Papers blog is up. Two things worth commenting on. (Well, perhaps more than that, but two things I have comments on.)

I think this paper went up back in the dark ages, perhaps as far ago as last Wednesday, but somehow I only caught it now. Andy Egan and Jim John wrote a short paper, largely a critical survey, on problems intrinsicness poses for representational theories of phenomenology. Roughly, the puzzle is that (intuitively) phenonemology is intrinsic and content isn’t, so by Leibniz’s Law phenomenology can’t be identical with content. But as stated this isn’t a pressing puzzle, because there’s a pretty powerful argument against one of the intuitions.

Phenomenology is extrinsic, for the reasons Ted Sider sets out here. The mereological difference between me and one of my hairs has no phenomenal character, but its duplicate in a world where I lack that hair has lots and lots of feelings, few of them to do with the missing hair.

I guess this is just a technical difficulty, and the puzzle they are getting at can be restated easily enough, but I’m not entirely sure how to do it. Maybe they can follow Ted’s suggestion and use stars everywhere as a way of restating the trilemma they are most interested in. But I suspect that’s just a matter of noting that the problem exists rather than actually solving it. There’s still clearly a problem because the respects in virtue of which phenomenology is extrinsic are still different to the (alleged) respects in virtue of which content is extrinsic. So I don’t think this changes much about the underlying dynamic. But Andy and Jim (and everyone else in the relevant literature) shouldn’t be using the concepts of intrinsic and extrinsic here.

Geoff Nunberg has an article largely about TLAs in which he doesn’t use "TLA". By the way, is it TLAs or TLA’s? It’s not a possessive, so you’d think an apostraphe wouldn’t be appropriate, but as thrice seen in this sentence, some apostraphes are just for contraction. And there sort of is a contraction there I guess. But by that logic, the singular should be T’L’A’, which it manifestly isn’t.