Guest Post: An advertisement for Individual Concepts

[This post is by guest blogger Tristan Haze of Sprachlogik.]

We have concepts of particular objects. The recognition of this piece of common sense enables us to solve a cardinal problem in the philosophy of language. Millianism, the view that the semantic content of a proper name is simply its referent, is apparently refuted by Frege's Puzzle (cf. Frege 1952). The major alternative, descriptivism - which comes in several varieties - is apparently refuted by Kripke's famous arguments (cf. Kripke 1980). The very natural view that names are associated with individual concepts allows us to solve Frege's Puzzle and accept Kripke's arguments against descriptivism, as well as his rigid designation thesis, with remarkable ease.

The Deliberative Question

What exactly do we mean when we ask the deliberative question, "What should I do"? It's surprisingly elusive. With a bit of work, we can pin down a behaviouristic kind of answer -- specifying when it's appropriate to offer and to challenge various responses to the question. But I suspect that in a more fundamental/philosophical sense, it isn't really a well-formed, determinate question at all.

First, note that we're not asking what would be objectively best. (Consider Parfit's Mineshafts case. You know that one of option A or B will save all ten lives, but the other will save none, and you don't know which is which. Option C is guaranteed to save nine lives. Clearly, the answer to the deliberator's question is "choose option C", even though this is the one option we can know is not objectively best.)

Perhaps we're asking (roughly) what would maximize expected value for the agent. This explains why option C is the answer in the ordinary Mineshafts scenario: relative to the agent's knowledge, it is worth 9 expected lives, whereas options A and B each have expected value of only 5 lives saved. But (as Kolodny and MacFarlane point out) this standard view has trouble accommodating our assertoric practices. For suppose Informant comes along and tells Agent that he's made a mistake, and in fact it's option A that is guaranteed to save nine lives, and options B and C that are the all-or-nothing gambles. Informant claims to reject (disagree with) Agent's previous answer to the question what he ought to do, and Agent himself seems likely to acquiesce in this by repudiating his previous response. ("I was mistaken to think that I should pick option C; really I should do A.") What's worse, we can further imagine an omniscient observer saying, "No, really he should pick option B -- that's the one that'll save all ten lives."

Here's the dilemma: is there a single, constant question, to which these various responses offer conflicting answers? Theoretically, it's difficult to see how this could be so. There's the question what maximizes expected utility relative to this evidence or that -- but these are different questions, so the diverging answers don't really conflict. On this picture, Agent should respond to Informant by saying, "Ah! You've changed my epistemic context in a most helpful manner. Granted, I answered my initial question [what ought I to do relative to my then-available evidence] correctly. But now I can ask an even better question: 'what ought I to do relative to my now-available evidence?' And, I agree, my answer to this question is 'pick option A!'"

(Compare ordinary context-dependent terms like the indexical 'now'. If tomorrow I say, "It is raining now," I won't thereby have to retract my current assertion that it isn't raining now. There is no single, constant question "Is it raining?" to which these are competing answers. There are only the more specific questions whether it is raining at this or that time and place.)

Unfortunately, when it comes to the deliberative question, this isn't how our linguistic practices seem to actually work. Instead, it seems, Agent will repudiate his previous answer, implicitly treating it as a competing answer to one and the same question (what should he do, period). My question is: does this make sense?

The relativist formally accommodates this behaviour by positing a semantics for 'ought' on which the truth of any token assertion 'Agent ought to phi' varies across assessors. We effectively end up understanding the deliberative question as having the constant meaning 'What should I do relative to the relevant evidence?' whilst allowing the relevant evidence to vary across assessors. Disagreeing as to what evidence is relevant thus translates into disagreeing about the deliberative question. But there's no absolute fact of the matter as to which evidence really is "relevant", and hence the correct answer varies from perspective to perspective, even when assessing a single token utterance.

I actually think that this 'relevant evidence relativist' (unlike the moral relativist) gets it right as a pragmatic account of when it's appropriate to make, challenge, and retract assertions. Intuitively, it seems appropriate for everyone involved to behave as if there was a single constant question here (unlike in the 'raining now' case). For example, it seems appropriate for Agent to initially judge that he ought to go with Option C, and then to retract [not merely "move beyond"] this judgment when faced with new evidence.

But does that really answer my initial question? I guess Wittgensteinians would think so -- "meaning is use", and all that. But intuitively, it seems like there's a further question here: not just about what assertoric behaviours are appropriate, but the more 'metaphysical' question of what is really meant, and really true.

If we think this is a genuine further question, we may be unsatisfied by the relativist's answer, since it seems most plausible that, strictly speaking, substantive answers exist only for complete or 'absolute' questions -- "Is it raining at such-and-such time and place?", not just "Is it raining?". The general question, "What should I do?" is likewise incomplete until we fill in the missing parameter of whose evidence we're assessing this against. Granted, we can offer a sociological story about how it's useful for a community to adopt linguistic norms that allow us to treat this incomplete question as though it were complete -- "disagreeing" in practice even when there's not really any substantive proposition at stake. But then it looks like this really is just a "language game", lacking in philosophical substance. (As MacFarlane himself concludes in 'Relativism and Disagreement': "From lofty philosophical heights, the language games we play with [relativistic words] may seem irrational. But that is no reason to deny that we do play these games, or that they have a social purpose.")

