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Sunday, November 25, 2007

Kripke and Goodman

Kripke's paradox depends on attributing a single intentional stance on the basis of a specific description of behaviour.

This is probably incoherent.

We don't describe a table as wanting to remain stationary, regardless of the "behavioural" evidence.

To attribute a single intentional stance is also to attribute the capacity to have intentional stances - and, therefore, to attribute other intentional stances. It seems unlikely that it could ever be intelligible to attribute a completely incoherent set of intentional stances to someone. In fact, for Davidsonian reasons, attributing intentional stances is probably like attributing rationality, or language: there is a normative aspect to it, and it's likely to be holistic. We're attributing a form of life.

In particular we're not depending on a restricted set of evidence, nor on a purely 'computational' argument - and most of the peculiar possibilities allowed by Kripke's account would be eliminated by holistic and 'principle of charity' types of consideration.

A similar type of argument can probably deal with Goodman's paradox. A language game needs to be playable - this is a significant constraint on 'grue' type semantics.

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