A Novel Proposition

Deustch and Russel's paradox

2008-12-05T22:28:00.000-08:00

Consider the following philosophical rule of etiquette:
(E) If a paradox is bad for everybody, don't use it to refute your opponents unless you personally have a solution.

I believe Deustch has violated (E). That's bad not only because it's rude, but because it's begging for a tu qoque response. I'll give that here.

Deustch thinks that any structured proposition theory is inconsistent because of the following argument:
Consider a set of propositions w, such that a proposition p is in w just in case the following obtains:
a) for some set of propositions m, p is the proposition that everything in m is true
b) p is not in m
He then asks that you consider the following proposition:
(P) everything in w is true

The argument goes as follows
1) Propositions have constituents
2) (1) -> (3)
3) Those constituents must exist if the proposition exists
4) (P) exists
5) w exists (3&4)

I'll divide the argument up for clarity. Here's to establish that if P is in w, then p is not in w, therefore p cannot be in w:
6) P is in w (assume for reductio)
7) The set of propositions such that P is the proposition that everything in it is true is w
8) P is not in w (6&7, by the conditions under which a proposition is in w)

To establish that P is in w:
9) P is not in w
10) there's a set of propositions such that (a) and (b) hold of (P) (9, w satisfies a and b for P)
11) P is in w (10, conditions under which a proposition is in w)

main argument:
12) P is in w and P is not in w (8, 11)
13) ~(1) (closed reductio)

Deustch contrasts this with the main objection against unstructure proposition theory, which is Soames' objection we saw earlier this term. Soames' objection applies directly to unstructured proposition theorists and nobody else. Deustch can only frame this as the main objection to structure proposition theory if it only applies to them. If it applies to unstructured proposition theory as well, his game is over.
This argument, of course, is a version of russel's paradox. This paradox springs up pretty much any place in which there's some principle of unrestricted composition (things can always combine to make bigger/more complex things). We see this in set theory, mereology, when formulating what properties are, possible worlds, everywhere. As for this particular formulation, the unstructured proposition theorists would deny (1) (of course). However we don't need a premise as strong as (1) to get the paradox going. Consider the same argument except replace premises (1), (2) and (3) with the following:
(1') Propositions are about things
(2') (1') -> (3')
(3') The things propositions are about exist
The argument goes through exactly as before. So the unstructured proposition theorist can't simply deny one. In fact, Deustch takes a different route when resisting the paradox. Here's what Deustch says about this:
"The essential assumption is that if a and b are distinct objects, then the propositions having them as constituents differ.[15] This is not true of possible worlds semantics, since e.g. the propositions expressed by "Jones wears a hat or he doesn't" and "Smith wears a hat or he doesn't" will express the same proposition whether or not Smith and Jones are identical.[16]"
This can be seen as a rather convoluted rejection of (7). Just because (P) is 'about' w over here, doesn't mean it's 'about' w over there. However, if one is going to be wishy-washy with aboutness facts, then plausibly propositions aren't (intrinsically) about anything (perhaps they're about something relative to a mode of presentation or something). This leads to a denial of (1'). This is already biting the bullet big time, but I can make things worse. Consider just talking about sentences, not propositions. Let (P) just be the sentence, not the proposition expressed. Let w be a set of sentences, m be a set of sentences etc. Replaces (1'), (2'), (3') and (4) with:
(1'') Proper names have referents
(2'') (1') -> (3')
(3'') If S is a well-formed sentence of non-fiction, the referents of all the proper names in S exist.
(4) (P) is well-formed sentence of non-fiction

With the proper modifications in the rest of the argument (just chanings 'proposition' to 'sentence' in each case) the argument goes through. Again, the denial of modified (7) would pretty quickly lead to the denial of (1''). Alternately the unstructured proposition theorist could deny (4), or (2''). However, the denial of these is a hefty cost.

A proponent of structured proposition theory may deny (2) (meinongianism, gappy proposition theory), or they could deny (4). For dealing with the modified arguments, they have similar options as the unstructured proposition theorist. These would also be costs, but the costs would be comparable to the costs of unstructured proposition theory.

correction to last post

2008-11-25T22:50:00.000-08:00

Sorry. Premise 4 below should read:

4) ~ [(2) & (3)]

King on propositions and changing truth values

2008-11-25T21:52:00.001-08:00

King kind of confuses me right at the start of chapter 6 when he talks about how propositions "must and must not change truth value across time and location". He makes this claim before he even starts laying out his position, but I am still trying to see the problem that he is so adamant about.

My understanding of where King starts from:

1) If the truth value of propositions is determined by the semantic value (relative to context) of sentences, then (2) & (3).

2) Propositions, according to his 'in Carnelian Bay' example, change truth value over different worlds, locations, and times.

3) Propositions, according to his 'Santa Monica based belief' example, do not change truth value over time or location.

4) ~ [(1) & (2)]

5) Therefore, further inquiry into the relation between propositional truth value and the semantic value of sentences is required.

I am having trouble with the examples that King is using in (2) and (3). In (2), he says (referring to the sentence "In Carnelian Bay there is a boat launching ramp") that "If 'there is a boat launching ramp' expressed a proposition (relative to that context) that didn't vary its truth value over locations, the locational operator 'In Carnelian Bay' would be vacuous, and the sentence would "feel" like 'In Carnelian Bay arithmetic is incomplete.' But it doesn't!" (pg 166).

I have no idea what King means when he says that the two sentences would "feel" the same. Furthermore, from what I understand, I think King has the example backwards. If propositions did not change their truth value over location, then wouldn't changing "In Carnelian Bay" with any other location (operator) result in "the same feeling" as the original sentence (instead of changing the proposition and keeping the location the same)?

For example, what King should have said is that if propositions do not change their truth value over location, then "In Carnelian Bay there is a boat launching ramp" (where the truth determining context lies in 'there is a boat launching ramp') would "feel" the same as "In the Sahara Desert there is a boat launching ramp". This poses much more of a problem because here the vacuous operator should not affect the truth of the proposition (being that the context of 'there is a boat launching ramp' stays with 'there is a boat launching ramp') but the truth value has obviously changed. I don't think, however, that in King's example the two sentences necessarily "feel" different.

If this line of thought is true, then it is an objection to (2) and the argument is no longer valid.

Now to address (3).

Again, King confuses me with the example that he uses. He says that he is in Santa Monica right now and when he says "I believe the sun is shining" it is about Santa Monica right now. From this he claims that if he were to change location or time, the proposition would still be about "Santa Monica at this time" and so would not change in truth value. I think King is either confusing two different propositions or is being lazy in his speaking. Technically speaking, when King asserts "The sun is shining", he is not asserting anything about Santa Monica; or at the very least that he is implying that the context he is in at the time he says that sentence is to be taken as part of the proposition itself (some kind of non-spoken magically attaching part). Basically, I think King is just trying to get away with being lazy when it comes to saying when you really meant when you expressed a proposition.

The proposition King actually said was: "The sun is shining".

The proposition King intended the listener to understand was: "The sun is shining where I am right now", or "The sun is shining in Santa Monica right now", or "The sun is shining in Santa Monica at 3:05pm", etc. etc. etc.

When you blur this distinction, but then claim that people are wrong to say that your belief is not about Santa Monica when you say "The sun is shining", you are just confused by your own vagueness (and laziness - which is not a bad thing because speaking would become lengthy, tedious, and robotic if we were to speak as precisely as is needed in order to avoid these shortcuts in meaning).

If this line of argument is true, then it is an objection to (3) and King's starting argument is invalid.

Harry D.

2008-11-23T11:38:00.000-08:00

Harry D. asks some questions. He isn't sure King can answer them. I will try to, though I may do a poor job because I don't really understand the questions in question.

(Q1) King's use of models.

(1) King says that propositions are not mathematical objects.
(2) King's motivation for (1) is Benacerrafian reasons which entail (3).
(3) King doesn't think there are any mathematical objects.
(4) But he uses diagrams for propositions.
(5) And these diagrams have to be mathematic objects. They are a certain kind of graph.
(6) But we cannot identify propositions with the graphs.
(7) So King has not answered: What are propositions?

(A1) I don't think (7) follows.

I'm not so bothered by (6). I don't think that it entails (7) I'm not bothered by introducing things via models. I might say that atoms are like little marbles that dance when heated. I don't mean to identify atoms with marbles or heating with dancing.

But maybe we still have to ask, nice model aside, what the atoms are. And so too with propositions. But if atoms and propositions are non-observables, I'm not sure how we can talk about them with the use of models and diagrams unless we give some attempt at representation. My scientific commitments are that the observables are all eliminable and reducible to the unobservable. So I'm not bothered by being able to talk about the essence of something, but not being able to pictorially show it. (6) seems to be taken to show King can only hint at what propositions are. (7) takes this to be invalid. I don't think it is invalid.

I'm not sure about (3). I don't think King denies that there are 'mathematical objects'. He certainly thinks that there are objects with which mathematics is concerned. I don't see how a structuralist / functionalist about numbers is a number-hater. I don't think that being non-platonistic about something makes you deny that it exists.

About (4): It seems like the model King uses is a representation of the proposition. A proposition seems to be a representation + semantic contents. And it seems that agents have to add the semantic contents. So we can never fully map what a proposition is in a diagram or model. But I don't see this to be a big deal.

(Q2) What is language?

(1) King never tells us what a language or a sentence of a language is ontologically.
(2) Whatever else English is, we know it is productive. One can produce novel sentences.
(3) On King's view, the propositions don't exist until the words get said.
(4) (3) should strike us as odd. The Chisholm style theory doesn't have this worry.
(5) King's account closes the door a priori on animals thinking propositionally.
(6) So King is vague about language, and his conclusions are counter-intuitive.

(A2) I think we can deny (6).

It seems easy to supply a King friendly account to attack (1). I think we can use some Sellars here to help King out. Language exists in the narrowly physical causal order. It is scribbles and squawks. But language is also in the broadly construed physical causal order. We don't just hear sounds, we hear words. We don't just understand sounds, we understand words.

I think the same problem could be posed for maps. Maps are in a sense just designs, blips, dots or scribbles. But when one knows how to read a map, the map is much richer. We don't just see the representation. We see what is represented.

About (2) - (4): Productivity doesn't seem to be an issue. Given the atomic bits of English, one can construe novel combinations. Given the rules of English, one can construe novel acceptable combinations. We don't need the propositions to have existed prior, we only needed the constituents to have. I don't need all the numbers to exist in order to do any math. I only need '1', '2', etc., '9', '0'. I can just reuse these numbers to get '12' or '124'. I don't see any problem with this.

I think (5) is a silly concern. I don't think it is bad that King closes the door a priori on animals thinking propositionally. It is still an open question, in a sense, even if we so close the door. But I think there are pre-theoretical reasons to doubt this anyways. Some people don't. There is reason, even if King is right, for one to argue that animals have an animal language or a private language, so they could think propositionally even if King were right.

(Q3) Vagueness on properties and relations.

(1) King assumes that there are properties and relations.
(2) He doesn't say what they are.
(3) He should.
(4) So it's not clear how propositions can exist in his sense, since he doesn't tell us what properties and relations are.
(5) Why cannot we think of propositions as being properties of the actual world?

(A3) I think one could deny (4), since even if he doesn't tell us what properties and relations are, it seems easy to figure out.

I guess I don't have a lot to say here. About (2): I think that the ideas of properties and relations is common enough. A property is a feature or character of a thing. A thing is hot or cold, small or large. I relation is a feature or character between things. A thing is next to another, distant from another.

One could be process ontology oriented. A 'property' like 'being tall' is a way for a thing to be intrinsically. So Wes is tall because there is a tallness going on. A 'relation' like 'being a brother' is a way for a thing to be extrinsically. So Wes is a brother because there is a thing he is related to via brotherness. These things are in space and time and enduring things so they seem non-spooky and physical.

I hope that isn't poorly stated. But it doesn't seem to be contrary to King's view.

About (5): Since propositions are representational, it seems the cannot be properties of the world in the way Harry D. wants. But maybe we can say that since they exist, like the CN Tower and my breakfast, they are properties of the world.

C1 and C2 wonder

2008-11-22T20:21:00.000-08:00

I think King's motivation for his C1 and C2 distinction is good. I'm motivated to accept something like what he wants, though I would want to avoid his problems. I think the classical empirical-foundationalists also want something like what he has.

The motivation behind C1, rationally reconstructed, seems to be one's being able to get into the space of reasons, make material inferences, paraphrase, justify, etc. one's use of language.

The motivation behind C2, rationally reconstructed, seems to be one's being able to reliably report, assert, identify, etc. One has to be able to use the words correctly.

Someone like CI Lewis is going to say that C1 is basically being able to know what is logically implied by a term; and, it seems, what is analytically implied. Lewis thinks these are distinct, but King could be said to just conjoin a term's 'connotation' and 'signification' as Lewis uses the words (roughly).

Lewis would say that C2 is one's being able to recognize instances. One has to know what the term picks out, and all consistently thinkable cases where the term would pick out those things. Again, King could be said to just have conjoined the ideas of 'denotation' and 'comprehension' as Lewis uses the words (roughly).

Maybe Russell-Mill would take C1 to be one's knowing connotations, C2 knowing denotations.

These people all want to cash out 'word-meaning' and 'sense-meanings'. It seems that something like this distinction between 'inter-linguistic transitions' and 'language-entry transitions' is good to have. Even for Quine we need stimulus-meanings 'in presence' and 'in absence'. HH Price likes this notion of 'in presence' and 'in absence' so he would want C1 to be something like 'thinking of a term in absence' and 'thinking of a term in presence'.

So even if we don't like King's formulation, shouldn't we look to keep a sort of C1 and C2 distinction for linguistic competency?

The Guy's Talk

2008-11-22T14:22:00.000-08:00

I think that guy with his cut between:

1. Intentionality
2. Representationality
3. Propositionality

Is a little odd. If the him / Prof B. dudes claim that someone like me or King run together (1) and (3) I think the natural response is that for someone like me or King we cut it:

1. proto-intentionality
2. Representationality (intentionality)
3. Propositionality (intentionality)

I wanted to say something about Dan's question, but can't remember what it was. Could someone (preferably Dan himself) remind me of what that was?

New Readings

2008-11-20T19:38:00.001-08:00

Scott Soames, "The Unity of the Proposition"

Jeff Speaks, "Facts, Properties, and the Unity of the Proposition"

Matthew Davidson, "Propositions as Structured Entities"

Harry Deutsch, "Review of Jeffrey C. King, The Nature and Structure of Content

Timothy Williamson, "Necessary Existents"

Proto-intentional states intuition pump

2008-11-20T17:34:00.000-08:00

I was thinking how to explain things to myself. Maybe someone else will find this helpful, or can give comments that may be helpful to me.

I think it's easy to use the toy Rylean ancestors of Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. We can always just add the Myth of Jones to the Myth of our Rylean ancestors and get a better account.

So the Rylean ancestors in question have Rylean views about the world and human beings. They roughly adopt the following picture:

`````````````````*proposition that-p
`````````````````|
*thinking that-p ➡ *saying that-p

Roughly, intentionality dwells primarily in language. Propositions are only expressed by language. A thought is the inner state which accompanies or causes the saying which expresses the proposition.

So the Ryleans here think that baby Bailey has no intrinsic thoughts. Baby Bailey is taught via direct method / stimulus-response English by his parents, mommy Bailey and daddy Bailey. Baby Bailey begins to make noises, and then after a while begins to associate contents with his sayings. When baby Bailey is making noises, he has certain brain states in his brain. Eventually, he has some thinking that-p brain states whenever he has a saying that-p utterance. His saying that-p utterances also come to express the proposition that-p.

The Ryleans basically have a verbal behaviorism. We can think to ourselves because we can have the brain states which cause speaking, but fail to have the speaking. But we always just analyze brain states as if they came to fruition in verbal behavior.

It seems that with this stuff in mind, we can give a good account of what proto-intentional states are. When the baby learns to make noises, he isn't tokening sentences. It seems like he's tokening noises. So these noises seem to be proto-linguistic to me. They aren't tokens of English sentences, really. They are tokens of the same noises that English sentences are noises of. Something like that.

And so when baby Bailey is making proto-linguistic noises, he will be having proto-thoughts in his brain. His brain will be making states which cause the proto-linguistic noises. At some point, when the noises become English sentences, those proto-thoughts will become thoughts.

I guess the question is how thoughts or sentences come to express propositions at all. I suppose that the thoughts or sentences provide structures to which we pencil in semantic contents. Like a map, it seems that we need an agent to bestow an interpretation upon the structure. No map-reader, and then the map is just a sort of proto-map.

Perhaps it is like this:

☛☛☛☛

This inscription might represent something. I have something in mind which it does represent, but if I don't tell you, it seems you can only imagine that it represents something. It is a sort of candidate for representation, or perhaps, a candidate for interpretation.

Maybe because we are all skilled and grown up, being told what it means allows us to jump right into taking it to be representational. Baby Bailey may not be so quick, and so may have an extended period of mastering inscription interpretation. Learning by direct method seems to have this sort of extended period of mastery as well. This period would seem to be the period of proto-states talked about above.

I guess it's like teaching someone to play chess. I can play effortlessly, so I play full-blooded chess. But Mr Noob has to do a lot of thinking and wondering. He isn't so sure of himself. He's always checking up rules in the rule book, say. So he's only proto-playing. He's in the midst of learning a game, so he's missing a lot of things that are obvious to others because he hasn't been conditioned to look for them.

