Resultados de la dimensión Conocimiento de las TIC (aprendiendo sobre las TIC)

worry comes in various forms. First, and most obviously, the meta-linguistic account of primary intensions makes it impossible for words from languages other than English to mean the same as ‘arthritis’, and the other way round. For example, the primary intension of (utterances of) the Italian word ‘artrite’ will be roughly ‘whatever is called ‘artrite’ in my linguistic community’, which is different of course from ‘whatever is called ‘arthritis’ in my linguistic community’. The point here does not depend in any way on taking seriously the description offered as a gloss to the primary intension; the English term and the Italian one determine different functions from possible worlds to secondary intensions. Here is why: surely it could be that in Italian 'artrite' applies outside of the joints, and 'arthritis' in English doesn't. It is crucial to Chalmer's solution that the syntactic form which is used differently with respect to the actual world (‘artrite’, in the example) could still count as the same word used in the actual world, otherwise Bert and TwinBert are just using different words, hence, given that the primary intension is related to the word somehow, the primary intensions differ. But in the possible world at which the two languages differ in this way, ‘artrite’ and ‘arthritis’ determine different extensions, and they could do so for a single bilingual speaker; therefore, they determine a different function from centered possible worlds to secondary intensions.

The two-dimensionalist might point out in reply that this problem would not prevent successful communication in the great majority of cases, due to sameness of secondary intension in the actual world. But, even granting the point about communication for the sake of the argument, we are still left an unwelcome result, because it seems to us that speakers of different languages can use terms meaning exactly the same as ‘arthritis’, and to have exactly the same thought, when they think they have arthritis, despite the phonological and orthographic differences; but this is impossible if the meta-linguistic move is accepted. Nor is the point dependent on focusing on public or stable meanings instead than on speaker or utterance meaning. Intuitively, the content of a particular utterance of ‘John has arthritis’, made by a particular English speaker, and the content of a particular utterance of ‘John ha l’atrite’, made by a particular Italian speaker, can be exactly the same, in all respects; and the same goes for two particular thoughts.

As we noted above, if the treatment extends to large part of our language, the counterintuitive result is multiplied. Moreover, the same result would apply to speakers of the same language who use different spellings of the word (either because two different spellings are accepted, or due to incompetence). Using ‘arthrytis’ instead of ‘arthritis’ would mean having a different concept. And indeed concentrating on the written form of the word seems insufficient, because surely illiterate speakers can have the concept; if we concentrate on phonological forms rather than orthographical ones, we avoid some of the problems, but then differences in pronunciation or accent would yield different concepts, which seems even worse. Not only that; it becomes impossible for a person affected by deaf-mutism since birth to possess exactly the same concept we do. The general problem is, again, that it seems obvious that phonological and orthographical features of the way we express a concept are inessential to it.

B) A second point is internal to the theory. Chalmer’s account of Bert’s case seems to undermine at least a significant part of the motivation for two-dimensionalism. I take one main motivation for two-dimensionalism to be the possibility to ground a priori knowledge of conceptual and metaphysical possibilities; but there is very little Bert can know a priori about arthritis. By the specification of the primary intension given above, next to nothing about arthritis can be learned. Surely Bert, according to Chalmers, could not know a priori that arthritis cannot apply to his thigh. But if my reasoning is correct, if he could not we cannot either, because we would also have a deferential concept; and if most concepts are like that, there is very little we can know a priori in general. If we defer about ‘arthritis’, then it is not clear why we wouldn’t defer about ‘consciousness’, which is a term having so much more

empirical and conceptual complexity connected with its use. But then the primary intension of ‘consciousness’ would be scarcely able to play any theoretical role. Of course Chalmers would argue that ‘consciousness’ is special in this respect. But even granting for the sake of the argument that this is so, it seems enough of a problem, from the point of view of the two- dimensionalist, that most of us are not in a position to know a priori most things we thought we could, e.g. that a bachelor is an unmarried man. It is easy to think of cases on the lines of the arthritis case for ‘bachelor’. Supposing ‘bachelor’ necessarily applies to all and only unmarried men, we can easily imagine someone being convinced by a misguided dictionary that ‘bachelor’ does not apply to certain unmarried men, such as clergymen. Then we can imagine a twin lives in a community in which “bachelor” actually does not apply to clergyman. The same considerations that lead one to attribute a meta-linguistic concept to Bert and his twin, lead one to attribute a shared meta-linguistic concept here. And, as I argued above, the same considerations apply to normally competent speakers. The point about the vast number of cases we are dealing with is again relevant.

Perhaps one could try to alleviate the worry by thinking of a primary intension which is only partially meta-linguistic, such as ‘the disease denoted by ‘arthritis’ in my linguistic community’, a formulation which is suggested in passing in Chalmers [2007]. But this formulation already puts the concept in danger of being subject to a Twin-Earth case. Surely as soon as the primary intension is going to include interesting features of the phenomenon, this is going to become possible.

C) Finally, there is a risk that the kind of meta-linguistic primary intension we are