Really, we should conclude, there isn't any single question here. Strictly speaking, it doesn't really make sense for Agent to retract his earlier judgment. And the apparent 'disagreement' (of Informant or the omniscient observer), though "appropriate" according to the rules of the game, is - in a more important sense - philosophically empty.

Relativism and Genuine Disagreement

Sometimes people think they disagree when really they are making perfectly compatible claims. What criteria determine whether an apparent disagreement is genuine? In particular, might we genuinely disagree over a matter of 'relative' truth (such that we're "both right")?

Here's a natural picture which suggests not: genuine disagreement requires a dispute over the (objective, "God's eye view") state of the world. This explains why, if tomorrow I say "It's raining", I don't really disagree with your present claim that it isn't raining. Both can be right, because there's no objective matter of fact about which we disagree. (We can both agree that it rains on March 19, 2009, but not March 18.) The situation is similar, we may think, for the cultural relativists who disagree about whether abortion is wrong. Both may agree that it is condoned by Sally's moral standards but not by Anne's, and at that point it is difficult to see what is left for them to disagree about. (They might fight, or have conflicting desires, but that is not the same thing as disagreeing in their propositional beliefs. It's more like the dinnertime 'disagreement' between a predator and its prey.)

The relativist might insist that they can still disagree over the relativistic proposition whether abortion is wrong. But sophisticated interlocutors will recognize that this effectively amounts to disagreement over whether abortion is wrong relative to the assessor's moral standards, which again seems to reduce to a non-cognitive conflict between the two moral standards. (It's not as though either party is making any kind of rational/epistemic error -- a fact, incidentally, that should give the moralist pause.)

So it's unsatisfying for the relativist to just appeal to formalities, e.g. "we disagree over the truth of this proposition!" That seems too cheap. But perhaps they can say more. On p.19 of 'Relativism and Disagreement' [pdf], MacFarlane suggests:

Accuracy [i.e. truth at the relevant context of assessment] is the property we must show assertions to have in order to vindicate them in the face of challenges, and it is the property we must show others’ assertions not to have if our challenges are to be justified.

This suggests the following account of genuine disagreement: two people genuinely disagree if they can appropriately challenge each other's assertions.

Sometimes people challenge assertions inappropriately. For example, if tomorrow I were to look back and say, "You said it wasn't raining, but now look: it clearly is!" my challenge would be inappropriate. Even given my beliefs, your past assertion was perfectly accurate, since the relevant context of assessment, in this case, is the context of utterance -- a time at which (I know) the statement was indeed true. So this account suffices to explain standard cases of merely apparent disagreement. But it does so in a way which is (at least potentially) compatible with maintaining genuine disagreement in case of relative truths.

The big question, now, concerns what is the "relevant" context of assessment when evaluating assertions about a relativistic domain. Again, suppose moral relativism is true. When we assess Anne's claim that abortion is wrong, is it Anne's moral standards or our (the assessor's) own that are relevant? To preserve moral disagreement, the relativist will want to insist on the latter. I argue elsewhere that this is a mistake: the relevant context for moral assessment is always the actor's. But, in any case, this is the crux of the dispute, and I'm more sympathetic to MacFarlane's line in other domains, e.g. matters of taste, humour, etc.

P.S. It seems to me that there's something to be said for both criteria of genuine disagreement discussed above. I think MacFarlane's is plausibly the primary notion: philosophical inquiry into disagreement is initially motivated by concern about our assertoric practices, which is what he focuses on. Yet there seems an important sense in which (from a philosopher's rationalistic perspective) relativistic disagreement is defective. So even if we grant that MacFarlane has correctly diagnosed what constitutes "genuine disagreement", we might still want to reserve a related term -- "objective" or "substantive disagreement", say -- for disagreements that meet the first criterion, of disputing how things are objectively.

Williamson on Telescopes

Philosophers who refuse to bother about semantics, on the grounds that they want to study the non-linguistic world, not our talk about that world, resemble astronomers who refuse to bother about the theory of telescopes, on the grounds that they want to study the stars, not our observation of them. Such an attitude may be good enough for amateurs; applied to more advanced inquiries, it produces crude errors. Those metaphysicians who ignore language in order not to project it onto the world are the very ones most likely to fall into just that fallacy, because the validity of their reasoning depends on unexamined assumptions about the structure of the language in which they reason.

-- Timothy Williamson, 'Must Do Better' [pdf], p.9.

'Community' fluff

JJ writes:

The Canadian-based What Sorts of People Should There Be? project, has 61 researchers from 15 different disciplines. The team also includes members of the community.

Members of what community? This sounds like a silly feel-good euphemism for non-academics, though note the unfortunate implication that academics themselves -- those 61 researchers -- are somehow not real members of "the community" (whatever that is).

