Readings in Analytic Philosophy

I would like to give a very brief overview of Chalmers’ program in the philosophy of mind and how his thoughts about metaphysics and semantics play into that program. Chalmers’ central focus in his program to provide a philosophical basis for scientific studies of consciousness is to formulate a theory of dualism about the [...]

I think this cartoon demonstrates a way of thinking of primary possibility in so far as primary possibility represents the possibility that science could be wrong in any of its claims. What the scientist conceives of in thinking that some hypotheses may or may not be true is a world where that hypothesis is [...]

I am posting this, but it is still a work in progress.
Two-dimensionalism has a unique history in the philosophy of language. I am going to begin by teasing out some ideas central to two-dimensionalism; after that, I will examine the historical context from which two-dimensionalism has arisen.
The central idea fueling two-dimensionalism is [...]

Linguistic entities are generally believed to have both an extension and an intension. What the extension of a linguistic entity is will depend upon the type of entity in question, that is whether the term is a sentence, singular term, general term or some other kidn of term.
The extension of a sentence will be [...]

What reason do we have for caring about our counterparts? These cartoons apparently don’t care about theirs!

Hey, I thought other possible worlds weren’t spacio-temporally connected to this one!

Here’s what I have discerned about two-dimensional intensions from Chalmers’ Foundations and Two-Dimensional Semantics articles:

Just as we can imagine that science is wrong is telling us, say for example, that water is H2O, we can also imagine how we would evaluate certain other counterfactual claims in a world where water is not H2O; a two-dimensional [...]

Do we know something extra by having some piece of indexical knowledge?

Consider the argument:
Necessarily, 9 is prime.
The number of planets is 9.
Necessarily, the number of planets is prime.
When the essentialist says that necessarily 9 is prime, he is predicating a property of 9 rather than ascribing necessity to the entire statement ‘9 is prime’. If we want to use de re modality, we must defend [...]

Carnap suggests that the notion of a true ontology makes sense only if true is taken to mean to be the result of a pragmatic decision. Accepting the existence of abstract entities involves a pragmatic decision to use a certain linguistic framework and not a theoretical assertion of the independent existence of system of [...]

We might believe as Quine does that we can preserve the lucidity or unambiguousness of ‘exists’. Quine thinks that we should not multiply senses of ‘exist’. We should just think of things being (existing) period. If we accept a meaning of ‘exist’ such as unactualized possible, then there would be an explosion [...]