I have also claimed that I don't need to go out into the world to do any empirical checking to know these things, — John

This seems wildly implausible. Surely you learned this fact in school?

I'd be interested to know why (you think that) Russell thought it was a good idea, because I don't have a clear sense of that myself. It might be I just got oversaturated with the view's opponents. There are some traditional purported problems with the direct reference view, but they all seem to me to be based on confusions arising from pretty clearly false assumptions: for example, the issue with 'empty names' like 'Pegasus' only matters if, for some reason, you think it's impossible to refer to things that don't exist, which seems straightforwardly wrong, and it puzzles me why historically people have thought such things. But then, that is speaking as someone from a different generation.

And yeah, I think you're right. I'll leave it to John to defend what he means.

Paris is the capital of France, and it may be the property of Paris most people are familiar with: but the word 'Paris,' so the thought goes, simply denotes a certain city. You can correctly describe that city using the description 'the capital of France,' but this is a contingent description.

Likewise, most people might know Aristotle as the teacher of Alexander the Great, but it seems 'Aristotle' does not in any sense mean 'the teacher of Alexander the great,' because we can say that Alexander might not have been Alexander the Great's teacher.

There's a long and very boring history in analytic philosophy talking about these kinds of issues, but I've never found the pull toward 'descriptivism' all that compelling, and looking back on it I'm never sure why people thought names acted like definite descriptions to begin with.

If you thought that the sense of 'Paris' somehow encoded its referent being the capital, though, you might not think that. It might be that Paris' (that city's) being the capital, because people call it the capital, is an empirical matter of fact, but given that the language has settled on this, and as a result come to be such that 'Paris' somehow means or is defined as the capital of France (though the meaning of the word could itself empirically changed), then you might end up with 'Paris is the capital of France' being something like an analytic truth despite that fact that its analyticity is propped up entirely by empirical facts about people's behavior.

But the fact that 'Paris is the capital of France' is not anything like an analytic truth shows this to be false, contra what people are claiming in this thread.

I don't have a firm position on essential properties, but I do think there are levels of tolerance people as a rule are more or less willing to accept as essential. For example, I think it makes sense to imagine if France fought for the Axis rather than the Allies in WW2. I have a harder time imagining France having grown up in Southeast Asia rather than Western Europe – this may mean it's more essential to being France that you're in a certain geographical location. But even that seems negotiable. If some country in an alternate history grew up in Southeast Asia that spoke French and had a similar history to the actual France, I think it would be fair to call it France. These things are all negotiable, though some more than others, and there may be no metaphysical facts or facts about linguistic usage that decide them in advance.

Once you say, 'Imagine if France had been in Southeast Asia, and they spoke Hindi, and none of the major battles in French history happened there, and the people were black, and...' then I falter and say, 'I don't see in what we we could possibly be talking about France anymore.' So at the very least some disjunctive conglomeration of these properties are essential.

Maybe, I think it depends. There are empirical facts about what people agree to, but some of these 'agreements' when they amount to nothing more than linguistic uses cease to be 'empirical' in the relevant sense from the perspective of the language. For example we might say that a tree is a plant as a matter of English usage, but this is contingent on what people use the words 'plant' and 'tree' to refer to. So there's a difference between the language, being as it is as the result of empirical use, guaranteeing non-empirically that something is the case, and it not even guaranteeing that, even when all the empirical facts about usage are established. If 'capital' literally meant something like 'that which we call the capital' you get into murky waters pretty fast. But I doubt any property-denoting expressions really work that way.

Sure, there is? There are capitol buildings and government functions. Do you really think being a capital consists in nothing other than people calling it the capital or saying it is? That there is no empirical aspect of the city from which you could determine it's the capital?

And clearly, we can imagine Paris not being the capital of France, so I don't see what the problem is.

Are you under the impression that you cannot 'just go look' and see that Paris is the capital of France? Being a capital comes with certain empirical manifestations, like being the center of certain political activities.

I told you that all you have to do is decide that the object you're calling "France" must have Paris as its capital. — Mongrel

No, this is not decided, not even according to Kripke. Kripke has certain controversial and strong views about which properties are essential to objects, but he takes these to be matters of metaphysics, not agreement or stipulation: such as, a table might essentially be made of certain physical constituents, or a person might essentially have some DNA. These are independent of his semantic thesis about proper names, however, and highly controversial, and I think not even Kripke would venture to say that Paris is essentially the capital of France.

