From owner-modality@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU Mon Mar 1 06:51:23 1999 Date: Mon, 1 Mar 1999 06:51:13 -0800 Sender: "Philosophy 596B: Mind and Modality" From: David Chalmers Subject: next readings To: MODALITY@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU Status: RO The visa has been approved (hooray), but the paperwork still needs to come through, so I probably won't be there until next week. Meantime we have fallen behind a little and some people still haven't posted their week 5 contributions, so we can spend a little more time on that. I am particularly interested in comments on the general form of the argument as e.g. laid out in "Mind and Modality" -- if the argument is to be questioned, where will one question it? Which premise, or which reasoning? Meantime we should move onto week 6 (the original week 7) readings sometime soon. This will concentrate around the PPR symposium on my book, in which all the respondents were type-B materialists, it turns out. Some of the material is on the web (all accessible via "online papers on consciousness"). I suggest starting with Yablo's "Concepts and Consciousness" (which is excellent); you could also take a look at his "Textbook Kripkeanism and the Open Texture of Concepts" which covers the same ground in a bit more detail, although this isn't as vital. You should also look at Brian Loar's important paper "Phenomenal States", not from the symposium, but which sets out a sophisticated type-B view which he reiterates in the symposium. Finally there is my response "Materialism and the Metaphysics of Modality" which goes over a lot of these issues more carefully. The other three papers (Hill/McLaughlin, Loar, Shoemaker) are not online, and I will have to fax or express mail them over tomorrow. In the meantime the papers I mentioned should be a good starting point. Any comment on those papers and on the general dialectic will be welcome. Time for bed now. --Dave. From owner-modality@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU Mon Mar 1 21:22:16 1999 Date: Mon, 1 Mar 1999 21:20:45 -0800 Sender: "Philosophy 596B: Mind and Modality" From: David Chalmers Subject: readings To: MODALITY@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU Status: RO Dear all, I have put sent some papers by express mail to Ann Hickman. They should be there by Wednesday or Thursday. The papers include (1) PPR symposium papers by Hill & McLaughlin, Loar, Shoemaker, Yablo. (2) Chalmers, "Materialism and the Metaphysics of Modality". (3) Hill, "Imaginability, Conceivability, Possibility, and the Mind-Body Problem" (4) Levine, Review of _The Conscious Mind_. (5) Evans, Reference and Contingency (6) Jackson, Finding the Mind in the Natural World. (7) van Cleve, Conceivability and the Cartesian argument for dualism (8) Yablo, Does Conceivability Imply Possibility? The most important papers to look at immediately are the papers in (1). Yablo's paper in (1) is on the web, but I included it for completeness. The same goes for (2). (3) is a useful paper to look at in association with Hill & McLaughlin's paper in (1), as it elaborates one of the central ideas. (4) gives another type-B materialist reply to the sort of arguments I give. All of these are relevant to our current and forthcoming discussion of the modal argument and the dialectic with the type-B materialist. (5) and (6) are papers relevant to previous issues. (5) is an important early paper by Evans on some ideas in the 2-D framework. (6) gives a very nice sketch by Jackson of some core issues relating metaphysics, modality, and materialism, and also talks about the role of the 2-D framework here. I think some people might find this particularly clear and useful. (7) and (8) will be relevant to the forthcoming discussion of conceivability and possibility (coming up fairly soon). I will ask Ann to either (a) make copies for everyone, or (b) leave the papers somewhere where everyone can grab them and photocopy them for themselves. [Probably it will be (b), but I'll try for (a).] In the meantime people should have read the Loar and Yablo papers and my PPR reply from the web, and might start discussing those issues shortly. (Both the Loar and Yablo papers on the web are particularly good, and nice statements of a type-B materialist position.) Right now I'm still hoping I might arrive by next Tuesday in time for class, but we'll see. --Dave. From owner-modality@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU Thu Mar 4 01:28:05 1999 Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 01:27:30 -0800 Sender: "Philosophy 596B: Mind and Modality" From: David Chalmers Subject: arrival To: MODALITY@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU Status: RO Dear all, Amazingly enough, the visa paperwork has made it to Arizona, and now I only need to wait for the FedEx and get the visa itself in Sydney. It looks likely that I will be arriving in Tucson at 3:59pm next Tuesday. I was hoping to be there in time for class, but I guess not. Still, I would like to meet once or even twice next week if that is possible. Once to have a general