Kvalia is Dead! Long Live Qualia!

Perhaps the title is a bit of an over-statement, since the future of kvalia.net is not fully clear yet. What is clear, however, is that kvalia.net is turning – or perhaps “morphing” is a better word – into qualia.se, i.e. we are merging our blog with another blog with a similar name and a similar theme.  The other blog in question is run by Andreas Chatzopoulos, a philosophy Ph.D. student at the University of Turku, Finland, who however lives in Gothenburg and therefore has run into me. So: the first major change from kvalia.net is that there will now be three contributors. The second change is that we will also start writing, at least to some extent, in Swedish. The third, and final, change is that we now hope to become more active and start blogging more often – hopefully not only with posts which are several thousand words long and pretty philosophically technical, but also on more worldly, e.g. political, topics.

In sum, then, we will hopefully improve immensely in the near future!

//Olof

On Graham Oddie’s Experience Conjecture

In his 2005 book Value, Reality, and Desire, philosopher Graham Oddie defends a robust version of moral realism according to which 1) evaluative judgements have propositional content, 2) the presuppositions of some of our evaluative judgements are fulfilled, 3) the truth or falsity of evaluative judgements is mind-independent, 4) evaluative judgements are not reducible to any other kind of judgement, and 5) values are causally efficacious features. As such, Oddie’s robust version of moral realism stands in stark opposition to expressivism, the error-theory, idealism, naturalism, and evaluative epiphenomenalism. Now, Oddie rarely presents a positive argument in favour of this robust version of moral realism. Instead he hopes to offer up solutions to some of its most pressing problems, thereby showing it to be a plausible value-theoretic alternative. Among the more difficult problems discussed in Oddie’s book is the problem of value-data. In short, the problem of value-data is the familiar epistemological issue of explaining how we can possibly acquire evaluative knowledge if values are indeed something over and beyond the realm of empirical reality. In this blog post, I want to provide the reader with a summary of Oddie’s solution to this problem and formulate some modest criticism towards it.

On The Two-Dimensionalist Reductio and The Response from Ideal Conceivability

According to an argument that was recently formulated by Robert J. Howell, there is a statement whose conceivable truth is enough to show that Chalmers’ two-dimensional approach to semantics is incorrect and directly self-refuting.[1] The statement Howell has in mind is this:

(SN) The space of metaphysically possible worlds is more limited than the space of conceivable worlds.

This statement is of course incompatible with Chalmers’ two-dimensional approach to semantics since, on that approach, the space of metaphysically possible worlds and the space of conceivable worlds coincide; they are in effect one and the same. Now, before I try to explain why Howell thinks that the conceivability of SN is enough to show that Chalmers’ two-dimensional approach to semantics is incorrect, I should introduce Howell’s epistemic notations ‘conceivable1’, ‘conceivable2’, and their modal counterparts ‘possible1’ and ‘possible2’.[2] Whenever a statement is said to be conceivable1 or possible1, what is meant is that it is conceivable or possible with regard to its primary intension. That is to say, the statement in question is conceivable when we treat other possible worlds as if they are actual and then evaluate the statement relative to those worlds. Conversely, when a statement is said to be conceivable2 or possible2, what is meant is that it is conceivable or possible with regard to its secondary intension. In other words, the statement in question is conceivable when we treat other possible worlds as if they are counterfactual and then evaluate the statement relative to those worlds. Clearly then, Howell’s distinction between conceivability1 and conceivability2 is equivalent to David J. Chalmers’ distinction between primary and secondary conceivability and his distinction between possibility1 and possibility2 is in turn equivalent to the distinction between a priori metaphysical possibility and Kripke’s a posteriori metaphysical possibility. With these clarifications firmly in mind, we can now turn to Howell’s two-dimensionalist reductio:

On David J. Chalmers’ Two-Dimensional Approach To Semantics

Some of my upcoming blog posts will be drawing heavily on the insights of David J. Chalmers’ two-dimensional approach to semantics. Because of this, I thought it prudent to write an introductory blog post where I provide the reader with a brief outline of these insights and explain how they bear on various issues in modal epistemology.[1] Again, the purpose behind this is merely to avoid any future confusion and to highlight the intuitions that the two-dimensional approach to semantics is often taken to capture. Before I begin, it should first be pointed out that David J. Chalmers’ two-dimensional approach to semantics seems to assume that the space of metaphysically possible worlds and the space of conceivable worlds coincide. Indeed, if my understanding is correct, the approach was in part developed so as to accommodate Saul Kripke’s insights about rigid designation with this view, thereby vindicating conceivability-based accounts of modal knowledge. What this means is that the two-dimensional approach to semantics does not, strictly speaking, entail that the space of metaphysically possible worlds and the space of conceivable worlds coincide (or indeed that conceivability is always a good guide to possibility), it merely explains how this is not refuted by any of Kripke’s arguments. In order to understand exactly how the two-dimensional approach to semantics vindicates conceivability-based accounts of modal knowledge, I think it would be helpful to get briefly acquainted with its analysis of linguistic meaning.

Contributors Wanted

Kvalia.net is looking for new contributors to make the blog a more vibrant forum for new ideas. Our hope is that, within a year or two, there will be four or five regular contributors on kvalia.net writing on a wide range of philosophical topics. If you are interested in becoming one of these contributors and aid in the growth and development of kvalia.net, and thus a fortiori in your own thinking, you are welcome to contact us at andres_garcia14[at]hotmail.com or olof.leffler[at]hotmail.com. Formal education in philosophy is not required per se, but we do require a certain level of quality. If you have any philosophical writings to share, be sure to include these in your e-mail!

// Andrés & Olof