According to Kripke, the name 'Paris' rigidly designates a certain individual, viz. a city. When stipulating a possible world, we say things like, 'If Paris hadn't been the capital of France...' Since we are using the word 'Paris,' which rigidly designates, even in this stipulated counterfactual scenario, we are still talking about Paris, hence why we use the word 'Paris.' We do not imagine if some other city might not have been the capital, we imagine if Paris, i.e. that very city, were different from what it was. This is what Kripke means in saying that possible worlds are not distant regions or alternate realities, but stipulated objects, and in stipulating, we stipulate that we are talking about Paris, that very city that the name 'Paris' refers to in all worlds.

Regardless of all of this, it's not a matter of linguistic stipulation what properties are essential to an individual, if any.

I don't agree; under the current and past definition it is the capital of France. — John

Paris is not the capital of France according to any definition. It is the capital as a matter of fact.

I'm sorry, I can't follow you. I don't see any difference between the two. Both talk about contingent facts that can be verified or falsified empirically.

Dictionaries often provide supplementary information about individuals outside of their definitions, and the definition of Paris is a certain city; to get people to see which city that is, it is appropriate to provide a descrition of it, like 'the capital of France,' even though this description is itself contingent.

If Paris were not the capital of France, it would not stop being Paris. Ergo it cannot be that the definition of 'Paris' includes its being the capital of France. There is no logical contradiction in saying that Paris is not the capital of France. Moreover, if another city became the capital of France, it would not become Paris. None of this should be controversial.

Read Kripke's remarks about Nixon in NN. They make the same point I'm making here, contradict what you're saying, and are integral to the point he's making and the notion of rigid designation.

I don't know what you mean. Can it be false right now that Paris is not the capital of France? Well, no, since it is. Can it be false right now that it's sunny in some location? Well, it either is sunny or it isn't, so it either can or it can't be, but I don't know which one.

Perhaps you're talking about epistemic modality, something along the lines of as far as I/we know, it might be sunny versus France might be the capital of Paris. But this is simply not what is at issue in determining whether a proposition is empirical.

The actual France (whose capital is Paris) can not be identical to an alternate France (whose capital is Caen). That's pretty basic. It's two different objects. — Mongrel

There is no 'alternate France.' When we say 'if France had a different capital...' We are talking about France. We are not talking about some other thing. That is why we say, if France had a different capital... This is one of Kripke's most basic points.

The rigid designator identifies an object across all possible worlds in which that object exists. Not all possible worlds period. Many possible worlds don't have the thing we call France (with its Paris capital.) — Mongrel

First off, this is only one interpretation of rigid designation.

Second, it's moot because a world in which France has a different capital is one in which, a fortiori, France exists.

one of the definitions of the name 'Paris' is 'capital of France'. — John

No it isn't. If it were, then it would be impossible for anywhere else to be the capital, which it isn't. Paris is not defined as the capital of France, although it is the capital.

In any case you still haven't told us how the purportedly merely empirical proposition 'Paris is the capital of France' could be falsified. — John

I am trying to understand what your problem is, but I really don't. Do you think it's not possible to check what city is the capital of a nation? You would falsify it by checking, and seeing that it's not that city, in the same way as you'd check and see the sun wasn't shining.

Yes, it can. That is Kripke's whole point, and the point of rigid designation, that the name denotes the same individual across possible worlds.

If we talk about what capital France might have had, we are not talking about some other thing besides France, we are talking about France. Pace Lewis, but I think Lewis is just wrong on this point.

(In fact to suggest that all modal considerations of France involve a different individual obviates the point of essential properties to begin with on many interpretations, since the whole point of an essential property is that it is invariant on an individual across worlds).

You seem to be under the impression that's it's impossible to check whether a certain city is the capital of a nation, or else this question makes no sense. But I can't figure out why you would think that.

You can check whether the sun was shining, and so verify or falsify that it was; likewise, you can check what the capital of a nation is.

To me, that says they are antonyms. I also note that he does not mention experience. — andrewk

Sorry, I messed up, being synthetic doesn't have to do with relying on experience, that's a posteriori. It has to do with conceptual analysis, of a proposition's truth not being discernible in virtue of the rules of the language or thoughts the language conveys.

Can you provide an example of one? I have never seen an attempted definition. People just seem to assume that it's meaning is obvious - which it isn't. — andrewk

Sure. For example let a property be a function from possible worlds to sets of individuals. Suppose that for some properties A and B, and for all possible worlds w, A(w) is a subset of B(w). Then the property A is contained within the property B, and it is impossible to be an A without being a B, and this is known to anyone who knows what the words denoting these properties mean.