The project website is also filled with corporatese buzzwords: their "innovative" work is generated by the "interactive synergy" of the project. There's even a Venn diagram of three overlapping circles to prove it.

But I shouldn't poke fun. The project itself actually sounds really interesting. There are many fascinating philosophical questions surrounding eugenics, genetic screening, selective abortion, etc. It's just a pity they felt the need to dress it up in such fluff. (I thought that's what bureaucrats and managers did when they couldn't sell their work on its merits. But perhaps it's universal. That would be unfortunate, because their unclarity makes it harder to tell when an idea or project is really worth attending to. My default response is to assume they're full of bunk, and I assume I'm not alone here.)

Non-causal Talk

Eliezer's anti-zombie argument was based on the premise that words refer to whatever generally causes us to utter them. (So 'consciousness' refers to whatever cognitive process causes us to utter this word, which is also present in the zombie world, thus contradicting the stipulation that the zombie world lacks consciousness.)

It's worth highlighting that this premise can't be right, for we can talk about things that do not causally affect us. We can even talk about things that don't exist, like unicorns, or God. (Or does Eliezer think that 'God' refers to the religious module of the brain, so that God exists after all?)

I'm reminded of Hilary Putnam's a priori semantic response to the skeptical scenario that I might be a brain in a vat (BIV). The idea is that if I were really a BIV then my terms like 'brain' and 'vat' would instead refer to the objects in the hallucinated 'image' (i.e. in the phenomenal world). So, the argument goes, whatever the words end up meaning, 'I am a brain in a vat' is guaranteed to come out false. I can "know" that I'm in the fundamentally real world, just because it's (allegedly) impossible for my term 'fundamentally real world' to refer to anything other than the phenomenal world that I'm presented with.

Clearly, something has gone wrong in these arguments. The appropriate response, I think, is to say "Stop redefining my words!" I can understand the BIV scenario perfectly well, and it's a scenario I cannot rule out with absolute certainty; hence 'I am a BIV' is not guaranteed to be false at all. Putnam's argument to the contrary is a mere semantic trick, playing with words.

The same is true of Eliezer. We know perfectly well what we mean by the term 'phenomenal consciousness'. We most certainly do not just mean 'whatever fills the role of causing me to make such-and-such utterances'. By suggesting this, he is playing Humpty Dumpty, redefining words to mean whatever he wants them to mean. It's simply changing the subject. (I never claimed that 'whatever fills the role of causing me to make such-and-such utterances' is physically irreducible. So to argue against this claim is not to address my claim that 'consciousness is irreducible'. It's just like arguing against atheism by redefining 'God' to mean 'the universe', or some such silliness.)

Eliezer has recently repeated the mistake in arguing for reductionism about identity (a view I actually share, though for different reasons). He writes:

Whatever-it-is which makes me feel that I have a consciousness that continues through time, that whatever-it-is was physically potent enough to make me type this sentence. Should I try to make the phrase "consciousness continuing through time" refer to something that has nothing to do with the cause of my typing those selfsame words, I will have problems with the meaning of my arguments, not just their plausibility.

Whatever it is that makes me say, aloud, that I have a personal identity, a causally closed world physically identical to our own, has captured that source - if there is any source at all.

And we can proceed, again by an exactly analogous argument, to a Generalized Anti-Swapping Principle: Flicking a disconnected light switch shouldn't switch your personal identity, even though the motion of the switch has an in-principle detectable gravitational effect on your brain, because the switch flick can't disturb the true cause of your talking about "the experience of subjective continuity".

This is a terrible argument, for the simple reason that whatever it is that makes me say 'X', is not necessary what I mean by 'X'. (Again: unicorns, God, etc.)

Cf. Linguistic Anti-Paternalism: each individual is the final authority on what they are using their words to express. To offer a brief sketch of how this might work: We may have a particular idea in mind, a bunch of descriptive platitudes about what it is to be X (which need not invoke causal relations at all, though it often will). Arguably, this is what decides the meaning of 'X', though there's no guarantee that it will successfully refer to anything in the world; that instead depends on whether there is any worldly thing which satisfies the platitudes.

Anyway, that's just a very rough and inadequate sketch of how an alternative view might go. But the purpose of this post is not to give a fully-fledged theory of meaning. It is simply to highlight one adequacy constraint on any such theory: it must make it possible for us to talk about, e.g., abstract or non-existent things, i.e. things which are not themselves the cause of our talk about them. (It needn't make epiphenomenalism true, but it had better be expressible!)

Logical Subtraction and Partial Truth

Stephen Yablo gave a very impressive series of lectures here last week. His core insight was that often we can communicate important truths by way of assertions that are literally false. The rough explanation for this is that the assertion, though false, may be "partly true", or "true insofar as it concerns a certain subject matter." For example, 'the number of dragons is zero' may be literally false if numbers do not exist. But it is partly true, i.e. true in what it says about dragons (namely, that there aren't any). If you take the literal meaning, and subtract the claim that there are numbers, the remaining content is wholly true.

