Maverick Philosopher

They are not the same because (1) has a property that (2) does not have, namely, the property of being truth-valued. If we assume Bivalence, then the property of being truth-valued is the same as the property of being either true, or if not true, then false. (1) is truth-valued, but none of its parts are truth-valued. Furthermore, the list of these parts, which is a mere collection of them, is not truth-valued.

The argument, then, is this:

If (1) = (2), then (1) and (2) share all properties.
It is not the case that (1) and (2) share all properties.
-----
It is not the case that (1) = (2).

The major premise is an instance of the Indiscernibility of Identicals, a principle above reproach. The minor premise is true because (1) has the property of being truth-valued while (2) does not. And the form of the argument is Modus Tollens, which we know is valid.

I have just established the fact of the difference between a sentence and a mere list of its components.

The question is now one of explanation: How does the sentence as a whole manage to possess the property of being either true or false given that (i) its constituent symbols lack this property, and (ii) the mere collection of symbols also lacks it. What makes the sentence a unity of its parts as opposed to a mere list, set, or sum of them?

The question at the level of philosophical theory about what constitutes the unity of a sentence/proposition presupposes a datum, namely, that the unity of a proposition is a peculiar unity that cannot be understood in terms of the 'unity' of a mere collection, whether this be an ordered or unordered list or an ordered or unordered set, or a mereological sum. Unfortunately, David Brightly denies what I take to be a datum, a given, a starting point for theorizing:

You haven't really given us a reason for thinking that understanding 'Socrates is white' consists in any more than having the meanings of 'Socrates', 'is', and 'white' simultaneously in mind, which is about as far as my own introspection takes me.

But surely one could have those three meanings before one's mind without having before one's mind the further thought that 'is' connects the other two. To understand 'is' by itself is just to understand the general sense of the copula. But to understand 'Socrates is white' is to understand not merely the general sense of the copulative 'is' but also the copulative 'is' as actually connecting the other two items. There is a distinction between the copulative 'is' and the copulative 'is' as actually copulating!

I am taking for granted the standard distinctions among the various senses of 'is.' There is the existential 'is,' the identitative 'is,' the copulative 'is' and perhaps the veritative 'is.' The topic at present is the copulative 'is.'

Brightly counters:

I think it would be very difficult to have the meaning of 'is' before the mind without the thought that it acts as a connective. Does 'is' have any meaning, apart from conveying tense, beyond its connecting role? In Russian, for example, in the first and second person present tense it is omitted altogether and the English pseudo-sentence 'Socrates white now' conveys the sense equally well.

It is certainly true that one cannot understand the copulative 'is' without understanding it as an actual or potential copula. But the point is that one can understand the copulative 'is' without understanding it as actually connecting two specified terms. Here is an analogy. I can easily understand that a certain cable, which I see for sale in an electronics store, is used to connect digital cameras to computers. This understanding does not require that the cable actually be in use as connecting a specified computer to a specified digital camera. And if the cable were in use connectng camera C to computer K, I could easily understand how that same cable could be used to connect some other camera C* to some other computer K*. Furthermore, supposing that every camera and every computer in the universe to be destroyed, but the cable in question to remain in existence, that cable would not cease to be the cable it is, and have the function it has, in these drastically altered circumstances.

The analogy, then, is this. The cable, hanging on a rack in an electronics store, and not connecting anything to anything, is to the copulative 'is' in general as the cable actually connecting a specified camera to a specified computer is to the copulative 'is' actually connecting a subject term and a predicate term in a sentence. Just as I can understand the function of a cable without seeing it in actual use connecting one device to another, I can understand the copulative 'is' without understanding it as connecting two specified terms.

Therefore, when I bring before my mind the mere list of a sentence's parts, I do not thereby bring before my mind the truth-valued unity of those parts. The sentence is more than the sum of its parts. It is a unity of those parts which makes of them an item that can have a truth-value.

Brightly rightly points out that the grammatical copula is dispensable. Although it is not correct English to say 'Socrates white,' one could say that and manage to convey a complete thought to one's audience. So the grammatical copula 'is' is dispensable, at least in some cases. In Turkish, both of the following are correct:

3. Deniz mavi. (The sea blue.)

4. Deniz mavidir. (The sea is blue.)

What examples like this show is that the grammatical copula is eliminable. (The Turkish example also shows that the grammatical copula need not be an independent or stand-alone word; it can be a suffix.) But these examples do not show that the logical copula is eliminable. Consider a variant of written English in which the grammatical copula is replaced by spatial juxtaposition in a certain order. In such a variant, there would still be a logical copula; it is just that it would be expressed, not by a written sign, but by spatial juxtaposition in a certain order.

It is essential to distinguish grammatical from logical copulae. Appreciating the distinction, we see that the dispensability of the former, assuming it is dispensable, does not show the dispensability of the latter. It is obviously the logical copula with which we are concerned in the question of the unity of the declarative sentence/proposition.

To sum up. What I called a datum above really is a datum. A declarative sentence is not a mere list of its subsentential parts. A sentence has a truth-value, and in the mouth of a speaker, says something about the world. But the individual words, whether taken singly or collectively, do not have a truth-value, nor do they say anything about the world. The 'is' in the sentence 'Socrates is white' does not occur in that sentence in the way 'is' occurs in the corresponding mere list. In the list, 'is' occurs as an isolated element, whereas in the sentence 'is' occurs both as an element and as that which actually connects subject and predicate. It occurs not as a mere potential copula, but as an actually copulating copula.

But this is all preliminary. The real fun starts when we try to work out a theory of what this peculiar unity consists in.

2. My thesis: we can (in English or a variant of English) get by without the signs 'is' and 'are' as signs for copulation, but we need some signs or other to express the copulative tie. Thus we can dispense with 'is' and 'are' used copulatively, but we cannot dispense with copula-signs in general. And because we cannot dispense with copula-signs, we cannot dispense with the copulative tie as a logical entity, as the (Fregean) sense of copula-signs.

3. Clarity will be served if we distinguish three questions. For the space of this post, the linguistic question is whether or not we can say what we want and need to say in English or a variant thereof without the signs that actually function in standard English as copula-signs. I answer this question in the affirmative: we can dispense with 'is' and 'are' used copulatively. The logical question is whether or not we can dispense with the copulative tie, however expressed, by whatever linguistic means. The copulative tie is the (Fregean) sense of a copula-sign when the sign is functioning in an asserted declarative sentence. I answer the logical question in the negative: we cannot dispense with the copulative tie. The ontological question, the question of copulative Being, is the question whether or not there is anything in reality that corresponds to copula-signs as they function within used (not merely mentioned) declarative sentences such as 'The sky is blue.' I answer this question in the affirmative as well, but I won't discuss the ontological question in this post.

4. Instead of writing 'a is F' one could write 'Fa' as one does in standard symbolic logic. For example, instead of writing 'Al is fat,' one could write 'Fat(Al).' But this does not show that there is no copula-sign; what it shows is that the copula-sign is the juxtaposition of 'Fat' and '(Al)' with 'Fat' to the left of '(Al).' It does not show that there is no copula-sign; it shows that there is no distinct or separate copula-sign. 'Al is fat' is a sentence of ordinary, standard English; 'Fat(Al)' is not. In a variant of English, however, 'Fat(Al)' is a sentence -- but only if the juxtaposition in a certain order of the terms is taken as the copula-sign. Hence my thesis: we have no need of the copula-signs which actually function in ordinary standard English as copula-signs; but we do need some copula-signs or other.

5. There are natural languages in which there either is no copula-sign or in which the copula-sign can be omitted. In Turkish, for example, one can say Deniz mavi thereby expressing what one expresses in English by 'The sea is blue' but cannot express (in standard adult English) by 'The sea blue.' It is correct Turkish to say Deniz mavi, but not correct English to say 'Sea blue.'

But of course Turkish does have a copula-sign. Since Turkish is an agglutinative language and makes heavy use of suffixes, the copula-sign is appended to the adjective mavi as a suffix thereto. Thus, Deniz mavidir. And in the case of substandard English — 'Me one bad dude,' 'Coffee hot' — the copula-sign is implied. There are also cases in which copulation is expressed by a word that grammatically cannot be a copula: 'He be stoned.'

6. In the case of 'Fa,' the natural thing to say is that the sign for the copula is the immediate juxtaposition of 'F' and 'a' in that order. So there is a copula-sign in 'Fa,' though there is no separate sign for it. The copula-sign is the juxtaposition. I conclude that the word 'is' used copulatively is redundant, but that what it expresses, the copulation, is not. Copulation can be expressed in different ways, or even left unexpressed but implied; what is impossible is that there be no copulation. For without it there are no complete thoughts and no declarative sentences. And because copulation must be expressed sometimes if other times it is left tacit, there is need in English and indeed in any language for copula-signs if that language is to be of ay use in the expressing of complete thoughts, Fregean Gedanken.

7. Note the difference between 'The heavy stone' and 'The stone heavy.' The second, but not the first, could be used to express (in Baby English) the proposition that the stone is heavy. Should we conclude that Baby English has no copula-sign? No! In Baby English one expresses copulation in writing by the immediate juxtaposition of 'The stone' and 'heavy' with the former to the left of the latter. In spoken English, one says the former first, the latter second.

It seems obvious that there could be any number of variants of English that express copulation in any number of different ways.

8. It follows that the logical and ontological problems of copulation cannot be dismissed by saying that there are natural or artifical languages in which there is no separate sign for the copula. No doubt this is true. But it is wholly irrelevant. If a language has no separate or special or distinct copula-sign, then it will have some other means of expressing the copulative tie. A language that had no means of expressing the copulative tie would not be able to distinguish a string of words from a string of words that expresses a complete thought.

The question to be answered, in a rough formulation, is this: What secures (grounds, establishes, accounts for) the peculiar unity of subpropositional constituents whereby they form a unified whole capable of having a truth-value?

At Sophist 261d ff., Plato raises the unity question and puts into the mouth of the Eleatic Stranger the suggestion that there is a fundamental difference between names and verbs, onomata and rhemata, and that "a statement never consists of names spoken in succession, nor yet of verbs apart from names." (262a) If I say, 'lion, stag, horse,' I do not express a proposition. Ditto if I say, 'runs, sleeps, walks.' But if I say, 'Socrates runs,' then I express a proposition or make a statement. So a statement is a complex in which there is a "weaving together [of] verbs with names." (262d)

The idea suggested by the Sophist passage is that if one thinks of the parts of a (declarative) sentence as all of them names, then there is no way that the parts can form a truth-valued unity. On this approach, the solution to the unity puzzle consists in realizing that some parts of speech are not names, and that they fit together with names to form unities of sense capable of being either true or false. Names name, while verbs describe; the roles are distinct but complementary so that, when a name is concatenated with a verb, the result is a propositional unity. Accordingly, those who find a problem here are simply laboring under a false assumption, namely, that all the parts of a sentence are names.

In Fregean terms, the false assumption is that all expressions are complete, when in truth some are essentially incomplete or gappy. Thus, in 'Socrates is white,' 'Socrates' is a name, and thus a complete expression, whose referent is an object (Gegenstand), whereas '___is white' is not a name but an essentially predicative expression whose referent is not an object but a concept (Begriff). On this approach, there is no need and no room for a copula. On the side of language/mind, there is a name and a predicable and they fit together without the need of a copulative tertium quid to connect them. It is as if the predicable has a gap or slot in it in which the name fits. The name completes or 'saturates' the essentially incomplete predicable expression. On the side of the world, there is an object and a concept, with the object falling under the concept, but without the need for an instantiation or exemplification relation to connect them. Since the copula 'is' on this approach is not a name, it cannot be taken to name the relation of instantiation.

This approach seems to stop Bradley's regress before it can start. If subject and predicate fit together like a plug and socket, then there is no need for a third item to connect them; and without this third item, the regress can't get started. You will recall that part of the unity problem is to secure unity without igniting a vicious infinite regress.