Thoughts?

Distant Past Wonder

2008-11-20T17:26:00.001-08:00

This may be more timely for next time, but I wanted to ask it anyhow.

It seems that for truth we need correspondence. So we have a fact-in-the-world bit on the one side, and a representation-of-a-fact bit on the other. So:

(1) •Snow is white• is true iff it is the case that snow is white.

Or, it seems,

(2) •It was temperature d at time t• is true if it is the case that it was temperature d at time t.

It seems that we can still have the fact-in-the-world bit going on in the absence of propositions. Propositions are just going to be the representation-of-a-fact bit. So the left-hand side bits of (1) and (2) might not be there. But this seems consistent with the right-hand side bits may still have obtained.

Doesn't it seem plausible that something might be the case, even though it fails to be represented as being true or false?

King's good intentions.

2008-11-18T17:18:00.000-08:00

The first objection King looks at is an objection against the origins of propositions. It looks like this:

1) Propositions need to exist in order for people to have propositional attitudes.

2) People having propositional attitudes is pre-supposed to propositions existing.

3) 1 +2, therefore propositions, according to King, are both pre-supposed-to and caused by people having propositional attitudes.

The problem is rooted in King's belief that there were no propositions before language.

King offers 2 solutions.

King solution 1:

4) People could have had 'mental sentences/language' which was not public.

5) This mental language could be the 'vehicle for the expression of propositions'.

6) If (6), then propositions could have been around before public language.

This is an argument against (3) above because if King is correct, then propositions could have been around before public language, but still not attached to it (instead being attached to 'mental language').

I think this is a bad response. It looks to me like King is passing the buck. Wouldn't he then need to give an account of how 'mental sentences' came to be the vehicle for the expression of propositions? All King has done is take the objection from 'public language' and put it onto 'mental language'.

Secondly, I thought an essential part of the nature of a proposition was for it to be shareable. If everybody had their own 'mental language' which propositions were associated with, then nobody would have been able to understand anybody else ever; they would have been talking past each other using different propositions for the same expressions, and the same expressions for different propositions.

King solution 2:

7) people could have had 'proto-intentional states' before the existence of propositions (proto-beliefs, proto-intentions, etc).

8) Proto-intentional states are not attached to propositions, but can become complex enough over time (by attaching lexical items to semantic values) to eventually create both propositions and intentional states (real ones) at the same time.

9) If 1 + 2, then (3) is false (as well as (1) and (2)) because nothing is pre-supposed or caused; it happens at the exact same time.

A few problems with this response:

Premise (8) is a nice idea and all, and King says that it's obvious to him that some animals have these proto-intentional states, but if he is going to rest his whole theory on this then he had better flesh out exactly how lexical items attach to semantic values. Maybe they don't do it without help, or maybe they don't "attach" at all. Also, how would this create propositions (because maybe some people don't believe that it would). Bottom line, he is trying to pass the burdon of proof onto a process that he has not given any information about. He has to expand on how this happens before this response is credible.

Next, There seems to be something funny altogether about 'proto-intentional states' in general. I would like King to show me an animal that has them, and how he knows they are 'proto' states and not just extremely simple (maybe basic) real intentional states. Again, I think King needs to provide more proof (or atleast show good reason) for believing in these 'proto-intentional states'.

Wonder

2008-11-18T15:34:00.000-08:00

Maybe this is an attempt at a question about scope.

(1) That first order logic is undecidable

and

(2) Not that first order logic is undecidable

both seem to have the proposition that first order logic is undecidable as bits. Is negation included in the second proposition?

(1) That first order logic is undecidable

and

(3) That first order logic is not undecidable

seem to have different proposition, since negation seems clearly to be a part of the proposition's make up.

Is it plausible to say that (1) and (2) contain the same proposition, but that (2) says of the same proposition as in (1) that it is false? It seems so to me, and that the proposition in (3) is not the proposition in (1) or (2).

A Thought Out Loud

2008-11-17T22:30:00.001-08:00

It seems to me that propositions are made up out of objects, properties and relations. Let us take (P) and (NP).

```````I
```````|\
```````|``\
```````|````\
(P) Mary Swims
```````|````|
```Mary*```Swims*

```````~I
```````|`\
```````|``\`\
```````|````\``\
(NP) Mary doesn't Swim
```````|````|```````|
``Mary*``Doesn't*``Swims*

It seems that the propositions differ. In the one case, we get Mary* and Swims* as constituents; and in the second it is Mary* and Doesn't* and Swims* we get.

The syntax are also different. We get instantiation in the one case, ~instantiation in the other.

Likewise for (1) and (2). I'll not do the LF stuff since it is too much...

(1) First order logic is undecidable
`````````|`````````|``````|
First-order-logic*```is*`````undecidability*

(2) It is not the case that first order logic is decidable
``````|```````````````````````|```````\`````|
`Its-not-being-the-case*`first-order-logic*`is*```decidability*

The proposition in (1) is made up of first order logic, the being relation, and undecidability. In (2) it is negation, first order logic, the being relation, and decidability.

Seems like quite different propositions.

I think my thinking is fine here.

Is King's account too fined grained?

2008-11-16T20:21:00.000-08:00

Is King's account too fined grained?

King considers whether his view individuates propositions too finely across languages. He wants us to think about the following three possibilities:

(A) At least some proposition(s) can be expressed in different natural languages.
(B) At least some proposition(s) expressed in one natural language can be expressed in any natural language.
(C) All propositions that can be expressed in one natural language can be expressed in any other.

Which do we accept?

1. If King's view is correct, then a proposition Q is expressible in different natural languages L and L' iff

(i) they contain sentences SL and SL1, whose syntactic structures at the relevant level of syntax are identical.

(ii) the semantic significance of these syntactic relations are the same.

(iii) the semantic values of the lexical items occurring in the same places in the syntactic structures associated with SL and SL' are identical.

2. King's view is correct.
3. So (A) entails a substantial empirical claim about the syntactic of the languages in question.
4. So (B) entails all languages to have sentences that are syntactically identical.
5. So (C) entails all languages to be structurally identical at the level of LF.

It seems we should conclude that (B) and (C) entail successively stronger and implausible claims about the LFs of natural language.

6. Thus, the entailments from (A) and (B) and (C) are too strong.
7. Because King's view makes them too strong, King's view is false.

This would, of course, make King unhappy. To see our way past this objection, we need to see that (A) differs from both (B) and (C) in its pretheoretical plausibility.

(A) is a sort of constraint on any theory of propositions. It is desirable for any theory of propositions to yield the result that 'Scnhee ist weiss' and 'Snow is white' express the same proposition.

1. If (A) is true then 'Scnhee ist weiss' and 'Snow is white' express the same proposition.
2. They do.
3. So (A) is true.

(B) and (C) contrast strikingly with (A). They are lacking pretheoretical plausibility.

Perhaps a more natural pretheoretical reading would be

(B') Some sentences of some language can be translated into any other language
(C') Any sentence of any language can be translated into any other language

Sadly, these rewrites only suppose the originals given a further assumption. We need to add that translation is pairing sentences which express the same proposition. So we need to ask: What is the evidence for (B') and (C')? How plausible is the additional premise?

Sometimes we do make strict translations, like in the case of 'Scnhee ist weiss' and 'Snow is white'. But usually in practice we make loose translation. We make what are closer to paraphrases.

It seems that the looser sense of translation is used to give a push for the pretheoretical plausibility of (B') and (C'). But this doesn't seem to help us bolster the case for (B) and (C), since they seem to rest upon the strict sense of translation.

To our questions we must answer: The evidence for (B') and (C') is the loose sense of translations. The additional premise is plausible given the strict sense of translation.

King thinks that it is a virtue of his theory that if we want to figure out whether (B) or (C) is true, we only need to look at the empirical evidence about language and do some theorizing about propositions. This lets King block the objection (6) above. (A) seems to be common-sense, and we should accept it. Whether (B) or (C) is true or not is an open question, perhaps.

'Elementary' trouble with King

2008-11-11T15:40:00.000-08:00

In chapter 7, King lays out his version of philosophical analysis. I'm going to briefly go over it until I run into some problems that I'd like to talk about.

King major claim is: There is such a thing as philosophical analysis, and my model can answer the five questions that (I think) a good theory of analysis should be able to answer (see chp 7 for these 5 questions).

For his theory of analysis to work, King requires that we accept three 'elements':

1st element: That "one must accept an account of propositions on which complex predicates contribute to propositions complex sub-propositional constituents that have properties and relations at their terminal nodes and that represent other properties".

2nd element: That "some properties and relations are complex, and have other properties and relations as components".

Here, King likes to use the example of the word "bachelor". He says that "bachelor" might be built up out of 1) being adult, 2) being male, and 3) being unmarried; and these are all in the conjuction relation. He also notes that properties can be built in ways other than conjunction (and he gives an example). Lastly on this point, he notes two more things:

1) That he does not have to explain how properties like this combine to make other properties, just as long as he can say it is part of a properties nature to be made up of combined properties like this.

2) That he is not necessarily committed to their being 'simple properties' (but he thinks there are - pg 200).

I think the latter of these two would make for some interesting discussion and controversy, but that would seem a little besides-the-point right now. Instead I would like to focus more on the 3rd element.

3rd element: That "there are three categories of words such that the words in a given category are all governed by the same standards of linguistic competence; but words in different categories are governed by different standards of linguistic competence".
Category #1) Linguistic competence: "one must be able to specify the componets of the property or relation expressed by the word and how those components are combined in the property expressed by the word".

Category #2) Linguistic competence: "one be able to reliably determine whether a given entity possesses the property expressed by e and to thereby know whether e applies to the entity or not"

At this point he notes that a category 1 word cannot be a category 2 word as well.

Category #3) Linguistic competence: He doesn't say what the linguistic competence is of category 3 words, just that they are "natural kind terms like water, tiger, aluminum...". These are words that fail to be governed by the standards of competence of C1 +C2.

I have problems with King's three categories. I think that category 2 words are not as distinct from category 1 words as King says they are. The linguistic competence for C1 words is that someone knows what properties they are 'built up out of', and the linguistic competence for C2 words is that someone knows everything (has sufficient information) about an entity so that they know whether it possesses a certain property or not. It seems to me that if you know exactly what a word is built up of (including the relations it has - something King conveniently leaves out of his discussion on purpose), then you should also have sufficient information to know whether it has a certain property or not. In fact, the 'sufficient information' would be precisely the properties and relations that you had to know for C1 words. In this respect, C2 linguistic competence would supervene on C1 linguistic competence, making the two categories really one and the same.

Without the ability to distinguish between category 1 and category 2 words (we don't even have to look at category 3 words now), King loses the ability to answer some of the questions he said an account should be able to.

I guess more formally:

1) If King's 3 word categories lose their distinction, element 3 must be rejected.

2) King's 3 word categories lose their distinction

3) 1 +2, therefore element 3 must be rejected

4) If King's theory of philosophical analysis is correct, then all 3 elements must be accepted

5) element 3 is not accepted

6) 4 + 5, therefore King's theory of philosophical analysis is not correct.

Paradox of Analysis

2008-11-11T10:34:00.000-08:00

I'm doing this from memory so I will use Sellars' version:

1. The concept Male Parent is the analysis of the concept Father
2. The concept Father = the concept Male Parent
3. The concept Father is the analysis of the concept Father

What leads us to befuddlement is that (1) should be true. (3) should be false. So what about (2)?

We might argue: "Look, (1) is true. The concept Male Parent and the concept Father mean the same thing. So (2) is true." But then we should think that (1) and (3) express the same sort of information. But they don't. So maybe (2) is false. But then how can (1) be true? If we can analyze concept X in terms of concept Y, don't X and Y have to mean the same thing?

Thus, befuddlement.

It should be easy to argue that (1) is true. We have a complex concept, being a Male Parent, and a simple concept, being a Father. We are analyzing the complex one into the simple one. Let us say that this isn't a logical truth, but an analytic one.

So then (2) has to be false. It is saying that a complex concept is identical to a simple one. This is false.

So then we can deny (3). An analysis is supposed to break down a complex concept into a simple one.

King considers examples like:

4. If x is a father, then x is a male parent
5. If x is a father, then x is a human adult male with offspring

When we explicate their logical form, we get

6. For all x [ [x is a father] iff [ [x is a male] & [x is a parent] ] ]
7. For all x [ [x is a father] iff [ [x is a human] & [x is an adult] & [x is a male] & [x is a parent] ] & [for some y [ y is an offspring of x] ] ] ]

So while both (4) and (5) are kinds of analysis for what it is to be a father, (5) is deeper. This is shown by (6) and (7).

If we consider the original example:

1. The concept Male Parent is the analysis of the concept Father
2. The concept Father = the concept Male Parent
3. The concept Father is the analysis of the concept Father

It seems we should indeed deny (2). I think Frege would appeal to there being two different senses. Sellars to there being to distinct functional classes, a •Father• and a •Male Parent•. King, it seems to me, two different concepts.

We can also see that the property of being a male parent is different from that of being a father. One is simple, one is complex. The concepts are likewise different. This is why we call (1) an analysis, whereas (3) is not. And if we were to take (3) to be an analysis at all, it would be an incredibly shallow one. As (4) - (7) shows, we can have various levels of analysis.

a couple of snags for King

2008-11-05T16:55:00.000-08:00

King really trades on the TRUE/true-at distinction in chapter 3. To avoid the mystery, he clearly defines true-at(P.83):
1. A proposition < o,p> is true at w iff o is in the extension of P at w; otherwise it is false at w.
2. A propositions < not,< s>> is true at w iff NOT(Vsw)=T where Vsw is a truth value of S at w; otherwise it is false at w.
3. A proposition < < some,p>,Q> is true at w iff is in the extension of SOME at w; otherwise it is false at w.
4. A proposition < possibly,< s>> is true at w iff POSSIBLY(S,w)=T

This is an account of true-at that does not require that a proposition exist at the world at which it is true. This is a major move for King, but I think there are a couple snags that still get him into trouble.

Snag 1: Narrow Metaphysical Acceptability
King is admittedly and actualist, which means he believes that all possible worlds actually exist. However, I think his view of propositions limits what sorts of things you can take to be possible worlds, i.e. he can't take possible worlds to be maximal sets of propositions. Here's an argument for that:
1) There are some things that cannot be asserted in currently existing languages
2) (1) -> (3)
3) There are some ways the world might be such that no proposition represents the world being that way
4) (3) -> (5)
5) Maximal sets of propositions contain insufficient information to be possible worlds
I won't defend each premise here, I'll just give the gist. Suppose we could have had different phenomenal experiences than those we actually do. We are (plausibly) unable to represent those experiences in our language. But by hypothesis we could have had those experiences. But if King is right, there are no propositions that assert (of the particular experiences) that we have or do not have them.
If King has general nominalistic tendencies, he'll shy away from the alternate view that possible worlds are maximal ways the world could have been. These properties are un-instantiated, and spooky!

Snag 2:
Related to my paper topic, I'll just point out that King is comitted to the following being true:
'Possibly every proposition is false'
'Possibly every proposition is true'
'Possibly every proposition is both true and false' (this will be true if worlds devoid of propositions are possible)
'There are no propositions expressed by hypothetical languages with sufficiently different syntax' (not as long as the language remains hypothetical anyway)
'The proposition that mary swims could have been true at a world at which mary doesn't swim' (this would be the case if we used the proposition that mary swims to represent something else)

King's response to objection 2

2008-11-04T20:15:00.000-08:00

In chapter 3, King goes over some objections to his theory of propositions. I am going to go over the second objection he addresses.

Objection 2 looks something like this:

1) According to King, propositions came into existence at a certain time in the past (namely, at the time when language, semantic values, and the like were invented).

2) If (1), then there was a time, before which propositions did not exist.

3) Propositions are the bearers of truth and falsity.

4) If (2) and (3), then before propositions came into existence, nothing was true or false.

5) But, obviously some things were true and false before propositions came into existence.

6) (4) and (5), therefore King's theory of propositions is flawed.

The time that King uses as an example of when propositions did not exist is right after the big bang. At this time there were no sentences or language of any kind, yet according to (5) there were still things that were true (such as the fact that particles had certain charges and certain masses).

To respond to this objection, King looks at it from two different viewpoints; presentism and eternalism.

King's presentist response:

Basically, King says that the presentist could claim that the objector fails to distinguish between two similar, but different, claims:

i) Nothing was true in the remote past.

ii) Things weren't a determinate way in the remote past.

King says that the presentist could reject claim (i) while accepting claim (ii). The reason he gives for this is that facts and propositions are separate according to his theory. There is no reason why there could not be facts (ways the world is, states of being, etc...), while at the same time there being no propositions. In a way, King bites the bullet here and says "it is the case that nothing was true or false before propositions came around... but it does not matter/it does not affect us".

I like King's line of thought here, but there is a way to respond to it. Someone in favour of objection 2 might say that King has not actually denied any premise in the objection, he has simply softened the blow a bit. If someone were to hold steady to the idea that "things were true and false before propositions existed", King would still have to provide evidence for why we should accept the distinction he offers. He would not be able to say "we should think that there is a distinction between truth values and factual states because it is in line with my theory of propositions".

King's eternalist response:

I am pretty sure I understand King's response here, but please correct me if I am wrong.

King says that the eternalist holds that anything that has, does, or will exist exists at all times, but in different temporal locations. This means that a propostion could actually be true (have properties) at a time where it does not exist. This might seem to support the objection (that things were true and false before propositions existed). However, King says that in the end "the objector incorrectly inferred that on the present view propositions in the remote past were not true from the fact that on the present view they are not temporally located in the remote past" (pg 79). What this means is that objection 2 is based on there being truths and falsities without propositions, whereas the eternalist is still able to attribute truth and falsity to propositions even though they do not exist. More formally:

i) Objection 2 assumes that there are true and false things before the existence of propositions.

ii) The eternalist holds that propositions can be true and false even at times when they do not exist.

iii) Therefore, objection 2 does not apply to the eternalist view.

I think this is a good response to premise (5) of the objection and I can't really see anything wrong with it at this time. The best way to support objection 2 would be to press King for a better explanation on why we should accept the distinction his position offers of truth values and factual states.

King: The Objection from Origins.

2008-11-02T15:26:00.000-08:00

This strikes me as also being The Problem of Emergence.

The question is: How did propositions come to be?

The objector wants to stick King on his non-Platonic account of propositions.

1. On King's view, the facts that are propositions came into existence in part as a result of lexical items acquiring semantic values and syntactic relations coming to encode certain functions.
2. But when we attempt to explain how our proto-linguistic ancestors brought it about that words had semantic values and sentential relations encoded certain functions, we will appeal to the beliefs and intentions they had.
3. On King's view, prior to the existence of language there were no propositions, which are the objects of attitudes like intending and believing.
4. But propositions must exist in order for creatures to have propositional attitudes.
5. So King's account of how propositions came into existence will have to presuppose that creatures had propositional attitudes prior to propositions existing. (1 - 5)
6. So King's view is contradictory and should be rejected.

King will want to deny (5). "The fundamental thought behind the present view of structured propositions is that the vehicle by means of which propositions are expressed consist of entities standing in relations and that these very relations provide all of the significant structure to the propositions expressed by those vehicles."

If, for example, "mental sentences" exist, these too will count as vehicles for the expression of propositions. This gives reason to deny (3), since "there may be propositions even in the absence of any public language."

While this would make someone like Sellars upset, it would make someone like Chisholm happy. Sellars thinks that intentionality primarily dwells in language, whereas Chisholm think that intentionality primarily dwells in thought. (Roughly.)

King might argue:

7. Mental sentences exist and encode propositions.
8. Propositional attitudes only exist if there are propositions.
9. Mental sentences can exist independently of any public language.
10. So Propositions and propositional attitudes can exist in the absence of any public language. (7 - 9)

Therefore, King can reply: "If there is a language of thought, and if our proto-lingusitic ancestors thought in it, propositions could have existed, and our ancestors could have had attitudes towards them, prior to the existence of public language."

While this might make someone like Chisholm happy, it does not make King happy: "I am not happy resting my response here on the claim that there is a langauge of thought and our proto-linguistic ancestors though in it."

King would rather assume that the claim in (7) is false. Let us deny that there is a language of thought.

11. If our pre-linguistic ancestors had propositional attitudes, propositions must have existed.
12. For propositions to have existed, our pre-liniguistic ancestors must have either had a public language or a language of thought.
13. Our pre-linguistic ancestors could have had neither a public language or a language of thought.
14. So our pre-linguistic ancestors had no propositional attitudes. (11 - 13)

This would make someone like Chisholm unhappy, someone like Sellars happy. King is happy too: "We must say that strictly speaking our proto-linguistic ancestors did not have propositional attitudes, hence propositions didn't exist then."

King appeals that our proto-linguistic ancestors "had some 'proto-intentional' states: proto-beliefs and proto-intentions." He adds that this should not be so strange, since: "it seems to me likely that many animals currently have only states of this sort and so it wouldn't be surprising that in our pre- and proto-linguistic stages we were rather like them in this respect."

We can make a Sellarsian appeal to back King up here. As I had noted before, Sellars says that there are two senses of 'meaningless utterance': "(1) Those utterances which are meaningless if they do not token a properly formed expression in a language. (2) Those utterances which are uttered parrotingly by one who does not know the language."

We might construe the following as an example of (1):

frettk taete34t ln4wti4j6a46

and the following as an example of (2):

When it is 5:00pm my computer says: "It is five o'clock."

Proto-intentional states would seem to not be of the first kind, but of the second. Let us assume that there are inner as well as outer linguistic utterances. Perhaps in a proto-intentional state, one utters in one's mind •it is five o'clock• or utters aloud •it is five o'clock•. Now to the person in question, the utterances here are meaningless. We might take them to be •it is five o'clock•s, but it is impossible that the proto-utterer does so.

A true in / true at distinction here would seem to help. But in any case, for King: "The idea would be that these proto-intentional states were enough to begin to attach lexical items to semantic values and more generally to do what had to be done to bring propositions into existence." That is, the inner our outer utterances would shift from proto- to full-blooded when agents attached semantic values to them. Agents have to move from Humean Representational Systems (stimulus-reponse / inductive systems), to Aristotlean Representational Systems (material inferential / deductive systems), to use the Sellarsian lingo.

King can use this reasoning to deny (5): "So propositions and real intentional states with propositional content came into existence together." There is no need to presuppose that propositional attitudes had to exist prior to propositions at all! "It is enough to suppose that they had proto-intentional states not too different in kind from those had by many animals today."

Again, along Sellarsian lines we can argue that animals have 'meaningless inner utterances' and 'meaningless outer utterances'. Human beings simply developed a level of complexity which led to our having 'meaningful inner utterances' and 'meaningful outer utterances.'

In King's terminology, I think that the above is a paraphrase of: "animals have proto-intentional states. Human beings simply developed a level of complexity which led to our having intentional states."

Finally, against someone like Chisholm who wants to be a Platonist about propsitions, King argues:

15. If propositions exist eternally, then there was a time at which no creatures had mental states with propositional content.
16. So then some account must be given of how creatures managed to get into cognitive contact with propositions.
17. So some account must be given of how some creatures came to have propositional attitudes.
18. So it seems that one could still have to invoke proto-intentional and proto-intentional action.
19. So in this respect, King's view is not in any worse shape than an account on which propositions are eternal.

I think that this little aside from King is rather weak, as the friend of Chisholm will perhaps object to (15) on the grounds that we intuit propositions, we do not have mental states which have propositional content. Mental states are going to turn out to be something like abstract entities, or graspings of abstract entities.

Maybe that objection doesn't amount to much, but against (16) we can deny that there is any need for our getting into contact with propositions to be cognitive. We might have some primitive pre-cognitive, direct access to them. (17) might be denied by appealing to an unstructured account of propositions which has all creatures having propositional attitudes, at least with Given propositions. So (18) can be objected to because intentional states are all or nothing. Perhaps all creatures have them; perhaps all minded creatures have them. So there is no need to appeal to proto-intentional states or actions.

So the friend of Chilsholm will argue that King's view is in much worse shape. But the friend of King will point out that King's view is sensible. So the further the eternalist moves from King, the further they move from being sensible.

Wondering

2008-10-31T17:53:00.000-07:00

Two wonders.

A. If we rerun "The Objection from Cognitive Significance" with (i) reading:

(i) 'It rains' is a •it rains•

and (ii) reading:

(ii) 'Es regnet' is a •it rains•

is it really enough for the Russellian to just say: "But I don't speak German!" I get that using:

(i) Ice-T is Ice-T.
(ii) Ice-T is Tracy Lauren Marrow.

avoids the problem of objecting that I don't understand the words being used. But I don't see how anything else is different about the cases. I suppose one might argue that since Ice-T and TLM are both understood to be self-identical, but not understood to be identical to each other.

But I don't see how this is really so different from the German - English case. I suppose the only real difference is that one might think that 'Es regnet' is just a silly made-up word. But why cannot one think that 'Tracy Lauren Marrow' is a silly made-up word as well?

B. If on the second objection, "Pegasus is make-believe" is supposed to turn out to be meaningless since 'Pegasus' has no referent and hence no semantic content, what about a case where I utter "He is Saul Kripke" pointing at no one? I suppose that the semantic content of 'he' is supposed to be the referent, and since there is no referent there is no semantic content.

What happens if I am confused, being messed with by Descartes demon? I see Saul Kripke standing next to me. I ask you if you see him, and you ask who I am talking about, I might say: "Him. Saul Kripke." Do we want to say that I am saying something false, or something meaningless? I suppose the objector wants to push that the Russellian has to say that it is meaningless.

I wonder if the distinction between speaker and attributive reference helps at all. When I talk about Pegasus or Kripke, I am trying to refer to something. But it turns out that I am referring to nothing at all. Hearing me speak, you may take me that I am trying to refer to something, even though you might recognize that I am in fact talking about nothing at all. Perhaps, no thing, not nothing.

This would seem to suggest to me that something gappy and not something meaningless is being asserted. Or maybe something false, for the same reason that "The present king of France is bald" is false.

But all this seems to give some reason to think that "Pegasus is make-believe" or "Here is Kripke (said pointing to a spot which is lacking a Kripke)" is not a meaningless assertion under a Russellian view.

Wessy Thoughts 2

2008-10-30T18:03:00.000-07:00

I just wanted to elaborate some thoughts I had at the end:

1. If R is correct, then the SC of a proper name is just its reference.
2. If SC of pn is just its referent, then for all S, if S contains a pn with no reference, S is meaningless.
3. It’s not the case that they are all meaningless.
4. So R is false.

So we can consider: "Pegasus is make-believe". Doesn't this turn out to be as meaningless as "Blart mook tuk ne oonto"?

A. I guess that (2) should be denied automatically. "is make-believe" seems to be a fine bit of language. "Pegasus" seems to be referentless, so "Pegasus is make-believe" seems to have a gap:

<____, MAKE-BELIEVE>
````↑`````````````↑
Pegasus is make-believe.

