This argument is not deductively valid:
The best available theory says p;
Therefore, p.
For even the best available theory can be false. It's not even clear that the premiss makes the conclusion very probable. So is it fallacious to argue for a claim by pointing out that it is entailed by the best available theory? No. The argument may be valid in another sense: in the sense that it is irrational to accept the premiss but reject the conclusion. For if you accept that the best available theory says p, rejecting p means to knowingly reject the best available theory -- and that may well be irrational. It's always irrational to knowingly reject the best available theory in favour of another, worse, theory. The only rational alternative is agnosticism. But if the best theory is sufficiently good and much ahead of its rivals then agnosticism too is irrational. That's because rationality demands that you increase your credence in a proposition in the light of good reasons.
Via Brian, I came across the recent debate in JPhil on whether knowing-how entails knowing-that. Jason Stanley and Tim Williamson make a good case that it does, but Ian Rumfitt makes an even better case that this holds only for one of the two meanings of "knowing how", namely for the one that translates as "savoire comment [faire]" in French, but not for the one that translates as "savoire [faire]". The former provides by far the most natural interpretation (and translation into French) of "Alex knows how to get to the nearest place selling beer". So the fact that
The Lewis tracker lists 229 new links for this week. But that's mainly because I've altered the filter so that lots of pages that were classified as irrelevant last week are now classified as relevant. Hopefully the news section will start being useful next week.
I don't know why, but for some reason I really like this statement of the "Political Philosophy for David Lewis" (classified as 0.24 relevant):
I believe in the value of the services that the fire department provides...
The blog looks a bit different now. Please let me know if it doesn't work anymore in your browser. If you don't like the orange, there's an alternative websafe blue style available (from wherever your browser lets you select alternative styles; in Internet Explorer that's nowhere).
There are two ways of denying that the future is real. One is to accept statements about the future as true but to interpret them in a way that does not require the existence of their subject matter. This is a kind of fictionalism or ersatzism about the future. (It's interesting by the way that abstract ersatz futures clearly don't count as futures, whereas it is controversial whether abstract ersatz worlds should count as real possible worlds.) The other way of denying the reality of the future is to reject the assumption that statements about the future are true. Then no fictionalist or ersatzist story needs to be told to account for their truth.
I agree that it sounds fairly plausible to say that phenomenal states have a kind of representational content built into them. But I don't find that plausible anymore if it's combined with the assumption that being of phenomenal type Q is an intrinsic and essential property of phenomenal states. Here's an intuition pump.
Consider a world just like ours except that flying-pigs qualia have traded places with crooked-image qualia. That is, in this world, people have the kind of phenomenal experience we have when we look at flying pigs when they look at crooked images, and vice versa. But our duplicates at this world are not halluzinating flying pigs when looking at crooked images. No, they are not at all mislead by their experiences. For instance, they are not at all inclined to say that there are flying pigs, or that they are seeing flying pigs in these cases. Nor do they draw any of the inferences we would draw if we had the impression of seeing flying pigs. Instead, they typically infer that they are looking at a crooked image. And they would judge their experience to be veridical just in case there really is an image hanging crooked before them.
As promised here are some remarks on the content of phenomenal states. Or rather, on Horgan and Tienson's remarks on the content of phenomenal states in their paper "The Intentionality of Phenomenology and the Phenomenology of Intentionality". Dave Chalmers pointed me at that last week. I should say that this post is not meant to be a response to Dave's comment. I can't respond to it yet because I haven't understood it yet. I'll have to read the other papers he mentions.
Suppose we want to know whether some thing A has the property of representing B. The first thing to do is to ask what exactly is meant by "representing" in this context. That is, we must inquire into the general conditions under which it would be true that some x represents some y. Then, in a second step, we have to find out whether these conditions are satisfied by A and B.
When I say that semantic properties aren't primitive I mean that there must be an informative answer to the first question for semantic terms. That is, it must be possible to spell out general conditions under which something represents or means or denotes y. And the answer must be specifiable in non-semantic vocabulary. We can do better than saying that x represents y iff it represents y. The answer needn't be simple, nor immediately obvious. As usual, the best approach might be to use thought experiments: if such-and-such were the case, would x represent y? If yes, "such-and-such" can be added as a disjunct to the conditions under which x represents y.
Most of the 5.3 million results Google returns for 'David Lewis' aren't about David Lewis the philosopher. The 53000 results for '"david lewis" OR "david * lewis" ~philosophy' look more promising. But even they contain lots of completely irrelevant stuff (like this one), and many of the not completely irrelevant results are uninteresting pages at bookstores selling one of Lewis' books.
Brian still believes that impossibilities are true in some fictions. I still disagree. But I wonder if the disagreement is substantial. Of course I agree that in some fictions one can find impossible statements. The question is whether these statements are true in the fiction. Not everything that is explicitly said in a fiction is true in the fiction. I'm now inclined to believe that our conception of truth in fiction may be ambiguous: on the standard conception, impossible fictions are ruled out; but on a different conception, they are tolerated. Let's call the former conception 'intensional' and the latter 'hyperintensional'.