Sometimes logical subtraction seems unproblematic, as the subtracted element is "perfectly extricable" from what's being said. Other cases, however, are more problematic. When you subtract the redness from scarlet, what's left? 'Tom [the tomato] is scarlet - Tom is red' does not leave any remainder that we can make sense of. It seems perfectly inextricable. Then there may be inbetween cases, such as Wittgenstein's famous question: "what is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?" We have some grasp of this, but as Jaeger has pointed out, "it is not the case that there is exactly one statement R such that 'R & my arm goes up' is logically equivalent to 'I raise my arm'."

Yablo's solution is to say that "P-Q always exists, but it doesn't always project very far out of the Q-region [of logical space]. Inextricability simply means that it is hard [or impossible] to evaluate P-Q in worlds where Q fails."

Intuitively, we can say that:
(i) P-Q is false iff P adds falsity to Q.
(ii) P-Q is true iff not-P adds falsity to Q.
(iii) If neither P nor its negation adds falsity to Q, then P-Q is undefined (lacks a truth value).

Yablo systematizes our intuitive judgments here by appeal to truthmakers, or the reasons why a proposition is true/false. P "adds falsity" to Q if it is false for a Q-compatible reason, i.e. there is a Q-compatible falsity-maker for P.

Example: Let P = 'The King of France is bald' and Q = 'France has a King'. Then P-Q is false, because of the following Q-compatible falsity-maker for P: the list of all the bald people, none of whom is a King of France. This falsity-maker could exist, and so make P false, even if Q were true and France did have a King. This shows that P is false for reasons over and above the falsity of its presupposition Q.

Here is a bit more technical detail. Let R be a potential candidate for P-Q. Yablo suggests that R is a successful candidate, i.e. R extrapolates P beyond Q, iff the following three conditions are satisfied:
- "Equivalence: within Q, R is true (false) in a world iff P is true (false)." That is, if R = P-Q, then it had better be the case that R&Q = P.
- "Reasons: within Q, a world is R (~R) for the same reasons it is P&Q rather than ~P&Q (...)" This is equivalence as applied to subject matter, rather than just truth conditions.
- "Orthogonality: outside Q, R is true (false) for the same reasons as within." This is the key principle, which really gets at the intuitive notion that we are genuinely extrapolating P rather than simply gerrymandering a proposition that happens to overlap with P in the Q-region (and then becomes wildly different beyond that point).

Example: The material conditional 'if Q then P' fails the orthogonality condition. Outside the Q region, it is true for the simple reason that Q is false, regardless of P. Compare the visual aid below: 'if Q then P' has truth conditions 'P or ~Q', so would include all the white region in R. The gerrymandering is visible in the fact that the R region would then turn a sharp 'corner' once it left the P & Q region. It should instead extrapolate cleanly as shown.

Reference and Preference

Ophelia Benson has got me thinking about the intersection of ethics and philosophy of language:

A face is shown... What makes it Muhammad's face? Nothing. The caption under the picture, that says 'depicting Muhammad preaching the Qur'ān in Mecca.' That's not much to go on. It could be a volley ball with eyes and a mouth drawn on it, that's just labeled 'Muhammad.' Yet apparently 180,000 people take its genuine faceness seriously enough to fret about its presence on Wikipedia.

When Muslims object to depictions of Muhammad, what exactly is the content of their desire? Suppose philosophers of language established that a causal theory of reference was correct, and historians somehow established that there was no causal chain of the appropriate sort connecting the prophet Muhammad to the picture in question. So it turns out that the face does not, as a matter of fact, depict Muhammad. Would that make the screaming masses happy? Do they really care about something so arcane as the reference facts? Or is it rather the appearance of obedience and acquiescence that they miss (and never mind that nobody's entirely sure just what it is they're acquiescing to)?

Belief Content and Linguistic Error

Suppose young Timmy mistakenly takes 'prime number' to be roughly synonymous with 'cool number'. So he goes around saying things like '666 is a prime number'. Does he believe that 666 is a prime number? Presumably not. He certainly doesn't have a de dicto belief involving the concept prime number, since he lacks this concept (he associates the words, 'prime number', with a different concept entirely). Nor does he have any de re beliefs about primes, i.e. beliefs which talk about this property under a different guise: he does not believe, for example, that 666 is divisible only by itself and 1. What Timmy believes is that 666 is a cool number (or, more likely yet, that '666' is a cool numeral), and he mistakenly takes the sentence '666 is a prime number' to express this belief.

What of Timmy's meta-beliefs? He might not have any, if he's very young, but let's suppose that he's aware of himself as a believing agent. What does he think he believes? Jack suggests to me the following: Timmy believes that he believes that 666 is a prime number. But this attribution seems mistaken for exactly the same reasons. Timmy lacks the concept prime number, so he can't have any (even meta-) beliefs involving it. And nor can he have any de re beliefs about primeness (under whatever guise), because he lacks any alternative grasp of the property in question. He's not capable of having primeness feature in his mental content at all.

