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Notes
This is especially true of his response to the “phenomenal concepts strategy”; he himself notes the strong convergence between his and my positions on this in our papers in Alter and Walter (2007).
So-called “type A” materialists deny even the conceivability of zombies. I will ignore this position for the purposes of this discussion.
I couldn’t find a reference to this term in the present volume, but he uses it in Chalmers (2006).
By definition the non-basic facts metaphysically supervene on, and are thus necessitated by, the basic ones. For any given fact P, if it didn’t supervene on the list of alleged basic facts, it would itself be basic. So the only question at issue is whether the relation between the two descriptions, the complete list of basic facts and the non-basic one at issue, is a priori as well as metaphysically necessary.
Chalmers uses the term “strong necessity”, which is defined in terms of his 2D semantics. I argue in Levine (2001) that not all “strong necessities” according to the technical definition are really “brute necessities” as I am using that term here.
I have in mind here the bruteness of its most fundamental laws and, perhaps, its initial conditions.
It’s important that this is not really Chalmers’s account, since he isn’t committed to anyone’s being able to articulate definitions of the relevant sort. Rather, the knowledge of the relevant descriptive condition is embodied in the pattern of judgments a subject would make under idealized conditions concerning the extension of the concept in each possible scenario, where a scenario is a maximal description of a world couched in the primitive vocabulary. This pattern of judgments constitutes a concept’s epistemic, or primary intension. None of my critical remarks depend in any way on the differences between the official 2D view and my oversimplified descriptivist account.
I don’t claim that everyone uses the term “direct reference” in this way, so consider this my own technical use; though I believe it’s at least one common understanding of the term.
So long as the causal theory doesn’t pick out the referent by virtue of the subject’s employing it as a descriptive condition to be satisfied.
Fodor’s atomism is the paradigm of this sort of account. See Fodor (1998).
I’m not going to take a stand on what makes logic a priori, but it certainly can’t be anything having to do with the analysis of non-logical concepts, which is what’s at issue here.
Or the judgments embodied in the concept’s epistemic intension, which comes to the same thing for our purposes; see note 6 above.
This is my interpretation of his emphasis in Chap. 7 on the “special epistemic gap” between the physical facts and the phenomenal facts.
References
Alter, T., & Walter, S. (2007). Phenomenal concepts and phenomenal knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Block, N., & Stalnaker, R. (1999). Conceptual analysis, dualism, and the explanatory gap. Philosophical Review, 108, 1–46.
Chalmers, D. (1996). The conscious mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Chalmers, D. (2006). The foundations of two-dimensional semantics. In M. Garcia-Carpintero & J. Macia (Eds.), Two-dimensional semantics: Foundations and applications. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fodor, J. (1998). Concepts: Where cognitive science went wrong. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Levine, J. (2001). Purple haze: The puzzle of consciousness. New York: Oxford University Press.
Levine, J. (2010). The Q factor: Modal rationalism vs. modal autonomism. Philosophical Review, 119(3), 365–380.
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Levine, J. Modality, semantics, and consciousness. Philos Stud 167, 775–784 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0197-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0197-4