So I think we can resist that is meaningless. It's just gappy. It seems that a sentence like: "My (said by Wes) son will be a boy" is like this too. I don't think we have a semantic content of my son. I think it would be queer to call this sentence meaningless. Maybe the phrase / name 'My son' and 'Pegasus' is meaningless, in some sense, but this just leaves a gap in the otherwise fine proposition.

B. The less sensible view I was pushing was that we have to object to (2) on the grounds of an ambiguity in 'existence'. The quantification-existence, and the predicate-existence. So if someone claims:

Pegasus doesn't exist

we can ask: Do you mean that we cannot quantify over Pegasus? This seems false. Perhaps you mean that there is nothing such that it meets our criteria for being a concrete, extended thing.

So we might have reason to think that we can quantify over numbers, but they don't exist. Tables and chairs exist. Or maybe particles exist. Or whatever. We just quantify over tables and chairs like we quantify over numbers and Pegasus. We just say of tables and chairs that they exist, while numbers and Pegasus don't.

So why should a sentence with a non-existing thing named in it be meaningless? We can still quantify over the thing, so it is still meaningful. "Blart mook tuk ne oonto" is meaningless. "Pegasus is make-believe" just contains a non-existing-but-quantifiable term which lacks semantic content.

I guess that (B) is like (A), but (A) seems less weird.

Thoughts?

Wessy Thoughts

2008-10-30T17:26:00.000-07:00

I take it from today that the whole issue of "The Objection from Cognitive Significance" has been satisfied. I'll just note something interesting (to me). Consider CI Lewis' notion of a sense-meaning. So the sense-meaning of a red apple is the sensory states I have in the presence of a red apple. Let's not over-think this now, since the view is robustly concept empiricist and not too attractive. But we can re-run the argument:

1. If Russellianism is true, and ‘Ice-T’ and ‘Tracy Lauren Marrow’ co-refer, then (i) and (ii) encode the same proposition:
(i) Ice-T is Ice-T.
(ii) Ice-T is Tracy Lauren Marrow.
2. The proposition expressed by (i) is uninformative, true in virtue of meaning (analytic), is knowable w/o empirical investigation, etc.; and the proposition encoded by (ii) is not any of these things.
3. If (2), then SC1 ≠ SC2.
4. So SCI ≠ SC2.
5. So either Russellianism is false or ‘Ice-T’ and ‘TLM’ don’t co-refer.
6. But they do co-refer.
7. So, Russellianism is false.

Lewis would make sense of (i) by slotting in the sense-meaning of Ice-T; the sensations I get when I look at (or whatever) Ice-T. So it is easy to see how (i) is analytic, since I have a sense-meaning of Ice-T and this is identical to itself!

Lewis would make sense of (ii) by slotting in the sense-meanings of Ice-T and TLM; the sensations I get when I look at (or whatever) Ice-T and TLM. So it is easy to see how (ii) is analytic; the same sense-meanings get slotted in.

But (i) seems to be a logical truth; (ii) does not. I might not know that I have a sense-meaning of TLM. Lewis is a descriptivist of sorts, so maybe he thinks that the semantic content is a sense or something; so lets say a Lewis-concept. A sense-meaning is what gives me a concept. I might hold that the man I am looking at now (or have looked past in the future, or would be looking at how if I were looking at Ice-T) is clearly Ice-T. This is the sense meaning of Ice-T. But I might not know that this is the sense meaning of TLM.

I think Lewis would argue that the sense-meanings are the same, but we have different concepts involved. A concept would be something like the denotation, the connotation, the signification, and the comprehension.

Roughly, the 4-modes for 'Ice-T' are:

1. Denotation: the class of actual Ice-Ts, past, present and future.
2. Connotation: those other words logically implied by the words ‘Ice-T’.
3. Signification: those universals which signify the qualities and relations in the thing, picked up in the connotation of the term.
4. Comprehension: consistently thinkable possible Ice-Ts, the consistently thinkable possible beings.

So (2) will pick up that being Ice-T is logically implied by being Ice-T, but not by being TLM.

Dubious, for many reasons, but Lewis can argue that the Russellian is wrong. The sense-meanings may be the same, but the concepts are different.

So what is true is:

(1) The sense-meaning of 'Ice-T' is the sense-meaning of 'TLM'.
(2) What has the same sense-meanings are synonyms.
(3) 'Ice-T' and 'TLM' are synonymous.

and

(4) The concept of Ice-T is not the concept of TLM.
(5) What have different concepts have different meanings.
(6) The concept of Ice-T and the concept of TLM have different meanings.

??

King and Syntax

2008-10-28T18:08:00.000-07:00

In chapter 2 (around page 34), King claims that the syntax, or syntactic concatenation, provides instructions as to how to evaluate the truth of a sentence. He kind of takes this for granted and as far as I can tell his argument for this goes something like:

1) The sentence "Rebecca swims" is true iff Rebecca instantiates the property of swimming.

2) The way we know if Rebecca instantiates the property of swimming is by looking at the syntactical make-up/organization/concatenation of the sentence (Syntactically concatenating a name with a one-place predicate in English in the manner of "Rebecca swims" has the result that we evaluate the sentence as true if the semantic value of the name instantiates the semantic value of the predicate).

3) So, this syntactic concatenation in (3) provides instructions as to how to evaluate the sentence.

Summed up: The way that a sentence is built syntactically (it's syntactic make-up) is the instructions on how to evaluate whether the sentence is true or false. Put another way, when we look at a sentence, the syntactic concatenation tells us what to look for in the world to know if the sentence is true or false.

King says that even if you do not want to grant existence to propositions, you would still have to admit this "instructional quality" of a sentence's syntax. He kind if leaves it at that from what I can see.

I have two objections to this claim.

The first is an objection to the argument as a whole. I want to point out the leap King makes from the premises to the conclusion. King goes from saying that the syntax of a sentence in a way "sets the parameters for" or in some way "determines" the truth value for the proposition in question, to saying that the syntax "provides instructions on how to go about figuring this out". This is just plain false. An example that I think illustrates this is that of a map. If you give someone a map of a city and point out to them the spot on the map where they are right now, and point out where you want them to end up, the map does not 'give instruction' on how to get there even though it does contain all the information they need in order to make the trip.

The line I am drawing here is very thin and precise and I could understand how some people might think the difference in negligible. I am not sure how to press this point further. There must be some procedure or cognitive process pre-existing and functioning correctly in order for the person to utilize the map for the purpose of direction. Otherwise it is just a bunch of names and lines on paper. The same goes for the syntax of a proposition. Even though the syntax might give you the information you need in order to evaluate the truth of a proposition, it does not direct you how to do so.

Without the ability to instruct people how to find truth or falsity, I think King still has to account for how we come to know the truth of a sentence based on its syntax (I think he would probably have to add some cognitive process of "deriving instruction from...").

My second objection is against premise 2 of the above argument.

It seems to me that the syntactical structure of a sentence is independent of it's context or intent, and therefore cannot be used to evaluate truth value. For example, when I say "Oxygen is good for us" in the context of right now it is true. Over time, however, "Oxygen is good for us" is false (over the course of a lifetime is causes cellular decay, tissue oxidation, cellular reproductive defects, etc...), even though it has the exact same syntactical make-up and truth conditions (I picked this example because it can illustrate two different contexts without changing the speakers location in space or time, thus eliminating possible responses from King).