First Argument Against the Platonic-Fregean Option

This approach, though very attractive at first, issues in the notorious 'horse' paradox. One of Frege's fundamental ideas is that there is an unbridgeable ontological chasm between objects and concepts, names and predicables. Objects can be named, but cannot be predicated; concepts can be predicated, but cannot be named. Objects are complete or 'saturated' entities; concepts are incomplete or 'unsaturated. Thus objects and concepts complement one another, and because of this, Frege thinks that their unification so as to form a truth-valued whole is not a problem as it would be if all of the parts of a sentence were names. For if all the parts of a declarative sentence were names, both the senses and the referents of these names would be objects and a tertium quid would be needed to connect them. But if a third thing such as a relation of instantiation is brought in to connect subject-constituent and predicate-constituent, then Bradley's regress is up and running. For if I connects S and P, what connects I, S, and P? A triadic relation? And so on.

The idea, then, is that the unity problem is solved, and Bradley's regress is avoided, if the essentially predicative nature of concepts is appreciated. This implies that the referent of '___is white' is essentially gappy, and essentially unnameable. For if I were to try to name the referent of this predicable expression, using perhaps the abstract substantive 'whiteness,' or 'the concept whiteness,' the thing named would be an object, not a concept. Yet it seems clear that we do need to talk about, and quantify over, concepts. Thus there will be occasions on which we will want to say that F and G are equinumerate, or that G is included in F. So if Frege's theory implies that we cannot talk about, and make predications of, concepts, then this will amount to a serious defect in the theory.

This bring us to the 'horse' paradox: The concept horse is not a concept. For 'the concept horse,' which is in subject position functions as a name, and what names denote are objects; but no object is a concept. Hence the concept horse is not a concept. But obviously the concept horse is a concept.

This contradiction is a reason to reject the Fregean solution to the unity problem. In a nutshell, the object/concept dichotomy helps with the unity problem, but gives rise to the 'horse' paradox.

They are not the same because (1) has a property that (2) does not have, namely, the property of being truth-valued. If we assume Bivalence, then the property of being truth-valued is the same as the property of being either true, or if not true, then false. (1) is truth-valued, but none of its parts are truth-valued. Furthermore, the list of these parts, which is a mere collection of them, is not truth-valued.

The question at the level of philosophical theory about what constitutes the unity of a sentence/proposition presupposes a datum, namely, that the unity of a proposition is a peculiar unity that cannot be understood in terms of the 'unity' of a mere collection, whether this be an ordered or unordered list or an ordered or unordered set, or a mereological sum. Unfortunately, David Brightly denies what I take to be a datum, a given, a starting point for theorizing:

You haven't really given us a reason for thinking that understanding 'Socrates is white' consists in any more than having the meanings of 'Socrates', 'is', and 'white' simultaneously in mind, which is about as far as my own introspection takes me.

But surely one could have those three meanings before one's mind without having before one's mind the further thought that 'is' connects the other two. To understand 'is' by itself is just to understand the general sense of the copula. But to understand 'Socrates is white' is to understand not merely the general sense of the copulative 'is' but also the copulative 'is' as actually connecting the other two items. There is a distinction between the copulative 'is' and the copulative 'is' as actually copulating!

I am taking for granted the standard distinctions among the various senses of 'is.' There is the existential 'is,' the identitative 'is,' the copulative 'is' and perhaps the veritative 'is.' The topic at present is the copulative 'is.'

Brightly counters:

I think it would be very difficult to have the meaning of 'is' before the mind without the thought that it acts as a connective. Does 'is' have any meaning, apart from conveying tense, beyond its connecting role? In Russian, for example, in the first and second person present tense it is omitted altogether and the English pseudo-sentence 'Socrates white now' conveys the sense equally well.

It is certainly true that one cannot understand the copulative 'is' without understanding it as an actual or potential copula. But the point is that one can understand the copulative 'is' without understanding it as actually connecting two specified terms. Here is an analogy. I can easily understand that a certain cable, which I see for sale in an electronics store, is used to connect digital cameras to computers. This understanding does not require that the cable actually be in use as connecting a specified computer to a specified digital camera. And if the cable were in use connectng camera C to computer K, I could easily understand how that same cable could be used to connect some other camera to some other computer. Furthermore, supposing that every camera and every computer in the universe to be destroyed, but the cable in question to remain in existence, that cable would not cease to be the cable it is, and have the function it has, in these drastically altered circumstances.

The analogy, then, is this. The cable, hanging on a rack in an electronics store, and not connecting anything to anything, is to the copulative 'is' in general as the cable actually connecting a specified camera to a specified computer is to the copulative 'is' actually connecting a subject term and a predicate term in a sentence. Just as I can understand the function of a cable without seeing it in actual use connecting one device to another, I can understand the copulative 'is' without understanding it as connecting two specified terms.

Therefore, when I bring before my mind the mere list of a sentence's parts, I do not thereby bring before my mind the truth-valued unity of those parts. The sentence is more than the sum of its parts. It is a unity of those parts which makes of them an item that can have a truth-value.

Brightly rightly points out that the grammatical copula is dispensable. Although it is not correct English to say 'Socrates white,' one could say that and manage to convey a complete thought to one's audience. So the grammatical copula 'is' is dispensable, at least in some cases. In Turkish, both of the following are correct:

3. Deniz mavi. (The sea blue)

4. Deniz mavidir. (The sea is blue).

What examples like this show is that the grammatical copula is eliminable. (The Turkish example also shows that the grammatical copula need not be an independent or stand-alone word; it can be a suffix.) But these examples do not show that the logical copula is eliminable. Consider a variant of written English in which the grammatical copula is replaced by spatial juxtaposition in a certain order. In such a variant, there would still be a logical copula; it is just that it would be expressed, not by a written sign, but by spatial juxtaposition in a certain order.

It is essential to distinguish grammatical from logical copulae. Appreciating the distinction, we see that the dispensability of the former, assuming it is dispensable, does not show the dispensability of the latter. It is obviously the logical copula with which we are concerned in the question of the unity of the declarative sentence/proposition.

To sum up. What I called a datum above really is a datum. An atomic sentence is not a mere list of its subsentential parts. A sentence has a truth-value, and in the mouth of a speaker, says something about the world. But the individual words, whether taken singly or collectively, do not have a truth-value, nor do they say anything about the world. The 'is' in the sentence 'Socrates is white' does not occur in that sentence in the way 'is' occurs in the corresponding mere list. In the list, 'is' occurs as an isolated element, whereas in the sentence 'is' occurs both as an element and as that which actually connects subject and predicate. It occurs not as a mere potential copula, but as an actually copulating copula.

But this is all preliminary. The real fun starts when we try to work out a theory of what this peculiar unity consists in.

Much depends, of course, on just what is meant by 'proposition.' Clarity will be served if we catalog some of the main uses of the term.

1. Geachian Propositions. A Geachian proposition is

. . . a form of words in which something is propounded, put forward for consideration; it is surely clear that what is then put forward neither is ipso facto asserted nor gets altered in content by being asserted. (Logic Matters, 255)

Geach distinguishes propositions in his sense from what we may call

2. Abstract Propositions. These are the contents of tokenings of indicative sentences. Suppose I assertively utter 'Two times two is four' and Karl assertively utters 'Zwei mal zwei ist vier.' Clearly, our utterances have the same content; we express the same thought. If you deny that, then I say you deny a datum. Now one terminological issue is whether we should refer to this common content as a proposition, or as a propositional content. I prefer to say that the the tokenings of the English and the German sentence express the same proposition.

Thus I distinguish among sentence types, tokens of sentence types, and propositions. Sentence types and tokens are tied to particular languages whereas propositions are not so tied and are therefore in this sense 'extralinguistic.' The arithmetical thought expressed by Karl and me is neither English nor German, even though the sentences in which we 'couch' the thought are German and English, respectively.

3. Commenter 'Ockham' suggests that in one sense, "a 'proposition' is a sentence that (impersonally) makes an assertion."

4. 'Ockham' suggests in a second sense that a proposition is "what is asserted by a sentence."

I reject both (3) and (4), and for the same reason: Sentences don't make assertions, people makes assertions using sentences. (Analogy: Guns don't kill people, people (sometimes) kill people (sometimes) using guns.) To say that a sentence impersonally makes an assertion is to say that a sentence in the indicative mood is typically used to make an assertion; but that is not to say that the sentence makes an assertion.

Now the issue before us is whether one and the same proposition can be asserted in some contexts and left unasserted in others. If we adopt the approach of either (3) or (4), then of course there cannot be unasserted propositions. But if we adopt (1) or (2), then there can be unasserted propositions. Since I see now reason to accept (3) or (4), I agree with Geach about the Frege point.

Why is this important? One reason is that it bears on the question of existence. The issue is whether the existence of an individual belongs to it intrinsically, and thus is in some sense predicable of it, or whether existence in no way belongs intrinsically to individuals but is rather bound up with acts of judgment as Hume and Brentano maintained. At this point I refer the interested reader to the preceding post in this chain.

So on the pragmatic side we have the distinctions among speech acts, and on the semantic side, the distinctions among moods. One question that arises is whether the speech acts map neatly onto the moods. When I make an assertion, must I use an indicative sentence? Or can I make an assertion using a non-indicative sentence? And can I utter an indicative sentence and not make an assertion? Here are some theses that seem true.

T1. One can make an assertion using a non-indicative sentence.

T2. One can utter an indicative sentence and not make an assertion.

T3. One can utter an interrogative sentence and be taken by one's audience to be making an assertion.

T4. One can utter an imperative sentence and thereby make an assertion.

T5. One can utter an optative sentence and thereby ask a question.

Ad (T1). Suppose A sincerely asks, 'Does God exist?' and B replies, 'Is there an angry unicorn on the far side of the moon?' It seems that B has answered A's question, and has done so by making an assertion, an assertion more straightforwardly put by an utterance of the indicative sentence, 'God does not exist.' And yet B has made his assertion by uttering an interrogative sentence. This appears to be evidence that one can make an assertion by using a non-indicative sentence. One can make an assertion without using an assertoric sentence.

Ad (T2). Suppose Johnny is picking his nose in public, and Mommy says to Johnny, 'We don't do that.' Mommy utters an indicative sentence, and yet does not make an assertion; she issues a command.

Ad (T3). I bought a hat recently at a swap meet for $20 and I asked the lady who sold it to me, 'Do you know how much this hat would cost at a retail outfitter's?' Her reply: 'How much?' The lady took me to be making an assertion that would normally be couched in some such indicative sentence as, 'I know how much this hat would cost elsewhere.' And yet, I was asking a genuine question. (I need to write a separate post on rhetorical questions.)

Ad (T4). Davidson gives this example: 'Notice that Joan is wearing her purple hat again.' The sentence is in the imperative mood, but is used to make an assertion. An example of my own. I say something you disagree with, and you reply, 'Get out of here.' You are not commanding me to leave, but denying my assertion with a counter-assertion.

Ad (T5). Another example from Davidson: 'I'd like to know your phone number.' This grammatically optative sentence might be used to ask a question that would be put more directly as 'What is your phone number?'

This linguistic data seems to support the view that we must distinguish between speaker's meaning and sentence meaning, which is a species of linguistic meaning. Sometimes they coincide, but often they come apart, as in the above examples. What a speaker means or intends by his speech act often diverges from what sentences mean when considered in abstraction from speakers and their intentions.

Now does commenter 'Ockham' deny that we need to make this distinction?

REFERENCE: Donald Davidson, "Moods and Performances" in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, Oxford, 1984, pp. 109-123.

My asserting that Dan is drunk is a speech act. When I make an assertion, I do at least two things: I commit myself to the truth of what I assert, and I communicate the content of my assertion to a hearer. Let me now propose a thesis that seems true but which we might want to think about:

T1. To assert that p is to assert that p is true.

Be that as it may, suppose I assert that Dan is drunk. I do this by tokening the sentence type 'Dan is drunk.' The assertoric force of the tokened sentence type is indicated by 'is' which signals the indicative mood among other things. Now here is my question: Are indicative mood and assertoric force the same, or different? When I refer to the assertoric force of a sentence, am I referring to its indicativity, and vice versa? Or must we distinguish between indicativity and assertoric force?

Consider this exchange between speakers A and B:

A: Peter is innocent.
B: (Ironically) Yeah, right. Peter is innocent.

