The examples involving killing people seem like good examples, but the others seem like they could be predicated on disagreements about semantics rather than, say, disagreements about anticipated experiences (or utility functions, I guess). Words would need to be tabooed before I would trust those examples.
All of these examples are, in fact, explicitly about semantics. They are thought experiments mean to elicit our intuitions about the concepts of knowledge, moral rightness, etc.
The examples involving killing people seem like good examples, but the others seem like they could be predicated on disagreements about semantics rather than, say, disagreements about anticipated experiences (or utility functions, I guess). Words would need to be tabooed before I would trust those examples.
All of these examples are, in fact, explicitly about semantics. They are thought experiments mean to elicit our intuitions about the concepts of knowledge, moral rightness, etc.
Agreed. And the example about the watch sounds more like a “gotcha” question than anything else.