Redefining 'intrinsic'

Several alleged counterexamples to the definition of 'intrinsic' proposed i n Rae Langton and David Lewis, 'Defining "intrinsic"', are unconvincing. Ye t there are reasons for dissatisfaction, and room for improvement. One desi rable change is to raise the standard of non-disjunctiveness, thereby putti ng less burden on contentious judgements of comparative naturalness. A seco nd is to deal with spurious independence by throwing out just the disjuncti ve troublemakers, instead of throwing out disjunctive properties wholesale, and afterward reinstating those impeccably intrinsic disjunctive propertie s that are not troublemakers. (The second of these changes makes the first more affordable). A third, suggested by Brian Weatherson, would be to invok e the general principle that the intrinsic and the extrinsic characters of things are independent, rather than relying just on one special case of thi s principle; but it is none too obvious how to do this.