peter Menzies and Huw Price, in their forthcoming "Is Semantics in the Plan?" have spotted a mistake in Lewis's "Psychophysical and theoretical identifications". But they don't spot that it's a mistake, and rather think it shows that the Ramsey-Carnap-Lewis-account of theoretical terms is severly limited.
The mistake is that Lewis identifies "theoretical role" with "causal role":
Sentences aren't just about the things they name. You can write an
entire book about the Second World War without ever mentioning the
whole war by name.
Very roughly, a sentence is about something X iff the way X is
matters for the truth value of the sentence. "It's raining" is about
the weather because differences with respect to the weather affect the
truth value of the sentence. By contrast, "it's raining" (or at least
"it's raining in Berlin on July 11, 2006") is not about the Second
World War because any way the Second World War might have been is
compossible with (just about) any state of the current
weather. (Arguably, the current weather counterfactually depends on
details about the Second World War. But what counts is compossibility,
not counterfactual dependence.)
I've learned a lot at the Lewis workshop, which was also enjoyable in every other respect. One thing I've learned is that my views about theory strength in Lewis's account of laws were rather naive.
Lewis defines a law of nature as a consequence of the best theory, where what makes a theory good is simplicity, strength, and fit (of assigned probabilities to actual occurrences). I claimed that objective standards for strength aren't hard to find: one could, for instance, use something like number and diversity of excluded possibilities (with a meaningful measure for 'number', these two criteria might coincide). But in the discussions, it turned out that this doesn't work, for at least two reasons.
It just took me two hours to put slides created with the LaTeX beamer class onto A4 pages as handouts. This is the solution I came up with (4 slides per page):
pdftops -paper A4 -expand original.pdf
psnup -4 -b2mm original.ps > handouts.ps
ps2pdf handouts.ps
(Not entirely unrelated to this: the next few days I'm at a Lewis workshop near Heidelberg. I'll try to catch up with my emails next week.)
I'll move all my stuff to a new server in a few days. I expect all kinds of unexpected problems coming up. So perhaps this site (and everything else on any of my domains) will suddenly be down towards the end of the week. In this case, emails to whatever@umsu.de also won't reach me. You can then still contact me via wolfgang dot schwarz at gmail dot com.
[Update 21 June:] Oops, the new hosting company was faster than expected. I've set up most of the sites and services on the new server now. Some stuff that nobody ever looks at is still missing. If something you need is broken, please let me know. If your mails to whatever@umsu.de are bouncing back with a "can't relay" message, that's most likely because some DNS records out there still haven't noticed the move. Not much I can do about it, sorry. (Try the gmail address.)