Although both A and B are tokening 'Peter is innocent,' only A is asserting that Peter is innocent. Now the sentence type considered by itself is in the indicative mood. So I am tempted to say that assertoric force, as a semantic component, is identical to indicativity. Both tokens have assertoric force despite the fact that only one is asserted. Now consider this example:

1. If Peter is innocent, then his conviction is unjust.

To assert a conditional is not to assert its antecedent. The antecedent, 'Peter is innocent,' is in the indicative mood. I want to say that it has assertoric force despite the fact that it is not being asserted.

What is assertoric force? I suggest that it is that property of a sentence that renders it capable of being used by an agent to say something either true or false. As far as I can see, it is the same as the property of indicativity. Sentences with assertoric force can be used without being asserted, but no sentence lacking assertoric force can be asserted. To say that a sentence is assertoric, or has assertoric force, is to say that it is of the appropriate form for the making of assertions.

Since assertoric force either is or is equivalent to the property of being either true or false, a sentence's being assertoric does not entail its being true. Nor, of course, does a sentence's being asserted by someone entail its being true. To assert a sentence is to assert it as being true, but that is not to say that an asserted sentence is true. Whatever truth is, it involves a relation to something external to sentences or propositions.

Clearly, each of these sentences can be used to express many different thoughts or propositions. If Jack says 'I love you' to Jill, the proposition expressed is different from the proposition expressed if Bill says 'I love you' to Hill. Since one and the same sentence type can be used to express different propositions, it follows that sentence types are distinct from propositions.

We must also distinguish between a sentence type and its linguistic meaning, the meaning it has in virtue of the conventions of the language to which the sentence type belongs. The four sentences displayed above have the same meaning. Since one and the same meaning is possessed by these four different sentence types, it follows that linguistic meanings are distinct from sentence types.

It follows from the two points just made that linguistic meanings are distinct from propositions. One proof of this is that one can have a complete understanding of the linguistic meaning of a sentence without knowing any proposition that the sentence has ever expressed. Suppose a Spanish speaker learning English learns that 'Mary loves Carl' means the same as 'Mary ama a Carl.' The Spanish speaker then fully understands the linguistic meaning of 'Mary loves Carl' but without needing to know any proposition, any truth or falsehood, that the English sentence has ever expressed. (See Castaneda, Thinking and Doing, p. 35) Therefore, the linguistic meaning of a declarative sentence is distinct from the proposition expressed by the sentence on some occasion of the sentence's use.

'Ockham,' blinded by his nominalist fear of reification, cannot admit this obvious distinction between linguistic meaning and proposition. This causes him to give bad arguments. For example, he writes, "In summary, the meaning of a sentence is what it says, what it says is true or false, ergo the meaning of a sentence is a 'truth bearer'." The argument is this:

1. The meaning of a sentence is what it says
2. What a sentence says is either true or false
-----
3. The meaning of a sentence is either true or false.

The argument equivocates on 'what it says.' If premise (2) is true, then what a declarative sentence says is identical to the proposition it expresses. It is important to realize that I am not assuming any particular theory of propositions. Thus I am not assuming that they are Platonic entities. I am simply insisting that we need to distinguish between the linguistic meaning of a sentence (the meaning it has in virtue of the conventions of the language to which it belongs) and the thought a sentence expresses when the sentence is uttered or otherwise tokened by a person in a definite situation. But in premise (1), the linguistic meaning of a sentence is identified with what it says. Thus 'what it says' is being used in two different ways, which fact destroys the validity of the argument.

If 'Ockham' says I am begging the question againat him, I reply that he is failing to admit an obvious distinction. The distinction is not original with me. It ought to be visible to anyone. If an a priori commitment to nominalism blinds one to so obvious a distinction, then so much the worse for an a priori commitment to nominalism.

A. Sentence-Types

Count the sentences in the following display:

The sea is blue
The sea is blue
The sea is blue.

'Three' and 'one' are both reasonable answers, but they can't both be right on pain of contradiction. To avoid contradictions we draw distinctions. In this instance we reach for the tried-and-true distinction between type and token and say that we have three numerically distinct tokens of one and the same sentence type. Now consider a different display:

The sea is blue
Deniz mavidir
Deniz mavidir
Die See ist blau
Die See ist blau
Die See ist blau.

In this display we have six sentence tokens of three sentence types belonging to English, Turkish, and German respectively. But all six tokens have the same linguistic meaning. They all mean what we English speakers mean when we think or say or write that the sea is blue.

Now my first point is that sentence types cannot be the vehicles of the truth-values. For example, the sentence-type 'The sea is blue' is neither true nor false. Which sea, and when? For a sentence-type to be true or false, all of its tokens would have to be true or false. But some tokens of 'The sea is blue' are true and some tokens are false. If Ali of Samsun looks at the Black Sea on a moonless night and utters the words 'Deniz mavidir,' he says something false. Or consider, 'He owes me ten dollars.' This is neither true nor false since it is indeterminate who 'he' and 'me' refer to, and which time the present tense of 'owes' pick out.

B. Meanings of Sentence Types

My second point is that the linguistic meanings of sentence types cannot be the vehicles of the truth-values. 'He is dead to me' and Er ist mir tot have the same linguistic meaning, but this meaning is neither true nor false for the same reason that the sentence type 'He is dead to me' is neither true nor false. No truth-value can be assigned until the reference of 'he' is fixed.

C. Sentence Tokens as Physical Phenomena

Now let's consider a token of a sentence type, a token of 'The moon is full.' Glancing up at the night sky, I say, 'The moon is full.' By uttering these words I produce a sentence token. Or I might write the words down on a piece of paper. Either way, a complex physical particular comes into existence, either a collection of sounds or a collection of marks on paper. If what we mean by a sentence token is a purely physical phenomenon, then sentence tokens cannot be true or false. For physical phenomena, considered by themselves, are devoid of meaning, amdeaning is a necessary condition of having a truth-value.

For a sentence token to have a truth-value, it cannot be a 'dead' set of marks or acoustic disturbances; it must be marks or sounds 'animated' by a mind who intends the marks or sounds to convey a meaning. And this suggests that the primary truth-bearers are items on the order of judgmental contents. But more on this later.

Let's think about the English word, not the letter, 'I.' This one-letter word is the first-person singular pronoun. It is the paradigm case of an indexical expression. The most obvious thing to say about 'I' is that its reference is context-sensitive. Tokened by BV, it refers to BV; tokened by AR it refers to AR. (An uttering is a tokening, but there are tokenings that are not utterings: there are inscribings and other encodings.) But

1. Proper names are also context-sensitive
2. Proper names are not indexicals
So
3. What makes 'I' an indexical cannot just be its context-sensitivity.

Ad (1). Since many rejoice under the name 'Phil Spector,' this expression type does not count as a genuine proper name; it is rather a use or tokening of it that does. Thus my use of 'Phil Spector' in the sentence 'Phil Spector is standing trial for murder' picks out exactly one man, the record producer famed for his 'Wall of Sound.'

Ad (2). If proper names are Millian tags whose meaning is exhausted by their reference, then a proper name is not an indexical for the reason that indexicals have a linguistic meaning, a Kaplanian character, while proper names do not. Thus 'I' has a meaning that every speaker of English understands, a linguistic meaning that can be captured in some such rule as 'I' refers to the speaker or writer. With respect to 'I' and other indexicals one can distinguish between character and content in Kaplan's jargon, but one cannot make this distinction with respect to Millian tags since their meaning is exhausted by their reference.

If, on the other hand, it is maintained that proper names express Fregean senses through which their reference is routed, then too proper names are not indexicals since there are no such senses in the case of idexicals. Indexicals are paradigms of direct reference. This is not to say that indexicals lack lingusitic meaning. Clealry, 'now' and 'here' differ in lingusitic meaning (Kaplanian character) in that 'now' picks out times whereas 'here' picks out places. The point is that indexicals refer directly.

When I say, 'I am happy,' I refer to myself but not via a special Fregean sense that my use of 'I' expresses. For if there were such a sense, what would it be? It would have to something like the property of being me, a haecceity property that I alone have and I alone could have. This property, however, appears ineffable, and suspect for this reason. Given that 'I' refers, it refers directly.

Now let's consider whether indexical expressions are token-reflexive expressions. For Hans Reichenbach, the word 'I' means the same as 'the person who utters this token'; 'now' means the same as 'the time at which this token was uttered,' etc.

In the case of 'I' it seems false that 'I' means the same as 'the person who utters this token.' Although it is true that I am the person who utters this token, if the synonymy holds, then

4. I exist

is synonymous with

5. The person who utters this token of 'I' exists.

But they cannot be synonymous since they have different truth conditions. There are possible worlds in which (4) is true, but (5) false. Surely my existence cannot depend on my uttering tokens of 'I.' (Cf. David Kaplan, Themes from Kaplan, pp. 519-520.)

To sum up. In response to Rhoda, I say first that indexicals should not be assimilated to token-reflexives, and second, that not every referring device is context-sensitive, let alone indexical.

But there is another issue that may be at the back of Rhoda's mind. It is arguable that linguistic reference is ultimately grounded in thinking reference, first-person reference. If so, it is always a subject who refers using linguistic devices; words and phrases do not refer on their own. One cannot do semantics from a third-person point of view, abstracting from the intentionality of mind. So it may be that all reference is ultimately indexed to an underlying transcendental ego.

It is plain that Columbus could not have used 'Castro's island' to refer to his landfall. The reason is not that he didn't speak English, for we could easily translate (1) into Italian and the ambiguity of (1) would remain in the translation. The reason is that Cuba had to wait until 1959 to become Castro's island whereas Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492. So if we take (1) to impute to Columbus a reference to Cuba under the description 'Castro's island,' then (1) is false. Nevertheless, there is a way of construing (1) so that it comes out true. One must distinguish between an external and an internal occurrence of a word or phrase and then take the occurrence of 'Castro's island' in (1) as an external occurrence.

'Castro's island' occurs externally in (1) in that it is an expression that the speaker (or writer or thinker) of (1) uses in his attribution of a belief to Columbus, but not one that Columbus could have used. To appreciate the contrast consider this example of mine:

2. JFK believed that Castro's island harbored Soviet missiles.

In (2), 'Castro's island' occurs internally in the sense that it is an expression that is used by the speaker of (2), and could also have been used by JFK, to refer to Cuba. JFK could have referred to Cuba as Castro's island whereas Columbus could not have. JFK could have had before his mind a Fregean proposition the subject constituent of which was the Fregean sense expressed by 'Castro's island.' But not so in the case of the Italian mariner.

So 'Castro's island' occurs externally in (1) but internally in (2). Now what I want to suggest is that an external occurrence of an expression in a belief context is a de re occurrence of that expression.

Since (1) is open to two readings, one true and the other false, there is pressure to disambiguate (1) by adopting a notation that prevents the ambiguity from arising. So consider

1E. Castro's island was such that Columbus believed it to be China.

What (1E) does is withdraw 'Castro's island' from the scope of a verb of propositional attitude. One virtue of (1E) is that it removes any hint that Columbus thought of his landfall as Castro's island. The speaker of (1E) refers to Cuba as Castro's island but does not impute to Columbus any reference to Cuba under this description or via the sense (Sinn) of 'Castro's island.' More simply,

1E*. Castro's island was believed by Columbus to be China.

Ignoring the past tense, we can can perhaps put it this way:

1E**. BEL (Columbus, Castro's island, being China)

where 'BEL' is a triadic belief relation, and not a dyadic one as it would be if belief were thought to connect a believer to a Fregean proposition. In this 'ontological assay' of (1E) no Fregean proposition occurs. All we have is two individuals and a property related by a three-term relation. The whole complex is a Russellian proposition.

Note that one can correctly apply Existential Generalization to (1E) and its variants. Thus one can validly infer

3. (Ex)(x was believed by Columbus to be China.)

One can also substitute coreferential terms for 'Castro's island' salva veritate. Thus from (1E*) one can infer

4. Cuba was believed by Columbus to be China.

Now if you understand the distinction between external and internal occurrences of an expression, as explained above, then it seems to me that you have all you need to understand the de re/de dicto distinction as applied to beliefs. An expression that occurs externally occurs de re, and one that occurs internally occurs de dicto.

I am not saying that some beliefs are de re and some are de dicto. I am saying that some occurrences of epxressions in belief sentences are de re occurrences and some are de dicto. I am also not saying that this is what most philosophers mean by the distinction. I am saying that this is one way of attaching sense to the distinction.

