Explanation and modality: on why the Swampman is still worrisome to teleosemanticists
- PDF / 339,305 Bytes
- 23 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 41 Downloads / 184 Views
Explanation and modality: on why the Swampman is still worrisome to teleosemanticists Dongwoo Kim1 Received: 26 March 2020 / Accepted: 10 October 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract In a series of papers, Papineau argues that the Swampman scenario is not even the start of an objection to teleosemantics as a scientific reduction of belief. It is against this claim that I want to argue here. I shall argue that our intuition about the scenario questions the adequacy of the conceptual foundations of teleosemantics, namely, success semantics and the etiological conception of biological function, on which the explanatory power of the theory rests. In the course of argument, some general connections between explanation and modality will be developed that shed a new light on Kripke’s analysis of necessary a posteriori propositions. The upshot will be that teleosemanticists should tackle the Swampman objection head-on. Keywords Teleosemantics · Representation · Swampman · Reduction · Explanation · Necessary a posteriori
1 Introduction Many have thought that Davidson’s Swampman scenario raises a serious problem for teleosemantics. For it appears to be possible from the scenario that there are completely ahistorical creatures with beliefs, which contradicts the theory. In a series of
Special thanks to David Papineau for reading multiple versions of the paper and providing many helpful comments and discussions. I would also like to thank Tomasz Zyglewicz for providing useful comments on a previous version of this paper. The paper has also benefited from helpful questions and comments from Sergei Artemov, Paul Dekker, Melvin Fitting, Jiwon Kim, Rohit Parikh, Brian Porter, Graham Priest, David Taylor, Yale Weiss, and other participants in the Fifth PLM Conference at the University of St Andrews and in the Logic and Metaphysics Workshop at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. I am deeply grateful for extensive and constructive comments from three anonymous referees from this journal.
B 1
Dongwoo Kim [email protected] Philosophy Program, The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, 365 Fifth Ave., Rm. 7113, New York 10016, NY, USA
123
Synthese
papers (2001, 2006, 2016), Papineau argues that the scenario is not even the start of an objection to teleosemantics as a scientific reduction of belief. It is against this claim that I want to argue here. I am concerned with two diagnostic questions, viz., whether or not the Swampman scenario poses any problem for teleosemantics and, if so, what exactly it is. Any substantive claims about teleosemantics must remain tentative. Below I shall argue that our intuition about the scenario questions the adequacy of the conceptual foundations of teleosemantics, namely, success semantics and the etiological conception of biological function, on which the explanatory power of the theory rests. Along the way, some general connections between explanation and modality will be developed that shed a new light on Kripke’s analysis of necessary a posterio
Data Loading...