meeting to go over topics so far, and once for a full to discuss some of the papers I recently sent, especially the material in the PPR symposium and related issues about the 2-D modal argument against materialism. That would get things nicely caught up and under control in time for spring break, and ready for real momentum in the second half of term. Would having a meeting at 5pm on Tuesday work for everyone? And is there another time that might work, e.g. sometime on Thursday? Please e-mail me to let me know whether you could make these meetings and what time would work best. On other topics, I'm looking forward to seeing everyone's week 6 contributions as soon as possible (and also this week's minutes, of course). Looking at my web site log, I haven't seen as many hits on the relevant material from arizona.edu as I would have liked. Everyone should have downloaded and printed http://ling.ucsc.edu/~chalmers/modality.html and http://ling.ucsc.edu/~chalmers/princeton.html as both are very important. The second outlines a lot of relevant material for the course in a definitive-ish (although brief) form, and the former should clarify quite a few things more discursively. The former in particular is vital to this week's readings (especially section 3). Of course you should also be looking at the other web material (e.g. Loar and Yablo). The papers I sent should be there very soon, and Ann will either copy them for everyone or leave them somewhere where you can grab them to copy. I'm looking forward to finally seeing everyone soon! --Dave. From owner-modality@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU Fri Mar 12 13:19:02 1999 Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 14:10:53 -0700 Sender: "Philosophy 596B: Mind and Modality" From: Anthony T Lane Subject: zombie To: MODALITY@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU Status: RO This might be a silly question, and I apolegize if we've already covered this: In reading your response to Shoemaker (Section 4) I was struck by how much phenomenal zombies are like us (or we like them...). Am I right in thinking that zombies think that they *know what it's like* to see red, and might even run arguments for dualism on the strength of these beliefs? You suggest that the judgments of zombies are a) unjustified and b) negatively rational. I'm not quite sure what you mean by 'negatively rational'-- is it just that they don't reason in a way we consider justified, but nevertheless manage to avoid errors? (If the results of their reasoning processes are the same as ours, might we not say that their beliefs are formed by a process that is at least as reliable as our own?) I suppose this is basically the line that elimintativists take. Are we to be assured of the fact that we have phenomenal experiences on the basis of the intuitive arguments in Ch.1? If zombies have the same beliefs, isn't hard to resist a skeptic/eliminativist who claims that we are really no different? Anthony From owner-modality@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU Sun Mar 14 16:11:49 1999 Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 16:11:01 -0800 Sender: "Philosophy 596B: Mind and Modality" From: David Chalmers Subject: Ideal apriority To: MODALITY@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU Status: RO Angela writes: >Also, regarding the concept of a priori, or rather the definition that ' x >is knowable a priori if x can be known prior to experience,' I don't see >why problems like the one presented by Godel's theorem aren't more >troubling...if we have to idealize away from our own cognitive limitations >to come up with an appropriate idea of 'in principle a priori >knowability' such that we are conceiving of a being that is not subject >to the sorts of mathematical counterexamples like Godel's theorem, then it >seems as if our concept of a priori knowable breaks down...i.e., how are >we to conceive of the distinction between what is knowable prior to >experience and what is not for an idealized being like the one needed to >avoid the Godel counterexample? It's not clear to me what such a being >could or couldn't know without actually having to look...if a priori were >defined strictly in terms of the analyticity of statements, then there >seems to be less of a problem keeping the distinction between a priori and >a posteriori straight when idealizing so far from our own case...but this >doesn't seem to be the way Dave wants, centrally, to define the a >priori...so is it the case that "knowable prior to experience" is more >akin, or closer in kind to an idea like "analyticity" than I think, or >what? A minor point: I wouldn't say "knowable prior to experience here", but rather "knowable independent of experience". It may be that it takes experience to acquire the relevant concepts, for example, so some a priori P can only be known by experiencing beings. Strictly speaking, the crucial thing is that experience doesn't contribute to the *justification* of the knowledge in question, given that one has the concepts. One might better define things by saying that P is a priori