I am not committed to (1E**) as the correct ontological assay of (1E*). The notion that one can analyze belief without invoking propositions or proposition-like entities strikes me as highly dubious. But this is really a separate topic.

Now, do you see that this septad is pregnant with contradiction? By (T3), Cicero has a certain property, the property of being believed by Sam to be a philosopher. Therefore, given the truth of (T1) and (T4), Tully has that same property. But this implies the negation of (D3).

To remove the contradiction, we must reject one of the T-propositions. The D-propositions express the data of the problem. Obviously, they can't be rejected. Of course, nothing hinges on the particular example. There are countless examples of the same form. Someone could believe that 3 is one of the square roots of 9 without believing that one of the square roots of 9 is a prime number, even though 3 is a prime number.

The Fregean solution is to reject (T1). In (D1), 'Cicero' refers to its customary sense, not its customary referent, while in (D2), 'Cicero' refers to its customary referent. This implies that the antecedent of (T4) remains unsatisfied so that one cannot conclude that Tully has the property of being believed by Sam to be a philosopher.

A different solution, one proposed by Hector-Neri Castaneda, is achieved by rejecting (T2) while upholding the rest of the T-propositions. The rough idea is that 'Cicero' in all its occurrences refers to a 'thin' object, an ontological guise, a sort of ontological part of ordinary infinitely-propertied particulars. This ontological guise is not strictly identical to the ontological guise denoted by 'Tully,' but the two are "consubstantiated" in Castaneda's jargon. This consubstantiation is a type of contingent sameness. Since Cicero and Tully are not strictly identical, but merely consubstantiated, the fact that Cicero has the property of being believed by Sam to be a philosopher does not entail that Tully has this property. So the contradiction does not arise. (Cf. The Phenomeno-Logic of the I, pp. 183-186)

The issue really has nothing to do with spatially external objects. There unproblematically are such objects whatever their ultimate ontological status. Note also that ER can be true even if there are no spatial individuals. ER is simply the claim that there is a way things are independent of us: it says nothing specifically about spatial individuals.

As Searle interprets it, ER sets forth a condition on the intelligibility of discourse and thought rather than a truth condition of discourse and thought:

There are conditions on the intelligibility of discourse . . . that are not like paradigmatic cases of truth conditions. In the normal understanding of discourse we take these conditions for granted; and unless we took them for granted, we could not understand utterances the way we do . . . . (181)

Among these conditions on intelligibility is ER. It is a necessary presupposition of a large chunk of thought and discourse. What Searle is doing is giving a transcendental argument for ER. He takes it as given that a sentence like 'Mt Everest has ice and snow near the summit' is intelligible. He then inquires into what must be presupposed for it to be intelligible. For the sentence to be true, Mt. Everest must exist, and it must have ice and snow near the summit. But for the sentence to be intelligible, it is not necessary that Mt. Everest exist, or if it does exist that it have ice and snow near the summit. What is necessary is that ER be true: that there be a way things are independent of human representations. If the mountain exists, then that is (part of) the way things are, and if it does not exist, that too is (part of) the way things are. The way things are, then, is not a truth condition of any such statement as 'Mt Everest has ice and snow near the summit.' It is a condition of the intelligibility of such statements and their negations. So even if every statement asserting or implying the existence of a physical object is false, and there is no spatially external world, it is still the case that ER is true. For it is still the case that there is a way things are independent of human representations.

For Searle, then, external realism (ER) is a transcendental condition of the intelligibility of large portions of public discourse. He is aware that to have shown this is not to have show that ER is true. (194) Speaking as we do, we are committed to its being true, but that is not to say that it is true. That there is a way things are independent of human representations is presupposed by the intelligibility of much of what we think or say, but it doesn't follow that it is true.

Why not? Because its truth is conditional upon the fact that our thought and speech is intelligible. If ER is true, then it is true whether or not human representations and their intelligibility exist. But if ER is argued to transcendentally as a condition of intelligibility, then ER's truth is conditional upon the existence of human beings and their representations. So we cannot say that ER is true, but only that we must presuppose it to be true. This is not to say that without us it would be false, but what without us it would be neither true nor false.

Is Searle's position satisfactory? I'm not sure. I want to be able to say that ER is true simpliciter, or true unconditionally (i.e., not conditional upon the fact of the intelligibility of our discourse.)

But does my desire to be able to say that ER is true unconditionally make sense? Maybe not. We cannot not presuppose that there is a way things are assuming that we continue to think and talk as before. But is there a way things are? Yes, it might be said, in the only sense in which it would make sense to assert it, namely, as a presupposition of our thought and talk. That is, what we as rational beings must presuppose as being the case IS the case. The 'possibility' that it not be the case is unmeaning. No sort of wedge can be driven between the presupposing and the being. But this seems to land us in a form of transcendental idealism.

A fascinating labyrinth, this. Collateral reading: Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, section 44 (c), Die Seinsart der Wahrheit und die Wahrheitsvoraussetzung.

From the same source:

Owen Gingerich, historian and astronomer emeritus at Harvard who led the committee that proposed the initial definition, called the new definition "confusing and unfortunate" and said he was "not at all pleased" with the language about clearing the neighborhood.

Gingerich also did not like the term "dwarf" planet.

"I thought that it made a curious linguistic contradiction," Gingerich said in a telephone interview from Boston (where he could not vote). "A dwarf planet is not a planet. I thought that was very awkward."

Yes indeed, in the new dispensation a dwarf planet is not a planet. But is this a "linguistic contradiction" as Gingerich says? It is if one takes 'dwarf' to be what I will call a specifying adjective, one that divides a genus into species, or a class into two disjoint subclasses. Thus if 'dwarf' is taken as dividing the class of planets into the dwarves and the non-dwarves, then 'A dwarf planet is not a planet' is a contradictory expression. Compare, 'An elm tree is not a tree,' 'A bald bachelor is not a bachelor,' 'A sharp knife is not a knife.' These are all contradictory expressions.

But there are also plenty of examples of what I will call sense-shifting adjectives. These are also known as alienans adjectives. They are so-called because they 'alienate' (literally: make other) the senses of the terms to which they are attached as modifiers. Consider the way 'decoy' when used to modify 'duck,' shifts the latter's sense. Clearly, a decoy duck is not a duck, but a piece of wood got up to look like a duck. Thus, 'A decoy duck is not a duck' is not a contradictory expression. Other examples: 'Negative growth is not growth,' 'Relative truth is not truth,' 'Artificial leather is not leather.' None of these are contradictory expressions.

So in response to Gingerich I would say that no "linguistic contradiction" hides in the bosom of 'dwarf planet.' 'Dwarf' in this usage is a sense-shifting or alienans adjective. The use of such adjectives in English is well-established and not a problem. The adequacy of the new definition of 'planet' as applying to celestial objects that clear the neighborhood around their orbits and are not satellites, however, is a question I'll leave for the astronomers.

Companion post: Nine Planets or Ten? The Empirical as Involving the Conceptual

This is a very interesting argument, and I would like 'Ockham' to tell us if it is his invention or from whom he has borrowed it. The aim is to show that there are singular concepts. I take it irreducibly singular concepts are intended, singular concepts that cannot be analyzed in terms of conjunctions of pure or qualitative properties. The concept fastest runner applies to exactly one individual at a given time in a given world, and is therefore singular, not general; but it is not irreducibly singular inasmuch as it can be analyzed in terms of multiply exemplifiable properties together with the help of some logical machinery.

It would also be nice to know whether concepts are being viewed as mind-dependent items or in some Platonic fashion. Given 'Ockham''s moniker, I'll bet on the former. If so, an objection immediately springs to mind: how can minds such as ours grasp (understand) irreducibly singular or individual concepts? How could any finite mind grasp an unanalyzable concept like Socrateity? A concept cannot be 'in' a mind without being understood by the mind it is 'in'; so an ungraspable concept would not be a concept. My singular concept, Vallicellitas if you will, is graspable by God perhaps but not by any finite mind.

Ad (1). This seems right. For example, the function, or one function, of 'Tony Blair' is to tell us which member of the Labour Party is Prime Minister.

Ad (2). This line telescopes an argument that appears to be a non sequitur. I grant that even if there is only one A, there could be another, and I grant that there can only be one N. But it does not follow that singular terms are not descriptive. If the descriptive backing is made complex enough, it seems the singularity of 'N' could be captured. Form the conjunction K of all the properties Socrates has in the actual world. This should suffice to individuate him in the actual world, i.e., to differentiate him from everything else in that world. Do the same for every possible world in which Socrates exists. Now form a monstrous disjunction D from all these Ks. This huge disjunctive property (each disjunct of which is a conjunction) is built out of descriptive elements and seems to capture Socrates' singularity.

Ad (3). This is plausible. 'Hades' and 'Cerberus' are singular terms even though there is nothing to which they refer. They are not meaningless. It is just that their meaning is not exhausted by their reference. I would conclude that they must have some descriptive backing. But this is not what 'Ockham' will conclude.

Ad (4). This follows. No problem.

Ad (5). We have no good reason to accept this since (2) has not been established.

Ad (6). Non sequitur! This is supposed to follow from (5) but does so only in the presence of some such subsidiary premise as that singular terms are significant. Otherwise, one could infer that, despite appearances, singular terms are insignificant (without meaning or sense). Imagine a Bradleyan semanticist who is out to consign singular terms to Appearance as opposed to Reality.

In sum, I think there are two main problems with the 'Ockhamite' argument. The first is that (2) has not been shown to be true. The second is that irreducibly singular concepts are creatures of darkness. I understand 'Cerberus': he is the tri-capital -- Is that a word? If it isn't, it is is now -- canine guardian of the underworld. But I cannot wrap my mind around (understand) any singular concepts if these are supposed to be irreducibly, non-qualitatively, singular. To put it brutally, there are no singular concepts to be signified.

'Santa Claus does not exist,' then, is true if and only if the history of the uses of 'Santa Claus' ends in a block, i.e., if a given use cannot be traced back in the causal chain to a real person. But surely neither declarative sentence-types nor declarative sentence-tokens can be non-derivatively either true or false. It is the proposition expressed by the tokening of a sentence-type that is either true or false. So what ought to be said is that the proposition expressed by 'Santa Claus does not exist' is true if and only if the history of the uses of 'Santa Claus' ends in a block. But then it is clear that this proposition can be true even if there is no name 'Santa Claus.' The wholly nonlinguistic fact of Santa's nonexistence cannot depend on a linguistic fact about a word.

But even if 'Santa Claus' does not end in a block, but leads back to a real person, it can still be the case that Santa Claus does not exist. How? Well, suppose that at the causal origin of the name is a real person, Saint Nicholas. Then 'Santa Claus' does not end in a block: it traces back to a real person. It is just that we use 'Santa Claus' now to refer to a legendary character (who rides a sleigh through the sky, etc.) and not to Saint Nicholas. So when I say now 'Santa Claus does not exist,' I say something true even though the history of uses of the name does not end in a block.

It could be that Saint Nick became legendary so gradually that each receiver of the name intended to use it in the way it was used by the person from whom he received it. It could be a sorites situation. With each link the intention to refer to the same thing is preserved; but at the ends of the chain the reference is different. (Cf. Leonard Linsky, Names and Descriptions, University of Chicago Press, 1977, p. 107 ff. The sorites idea is my own.)

Let's see if we can sort this out. Suppose there is a man, Ken, who knows nothing about Aquinas except that he is a prominent Catholic theologian and a saint of the Roman Catholic Church. Other facts about him are beyond Ken's ken. Ken doesn't know whether Aquinas lived after Augustine or before, the titles of the books he wrote, his principal doctrines, or anything else, except the two facts I mentioned, and perhaps what logically follows from them. Suppose Ken and I are having a brief discussion about Aquinas.

Regardless of what Geach might actually have meant in the passage quoted above, my claim is that, first, when Ken says 'Aquinas was a big name in Catholic theology,' he refers successfully to Aquinas, the same person I was talking about; and second, that Ken's use of 'Aquinas' is not routed through (mediated by) the sense of any definite description Ken can (has the ability to) supply. Does this example refute descriptivism tout court? No, but it refutes a certain kind of descriptivism. It refutes the following thesis:

T. No one ever refers successfully to an object except via a definite description (or cluster of same) that he can (has the ability to) produce on demand.

