1. There is nowadays considerable evidence for the existence of pulsars. Still, it isn't incoherent to worry that the evidence might be misleading and pulsars don't exist after all. But it is incoherent to worry that pulsars might be the apple trees in my parents' garden. These apple trees aren't neutron stars, and they don't emit regular pulses of electromagnetic radiation, and things that don't do that don't deserve the name "pulsar".
2. Suppose we are convinced by van Inwagen's arguments that fictional characters are abstract entities created by authors and denoted by our fictional names. This suggests the following picture: Over and above our material universe there is a special realm of abstract fictional characters. Everytime an author writes a novel, new entities pop up in this fictional realm. There is no causal connection from the fictional realm to our world. But then how do we know about the fictional characters? How can we be sure for example that the creation of fictional characters is reliable? Couldn't it happen from time to time that a fictional character fails to be created? If so, perhaps Madame Bovary exists, but Sherlock Holmes doesn't. In which case it would be false (on the Kripke-van Inwagen account) that Sherlock Holmes was invented by Conan Doyle or that he is a widely known fictional character. Isn't our confidence in such assertions rather mysterious and irresponsible given that really we have no access at all to the fictional realm? At the very least, the exceptionless correspondence between what our authors do here on Earth and what happens in the fictional realm cries for explanation!
Metaphysical debates about causation, consciousness, chance, change, mathematics, or modality have a lot in common. In all cases, metaphysical theories try to tells us what, if anything, makes a certain class of statements true. Among the possible answers, we usually find suggestions to reject the alleged phenomena, to declare them as primitive, and to reduce them in various ways to something else. But on closer inspection, there appear to be big differences, in particular with respect to what is required for a reduction.
In "Tharp's Third Theorem", Lewis agrees with Jackson that "all of us are committed to the a priori deducibility of the manifest way things are from the fundamental way things are (whatever that may be)" (TTT, p.96). His somewhat cryptic argument isn't quite the same as Jackson's though, and it seems that he avoids the mistake I mentioned yesterday.
Note that Lewis doesn't say we're committed to the a priori deducibility of all truths from the fundamental truths. Instead, he speaks of the "fundamental way things are", or from "contingent truths, supervenient on the fundamental way things are" (TTT 96). (In case that's not clear: Like Lewis, I use "truth" for "true sentence", not e.g. for "true proposition".)
Let logicalism ("logicism" was already taken) be the claim that all truths supervene upon purely logical truths, where a purely logical truth is a truth that contains only logical terms, including terms from second order modal logic.
Logicalism immediately follows from this purely logical truth ('[]' is the box, 'ACT' the actually operator):
p <-> []((x)(F)(Fx <-> ACT(Fx)) -> p)
While all truths therefore supervene upon the purely logical truths, not all truths are a priori deducible from the purely logical truths. For instance, that water covers most of the earth isn't. So we have a counterexample to the claim that whenever all truths supervene on the F-truths, then all truths are a priori deducible from the F-truths.
Serious Metaphysics, in Jackson's sense, tries to identify a limited set of truths (i.e. true sentences) that entail (i.e. strictly imply) all truths. So what about
*) Everything is just as it actually is?
((p)(p <-> actually p), or (x)(F)(Fx <-> actually Fx))
(*) is true. It entails all other truths: whenever S is true, then so is "necessarily, if (*) then S". And it is fairly simple and economic: for instance, it doesn't contain macrophysical or phenomenal terms. Still, it's not serious metaphysics. What's wrong?
Apropos conceptual differences, Lewis didn't seem to care much about whether his
analyses exactly matched other people's semantic intuitions:
In "Veridical Halluzination and Prosthetic Vision", he claims that
prosthetic vision is properly called "seeing". He continues:
If you insist that "strictly speaking", prosthetic vision isn't really
seeing, then I'm prepared to concede you this much. Often we do leave
semantic questions unsettled when we have no practical need to settle
them. Perhaps this is such a case, and you are resolving a genuine
indeterminacy in the way you prefer. But if you are within your
rights, so, I insist, am I. I do not really think my favoured usage is
at all idiosyncratic. But it scarcely matters: I would like to
understand it whether it is idiosyncratic or not. (p.280 in Papers
II)
Another example: In Convention, he suggests that a regularity to dress in a particular way doesn't count as conventional if many people conforming to the regularity want others not to conform (so that they can poke fun at them). Realizing that this classification isn't obvious he notes:
If the reader disagrees, I can only remind him that I did not
undertake to analyze anyone's concept of convention but mine. (p.47)
He speaks of reminding the reader because he had already mentioned in the introduction that there might be no clear common concept of
convention. But, he adds, "what I call convention is an important
phenomenon under any name" (p.3).
In case anyone's interested, here is the preliminary study guide for my Wissenschaftstheorie course (postscript file, German). I've decided to spend a little time on constructivism and relativism because there's a parallel course on sociology of science, and at least in Germany it is common sociological practice to talk as if constructivism and relativism were true. (My principle of charity demands not to take this talk literally. It usually makes sense if one substitutes "theory" for "reality" and "belief" for "truth".)
On rereading Brian's counterexamples paper, I'm not so sure anymore I understand him correctly: Are the semantic values of predicates that are supposed to be fairly natural (unions of ranges of) C-intensions or (unions of ranges of) A-intensions? Philosophical analyses usually spell out A-intensions: they tell us that pain is what occupies the pain role, or that water is the watery stuff, not that pain is C-fiber firing and water H2O. So if the naturalness of semantic values speaks in favour of simple analyses, it should be naturalness of A-intensions. On the other hand, the fish example makes more sense if it is understood as talking about C-intensions (which would also match a suggestion sometimes made by Jackson, e.g. on p.95 of "From H2O to water", that we might analyse "water" as something like "the most natural kind roughly meeting such and such conditions"). The A-intension of "fish" presumably isn't all too natural, among other things it contains whales at worlds where the fishy animals of our acquaintance are mostly whales.
A few more comments on why I think the setup of Weinberg, Nichols and Stich's experiments on intuitions is unfortunate. The problem seems particularly obvious in the experiments on semantic intuitions reported by Machery, Mallon, Nichols and Stich, but I think it carries over to many (though perhaps not all) of the experiments of Weinberg, Nichals and Stich. Here is one of the questions Machery, Mallon, Nichols and Stich asked:
I don't understand what's so bad about admitting that people may use and understand the same words in slightly different ways.
Suppose there is a community of Martians who have a word for true
justified belief, but no word for knowledge. When these Martians learn
English, they might at first take "knowledge" to be synonymous with
their word: the difference hardly shows up in ordinary contexts. So when they use "knowledge", they mean true justified belief.