when P can be known in a way such that experience does not contribute to the justification of P, or such that P has an experience-independent justification. (An example: perhaps one might hold that only a being with red experiences can have the concept of "red", in which case "all red things are colored" would only be knowable by experiencing beings, but might still be a priori.) Anyway, your point is interesting. It's certainly true that if we idealize the notion of apriority, then it becomes harder to know whether a given P is a priori. I take it that we can agree that there is still a distinction between P such that a human can know it independently of experience, and P such that some being can know it independently of experience. Call the former "human apriority" and the latter "ideal apriority". Your point is that it is harder to know whether P is ideally a priori than whether it is humanly a priori. Of course it may not be trivial to know whether a given P is even humanly a priori. Take for example some complex P in mathematics (or maybe philosophy), such that only a genius mathematician, in 200 years time, will come to know that P. Then we ordinary folk aren't in a good position to know whether P is a priori. But I guess one might say, at least some human can know whether P is a priori. At least, some human can know P in an a priori way, and from there it hopefully won't be too hard for them to conclude that P is knowable a priori (as long as they know that they know that P, and as long as they know that they know it a priori). Whereas for ideal apriority, maybe none of us can know. I think this is a consequence of the notion of ideal apriority that we just have to accept. Presumably there are some P such that no human can know P, but such that smarter beings could know P independently of experience (e.g., P = the Godel sentence of the human mathematical community, or some such). Then P is ideally a priori, but we can never know that. This is to say that ideal apriority can be "epistemically opaque", in that we can't always know whether P is ideally a priori. It's not clear to what extent this is really an objection to the notion. Plenty of properties are epistemically opaque. E.g., truth is epistemically opaque -- we can't always know whether P is true. Similarly, necessity is epistemically opaque, and so on. It may still be that we can chart interesting relations between these notions, make argument that particular statements are or are not true/necessary/apriori, and so on. One objection might be that the epistemic opaqueness makes the notion less useful, and makes in particular makes it harder to judge its application in a given case. E.g., one might object that one could never know, for a given P, that P is not a priori -- we might know that *we* don't know it a priori, but not that no being could. Still, this doesn't seem to be a problem for many P. E.g. let P be "Bill Clinton is the 42nd president of the USA". It seems pretty clear that no being could know this a priori. That is, we are justified in saying this is not ideally a priori, even though we can't simulate the thinking of the smart beings in question. I think the moral is that although we can't know exactly what smarter beings could know, so we can't know exactly what is ideally a priori, one can still come to justified conclusions about many things that such beings could and couldn't know, so one can still come to justified conclusions about what is and isn't ideally a priori. For example, we can know that "2+2 = 4" is ideally a priori, and that "there is a telephone on this desk" is not. I suppose the central question in our context is whether "there are no zombies" (or strictly, "P -> Q" where P is the complete physical truth and Q a phenomenal truth) is more like the case of the Godel sentence or the case of the telephone. If one accepts the epistemic intuitions, ir certain does not *seem* to be a priori, and it seems that *we* can't know it a priori. But maybe it is ideally a priori, in that a less limited being could know it a priori? In which case our epistemic intuitions here merely reflect our cognitive limitations? That's a deep question. It corresponds to the possibility of what I was calling on Tuesday "type-C materialism", the idea that there is an a highly nonobvious a priori entailment from physical to phenomenal (so that zombies are prima facie cnceivable but not ideally conceivable, etc). I don't have anything definitive to say about this. I do hold out hope that it is in some ways more like the telephone case than the Godel sentence case, though. That is, I think we have some reason to believe that it is not just not a priori for us, but it is not a priori for any being. There is the point, for example, that if there is even an ideal a priori entailment from physical to phenomenal here, then there must be some sort of a priori conceptual analysis of phenomenal concepts in functional and structural terms. And I think we are in a position to say with justification that any such analysis would be a misanalysis -- it simply gets the meaning of the concept