McGrew's response to this is that Ken could have supplied the definite description, 'the person other people refer to when they use the name "Aquinas"' or perhaps, 'The important Catholic thinker Bill refers to when he says "Aquinas".' If 'could have' refers to an ability of Ken's, then it is not clear that Ken has this ability. Indeed, I can simply stipulate that he doesn't have it. That being stipulated, wouldn't we agree that Ken referred successfully to Aquinas when he said, 'Aquinas was a big name in Catholic theology'? Ken referred to Aquinas even though he did not refer to Aquinas via any definite description, and also lacks the ability to concoct any such description.

We now consider Jerry, who is just like Ken in his ignorance of individuating facts about Aquinas, but is intellectually more flexible. He has the ability to concoct the definite description, 'the theologian you, Bill, are referring to now when you utter "Aquinas".' Call this description D. So if I ask Jerry who he means by his utterance of 'Aquinas,' he says, 'I mean the very person to whom you are referring when you say "Aquinas".' The question is now this: Does Jerry's employment of D specify conditions satisfaction of which would count as Jerry's successful reference to Aquinas?

It seems to me that the answer is in the negative. Jerry has no idea to whom I am referring. That is, Jerry has no idea of the properties whose joint instantiation is the person I am referring to. It follows that Jerry has no idea to whom he is referring. For Jerry is referring to the same person to whom I am referring. Since Jerry has no idea to whom he is referring, and since the descriptivist notion is that reference is to whomever or whatever satisfies the idea of the object to which one purports to refer, it follow that Jerry cannot be referring to anything.

To put it another way, Jerry cannot borrow my reference; he must enact his own. I have an idea of the properties joint instantiation of which would constitute successful reference to Aquinas. But Jerry has no idea of these properties. So Jerry cannot be said, on descriptivist ptrinciples, to be referring to anything.

I have made two points. The first is that thesis (T) above is false. The second is that on descriptivist principles there can be no borrowing of speaker's or thinker's reference: a definite description like 'the person to whom Bill is referring' cannot constitute the descriptive backing of an ordinary proper name.

This is surely correct. Thomas Aquinas once came up in a conversation I had with my unlettered brother-in-law. The latter said something like, "Aquinas was a big name in Catholic theology." My brother-in-law was undoubtedly referring to the same person I was referring to even though he would not have been able to supply even one definite description. Recall that to be definite a description must be of the form, the unique x such that [insert description]. 'a big name in Catholic theology' is an indefinite description.

Geach also provides an interesting critique of Quine's "intransigent" extension of the Russellian line whereby names are transformed into predicates. Thus for Quine 'Pegasus is winged' goes over into something like 'There is exactly one x such x pegasizes, and x is winged.' Perhaps we can discuss Geach's Quine critique in a separate post.

Geach also rejects the view that ordinary proper names — which, nota bene, are to be distinguished from logically proper names — are devoid of connotation. On this view, "no attributes logically follow from a thing's being given a proper name." (67) Proper names are bestowed by fiat, whence it follows that there is no right or wrong about the application of a name: there is no property possession of which by a thing is a necessary condition of the name's being attached to it. It is different in the case of a general term. If 'fat' is true of Al, it follows that there is a property in virtue of whose possession by Al the term is correctly applied to him. By contrast, on the view under consideration, we cannot speak of a name being true of its nominatum, or not true of it.

As I said, Geach rejects this theory of names. In the typical case, the same name applies to a person throughout his life from infancy to dotage. Geach takes this to imply that "the baby, the youth, the adult, are one and the same man." (69) They are not the same absolutely, or the same thing, but the same man. Here Geach sounds his theme of the sortal-relativity of identity. One cannot say sensibly of two things that they are the same absolutely; what one can say is that they are the same relative to some sortal under which both fall. If so,

. . . my application of the proper name is justified only if (e.g.) its meaning includes its being applicable to a man and I keep on applying it to one and the same man. On this account of proper names, there can be a right and wrong about the use of proper names. (69)

This jives with what I was saying earlier about 'God.' The notion that 'God' could denote anything at all, whether a sense of fear, a bolt of lightning, or what have you, strikes me as absurd. But that is the consequence one must swallow if one thinks of names as mere external tags devoid of sense. Geach now considers an objection:

It has often been argued that it cannot be part of the meaning of a proper name that is bearer should be a man, because we cannot tell this by hearing the name, and because there is nothing to stop us from giving the same name to a dog or a mountain. You might as well argue that it cannot be part of the meaning of 'beetle' that what it is applied to must be an insect, because we cannot learn this meaning just from the sound of the words, and because 'beetle' is also used for a sort of mallet. In a given context, the sense of 'beetle' does include: being an insect, and the sense of 'Churchill' does include: being a man. (70)

I lack the expertise to say much about the traditional view of the proposition. But there is something amiss in the above characterization of the modern view. It is indeed true that propositions on the modern view are structured entities, complexes, and that they are expressed by sentences, or rather by the tokening of sentences in the indicative mood. Thus as I understand the matter, the sentence-type 'Frege is a logician' does not express a proposition; it is rather the tokening of this sentence-type that expresses a proposition, where tokening includes assertive utterance and producing an inscription.

But from the fact that propositions on the modern view, including singular propositions, are structured entities, it does not follow that these singular propositions have as constituents the things they are about. 'Socrates is wise,' for example, expresses a singular proposition. But it does not follow that Socrates himself, all 200 lbs of him, warts, beard, shabby cloak and all, is a constituent of the proposition. One could take that view, in which case one would be advocating a Russellian-Kaplanian view of propositions. But one needn't take that view. One can maintain that a proposition like the one expressed by (a tokening of) 'Socrates is wise' does not have Socrates himself as a constituent, but an abstract representative of him.

As I recall A. Plantinga's view in "The Boethian Compromise," proper names express individual essences or haecceity-properties. Thus 'Socrates' might express the property of being the teacher of Plato in Alpha, where 'Alpha' names our world, the possible world that happens to be actual. Clearly, there are possible worlds in which Socrates exists but is not the teacher of Plato; but there is no world in which Socrates exists but is not the teacher of Plato in Alpha. The property of being the teacher of Plato in Alpha is a property that individuates Socrates: only he has it in the actual world, and no one distinct from him has it in any possible world. The property of being identical to Socrates, if there is such a property, would seem to do as well.

Thus a sort of compromise is struck between direct reference theories on which proper names are rigid designators -- terms that denote the same object in every possible world in which the object exists -- and theories on which reference is routed through sense. World-indexed properties induce rigidity while still serving as semantic intermediaries.

My point contra 'Ockham' is that singular propositions need not be Russellian-Kaplanian: they can be Fregean: they can be such that all their constituents are abstract entities like Fregan senses. I am aware that many philosophers use 'singular proposition' and 'Russellian-Kaplanian proposition' interchangeably. In my opinion that is bad terminology. Here is an example of this bad terminology.

CTR. A token (or tokening) t of name n denotes x iff there is a unique x such that x directly or indirectly causes t.

For example, my utterance of 'Mary' denotes Mary iff Mary causes my utterance of 'Mary' either directly or via an historical chain.

Now it is well known that ordinary proper names are ambiguous: millions of women have rejoiced under the name 'Mary.' And the same goes in lesser degree for 'Mary McTaggart Bonch-Osmolovsky.' Distinctive as that name is, it is not proof against ambiguity. But it would be a mistake to infer from the ambiguity of names that names are indistinguishable from indexicals like 'I,' 'here, and 'now.' One crucial difference is that names are context-independent in that the reference of a name need not change when different people use it at different times and places. Despite the ambiguity of 'Bill Clinton,' if used with the intention of denoting a particular person such as the former U.S. president, it denotes that same person whether he uses it, I use it, or anyone uses it, now or at some other time, here or at some other place. By contrast, the reference of an indexical depends on the context of use. 'I' tokened by BC refers to BC, by BV to BV.

I am not free to fix the reference of 'I' so that it can be used to refer to a person other than me. I cannot stipulate that 'I' shall refer to the woman who is my wife. But I am free to fix the reference of an ambiguous proper name like 'Mary.' I can stipulate that 'Mary' used by me shall refer to the woman who is my wife.

So names, despite their ambiguity, behave differently than indexicals. But can this crucial difference be maintained in the face of (CTR)? The theory says that the referent of a name-token is whatever directly or indirectly causes its utterance. A token of 'Mary' refers to Mary my wife in one context while a token of the same name-type refers to Mary my great aunt in another context. If so, it is not up to me to fix the reference of 'Mary' by the use of a definite description. The reference is determined causally by facts external to me and my intentions. This seems to imply that if (CTR) is true, then names are indexicals in disguise. Their reference depends on the context of use. Different tokens of 'Zeno' have different referents depending on whether I amin a philosophy classroom or in a veterinarian's office with my cat Zeno.

Not so on a description theory. If names have sense, and sense determines reference, then every token of a name will have its reference fixed independently of context. These considerations may be summed up as the following argument:

1. Names are not indexicals.
2. The Causal Theory implies that names are indexicals in disguise.
Therefore
2. The Causal Theory is mistaken.

(This argument was suggested to me by Michael McKinsey, "Causality and the Paradox of Names," Midwest Studies in Philosophy 1984, pp. 501-507.)

For example, on the descriptivist approach there is associated with the name 'God' a certain concept in the mind of the person who uses the name, a concept which includes various subconcepts (immaterial, unchanging, omnibenevolent, etc.). The name has a referent if and only if this concept is instantiated. Further, nothing having a property inconsistent with this concept can be the referent of the name. If our atheist were a descriptivist, his denial of the existence of God could be expressed by the assertive utterance of

2. The concept of an immaterial, omniqualified, etc. being is not instantiated.

But our atheist is a direct reference theorist, and so cannot avail himself of (2). For on the direct reference theory, for 'God' to have a referent it suffices that (i) there be an initial baptism of some being as 'God,' (ii) there be an historical chain whereby this name gets passed down to the present user; (iii) each user in the chain have the intention of using the name with the same reference as the one from whom he received it. Thus it is not necessary that the referent of 'God' fit any concept of God that the end-user might have. This allows a Jew, a Christian, and a Muslim to be referring to the same being when they utter sentences containing 'God' despite the fact their conceptions of God are quite different.

How then does the direct reference theorist deny the existence of God? Since his denial cannot be about a concept of God, it must be about the word 'God.' He must deny that the name 'God' was ever introduced in an initial baptism; or he must deny that the historical chain is unbroken; or he must deny that all the various users had the intention of using the name with the reference of the one from whom they received it.

But how can the nonexistence/existence of God hinge on such linguistic facts? The nonexistence of God, if a fact, is an objective fact: it has nothing to do with the nonexistence of some initial baptism ceremony, or some break in a link of name transmission, or some failure of intention on the part of the name-users. Suppose 'God' was never attached to a referent in any baptism. God might still exist.

More fundamentally, is it not just absurd to hold, as direct reference theorists seems to hold, that it is not necessary that the referent of 'God' fit ANY concept of God that the end-user might have? For that seems to imply that anything could be God. Could God be Abraham's fear during a lighning storm on a high mountain? Obviously not. Why not? Because 'God' used intelligently encapsulates a certain descriptive content or sense that constrains what can count as God.

What am I failing to understand?

According to esteemed commenter Prof. Mike Almeida, a necessary condition for successful reference on the causal theory is that a speaker's use of a name be causally connected (perhaps indirectly) with the object referred to. As he says, "we can refer to objects only if we stand in some causal relation to them (direct or indirect). . . ." What Almeida is saying is that, on the causal theory, one cannot refer to a thing or event to which one does not stand in a causal relation.

Let us assume that Almeida is correct in his understanding of what the causal theory (or at least the Kripkean version thereof) requires. The theory then rules out all reference to abstracta: Fregean propositions, numbers, sets, etc. But it also rules out reference to future events.

Suppose meteorologists predict a hurricane that has the power to wipe out New Orleans a second time. Conservatives to a man and a woman, they introduce the name 'Hillary' for this horrednous event, and they introduce it via some appropriately complex definite description. (They can't point to it since it doesn't yet exist.) The meteorologists continue with their work using 'Hillary' for the event in question. Since the event lies in the future, there is no question of its causing directly or indirectly any use of the name 'Hillary.' Nor is there any question of the name's being introduced on the basis of effects of the event.

