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Additional info for Minds, Ethics, and Conditionals: Themes from the Philosophy of Frank Jackson

Sample text

We do not know what someone would have us think, if they tell us that rape is bad, until we know whether their mature folk morality is utilitarian or something else. These are surprising claims, and each tramples on very robust intuitions. Jackson may try to let Shakespeare off the hook by saying that ‘meanings ain’t in the head’, or in other words being sufficiently ‘externalist’ about the concepts that enter into our descriptions of what people know. So it might be suggested that in natural kind cases merely being in a certain context (a world in which the watery stuff around us is H2 O) even when we do not know that context, suffices to know propositions expressed in terms of ‘water’—the propositions, that is, whose identity is only given by the chemistry.

Jackson, like Lewis, is hospitable to the possible existence of stuff other than the physical and that might carry mentality—ectoplasm, entelechies and ‘such-like rubbish’ as Lewis called them. This is why supervenience is originally introduced only in terms of minimal physical duplication (Jackson 1998: 12). The idea is that if ours is a physical world, so that mentality is carried by the physical, then any world where we exactly duplicate the physical and stop right there is a mental duplicate of our world.

Is it true, as Jackson claims (2003: 87) that ‘N = the F’ is a priori when ‘F’ is a description that specifies the reference fixer for ‘N’? I believe this claim is false. Consider Evans’s descriptive names. Suppose we none of us know who invented the zip, but let us suppose it is common knowledge that some unique person did. Now I introduce ‘Julius’ on the back of the description: ‘Let us call the man who uniquely invented the zip, Julius’. What is now a priori? We might say (if we are fastidious we might even baulk at this, but I shall let it pass) that it is a priori that the sentence ‘Julius invented the zip’ is true.

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