I think that this objection shows an obvious problem with premise 2 and is more difficult for King to respond to that simply saying "evaluation changes relative to the context the syntax is in". I have clearly shown that the same syntax can have 2 different evaluations at the same location, time, but different contexts. Basically what I am saying is that if syntax can be the same (independent) in 2 different contexts, how can you know which evaluation to use when looking for truth value? Therefore the syntax must not instruct us in regards to evaluation.

King and Structure

2008-10-28T11:48:00.000-07:00

King says that there is something that binds together the constituents of propositions and imposes a structure on them.

King assumes that individuals, properties and relations are the constituents of propositions.

1. Names, demonstrative pronouns, and indexicals contribute the individuals they designate in contexts to the propositions expressed in those contexts by sentences in which they occur.
2. n-place predicates contribute n-place relations to propositions.
3. Truth functional sentential connectives contribute truth functions to propositions.
4. Determiners contribute to propositions two-place relations between properties.

There are two important constraints for how these constituents are bound together:

5. Any account of what holds together the constituents of propositions should leave no mystery about what propositions are and should give us confidence that propositions so construed really exist.

6. The account should shed light on the question of how it is that propositions are able to have truth conditions and so represent the world as being a certain way.

(5) is important because we have to show that these things really exist. (6) because that is what they are supposed to do.

King runs with the Tractatus notion of propositions as being facts. The proposition-fact has to map onto a world-fact to be true. So we can consider:

7. Rebecca swims.

The proposition expressed by (7) has Rebecca and the property of swimming as constituents. King claims that the proposition that Rebecca swims is a fact that has Rebecca and the property of swimming as components. But that proposition is not the fact consisting of Rebecca possessing the property of swimming.

So if Rebecca had failed to possess the property of swimming, that is, if there were no fact consisting of her possessing the property of swimming, the fact that is the proposition that Rebecca swims would still obtain, but sadly it would be false.

I think what King has in mind is that given the existence of certain things, like Rebecca and the property of swimming, there are possible worlds where Rebecca has the property of swimming; or there are regions of logical space where Rebecca and the property of swimming connect. (I guess it depends on how you like your metaphors.) So propositions are like 'possible states-of-affairs'. They encode possibilities. If those possibilities obtain, the propositions are true.

King holds that the best way to satisfy (5) and (6) while making use of his assumptions (1) - (5) is his way. Let us consider the sentence:

8. Rebecca loves Carl.

We can represent this sentence is tree form:

(A)

```````````/\
``````````/`\
`````````/```\
````````/`````\
```````/`````/\
``````/`````/``\
`````/`````/````\
Rebecca loves Carl.

Now we only need to add the semantic values.

(B)

```````````/\
``````````/`\
`````````/```\
````````/`````\
```````/`````/\
``````/`````/``\
`````/`````/````\
`````O`````O````O
`````|``````|`````|
Rebecca* loves* Carl*

So then we have built the proposition (B) out of the relations the sentence has (A). Plus there is little room to doubt that these propositions really exist. So (5) is met. (B) is just our proposition!

It is also easy to see how (6) has been satisfied.

I'm sort of tired and lazy with other things to do, so I hope you don't mind me not elaborating...

King's historical digression

2008-10-26T22:21:00.000-07:00

A component of King's view is that propositions represent externally. That is, we use propositions to represent objects standing in instantiation relations to properties. Not only that, he claims that we use the facts he describes in chapter two to do this representation. This struck me as odd, leaning on what seems to be an empirical fact(that we actually do this). He says a couple other odds things that are meant to bolster his point, I think he could've supported it better. He says (page 60):

" As should by now be clear, the existence of sentences such as 'Rebecca swims' brings into existence facts such as 4b'' where, let us suppose, the propositional relation doesn't yet encode the instantiation function, but the sentenctial relation of 'Rebecca swims' does. Since we now claim that the propositional relation encoding the instantiation function is part of the fact that is the proposition that Rebecca swims, 4b'' is not yet that proposition. Indeed, neither the proposition that Rebecca swims, nor, we may suppose, any other proposition exists yet... However sentences have truth conditions, in part in virtue of the sentential relations encoding functions"

So, on this view we can have a totally functional language with truth conditions for sentences without ever having propositions. The only time we need propositions is when we start having propositional attitude verbs, modal operators and that-clauses.

I think this is a bad route for King to take. Consider a world in which there is a language as rich as english, but there are still no propositional attitude verbs, modal operators and that-clauses. Most of the arguments in favor of propositions still apply, though in a different way. Recall that King has to make rampant use of the true-in true-at distinction. Since I get these confused, let's say a proposition is true-in a world iff that proposition exists at that world and is true of that world. Let's say a proposition is true-at a world iff the proposition exists in the actual world and is true of the significant counterfactual world.

Ok, suppose we have this counterfactual world and we have ben and marry. They have a little discussion:

Ben: I love you

Marry: You love me

It is true-at this world that Ben and Marry share a belief. But for this to be so, they must bare a common attitude to something. It's not any sentence, since they express their beliefs using different sentences. It must be a proposition. But that means that propositions must not only be true-at that world, there must be propositions true-in that world. Otherwise it would be false-at that world that Ben and Marry share a belief.

Thankfully for King, I don't think he has to be committed to this strange view. He can hold that when we have truth-conditions for a sentence, we have a proposition that sentence expresses that has the same truth conditions. But if he says this then much of the motivation for thinking that we in fact use this propositional relations to represent propositions falls away. I'll give the crux of his support found on page 61:

"As speakers began to attempt to talk about structured contents by means of that-clauses, they implicitly took these contents to have the same truth conditions as the sentences with those contents."

If speakers were already using propositions in a representational way, then the further occurrence of the use of that-clauses described here is irrellevant for arguing what they were using to represent. If King were to digress and say that speakers implicitly took the propositions to have the contents he described back when the language was created, he is at pains to motivate us to think they were using propositions in this representational way. It's clearer to see how representation is bestowed upon propositions when propositions are the things being talked about, it is less clear when they are not.

Furthermore, he supposes that those who speak of propositions speak of structured propositions implicitly. I think it would be hard to walk up to... say... Robert Stalnaker and tell him "you Robert Stalnaker are talking about structured propositions" and have that be compelling. Since he takes everyone to be talking about propositions as described in his view, the same would apply to anyone with a view contrary to his.

This dilemma is by no means a knock-down argument against his view. However I think it shows that his view does not have a virtue that he thinks it has.

Benacerraf & Russell wonder

2008-10-26T11:06:00.000-07:00

I'm curious about the example in class:

(1) The student in the classroom 384 is smiling.

If I was right in the previous post, we have to distinguish between a sense of indeterminacy and underdeterminacy for (1).

Should we read the Benacerraf dilemma as posing:

(2) It is not clear which student, if any, is the student in question, so there is no such student. (1) could be about any student, so it is about no student.

or

(3) It is not clear which student, if any, is the student in question, so there is no way of telling if (1) is true or false. (1) could be about any student, so it is not clear which student it is supposed to be about.

It seems like a defense of the reading of (2) would be to appeal to Russell's notation:

(4) (∃x)((Fx & (∀y)(Fy → y = x)) & Gx)

and since just as there is no unique king of France, there is no unique student in the classroom 384, the sentence is false. Nothing is there to satisfy the definite description, so the sentence has to be false.

A defense of the reading of (3) would seem to appeal to a 3-valued logic. There are true sentences, false sentences, and yet-to-be-determined sentences. If we suspected that a spy was in the classroom, and an intelligence agent told us that "The spy is the man who is smiling" it would seem absurd to conclude since there is no unique smiler, that isn't any spy at all. Why wouldn't the agent just say that in that case?

Or imagine a police detective who finds a murder victim. He might construct a story to explain the murder, that a unique individual entered through the bathroom window and hit Jones over the heat with a frozen banana. The detective might conclude that there was some unique x who did this. How would he react if we told him that since anyone could satisfy this condition, no one could?

The defender of the reading of (3) might argue that in reality, not everything is as clear cut as knowing plainly that there is no king of France. We have to wait to see for many claims.

The defender of the reading of (2) might argue that we still in principle have a 2-valued logic, but admit that we have trouble answering about some claims.

It almost seems like the difference between (2) and (3) is whether we need to have evidence to rule something in, or rule something out. (2) seems to argue that if we have no principled reason to accept the claim as true, it must be false. (3) seems to argue that if we have no principled reason to accept a claim as true or to accept a claim as false, we should stay agnostic.

Does anyone have a preferred reading?

Benacerraf

2008-10-23T17:52:00.000-07:00

I think I may have (tried to) state this before, but it seems like there are two interpretations of the Benecerraf dilemma. A strong one and a weak one. The strong one can be called a 'indeterminacy reading' and the second a 'underdeterminacy reading'.

It seems like in some cases, like when someone shows me photos they claim were taken at a haunted house, and point to some glossy flares they call 'orbs', the person is claiming that some shaky evidence should convince us of something's objection. In a case like this, it seems indeterminate what those 'orb' things are. They could be anything, so they are nothing. That is, 'orb' is being applied to a tokening of a candidate for being an orb. But something seems funky about the identifying of the tokening as an orb.

Sometimes the Benacerraf dilemma seems to run like this. If you want to identify numbers with abstract entities, you have to say something about those entities. You seem to leave it indeterminate as to what they are. If you face multiple interpretations or multiple candidate objects, it seems indeterminate which one to choose.

But in some cases, like when a scientist sees a cloud of particles under his microscope, he simply has evidence that is underdeterminate. He clearly has some candidates in mind, and some principled reasons to select some interpretations of candidate entities over others. Or, if a policemen found Jones dead, he might be sure that there is a murderer, even though the evidence underdetermines who that murderer is. In some sense I guess who the murderer is is indeterminate. But it seems wrong to think that anything could have killed Jones. It seems we can at least narrow it down to a someone.

It seems then that the lover of propositions only needs to appeal to common-sense intuitions that are consistent with the existence of propositions. What propositions are doesn't seem to be indeterminate, in the sense that we have no principled way of finding out what they are. We may simply have evidence which is underdetermined.

If I'm playing chess, for example, I can ponder at a •pawn• token. So I can have a wooden pawn, a metal pawn, a pawn shaped like a bear, a pawn shaped like a pillar, etc. There is something here, a shared structure of all the shapes I want to call pawnness, or a •pawn•. The 'pawn functional class'. Whatever. It seems odd to take the strong reading of the Benacerraf to claim that since anything could play the role of a pawn, that is, anything could be a pawn, nothing can be a pawn. It seems better to admit that the list of pawns is open ended, since it is underdetermined what pawns are in some sense. Anything could be used as a pawn!

It seems the same sort of move could be made with propositions. A shaky notion seems fine. We plead guilty to underdetermination. But this isn't the same as accepting indeterminacy. That many things might be pawns or propositions doesn't mean that nothing is.

??

Freg-razy

2008-10-23T16:43:00.000-07:00

Frege's views seem to have crazy results, yes. But if we look back in time to the pre-Kripkean philosophers, we can see that there is lots of craziness. Frege may have a structured account of propositions and of thought, but he seems to have the same craziness.

Let me pick on Santayana, since he as much as anyone is a good candidate for being a 'Locke-Plato,' as Sellars calls them. Santayana holds roughly:

1. The only meaningful language is private language.
2. Knowledge is just faith mediated by symbols.
3. Intuition is direct access to Universals.

Givenness is super important for Santayana. The Given from sensation, and from thought.

The philosopher's aim, for Santayana, is just to have an aesthetic experience with contemplation. It's fun to ponder the Universal triangularity. Life is crappy and unhappy, but the life of reason offers some escape. The Indian mystics are pretty good, but the Greek notion of cultivating a higher man is a better notion.

Right. So this is crazy. But consider the problems we though Frege faced today. Santayana thinks that the only meaningful language is my language. So he'd be an individualist about senses. When other people make noises, I only understand what I hear; my meanings are used. But usually I just behavioristicly respond in animal faith.

Now I can have all sorts of wrong descriptions of people, so I may think that I am thinking about Einstein but really am thinking about the inventor of the atomic bomb, whoever that is. But this is just a case of non-thinking! This is just me dumbly using symbols governed by animal faith.

So even when I think I'm thinking, I'm not. The real Thinking is the intuiting Universals bit. I am Given Universals in experience or Thought. But I can bumble around in animal faith making squeaks and squawks and what have you. That doesn't bother Santayana. Real Thinking, not animal thinking, is hard to do. Most people never do it because they are clouded by animal faith.

It strikes me that Frege is a sort of bridge away from some poor Platonism combined with an unstructured view of propositions and thinking. And strange other views. But an old-school philosopher (pre-Kripkean) might not see anything wrong with that. We might take these aspects of Frege as a reductio against him, but people with the 'right' intuitions I don't think would be bothered at all.

The history here is interesting to me.

Objections to Russell's facts and propositions

2008-10-21T16:37:00.000-07:00

In his chapter on facts and propositions, Russell starts off by talking about the sorts of things he thinks are undoubtable. The first of these is that the world contains facts and beliefs (and that beliefs have reference to facts). He holds that a fact is the kind of thing that makes a proposition true or false, but that facts themselves cannot be true or false; they simply just are. The example he uses is the proposition "It is raining". The proposition is true or false depending on the fact if it is raining: "the condition of weather that makes my statement true (or false) is what I should call a 'fact'" (pg. 182). Russell also says that no particular thing just by itself makes any proposition true or false; a 'fact' is expressed by a whole sentence, not by a single name.

At this point, it seems to me like Russell runs into some problems. So far it looks like Russell argues:

1) All facts are expressed by propositions.

2) All facts are expressed by a whole sentence.

3) 1 +2, therefore: All facts expressed by propositions are facts expressed by a whole sentece.

The conclusion of (3) seems to put too much importance on the structure of the language being spoken. Couldn't you express a fact without using a whole sentence? Did cavemen not express facts when they were speaking broken-up-non-perfect-language? Not only that, but consider the ease of which people can still understand which fact you are referring to when you speak improper english. For example, after writing a test someone just learning to speak english might say to you "I think that test do good?", and any normal person would interpret this (probably correctly) as "I think that I did well on the test". Here, Russell would have to say that this person was not expressing a proposition, as well as not expressing any fact. I think that clearly they are expressing both a version of the that-style propostion "that I did well on the test" as well as a version of the fact I did well on the test (which could still prove the proposition true or false).

Moving on, Russell gives examples of the different types of facts and then starts on symbols. I do not want to focus on the details of these parts, but rather on the argument Russell seems after the examinations. Russell eventually comes to the conclusion that propositions are not names for facts. He says people who think this have mistaken types of symbols. He finishes by suggesting that names are the proper symbols for a person (or other things I imagine) and a sentence (or proposition) is the proper symbol for a fact. Russell takes care to show that propositions cannot name facts. Here is his argument:

1) All Propositions bear a 3 place relation

2) All names bear a 2 place relation

3) 1 + 2 therefore, No propositions are names

In support of premis 1, Russell claims that all propositions are either true, false, or meaningless. So there are 3 possible relations propositions can have toward something. Names on the other hand, as premis 2 suggests, can either name the thing they are relating to or be meaningless (a name is not true or false). He says that if a name does not name anything, then it is simply a sound. From the difference in the nature of propositions and names, Russell derives his conclusion that the two are completely different.

I would like to raise an objection to premis 1. I do not think that propositions bear a 3 place relation. I would like someone to show me a proposition that is meaningless. It seems impossible to do. Any proposition you can put together (let's use Russell's guidelines from earlier and say that any proposition must be a sentence) is either true, false, or not a proposition (not meaningless as he would suggest).

I think that this objection to premis 1 takes one leg out from Russells argument. I haven't quite figured out how to reconcile the fact that propositions are true and false, and names either 'name' or 'do not name'. If this difference could be shown to be negligible, or that somehow naming something and not naming something is the same as being true or false then Russell's position would completely reverse. He would have to accept that propositions are (or can) name facts.

The closest thing I can think of to reconciling these two relations is that it is either true or false that something is the name for something else. I think this line of reasoning looks promising, and Russell cannot sit contently forever on his position that propositions cannot name facts.

Better Russell Bit

2008-10-19T09:46:00.001-07:00

It occurred to me last night that I should do a better job of giving Russell's position. Now, certainly this isn't perfect; but it should hopefully be better!

Russell assumes:

1. Propositions meaningful are non-linguistic entities.
2. Meanings are non-linguistic entities.

I happen to not agree with this so much, but I presume it is obvious to everyone else and stands in no need of defense.

But there is a tradition of British philosophy which denies this as well. They would argue:

3. Language stands for ideas having meanings.

This is a concept Empiricism: the basic words and concepts, basic ideas, are extracted from experience. So a private sensory language exists which is meaningful because it is about our ideas. (So when a baby sees a red patch, his private language gives meaning to his sensations and gives him ideas.)

This is a most queer view, but nonetheless was historically popular. It is further held that:

4. In every judgement there is something, the true subject of the term, which is not an idea and does not have meaning.

The motivation here is clear: we don't want to be idealists, with only ideas and meanings existing in the mind. So there are some transcendentally real objects, even if we can only idealize them. Kant or Locke would want this. There are 'unknowables' or 'I-know-not-whats' to deal with.