Paris is not defined as the capital of France in any way. It is the capital of France, but that is not the same thing.

Whether Paris is the capital of France is not a matter of definition, it is a matter of fact, which city is the capital of the country. It might be a matter of some complex broader social agreement, but it's first of all not only a matter of that, and second of all this is not the same thing as it being a matter of definition.

No. It wouldn't commit me to saying France can't change its capital. Among the essential features of what we call France is that for a period of time (including this date), Paris was its capital. Pretty simple. — Mongrel

Except it's not, because we can say things like, 'if France's capital had been Cannes right now...' This would be literally unintelligible if it were an essential property of France to have Paris as its capital during some stretch of time.

'Synthetic' means requiring the use of experience, rather than mere analysis of linguistic expressions and the internal structure of the language, to determine truth or falsity. In Kantian terms is means a cateogorical judgment in which the predicate is not contained within its subject (and you can define this containment relation is various ways).

Okay, but that has nothing to do with the present topic or whether a proposition is empirical. You're talking about epistemic modality.

Of course i'm talking about modal possibility. That's what we're all talking about. That's what I was just pointing out. Whether a proposition is synthetic, empirical, contingent, or whatever, doesn't have to do with whether it's actually true, nor with whether it's a live epistemic possibility that it's actually true. You seem just to be misunderstanding the terms of the debate.

'Paris is the capital of France' is a plain empirical proposition, just like 'the sun is shining.' It can be verified or falsified just as easily as propositions about the sun shining. I'm not sure why you think otherwise. It's a matter of fact what city is France's capital.

I don't know what would possess someone to think that Paris being the capital of France is one of France's essential properties: this would commit you, among other things, to believing that France cannot change its capital, without being destroyed, which is false. Nor do I think any reading of Naming and Necessity will get you there. In any case, it's not an interesting point.

P2 is also true by virtue of the definitions of '7', '5', '+', and '12'. — andrewk

If you think math is learned synthetically, then you're going to deny this. This was more or less the default position in philosophy prior to the rise of logicism, as far as I know. Mathematical equations were not taken to be made true in virtue of definitions, but in virtue of intuitions about space and number.

All you have to do is recognize that having Paris as its capital is essential to the thing we call France. — Mongrel

But it quite clearly isn't. France could change its capital in the future.

I'm not sure why that seems bewildering. — Mongrel

It seems bewildering because it's clearly false, and you're defending it apparently with a misreading of Kripke. I'm not sure of any reasonable way to claim that France's capital being Paris is an essential property of France. In fact it seems insane. Maybe you can explain why you think that?

but we are talking here about the empirical world, France and Paris as they now stand. — John

Then you're not talking about it being metaphysically possible or impossible, but about it being actual or factual.

To say a proposition is contingent is not to say that we don't know in the actual world whether it's true. I know it's sunny right now; but it could have been otherwise. Just because it actually is sunny doesn't mean the proposition expressing that isn't based on experience, or contingent, or whatever you like.

There is no elaborate argumentation here. When we say something's an empirical proposition, we mean roughly it pertains to some contingent matter of fact that might have been otherwise. Clearly Paris doesn't have to be the capital of France. It's synthetic a posteriori pretty uncontroversially on anyone's standards.

It may not be an epistemic possibility, in that what we know about France rules out that the actual world is one in which some place other than Paris is the nation's capital. But this is true of all sorts of empirical propositions. It's an empirical proposition that the sun is shining here and now, like you said, but given what I know about today's weather, there is no serious epistemic possibility that it isn't.

I'm not sure why taking several primitive deductive steps to get from one thing to another means that the meaning isn't so in virtue of the words. And I've never heard anyone say that the number of 'steps' involved (whatever that might mean) is relevant to the distinction. It's worth noting that a minimum required number of steps is not a semantic notion to begin with: there are no 'steps' to whether one meaning is contained within another, it just is or isn't by some well-defined containment relation (like the extension of one term being a subset of the other in any possible world). Deductive steps are a proof-theoretic notion, which isn't the issue. And in that case, how many steps minimum something requires depends on your proof-theoretic machinery.

I've read Naming and Necessity. I'm actually pretty familiar with it.

The thing we rigidly designated 'France,' is France, which is depending on how you slice it a geographical area, nation-state, or cultural locus in Western Europe. It's perfectly possible for that very thing to have a capital other than France. It's not like having France as a capital is some essential property of it, or part of the definition of the word. It's kind of bewildering that people are seriously suggesting this tbh.

Sure there is. For example, the world in which the capital is Cannes instead.

