Although Chalmers is no longer young, he was not yet 4 years old when Kripke delivered his lectures. So, unlike Putnam and Dummett (who were both born about 15 years before Kripke), he is someone who came of age when Kripke’s views were well known. That means he will draw from Kripke in addressing his own concerns rather than sharing the concerns that provided the context for the development of Kripke’s views. (We are also a long way from Wittgenstein: C. D. Broad, who Chalmers begins with, was about the same age as Wittgenstein, was a colleague of his at Cambridge, and was, like him, a student of Russell; but, in both the style and the substance of his work, he was about as far from Wittgenstein as is possible given those connections.)
For our purposes, the key part of Chalmers’ article is his §6, and that is the beginning of your assignment for Wed. The rest of the article provides background and context (and doing that is one of Chalmers’ aims since this was written for a philosophical reference work). The key background appears in §§3.2 and 5 and, more broadly, in the whole of §§1-3. The remainder of the article develops the general context, which is the mind-body problem as Chalmers conceives of it.
• While what Chalmers calls the “conceivability argument” is the one he will consider in §6, the others he outlines in §3 are important. Indeed, the knowledge argument of §3.3 is probably the best known of the group.
You will notice, in §3.4, the reappearance of the labels ‘P’ and ‘Q’ from §3.2. They will continue to reappear in later sections, and I think it is safe to regard them as always having the same significance: ‘P’ is a complete physical description of the universe (not by any means limited to our knowledge of it) while ‘Q’ (when Chalmers is being careful) is some particular phenomenal truth, some truth concerning what he calls the “phenomenon of consciousness” and describes in §2. (Chalmers uses some basic logical notation in this connection: ‘P ⊃ Q’ amounts to ‘if P then Q’ and ‘P&~Q’ amounts to ‘P but not Q’.)
• Apart from these sections, §4 (part of the first assignment) and §7 (part of the second) provide a couple of near alternatives to the position addressed in §6. Alternatives that are further afield are sketched in §§9-11. Those sections are in the third assignment, and its beginning, §8, which outlines that part of Chalmers’ taxonomy, is probably the most important part of the last assignment.