A few observations about the first third of the project -- update of Carnap

Just a few quick thoughts about the first part of the project in which I update Carnap and delimit the (acceptable) class of state-descriptions with the use of a particular notion of concepts. The idea is that roughly that there is a separation between the imagined mini-world (which could be expanded to a full fledged possible world) and the description of it. This itself may require a bit more work -- does it mean that something must exist if we imagine it? It doesn't seem prima facie that it must -- anyway I'll have to say more about that... And the possession of concepts and their correct and consistent application to those imagined counterfactual scenarios. I've said more about just how the idea works in the proposal, here I'd just like to say that there are reasons to think that such an account is a good one to take. First off, it seems that this approach principally avoids skepticism about de dicto modal claims. If we insist that to possess a concept is to be competent in its deployment in imagined scenarios, then it seems that this insistence guarantees that our thoughts (about the properties had by individual objects in the world) are related to the world in the sort of way that assures that when a cognizer possessing concept C coherently imagines (spelled out in terms of consistent concept deployment) a counterfactual scenario in which object o falls under concept C, then it seems that this counterfactual scenario makes sense in that things could have been the way that the cognizer imagines without fear of contradiction. [[Maybe this 'coherence' could be cashed out in terms of informed cognizers communicating in virtue of their interpretability rather than by some sort of 'metaphysical' contradiction which makes it seem that conceptual coherence is founded on some sort of ultimately metaphysical notion of modality. Have to do more with this. It's difficult to see how to speak of the right thought world relation if an analysis of modality is to be reductive. I want to say that if we can coherently imagine some scenario, then that scenario could have been in fact been actual but that seems to make our imaginings depend upon some sort of mysterious metaphysical possibility - and then we stuck in some sort of circle... But if I say that possessing a concept allows the possessor to correctly identify each sample of something which has the property expressed by that concept, and the possessor can also deploy the concept correctly in counterfactual scenarios, what does that 'correctly' come to? It could mean that the individual objects 'in' the imagined counterfactual scenarios are exactly like the actual samples identified by the cognizer in the actual world in the ways relevant to making those samples such that they had the property expressed by the concept. Can we then say that the ''in' the imagnined counterfactual scenarios' is metaphorical -- that is there need be no existing counterfactual scenario against which the imagination must be "checked"? I hope so. I think we can just leave it at that -- we say that a cognizer possesses a concept if when he imagines a scenario in which individual object has the property expressed by the concept which is possessed then in his imagining this object is attributed all the features that an identical, actual such individual object would have. There's still the sneakily modal "would have were it to exist" or "would have were it actual". Does this seemingly unreducible feature doom the account to circularity? I'm not sure -- have to think more about this particular feature of the account. ]]
 Second, it seems that this sort of treatment of concepts fits appropriately with what we hold intuitively as "knowing the meaning of a word [that expresses some concept or other]". We want to say that knowing the meaning of 'is a philosopher' doesn't simply come to knowing the extension of 'is a philosopher', but rather knowing what it takes to make one a philosopher, or (I think) in other words, what would fall under the concept 'philosopher' in counterfactual scenarios. This idea of concepts seems to fit our intuitive notion of knowledge of meaning (at least for the concept of 'philosopher' -- I'm not sure how it would fare in those contentious areas in which a 2d semantics seems plausible, for instance for concepts like WATER).