When first introduced to the distinction between three- and fourdimensionalism and between perduranitsm and endurantism, many, myself included, have the feeling that both are valid ways of looking at the same reality and hence that at bottom they must be somehow equivalent or inter-translatable.
I still believe some of this. Consider for example the question of interpreting temporal predications. Endurantists say that "x is F at t" is true iff (the whole of) x stands in the F-relation to t, or iff x instantiates-at-t F, or something like that. As a perdurantist, I need not deny that. Rather, I have a further analysis of what it means to stand in the F-relation to t, or to instantiate-at-t F: it means to have a temporal part located at t which is F. Similarly, I needn't deny that I am wholly present right now. Applying the perdurantist analysis, what this claim says is that I -- the entire worm, with all his spatial and temporal parts -- have a temporal part which is present right now. Perhaps I could even try to make sense of claims like "people don't have temporal parts" by appealing to restricted quantification. But somewhere around this point the translatability comes to an end. Endurantists usually build the rejection of perdurantism into the very heart of their account, and it is certainly uncharitable to re-interpret this rejection so that it is after all compatible with what it rejects. (Here is something odd, by the way: how can it be uncharitable to interpret someone's utterances in such a way that they come out true rather than in a way in which they are false?)
There is a curious problem about rejecting both premise 2 and 3 in this familiar argument:
- It is conceivable that pain is not CFF.
- If it is conceivable that pain is not CFF then it is possible that pain is not CFF.
- If it is possible that pain is not CFF then pain is not CFF.
- Therefore: pain is not CFF.
I believe that premise 3 is almost certainly false: why can't 'pain' denote CFF at our world and D-fiber firing at other worlds? Or, even better, CFF in humans at our world and other states in other beings here and elsewhere? Some claim that 'pain' must rigidly denote a kind of diagonal state that all beings who are in pain share. But I've never seen a convincing argument why this should be so. Crispin Wright argues (in "The Conceivability of Naturalism") that a) the reference-fixing description for 'pain' is something like 'state of feeling painful', which is itself rigid, and b) necessarily, pain satisfies this description. But it is not at all obvious to me that the reference-fixing description for 'pain' is 'state of feeling painful', rather than, for example, the non-rigid 'state that feels painful' or something physicalistically more acceptable.
Sometimes the best argument for a certain assumption is that it proves fruitful in various theoretical contexts: Why believe in a plurality of worlds? Because the hypothesis is serviceable in semantics, decision theory, theories of intentional content, the interpretation of modalities, the definition of supervenience, etc. -- and that is a reason to believe that it is true. Another example, again by Lewis, is the argument for universals, or at least for a fundamental distinction between natural and unnatural properties: the assumption is serviceable to account for objective similarity, the determinacy of meaning and translation, the interpretation of some quantified sentences, the analysis of natural laws, etc. Similar arguments can be put forward for the existence of temporal parts, states of affairs, events and numbers.
These arguments presuppose that it is really the very same assumption, rather than a diverse family of similar sounding assumptions, that does all the work it is supposed to do. The case for numbers would be much worse if lots of different arithmetics were 'indispensable' in different branches of science. The problem is quite obvious for events: the events employed in relativity theory can hardly do as the events used in Davidsonian interpretations of English adverbs.
I've finished the promised rewrite of Beta-Blogger.
I've just updated this blog to the freshly rewritten version of my blogger. Please let me know if you experience any problems. The RSS feed has a new URL, but the old one should redirect your aggregator automatically.
I'll tentatively enable comments, though I don't really know why, as I'm quite happy with the amount (and quality) of feedback I got so far. Perhaps it's because everyone else has comments. At any rate I hope the feedback I'll get is more like this than like that.
Question: What exactly is wrong with something like this as a (physical-cum-indexical) conceptual analysis of "pain" (in my idiolect)?
the state I am in now
One obvious problem is that it's too unspecific: pain is not the only state I am currently in. But that's not the only problem. What else?
Is it a priori that I feel pain now? Or does my knowledge that I feel pain depend on empirical information? Could it turn out that I don't feel pain? Could it have turned out?
I take back what said at the end of my last post about the need to distinguish two kinds of A-intension, one transparent and one intransparent. There's not really any need to do so, and it only leads to a lot of trouble. (For instance, is it a priori that elms satisfy the transparent intension, or the intransparent intension, or both, or neither?) I thought I needed a transparent conception to explicate some sort of speaker meaning and to account for rationality. Certainly, what we need for this is a conception of meanings that it in some sense 'transparent' or 'narrow', but that does not preclude it from making reference to unknown facts about other people or causal chains. For example, the belief that the actual F is not the actual G should not count as irrational (for suitable F and G) even if the actual F is (necessesary) the actual G. But 'F's and 'G's whose A-intension is full of causal and deferential components can nevertheless provide for that, as long as it isn't a priori that the F is the G.
Suppose theory 1 says that entity x has certain properties, and theory 2 says that entity y has those properties. If we believe both theories, should we conclude that x=y?
It depends. Sometimes we not only should but must conclude that x=y, for example when theory 1 says that x is the planet Venus and theory 2 says that y is the planet Venus. In other cases, there is little reason to draw the conclusion, as when the theories merely say of x and y respectively that it is some planet or other. In yet other cases, the conclusion can be motivated by methodological considerations. For instance, whoever first realized that Hesperus is Phosphorus probably realized that the identity makes for a simpler overall theory.
I just realized that I have inconsistent attitudes towards ontologically dependent entities, that is, entities x such that for some contingently existing entity y, i) necessarily, if x exists so does y, and ii) x and y are not parts or subsets or elements of each other. On the one hand, I don't believe that there are many such entities, except perhaps holes and borders. On the other hand, I also don't believe in general restrictions on the counterpart relation, or, perhaps equivalently, in restrictions on cross-world fusions of individuals. It follows that for any old property any world-bound thing has at our world, there is a thing which has this property essentially. For instance, there is somebody who leads exactly your life but who, unlike you, is essentially such that the cup in front of me is now empty. This somebody is a dependent entity: it can only exist if my cup does.
The other hand seems so obvious to me that I fear I must give up the one hand: there are lots of dependent entities. I can still say that they are not ordinary things, and that it is very hard or even impossible to refer to most of them (individually, of course -- I just managed to refer to them collectively). But still they exist. Hm.
One of the three other things I've been working on is Ned, a kind of web-based editor and file-manager. There are several reasons why I need this. One is that I often want to edit files on a server while I am at other places like the university where no (S)FTP or SSH client is installed. Another is that most of the servers I work with do not allow SSH access, so even if I only want to change a single character in a file, I have to open an FTP client, download the file, open an editor, change the character, save the file, and upload it again. Ned makes this much easier. Moreover, Ned also supports some filesystem operations (like copying files and recursively deleting folders) that are not supported by common FTP clients.