Instead, I would suggest that Timmy has entirely accurate meta-beliefs. (We have no reason to doubt his introspective abilities.) He believes, truly, that he believes that 666 is a cool number. That's all. It's only his linguistic beliefs that are false. For example, he falsely believes that he can express his above (true) meta-belief by asserting, 'I believe that 666 is a prime number.' He can't; this assertion means something different from what Timmy thought. It means something that happens to be false, whereas all Timmy's non-linguistic beliefs are true.

The upshot of this is that sincere assertions do not always succeed in expressing your beliefs. Linguistic errors may mean that what you end up saying actually means something different from what you believe (i.e. what you meant to say).

This seems to me the tidiest way to make sense of what's going on in these cases. Is there any residual problem that the above analysis fails to deal with?

The Logic of Indeterminacy

Alex's comment to my previous post reminded me that I need to say a bit more about my treatment of indeterminacy. He wonders how the following claims of mine could be consistent:
(1) It is indeterminate whether 'Bob' denotes Bob1 or Bob2.
(2) It is likewise indeterminate whether 'Mirror-Bob' denotes Bob1 or Bob2.
(3) But it is determinate that 'Bob' and 'Mirror-Bob' do not co-refer.

After all, if you took 1 and 2 to be the fundamental semantic facts in this scenario, then there is nothing to rule out their being coreferential -- it would simply appear to be indeterminate whether that's actually the case. To supervaluate: there are four ways* to resolve the indeterminacy, and on two of them the names co-refer, and on the other two they don't. So we cannot settle the question whether the terms co-refer.

* = Those four ways are:
(a) 'Bob' denotes Bob1, 'Mirror-Bob' denotes Bob1 [co-refer]
(b) 'Bob' denotes Bob1, 'Mirror-Bob' denotes Bob2
(c) 'Bob' denotes Bob2, 'Mirror-Bob' denotes Bob1
(d) 'Bob' denotes Bob2, 'Mirror-Bob' denotes Bob2 [co-refer]

But that's the wrong way to go about things. While 1 and 2 offer a partial description of the semantic situation, such an atomistic approach cannot capture everything that's going on. It is whole scenarios that are instead fundamental. Compare 1 and 2 with:
# (4) It is indeterminate which of the four semantic scenarios, a-d, obtains.

This is the situation as Alex took it to be. But it is not what I had in mind. And this way of presenting things brings out some alternative possibilities, such as:
# (5) It is indeterminate whether semantic scenario a or d obtains.
(6) It is indeterminate whether semantic scenario b or c obtains.

This is my claim. Crucially, it is 6, not 1 and 2, which provides the fundamental account of the situation I had in mind. (1 and 2 are consistent with any of 4, 5, or 6. That is why they are merely partial descriptions.) To derive more particular claims -- e.g. my 1, 2, and 3 -- from the fundamental account (6), we simply supervaluate. That is, a claim is:
(I) determinately true if it is true in all allowed scenarios;
(II) determinately false if it is false in all allowed scenarios; and
(III) indeterminate if it is true in some allowed scenarios and false in others.

Since my allowed scenarios are b and c only, we obtain the following results:
My claim 1 is true because 'Bob' denotes different people in scenarios b and c.
Likewise for claim 2 and 'Mirror-Bob'.
3 is true because in both b and c, 'Bob' and 'Mirror-Bob' denote different people.

Does that all make sense?

Decomposing Descriptive Content

I think that descriptivists may have to reject semantic compositionality in some cases. In particular, the two sentences (1) 'Bob is human' and (2) 'Bob = Bob' may not be strictly decomposable in their descriptive contents. I will show that there is another term X which can replace the first mention of 'Bob' in the first sentence, but not in the second, without altering the sentence's content. So the contribution that either term ('Bob' or X) makes to the meaning of the whole depends on the rest of the sentence in which it is embedded. In sentence #1, 'Bob' and X will contribute the same semantic value, whereas in sentence #2 they will differ.

First, some background: I use 'descriptive content' to refer to the kind of ('narrow') representational content or semantic value that is grounded in scenarios (conceptual possibilities, or centered possible worlds considered as actual) -- namely, the primary intension. For example, the descriptive content of a proper name, 'Bob', is given by some associated reference-fixing descriptive property, D, such that 'Bob = the D' is analytic (if D can be captured in our language). Equivalently: it is the set of possible persons who are such that he is Bob follows a priori from the hypothesis that his world is actual. [Read up on the links if this is hard to follow.]

Now for the argument:

Consider a perfectly symmetrical universe, containing two qualitative duplicates we may dub 'Bob' and 'Mirror-Bob'. They share all their objective intrinsic and extrinsic properties (for their surroundings are also qualitatively identical). So there is no difference between them -- no unique property that could fix the reference of my term 'Bob' (or 'Mirror-Bob') as referring to the one person rather than the other.* Probably the best way to make sense of this is to say that the two terms are indeterminate between the two referents, and so to assess the truth of any sentence involving the terms, we supervaluate over the various possibilities.

* = Aside: this problem could be overcome if we were inside this universe, for then we could appeal to the relative property of being the Bob in my vicinity, or whatever.

