D. Chalmers

Why is two-dimensional semantics important? One can think of it as the most recent act in a drama involving three of the central concepts of philosophy: meaning, reason, and modality. First, Kant linked reason and modality, by suggesting that what is necessary is knowable a priori, and vice versa. Second, Frege linked reason and meaning, by proposing an aspect of meaning (sense) that is constitutively tied to cognitive signi?cance. Third, Carnap linked meaning and modality, by proposing an aspect of meaning (intension) that is constitutively tied to possibility and necessity

How does conscious experience emerge from a physical basis? At a first glance, this is the question about the mind that most needs answering. So it is curious that those who study the mind professionally have often avoided the question entirely. In psychology, the cognitive revolution did not make consciousness respectable: most cognitive psychologists have stuck to subjects such as learning, memory, and perception instead. Neuroscientists have been known to speculate on the topic, but usually only late at night, after a few drinks. Even philosophers have been curiously diffident. Some have been exercised by the fact that there is a problem, others have been concerned to deny the problem entirely, but the focus of inquiry has remained elsewhere. As in all these fields, serious theories of consciousness have been hard to come by.

Is there progress in philosophy? A What might be called a glass-half-full view of philosophical progress is that there is some progress in philosophy. The glass-half-empty view is that there is not as much as we would like. Inspired in part by van Inwagen’s discussion of disagreement in philosophy, this paper articulates and argues for a thesis about the relative lack of progress in philosophy: there has been less convergence to the truth on the big questions of philosophy than on the big questions of the hard sciences. It then investigates the question of what explains this relative lack of progress. The paper considers a number of explanations and argues that none of them is fully adequate. It then articulates a form that an adequate explanation might take.

This paper argues that recent ethics research guidelines fit poorly onto the kinds of research undertaken in the humanities, where a research conversation often forms a distinctive method of investigation that has no scientific equivalent The NH&MRC ethics guidelines pay little attention to the issues raised in humanities and social science research. Also, ethics committees are constituted primarily to look at ethical issues that arise from medical and scientific research, causing extra problems for those in the humanities and social sciences.

First, I should clarify the notion of "taking consciousness seriously", which serves as a premise in my work. Mulhauser characterizes this as the assumption that no cognitive theory of consciousness will suffice. The latter assumption would indeed beg some crucial questions, but it is not the assumption that I make. I make an assumption about the problem of consciousness, not about any solution. To quote (p. xii): Throughout the book, I have assumed that consciousness exists, and that to redefine the problem as that of explaining how certain cognitive and behavioral functions are performed is unacceptable. This is what I mean by taking consciousness seriously. That is, the premise is simply that there is a phenomenon to be explained, and that the problems of explaining such functions as discrimination, integration, self monitoring, reportability, and so on do not exhaust all the problems in the vicinity. The deepest problem of consciousness, as I understand it, is not the problem of how all these functions are performed, but rather the problem of explaining how and why all this activity supports states of subjective experience.

This is just a beginning categorization. I claim no 'objective correctness' for it. And of course the categories can be fluid, and the same joke can be a member of more than one category (and perhaps it will be funnier if it is). But thinking about the jokes which I can recall from the Humour Weekend, most seem to fall squarely into one or another category, indicating that perhaps this is a useful way of dividing jokes. It seems to me that the "causes of humour" in all 4 classes are different, coming from different parts of the brain.

In article [email protected] writes: Reminds me of a friend of mine who claims that the number 17 is "the most random" number. His proof ran as follows: pick a number. It's not really as good a random number as 17, is it? (Invariable Answer: "Umm, well, no...") This reminds me of a little experiment I did a couple of years ago. I stood on a busy street corner in Oxford, and asked passers by to "name a random number between zero and infinity." I was wondering what this "random" distribution would look like.

The project that Dan Lloyd has undertaken is admirable and audacious. He has tried to boil down the substrate of information-processing that underlies conscious experience to some very simple elements, in order to gain a better understanding of the phenomenon. Some people will suspect that by considering a model as simple as a connectionist network, Dan has thrown away everything that is interesting about consciousness. Perhaps there is something to that complaint, but I will take a different tack. It seems to me that if we apply his own reasoning, we can see that Dan has not taken things far _enough_. When we have boiled things down to a system as simple as a connectionist network, it seems faint-hearted to stop there, and perhaps a little arbitrary as well. So I will take things further, and ask what seems to be the really interesting question in the vicinity: what is it like to be a thermostat?

1. I think that by emphasizing theoretical spaces of representations, Andy has put his finger on an issue that is key to connectionism's success, and whose investigation will be a key determinant of the field's further progress. I also think that if we look at representational spaces in the right way, we can see that they are deeply related to classical phenomenon of systematicity in representation. I want to argue that the key to understanding representational spaces, and in particular their ability to capture the deep organization underlying various problems, lies in the idea of what I will call.

At the April 2006 meeting of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association, in an author-meets-critics session on Scott Soames' book _Reference and Description: The Case Against Two-Dimensionalism_, I presented a comment on Soames' book, "Scott Soames' Two-Dimensionalism". The other critic was Robert Stalnaker. Soames presented his response to critics. Below is a reply to Soames' response to me, for those who were at the session and interested others. Note that this response was mostly written before the session, except for one or two paragraphs where the discussion in the session is mentioned.

Scott Soames’ Reference and Description contains arguments against a number of different versions of two-dimensional semantics. After early chapters on descriptivism and on Kripke’s anti-descriptivist arguments, a chapter each is devoted to the roots of twodimensionalism in “slips, errors, or misleading suggestions” by Kripke and Kaplan, and to the two-dimensional approaches developed by Stalnaker (1978) and by Davies and Humberstone (1981). The bulk of the book (about 200 pages) is devoted to “ambitious twodimensionalism”, attributed to Frank Jackson, David Lewis, and me. After a quick overview of two-dimensional approaches, I will focus on Soames’ discussion of ambitious twodimensionalism. I will then turn to a system advocated by Soames that is itself strikingly reminiscent of a two-dimensional approach. Two-dimensional semantic theories are varieties of possible-worlds semantics on which linguistic items can be evaluated relative to possibilities in two different ways, yielding two sorts of intensional semantic values, which can be seen as two “dimensions” of meaning. The second dimension is the familiar sort of Kripkean evaluation in metaphysically possible worlds, so that necessarily coextensive terms (such as ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’ or ‘water’ and ‘H2O’) always have the same semantic value. The first dimension behaves differently, so that there are typically at least some cases where necessarily coextensive terms have different semantic values on the first dimension. For this reason, the two-dimensional framework is sometimes seen as a way of granting many of the insights of a Kripkean approach to meaning (on the second dimension), while retaining elements of a Fregean approach to meaning (on the first dimension)

In this paper I use thought-experiments to argue that functional organization fully determines conscious experience. These thought-experiments involve the gradual replacement of neurons by silicon chips, and similar scenarios. I argue that if "absent qualia" or "inverted qualia", are possible, then phenomena I call "fading qualia" and "dancing qualia" will be possible; but I argue that it is very implausible that fading or dancing qualia are possible. The resulting position is a sort of nonreductive functionalism.

*[[I wrote this paper in January of 1990, but did not publish it because I was never entirely happy with it. My ideas on consciousness were in a state of flux, ultimately evolving into those represented in my book _The Conscious Mind_ (Oxford University Press, 1996). I now think that some parts of this paper are unsatisfactory, especially the positive theory outlined at the end, although a successor to that theory is laid out in the book. Nevertheless, I think the paper raises issues that need to be addressed. ]].