 OK, good morning, bright and early. Well, early, anyway. So today, we're going on to look at Evans on the Causal Theory of Names. But I want to wrap up first thinking about color. Color isn't really discussed in the texts that we're looking at, but I think it's an interesting case as a kind of exercise for a causal theory of representation. Because we do represent the world as colored. That seems like a datum. And in a causal theory, there's a question, how can that be happening? What is it that we're causally responding to that is allowing us to represent the world as having all these qualitative colors? And on a natural story, the world out there isn't itself colored. The world out there doesn't contain these qualitative characteristics. The world out there only contains light of various wavelengths, not the qualitative color characteristics themselves, the blueness of the blue thing, and so on. So how come we are managing to represent these qualitative characteristics if there is nothing qualitative out there for us to be causally responding to? And the natural answer that I guess many of you guys were defending last time was that it's something to do with our color sensations. We have inner qualitative sensations, and our color representations are causally responsive to those inner color sensations. And the bombshell on which we ended last time was that this talk about color sensations doesn't make an ounce of sense. This is a dramatic claim, I realize, because it's a very popular view, not just in this class, but in philosophy generally, that there are sensations of color. But it seems to me that it really is a difficult notion, because in the one hand, the color sensations are supposed to be what we have most immediate knowledge of. They're what inject your consciousness of color into vision. So they're what you have your first and most immediate knowledge of in having knowledge of colors. But on the other hand, when you just reflect for a moment on your own current visual experience, your own current visual experience doesn't give you any knowledge of color sensations at all. Your own current visual experience only gives you knowledge of the colors of the objects around you. It only gives you knowledge of color as a characteristic of concrete objects. So you could say, well, I'm going to hypothesize that there's something you don't have any direct knowledge of, namely, these color sensations. And these color sensations would be like postulates, like the electron is a postulated object. You could say, color sensations are like electrons. They're postulated to explain what goes on. And then you might form hypotheses about how they behave, just as you can form hypotheses about how electrons behave. But the position you reach at this point is actually incoherent, because nothing can be both, nothing can be both a purely theoretical postulate, hypothesized in order to explain what's going on. And on the other hand, the thing that we have most immediate knowledge of in ordinary color experience was providing us with knowledge of the blueness of the blue thing. I mean, you might go try going down either of these tracks, but the current position is that you try going down both of them at once. And that is incoherent, it seems to me. So if we reach that point and we say, well, where is this qualitative character? We can't take it as a given that the representations have it. So it must be a characteristic either of inner sensation or of the world out there. Actually, the most popular view is that we don't say color is a characteristic of the world out there. And I think a lot of people would say this talk about color sensation, not most, but many philosophers would say this talk about color sensation is kind of problematic. It is not obvious that it really makes sense. So why don't we think instead of the qualitative characters of the objects around us, as that's something we represent the world to have. We represent the world to have the blueness, the redness, and so on. It doesn't really have those qualitative characteristics. We just represent the world that way. And if you put it like that, you don't need to bother talking about sensations at all. Does that seem like a sensible view? Can you put your hand up if that sounds reasonable enough? I mean, it might be wrong, I'd be right. But at any rate, it's reasonable enough. Yeah, the thing is, that was a trap. I think that makes no sense. Whatever, if you have a causal theory of representation, there is nowhere really to go here. Because if you have a causal theory of representation, then could be representing the qualitative colors that you representations have to be causally responsive to the qualitative colors. But where are the qualitative colors that your system of representation is causally responding to? There are no qualitative colors out there. We're assuming there's only the light wavelengths. There are no qualitative colors in here, in your sensations. That's the other thing we're assuming. So there's no way in which those representations could now be representing the qualities of color. I mean, a causal theory of representation needs two things. It needs the representation. And it needs the phenomenon that the representation is causally responsive to. So the point we've now reached is, we say there aren't the color sensations in there. There aren't the colors out there. So how could the representations be representing qualitative colors? There's no qualitative