Consider, then, the following sentences:
(1) 'Bob is human' and (2) 'Bob = Bob'

And compare the first-term substitutions:
(1a) 'Mirror-Bob is human' and (2a) 'Mirror-Bob = Bob'

Both 1 and 1a are true, and indeed true in all the same scenarios, which is to say that they have the same descriptive content. (Intuitively: to say that Bob is human, and to say that Mirror-Bob is human, is not to describe two different scenarios. Both names actually range indeterminately over the same two people, and both apply equally determinately to any unique Bob-counterparts in other, non-symmetric, worlds.)

But 2 and 2a clearly differ in content, for the former is true and the latter false! For although it is indeterminate which of the two people each of these terms denotes, it is determinate that they denote numerically distinct people. (Either 'Bob' denotes the one guy and 'Mirror-Bob' the other, or vice versa. On either way of resolving the indeterminacy, the names turn out not to be co-referential. Hence, by supervaluation, it is determinate that they are non-co-referential.)

The problem for compositionality is that this fact -- that the two terms do not co-refer -- cannot be derived from the descriptive contents of each term alone. Indeed, we've seen that both names have the same primary intension (an intension which happens to be indeterminate at this world, but not at others). But, despite having the same content, they can potentially make significantly different contributions to the content of a whole sentence in which they are part, as the comparison of 2 with 2a shows.

(Can anyone suggest a neater way to make sense of this puzzle case?)

Rule-Following for Solipsists

There are indefinitely many ways we might fit a curve to data, or generalize from finitely many cases to a universal rule that gives the right result in those given cases. For example, my actual usage of the '+' operator to date has not covered every possible case. So it's consistent with my past usage that the rule guiding this usage is not plus at all, but perhaps something like Kripkenstein's quus (which yields different results from plus for certain operations I've not yet performed).

Pettit suggests that meaning is irreducibly social, then, as it is only the stable dispositions of others that provides a check on our own actual conclusions (if I claim 21+22=44, say), establishing the possibility of error and thus meaningfulness. The normative standards we need to hold ourselves to account may be found by triangulating with others. Or so the argument goes.

However, it seems to me that all the work here is being done by the stable dispositions, and not the fact that they're held by other people. After all, if each individual has only a finite usage base to work from, the same is true of our community. We've added a few more points, perhaps, but there are still indefinitely many ways to fit a curve to the data. Nothing significant has been achieved by adding more people into the mix. Indeed, if another disagrees with my application of an operator or concept, we needn't always bother to triangulate at all -- we may simply conclude that we're following different rules, or employing different concepts!

So what really matters here is the stable dispositions (and, indeed, one's own stable dispositions). My use of '+' follows the rule for plus not quus because I have the appropriate dispositions. I am disposed to judge "21+22=44" unacceptable, upon sufficient reflection (and at first glance; but more complex examples may demand more by way of idealization). We can bind ourselves to norms, distinguish our actual vs. ideal judgments, and so other people play no essential role here.

De re Belief

De dicto belief ascription: (1) Jones believes that the tallest spy is a spy.

De re belief ascription: (2) Jones believes, of the tallest spy, that he is a spy.

I find the latter puzzling. Does it commit us to haecceities, or deep facts about the identities of things? Hopefully we may account for the phenomenon without such metaphysical cost. Here's the vital question: what must the world be like in order to satisfy the ascription made in #2?

I don't think it requires any mysterious identity facts. One platitude about de re belief is that its object must actually exist. (I can have de dicto beliefs about unicorns, but there is no unicorn such that I have beliefs about it.) Further, de re belief requires some kind of causal acquaintance (however indirect) with its object. So perhaps #2 is just a convenient way to describe the conjunctive fact that Jones believes (de dicto) that the person he bears such-and-such relation to is a spy, and Jones does indeed bear such-and-such relation to someone (who is now counted as the object of the belief when we ascribe it in de re terms).

Consider:
(3) Jones believes that Smith is the tallest spy.

Unlike in the previous case, this seems to imply the corresponding de re ascription:
(4) Smith is believed by Jones to be the tallest spy.

Jackson accounts for this via his descriptivist analysis of proper names. The representational content of 'Smith' (for Jones) is just some unique associated descriptive property that builds in the aforementioned acquaintance relation, and thus licenses "exportation" to de re ascription.

Does that do the trick, or is there more to de re belief than captured above? (Do some philosophers deny that de re belief is reducible in this way to the de dicto?)

Linguistic Paternalism

Anne thinks or utters to herself some sentence S. Who is the authority on what Anne's utterance means? Anne herself, I should think. That's not to say she's infallible here - just that if she's in error, then she must be in error by her own lights. We cannot foist semantic standards on her from without.

