I've decided to give this google docs thing a try, and so I put up one of my current works in progress, related to what I was posting about a few weeks ago. It can be found here, for anyone interested in reading a somewhat lengthier version of the argument I mentioned in this recent post.
Instead of getting much further work done on that paper, I've been reading other things. I re-read Carnap's The Logical Structure of the World, as well as his Meaning and Necessity, and also read van Fraassen's Laws and Symmetry. There seems to be a common viewpoint held by Carnap and van Fraassen, and also related to the views of Langton I mentioned earlier. All concerned seem to hold that if you know the structure of a situation, the various relationships between the parts involved, you know quite a lot. Further, they all maintain that it's fortunate that structure tells you so much, because it tells you everything you're ever going to get; there's nothing else that can be known.
This is, I think, actually relevant to the philosophy of mind topics I've been thinking about. Functionalist accounts are, of course, all about structure and relationships, and the argument that a functionalist cannot account for the phenomenal often seems to be based on a view of phenomenal properties on which they just aren't structural/relational. I also glanced at Chalmers recently, and was thus once again struck at how implausible his argument seemed to me. The claims he presents as obviously true which strike me as obviously false often involve the word "property;" I'm almost certain he doesn't use the word the way I do (as surely he'd recognize the obvious falsity of his claims if he did). I'm less sure what he does mean, but it seems likely that he intends the kind of metaphysical meaning Carnap and the rest say is incoherent. As usual, I'm with Carnap.
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