Prueba de la tercera hipótesis específica

A recent important version of conceptual analysis is known as the Canberra Plan (Lewis 1994, esp. 298–303; Jackson 1998, esp. ch. 1–3; Nolan 2005, ch. 9;

and Braddon-Mitchell and Nola 2009, ch. 1). (The name is a label for how

philosophy is meant to be done in the School of Philosophy in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University, Canberra.) Suppose we want to know what a certain philosophically interesting subject matter is. Suppose, for instance, we want to know what temporal change or personal identity or colour is. The Canberra Plan offers the following three-step programme for finding out the nature of the subject matter.

First: assemble folk platitudes about the subject matter. The first task is to draw up intuitions about the subject matter. What are wanted are intuitions that are widely, if not unanimously, shared. They are intuitions that all the folk have. To be widely shared, the content of these intuitions needs to be obvious and uncontroversial. (Recall Moore’s list of common sense claims in chapter 1, §2.) Hence the intuitions to be assembled are folk platitudes about the subject matter. Insofar as discovering what intui-tions we have can be done a priori, this part of the programme is an a pri-ori exercise. For example, the list of folk platitudes about colour provides a description of the concept COLOUR. The list includes such platitudes as that colours appear to be visible properties of objects, that they can persist through changes in lighting conditions, that they cause sensory experiences of colour, that there is something visible that all things of the same colour have in common, and so on. By describing the concept COLOUR, the list of folk platitudes is thereby describing a certain role,

“the colour role,” as we might call it.

Second: discover what occupies the role. Having used the folk platitudes to delineate a certain role, there is then a question as to what occupies that role. Folk platitudes about colour say that colour is, amongst other things, a visible property of the surfaces of things and the cause of our sensory experiences of colour. But what kind of thing is it that occupies this role? If folk platitudes delineate a role, it is another task to discovery what occupies that role.

At least in the case of some roles, it is a contingent fact what occupies those roles. Perhaps at one possible world a thing undergoes change over time by remaining identical through time and differing in its properties at different times. Perhaps at another possible world a thing undergoes change over time by its having different temporal parts. We cannot tell a priori which of these ways is involved for a thing to change over time at the actual world (Jackson (1994)). So we need to use a posteriori means to discover what occupies the role of change over time.

Furthermore, even in the case of roles where we can tell a priori that exactly one kind of thing could occupy that role, it is a further question whether anything actually occupies that role. For example, perhaps our folk intuitions about freedom of action include the libertarian intuition that a free action cannot be determined by events in the distant past.

Assuming that in the actual world our actions are determined, it follows that nothing perfectly realizes the freedom of action role. But it may be that there is something about our mental life that meets many of the other folk intuitions about freedom, especially many of the more import-ant ones (Jackson 1998, 44–45). In that case, although there is no per-fect occupier of the freedom of action role, there may be an “imperper-fect occupier” of it and an “imperfect deserver” of the expression “freedom of action.” As Lewis puts it, “[when] it comes to occupying a role, and thereby deserving a name, near enough is good enough” (Lewis 1996, 58).²⁰ We would have freedom of action, although what we have does not exactly match the list of folk intuitions about freedom. Once again, it requires a posteriori investigation to tell what occupies, or is the best candidate for occupying, the role marked out by a list of folk intuitions.

Third: identify the subject matter with what occupies the role. The first stage of the Canberra Plan programme said that the folk platitudes about a subject matter determine a certain role, and that whatever occupies that role is identical to that subject matter. The second stage instructs us to discover what occupies that role. It follows that whatever it is that occupies that role is identical to the subject matter. In slogan form: to be F is to occupy the F-role.

Jackson officially assigns conceptual analysis the modest task of iden-tifying the F-role by assembling folk platitudes about Fs, and of establish-ing whether the folk platitudes are consistent with what science claims about the world (Jackson 1998, 42–44). Yet he also puts conceptual analy-sis to the much more ambitious task of specifying conceptual entailments between different descriptions of the world. Take any true description of anything in the world. This might be people’s psychology or the col-ours of objects, to take two of Jackson’s examples. The ambitious task is this: given physicalism — the claim that everything is physical — every true description of anything in the world is a priori deducible from a description of the world in terms of fundamental physics. To defend the view that there are colours or minds in our world, we need to show how things as told in the vocabulary of fundamental physics make true things told in the vocabulary of colour or of psychology. This requires us to define the subjects, and to do this we must do conceptual analysis. This is Jackson’s “entry by entailment” thesis applied to the case of physical-ism (Jackson 1998, 6–8). Notice that this ambitious entry-by-entailment role for philosophical analysis goes beyond any role of assembling and systematizing folk intuitions. It is doubtful that there are even any folk

20 See also Lewis (1989, 92–94) and Nolan (2005, 223–27).

platitudes about how microphysical descriptions relate to psychological or colour descriptions.²¹