characteristic of sensation, no qualitative characteristic of the objects out there, to be causing the representations. I think my own view is the only way to go here is to say, well, if you talk about color sensations, really doesn't make sense. It really is kind of obscurantist to talk about these color sensations when we don't understand exactly what they are and we don't have any everyday common sensical knowledge of them. Then why not take the appearances at face value? Why not suppose that really the objects out there have the quality of colors they seem to have? And the physics is just incomplete. There is more to the world out there independent of us. There is more to the mind independent reality than just physics of the situation. What more there is are the primitive color characteristics of the objects. So if the objects really are in themselves, blue, red, yellow, and so on, then our color representations can have the contents that they do as responses to those qualitative characteristics out there. And we don't have to bother with this difficult talk about color sensations. We can explain the whole thing in terms of a causal theory of representation. But note that the pressure that a causal theory of representation puts you on here. If you've got the representation with a particular kind of, and it's representing things a particular way, there must be something there that is that way in order for the representation to be representing it as that way. Was that a bit too fast? Do you see what I mean? Yeah. There go to, sorry? Did you say that was OK or that was not OK? I'll do it again. OK. If you go to the causal theory of representation, then that's to say you've got the representations over here. That's the representations, yes? And a causal theory says the only way the representations gets to be a representation of that queue, let's say, is if there's some queue out here causing the representation. You could only have a representation of goodl. If there's goodl out there causing your use of the name. You could only have a representation of water if there's water out there causing your use of the sign. You could only have a representation of color if there's color out there causing your use of the sign. And when people say there's no smoke without fire, in a way that's actually literally applicable here because, I mean, of course there can be smoke without fire. I mean, I'm not denying that. But there's something right about it which is we treat smoke as a sign of fire. Smoke is a sign of fire in the sense that it's reliably caused by fire. That's all right, that wasn't too fast. Yeah, you see smoke, you can say that's fire. That smoke means fire, you can say, right? The smoke indicates the presence of fire. That couldn't be unless there was usually fire out there causing the smoke. So similarly, you can't have a representation of water. The water indicates the presence of water. The water representation indicates the presence of water. The color representation indicates the presence of color. But it couldn't do that unless there were colors out there. Oh, oh boy, OK, one, two, three. The representation is itself the cause. So it causes itself. That's right. We get color representations from somewhere. That's the whole point. Yeah, that's a central thing, right? Whether you agree with anything else I say here, that's the important thing. A color representation is not self-standing. Its meaning is not kind of generated from within. It's always generated from something that's causing it. That's true of representation in general. That's the claim of a causal theory, yeah. The cause and the effect must be two different things. Things can't cause that. I mean, it's sometimes said that God is his own cause. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but that's a very unusual case. Things can't in general cause themselves. If you catch a disease, and you say, how come that happened, then the SF just can't be what caused itself. You should get another doctor to tell you that, right? Things can't cause themselves. It makes no sense. Well, OK, you'd have to be saying this is a very special case, right? The whole idea of a causal theory is there's the water out there and the representation of water. There's a name goodle and the person goodle. And one's causing the other. There are two different things, and one causes the other. This idea of a representation causing itself, in the face of it, it makes no sense. I mean, I don't mean to be pejorative here, but really, I mean, if you said, well, where did the chalk come from? How was it made? The ideal, well, it made itself. I mean, how could that be? You see what I mean? But that's what you'd have to be saying about the color representation, oh, it made itself. How does that work? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's right. Physics isn't complete, yeah. That's right. You could say that. I mean, it's a lot of brain science is actually very puzzled by this picture that you do get people who go through assemblies of cell firing saying, now, where do we get the color qualia? Where do the color qualia come? And you keep turning over these assemblies of cell firing looking for the color sensations. And they're so hard to find. And the truth is you could trace a bunch of hits in the retina all the way through to the back of the brain, all the way through to the front of the brain, all the way through to action. And I never noticed color sensations at any point. Yeah? So it is very puzzling for the scientists who are thinking about where consciousness is. How shall we find it? And you get reactions like, well, maybe if the mathematics is sufficiently complex, we will find the color sensations. But it really seems that it is not a matter of mathematical complexity. The thing isn't there at all. And it seems to me at that point, a natural reaction to say, well, where do the colors seem to be? They seem to be out there on the objects. Yeah? Maybe you're just looking in the wrong place. Yeah? That's right. Oh, I just said there's this basic incoherence in the other one. Oops, I'm going the wrong way here. I said that the color sensations are kind of incoherent because in the one hand, they're theoretical postulates that we don't know anything about directly. Yeah, they're just postulates. And that's the kind of line you're taking. They're in there in the brain somewhere. And future research will tell us something about them. But in the other hand, they're also supposed to have this characteristic that they're the most immediate thing you have knowledge of in everyday visual experience. Now, I think it's perfectly reasonable to say, I'm going to forget about this part, the special insight into them. Let's suppose they're backstage. Yeah? I think that's a perfectly defensible view. It really is obscure, though. I mean, you lose the sense that you have to, as you say, knowingly give up the sense that you know what you're talking about when you talk about color sensations and say it's just this postulated black box backstage in consciousness somewhere. And if that's the deal, then I have no problem with that in principle. But it's not one many people have gone down. It's not what usually they have in mind when they have a color sensation. On the other hand, they talk about the colors of medium-sized objects. That we understand. You know, we use a million times every day. It's a robust, well-worked terminology. There's nothing obscure about it. So that's why I like it better. But that's how to say that's decisive. So I think the track you're suggesting is perfectly reasonable. Yeah? Yeah. This was meant to be a kind of, by the way. Put your hand if you've got a question. Okay, you've got a question. Okay, this is going to be really quick. Okay, one line. I'll try to talk for less than 20 minutes each time. One, two. Yeah. No, you see a color. Yeah. No, it's not translation. It's causation is the key thing here. Yeah. So I'm not saying your brain interprets. That's what the last commenter was saying. Your brain interprets the stuff out there as colors. I'm saying the colors are out there and your brain just causally responds to them. If it seems to you like, unless you have something of a startle reaction, you don't really understand what I'm saying. Because most educated people today would take it for granted that that's false. Yeah, that the colors are somehow generated by the mind. But I'm suggesting that that's wrong. Yeah. It's not wrong. That's right. Could you speak up, please? Did you say it's not wrong? I'm saying it's caused by the color. No, I'm saying it's caused by the color. That's right. That's how come you've got a representation of the qualitative color. If it's caused by the wavelengths out there, you have no idea how it came about that you've got a representation of a qualitative color here. That's the problem. Yeah, that's where we come in with that basic difficulty. One, two, yeah. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, well, I was saying when you try and reflect on the nature of your current color experience, you wind up just looking at the world around you. No, you can have knowledge of what you're seeing. In order to describe what you're seeing, you describe the world around you. But that is knowledge of a mental state. Abstract back and take that mental state as an object itself, I can say plenty of stuff while it's happening out there, but how can I say anything about that mental state itself? What's going wrong there is a picture of knowledge of your own mental state as knowledge of something in here, a bunch of sensations confined to your head. You have to think of the color experience, your ordinary seeing of things as something that connects you to the world out there. That's what a causal theory is saying. Remember that thing about the thinker? The whole point there was, you can't know whether you're thinking about H2O or XYZ just by looking inside your head. The whole point about this, this is what I mean about how deep this causal theory goes, is that that picture of your mind is something separated out from the world that you can have knowledge of, independent of your knowledge of your environment. That is getting blown up here. I think that's what's behind your question. In describing the environment, you are describing what you're seeing, you describe your environment all right, but you're thereby describing your mental state. It's common sense, but it's wrong. That's what I'm saying. I do recognize the intuition there. That's right. That's right. We just have to sort that out the way we do ordinarily. It's like if I'm in a store and I ask for a blue shirt and they bring me something and I say, that's not a blue shirt, that's a green shirt, then these disputes do come up. I've actually been in that context exactly, but I've been in at least one quite impassioned argument about whether something was blue or green. You just have to settle