First, on behalf of type-B materialism a reply to yesterday's
post. (Thanks to Sven Rosenkranz for pointing out something like this to me.)
What makes it the case that the red-quale is the referent of "the distinctive quality of my current red-experience"? Not causal or counterfactual relations. Not demonstrative baptising. Not other kinds of verbal and non-verbal behaviour. Right. But these attempts to naturalize semantic properties are doomed anyway. They presuppose that semantic properties are generally independent of how things appear to us, which they are not. In fact, how things appear to us is an essential component in many "modes of presentation" determining the reference of terms. E.g., the referent of "red" is what appears to us under normal conditions in the way red things appear to us. In a same manner, the referent of "the distinctive quality of my current red-experience" is what appears to me in this distinctive way. Which is the red-quale, which in turn is a property of brain states. But no amount of physical information will tell you how this property of brain states appears to me. Phenomenalism as a semantic doctrine may have been too extreme, but it was not entirely wrong.
Some strings of symbols and noises and brain states have semantic properties. What makes it the case that a
particular string or noise or state has the semantic properties that it has? One possible answer is that nothing
does: semantic properties are fundamental, primitive and inexplicable. That's incredible. Not only because
semantic properties just don't feel fundamental, as Fodor pointed out long ago. Much worse, it would
make little sense of our use of semantic vocabulary: we believe that our expression "the moon" denotes that
heavenly body up there; but how do we know? Maybe it really denotes the largest red thing in Alaska, or
Gottlob Frege, or nothing at all. If reference is fundamental,
facts about how "the moon" is used, how it got introduced, what conceptual role it plays, in what kinds of causal or
counterfactual relations it stands to other things, how people verify statements containing it, what degree of
naturalness various candidate referents have, etc. must all be considered irrelevant. On this view, there is a
possible world where all these facts about use etc. obtain, but where "the moon" denotes Gottlob Frege. Obviously that's silly.
Semantic properties are clearly determined by facts about use, baptising, causal chains, naturalness, etc. (In so far as they are determined at all, that is. No doubt sometimes the facts about use etc. are insufficient to settle whether a string or noise or state has semantic property A or B. But then it really is indeterminate which of the properties it has.)
The problem of intrinsic change is often put in misleading terms, like: "how is it possible for a thing to have incompatible intrinsic properties at different times?", or: "how can I be first bent and then straight?" Putting the problem this way invites wrong kinds of answers, like:
- There really is no problem here. Why should things not have incompatible properties, as long as they
have them at different times?
- Well, a thing can change its instrinsic properties by consisting of a substratum to which different properties attach at different times.
- How can I be first bent and then straight? Why, by standing up.
When I first read Lowe's proposed solution, I thought what he offers belongs to this class of answers that don't answer the real problem. In fact, his answer looks much like the third one above: How can I be first bent and then straight? By having parts, such as legs and a torso, which can change their spatial arrangement. Sure. But does that answer the problem?
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.