Example: Anne believes that 'whale' refers to a kind of really big fish. She may even be initially inclined to claim that "whales are fish" is true by definition. If so, we may doubt that she's thought sufficiently clearly about what she means by the word. But this is easy enough to check: simply bring to her attention the possible scenario we think she has neglected. We ask Anne to imagine that it turns out those big whale-shaped creatures in the ocean are warm-blooded, breathe oxygen, live-birth and nurse their young, etc., and are generally considered by scientists to belong under the category 'mammals' rather than 'fish'. Anne might make various responses:

(1) She may agree, on reflection, that if this scenario is actual then it turns out whales are mammals. So their fishiness is not built into the very meaning of her term after all. Our example served to bring out her implicit commitment to a broader concept than she had initially appreciated.

(2) She may insist that she means something different from the scientists et al. When she talks about 'whales', she means to talk about fish, and that's non-negotiable. If the world doesn't cooperate, that's the world's problem: maybe - she will say - the world doesn't contain any whales after all, but rather giant oceanic mammals that she mistook for whales.

It seems unlikely that she would choose the second option. We usually want to talk about what's in the world, so we use 'whale' to refer to whatever actually fills the whale-role, or "that kind of thing right there" (be it fish or mammal). But that's our choice, and there's no reason in principle why we couldn't stubbornly opt to use our words in the second kind of way. In such a case, it would seem a strange kind of 'linguistic paternalism' that would lead philosophers of language to insist that Anne - for all her reflection - remains just plain wrong about what her words "really" mean.

See also: Verification and Base Facts

Why Disagree (Relatively)?

More on relative truth and disagreement. Let 'Pa' denote that P is true relative to Anne. I suggested before that such relativity claims are absolute: even Bob should agree that 'abortion is wrong' (P) is true for Anne. It's just that it is false for him, and thus false simpliciter (from his context of assessment). So he would grant Pa but not P.

Jack now brings to my attention the following biconditional: (P iff Pa)a. We've seen that Bob will deny (P iff Pa). But he must also recognize that P would be assessed differently relative to Anne, such that the biconditional will come out true for her.

Now here's a plausible principle: as responsible epistemic agents pursuing knowledge, we should not want to lead our fellow inquirers into false beliefs. So Bob should be reluctant to convince Anne to deny P after all. Why? Because, by the Anne-relative biconditional, she should then also deny Pa, but Pa is an absolute truth. (I'm assuming that her context of assessment won't change when she changes her belief about P.) Indeed, the point may be made even more directly by noting that, in virtue of being true-for-her, P is surely the appropriate belief for Anne to have, the one she should have, even if Bob would judge it technically 'false'.

So if Bob can grant that Anne is believing appropriately, is there really any genuine disagreement left? Maybe it is just the kind of non-cognitive opposition you get with emotivism -- merely a matter of cheering for two different teams. You need not think the other person has made any mistake, but you are oppositely aligned and so destined to clash. But I guess even the meaning relativist can tell this kind of story, so it's no longer clear what distinctive benefits are offered by truth relativism. (Or should the truth relativist hold even 'appropriate belief' to be a relative matter? That seems to be going too far...)

Relative Truth and Disagreement

Consider sophisticated moral relativism. Say Anne's idealized self would conclude that abortion is wrong, whereas Bob's would not. So 'Abortion is wrong' is true for Anne but not for Bob. Do they disagree? They would not if they meant different things by 'abortion is wrong' (e.g. 'abortion is wrong to me'). They would just be talking past each other, as if Anne were to say "I like icecream," and Bob replied "No I don't!"

So, to preserve genuine disagreement, they must be expressing one and the same proposition. That much is shared and universal. What's relative is the truth (not the meaning) of what's said. Anne and Bob are both talking about the proposition that abortion is wrong, but the truth of the matter differs between them. (This seems crazy if truth is meant to correspond to worldly facts - how could facts be relative? But it makes more sense if we see truth as an epistemic construct.)

How are we then to understand the truth predicate? Jack points out to me that problems arise when we ask Bob to assess Anne's assertion that "'Abortion is wrong' is true." If 'true' in Anne's mouth means true-for-Anne, then it hardly seems that Bob can dispute her claim. It really is true-for-Anne that abortion is wrong, after all. But note that the problem again lies in attributing merely semantic relativity. We should instead insist that Anne and Bob mean exactly the same thing by 'true'. They just assess it differently. Bob correctly judges that Anne spoke falsely. Anne correctly judges that she spoke truly. They're both right, and they also genuinely disagree with each other -- a disagreement that will persist even upon semantic ascent. True?

Now You're Talking

Markosian (1993) defends the suspicious move from tensed language to tensed reality, by claiming that if we cannot paraphrase away talk of 'presentness' into B-theoretic language (e.g. 'being contemporaneous with this utterance'), "this must be because [the former] expresses something that cannot be expressed by anything like [the latter]." (p.833) But why should this matter? Perhaps the assumption is that sentences express world-involving propositions, so that the difference in expression reflects a difference in the world. But that would seem question-begging in this context. We might do better to skip straight to the question of how the world has to be in order to make our tensed sentences true. And, as noted here,

the sentences U: "The enemy is now approaching." and V: "The enemy [is] approaching simultaneously with U." are presumably made true by one and the same fact -- the tenseless fact of the enemy's approaching at some time t which is also U's time of utterance -- despite their lack of synonymity.