What we seem to have here is a legitimate use of a proper name that cannot be accounted for by the causal theory. For the causal theory rules out reference to a thing or event to which one does not stand in a causal relation. This suggests that there is something very wrong with the theory. See John Searle, Intentionality, Cambridge 1983, p. 241.)

The underlying issue concerns the mechanism of reference. How do linguistic expressions attach or apply to extralinguistic entities? How do words grab onto the (extralinguistic) world? In particular, how do nominal expressions work? What makes my utterance of 'Socrates' denote Socrates rather than someone or something else?

It is reasonable to hold, with Frege, Russell, and many others, that reference is routed through, and determined by, sense: an expression picks out its object in virtue of the latter’s satisfaction of a description associated with the referring expression, a description that unpacks the expression’s sense. If we think of reference in this way, then ‘God’ refers to whatever entity, if any, that satisfies the definite description encapsulated in ‘God’ as this term is used in a given linguistic community.

Now consider two candidate definite descriptions.

D1: ‘the unique x such that x is omnipotent,omniscient, omnibenevolent, and created the world ex nihilo.’

D2: ‘the unique x such that x is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, created the world ex nihilo, and is triune.’

Suppose that reference is not direct, but routed through sense, or mediated by a description, in the manner explained above. If (D1) is the description that explicates (‘unpacks’) the sense of ‘God,’ then Jews, Christians, and Muslims refer to the same entity when they use ‘God’ (or its equivalents in Hebrew and Arabic). But if (D2) is the description that explicates the sense of ‘God,’ then Jews, Christians, and Muslims do not refer to the same entity. This is because it is no part of the sense of ‘God’ for a Jew or a Muslim that God be triune, i.e., be one God in three divine persons. On the contrary, the Jewish and Muslim emphasis on the transcendence and radical unity of God entails for them the denial of any trinitarian structure in God.

Since (D2) comes closer than (D1) to a full unpacking of the sense of ‘God’ as Christians use this term, it follows that Christians and Muslims do not refer to the same entity. They do not refer to, or worship, the same God for the simple reason that their conceptions of God – conceptions built into the very sense of ‘God’ – are mutually exclusive. I am assuming, of course, that reference is sense-mediated.

Now what about the Eastern Orthodox? They too are trinitarians, but they reject the filioque clause: they deny that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the the Father and the Son, holding instead that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father alone. (Imagine chopping someone’s head off over a theological nicety such as this!) So do the Roman Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox refer to the same entity when they say ‘God’? No, if reference is routed through sense, and if the filioque clause is part of the very sense of what the Eastern Orthodox mean when they say ‘God.’

A further wrinkle. I would say that any God worthy of worship must be ontologically simple, while Alvin Plantinga – no slouch of a philosopher – would reject the very idea of divine simplicity as incoherent. (See my SEP article on divine simplicity.) So when he and I use ‘God,’ are we referring to the same entity?

I hope you are beginning to see how much is hidden behind the facile remark that Jews, Christians, and Muslims worship the same God. If the conceptions of God are different, and the only access we have to God is via our conceptions, then in what sense are we talking about the same God? An obvious response would be to say that the Muslim and the Christian are talking about the same God all right, it is just that the Muslim (or the Christian) has one or more false beliefs about God. Thus if God is triune, then the Muslim who denies this has a partially false conception of God; but this does not prevent him from referring to the same being that the Christian refers to.

Does successful reference require that the thing referred to satisfy the description by which I refer to it? You and I are at a party. I say, "The man in the corner with champagne in his glass is the new dean." Suppose, unbeknownst to me, that it is not champagne but carbonated water that fills his glass, and suppose further than no one in the corner is drinking champagne. It follows that the definite description goes unsatisfied. But it seems that successful reference has been achieved: I have managed to draw your attention to the man who is the new dean. What this Kripke-Donnellan example seems to show is that reference need not consist in the satisfaction of a description. The description is used to make a successful reference even though nothing satisfies it, i.e., no one thing has all these properties: being a man, being in a corner, being such that champagne fills his glass.

Still, the description comes very close to being satisfied. So this example is not that clear. If ‘God’ is a logically proper name whose meaning is exhausted by its reference, a Kripkean rigid designator, rather than a Russellian definite dscription in disguise, then what would make 'God' or a particular use of 'God' refer to God?

A particular use is presumably caused by an earlier use. But eventually there must be an initial use. Imagine Abraham on Mt. Sinai. He has a profound mystical experience of a being who conveys to his mind such locutions as "I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt not have false gods before me." Abraham applies 'God' or 'Yahweh' to the being. But what makes the name the name of the being? One may say: the fact that the being or an effect of the being causes the use of the name.

But a certain indeterminacy seems to creep in if we think of the semantic relation of referring as explicable in terms of causation. For is it the experience of God that causes the use of 'God'? Or is it God himself who causes the use of 'God'? If the former, then 'God' refers to an experience had by Abraham and not to God. Surely God is not an experience. But how can God be the cause of Abraham's use of 'God'? Causes are events, God is not an event, so God cannot be a cause.

We will have to think about this some more tomorrow.

It seems to me that this explanation leaves something to be desired. I have no beef with the notion that the first distinction is an example of the de dicto/de re distinction. To say of a dictum that it is necessarily true if true is different from saying of a thing (res) that it has a property necessarily. Suppose a exists in some, but not all, possible worlds, and that a is F in every possible world in which it exists. Then a is necessarily F, F in every possible world in which it exists. But since there are possible worlds in which a does not exist, then it will be false that 'a is F' is necessarily true, true in all possible worlds.

So far, so good. But the distinction between

1. Nec (if p then q)

and

2. If p, then Nec q

is situated entirely on the de dicto plane, the plane of dicta or propositions. The distinction between (1) and (2) is the well known distinction between necessitas consequentiae and necessitas consequentiis. To confuse (1) and (2) is to confuse the necessity of the consequence with the necessity of the consequent. Or you could think of the mistake as a scope fallacy: the necessity operator in (1) has wide scope whereas the operator in (2) has narrow scope. But what makes (2) de re? What is the res in question? Consider an example:

3. Necessarily, if a person takes Enalapril, then he takes an ACE inhibitor

does not entail

4. If a person takes Enalapril, then necessarily he takes an ACE inhibitor.

A second example:

5. Necessarily, if something happens, then something happens

does not entail

6. If something happens, then necessarily something happens.

It can't be that easy to prove fatalism. The point, however, is that the distinction between (5) and (6) does not trade on the distinction between dicta and rei, between propositions and non-propositions: the distinction is one of the scope of a propositional operator.

I conclude that the de dicto/de re distinction is a bit of a terminological mess. And note that it is a mess even when confined to the modal context as demonstrated above. If we try to apply the distinction univocally across modal, doxastic, temporal, and other contexts we can expect an even bigger mess. A fit topic for a future post.

A Purely Quantificational Use of 'I'

Consider

1. Mary believes of me that I am grouchy.

Suppose (1) is asserted by Bill. Then (1) is just the first-person transform of

2. Mary believes of Bill that he is grouchy.

Regimenting (2) yields

3. There exists an x such that: x = Bill & Mary believes that x is grouchy.

This regimentation in standard predicate logic shows that 'he' in (2) is a variable bound by an existential quantifier outside the scope of the psychological prefix, 'Mary believes that.' Similarly, (1) can be displayed as

4. There exists an x such that: x = me & Mary believes that x is grouchy.

It follows that the occurrence of 'I' in (1) is simply a representation of the variable 'x' in (4). It is not a genuine singular referring expression. It is a variable in the disguise of a first-person pronoun. The illusion that 'I' as it functions in (1) is a first-person pronoun is due to the surface-grammatical similarity between 'I' in (1) and 'I' in 'I am grouchy.' Syntactically, both tokens of 'I' are instances of the first-person pronoun. But only one of them functions semantically as a first-person pronoun.

Semantical rule (R), therefore, is either false or not obviously true. This gives some idea of how subtle is the semantics of self-reference.

But we need to get down to cases. I’ll borrow/modify some hackneyed examples from section 4 of Quine’s Mathematical Logic and see how far they take us. Consider the following:

1. Boston is a city in New England
2. Boston is disyllabic.
3. ‘Boston’ is a city in New England.
4. ‘Boston’ is disyllabic.

Which of these sentences are true? (1) and (4) are true, but (2) and (3) are false. It should be obvious why. A city is not the sort of thing that can have two or any number of syllables. A city is not a word. And no word is a city. So we say that in (1) and (2), ‘Boston’ is used, not mentioned, while in (3) and (4), ‘Boston’ is mentioned, not used.

One way to mention an expression is via a definite description. Thus, 'the first word in sentence (1)' mentions the word 'Boston.' But it is more common to mention an expression by forming a name of it, and one conventional way to do this is by enclosing the expression in single quotation marks, although double quotation marks are also used. Another way is by italicizing it. But conventions are precisely conventional and so only a quibbler or a schoolmarm insists on one convention over another equivalent one. What is not a matter of convention, however, is the distinction between using and mentioning expressions. This is not a distinction that we have created by adopting a convention. For it is the distinction between what we refer to and the (conventional) means whereby we refer to it. As such, this distinction is prior (logically? transcendentally?) to all expressive conventions.

Now suppose one wants to say that the first word in (3) is different from the first word in (1) using names of these words. To do that, one would write

5. "'Boston'" is a different word than 'Boston.'

The difference is that "'Boston'" refers to a word, namely the word 'Boston' while 'Boston' does not refer to a word but to a city. Another difference is that in "'Boston'" there is a single pair of quotation marks whereas in 'Boston' there are no quotation marks.

Another way to mention a word is by placing 'word' immediately before it. For example,

6. The word ambisinistrous has five syllables.

This is good enough for journalists and nonphilosophers, but philosophers of the analytic persuasion are almost always careful to write: 'The word "ambisinistrous"' to make it crystal clear that they are mentioning the word not using it. If you call this redundancy, I will reply that redundancy in pursuit of precision is no sin, not even a peccadillo.

And you will have noticed that in each of (1)-(6), we are talking about or mentioning sentences, not using them. So still another way to mention an expression is to set it off orthographically as above.

Note also that each sentence is numbered. But when I refer to those numbered sentences, I enclose the numerals in parentheses. This is because I am talking about, not using, the sentences in question. More examples:

7. 7 is an arabic numeral.

8. 7 is a number.

(7) is false, while (8) is true. A number is not a numeral. Numerals refer to numbers, and different numerals can refer to the same number. Here is a list of token-distinct and type-distinct numerals and numeric expressions all of which refer to the same number:

7, seven, Sieben, VII, 7, 7, 111, yedi, 111, 5 + 2, 4 + 3, 110 + 1, 100 + 10

You will note that I have ommitted the quotation marks. This is because the orthography makes it clear that I am mentioning, not using, these expressions. Each of these numerically distinct expressions refers to the same number, the number English speakers refer to when they say or write '7' or 'seven.' This is the same number Turks denote when they say or write 'yedi.' The same number is denoted by '111' in binary (base-2) notation. Thus we can write

9. 7 (base-10) = 111 (base-2).

It should therefore be clear that words and what they refer to must not be confused, even when the object referred to is extraordinary, like the number 7. No one will confuse 'double cheeseburger' on a menu with something edible. People use menus to order food in restaurants, and no one confuses menu with meal. But when the discussion becomes the least bit abstruse, people fall right into this confusion. They confuse numerals with numbers, names of properties with properties, and sentences with the propositions they express. This leads them to think that what is true of expressions (that they are conventional and dependent on us) is also true of their referents.

Note first that the medico was not joking but making a serious point. But he couched this serious point in a sentence which is plainly false. Since he had no intention of deceiving his audience, and since the point he was making (not merely trying to make) about cholesterol is true, he was not lying. He was not bullshitting either since he was not trying to misrepresent himself as knowing something he does not know or more than he knows.

Exaggeration bears some resemblance to metaphor. If I say, 'Sally is a block of ice,' I speak metaphorically or figuratively. What I say is literally false. But by saying it, I manage to convey to the listener some such proposition as that Sally is unemotional and (perhaps) sexually unresponsive. And when the sawbones exaggerated, though he said something literally false, he managed to convey to his audience the true proposition that total cholesterol levels for most of us need reducing.

