World without Design: The Ontological Consequences of Naturalism by Michael C. Rea

Author:Michael C. Rea [Rea, Michael C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: 9780199247615
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2011-09-06T13:49:05+00:00

(4.2)

Wherever there is matter arranged in the way distinctive of water molecules, there is a material object that is essentially composed of H 2 O.

According to Lewis, whether 4.1 and 4.2 express truths depends largely upon the context in which they are tokened; and knowing that they are true is largely a matter of knowing the salient facts about one's context—in this case, presumably, facts about the concepts of water, chemical structure, and so on, as well as one's interests and purposes in asserting 4.1 or 4.2.17 Lewis's counterpart theory enters the picture too, however; and the truth of counterpart theory (or, at any rate, his brand of it) is not plausibly thought to be a purely conceptual matter. So, strictly speaking, Lewis's view seems not to be a thoroughgoing conceptualist proposal. But his view implies that, once the counterpart theoretic apparatus is in place, knowledge of concepts, linguistic conventions, and other relevant contextual features is sufficient to allow us to acquire justified MP-beliefs.

As with Burke's view, the bare skeleton of Lewis's view is strictly neutral with respect to the question whether modal properties are intrinsic. To see why, it will help first to review briefly the basic outline of counterpart theory. According to Lewis, the modal properties of an object are reducible to facts about the object's counterparts. To say, for example, that Socrates could have been a tax collector is to say that there are possible worlds that have Socrates-counterparts who are tax collectors. A counterpart of an object is just what you might expect from the label: it is an object sufficiently similar to the original to serve as a stand-in, or representative, for it in its absence. Thus, on Lewis's view, no individual object is a part of multiple worlds; but each individual thing is represented in multiple worlds by its counterparts. An object 'exists in a world' (or, better, exists according to a world) just in case it has a counterpart in that world; and it has a property P according to a world just in case it has a counterpart in

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.