But this line of thinking brings the conclusions:

5. So meaning is linguistic (or experiential).
6. So propositions, to have meaning, must be linguistic (experiential).

I add "(or experiential)" since a good Empiricist will argue for all sorts of non-linguistic knowledge, awareness, etc. grounded in the magical power of experience... as you can tell I do not accept this view. But an empiricist like CI Lewis will argue in defense of (5) that sense-meanings are essential for any meanings to exist at all, and in defense of (6) that propositions are only meaningful if they phenomenologically reduce into statements about immediate experience.

Yes, Lewis is a phenomenalist. It seems that (3) and (4) commit us to Kantian transcendental idealism if we want to be 'realists' and phenomenalism if we are happy to be solipsists. We can argue for 'realism' is we are unhappy with being solipsists.

But now we see that:

7. ~( (1) & (6) )
8. ~( (2) & (5) )

So something has to give. Even thought I don't like (1) or (2) so much, I don't like (3) or (4) either! What is wrong with (3) and (4)?

3. Language stands for ideas having meanings.

4. In every judgement there is something, the true subject of the term, which is not an idea and does not have meaning.

I don't like (3) because it give meanings primarily to ideas, which later get hooked up to language. So there are pre-linuistic means and concepts acquired directly through experience. This violates the Myth of the Given. This view isn't in favor of innate ideas, but has the same basic picture in mind.

I don't like (4) because subjects have meanings. Lewis would even argue that they have sense-meanings. Something like direct reference will show that I can refer to something directly, even if I cannot access it with sensations or if I only know some contingent facts about it. I mean Jones when I say 'Jones' or point at him. Does it make sense to say 'the real Jones' is hidden, meaningless, etc.? That seems queer. That is Jones there, damn it!

Russell makes the point that:

5. Words have meaning, in the simple sense that they are symbols which stand for something other than themselves.

So there is a psychological and logical element to meaning. The defender of (3) and (4) are getting these messed up. Ideas seem to relate to psychological meaning, which is distinct from denotation which relates to a logical meaning.

This confusion is evident if we consider (6):

6. Propositions, unless they are linguistic, do not themselves contain words, only containing entities indicated by words.

Propositions do have meanings, but are not word-things. But this isn't a contradiction!

Agents are talkers. Words are talkings and entities are talk-eds. We shouldn't confuse the talkings and talk-eds! A proposition is not a talking at all, it is a talk-ed. A talking simply represents it.

To motivate (5) and (6) we can appeal to denotation as a kind of meaning, distinct form psychological or empirical notions of meaning. A poor Empiricist like Kant may wonder how I can have an idea of a thing-in-itself, the real deal object behind my sensations and ideas. Russell sees that I still denote that thing, even though I cannot experience it, such that I have no idea of it and it is 'meaningless' to me. This lets us conclude:

7. Meaning, in the sense in which words have meaning, is irrelevant to logic.

Rather,

8. Meaning, in the sense in which propositions have meaning, is relevant to logic.

And this non-psychological sense of meaning is denotation!

So Russell seems to accept the limitations of language and of ideas, of empirical notions of meaning. But this isn't a defect, since there are more robust systems of representation in logic and propositions, which are non-empirical and non-psychological notions of meaning.

A criticism here that I won't fully cash out is this: the traditional Empiricist appeals to the Givenness of sensation to do the heavy lifting. The traditional Rationalist appeals to the Givenness of intellect to do the heavy lifting. It strikes me that Russell wants to accept the Givenness of acquaintance, coupling the traditional Empiricist and the traditional Rationalist together.

I hope this is better than the last formulation of Russell's argument.

Russell, Berkeley attacking

2008-10-18T13:08:00.000-07:00

Russell tells us that it is (was) customary to regard all propositions as having a subject, an immediate this, and a predicate, a general concept attached to it by way of description.

Some people argued:

1. All words stand for ideas having meanings.
2. In every judgement there is something, the true subject of the term, which is not an idea and does not have meaning.

But Russell thinks this notion of meaning confuses logical and psychological elements. It makes sense to argue:

3. Words have meaning, in the simple sense that they are symbols which stand for something other than themselves.

But then this means that:

4. Propositions, unless they are linguistic, do not themselves contain words, only containing entities indicated by words.

And it seems that:

5. Meaning, in the sense which words have meaning, is irrelevant to logic.

So there has to be another sense of meaning:

6. The concept a man is symbolic: it denotes.

This means that when a man occurs in a proposition, the proposition is not about the concept a man.

So:

7. Concepts have meaning in a non-psychologial sense.

This notion of meaning as denotation is more robust, so only those things which denote have meaning. The confusion over meaning is due to the notion that words occur in propositions, which in turn is due to the notion that propositions are essentially mental and are to be identified with cognitions.

I think that this is a good argument against some forms of concept empiricism which do seem to naturally lead to idealism or solipsism. Though, as an interesting side note, Russell seems to get stuck in solipsism with the Given.

If someone were inclined to accept British Empiricist theories of concept acquisition and of meaning, such that basic concepts are abstracted from experience and meaningful concepts originate in experience, it is easy to see how we can get the notion that:

8. Concepts are only meaningful if they have meanings.
9. Meanings are given in experience.
10. So concepts are only meaningful if they are given in experience.

But substance isn't given in experience: so Berkeley says that substance is meaningless. Substance is not an idea, and so doesn't have a meaning.

So a Lockean might have to admit that ideas and concepts are mental, so are meanings mental. Substance being non-mental, is not meaningful. Berkeley things we cannot have ideas which are non-meaningful, and I'm sure Locke or even Russell would appeal to instrumentalism in science to get it in there. (inferential realism.)

But it seems like Berkeley will just run a Benacerraf dilemma. What is good for Jubien in terms of abstract entities will be good for Berkeley in terms of abstract general ideas.

1. For there to be substances, a theory of substance must be true.
2. A theory of substance is either a mathematical theory or an ontological theory).

3. For a mathematical theory to be true, it must either offer a model of what substance is or given a real account of what substance is.

4. If a mathematical theory of substance only provides a model of what substantial existents are, then it has not answered the question of what substance is.
5. If a mathematical theory argues that the model is identical to substance, then they face a Benecerraf dilemma.

6. Therefore a mathematical theory of substance is not true. (4 - 5)

7. An ontological theory of substance has to offer a real account of what substance is.

8. To give a real account of substance, we have to analyze our general idea of substance.

9. A general idea is either a singular idea or an abstract general idea.
10. If our general idea of substance is a singular idea then it is Given in experience.
11. Our idea of substance is not Given in experience.
12. So our idea of substance is not a singular idea. (10 - 11)

13. So our idea of substance is an abstract general idea. (9, 12)

14. Abstract general ideas are contradictions.

15. So an ontological account of substance is a contradiction. (13, 14)

16. Any theory that is a contradiction is false.

17. So the ontological theory of substance is false. (15, 16)

20. Both mathematical and ontological theory is false. (6, 17)

21. So there is no true theory of substance. (2, 20)

22. So there are no substances. (1, 21)

Berkeley will assume:

1. We can only know those things Given in experience.
2. Substance cannot be Given in experience.
3. So we cannot know about substance.

He'll accept Wittgenstein's: "A nothing would do well as a something about which we could say nothing."

If we adopt an instrumentalism or realism for a philosophy of science, Berkeley will say that we are still accepting 1 - 3, so substance is just mental after all.

So both Berkeley and Russell will deny (2):

1. All words stand for ideas having meanings.
2. In every judgement there is something, the true subject of the term, which is not an idea and does not have meaning.

B. will claim that something without a meaning is nothing. But the idea of meaning is correct. R. will claim the notion of meaning is wrong. Substances have denotation.

But I think B. will still run a Benacerraf dilemma. What are we denoting, these non-meaningful things?

B. is a crafty bastard. Our concept a man is clearly originated in experience. But what of mind-independent material thing? What of our concept is a proposition? etc.

There is more to say, but I'm sure that this is enough for now.

Some defence for Stalnaker against Richard

2008-10-14T19:57:00.000-07:00

In Mark Richard's Structure, he talks about Stalnaker's unstructured view of propositions. One particular idea of Stalnaker's that he argues against early in his paper is that the acquisition of deductive knowledge is putting one's separate belief states together. He argues that this supposed advantage of unstructured propositions is not possible because it commits one to certain beliefs that one does not necessarily have. Richard sums it up as follows:

"When a collection of premises entails distinct propositions p and q, one may see one entailment, but not the other".

He gives one of Stalnaker's responses to this problem; that perhaps it is because the merging of belief states is done in a sequential manner that does not necessarily entail the not-believed conclusion. (I will illustrate with the same example from the text):

(1) Barbers shave only those who do not shave themselves
(2) The barber Jones shaved all those who attacked Lionel
(3) 1+2 --> No one who shaves himself attacked Lionel
(4) Anderson shaves himself
(5) 3+4 --> Anderson did not attack Lionel

Here, Stalnaker is showing that from 1, 2, and 4 "Smith" can deductively (through the sequential merging of belief states) conclude that Anderson did not attack Lionel (5) without realizing (or believing at some point) that Jones did not attack Lionel.

Richard thinks Stalnaker is mistaken. He thinks that according to the unstructured propositionalist, "Jones did not attack Lionel" cannot be avoided by sequential deduction. Richard's argument is:

(6) (1) and (2) entail the conjunction of (1) and (2), not (3)
(7) The conjunction of (1) and (2) entails that Jones did not attack Lionel (while at the same time entailing that Anderson did not attack Lionel when combined with (5))
(8) If the conjunction of (1) and (2) can lead Smith to deduce that Jones did not attack Lionel (even though they also entail that Anderson did not attack Lionel, then Smith must realize (and believe) that Jones did not attack Lionel

And of course, if (8) is the case then Stalnaker is stuck with the problem of deduction.

There are a few oversights in Richards objection that I would like to point out. Richard (and all supporters of this line of objection) seems to be assuming that the entire process of merging belief states takes place instantaneously (that once a part of a belief state starts to merge with another, the entire belief state is immediately merged). What if is the case that parts of belief states can merge quickly while other parts take more time to merge (more deductive reasoning, etc..). This would allow for certain deductions to be made while others do not occur to you right away. Or what if certain parts of belief states did not merge at all (like in the case of incompatible belief states).

Someone might try to point out that belief states are platonic in nature and are not restricted by time limitation in such ways. To this I would respond by pointing out two things:

A) For belief states to merge, there would have to be a time where they were not merged, which suggests some sort of being-in-a-state-at-time-x-versus-at-time-y distinction.

B) The part of our brain that pulls the magic trick of interaction with an abstract object is bound by spacetime limitations, and would take time to "catch-up" to an immediate belief state merger (and it is in this "catching-up" transition where certain deductions could happen non-uniformly, or maybe even not at all).

If belief states do not in fact merge instantaneously, then I think (7) and (8) of Richard's argument are not as sound as they seem. At the very least, it is reason to question the problem of deduction in the sequential deduction position.

Sellars, Soames and a little Frege

2008-10-12T20:39:00.000-07:00

Sellars holds that candid meaningful linguistic utterances express thoughts.

But the term "express" and the related phrase "express a thought" is 'radically ambiguous'.

1. If candid meaningful linguistic utterances express thoughts, then (A) or (B) is true.

(A) To say of an utterance that it expresses a thought is to say, roughly, that a thought episode causes the utterance.

(B) To say of an utterance that it expresses a thought is to say that the utterance expresses a proposition (i.e., a thought in Frege's sense (Gedanke)—an "abstract entity" rather than a mental episode).

2. Candid meaningful linguistic utterances express thoughts.
3. So (A) or (B) is true. (1, 2 MP)

Sellars is motivated to say (A) is true.

If we distinguish between these two sense of "express" as the "causal" and the "logical", we should distinguish between two sense of "thought" by referring to thinkings and propositions.

So we can draw a diagram thusly:

````````````````````✸ proposition that-p
````````````````````❘
Thinking that-p ✸ ➝ ✸ speaking that-p

This picture has a mental episode which causes a verbal episode, which expresses an abstract entity.

But something seems to be funny here. What is the relation between thinking that-p and the proposition that-p? Maybe we should treat the relation between speaking and the proposition as the logical produce of the causal relation between the speaking and the thinking and a relation between the thinking and the proposition, thus:

``````````````✸ proposition that-p
```````````````❘
Thinking that-p ✸ ➝ ✸ speaking that-p

This roughly means that for a speaking to mean that-p is for it to be caused by a thinking that-p.

Or the first diagram could be used to show that to be a thinking that-p is to be an episode of a sort which causes speakings which express the proposition that-p.

These considerations are based in our trying to make sense of (B).

Sellars would rather work with a more complex framework in which the idea that thinkings belong to "inner speech" is taken seriously, and combined with the idea that expressions in different languages can stand for (express in the logical sense) the same proposition. So we can roughly make the following diagram:

```````````````````````````✸ proposition that-p
```````````````````````___❘______
`````````````````````❘``````````````❘
`````````````````````❘`````_______❘_______ overt proposition
`````````````````````❘`````❘`````````````````````❘```that-p
`````````````````````❘`````❘`````````````````````❘
Mental sentence (type) ✸````✸ sentence in L1 (type) ✸ sentence in L2
`````````````````````⇡````⇡`````````````````````` (type)
```````Thinking that-p ✸ ➝ ✸ speaking that-p

On this account, neither the relation of the speaking to the proposition nor the relation of the thinking to the proposition is to be analyzed as a logical product along the lines of the other diagrams. Sellars intends this claim to be compatible with the idea that there is an internal relation between the idea of a speaking expressing a certain proposition and the speaking being caused, ceteris paribus, by a thinking which expresses the same proposition.

And a footnote to this says that there are two senses of "meaningless utterance": (1) Those utterances which are meaningless if they do not token a properly formed expression in a language. (2) Those utterances which are uttered parrotingly by one who does not know the language.

So what of meaningless mental utterances? We might not call it a thinking, but it would stand to thinkings as meaningless utterances stand to "saying something."

It seems that one could in some sense "say" while "saying nothing" or "think" while "thinking nothing", but then this isn't really saying or thinking in the full-blooded sense. This is what I take Sellars to be hinting at.

Now what Sellars is hinting at here is that intentionality is the mark of the mental but also of language. So thoughts and speech instantiate propositions; but not all brain states or utterances instantiate propositions. So maybe in some sense animals think or speak, but this isn't the intentional stuff that instantiates propositions; non-propositional and non-intentional brain states and utterances can be explained on Sellars' view.

Now it seems to me that Soames has objections to (B) as well, and accepts something roughly like (A). Soames probably would not like Sellars' modeling of thoughts on language, etc. Maybe he'd see what Sellars is hinting at and he'd agree. I don't know.

An important similarity I see is that for both, human beings have to get into the representing game for their thoughts our utterances to encode propositions. It is not that thoughts are intrinsically intentional and later get linked up with language; or that propositions are intrinsically intentional and later get linked up with language.

Instead, thoughts and utterances happen. Sure, so in some sense 'thoughts' and 'language' emerges at some point. Let us call these 'proto-propositional' events. Then at some point, due to human representational activity, 'proto-propositional' events are taken to be propositional. That is, certain things, like thoughts and speech, become taken to be representational.

I just find this interesting and thought I'd share. If what I have said is vague or shady, it is simply because this isn't for marks!

Soames and Mapping

2008-10-12T11:10:00.000-07:00

A. Soames brings up a pretty interesting objection to propositions:

1. According to the Frege-Russell view, propositions are the meanings we assign to sentences, formulas and the like, when we interpret them.
2. So it makes no sense to say that propositions have meanings or get interpreted by us. (from 1)

Soames concludes from this misunderstanding that:

3. The Frege-Russell view has a confused discussion of "the unity of the proposition" which makes it impossible to ask the question "What makes propositions representational, and hence capable of being used to interpret sentences and provide their meanings?" because this question violated a fundamental feature of what they took propositions to be.

And this has the result that:

4. If by 'proposition' we mean what Frege and Russell meant, then there are no propositions. (from 3)

But given that there are propositions, the Frege-Russell view must be wrong.

B. Soames offers an alternative way of thinking of propositions as the meanings of sentences, bearers of truth value and objects of attitude:

5. Propositions are structured entities, the constituents of which are objects and properties.
6. To say that certain constituents make up a complex is to say that, in it, the constituents stand in certain relations to one another.
7. So a proposition (the complex) is, in effect, the standing of objects and properties (the constituents) in those relations. (from 5 - 6)

For our discussion here, Soames says that we need no further discussion of details here. What these relations are, of course, will depend on the specific abstract structures we take propositions to be.

C. Soames gives an example:

8. A is different than B.

(8) expresses a proposition which is a complex in which a, b and the difference relation stand in a certain relation R.

Given Soames' view, we can see that a's and b's standing in R to difference represents a as being different from b because of the interpretation we place on R, and thereby on the structure as a whole.

This means that our use of R is such that for a and b to stand in R to difference is for us to take the proposition as representing a as different from b.

We can think of propositions as functioning as something like maps:

Imagine a map with two dots. One is labeled "Winnipeg" and one is labeled "Calgary". The "Calgary" dot is to the left of the "Winnnipeg" dot. This represents Calgary as being to the west of Winnipeg, and Winnipeg as being to the east of Calgary. The dots are 13.28 centimeters apart. This represents that Winnipeg and Calgary are 1328 kilometers apart.

How does the map represent? It represents Calgary as being 1328 kilometers to the west of Winnipeg, in part, because of the interpretation we give to the relation being 13.28 centimeters and to the left of on the map.

