| Phi 346-02 Spring 2014 |
|
(Site navigation is not working.) |
I have few notes to offer on these sections. In them, Chalmers mainly works out details of the applications of his ideas to particular examples. The reading may not always be easy, however, because you will need to pay attention to details (and keep track of the reference of the letters sprinkled throughout).
• Sections 4 and 5 are devoted to the idea of “epistemic” intensions (which are related to epistemic possibility in the way the intensions that we’d seen earlier are related to metaphysical possibility). Section 4 is devoted to intensions of sentences. Notice especially the idealization he comments on near the end of p. 56. Then §5 extends the idea of epistemic intentions to what Chalmers calls “concepts,” which are associated with the various items of epistemic vocabulary he lists in the second paragraph.
• Section 6 completes Chalmer’s discussion of the Twin Earth example as well as Putnam’s example of his beech-elm confusion. He also considers a similar example due to Tyler Burge (1946–). Chalmers gives a pretty full account of it, but here is Burge’s original description of the basic situation.
A given person has a large number of attitudes commonly attributed with content-clauses containing “arthritis” in oblique occurrence. For example, he thinks (conectly) that he has had althritis for years, that his arthritis in his wrists and fingers is more painful than his arthritis in his ankles, that it is better to have arthritis than cancel of the liver, that stiffening joints is a symptom of arthritis, that certain sorts of aches are characteristic of arthritis, that there are various kinds of arthritis, and so forth. In short, he has a wide range of such attitudes. In addition to these unsurprising attitudes, he thinks falsely that he has developed arthritis in the thigh.
Tyler Burge, “Individualism and the Mental,” in Peter A. French et al (eds.), Studies in Metaphysics (U of Minnesota Press, 1979), pp. 77.
• Section 7 is a final brief comment on the relation of epistemic intensions to intensions as we had considered them, something he calls “subjunctive” intensions.