wrong. Of course an opponent could respond by saying that I only say this because of my cognitive limitations, and that if I was less limited I could see the deep a priori equivalence between phenomenal and functional concepts. The dialectic gets a little fuzzy around here, but my own view is that even if we can't rule out type-C materialism definitively, there is a strong prima facie case against it. (Incidentally this brings out why doing things in terms of "analyticity" might not help here. If the type-C materialist were right, maybe there could be an analytic but highly nonobvious equivalence between phenomenal and functional concepts. We already know that analytic truths aren't always trivial -- witness the tricky analysis of the concept of "knowledge". So maybe it could turn out that analyticity is epistemically opaque, just as ideal a priority is.) That being said, it's a complex issue and a very worthwhile avenue to explore. If anyone wants to follow up on this, e.g. writing a paper exploring the type-C materialist position and the slack opened up in the argument by the difference between prima facie and ideal conceivability, etc, I'd be delighted. --Dave. From owner-modality@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU Sun Mar 14 16:26:06 1999 Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 16:25:56 -0800 Sender: "Philosophy 596B: Mind and Modality" From: David Chalmers Subject: Re: zombie To: MODALITY@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU Status: RO Anthony writes: >In reading your response to Shoemaker (Section 4) I was struck by how much >phenomenal zombies are like us (or we like them...). Am I right in >thinking that zombies think that they *know what it's like* to see red, >and might even run arguments for dualism on the strength of these beliefs? That's right. I discuss that at length in Chapter 5 of the book (which we haven't covered). I call it the "Paradox of Phenomenal Judgment". It certainly leads to some interesting tensions, thugh I argue that it doesn't lead to any fatal flaws. >You suggest that the judgments of zombies are a) unjustified and b) >negatively rational. I'm not quite sure what you mean by 'negatively >rational'-- is it just that they don't reason in a way we consider >justified, but nevertheless manage to avoid errors? (If the results of >their reasoning processes are the same as ours, might we not say that >their beliefs are formed by a process that is at least as reliable as our >own?) By "negatively rational", I mean that they don't make mistaken inferences, errors of reasoning, etc. Nevertheless, they are still wrong, and unjustified, at least on my view, as they don't have the positive evidence that we do that justifies our belief in experience. (The evidence is provided by experience itself!) I'm not sure I'd put things in terms of reliability, exactly, as one can argue that the zombie's belief-formation process is unreliable here -- after all, it produces a lot of false beliefs! >I suppose this is basically the line that elimintativists take. Are we to >be assured of the fact that we have phenomenal experiences on the basis of >the intuitive arguments in Ch.1? If zombies have the same beliefs, isn't >hard to resist a skeptic/eliminativist who claims that we are really no >different? Someone could certainly try to do that. In response I'll say two things. First, I don't think zombies have exactly the same beliefs as us here, as many of our phenomenal concepts and beliefs are themselves partly constituted by our experiences, experiences which the zombie lacks. (See "Mind and Modality" lecture 3 here.) But even setting that point aside, I think the skeptic/eliminativist would only have a good argument here under the assumption that the justification of a belief always inheres in other beliefs. If so, and if my zombie twin had the same beliefs, I'd be in trouble. But I think it is independently implausible that the justification of our beliefs always inheres in other beliefs. In particular, I think it is plausible that beliefs are often justified by *experiences*, and that experiences provide direct evidence for our beliefs. If that's right, then my phenomenal beliefs have justification that the zombie lacks: the zombie is in a very different epistemic situation, and lacks all my evidence. If so, then the mere possibility of a zombie forming the same beliefs in an unjustified way doesn't undermine the justification of my own beliefs here. I still know I have experiences, because of my first-person evidence! Now maybe the zombie *thinks* he has that evidence too, but he is wrong and unjustified in thinking so. Again, it's the experiences themselves that justify all the beliefs in question. Anyway, this is a subtle and interesting dialectic, though a bit outside the issues we are focusing on here. There's a lot more on it in Chapter 5 of the book and in "The Content and Epistemology of Phenomenal Belief" (online). --Dave. From owner-modality@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU Fri Mar 5 14:28:45 1999 Date: Fri, 5 Mar 1999 15:23:41 -0700 Sender: "Philosophy 596B: Mind and Modality" From: Brad J Thompson Subject: Comments on Loar and Hill/McLaughlin To: MODALITY@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU Status: RO Here are some thoughts about the strategy taken by Loar and Hill/McLaughlin regarding the a posterioricity of psychophysical identities. I agree with Chalmers that it is not enough for the type-B materialist to explain why zombies are conceivable. They also have to give an account of why the conceivability in such cases is an unreliable guide to possibility. I don't think that the cognitive accounts that Loar and H & M give are *as* irrelevant to the issue of whether conceivability is a guide to possibility as Chalmers suggests. Chalmers contends that we could give a psychological account of the conceivability of any state of affairs (such as mathematical beliefs). He claims further that Loar's notion of a recognitional concept does no extra work beyond establishing that physical and phenomenal concepts are cognitively distinct. But there does seem to be the difference, as Loar discusses, that phenomenal concepts pick out their referents directly. This is a feature unique to phenomenal concepts. Agreeing again that a cognitive explanation alone does not fully address the anti-materialist argument, I do think that the case of phenomenal concepts can be distinguished from all other concepts in a way that gives the materialist a foot-hold for developing a response. But what more can the materialist say in order to motivate his or her position? Unless given strong reasons to the contrary, we ought to accept that conceivability entails possibility. Loar and H & M seem to accept this burden. (There is more to be said here about *who* has the burden of proof--the materialist or the anti-materialist. The above claim provides reason to think that the materialist has the burden. I suspect others will disagree--I'd be interested in any arguments for the contrary position.) Loar's conclusion seems to be rather weak--for all we know, phenomenal concepts pick out the same properties as physical concepts. But how could we discover or determine that they do in fact have the same referents? It isn't clear to me what Loar has to say about this, especially give his agreement that identity statements involve a prior analyses. H & M suggest that the materialist view has greater coherence, simplicity, and does not violate other intuitive doctrines such as the causal efficacy of the mental. Chalmers suggests that these points are being forced to do double-duty here. I have to go now (!) so I won't discuss this issue, though I hopefully I can pick up on it later since it seems crucial if we grant that the conceivability of zombies has an *interestingly* distinctive cognitive explanation. Brad ---------------------- Brad J Thompson bradt@U.Arizona.EDU From owner-modality@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU Fri Mar 19 13:10:27 1999 Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 14:09:09 -0700 Sender: "Philosophy 596B: Mind and Modality" From: Timothy J Bayne Subject: Comments on Yablo To: MODALITY@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU Status: RO Some comments on Yablo, (1) I have some worries about the reliability of conceivability that Yablo either doesn't mention, or doesn't take as seriously as he should. The first is the fact that one's modal intuitions can be influenced by how the secenario that one is being asked to imagine is described. The locus classicus of this is Bernard William's wonderful paper *The Self and the Future*. In the first scenario, information from my brain is extracted and placed in your brain, and vice versa. Most people have a very strong intuition that my identity goes with my information, and thus the continuity of one's body is not sufficient for one's continued existence. In the second scenario, I am told that I will be tortured tomorrow, but not to worry, for I will be given a drug before hand such that all of my memories are erased. Most people have an equally strong intuition that I should worry, and thus they think that continuity of one's body is sufficient for one's continued existence. (I'm glossing over a lot of the details here, hopefully most will be familiar with the paper.) The moral that at least some have drawn from this is that, with a few exceptions, thought-experiments (or thought-experiments that go beyond what we know to be nomologically possible) are unreliable. (Kathleen Wilkes says *something* like this, as does Mark Johnston.) There are a number of things that Yablo might say about this case. His first line of response (p. 38) doesn't look promising - nobody is conflating metaphysical possibility or conceivability with epistemic possibility here. He might want to push the second line (p. 39), for he says that 'it is all too easy to believe that much of the current controversy over conditions of personal identity and survival. . .owes more to our meaning slightly different things by "person" and survive" than to any real clash of modal intuitions" (p. 39) But this doesn't look like it will work here, for it is one