The Intelligibility of Spectrum Inversion

Extract

Christopher Peacocke has recently made an important and insightful effort to fashion a non-verificationist method for distinguishing sense from nonsense (or, as he puts it, genuine from spurious hypotheses). The argument is subtle and complex, and varies somewhat with each of his three target ‘spurious hypotheses’: that if a perfect fission of one person into two were to occur, one and only one of the resulting persons would be identical with the original; that another person’s visual experience can be qualitatively different from your own when you are both seeing the same object, even though your relevant brain states are physically identical and so are your environmental conditions; and that the entire material universe is moving undetectably at a particular uniform velocity with respect to absolute space. My own assessment of his efforts is that they are most successful against the third of these hypotheses, and that this is a function of the fact that of the three, it alone (from both Peacocke’s and my perspectives) clearly employs a problematic concept- that of absolute location. However, my purpose here is not to engage in a comprehensive evaluation of Peacocke’s project; it is rather to defend the extreme inverted spectrum hypothesis (henceforth EISH) against his attack. I shall argue not only that his argument against EISH fails, but that he is himself independently committed to its intelligibility. Beyond that, I shall point out some striking and, to my mind, welcome consequences of his plausible claims concerning the relations between his own proposal and certain other views concerning content theory; the consequences in question depend both on his positive proposal and on my reasons for rejecting his argument against the extreme inversion hypothesis.