Search This Blog

Showing posts with label Goodman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Goodman. Show all posts

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.