A Study in Philosophy

1. On sense and reference On page 30 of Naming and Necessity , Kripke says,  If 'Aristotle' meant the man who taught Alexander the Great, then saying 'Aristotle was a teacher of Alexander the Great' would be a mere tautology. But surely it isn't; it expresses the fact that Aristotle taught Alexander the Great, something we could discover to be false. So, being the teacher of Alexander the Great cannot be part of [the sense of] the name. Let us suppose that a student learns the name “Aristotle" by learning that  (P) Aristotle was a teacher of Alexander the Great.  The typical student will assume that Aristotle was a human who lived at a particular historical time, and could further deduce that Aristotle was a person of competence and reputation. Further deductions, based on knowledge of history, could include that Aristotle was a man, that he lived well into his adult years, and so on. Thus, P attributes a property to a person (from which other properti...

In his recent book,   From Bacteria to Bach and Back  (2017), Dennett utilizes memetics to develop his ideas on consciousness. I haven't finished it yet. I paused after 120 or so pages, because I have concerns with his preliminary discussion of information.There are areas where I agree with Dennett, but I have problems with his discussion of both Shannon information and semantic information. The problems with the latter are unfortunately predictable given Dennett's longstanding approach to intentionality.  I. Shannon Information In a chapter entitled "What is Information?,” Dennett follows a seventy-year tradition of making a strong distinction between semantic information and Shannon information. Here is how Claude Shannon (" A Mathematical Theory of Communication ," 1948) introduces the distinction:  The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point.   Frequently the...