A mere ripple in cow-infested waters

[paulhope]

I finally did my part and updated Good Sense is the Master of Human Life. The Other Paul may want to edit the latest contribution some more--I won't blame him, it's not my finest--but it feels good to not be the bottleneck any longer

Comments

[paulhope]

Cool beans. Given how much I suck at getting around to reading, my intention with Holism was just to read his objection to Block's CRS, since it's what I care about most, and then move on.

I've never heard of Elm before, but it sounds like I could use it. I've been antsy about semantic externalism ever since I encountered it, but then realized I was slowly committing myself to it. One nice thing about Fodor's theory that I just read is that I think you can adopt it without accepting Putnam's argument against BIV skepticism, which always seemed to me to suck.

I'm still not a huge fan about broad content though, although I'm warming up to that view of things. It seems like...I dunno. Cheating. Twin Earth never really did it for me--isn't it just the same water, to those people? I've never heard the pro-Twin Earther's response to jade. Thankfully, yet again Fodor has hints about how to resolve that issue, for me at least.

That paragraph wasn't really coherent. Sorry. Large sections of my brain are occupied with other things right now.

[rachiestar]

I think you'd like the argument Fodor offers RE: Twin Earth in Elm. If I understand it correctly, his point is that the burden of proof is on the externalist to prove that it is nomologically possible for there to exist agents for whom it is impossible to reliably differentiate H2O from XYZ: that is, to reliably split the concept WATER across two different natural kinds. I am not at all sure I'm representing that correctly. Anyway. He dismisses Twin Earth problems pretty quickly, but says that Fregean Hesperus/Phospherus problems are more difficult. I don't remember what he says about those.

[rachiestar]

But hey PS --> I went out last night with my high-school friend Claire (Harlan-Orsi). We talked about you. :-)

I think it is entirely too funny that you know everyone I went to high-school with. This suggests to me that there are less than or equal to 12 students at Brown, including the grad school.

[paulhope]

Well, it's true. There are exactly 11 students at Brown at any given time.

I've always thought Claire was cool and have meant to invited her to potlucks but I'm afraid she won't know anybody. What should I do?

[rachiestar]

Aw, I don't think it'd be a problem. If there's one thing I know about that girl, it's that her natural habitat is the awkward situation. :-)

But if you're really worried about it, perhaps extend the invitation to "Claire + 1" or invite another mutual friend?

[paulhope]

The problem is that as it currently stands, invitations are sent via email en masse.

So while there are certainly other people she knows who are invited, if their chances of attendence are independent of each other, we risk getting a loner.

But actually, now that I think about it, Mike Greenberg comes somewhat reliably, so that should be a match.

Very well. Added to the list.

p.s. what did you two say about me?

[rachiestar]

Mike Greenberg comes somewhat reliably, so that should be a match.

Heh. That was gonna be my other suggestion. :-)

p.s. what did you two say about me?

I just asked if she knew you, and she said that you guys were in a fiction class together, I think? I don't know. I think I said something about it being funny that you and I do very different philosophy-y stuff, but that we've got a considerable amount of interest-overlap. Then the bartender gave her the wrong beer and I tried to show her on a napkin what a conditional looks like in prop logic.

[awwh_snap]

Yeah, you've basically gotten the Twin cases down. With the Twin cases intension/sense/connotation/narrow-content doesn't determine extension/reference/denotation/broad-content (of natural kinds). With Frege cases you have the opposite.

He dismisses Twin cases quickly - whether it is H2O or XYZ [the intension of H2O just cannot be something like, say, sulfuric acid, or closer to home, vodka] or Elms and Beeches [here he says, it just doesn't matter if one's intension doesn't determine the matter-of-fact extension, since one can defer to experts in linguistic division of labor if one really, really needs to know the difference]. He dismisses both on reliability conditions as you put it. With Frege cases, he discusses the Oedipus problem of not knowing that Jocasta is his mother in addition to the Hesperus/Phospherus problem.

He's able to tackle both on the assumption that if one doesn't know that Hesperus is Phospherus, it is probably becuase there is little stake in knowing the difference. He employs ceteris paribus clauses to tackle the success conditions of Frege cases, dismissing the possibility of Oedipus cases as fringe cases. In most cases, when one's actions require us to know that when we sleep with certain people, they aren't our mothers/fathers/siblings etc.

And in most cases, ceteris paribus, the explanatory power of extension suffices to determine intension. He also compares the success/reliability conditions to the abductive features of science, viz., that science operates on reasoning to the best possible explanandum, and being able to do so requires one to have broad content and narrow content in order to successfully predict/explain phenomena. That's the idea in short I think. So as Rachel says, the burden of proof is on those who believe that both cases are impossible to instantiate successfully.

[paulhope]

Hmmm. I think Fodor presented this line of reasoning in the article I just read, but I don't think that was the concern that was getting to me.

The thing I found comforting about his account was his claim that it was build into the Twin Earth story that the agents involved intend their "water" concept to pick out a natural kind, and hence that it is coded into the concept that the category of the thing picked out is related to the concept of "the same substance as these local samples."

The effect of this is to make the causal chain between XYZ and "water" asymmetrically dependent on the chain between H20 and "water," which lets him get away with "water" meaning H20 and not XYZ.

But that also (arguably, I suppose) spoils Putnam's BIV solution (you're familiar with it, yes?) because it lets "brain" depend assymetrically on real brains and not computer simulated brains.

[awwh_snap]

The effect of this is to make the causal chain between XYZ and "water" asymmetrically dependent on the chain between H20 and "water," which lets him get away with "water" meaning H20 and not XYZ

Yeah, that's not inconsistent with what I said. Putnam starts his famous article on the H2O and XYZ problem by trying to debunk two theses common in phil. of mind/language: (1) that psychological states determine meaning and (2) that sense[/intension/connotation/narrow-content] determines reference[/extension/denotation/broad-content]. Putnam thinks the H2O and XYZ possiblia undermine both theses because: (1) a person can have identical psychological/functional states for H2O and XYZ but not know the difference in kind; and (2) one can know the same intensional properties for both and not know the extensional properties of each. I just realized you probably already know all this, but at any rate...

Fodor retorts that one cannot have identical psychological/functional state for two different natural kinds that seem extremely similar: XYZ cannot be an adverse substance, for instance, such as, say, Vodka (which can at first glance look the same as H2) or Sulfuric Acid. Functional and psychological states of persons will be contingent on its etiological/causal capacities, viz. the capacity to succesfully state what is H2O and not-H2O; otherwise, there is the possibility that drinking "water" all the time can result in the person being permanently soused or it could be curtains said person.

XYZ just plain cannot have identical functional/psychological states with H2O, to bluntly put it as Fodor does. One cannot have drastically different functional states for something like "water," thereby allowing "water" to successfully refer to H2O in all possible worlds; and, mutatis mutandis, Putnam's objection against psychological states determining meaning doesn't necessarily make it impossible for psychical states of persons to pick out natural kinds.

But that also (arguably, I suppose) spoils Putnam's BIV solution (you're familiar with it, yes?)

It's been a while since I read the BIV article, but I only remember the disquotational parts of his solution, where he tried to employ meta-language and object-language criterion, but I don't recall the details. I always thought the BIV scenarios were a lot tougher to respond to than natural kinds, especially given the Pyrrhonian skepticism involved.