that the way people usually do. You look at color charts, you talk to other people. You kind of get recalibrated. We do get into these disputes and we do settle them, but all at the level of common sense. Okay, last one. What about what's that? An abstractionist painter, yes, right? That's right and that's interesting. Well, it's a complex case, but in the case of water, you can do a painting of water that can be meant to be water. There it is, the bottle. Let's say it's peri, it's meant to be water. There's the glass, there's the bubbles. Water is all right, but there's no such scene in reality for you to be responding to. But still, it could be that the only way you can have a system of representation in which you can do that kind of stuff is that there are colors out there. Sorry, is that there is water out there in that example. The abstract painting is a little bit fancier because there's something about it, it's not naturalistic. But I think with an abstract painting, the painting itself is colored. Yes? Ah, it's a painting in your mind. That's a very fancy example. Okay, there's a painting in your mind, but it's not... Okay, right. Let me just make this general point that is one thing to say, in order for the system of representation to exist, the phenomenon must be out there to be causing you to use that system, right? That's what happens with water or good or whatever. Yeah, you can only have those representations if the stuff's out there. But that's not to say that every representation you form using that system has to be an accurate representation of what's going on. Yeah. That doesn't comprehensively address your example, but that's where I think you'd start. Okay? I just want to make one final remark that takes a bit further about last question, about one question about different people representing things differently. I just say this to try and make clear what the position is I'm suggesting. If you say that the colors are out there just the way we see them, you have to face the fact that lots of other animals seem to have different kinds of color vision to us. So goldfish, for example, seem able to see into the ultraviolet. Lots of birds seem to have ultraviolet vision. There are lots of birds that to us look drab and ravens and crows and so on. And then when you flood them with light in the wavelengths in which they see each other, if you see what I mean, they turn out to be differently, brilliantly colored. So if you take the goldfish or if you take bird vision like that, then what are we going to say about it? Is it that we see the colors right and they see them wrong? Or do they get it right and we get it wrong? Surely we can face off a goldfish, but we do seem to have this question which is really kind of amping up that thing. One thing I fobbed you off by saying well we do actually resolve these differences, but with a goldfish no amount of talk is going to... Well, you see what I mean. And really, so I just raise that, I don't want to try and address that here, but I just raise that to try and make clear what the view I'm recommending is. It's a view in which the goldfish really is a threat. And the question for you is if you don't buy that picture, then what causal theory would you like or color representations? That's homework. So I really want to move on to the Evans now. So I want to just whistle through and revive your memories of what was going on with Kripke. Kripke, Kripke, do you know Kripke? It seems like a long time ago now, but you remember Kripke? Kripke, yes. What do I really think of it with the Kripke is you can think of ourselves as having files on the things and people and objects around us. I kept saying well the causal theory says someone radiates information about themselves into the community. We build up a cluster of descriptions relating to that individual. So you can think of that as each of us having a dossier on that individual. Each of us has our mit rom ne dossier. Each of us has our dossier and our friends. You build up all this information is true of them. And then the question is what is the relation that it has to hold between the information that's in a file and the person it's of for that person to be the person the file is about? How do you explain what that relation is between the dossier and the person? And the description theory said it has to be the person who best matches what's in the dossier. And Kripke gave a quite different answer. He said consider your good old dossier. Your good old dossier contains a whole bunch of information principally relating to the person who proved these mathematical theorems. But suppose that the person who actually proved the incompleteness of arithmetic was someone else, someone outside the girdle gang. Then that other person would be the person who best matches the contents of your girdle dossier. But still girdle would refer to the person who stole the credit. That was the point. The source of the dossier, not the person the dossier best matches. I'm racing over this, but I assume that this is familiar at this point. So the Kripke picture was there's an initial baptism in which the thing may be named by extension or the reference of the name may be fixed by description. And a chain of communication in which the name is passed from speaker to speaker. And what is riling up Evans in this article is the focus on the initial baptism. The thing about the initial baptism is that it might be lost in the mists of history. And who cares