and the same person who can conceive of a scenario that supports P, and can also conceive of a scenario that also supports not-P. Perhaps what he should say is something like the following: whether one's ability to conceive of P provides good reason for thinking that P is (meaphysically) possible depends on the situation/background against which one is imagining P (see p. 28). The difference between the two scenarios is the context in which the P fact is imagined. To use an analogy, the difference is something like that between imaging a tiger in a zoo and imaging a tiger in a wild, and finding that in the first situation one can imagine the tiger to be polka-doted, but in the second situation one cannot. And this of course is perplexing, because whether or not tigers can be polka-doted should not depend on their immediate environment. I take it that Yablo needs to argue that the imagined context in Williams's scenario's is not as benign as putting one's imagined tiger in the wild or in the zoo - he needs to argue that it actually changes what it is that one is imagining. Here's another example. it would be a bad result for perception if two lines drawn on a piece of paper looked parallel during the week, but appeared to curve on weekends. But it's not so bad when two lines that appear to be parallel when viewed by themselves, seem to curve when embedded in a larger picture of other lines that curve. Then we have grounds for explaing the latter case as one of perceptual illusion. Yablo needs to explain why the context of one (or both) of Williams's scenarios creates a modal illusion. Of course, he may well be able to do that, but no-one seems to have had much succcess at this task. (2) A second worry that I have is one that I've bought up before. It's the problem of inter-subjective disagreement concerning essentialism about one's own identity. Yablo several times refers to the Kripkean intuition that one's origins are essential to one. Some (Aristotelians?) some to think that although one's origins are not essential to one, one's species membership is. Others (an undergrad professor of mine) think that neither one's origins nor one's species membership are essential to one. He thought that he could conceive of himself as being a poached egg (an ordinary poached egg, not an eggy creature that walks and talks). Assuming some form of modal factualism, on which at most one of these positions is correct, how do we decide which one is? Again, it seems to me that neither (1) nor (2) (see p. 39) will work here. Will (3) work? Are there defeaters for one or more of these positions? Perhaps this is where the argument would turn. Perhaps the Kripkean would claim that I couldn't have been a poached egg, for if I could, then you might just as easily have been the same poached egg, but, necessarily, I couldn't have been you. But what is one's reason for thinking that the last claim is true? That one cannot imagine a situation in which I am you? But that seems to be just what is in question. Yablo could also argue that the disagreement between the Kripkeans, Aristotelians and the poached egg people is contaminated by theoretical commitments, but again, this would have to be argued. Now, of course, there are lots of modal problems that (almost) everyone agrees on, e.g., I could have had something different for breakfast this morning. So the argument cannot be that people fail to exhibit agreement on a lot of modal statements. But to say this isn't to say much. The problem seems to be that there are lots of important modal statements that people don't agree on, and it's not clear that they are making some non-modal factual error or logical error that would explain their modal disagrement (p. 39). The situation here seems to be akin to that of religious discourse, and to some extent moral discourse. Most people agree on most moral judgments, but that doesn't make the job of trying to understand why there is a residue of basic and fundamental moral disagreement any easier. (3). Why does Yablo think that 'it is inconceivable that addition facts should vary between possible worlds'? (p. 32) Presumably it's not because of some inductive generalization. It's not as if he's tried to conceive of <2+3=5> in one world, and <2+3 not=5> in some other world and failed, tried to imagine <3+3=6> in one world and <3+3 not=6> in some other world and failed, and so on, and thus induced that all arithmetical statements have their truth-values necessarily. Has he directly tried to imagine all arithmatical truths having their truth-values contingently? How would one do that? I have some sense of what is involved in entertaining the thought , but I have no idea of how to submit this thought to imaginative scrutiny. Tim Timothy J. Bayne RM. 213 Social Science Department of Philosophy University of Arizona Tucson, AZ 85721 USA Hm ph. (520) 298 1930 From owner-modality@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU Sun Mar 28 21:58:52 1999 Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 22:57:50 -0700 Sender: "Philosophy 596B: Mind and Modality" From: Angela J Burnette Subject: Re: Loar's mode of presentation argument To: MODALITY@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU Status: RO Loar's talk of different modes of presentation...phenomenal states are presented, or represented in our concepts differently from physical states, which are mediated by perception of extrinsic qualities rather than directly presented by intrinsic qualities...seems to be offering an explanation of why we can (and maybe necessarily do) have different concepts for possibly the same properties, but I'm not clear on exactly where Loar's mode of presentation considerations are supposed to push on the anti-materialist argument... is he claiming that the conceivability of zombie worlds doesn't warrant the move from conceivability to possibility because we are fooled into thinking that they can actually come apart just because we can conceive of them coming apart (due to the fact that they are presented via different modes?) In other words, is he offering evidence to the effect that conc. doesn't nec. track possibility given the unique quality of phenomenal states? becaus it seems to me that the ideal conceiver would not be mistaken by different modes of presentation, but as this has not come up as a response to Loar (to my knowledge) I wonder if I am understanding the argument or not.... angela From owner-modality@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU Sun Mar 28 23:37:53 1999 Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 00:34:58 -0700 Sender: "Philosophy 596B: Mind and Modality" From: Erik J Larson Subject: Re: Loar's mode of presentation argument To: MODALITY@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU Status: RO I take it that Loar is making the point that the conceptual independence of the phenomenal and physical is consistent with psychological differences and doesn't necessarily tell us anything about differences in expressed properties, which is just to say that the epistemic premise concerning conceptual distinctness does not entail the metaphysical conclusion concerning anti-materialism. So I take it that Loar's "mode of presentation" argument is intended as a counterexample to the move from conceivability to possibility. I accept Chalmer's reply to Loar, i.e., that he presupposes strong psychophysical necessities rather than explaining them. So I'm not so worried about Loar, specifically. My worry is more generally the move from an epistemic premise to a metaphysical conclusion. Loar points out one possible way in which we may fail to draw solid metaphysical conclusions from epistemic considerations. The argument may be flawed in its specific guise. But I think there is a general confusion here, about exactly what the anti-materialist argument can sustain metaphysically given the epistemic starting point. I am tempted to say that the (anti-materialist) argument establishes this: Because we cannot see any necessary connection between physical and phenomenal states--the conditional P->Q is not apriori--we cannot positively establish the truth of materialism. I take it that the argument is stronger: Because physical and phenomenal states necessarily have different primary intensions, materialism is false (add in "there is a logically possible world where P holds but not Q and so on). The second formulation of the argument gets to the conclusion, but it seems that it rests on much shakier epistemic ground. Maybe we should add some antecedent clause, to the effect that "If we have access to the correct primary intensions of phenomenal and physical states, and if we are able to completely specify (without fear of confusion or cognitive obscurities etc) these intensions...", then we get necessarily distinct primary intensions and a postively conceivable zombie scenario and a good foothold on the anti-materialist conclusion. But for myself, all I can see is the former argument-- we cannot see any necessary connection between physical and phenomenal states. And this is just a fact about what we can and can't see, and not much more. So I'm looking for someone to pull me out of the epistemic trap, so to speak (I'm guessing it will be Dave). Erik "What our grammarian does is simple enough. He frames his formal reconstruction of K along the grammatically simplest lines he can, compatibly with inclusion of H, plausibility of the predicted inclusion of I, plausibility of the hypothesis of inclusion of J, and plausibility, further, of the exclusion of all sequences which ever actually do bring bizarreness reactions." -- W.V.O. Quine ---------------------- Erik J Larson erikl@U.Arizona.EDU From bayne@U.Arizona.EDU Fri Mar 19 14:25:30 1999 Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1999 15:24:31 -0700 (MST) From: Timothy J Bayne To: David Chalmers , MODALITY@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU Subject: A Comment on Hill Status: RO Hill makes some interesting points about having access to the same property via two different modalities. I take it that he doesn't want his argument to rest on the distinction between a property and its mode of presentation (65). Rather, he wants to