Resultados de la dimensión Uso de las TIC (Aprendiendo con las TIC)

Before moving to consider the consequences of the rejection of 1, and some possible replies, there is another (classic) thought experiment it will be useful to consider. The thought experiment is the one described in Burge [1986]. It also involves someone having a seemingly a priori false belief, but, unlike in the arthritis case, there is no linguistic incompetence involved, or at least no deferential disposition. Instead the a priori false belief is grounded in sufficiently deviant background beliefs. We have seen that Chalmers’ reply made some use of the fact that a deferential concept was involved in the previous case, so adding a counterexample in which that is not the case should reinforce the conclusion that 1 has to be abandoned. The case discussed here will be also relevant in section 2.4.1. Burge describes the case as follows:

We begin by imagining a person A in our community who has a normal mastery of English.

A’s early instruction in the use of ‘sofa’ is mostly ostensive, though he picks up the normal

truisms. A can use the term reliably. At some point, however, A doubts the truisms and hypothesizes that sofas function not as furnishings to be sat on, but as works of art or religious artifacts. He believes that the usual remarks about the function of sofas conceal, or represent a delusion about, an entirely different practice. A admits that some sofas have been sat upon, but thinks that most sofas would collapse under any considerable weight and denies that sitting is what sofas are pre-eminently for. A may attack the veridicality of many of our memories of sofas being sat upon, on the grounds that the memories are a product of the delusion. (Burge [1986], p. 707)

Burge also invites us to imagine that A is going to look for confirmations of his hypothesis, in any rational way you can think of, and if he were to find none he would admit his error. We can add to the story, to convince us that A is not to be disregarded as a rational subject, that A

has got misleading but reasonable evidence that something (perhaps a conspiracy, or an extra- terrestrial civilization, or an evil demon) is inducing the delusion upon human beings.

The further step of the thought experiment is imagining B, an individual internally identical to A, who lives in a possible world where indeed there are no sofas (not in the sense we standardly think of them), but only works of art or religious artefacts, looking superficially like sofas. By a series of coincidences, B is brought to falsely think that these objects are commonly sat upon, and they are meant to be sat on. In his community, most people know that the primary function of these objects is to be works of art or religious artefacts; but all B

has heard is identical, at least in sound, to what A has heard. However, by the time B, having acquired new evidence (subjectively indistinguishable from the evidence A has acquired), is doubting that ‘sofas’ are meant to be sat upon, his doubts are correct. What he expresses with that sentence is something false.

The conclusion that we should draw from this thought experiment, for our present purposes, is the following: A’s belief is a priori false (remember that the idea of an a priori

false belief, per se, is entirely unproblematic in the two-dimensionalist framework), while B’s

is true. In a two-dimensionalist framework, this entails the primary intensions of their beliefs differ, despite A and B being internally identical. The difference with the arthritis case is that

A is not plausibly regarded as linguistically incompetent. He is informed of the prevailing pattern of use of ‘sofas’, and he knows dictionary definitions (although he thinks they are mistaken). He is capable to use ‘sofa’ in the standard way for most purposes, and to engage in sophisticated conversation about the nature of sofas, in which he and his opponents do not seem to talk past each other; his error seems motivated not by misunderstanding but rather by his non-standard background beliefs. Most importantly, he is not disposed to defer to anyone in his use of ‘sofa’.

What could the two-dimensionalist reply at this point? It seems she has two possible strategies only: insisting again that A and B have a metalinguistic concept of sofa, or denying that A’s belief is a priori false. Let’s consider them in turn. I’ll be brief on the first strategy,

because we found the metalinguistic move unsatisfying before, and here it seems to lose its main motivation, which was that the speaker was disposed to defer to experts about his use. A fortiori, we would have to find the move unsatisfying here.

The other response, claiming that A’s belief is false, but not a priori so, might come in

two forms. The first form of this reply involves claiming that in general the belief expressed by competent speakers with utterances of ‘sofas are meant to be sat upon’ (the proposition expressed by the sentence in the public language, if you wish) is not a priori true. However, the example seems to make the move scarcely plausible. The truisms which are doubted could be varied to include, instead of a specification of a function of the artefact, facts about its typical perceptual appearances, or any other so-called ‘prototypical’ feature of the object. And the reply would incur at least one the problems discussed for the meta-linguistic strategy, that of making very little a priori knowledge available to speakers in general.

The other version of this kind of reply involves claiming that A’s utterance deviates

significantly in meaning from similar utterances made by most competent speakers, so that his utterance in particular is not a priori false. This strategy will be considered in the next section. So far, the conclusion to be drawn is that we found no plausible way for the two- dimensionalist to save 1. If there are primary intensions, it seems they do not supervene on the internal states of the subjects entertaining them. We have not yet said what the consequences are for thesis 2, if thesis 1 is discarded. This will be the first topic of the next section. We will then consider whether it is plausible to defend 1 by appealing to 2.