The Last Entry in Impinging Radiation
Here ends the eight month experiment with Impinging Radiation. The proposal will be defended sometime in November 2006. Everything I've ever done for this project is on the web now: here.
Here ends the eight month experiment with Impinging Radiation. The proposal will be defended sometime in November 2006. Everything I've ever done for this project is on the web now: here.
Yesterday (July 24th, 2006), Ludwig gave provisional approval to the "proposal proposal" I'd sumbitted in June. I have to clarify the positions taken in the document and re-write it in a clearer fashion. But I should be ready to defend the proposal in October (or November), 2006.
I'll start with this old chestnut: possible worlds, state-descriptions, individual objects as instantiations of the properties that are their so-called object essences, etc. all seem to be a way of describing the distribution of properties across objects such that these distribution of properties across objects serve as the truthmakers for modal claims. Actually, with Jubien's properties in Platonic heaven and the instantiation relation things are a bit different -- it's the entailment relation between different sorts of properties (that exist above the Great Line of Being) that determine de dicto modal claims. So, for instance, if property A bears the entailment relation to property B, then any object which instantiates A must (with modal force) also instantiate B, and the modal claim, 'Necessarily, if x is A then x is B' is true.
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. ]]
In the first part of my updating of Carnap, I noticed that his account fell prey to the same sort of criticism that Shalkowski offered for "ontologically-based" reductive accounts of modality -- specifically possible worlds as concreta or abstracta. Whereas it looks as though, if Shalkowski's paper finds purchase, there is a trouble with no real solution in sight for these metaphysical sort of reductions, I tried to sketch a way out of this sort of difficulty for semantically- (or more generally epistemically-) based approaches to the reductive account of modality of the sort that I think Carnap is aiming at. Basically, the idea was the following. Carnap's state-descriptions are sets of sentences that, in terms of a formal language, describe the possible worlds of (say) Lewis. These state-descriptions are essentially sets of sentences that describe, to speak a bit in the manner Levine in his [1998], the distribution of properties across individuals. [[Of course, this is a bit misleading, because it seems that we must have some way to carve-up the matter of our environment into individual objects before we can even begin to assign properties to those individuals -- so it seems that our system of concepts must be deployed before we can even begin marking out individual objects.]] But before we can even take something like these state-descriptions sets of sentences describing possible worlds (even if they only have conceptual ontological status), it seems we must have some way to delimit the class of these state-descriptions. We don't want every combination and permutation of properties across objects to be permissible -- in that case, we'd be left without any true de dicto modal claims -- a triangle might lack the property of being a trilateral for instance. [[This is the equivalent of allowing impossible worlds into the pluriverse.]] I believe the divide between world and how the world is described is important in helping resolve this issue.
Here is what I submitted to Ludwig as a proposal for my project at the end of last semester.
Here's a bit of work I did on the first three chapters of Alan Sidelle's book.