That's Kripke's necessary aposteriori in a nutshell. — Mongrel

No, it's not. The necessary a posteriori applies to things like identity statements using differing names of the same individual. I.e., there is no world in which Hesperus isn't Phosphorus. There are certainly worlds in which France has a different capital.

...Yes?

...If France had a capital other than Paris? I don't understand what you're asking.

No, that sounds like a plain old empirical proposition to me.

My views are roughly hedonist, but I've come to think hedonism itself can't be rationally defended, only understood through Socratic inquiry to be the only position that is practically defensible, and no argument can rule out the possibility that there are other goods which we can affirm that have nothing to do with our lives. But if one is interested in Socratic self-examination and a life in tune with that, I think hedonism is 'just about' demonstrable, not as a personal preference but as a rigorous philosophical truth, or as close to that as it's possible to get.

As for how that hedonism manifests, I think the default response, and the one people in general default to, is a kind of pre-modern or 'Homeric' hedonism: eat and drink well, win glory, destroy your enemies, celebrate beauty and like what's naturally better. But in environments where this isn't possible, the only recourse may be a maverick individualistic Cyrenaic-style hedonism, which then might manifest as anything from libertine antics to pessimism, depending on individual proclivities.

My predictions for the majority on the questions, before looking at this:

a priori knowledge: yes [RIGHT]
abstract objects: platonism [RIGHT]
aesthetic value: subjective [WRONG]
analytic-synthetic distinction: yes [RIGHT]
epistemic justification: externalism [RIGHT]
external world: non-skeptical realism [RIGHT]
free will: compatibilism [RIGHT]
god: atheism [RIGHT]
knowledge: empiricism [RIGHT]
knowledge claims: contextualism [RIGHT]
laws of nature: non-humean [RIGHT]
logic: classical? [this question doesn't make any sense] [STILL RIGHT]
mental content: externalism [RIGHT]
meta-ethics: anti-realism [WRONG]
metaphilosophy: naturalism [RIGHT]
mind: physicalism [RIGHT]
moral judgment: non-cognitivism [WRONG]
moral motivation: externalism [WRONG]
newcomb's problem: meh [X]
normative ethics: consequentialism [WRONG]
perceptual experience: disjunctivism [WRONG]
personal identity: psychological [RIGHT]
politics: egalitarianism [RIGHT]
proper names: millian [RIGHT]
science: realism [RIGHT]
teleporter: survival [RIGHT]
time: meh [X]
trolley: switch [RIGHT]
truth: deflationary [WRONG]
zombies: inconceivable [WRONG]

That's 20/28 attempted right, but it looks like I was misinformed about the prevailing metaethical opinions. Interesting also that a lot of these views don't make sense in conjunction, and it seems statistically some of the philosophers must hold these fashionable views simultaneously in conjunction.

The Liar's Paradox carries an unusual amount of weight in philosophy of language. Even people who aren't talking about it explicitly feel obliged to set it aside in a footnote, like 'I realize this truth schema doesn't solve the liar's paradox.'

It has always seemed pretty straightforward to me. If you think of truth conditions as a kind of program that can be run to return a (truth) value, then the liar sentence will cause a crash because it will loop indefinitely trying to establish those conditions, and you'll get no output. This seems to be predicted by any ordinary semantics and to be exactly the right empirical prediction, so I've never seen what the problem was.

That would be interesting if true. A lot of papers I've read both in philosophy and out seem to throw out moral anti-realism by the way and very casually, as if it were a commonsense truth. I'm reading a lot in linguistics too now about evaluative adjectives, deontic modals, predicates of personal taste, and so on, and it's usually assumed without argument that these things can't have objective extensions or participate in objective truth values.

Yeah, I don't know of any philosopher who defends the existence of the analytic a posteriori. I suppose it could be possible if you hold a view such that knowledge of the operations of a language is impossible without world-knowledge. For example, to know the meaning of a referential expression might be to know its referent, which would in turn requiring having empirical knowledge of how the language community uses it to refer.

Analytic is a conceptual term, meaning roughly that the rules of a language, or of its interpretation, guarantee that a certain sentence or thought is true (or false). For something to be analytically true is for the truth of it to be contained within the meaning of the thing that expresses it. If you're competent with the rules of the language or rules of thought, you'll be able to recognize it as true just by looking at it.

A priori is an epistemological term, which means that something is known, or knowable, without experience, by means of reason alone. This need not be in virtue of its being analytic – for example, you might think 'I exist' is in some way a priori, even though it's contingent and so not analytic.