what the initial baptism was? It seems to bear no relation necessarily to the way we use the name now. And it's not at all clear how to explain what a chain of communication is either. So I said, if you say, well, Rumsfeldt I think is the name of a pre-Socratic philosopher. I just picked up a little bit of conversation about Rumsfeldt about known unknowns and all that. And I thought, yeah, that's a pre-Socratic. Sounds like a pre-Socratic to me. Then do you really understand the name? I mean, the chain, the causal chain goes back to Donald Rumsfeldt's initial baptism. No argument about that. That's really what's going on from your use of the name back to the politician's baptism. But if your use of the name is so out of joint if you raise questions like did Rumsfeldt influence Plato then your use of the name seems to be so out of sync with any talk about the politician that you wonder what point is there in saying you're referring to the politician? Evans writes, one could regard the aim of this paper as being to restore the connection which must exist between strict truth conditions including the account of reference and the beliefs and interests of the users of the sentences if the technical notion of strict truth conditions is to be of interest to us. So that's to say, talking about what someone's referring to isn't a purely technical exercise. It has to fit in with how... It has to relate to the kind of interest that our thought and talk have for us. The work thought and talk do in our everyday lives it's not just a technical question what you're referring to when you use a sign. And so here's an example to suggest that the initial dubbing ceremony that Kripke talks about can't really have that kind of force that Kripke supposes. Suppose one of a group of villagers dubbed a little girl on holiday in the vicinity Goldilocks on the name caught on. However, suppose there were two identical twins that the villagers totally failed to distinguish. It just happened that at the initial dubbing one of them ran in range of the dumber and the dumber said, I dub thee Goldilocks and it was just an accident. They got that one rather than the other one. The two of them kept running around and then Evan says, I should deny that Goldilocks is the name of either. I mean, since how should I say in the life of the villagers there is no significant distinction drawn between the two twins the mere accident that a dubbing ceremony caught one of them rather than the other can be of no relevance. Here's another example. An urn is discovered in the Dead Sea containing documents on which are found fascinating mathematical proofs inscribed at the bottom is the name of Ibn Khan and for decades mathematicians study these proofs talk about what Ibn Khan didn't understand talk about Ibn Khan's level of mathematical sophistication and so on and they've never noticed right at the bottom in very small print it says, it scripts it, I'm the scribe I'm the humble writer down with the proofs not the mathematician myself and Evan says, are you really going to say when for decades mathematicians have been arguing about whether Ibn Khan was really in a position to prove, let us say, the incompleteness of arithmetic they were talking about the scribe because that's the person who was first dubbed Ibn Khan no, they were talking about the mathematician so Kripke's talk about the importance of the initial dubbing seems to be giving an importance to an almost accidental ceremony that it doesn't really have and the idea that chain of communication is also pretty problematic Kripke says, what's the chain of communication? Well, when the name's passed from link to link the receiver of the name must, I think, contends when he learns it to use it with the same reference as a man from whom he herbed it and Evan's point is that can't be a correct account of the chain of communication consider Marco Polo's naming of Madagascar Marco Polo is standing in the mainland presumably around Mozambique somewhere looking out at this great island and he says to the locals what do you call that? and they think he's pointing to a bit of the mainland they think he's pointing to the hills over the coast and they say that's Madagascar and he takes them to be referring to the island so he's making a mistake about what they're referring to he thinks they're referring to this they are actually telling him the local name of a bit of the headlands out in Mozambique and he is intending in Kripke's phrase he is intending to use it with the same reference as the people from whom he herbed it but he's not I mean if you really took Kripke's story seriously here then there's a chain going from you and me today and the makers of this map today back through to Marco Polo back through to the locals back then all of us intending to use the name with the same references of people from whom we herbed it right back to the locals initial dubbing of that bit of the headland Madagascar so if we really took Kripke's theory seriously you'd have to say Madagascar's not an island Madagascar's just a bit of the mainland of Africa but there's a crazy view that's the thing about this would be a purely technical notion of reference that it doesn't bear any relation to the way we actually use the name Madagascar every day or how we actually assess what each other are saying is true or false so the basic point there about the Madagascar example is that reference can shift despite a causal chain on an intention to preserve