Alternatives and Challenges

After an opening section surveying some possible alternative ways of employing semantic plasticity to handle the puzzles, this chapter discusses two challenges to the view developed in chapters 11 and 12. One involves the threat of rampant error in counterfactual speech reports. The second involves certain uncomfortable consequences of applying our favoured treatment of words like ‘that’ and ‘table’ to words like ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘person’, ‘thinker’, and ‘conscious’. We show how considerations of semantic plasticity militate in the direction of a kind of “metaphysical misanthropy”, and explore its ethical ramifications.