A proposition, like a map, is something we interpret. We interpret the propositional relation R, in interpreting the complex in which a and b stand in R to difference.

D. The major conclusion I draw from Soames is this insight:

So while Russell's multiple-relation theory of judgement takes the role of agents to be crucial in unifying the constituents of judgements, we now have reason to take agents to be crucial in endowing propositions with the representational properties that allow them to serve as objects of judgement, and other attitudes.

I am reminded of a (surprise!) Sellarsean idea here: for representations we need representers, representings and represent-eds. Or, to say consistent with Soames, mapers, mapings and map-eds. That there might ever be mapings, and thereby map-eds, without mapers strikes me as preposterous.

I see the issue of models and commentaries useful here as well. Consider:

9. Winnipeg↗
↖Brandon

This model, say, could represent anything. It seems that it certainly needs someone to interpret it for it to mean anything. I do not understand how this map could map anything without a mapper!

But what commentary should be provided? Perhaps it means that if you want to go to Winnipeg, you should go north-by-north east. To go to Brandon north-by-north west. Maybe. Perhaps it means that you are currently in between Winnipeg and Brandon and there are roads going in those directions. Maybe. Perhaps it means that Winnipeg is awesome and Brandon is sucky. Maybe.

I suppose that there are natural readings and unnatural ones, in the sense that some possibilities seem more intuitively plausible than others. I doubt (9) means that Hitler was German and that sandwiches involve bread. But I suppose, if we thought we should interpret it that way, it may well do so.

Wittgenstein complained of Moore and Russell that "they only ever look at the logical form of words, and never the uses of those forms." It seems like an interesting point to note. How could we merely study the logical form of (9) and understanding anything at all about it? It seems that we must take into account how (9) is being used.

I presume we do not need explicit rules of interpretation or commentaries, but that we only need to know how to read sentences or maps in order to know how to interpret them pretty well. We just need, as it were, some simple map-reading skills to be mappers. Then we can read into maps what they are about. It seems that if I show you a map of Winnipeg or tell you the proposition that Frege is bearded, you look past the map itself or the proposition itself, and instead you attention is drawn toward what is represented, i.e. Winnipeg and Frege.

So I think we answer the question: "What makes propositions representational, and hence capable of being used to interpret sentences and provide their meanings?" by noting the need of representers, mappers and interpreters for there to be representations, maps, and interpretations and represent-eds, map-eds, and interpret-eds.

Worry, yes. Insight? Maybe.

2008-10-08T13:21:00.000-07:00

I had a bit of a crisis of faith over propositions this morning, and a resolution. I thought I'd share. Were the worries worth the worry? Is the solution satisfactory?

I began by considering:

(A) Dan is a philosophy student.

(B) Dan-eun chul-hak saeng-ibnida.

I thought that it was a mistake to assume:

(1) If A in L1 translates into B in L2, then A expresses the same proposition that B expresses.

since

(C) Gutentage.

translates

(D) Bonjour.

and neither (C) or (D) expresses a proposition.

Perhaps (1) could be amended:

(2) If A in L1 translates B in L2, and if A and B both express propositions, then A expresses the proposition that B does.

But given some reasonable assumptions (like Frege) we might feel that (A) and (B) express different propositions, even if the sentences and their propositions play the same sort of functional role. I was tempted to think that (A) and (B) were equal expressions but not identical; and so with the propositions expressed.

I worried that this would make propositions into wheels idly turning.

(E) Wes is a bachelor.

and

(F) Wes is unmarried.

both presumably 'mean' or 'say' the same thing (in the sense of 'equality') without 'meaning' or 'saying' the same thing (in the sense of 'identity').

But this strikes me as queer. How could distinct token-classes of the same type, like (A) and (B) .or. (E) and (F), express distinct propositions? Shouldn't we tie propositions to types and not token-classes?

It seems more plausible to reason:

1. (A) and (B) are of the same type.
2. Token-classes of the same type express the same proposition.
3. (A) and (B) express the same proposition.

than

4. (E) and (F) are distinct token-classes.
5. Distinct token-classes express distinct propositions.
6. (E) and (F) express distinct propositions.

It seems a Sellarsean move helps. Let us picture the state of affairs that it rains thusly:

(G) 〪〭〫〬

This will stand for the state of affairs that it rains, in a 'minimally linguistic manner'. We could imagine an ostensive definition instead, a scientific model of rain, etc. But we can explicitly put this state of affairs into language:

(H) It rains.

and

(I) Es regnet.

We can say that (H) and (I) are distinct token-classes of the •it rains• type. And the •it rains• type encodes (G).

It seems reasonable to conclude:

7. In the case of (A) and (B), (C) and (D), (E) and (F), and of (H) and (I), there are two sentences of distinct token-classes, but of the same type.
8. We can translate the sentence A in L1 into the sentence B in L2 iff A in L1 and B in L2 are of the same type.
9. If A translates B, then A and B are different ways of saying the same thing.
10. So (A) is a different way to say (B), (C) is a different way to say (D), (E) is a different way to say (F), and (H) is a different way to say (I).

What do (A) and (B) both say? They both encode, say, the same type. So (C) encodes •good day• and so does (D). On top of this translation principle, it seems we can note that some types encode states of affairs. So (C) translates (D) but they express nothing. They say the same thing but encode nothing. (Or not a state of affairs in any case.) But (H) and (I) are both of the same type; and this type encodes the state of affairs that it rains. Thus we might rewrite (2):

(3) If A in L1 translates B in L2, then A in L1 and B in L2 are of the same type. If a type expresses a proposition, then all tokens of token-classes of that type expresses that proposition.

Thus I satisfied myself and ended my worry.

I will lastly note:

11. That it rains is a state of affairs.
12. States of affairs can be encoded in language as propositions, or can be actualized in the world as facts.
13. If it rains is a fact, then •It rains• is true.
14. If it rains is not a fact, then •it rains• is false.

So it seems we get a nice little correspondence theory of truth, flush with propositions, facts, states of affairs, sentence-types, and translation rules. Yay!

The theory of Stickiness

2008-10-08T00:30:00.000-07:00

Concerning the problem of how a thought and its constituents bind together and how this binding imposes structure on the thought, Frege appears (according to King) to posit the following theory: the senses of words in a sentence are the constituents of a thought. These senses bind together to build a thought by means of an unsaturated sense being completed or saturated by other senses. Finally, the way the words are structured in a sentence is mirrored by the structure of the senses in a thought. For Frege, a thought must contain an unsaturated sense to hold the constituents (the other senses) together; it is the binding glue, so to speak. An unsaturated sense must be completed by some other sense to have a thought. Without going into detail how this works, I will turn to the criticism that King makes of this binding glue.

King notes that while it appears we have been given an answer to the concerning problem, we have in fact been given very little to account for the binding of the constituents of a thought. Attributing the binding power simply to the unsaturatedness of some constituent of a thought seems no better than claiming that the constituents of a thought hold together because some parts of a thought are “sticky”. If this criticism holds than what is needed is a substantive theory of stickiness to provide a real account of binding, but we do not have this substantive theory, so Frege’s original theory seems at a loss of explaining. We may construct the problem as follows,

1. Either we do not have a real account of binding or we have a substantive theory of stickiness.

2. If we do not have a real account of binding, then it is not the case that constituents of a thought bind together due to the unsaturatedness of some its parts.

3. We do not have a substantive theory of stickiness.

4. Therefore, we do not have a real account of binding. (1,2 DS)

5. Therefore, it is not the case that constituents of a thought bind together due to the unsaturatedness of some its parts.(2,4 MP)

This argument seems to follow, and I agree with King that were we at a loss for some theory of stickiness beyond thinking that sticky parts hold a thought together, then we would lack a real account of what binds the constituents of a thought together. However, it seems that we may resist granting truth to premise (3) by the following considerations. To my untrained eye it seems that Frege still has some room to provide at least a proto-theory of stickiness which essentially derives its explanatory power from syntax rules pertaining to the language and sentences therein. So, we can say for instance, that since concept words are predicative, then things that are predicative in a language constitute unsaturated concepts which contribute senses to our thought in question. Also, just as is required by our syntax that a predicate alone does not make a sentence, then we require something else, either a subject, or another unsaturated concept, or a relation, etc to combine to make a sentence. And each part contributes its part to the sentence which then expresses the thought.

However this seems a little too obvious and so simple a referral to be a suitable consideration as a solution. Perhaps I have not grasped the gravity or complexities of simply relying on syntax to determine how constituents of thoughts may be held together. Furthermore, this would of course not solve much, since the problem of the arbitrariness by which we chose syntax rules arises and we have no absolute reason for why syntax rules should determine how things are ordered and held together. Any suggestions?

Frege and the reductio

2008-10-07T11:56:00.000-07:00

I always seem to get confused when I get just passed the first third of pg 185 of Frege's On Concepts and Object. But there was a reductio raised in an earlier post (Wes) that I agreed with so I will talk about that. It has been summed up a few times already, so I will give a really short interpretation of Frege's argument before the reductio.

All the examples Frege gives seem to imply that anything which can be used as an adjective is a concept, and anything that cannot is an object. Concepts have instances in objects, but objects cannot have instances in concepts. When Kerry objects and says that there are situations where concepts seem to play the part of objects, Frege does two things: 1) he says that because of the inadaquacy of language certain paradox's will arise, 2) that there are situations where second-order concepts can have instances in first-order concepts.

I totally agree with the reductio Wes gives against Frege's work:

1. Frege uses the resources of language to explore language

2. The resources of language are inadaquate to fully explore language

3. Therefore, Frege is unable to fully explore language.

At first I considered, in Frege's defense, that he never actually claimed that he was going to fully explore language. He claimed that it was precisely because of this inadaquacy of language that he would not actually give a definition of his 'bedeutung'; he would only give a feeling of, or clues to, what it is like. Wouldn't this preface have to be applied then to everything that follows in Frege's argument?

4. Frege's concept-object distinction is central to his idea of Bedeutung

5. Frege's idea of Bedeutung is not fully fleshed out or defined, but is still useful

6. Therefore, Frege's concept-object distinction is not fully fleshed out or defined, but is still useful (4,5 MP)

However, upon review I think that 4 is backwards. Frege comes to his idea of what Bedeutung is precisely because of the relations between subjects, predicates, objects, and concepts. His argument for Bedeutung is like this:

7. Objects are incapable of being used as a grammarical predicate themselves.

8. Objects can play a role in part of a concept (ex: "no other than Venus" he says is a concept, and yet 'Venus' is part of that concept).

9. If the whole of the object were in the makeup of a concept, the object would in fact be a concept.

10. If 9, then part of an object must stay wholly an object while said object plays a role in a concept.

The part of the object which can only be an object is called the Bedeutung. This clearly shows that the idea of Bedeutung relies on the concept-object distinction. I cannot really think of a way to defend Frege from the reductio. I think he has to atleast concede that his concept-object distinction is sitting on unsound foundation.

Does this mean that he has to give up his position entirely though? If he admits to the fact that his concept-object distinction does a lot of the work, but is not consistent in a few specific instances where language gets weird and self-reflexive, it still may be a very useful theory. Couldn't you say his theory is workable pending further developments in the constructs of language. Lots of accepted theories rest on unstable grounds, such as the theory of gravity (where what we learn in school breaks down at quantum levels), or even the laws of thermodynamics (in recent cosmological models). What he cannot say however, is that his concept-object distinction is flawless and in no need of further development.

A Comment on Dan's Proposal, and a Question about Frege

2008-10-07T10:41:00.000-07:00

I’d like to comment on Dan’s comment on Dan below, and then pose a question about Frege. Dan’s proposal was that properties are fusions of properties of a certain type, and that Benacerraf worries about which entity is the proposition encoded by a sentence can be avoided if we note that certain complexes of properties have a more legitimate claim to being the meaning of a sentence than others. The proposal has it that the sentence (1)

(1) John loves Jane

encodes a proposition, and that this proposition is a complex C consisting of the properties being-John and loving, loving, and being-Jane and being-loved. Dan noted, correctly, I think, that a view according to which the proposition encoded by (1) is C is still going to be vulnerable to a Benacerraf worry. After the talk on Friday, I asked Dan why he didn’t include the considerations voiced last class about which properties might help the propositionalist avoid this worry. Roughly, the idea was that some properties have a stronger claim to being included in the proposition encoded by (1). If I recall correctly, these were properties such as being John and occupying the first position in the fusion, loving and occupying the second position in the fusion, and being-Jane and occupying the third position in the fusion. Let’s call the complex consisting of these properties C’. It seemed like a view according to which (1) encodes C’ might avoid Benacerraf worries, since now we have a fusion of properties that is relevantly similar to the surface structure of the sentence.

But it seems like this won’t work if we want the same proposition to be encoded by synonymous sentences of distinct natural languages that have different surface grammars. Consider (2) and (3)

(2) Dan is a philosophy student.

(3) Dan-eun chul-hak saeng-ibnida.

(2) and (3) mean the same thing, but they have a radically different grammatical structure (for instance, in (3), the copula is the last term. Were we to translate each term of (3) individually, the English equivalent would be something like ‘It is of Dan that philosophy student he is.’ It won’t do to say that the proposition encoded by (2) is something like a fusion consisting of the properties of being-Dan and occupying the first position in the fusion, being and occupying the second position in the fusion, being a philosophy student and occupying the third position in the fusion, since it would be implausible to hold that (3) encodes this same fusion of properties. But (2) and (3) do mean the same thing; since a propositionalist wants this to be the case in virtue of (2) and (3) encoding the same proposition, this seems like a problem for the proposal.

Frege’s view might be subject to similar worries. Frege holds that (i) proper names express saturated senses; (ii) predicates express unsaturated senses; (iii) BBC is true, and (iv) MC is true. Crucially, with respect to (ii), Frege thinks that the ‘degree’ of unsaturatedness of a sense expressed by a predicate corresponds to the adicity of that predicate. Now, the sense of a sentence is a thought for Frege. If BBC is true, then this means that the thought expressed by (1) is going to be built up out of the senses expressed by ‘John,’ ‘loves,’ and ‘Jane.’ If we let ‘S’ denote ‘sense-of’, the thought expressed by (1) will look something like (T):

(T) {S(John), S(loves), S(Jane}.

On Frege’s account, it is the (doubly) unsaturated sense of ‘loves’ that holds (T) together, in virtue of having the saturated senses of ‘John’ and ‘Jane’ filling in its unsaturated positions. But we might wonder why (T’) is not an equally good candidate for the thought expressed by (1):

(T’) {S(loves), S(John), S(Jane)}.

The reason why (T’) is not a candidate for the thought expressed by (1) is that for Frege, MC is true. And MC tells us that the structure of the words in a sentence mirrors the structure of the thought that it expresses. Since (1) has the structure it does, the thought it expresses must have the structure of (T) and not (T’).

But if MC is true, then it seems like Frege is committed to holding that (2) and (3) express distinct thoughts. Is this a worry?

Soames Represents!

2008-10-06T22:25:00.000-07:00

In Soames' paper "The Unity of the Proposition" he takes up the task of figuring out what the '<', the '>' and the ',' mean when we say . He gives what I take to be a sound refutation of Frege and Russel, and then sketches a view of his own. If I understand Frege and Russel right, I believe they are correct about something that Soames denies. I'll start by reiterating the sketch that Soames lays out.
(S) Propositions are structured entities, the consituents of which are individuals and relations. These consituents compose a special complex C (which is, for Soames, the proposition).
(R) C is the consituents' standing in the R relation to each other.
Soames commits himself to (S) on page 16:
"We retain the idea that propositions are structured complexes, the consituents of which are objects and properties"
Two sentences down he commits himself to (R):
"The complex is, in effect, the standing of the consituents in those relations"

Soames thinks that we use the relation R to represent the way in which the constituents are put together. The idea here is subtle, so let's see if we can tease it out a bit. I'd like to say that for this account to work, the consituents of a proposition must actually stand in the relation R to each other.
1) my bed, the inside of relation, and chaos do not stand in relation R to each other (assume for reductio)
2) (1)->(3)
3) my bed, the inside of relation, and chaos are merely represented as standing in the R relation to each other.
4) ~(3)
5) ~(1)
The idea is, if there is a proposition then if Soames is right it somehow involves them being related by R. However if they do not actually stand in relation R, then they must at least be represented as doing so (premise 2). However, I think if R indeed had this representational capacity, we could do away with it altogether and place that representational capacity on whatever it is we take R to represent. For instance, if R represented predication and R didn't actually hold of the consituents of a proposition, we would be representing the consituents as bearing R to each other, which in turn would represent them bearing the predication relation to each other. It would be much easier just to represent them bearing predication to each other and do away with R. Therefore, I take (4) to be true, and I take Soames to imply that the consituents of a proposition actually do bear R to each other.

So we have that is R(my bed)(in)(chaos). We interpret R to be the predication relation, and thus R(my bed)(in)(chaos) represents that there's chaos in my bed.