So the inference from language to reality seems thoroughly unmotivated. (Am I missing something?)

One way to bring this out is to consider the analogy between 'now' and other indexicals, e.g. 'I'. As Lewis and others have pointed out, there seems something special about attitudes de se, which refer to oneself under the indexical guise. They cannot simply be paraphrased into objective worldly descriptions. But I take it no-one is thus tempted to infer that the world itself contains a special property of "I-ness", held by me alone. So why does tensed talk tempt anyone into inferring that the world itself contains a special property of "presentness", held by the current moment alone?

Literalism and Automatic Interpretation

Some interesting remarks from Jason Kuznicki:

Fundamentalism is an interpretive strategy. Fundamentalism is not a divine command; it is a human decision about how to read a text, and it should be made to prove itself against all of the other equally human approaches to reading. No one has a magical hermeneutic key descended from Heaven, and there is no reason whatsoever to believe from the outset that fundamentalist readings are any closer to God than any other. The fundamentalist interprets his text just like anyone else does. The only difference is that he claims not to interpret, and the sacredness of the text causes many people to believe what would in any other context be an obvious imposture.

It is tempting to claim that a literal interpretation is somehow the most 'natural', or the 'default' option. But I think this is simply because it comes most easily to us literal-minded folk. Some past cultures were, I gather, not nearly so literal-minded. I vaguely recall reading an ancient Roman historical text, calmly relating the role that the gods and sea monsters played in the day's events. Even if my memory misleads me, we can certainly imagine a culture where their talk is infused with mythological references, which have more poetic than literal significance. (They may treat religion as a cultural practice, rather than a collection of metaphysical beliefs, and so be puzzled if an outsider were to ask them if they thought it was "really true?" They didn't take themselves to be making such assertions.)

The point is this: given our cultural background, we tend to automatically interpret text literally. (There are some exceptions, e.g. idiomatic expressions.) It may not even occur to us to interpret it any other way - or if it does, it may seem forced or artificial. But this is a wholly contingent fact about us. We could have been different. In the imagined culture, one automatically interprets text poetically. It may not even occur to them to interpret it any other way. No more than we are tempted to think that a man needs a wheelchair upon making a purchase that "cost him an arm and a leg."

Does that sound right? I've heard of similar views in aesthetics, i.e. that there is no natural distinction between "realistic" vs. "abstract" art or representation. There are only signs that are more or less conventionally familiar. The more familiar ones are recognized automatically, and so no conscious interpretive effort is required, which misleads us into thinking that there is no interpretation involved at all. Contingent ease is thus mistaken for essential naturalness. There's surely something right about this, though the leap to full-blown interpretive relativism seems a bit suspicious. Any thoughts?

Motivating Descriptivism

Here's a quick and dirty argument (inspired by Frank Jackson's seminar last night):

Premise: Signs are no use to us if we don't know (have access to) what they mean.
Conclusion: Reference requires mediating descriptions.

Convinced?

The Maxim of Mirroring

Jonathan Ichikawa discusses a curious puzzle, 'It must be so (but I wouldn’t say that it is so)':

“it must be that X” can be [used] to express high confidence in X. What’s striking me is that this is so even when, intuitively, my epistemic position isn’t strong enough to just assert X. Is that weird? ...

I know that sometimes, pragmatic rules prohibit me from asserting things that are entailed by other things that I can assert, like when I say “she’s more than four feet tall” when someone asks me how tall she is and I know that she’s 5′4″. But this seems worse: I’m prohibited by something like the maxim of quality from asserting something that is strictly stronger than something I am permitted to assert.

This strikes me as a special use of the modal 'must'. In saying, "it must be that X", we are not merely communicating the claim "it is the case that X" with additional modal force ("it is - indeed, must be - the case that X"). Rather, we seem to be saying something more like, "General considerations force me to conclude that X." We are indicating a certain indirectness of thought; a need for inference from the general to the specific. That is how we reached the conclusion ourselves, after all. By forcing the listener to undergo a similar process, we communicate that this is how we reached the conclusion ourselves. (We may need to add this "maxim of mirroring" to Grice's list!)

On this account, then, direct assertion ("X is the case") implicates possession of direct evidence. Note that introducing the 'must' - though semantically stronger - requires us to make an inferential step before we reach the simple conclusion that X is the case. By drawing out the listener's thoughts in this roundabout way, one mirrors the thoughts of the speaker. That is, you communicate that your grounds for believing X are indirect (and so perhaps insufficient for knowledge). In this way, it can be felicitous to make the strong claim "X must be the case" - even if you lack sufficient evidence for the weaker claim that X is actually true.

A problem remains. Suppose you don't know whether X is true, but may permissibly say 'it must be that X.' Assuming that knowledge is the norm of assertion, Jonathan points out that we must either (1) deny that 'it must be that X' entails X on the above use of 'must', or (2) claim that 'it must be that X' is not an assertion but "some more tentative thing." (I guess a third option would be to deny that knowledge is closed over entailment.) Which of these options most naturally fits the story I've told above?