But I wouldn't want to say that the good doctor was speaking metaphorically. I am merely pointing to a similarity between metaphor and exaggeration. The similarity may consist in the coming apart of sentence meaning and speaker's meaning. In both examples, the sentence meaning is that of a falsehood. The speaker, however, using those literally false sentences means something different from what the words 'by themselves' mean, and manages to convey truths to his hearers.

So I suggest that to understand exaggeration we need to understand metaphor so that we can delimit the former from the latter. But what exactly is metaphor? That's a tough one. Here I catalog three specimens of exaggeration by well-known philosophers.

Academic environments are generally characterised by the presence of people who claim to understand more than in fact they do. Linguistic Philosophy has produced a great revolution, generating people who claim not to understand what in fact they do. Some achieve great virtuosity at it. Any beginner in philosophy can manage not to understand, say, Hegel, but I have heard people who were so advanced that they knew how not to understand writers of such limpid clarity as Bertrand Russell or A. J. Ayer.

It is not clear whether Moore should be called a philosopher or a pedant of such outstanding ability as to push pedantry and literal-mindedness to a point where it became a philosophy. [...] One might say that Moore is the one and only known example of Wittgensteinian man: unpuzzled by the world or science, puzzled only by the oddity of the sayings of philosophers, and sensibly reacting to that alleged oddity by very carefully, painstakingly and interminably examining their use of words...

In this passage Gellner explains the appeal of the later Wittgenstein:

The linguistic naturalism, the reduction of the basis of our thought to linguistic etiquette, ensures that there is no appeal whatever to Extraneous Authority for the manner in which we speak and think. Naturalism, this-worldliness, is thus pushed to its final limit. But at the very same time, and for that very reason (language and custom being their own masters, beholden and accountable to no Outside norm), the diversified content of language and custom is indiscriminately endorsed. Thus the transcendent, if and when required, slips back ambiguously, in virtue of being the object of natural practices, customs, modes of speech.

Penetrating. I've got to get this book!

Phil balked at this, and has been maintaining that 'I do not exist' is nonsense. From this he concludes that 'Possibly, I don't exist' is nonsense. The gist of it is that if you operate on nonsense you get nonsense. Garbage in, garbage out. 'Possibly' is a modal operator. But in an initial statement, Phil spoke of modal and epistemic operators. So I took him to be mounting a general argument along the following lines:

1. If O is any operator (modal, epistemic, deontic . . .)and p a proposition, and O(p) the result of O's operating upon p, and if p is nonsense, then O(p) is nonsense.

2. 'I do not exist' is nonsense.

Therefore

3. O('I do not exist') is nonsense.

Against this I gave two arguments. The first substitutes '~' for 'O'. The negation of 'I do not exist' is 'I exist.' So if Phil is right and operating on nonsense yields nonsense, and the former is nonsense, then the latter must also be nonsense. But 'I exist' is not nonsense. So 'I do not exist' is not nonsense either.

The second argument substitutes 'It will be the case that ___' for 'O.' Surely it makes sense to say, 'It will be the case that I do not exist.' Of course, people don't typically say things like this. I don't say to my wife, 'Since it will be the case that I do not exist, I am now designating you primary beneficiary of my Roth IRA.' I say something like, 'In the event of my death, I want my IRA funds to pass directly to you; so I am naming you primary beneficiary.'

But appeals to ordinary language cut no ice! They count as little as appeals to common sense count in science. One cannot refute Galileo by appeal to the commonsensical notion that heavier bodies fall faster than lighter ones, or refute Georg Cantor's transfinite set theory by saying that everyone knows that no set can have a proper subset with the same number of members. Or consider the additivity of velocities. One cannot invoke this commonsensical notion in refutation of Einstein.

So, while accepting premise (1), I make a Modus Tollens of Phil's Modus Ponens. I say: Because 'It will be the case that I do not exist' makes sense, 'I do not exist' also makes sense.

But now let's consider Phil's latest reply to Spur:

"It will be the case (one day) that I do not/no longer exist" seems OK to me as kind of an awkward way of saying "one day I'll be dead." I suppose you can say that sentence is a tense transformation of "I do not exist," but so what? If p is any indicative sentence in English, and trans(p) a sentence that results from changing the tense of p, why is it an argument that S's utterance of p at t makes sense if in fact there is some sentence trans(p) that S can utter sensibly at t? I see no reason to credit this principle and lots of reason to disbelieve it. In general, you can't assume the sense is preserved across tense transformation, and we could give lots of examples of where it obviously fails. So, "I will be dead some day" is OK, but not "I do not exist", and their tense relationship has no bearing.

This reply suggests that Phil and I may be at crosspurposes. Phil speaks of utterances making sense or failing to make sense. I was speaking of sentence-types.

So let's distinguish between the claim that the sentence-type 'I do not exist' is nonsense from the claim that each oral tokening (uttering) of this sentence type is nonsense. Is the second claim true?

One thing is clear: No one can utter 'I do not exist' and say something true. The very act of uttering the sentence falsifies it. We can go further: the very act of tokening it (whether in oral or written language, or in thought) falsifies it. If I think to myself: 'I do not exist,' I establish my existence. Of course, this is just a version of the Cartesian cogito.

We can go further still. Necessarily, for any subject S, if S tokens 'I do not exist,' then 'I do not exist' is false. But why should we conclude from this that the tokening of 'I do not exist' is nonsensical? There is a proposition that is the sense of 'I do not exist' despite the fact that I cannot express this proposition using the the first-person singular pronoun. The proposition in question is false, but it might have been true: I do not exist of necessity.

No doubt there are utterance-events that are self-defeating or self-falsifying. Another example is the uttering of 'I am not uttering anything now.' Yet it is true that I am not uttering anything now. Whatever is true is meaningful. So 'I am not uttering anything now' is meaningful despite its being self-falsifying if uttered. Phil continues:

I've been arguing here for only two claims. One, the general rule that if S's utterance of p at is nonsense, so is any attempt to assert a MODAL version of p. Two, S cannot meaningfully assert at any time "I do not exist." Bill accurately reported my view when he said, "the core of what you are saying is that my non-existence is not assertible by me using [that 1st person sentence]." That is equivalent to saying "I do not exist" is nonsense in the sense discussed. And if so, by the general rule, so is "I don't exist, for all I know" and "Possibly I don't exist", and any other modal version of "I don't exist".

By 'nonsense' here, Phil means something like self-falsifying. No doubt, any person's utterance of 'I do not exist' is self-falsifying. But 'Possibly, I do not exist' and its equivalent 'I might not have existed' are not self-falsifying. I do not falsify these modal sentences by uttering them, or by tokening them in any way. They may or may not be true. But surely they are not rendered false by their tokening.

Part of the problem in this discussion is Phil's use of 'nonsense' when he should be using a much more specific term. 'I am not uttering anything now' is self-falsifying if uttered. 'I do not exist now' is self-falsifying if tokened in any way. But neither are nonsense in a sense that would justify saying that their modalizations are nonsense in that same sense. 'I might not have been uttering anything now,' if uttered, does not falsify itself. 'I might not have existed now,' if tokened in any way, does not falsify itself.

What say you, gentlemen? Have I nailed it down?

The same goes for 'I exist now.' It cannot be tokened, in language or thought, without it being the case that a truth is expressed; but it does not follow that the one who tokens it necessarily exists. Its negation, 'I do not exist now,' cannot be tokened in language or thought without it being the case that a falsehood is expressed; but it does not follow that the nonexistence of the one who tokens it is impossible.

The illicit inferential move from (1) to (2) illustrates the ancient modal fallacy of confusing the necessitas consequentiae with the necessitas consequentiis, the necessity of the consequence with the necessity of the consequent.

The point is not to confuse 'Nec(p --> q)' with 'p --> Nec q.'

A sophomoric fatalist might argue like this. "Necessarily, whatever happens, happens. Therefore, whatever happens, necessarily happens, so that whatever occurs could not have been otherwise." But this reasoning commits the modal fallacy in question.

Or taken someone who argues that, necessarily, whatever is known is true; ergo, whatever is known is necessarily true. This reasoning likewise confuses the necessity of the consequent with the necessity of the consequence.

If someone argues that 'I exist' is not a first-level predication of existence on the ground that if it were then the sentence in question would be necessarily true -- which it isn't -- then I would tax such a person with the modal fallacy in question.

And if someone were to argue that 'I do not exist' is nonsense on the ground that it is necessarily false, then I would suspect him of falling into the same trap.

BV: I think it is important to distinguish between nonsense and necessary falsehood. The sentence you cite is necessarily false: if true, then false; if false, then false; ergo, necessarily false. Since it is necessarily false, it must have meaning or sense, Sinn in Frege's terminology. Meaningfulness is a necessary condition of having a truth-value. An example of nonsense would be something like, 'Abbaquabba droojprupper gyres potrzebie-like.' But the sentence you cited has a clear meaning.

In general, you cannot retrieve a nonsensical sentence from nonsense by appending some modal or epistemic operator to it. "Possibly" or "necessarily" or "for all I know, [ nonsense]” is still nonsense. The only kind of operator that can generate a sentence with truth value from a sentence with a nonsensical argument is something like “It is nonsense to say [nonsense].”

BV: Fine, except that the sentence you cited is not nonsense.

It is nonsense for a speaker to say “I don’t exist.” Therefore adding a modal or epistemic operator cannot make his sentence into something with sense. “For all know, I don’t exist” , “Necessarily I don’t exist”, etc are all nonsense.

BV: Sorry, but I think this is simply mistaken. 'I don't exist' has a clear sense. It is just that anyone who utters (or otherwise tokens) it utters (or otherwise tokens) a falsehood. The words taken individually have meaning, and the syntax is unexceptionable. The problems arise on the referential plane, on the level of Frege's Bedeutung. The first person singular pronoun is immune to reference-failure: no one can say (or otherwise token) 'I' without denoting something. Consequently, every tokening of 'I do not exist' is false.

Or think of it this way. 'Possibly, I do not exist' obviously does make sense, so, invoking your principle that prefixing nonsense with a modal (epistemic, deontic, etc.) operator produces more nonsense, it follows that 'I do not exist' is not nonsense.

And if 'I do not exist' is nonsense, then prefixing it with the negation operator will also result in nonsense. So you are committed to saying that 'I exist' is nonsense. But the latter is obviously not nonsense. So 'I do not exist' cannot be nonsense.

Will you say that both 'I do not exist' AND 'I exist' are nonsense? But then the Cartesian cogito, which culminates in sum, I exist, is nonsense. You are digging yourself into a very deep hole here, Phil.

For a human being, it is essentially and necessarily true that if he existed he was born. If it nonsense to say “I don’t exist”, therefore it is equally nonsensical to say “ I was never born.” No modal or epistemic operator can turm nonsense into sense. Therefore it is also nonsense to say “ Possibly I was never born”, or equivalently, “I might never have existed.”

BV: I grant you that, necessarily, for any animal x, x exists iff x was born. BV is an animal. So necessarily (BV exists iff BV was born.) Note the scope of the necessity operator. Nec (p iff q) is consistent with p and q's being contingent. Now surely BV might not have existed and might not have been born. BV expresses this to himself by saying 'I might never have existed.'

2. The materialist has more than one option, but a very tempting one is to reduce reference to causation. The idea is roughly that the referent of a word is what causes its tokening. Thus 'cat'-tokenings refer to cats because cats cause these tokenings. Suppose I walk into your house and see a cat. I say: "I see you have cat." My use of 'cat' on this occasion -- my tokening of the word-type -- refers to cats because the critter in front of me causes my 'cat'-tokening.

3. Unfortunately, this is only a crude gesture in the direction of a theory. For it is obvious, as Hilary Putnam points out (Renewing Philosophy, p. 37), that pictures of cats cause 'cat'-tokenings, but pictures of cats are not cats. Cats are typically furry and cover their feces. Pictures, however, are rarely furry and never cover their (nonexistent) feces. Yet I might say, seeing a picture of a cat over your fireplace, "I see you like cats." In that sentence, 'cat' is used to refer to cats even though what caused my 'cat'-tokening was not a cat but a non-cat, namely, a picture of a cat.

