Sensitivity as Dependance or Shiftiness
Back when I was trying to find a modal (also sometimes called "intensional" or "combinatorial", in the literature) definition of intrinsicality, everyone was benign her head against a point discovered by Lewis: that there are two different ways of understanding what it means for some one aspect of reality (a parameter) E to be sensitive to another one F (commonly, a contextual feature, but not necessarily): 1. Dependance : The value of E depends on F . 2. Shiftiness : The value of E changes with F . One might think that both things are just different aspects of the same phenomenon and that they are, at least, extensionally equivalent. However, a little bit of reflection reveals that this is not so. It is perfectly possible for a parameter to get the same value in different ways depending on different features of its context. This phenomenon is most easily seen in natural language, as Kaplan clearly showed in his logic of indexicals . Thus, it is perfectly...