Michael W. Pelczar

THE INDEXICAL CHARACTER OF NAMES

Indexicals are unique among expressions in that they depend for their literal content upon extra-semantic features of the contexts in which they are uttered. Taking this peculiarity of indexicals into account yields solutions to variants of Freges Puzzle involving objects of attitude-bearing of an indexical nature. If names are indexicals, then the classical versions of Freges Puzzle can be solved in the same way. Taking names to be indexicals also yields solutions to tougher, more recently-discovered puzzles such as Kripkes well-known case involving Paderewski. We argue that names are in fact rigidly designating indexicals. We also argue that fully developed, the direct reference theorys best strategy for solving the puzzles amounts to the adoption of the indexical theory of names – a move that we argue should be thought of as a natural development of the direct reference theory, and not as antagonistic to it.

Names as Tokens and Names as Tools

After presenting a variety of arguments in support of the idea that ordinary names are indexical, I respond to John Perrys recent arguments against the indexicality of names. I conclude by indicating some connections between the theory of names defended here and Wittgensteins observations on naming, and suggest that the latter may have been misconstrued in the literature.

Sensorama : a phenomenalist analysis of spacetime and its contents

1. Introduction 2. Space, Time, and Spacetime 3. Phenomenal Duration, Succession, and Change 4. Phenomenal Simultaneity 5. The Stream of Consciousness 6. Idealism 7. Phenomenalism: A First Appraisal 8. Radical Phenomenalism 9. Idealism Vindicated 10. The Conscious Self 11. Intentionality 12. Conclusion Appendix: objections to relativity Notes Index

Presentism, eternalism, and phenomenal change

Normally, when we notice a change taking place, our conscious experience has a corresponding quality of phenomenal change. Here it is argued that one’s experience can have this quality at or during a time when there is no change in which phenomenal properties one instantiates. This undermines a number of otherwise forceful arguments against leading metaphysical theories of change, but also requires these theories to construe change as a secondary quality, akin to color.

On an Argument for Functional Invariance

The principle of functional invariance states that it is a natural law that conscious beings with the same functional organization have the same quality of conscious experience. A group of arguments in support of this principle are rejected, on the grounds that they establish at most only the weaker intra-subjective principle that any two stages in the life of a single conscious being that duplicate one another in terms of functional organization also duplicate one another in terms of quality of phenomenal experience.

The knowledge argument, the open question argument, and the moral problem

Someone who knew everything about the world’s physical nature could, apparently, suffer from ignorance about various aspects of conscious experience. Someone who knew everything about the world’s physical and mental nature could, apparently, suffer from moral ignorance. Does it follow that there are ways the world is, over and above the way it is physically or psychophysically? This paper defends a negative answer, based on a distinction between knowing the fact that p and knowing that p. This distinction is made intelligible by reference to criterial connections between the possession of moral or phenomenal knowledge, and the satisfaction of cognitively neutral conditions of desire and experiential history. The existence of such connections in the moral case makes for an efficient dissolution of the so-called moral problem.