Benacerraf does not address Black’s article directly, but he does discuss an article by James Thomson that restated and defended some of Black’s points using analogous arguments. Benacerraf provides enough details about Thomson’s argument that you do not need to read it; but, if you are curious, you can find it in Salmon’s anthology between Black’s and Benacerraf’s pieces.
• Benacerraf’s introduction (pp. 103-106) summarizes Thomson’s argument, but further quotations from him and comments on these quotations appear later in the article.
• The bulk of section I (pp. 106-121) consists of Benacerraf’s responses to a series of arguments that appear as block quotations. Many of these are further quotations from Thomson, but some are Benacerraf’s own inventions. He states what he takes to be the upshot of this whole discussion in the last two pages of the section (pp. 120-121).
• I have not assigned Benacerraf’s section II since it is concerned more with the philosophy of logic than with the topics of this course. But, if you are curious about this part of his discussion, you can sample the key points without reading all of it if you look at two paragraphs, the one beginning just below the middle of p. 125 and the last paragraph of the article (on. p. 129).