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Langton and Lewis on “Intrinsic” *
Author(s) -
MARSHALL DAN,
PARSONS JOSH
Publication year - 2001
Publication title -
philosophy and phenomenological research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.7
H-Index - 39
eISSN - 1933-1592
pISSN - 0031-8205
DOI - 10.1111/j.1933-1592.2001.tb00107.x
Subject(s) - citation , art history , philosophy , library science , history , computer science
Langton and Lewis say that an object is "accompanied" iff it coexists "with some contingent object wholly distinct from itself." (Langton and Lewis 1998, p. 333) A "lonely" or "unaccompanied" object is one that is not accompanied. We will also speak of an object being "accompanied by an F" iff it coexists with some F wholly distinct from itself. This works very nicely for the obvious examples. It works for being cubical, being 50 km from a capital city, and being lonely (intrinsic, extrinsic, extrinsic, respectively). But it doesn't work for every property. Langton and Lewis note that disjunctive properties cause trouble: they give the example of being cubical and lonely, or else non-cubical and accompanied. This property is independent of accompaniment, but intuitively is extrinsic. Other disjunctive properties are intuitively intrinsic (the property of being cubical or spherical, for example), so a new test must be prescribed for them.