Indeed, practically anything can cause a 'cat'-tokening: cat feces, cat hair, cat caterwauling. Suppose I see Ann Coulter engaged in a 'cat-fight' with Susan Estrich on one of the shout shows. I say, "They are fighting like cats." Nota Bene: my use of 'cat' in this sentence is literal, but it is not caused by a cat! (My example, not Putnam's).

4. Our problem is this: what determines the reference of a word like 'cat'? What makes this bit of language represent something extralinguistic? 'Cat' is a linguistic item; a cat is not. (French 'philosophers' take note.) In virtue of what does the former target the latter? If both a cat and a pile of cat scat can cause a 'cat'-tokening, then the causal theory of reference is worthless unless it can exclude these extraneous (excremental?) cases.

The problem is that 'cat' refers to something quite specific, cats, whereas 'cat'-tokenings can be caused by practically anything. To solve this problem, a notion of causation must be invoked that is also quite selective. It turns out, however, that this selective notion of causation presupposes intentionality, and so cannot be used in a noncircular account of intentionality. Let me explain.

4. Context-Sensitive versus Context-Independent Concepts of Causation. We often in ordinary English speak of 'the cause' of some event, a myocardial infarction say, even though there are many contributing factors: bad diet, lack of exercise, hypertension, cigarette smoking, high stress job, an episode of snow-shovelling. Which of these will be adjudged 'the cause' is context- and interest-relative. A physician who gets a kick-back from a pharmaceutical concern will point to hypertension, perhaps, so that he can prescribe a massive dose of angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor, while the man's wife might say that it was the snow shovelling that did him in.

To take a more extreme example, suppose a man dies in a fire while in bed. The salient cause might be determined to be smoking in bed. No one will say that the flammability of the bedsheets and other room furnishings is the cause of the man's incineration. Nevertheless, had the room and its furnishings not been flammable, the fire would not have occurred! The flammability is not merely a logical, but also a causal, condition of the fire. It is part of the total cause, but no one will consider it salient. The word is from the Latin salire to leap, whence our word 'sally' as when I sally forth to do battle at a chess tournament. A salient cause, then, is one that jumps out at you, grabbing you by your epistemic shorthairs as it were, as opposed to being a mere background condition.

Putnam cites the example of the pressure cooker that exploded (p. 48). No one will say that it was a lack of holes in the pressure cooker's vessel that caused the explosion. A stuck safety valve caused the explosion. Nevertheless, had the vessel been perforated, the contraption would not have exploded!

What these examples show is that there is an ordinary-language use of 'cause' which is context-sensitive and interest-relative and (if I may) point-of-view-ish. A wholly objective view of nature, a Nagelian view from nowhere, would not be able to discriminate the salient from the nonsalient in matters causal. In terms of fundamental physics, the whole state of the world at time t determines its state at subsequent times. At this level, a short-circuit and the current's being on are equally causal in respect of the effect of a fire. Our saying that the short-circuit caused the fire, not the current's being on, simply advertises the fact that for us the latter is the normal and desired state of things, the state we have an interest in maintaining, and that the former is the opposite.

The ordinary notion of cause, then, resting as it does on our interests and desires, presupposes intentional notions. I cannot be interested in or desire something unless I am conscious of it. And I cannot adjudge one state of affairs as normal and the other as abnormal unless I have interets and desires.

5. Recall what the problem was. The materialist needs to explain reference in physicalist terms. He thinks to do so by invoking physical causation. The idea is that the referents of a word W cause W-tokenings. The reference of a word is determined by the causal influence of the word's referents. So it must be cats, and not pictures of cats, or the past behavior or English speakers that causes 'cat'-tokenings. But surely the past behavior of English speakers is part of the total cause of present 'cat'-tokenings. (See Putnam, pp. 48-49.) 'Cat' does not refer to this behavior, however. To exclude the behavior as non-salient requires use of the ordinary interest-relative notion of causation. But this notion, we have seen, presupposes intentionality.

6. The upshot is that the above causal account of representation -- which is close to a theory proposed by Jerry Fodor -- is viciously circular: it presupposes the very notion that it is supposed to be reductively accounting for, namely, intentionality.

The distinctions are out there in the world whether we mark them linguistically or not. But when a language degenerates, so does its expressive power and its ability to reflect extralinguistic distinctions. That is not a good thing. (Do I really need to argue for this?)

A linguistic conservative need not be opposed to lingusitic change as such. I myself welcome and use with relish such neologisms as 'blogosphere.' I myself have coined 'paleologism' -- which is of course a neologism. Therein lies a paradox. See here.

Taken literally, the sentence quoted above is nonsense. Only when it is construed figuratively does it make sense.

Now let's consider a more subtle and philosophically interesting question. A recent commenter on this site reports that Mormons believe that man was literally created in God's image. What the commenter means is that the similarity is believed by Mormons to be physical. So if the similarity were spiritual/mental, then the similarity would be figurative.

What is interesting here is the identification of the literal with the physical. But what literally exists need not physically exist. If God exists, then God literally exists; but no orthodox theist holds that God physically exists (exists at a spatiotemporal position, has a material body. When the orthodox theist talks about God he is not talking figuratively, but literally -- which is not to say that what he says is true.

The literal is not the same as the true, since there is the literally false. "She has her head in the clouds," in most contexts is literally false.

A Cartesian who affirms the existence of both thinking substances and extended substances means that both literally exist. Ditto for the Platonist who holds that unexemplfied universals exist. Noew what about the materialist who holds that everything that exists is a material entity. If that view is true, it is literally true. But if true, is the truth of it a physical entity?

1. Purely stipulative definitions. Suppose I make up a word and give it a meaning. I stipulate that a fred is anything that is both fat and red. I have concoted a common noun and attached a meaning to it for some purpose I have in mind. Surely it would be absurd for someone to object: "You've got it wrong; a fred is anything that is both fat and dead!" An arbitrary stipulation is just that: arbitrary. There is no fact of the matter to argue about. Thus it makes no sense to ask whether a purely stipulative definition is either true or false. To the extent that a definition rests on stipulation, to that extent no question of truth or falsity can arise.

2. Other definitions are purely lexical. The purpose of such 'dictionary' definitions is to set forth the meaning of a word or phrase in use within a given linguistic community at a given time. The meaning of 'weblog,' for example, in its main current use is obviously not a matter of stipulation. An adequate definition must be crafted in such a way as to capture the way the term is actually used by the cognoscenti. Thus we might say that

A weblog is a frequently updated website consisting of relatively brief permalinked posts arranged in reverse chronological order with hyperlinks to material cited.

I submit that this is good definition. Merriam-Webster's, however, offers a multiply defective definition: "a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments and often hyperlinks."

The first problem with this definition is the word 'personal.' A blog can be personal, but it can also be as impersonal as you like. There are blogs in which nothing of a personal nature is allowed to intrude: they treat some subject-matter in an objective way much as a professional publication would.

The phrase, "often hyperlinks," is not quite right either. Without hyperlinks, it would be a stretch to call an online journal a blog. A good blogger links, when possible, to material he or she is quoting or responding to. This is part of what makes this medium so useful and so powerful. Hyperlinkage is the soul of the Web's webbiness.

Third, a weblog without permalinked individual posts is arguably not a weblog. A blog with links but without permalinks is 'webby' but not 'blogospheric.' The blogosphere is a proper subspace of the Web, and what distinguishes the blogosphere are permalinked posts.

"With reflections, comments. . ." points to a fourth problem with the M-W definition. It is redundant to say that an online journal will contain reflections and comments. What would a blogger be doing if he weren't commenting on this and that, whether it be on the events of the day, or on other blogger's reactions to the events of the day, or on interesting links he has dug up, or . . . ? But if the suggestion is that a weblog must allow comments by readers, then that is wrong: a weblog is no less a weblog if it disallows comments from readers.

The main point, however, is that there is a fact of the matter as to whether or not a lexical definition is adequate. There is something one can sensibly argue about. So there is a sense in which purely lexical definitions are either true or false. What makes the true ones true are facts about usage in a given community at a given time. Thus what makes my definition of 'weblog' true is not its faithful rendition of the invariant essence weblog but its capturing of a certain pattern of usage, a pattern subject to change.

Meaning is tied to use, and when use changes, meaning changes. So there are no 'true meanings' of words. Nevertheless, a word can be misused if one of its users uses it in a manner at variance with the common usage accepted among the cognoscenti.

One of Willard Van Orman Quine’s claims to fame rests on his celebrated attack on the analytic/sythetic distinction in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” first published in The Philosophical Review in 1951 and reprinted in From a Logical Point of View in 1953. Since for Quine, and for the logical positivists, all and only analytic truths are necessary, and all and only contingent truths are synthetic, the question about analyticity is one-to-one with the question about necessity.

Let us consider a chess truth which is analytic and thus necessary:

1. King and knight alone cannot enforce mate against a bare king.

(1) is an analytic or conceptual truth: it is true in virtue of the stipulated meanings of ‘king,’ ‘knight,’ ‘mate,’ etc. in books such as the U.S.C.F. Official Rules of Chess, or the F.I.D.E. equivalent. Ignoring the very minor differences between the two rule books, we may take them as defining what I will be calling standard chess. (1) is true ‘come what may,’ true ‘no matter what happens’ in any actual game of standard chess. One could call it a ‘framework truth.’ In this sense (1) is immutable, to use Rand’s word; it cannot be overturned or revised by any experience that occurs within the world of the 64 squares. (1) is unfalsifiable by any chessic experience and so is immune to revision within the conceptual framework of standard chess. But Quine famously maintains that “...no statement is immune to revision.” (FLPV 43) This suggests an argument:

2. No statement is immune to revision
3. Every necessarily true statement is immune to revision
Therefore
4. No statement is necessarily true.

But surely (1) is a statement that is necessarily true in virtue of its being analytically true; so Quine’s (2) is false. Within a given framework such as standard chess the framework truths are immune to revision. How could it be otherwise? They constitute that framework. So it looks like Quine is just obviously wrong. Or am I moving too quickly?

At this point we need to draw a distinction. Since (1) is part of the conceptual framework of standard chess, part of the very definition of standard chess, (1) cannot be revised without rejecting standard chess. But (1) can be revised if we are willing to reject standard chess. A chess variant could be devised in which (1) does not hold. The necessity of (1) is therefore a conditional necessity: it is necessarily true on condition that one adopts the conventions of standard chess. But accepting these conventions is not itself necessary. One doesn’t have to play standard chess at all, and there is nothing to prevent the present rules of standard chess from being modified in various ways. Indeed, there would not be any chess at all, standard or nonstandard, were it not for the existence of homo ludens. The existence of homo ludens, however, is contingent. Presumanly no one will say that the rules of standard chess are inscribed in a Platonic topos ouranos.

So what does Quine mean when he says that no statement is immune to revision? Is he saying that every statement is part of a conceptual framework and is open to revision due to the framework’s being open to revision? This is consistent with saying that there is an absolute distinction between analytic and synthetic statements within frameworks. Or is Quine making the much stronger claim that every statement is open to revision not only due to the revisability of frameworks themselves, but also internally to each framework? The stronger claim implies that the rule about king and knight constituting insufficient mating material is revisable by changing (or else rejecting) the framework of standard chess, but also by maintaining this framework but somehow reinterpreting the rule as contingent and falsifiable by further chessic experience.

What we have then, are two grades of revisability, weak and strong. Weak revisability makes a certain amount of sense, but how does it undermine the analytic/synthetic distinction? Strong revisability appears to make no sense. How could there not be an absolute, mutually exclusive, and mutually exhaustive distinction in chess between statements like (1) and statements that record moves in a given game?

My point is this. Within a conceptual framework F there are certain framework truths constitutive of F that are both necessarily and analytically true for anyone operating within F. These truths are immune to revision as long as one operates within F, and are absolutely distinct from the synthetic and contingent truths that one operating within F may have occasion to affirm. Therefore, one cannot undermine the analytic-synthetic distinction by showing that all truths are framework-relative, that none are grounded in the nature of things. If F is supplanted by F*, then it may be that a statement analytically true in F is false in F*; but that is consistent with there being a distinction between analytic and synthetic statements in each framework.

Or am I missing something?