reference and we've actually had this point already in that effecting story of spot that's exactly what happens I mean I won't work through that painful story again but yeah you can remember it right it's the same model okay so that's the Evans' line of attack on Kripke now there are what he does to respond to Kripke is he introduces the notion of a dominant source of information and when you try and explain this abstractly I think it's quite a difficult notion to give a fully explicit account of so I'll work through his attempt to give a fully explicit account of it and then I'll look at his example I think the example of Napoleon makes it very vivid what he means and makes it very clear that there is some idea there however unsatisfactory the notion of a dominant source of information is your task as homework is to improve that definition of a dominant source of information here's a kind of definition that Evans gives a speaker intends to refer to the item that is the dominant source of the associated body of information so in the case of Madagascar you get a bunch of information about Madagascar you have a whole bunch of impressions about Madagascar you have your file on Madagascar what matters is not who is at the end or what is at the end of some long historical chain going back through the centuries what matters is look at your body of information as you have it now what is the dominant source of all that information is it the island or is it the headland usually our knowledge or belief about particular items is derived from information gathering transactions involving a causal interaction with some item or other conducted ourselves or as in the case of Madagascar you can get it through a long chain or if it's someone who's moved in next to you you can get it just by directly interacting with them not through a long chain you can find out about a person from a perception from a photograph from rifling through their suitcase from burgling their house or finding out what other people say you can find all about this person one way or another and that gives you a file that gives you a cluster or a dossier of information on that person now when you're getting that cluster putting together your file on that person you might mix up information from different people a cluster or dossier of information can be dominantly of an item though it contains elements whose source is different so if you've got a photograph like this I was trying to find a photograph I could show it this hour of the morning of two people kind of all tangled up so here you have information coming from two rugby players right? yes? yes that's alright so you're getting information here so it's all mixed up but in my view your information is dominantly of the guy in the front you're getting more and more and clearer information of the guy in the front so even though you've got here something that is giving you information about two different people you can say well it's really dominantly of one rather than the other even so its dominance is not simply a function of the amount of information even if you could quantify information it's not just going to be a matter of how much information and in the case of persons for example each man's life presents a skeleton and the dominant source may be the man who contributed to covering most of it rather than the man who contributed most of the covering so what he has in mind I think if for example we know a bit about let's say Maxwell the great physicist then it may be that we actually have some scans that were done of Maxwell's knee that give you a massive amount of information about Maxwell's knee so we know far more about his knee than we know about anything else that Maxwell did and even if that scan it turned out we were all wrong about it that wasn't really Maxwell's knee at all you see what I mean that could happen too what matters is not who contributed most of that information if most of the information relates to the knee what we want is where the overall shape of Maxwell's life and achievements comes from the overall picture so the important thing is who contributed to covering most of the skeleton not the fact that you're getting a massive amount of detail of some relatively unimportant part of the skeleton I'm whistling through this a little bit because I hope it's plain enough but help me at any point you might want to speed up a bit which is hard to do okay copy with that okay so dominance is oh hold on so detail in a particular area can be outweighed by spread detail in the coverage of the knee can be outweighed by spread in the coverage of the life and your reasons for being interested in the item at all will also weigh so image in Dickey has a couple of examples that really test out this notion of dominance one is these are in the paper just out this year one is suppose you have a village with an astrologer who fastens on to a two year old child and says this little girl will do great things this little girl is a child of destiny and she generates a whole bunch of predictions about the great things this little girl will do for the village and maybe ten years down the line those legends are alive and well and people remember relatively little about the actual life of the little girl still that little girl is the person you're talking about that little girl is a person that all the legends are of even though the little girl contributed relatively little to all these fabulous legends that have grown up