exploit the distinction between two types of imagination. So I *think* that he wants to claim that a property can be presented to types of imagination under the same mode of presentation, and yet these two presentations differ in their intrinic character. I'm not sure his case for this claim (if it is his claim) can be maintained. As I read him, Hill attempts to motivate this line by arguing that the same property (under the same mode of presentation?) can be presented to two different senses, and yet these two presentations can differ in intrinsic character: "Is it possible for psychological mechanisms to produce radically different experiences if those experiences are in fact presentations of the same property? Well, yes, this happens all of the time in the case of perceptual presentations. Compare a visual presentation of the surface of a piece of sandpaper with a tactual presentation of the same surface. Any two such presentations will be quite different in point of intrinsic character; but still the properties that are presented by the former will overlap with the properties that are presented by the latter (p. 67)." The trouble with this example is that in seing a piece of sandpaper one is given a lot of information about it that one does not get in touching it, and vice-versa, and arguably that is what makes the experience of seeing that something is shaped like X different from feeling that it is shaped like X. What we want is a case in which one *just* gets information about the paper's surface structure, and the nature of this experience is different depending on the modality, without the mode of presentation being different. It is not obvious that in such a case there would be a difference between the visual-experience and the tactile experience. (Part of the problem here is knowing what it would be like to *just* see the surface structure, or just feel the surface structure - but leave that aside.) Despite his avowed intentions, Hill seems to be simply back into the distinction between a property and its mode of presentation: there's the one property of the surface structure of the paper, and it has two modes of presentation. Seeing that something is square, and feeling that it is square may both involve the single property of squareness, but it also seems to involve two distinct modes of presentation: feeling-squre and looking-square. 'Feeling-square' and 'looking-square' seem to be distinct properties. This issue is basically Molyneaux's question to Locke: suppose that a person blind from birth were suddenly to regain their sight, would they be able to identify objects without touching them? Or would they have to discover that feeling-square and looking-square both converged on a single property, being square? Put the issue another way: is it contingent that something looks square iff it feels square? (Perhaps we should relativise this to ideal circumstances: X looks square under ideal conditions iff it feels square under ideal conditions. It seems important to distinguish between two types of sensory concepts here. The first type refers to properties that are accessible to different modalities, but are such that the different modalities experience them in such a way that the perceiver may not realize (even under ideal circumstances) that she is experiencing the same property. Surface structure, or squareness, may be such a property. The second type refer to properties that seem to be accessible, in some sense, to only one sense modality. (Phenomenal) red and the sounds of middle C might be such properties. Although the concept and are not "tied" or "restricted" to particular modalities - arguably they wouldn't be *concepts* if their inferential range were restricted to a modality - they do seem to be grounded in a single modality in the way that, say, is not (even for a blind person). But one might come back and say that the property red can be directly detected on the basis of non-visual cues - this is what Mary can do. The counter-reply is that Mary can use some kind of red concept, but not her concept of phenomenal red, which refers to the qualia. But now one wants to know about and . Exactly how are these related? they seem to be sensory concepts, but they don't seem to be modality specific in the way that, say, is. What one attempts to refer to in thinking that X looks square is a fact about X that is also direcly accessible to other modalities. Arguably, this is not the case with (phenomenal) red. In judging that X looks red, there is (arguably!) no commitment to thinking that that same property can be directly identified via some other mode of access. I take it that Hill would not like this result. He would want to resist the idea of a property (phenomenal-red, visual-squareness) that is logically modality specific. The upshot: Hill's "2-types of imaginability" position seems to collapse into, or at least require, a "two modes of presentation" position - and he doesn't want that (I take it). cheers, Tim Timothy J. Bayne RM. 213 Social Science Department of Philosophy University of Arizona Tucson, AZ 85721 USA Hm ph. (520) 298 1930