So assume (according to this picture) we interpret R to be R' (for instance, R' could be the predication relation). That would be a good band name: "The Predication Relation". Anyway, Soames doesn't assert this, but I would presume than this sort of account would take a proposition Rab to be TRUE iff R'ab. This has some unintuitive consequences. For instance, if we weren't around to represent R as being R', then Rab would have no truth value. Thus, if we weren't around, it wouldn't be true that snow is white etc. This is similar to King's account, and while controversial, not everyone would find it bad. It would however have to exploit the true in/true at distinction.
Also, to avoid some more unintuitive results, this R relation would have to hold of the constituents of propositions necessarily. If it did not, and if the proposition that Fa really was just RFa, then the proposition that Fa couldn't be RFa at a world in which ~RFa for the same reasons that we need RFa to be true here for it to be the proposition that Fa. That that world at which ~RFa could be similar enough for us to use language in pretty much the same way. If this is right, it would be odd that we would use a different R to represent R' in that world.
Admittedly, these are sort of weak jabs at Soames' sketch. The more knee-jerk reaction I had was "I don't use R to represent anything, I don't even know what R is!". So I propose an alternative that more suits my intuitions about what's going on:
I use 'There's chaos in my bed' to represent chaos standing in the inside-of relation to my bed. The sentence is true iff the representation is accurate. 'Yesh balagan b'mita sheli' means the same thing in virtue of representing the same thing. It may be objected "what is this representation you speak of. Surely it's not chaos standing in the inside-of relation to your bed, for in fact chaos does not stand in any such relation." My response would be to say that it's surely possible to have a representation. Soames has one, namely Rcib, where R stands for predication. I would simply have the sentence itself represent, and the proposition be the object of representation (a platonic entity I suppose). So 'There's chaos in my bed' would represent which would be chaos being in my bed. It's false since there's no chaos in my bed (at the moment), though one could say that chaos being in my bed exists (though is perhaps uninstantiated, or doesn't obtain, or something).
Since my view is contrary to that of Soames, I'm sure I've gone wrong somewhere.

A tidbit

2008-10-05T18:20:00.000-07:00

Recall early in the semester we breifly considred a position that identified what is asserted with sentences of a language. The main objection to that position came from the translation principle (the principle that a sentence of a different language can have the same meaning as a sentence in the first language). The objection went as follows:
1) 'There's chaos in my bed' and 'yesh balagan b'mita sheli' assert the same thing
2) A statement of 'yesh balagan b'mita sheli' does not assert 'there's chaos in my bed'
3) A statement of 'there's chaos in my bed' does not assert 'yesh balagan b'mita sheli'
4) (2)&(3)
5) If declarations of sentences assert sentences, then (1)->~(4)
6) ~[(1)->~(4)] (1,4)
7) It's not the case that declarations of sentences assert sentences

The idea behind (5) is that if what is asserted is a sentence, then the most plausible candidate for what is asserted is the sentence used to make the assertion. If this is right, (2) and (3) are plausible. But if (1) is true, and either one of the given sentences must be what is asserted, either (2) or (3) must be false.
One major consideration for accepting (4) is that to choose (2) to be false or (3) to be false would be an arbitrary choice. In other words, there's no principled way to choose what sentence is asserted by a sentence of a given meaning (indeed, what is asserted by ALL sentences with that meaning).
But this is (on the face of it) is just a benaceraf dilema. A proponent of the view could look a few classes forward and say to the proposition theorist that she will face benaceraff dilemas anyway. That is no reason to reject the view at hand.
Obviously the analogy is a bad one, but why?

The Tractatus on Propositions

2008-10-05T12:07:00.000-07:00

I had shared this in an email with Adam, and he suggested I share it with everyone such that we could discuss the useful and not so useful aspects of Wittgenstein's Tractatus as it relates to propositions. I sort of made some references to this work in my last post, so it might be more valuable than ever to post the email:

For fun I thought I'd take another stab at what the Tractatus is all about.

1. There are facts.
2. There are fact-stating propositions.
4. If a fact-stating propositions states a fact that obtains, it is true. If it fails to obtain, it is false.
5. If a sentence doesn't express a proposition it is nonsense.
6. If a sentence expresses a proposition then it is one of two kinds.
7. "This is my hand" states that this is my hand. If this is my hand, then the fact states by the proposition obtains and the sentence expressing the proposition is true.
8. A proposition which states a fact that might or might not obtain has sense.
9. A sentence like (7) isn't nonsense, but it doesn't seem to meet the standards of (8), and is thus senseless.
10. So propositions are either senseless or have sense.
11. So meaningful sentences express propositions.
12. That 1 + 1 = 2 or that A or ~A is the case, these are propositions which are senseless.

So sentences either express propositions or do not; if they state propositions the propositions are either senseless and are analytic truths which are transcendental (necessary in all worlds). So senseless propositions show what is the case but say nothing, while propositions with sense say what is the case and show something as well. Thus, "This is my hand" if true shows that this is my hand, and that this is not a tree. But it only says that this is my hand.

I hope that this is roughly clear. There are fact stating sentences. But that sentence that tell us that isn't fact stating in the same manner. So there are two sorts of propositions which meaningful sentences can express.

Wittgenstein thinks that Frege and Russell should have to adopt a sort of solipsism where the propositions which are Given to us are true. The rest don't fact state! Thus, the only propositions with sense are the immediate propositions, and those are the ones an empirical language uses. So facts are only now, so the world is only now. Thus, talking about the past or future is nonsense, we can only hint at things but cannot explicitly say them.

So basically, Wittgenstein thought that there are fuzzy sentences and clear sentences. Empirical science is concerned with clear sentences. So the only things that it makes sense to talk about are the empirical sciences. Philosophy is a clarification of language because we have to demarcate sense from nonsense, from showing and saying. There is nothing wrong with nonsense because it can provide hints. It can show what cannot be said. Because what can be said are only the propositions of empirical sciences.

Maybe this is all fuzzy still, but I hope it can make some sense. (See, this cannot be clearly stated because it is fuzz and nonsense itself!)

So philosophy for the Tractatus is like a stop-smoking program. I write some stuff, like 12 steps, that the smoker finds informative and meaningful. They learn the steps and then live them. Once they live them, they stop smoking. So the program loses all meaning and can be thrown away. Now that I quite, what need have I of quitting?

Frege Comment Paper

2008-10-05T11:57:00.000-07:00

Frege is concerned with how to explain how the parts of a proposition "hold together". To do this, Frege thinks that we need a distinction between the sense and the referent of a predicate on the one hand, and those of a proper name (singular terms and sentences) on the other.

1. There predicates.
2. There are proper names.
3. The there are senses.
4. There are referents.

We can conclude immediately, given how the terms are introduced:

5. Predicates and proper names are distinct.
6. Senses and referents are distinct.

This means that we can conclude:

7. A predicate has a sense and a referent.
8. A proper name has a sense and a referent.

Frege also holds that:

9. The sense of a predicate is unsaturated.
10. The referent of a predicate is a concept.
11. The sense of a proper name is saturated.
12. The referent of a proper name is an object.

But despite this, it remains a "vexed question" whether or not saturated senses can ever be referents of proper names and so qualify as objects. We certainly have reason to think that unsaturated senses cannot be referents of proper names and so cannot be objects.

This means we have reason to believe the truth of (13):

13. Proper names cannot have as referents unsaturated senses, so unsaturated senses cannot be objects.

But we have to take seriously that:

14. If proper names can have as referents saturated senses, then saturated senses qualify as objects.

But it is not clear that Frege would allow that we can have a proper name which refers to the sense of a proper name, or that we can have saturated senses which are objects. The motivation for (5) would seem to be the same as (6): that something that is a sense is logically ruled out as being a referent, just like something that is a predicate is logically ruled out as being a proper name. But it seems that we could have a sense which is made a referent, even though we cannot have a referent which is made a sense.

Given this rough view, Frege starts by taking singular terms and sentences as basic features of language, characterizing predicates as being an expression obtained by removing one or more occurrences of singular terms.

15. Singular terms and sentences are basic features of language.
16. We can derive predicates as expressions by removing one or more occurrences of singular terms.
17. If we remove one or more occurrences of singular terms, we are left with "gaps" in our language.

Thus, we have something with gaps which need to be filled out to form a sentence.

But we must be careful not to think that the sense of a predicate is something which stands in need of similar completion. Frege retreats to the idea of an unavoidable "awkwardness of language" that limits us severely when we try to apply language to its limits, since we only have meager linguistic resources which we are trying to apply to language itself.

This would seem to set up a reductio of Frege's project.

(18) Frege deploys the resources of language to explore language.
(19) The resources of language are inadequate to fully explore language.
(20) So Frege's theory is unable to adequately and fully explore language.

But Frege sees this "fog of paradox" as nothing against the doctrine engulfed in it, but due to the unspeakable depths being plunged. We just have to accept that language has limitations which inhibit an exploration of its own foundation.

It seems to me that Frege wants to have a nice distinction and clear cut between predicates and proper names, hence (5); and that he would like this nice distinction and clear cut to be mirrored between senses and referents, hence (6). But this nice distinction and clear cut seems to be lacking, since I might refer with a proper name to a sense, thus having something that is a sense, but that is also a referent to something else. And Frege just seems to think this is a general problem when we use language against itself.

This reminds me of two general notions: those of Rorty and those of Wittgenstein's Tractatus.

Rorty attacks metaphysical doctrines, particularly foundationalism and logical atomism, as introducing a notion of "B class entities" which are only meaningful insofar as they are reducible to "A class entities". So everything that is meaningful is reductive to a common base. But, oops, "A class entities" are not reducible to themselves. So the Tractatus makes this sort of mistake by holding that meaningful sentences reduce to atomic sentences, which themselves are not reducible. And hence not meaningful? No, they have to be meaningful in a special way. For Rorty, this shows how flawed and ridiculous the whole enterprise was in the first place. But Frege sounds here like the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus. It's just a general problem with the nature of our investigation, not with the specifics of our investigation itself.

The Wittgenstein of the Tractatus was very Fregean, and I see some interesting parallels. Perhaps in Frege's defense we could appeal to the Tractatus' quietism. There is only so much work that saying can do. The foundation of things is a showing, which is more rich than a saying. Instead of trying to talk about the limits and foundations of language, we should rather realize that we can never have any such meaningful talk; and then this shows us something. We can try to talk and fail, hence the "fog of paradox" due to the unspeakable depths being plunged. But then this "fog" and the "unspeakable depths" make themselves manifest by showing themselves, not by being explicitly said.

So the natural response to Rorty is that "B class entities" are the 'sayers' and the "A class entities" are the 'showers'. So of course the sayers get reduces to the showers, and the showers are irreducible. But then again, this may just seem like a reductio of this way of looking at things. The Wittgenstein of the Tractatus thought it was, and that a Fregean way of looking at things is only useful for bringing up the problems it does in order to show us something unsayable. This was not something Frege understood at all, and if he did understand it I am sure he would not be at all happy with that interpretation.

Objection to Dan's proposal

2008-10-02T18:55:00.000-07:00

My proposal was that propositions are a fusion of properties of a particular type. I'll illustrate with an example:
'John loves Jane' expresses the fusion of the following properties:
Being John&Loving, Loving, being Jane and being loved
I argued that this is a characterization that most accurately describes the meaning of the sentence, and thus is the best candidate for being the proposition.
This too is ambiguous. Consider the following:
The property of being Jane & being loved by John
The property of being John & Loving Jane
These are (prima facie) distinct properties. Each are equally good candidates for being the proposition expressed by 'John loves Jane'. Apply Bennaceraf.
One way to respond is by saying that english doesn't parse things this fine, and that most sentences are ambiguous between a few very related propositions. Another way to respond is to say that despite appearances, the two properties described above are the same. This is totally implausible, since one property is had by John and the other is had by Jane.
I think the moral of the story still stands. A benacceraf dilema only shows that there's a bit more work to do describing the proposition (fully). It doesn't show that there is no proposition. Moreover, we might not even need a full description of the proposition, a partial one will often do. If that's the case, proposition theory stands, and the benacceraf dilema doesn't support any non-existence claims.

Worry about abstract entities #3

2008-10-01T17:23:00.000-07:00

Help me out. I presume that either my methodology is flawed, or my methodology is sound but my analysis lacking, or everything is fine in principle but I am failing to see something apparent.

Let us imagine I have the following sample of things:

▲ ◯ ◼ █ ◣ ◒ ★ ☆ ⚡ ♻ ♫

I should be tempted to introduce a category-term for them, “shape”. So I would introduce a “shape framework” which would function as a sort of kind. Thus in my shape framework I have the following:

▲ ◯ ◼ █ ◣ ◒ ★ ☆ ⚡ ♻ ♫

I guess I’m sympathetic to a distinction between fundamental and superficial existences, since I want to talk about the things in my framework that are models and the things in my framework that are commentaries. Thus the shapes *▲*, * ◯*, *◼*, etc. are models for things in the world, in this case my original sample, and my category term “shape” is in the commentary. Also in my commentary are the names of the shapes, “isosceles triangle”, “circle”, “square”, “rectangle”, “rectangle”, “right triangle”, etc. The wordy bits are in the commentary, the thingy bits are in the model. The thingy bits are ‘fundamental’ in some sense, and the wordy bits are ‘superficial’.

And since I have names for the things, I can introduce terms for the tokens, and also construct for myself token-classes. Thus, I can construct the ‘triangle kind’ which includes:

▲ ◣

The ‘black shape kind’ which includes:

▲ ◼ █ ◣ ★ ⚡ ♻ ♫

and so on. So I have given in my commentary: 1) A name of the type in question, namely shapes. 2) Names for the tokens in question, namely isosceles triangle, circle, square, etc. 3) Names for the token-classes in question, namely black shapes, white shapes, triangles, stars, etc. In my model I have the shapes.

Now I seem to be pretty content with this. I have appealed to types and token classes, but they were pragmatically introduced into my commentary. Maybe I’m just nominalist leaning here. But I imagine a Platonist saying: but you have need of Platonic entities! Don’t you see that the symbols

★ ★ ★

are each instances of the same universal? The universal in question is ★ness, which is instantiated in three locations above!

Maybe I haven’t done a very good job of explaining the Platonist’s position, since I do think that “This is a *★*” is true of the three shapes above. But I don’t see the need for an appeal of a Platonic entity. After all, the first *★* is located to the left, the second is in the middle, the third is to the right. So isn’t there three kinds of *★* in play?

Maybe every shape below is an instantiation of a distinct universal:

▲ ◯ ◼ █ ◣ ◒ ★ ☆ ⚡ ♻ ♫ ♫ ♻ ⚡ ☆ ★ ◒ ◣ █ ◼ ◯ ▲

I presume there will be an appeal that the left-most shape and the right-most shape are of the same kind, namely the ‘▲-kind’. But one is left-most and one is right-most. Why not say that there is a ‘▲-left-most-kind’ and a ‘▲-right-most-kind’? This surely does seem silly. But I don’t see why we shouldn’t say this. We seem to need token-classes here.

I also wonder about shapes in general. If I have a square that is well drawn and a square that is poorly drawn, are each instances of the same universal? Or is there a poorly-drawn-squareness in the one case, and a well-drawn-squareness in the other?

If the universal doesn’t care how well or how poorly a square is drawn, why don’t rectangles count as squares? Why can’t a poorly drawn square that looks more like a trapezoid count as a square?

If the universal does care how well or how poorly a square is instantiated, then it seems we have an infinite degree of squareness. But then how to we stop a slide into every token of anything being an instance of a distinct universal?

I presume that we can bundle general shapes together. Thus, obtuse triangles, obscene triangles and scalene triangles are all triangles. Small squares, large squares and middle-sized squares are all squares. But are we not getting into a relativity to how things appear to me? If I had fuzzy vision, circles and square-like circle-impostors would look the same, and I might think that they instantiate the same universal because they strike me as being of a common and general shape. If I had sharp vision, I would notice that there are no straight lines or right angles, and that Euclidean geometry is false. Then do I have to give up on there ever having been universals for the Euclidean shapes in the first place?

And even if all this can be ignored, how can we ever figure out the fine cuts between instances of triangles of one sort or another and just near cases? How can we divide between when I pile instantiates pileness, and then when reduced instantiates something else?

Perhaps in the case of pileness is problematic in itself, but what of other shapes. I can clearly move pixels a micron this way or that. Does squareness come and go based on these little movement? I presume as well that there are no straight lines, no perfect circles, so wouldn’t we always be stuck with shades of grey?

I could go on and on. I may have gone on too long already. But this really bothers me. I think the modest and tidy framework I had up above avoids these problems. Am I wrong? Or am I right, and the framework is lacking as a result. Or is the notion of Platonism, or something near-to, lurking in the neighborhood?

Explaining A Process of Reasoning, an objection

2008-09-30T23:13:00.000-07:00

Stalnaker proposes that a possible worlds analysis of propositions allows us to escape the dilemma facing reconstructions of arguments used to explain a process of reasoning. The idea is, supposing someone sees a footprint in the sand, and they immediately infer that a person has been walking in the sand within the last few hours, one may explain this inference by constructing a deductively valid argument of this process of reasoning. The restructured argument adds some suppressed premises, e.g. such impressions are made only by human feet, to the explicit premise (the perceptual belief). Now, the dilemma faced by the reconstruction concerns its correctness as an explanation. The suppressed premises must be accounted for, but how exactly must they have entered into the initial inference? The reconstruction either imposes on the agent implausible unconscious processes, or it fails to be an explanation, but is rather a model of how the inference might have happened.