around her or again it could happen that with Chaucer it could be have been that in the Middle Ages a whole bunch of myths grew up about Chaucer the early English writer and that people in the Middle Ages believed mostly a bunch of nonsense about Chaucer so that actually they believed it was a saint they believed he had magical powers whatever stuff you like but actually Chaucer himself was not the dominant source of all these legends it could still be that eventually all these legends are scrapped away and we've got stories about the real Chaucer I usually just love to I would like to stop for questions but I'm going to just blast through if that's all right and then we'll see if there's any time left I just wanted to get to everyone's example of Napoleon okay what's the question? it's like what? Chuck Norris is it? is that like Chuck Norris? I'm sorry to say I don't know who Chuck Norris is is that like Chuck Norris? it is like Chuck Norris well there you go I will look that up for next time okay well thank you that was clearly very helpful now you understand now it all falls into place okay Evans' own example is Napoleon so that's a picture of Napoleon encountering the Sphinx Napoleon is the one on the left in the hat okay so here are two scenarios Evans discusses suppose an impersonator took over Napoleon's role from 1814 on so this is Napoleon in his mature phase as you can see this is Napoleon after his great military victories after he's been released from prison or got out of prison and an imposter takes over at that late stage and it's actually an imposter of the mature Napoleon who fights at Waterloo and loses okay suppose that happened and then the historians say how would the historians describe that situation would you say Napoleon fought at Waterloo Napoleon, oh sorry Waterloo happened later Waterloo was just about the last big thing that happened yes, Napoleon fought at Waterloo oh no no no no let us suppose that the historians now know the situation you're perfectly right they would say that but let me put it another way if they said that he fought at Waterloo Napoleon fought at Waterloo would they be right? okay anybody think they'd be right? very good okay now then the thing is because just summing up what we all think here is mid-career Napoleon unifying Europe under the French Empire and this is the person who's the dominant source of all our beliefs about Napoleon what happened when he was beat at Waterloo I mean in the English mind that ranks pretty high but it's actually not you know what you think of as his main achievement if you see what I mean yep so Napoleon refers to the dominant source of our cluster of beliefs about him which is this guy out there unifying Europe yep but now consider another scenario suppose that an impersonator takes over when Napoleon is just starting out as you can see here he is hardly a beard, no hat but so he's just beginning and then an impersonator does him in and takes over so that this guy here is actually the person who took over the person who did him in and took over at that point so then the cluster of the typical historian would be dominantly of the impersonator yes so if Napoleon was done in and taken over let me put it more neutrally if this guy was done in and taken over at a relatively early age our cluster of beliefs that we associate with the name Napoleon would be dominantly of this guy yep the guy who'd taken over the mid-career Napoleon yes so in that case if we said Napoleon fought at Waterloo would that be true or false? aha it would be true who is the official answer? I mean everything is negotiable here put your hand up if you think it's true if you think it's false aha if you have no idea what I'm talking about let me just check put your hand up if you do know exactly what I'm talking about but maybe you're just not sure about the answer okay I have to say that is less than overwhelming but okay so here's Evans diagramming the situation he says this is the first case in which we have we have the early Napoleon making it through to mid-career before he is sandbagged and someone else takes over and then when you say Napoleon is F what you're talking about is this character yep the character who made it through to his mature years before being bumped off yes whereas in this case when our character gets bumped off pretty early in this case when you're talking about when you're talking about the dominant source of this collection of beliefs then really you're talking about this person Peter if I'm explaining this correctly this should be fairly straightforward so the thing is that if you take this example to heart then Kripke's kind of is a causal picture alright well what matters is who's the dominant source of the information you have right now tracing back a causal chain through the mists of time to some initial dubbing isn't really to the point it doesn't really matter what the initial dubbing was that's not the critical thing what matters is the dominant source of the set of beliefs that you have right now one and two that's true that's right I hadn't thought of doing that but you could cast it in terms of which dubbing is important I think part of the point of Evan's picture is to take away the idea of the dubbing itself as being an important idea because Koska that's correct that's a very interesting case because in that case you might think that my father part is really dominant it needs more discussion ok let's take up that next time ok thank you