Stalnaker’s account constructs belief states as sets of possible worlds, and individual beliefs as negative properties of belief states. The explanation above is correct, since the belief state will be one relative to which the premise entails the conclusion, and the suppressed premises can be though of as properties of the initial belief, i.e. properties which show that that belief state is one relative to which the explicit premise entails the conclusion. An argument may be extracted for further analysis as follows:

1. if for all possible worlds compatible with the initial belief state of the agent in which the premise is true, the conclusion is also true, then initial belief state of the agent is one relative to which the premise entails the conclusion.

2. The suppressed premises are properties of the initial belief state which show that the belief state is one relative to which the explicit premise entails the conclusion.

3. (1) and (2).

4. if (3) and the initial belief state of the agent contains no possible worlds in which the premises listed are false, then the reconstructed argument is a literal description of the situation.

5. If the reconstructed argument is a literal description of the situation, then it is a correct explanation.

6. The reconstructed argument is a correct explanation.

The objection I wish to raise here concerns the bloated premise (4). Essentially I’ve packed the key properties which an argument must have in order to be considered a correct explanation. A great advantage of this account allows a complicated reconstruction to have many suppressed premises, while still being a literal description – as Stalnaker notes. The problem, however, lies in the multitude of reconstructed arguments that could be assessed as literal descriptions of the situation. The problem, then, is not that it can’t explain the situation, but rather that it has too many explanations.

A weakened Benacerraf dilemma seems to face Stalnaker’s explanations. The suppressed premises may be few in number or many; depending on how complicated we wish to make our explanation. But which explanation is the correct one based on the explicit premise, inferred conclusion, and stipulated suppressed premises? They are all correct, it seems, according to Stalnaker’s account. But that doesn’t seem right. We weren’t hoping to just create an imaginative model of how the inference might have been made, but rather to correctly explain it. But an imaginative model is what we appear to be left with, for the suppressed premises, which show that the belief state is one relative to which the explicit premise entails the conclusion, may be near infinite in number. And since these suppressed premises are what differ from one argument reconstruction to another, then we are left with near infinite possible explanations. A weakened Benacerraf dilemma would conclude that for any explanation, we should not accept it.

The conception of beliefs as negative properties of a belief state was supposed to elucidate this problem of reconstructing arguments. Instead, it has left us with no explanations which we can accept. Perhaps, then, there is something wrong with considering beliefs as negative properties of a belief state.

Maybe some active (not tacit) problems for Stalnaker

2008-09-30T10:13:00.000-07:00

Let me start by briefly summing up my understanding of Stalnaker's position in chapter 5. Stalnaker holds that if we allow the concept of acceptance states which are more fundamental than belief or desire states, then we can explain conflicting beliefs as beliefs held in different acceptance states, and deductive reasoning as the understanding which accompanies the merger of two acceptance states. For the acceptance state hypothesis to be true means that the three conditions Stalnaker lays out on pg. 82 must always be true:

1. If P is a member of a set of accepted propositions, and P entails Q, then Q is a member of that set.

2 If P and Q are each members of a set of accepted propositions, then P & Q is a member of that set.

3. If P is a member of a set of accepted propositions, then not-P is not a member of that set.

I think one of the key claims Stalnaker makes is that acceptance can be compartmentalized. This is also the first thing I would like to question. What gives us the ability to compartmentalize our acceptance states? Is it the fact that we can suspend belief periodically to allow different sets of circumstances (different acceptance states)? For instance, in philosophy we sometimes use extraodinary hypothetical situations which could never actually happen in real life to test a hypothesis. Are we not temporarily suspending our beliefs about the world right now to entertain the beliefs of a different acceptance state? The fact that beliefs could affect acceptance states (and not the other way arround) seems to suggest that beliefs are more fundamental (I'm not sure how Kosher this is).

1. If A causes changes in B, then A is more fundamental than B.

2. Beliefs/desires cause the change in acceptance states.

3. Therefore, Beliefs/desires are more fundamental than acceptance states.

I think another problem with Stalnaker's view is that the problem of Deduction poses a bigger problem than he gives credit. I do not think that his answer of tacit beliefs and active beliefs solves the problem because both are still beliefs that you must actually hold. Hypothetically speaking, what if an acceptance state of mine entailed a belief which I could not hold because we are not sufficiently evolved enough at this point to grasp such a concept? Would that concept still count as a tacit belief?

1. I believe that P

2. P entails that afsoldifjsewoifse (my mind cannot grasp such a concept so I mashed keys)

3. I believe that afsoldifjsewoifse

I realize that the trick here is that I could never find an actual example of this to show Stalnaker because recognizing such an example would mean that I could grasp afsoldifjsewoifse to begin with. I guess you would have to add a premise 4 to the above argument where 4. There exists concepts that my mind cannot grasp which can be logically entailed by my current beliefs.

My last thought is that there seems to be something fishy about having tacit beliefs in a completely closed system of belief (like the one Stalnaker accepts in response to Kyburg's "one single fat statement" objection. Stalnaker embraces the idea that all our inductive knowledge could be represented by one fat statement because it makes for one very thin proposition. Wouldn't you also have to include your tacit beliefs into this huge conjuction? If you do not, then it seems incomplete, and if you do then you cannot avoid the problem of deduction. I think this is the biggest problem Stalnaker faces.

A futile defense of Stalnaker

2008-09-29T23:12:00.001-07:00

Stalnaker seems to have one hell of a time defending his view. I think this is partly due to his view being false (and vague), but let's see if we can help him out anyhow.
Mark Richard has a pretty clever argument against him. He considers an argument, and evaluates Stalnaker's methods of avoiding the deduction problem with respect to it. The argument is as follows (p.14)
(C) Barbers shave only those who do not shave themselves,
(D) The barber Jones shaved all those who attacked Lionel,
(E) Anderson shaves himself

(C&D&E) -> (A)&(C&D&E)
(A) Anderson did not attack Lionel

But also (C&D&E) -> (J)&(C&D&E)
(J) Jones did not attack Lionel.

Richard's argument runs roughly as follows:
(1) Stalnaker's view
(2) (1) -> (3)
(3) deductive inference is acheived when one considers two or more belief states, and integrates them by having as his/her new belief state the intersection of the states considered
(4) (3)->(5)
(5) There is only one deductive consequence of considering (C&D&E)
(6) (A) is distinct from (J)
(7) (A) and (J) are deductive consequences of considering (C&D&E)
(8) ~(6) (5, 7)
(9) (6)&~(6)
(10) ~(1)

I'd like to apologize to Chelsey for my rampant use of reductio.
(2) is supported in Stalnaker, I'll throw in a couple of quotes
"A person may be disposed, in one kind of context, or with respect to one kind of action, to behave in ways that are correctly explained by one belief state, and at the same time be disposed in another kind of context or with respect to another kind of action to behave in ways that would be explained by a different belief state."(p.83)
And Richard quoting Stalnaker:
"There may be propositions whose truth might be discovered by a purely deductive inquiry... The thesis [is] that acquiring deductive knowledge is putting one's seperate belief states together"
(4) is derived by presuming that the only (or best) way of integrating one's beliefs is to take the intersection of them (the possible worlds). This is the natural way of looking at belief integration under this model, and moreover it's not clear how else one could integrate beliefs.
(6) is supposed to be obvious. Intuitively there are two distinct propositions under question. (7) is assumed by hypothesis). The rest follows.

I believe Stalnaker already has a response to this up his sleeve. Recall Stalnaker chapter (4), in which he discusses the sentence 'Jim is a doctor' as said in the mouth of a child and an adult. I left that paper at school, so I won't quote. However, Stalnaker seems to have the view that the child does not understand the propositions that Jim is a doctor as well as an adult because there are many situations under which the adult could determine the truth value of the proposition, but the child could not. For instance, if the child is unaware that philosophers are Doctors (or has some dim notion of it) then the child wouldn't know the truth value of the proposition if Jim had been a philosopher.
This is all kind of rough and ready, and I think it conflicts with other things Stalnaker says, but let's run with it. On this picture the child and the adult are actually grasping (understanding, whatever) a different set of worlds when considering the proposition that Jim is a doctor. This seems a lot like some sort of descriptivism about that-clauses. There's a set of worlds that a speaker associates with a that-clause. If this is true, there can be multiple associations. This could tell against (4). It may be true that one performs deductive inference by taking the intersection of belief states. However, these belief-states don't match up directly to propostions in the ways that (4) requires. When one considers the consequences of (C&D&E), one takes the intersection of the sets of worlds one currently associates with (C&D&E). This set of worlds is not, however, the set of worlds determined by (C&D&E). So for (4) to be false one merely has to make the deduction twice, each time associating (C&D&E) with different sets of worlds.
This sort of approach can also account for deductive error, and various hooded-man type situations. However, the drawback is that it is descriptivism, and falls prey to the 100,000,000 lethal objections to descriptivism. It also makes it nearly impossible for propositions to be shareable.
On a side note, I can't decide whether or not this is actually Stalnaker's view.

An extraction of an argument from Richards and some words about it

2008-09-29T18:22:00.000-07:00

I doubt this will count as a comment paper, but I did the work and thought I may as well share it!

Richards runs an argument of this sort against a possible-worlds semantics, which seems to be the more popular flavor of the 'unstructured proposition theory':

1. According to a possible-worlds semantics, the truth of a valid arguments premises ensures that of its conclusions, and the worlds in which all its premises are true are exactly the world in which all the premises and the conclusion are true.
2. Therefore valid arguments are logical truths. (from 1)
3. Valid arguments are not logical truths.
4. Therefore possible-worlds semantics is false. (from 1 - 3)

I hope that that is structured OK. I really cannot tell!

Richard gives an example with the argument:

Barbers shave only those who do not shave themselves; the barber Jones shaved all the men who attacked Lionel; hence, Jones didn't attack Lionel

which is clearly valid. This of course means that the truth of the premise ensures the truth of the conclusion. This means that the worlds where the premises are true are the worlds where the premises are true and the conclusion is true.

This also means that the intension of:

Barbers shave only those who do not shave themselves, and the barber Jones shaved all the men who attacked Lionel

is the intension of:

Barbers shave only those who do not shave themselves, and the barber Jones shaved all the men who attacked Lionel, and Jones didn't attack Lionel.

But then that means that it is a truth of logic that:

Whoever believes that (barbers shave only those who do not shave themselves, and the barber Jones shaved all the men who attacked Lionel), believes that (barbers shave only those who do not shave themselves, and the barber Jones shaved all the men who attacked Lionel, and Jones didn't attack Lionel).

And as Richard points out, this doesn't seem to be a truth, let alone a logical one.

It seems that the unstructured proposition theorist casts too wide a net. They may go on to offer a more restricted interpretation, but it fails as well. It seems that generally unstructured proposition theories have a heck of a time with deduction.

Concern Post #2

2008-09-27T13:04:00.000-07:00

Maybe I can state my concern over AEs and propositions to a general concern over Types and Tokens.

I seems that Mr. Realist would want to hold that:

red rot rouge

all are instances of the same word-type. The 'redness' type. I'm not totally sure how they would go about expressing this, probably just with saying: these words all express redness. Likewise:

△ ▽ ▷ ► ▼ ◬ ▿ ◿ ▲

all are instances of ▲ity, or triangularity.

Now it seems that Mr. Realist is going to have some problems. Maybe they are just small and bred by my personal confusion. But 'redness' seems to be an English word. If there is an English and a German red-type, this seems to be really the talk of a English and German red-token-class. (Same for the triangle case, with the variety of shapes and designs.) Thus, the Sellarsean move to introduce honest-to-God types: 'red' in English, 'rot' in German, 'rouge' in French all play the same role. Each are •red•s.

Mr. Realist cannot be happy with this, I don't think. Triangularity is supposed to be an abstract entity, not some sort of functional class! Likewise, the sign-designs *△*, *▽*, *▷*, etc. are all of the triangular-kind. Mr. Nominalist wants to say that each shape is called triangular, where Mr. Realist wants to say that each shape is an instance of a three-sided closed-plain figure, i.e. instances of triangularity.

To claim that each shape plays the triangular role, that each is a •triangle• cannot make Mr. Realist very happy at all. We might say that the German 'dreieck' and English 'triangle' each play the same linguistic role: each are •triangle•s. Likewise,

△ ▽ ▷ ► ▼ ◬ ▿ ◿ ▲

are each distinct token-classes of the triangle type. Each shape stands for triangularity, in that: "This is a triangle" is true of each shape.

Mr. Realist cannot seem to be happy about this at all.

It seems that Mr. Realist wants the type to be an entity in the full-blooded sense, distinct from its tokens. The type should be able to be real (or on some accounts, exist) even if its tokens do not exist (or are not real, on those same accounts). To claim that types are only functions seems be incompatible with Mr. Realist's general philosophy. Mr. Realist wants us to have to compare things in the world against things in Platonic heaven to see what they really are. We have to compare instances and exemplifications with the damn Universal! Not with a function!

Certainly we can claim that types or numbers are real, even if they are just functions or structures, but I don't think we are being full-blooded, honest-to-God realists any more. What need have we of Universals when we outsource their explanatory role to functions?

Also, I see a problem in that presumably "the universal blah" and "an instance of the universal blah" seem to be rigid designators, where "the structure that plays the role blah" does not seem to be. Consider:

The killer of Jones is Smith.

It seems that there could be possible worlds where Smith didn't kill Jones. So the killer of Jones isn't a single entity which we can necessarily identify with Smith. Other people could play the killer role. Or no one could. Doesn't the same problem crop up if we want Universals and their instances? It seems that if we appeal to a structuralist account, then in any world, we can literally identify a different entity with the structure! This cannot make Mr. Realist happy at all. That

◣

is an instance of ◣ity seems to be necessary, not just a matter of the shape fitting a role! But this seems to be false, doesn't it.

Help Quell My Concern

2008-09-25T20:51:00.000-07:00

I still am concerned about the Benacerraf Dilemma; that it works.

If we say that there is an entity or a class of entities which are abstract entities or propositions, it seems to me that there has to be a sort of closed criteria to differentiate that single or that single kind of entity. Imagine if we thought that there was such thing as a cat or a kind of thing as cats, but that all sorts of other animals could be identified as cats.

It seems to me like having ten photographs of alleged Sasquatches. Now some true believer wants to say that in any given photo there is a Sasquatch, and in the totality of photos a kind of thing that is a Sasquatch. If the skeptic says: That could be anything in the photo!, can the true believer really get away with saying: Oh well, I guess there is a Sasquatch structure or function which many different things and kinds of things can fill! This seems absurd.

Or imagine finding a dead body. This seems like compelling proof of a murder to the conspiracy theorist. He can construct a theory based on evidence to identify the murderers as Smith or Jones. But the skeptic can point out that the theory is so loose that anyone can fit this role. There are alternative explanation for the dead body for the skeptic. There is no single killer here, nor even a single kind of killer for this body.

If "The dude who wrote Naming and Necessity", "One half of Kripkenstein, the half who isn't Wittgenstein", and "Saul Kripke" are all equally good linguistic representations of Saul Kripke, don't we have to abandon the notion that there is a single linguistic representation of Kripke, or a single kind of linguistic representation of Kripke? I'm not even sure that there is a single type or class of linguistic expressions that pick out Kripke. There are many equally good linguistic representations, many equally good kinds of linguistic representations.

This all seems like a Wittgensteinean move against Universals, with the example of what makes all games games. It seems there is just a family resemblance, a messy cross-section of related but distinct criteria. If we can say that there are cat entities and a kind of entities that are cats, we surely avoid the B.D. If we cannot say that there are proposition entities and a kind of entities that are propositions in the same manner, we should probably drop the notion that they are entities like cats are entities. I don't see this as overly devastating except to Platonism, which is false anyhow.

Thoughts?

King vs Schiffer

2008-09-23T15:31:00.001-07:00

At the beginning of chapter 4 of his book, King is mainly concerned with Stephen Schiffer's objection to structured propositions. He writes the objection out as follows:

(1) If any theory of structured propositions is true, then (a) 'barks' in Ralph believes that Fido barks' functions as a singular term whose referent is a constituent of the structured proposition to which the that-clause refers.

(2) If (a), then the following inference is valid:
Ralph believes that Fido barks
Therefore, (Something Exists x)(Ralph believes that Fido x)

(3) But the inference isn't even coherent, let alone valid.

(4) Therefore, No theory of structured propositions is true.

King's method of rejecting this objection is to find a way to reject (1). To do this he gives three statements which are entailed by Schiffer's argument. The successful rejection of any of these three statements, according to King, results in the defense of Structured Proposition Theory (SPT). I will give the first two claims, but no the third because I am not concerned with it at this time:

i) Structured proposition theorists, including Russellians, are committed to the claim that the referent of a that-clause is determined by the referents of the expressions in it and how they are combined syntactically (CH), and so all the expressions in a that-clause (including 'barks' in 'that Fido barks') must be referring expressions.

ii) STPs, including Russellians, are committed to the claim that that-clauses are referring expressions.

King states that in order to disprove (i) all you need to do is disprove (ii) because (i) is entailed by (ii). King's argument against (ii), as far as I can tell, is that instead of referring expresions, you can hold that a belief ascription such as 'Lucy believes that Fido barks' is true iff Lucy stands in the belief relation to the proposition that Fido barks. In this case no referring expression is needed.

Basically, King showed that there actually are that-clauses which are not referring expressions.

a) Belief ascription that-clauses ('Lucy believes that Fido barks') are not referring expressions

b) If (ii), then all that-clauses are referring expressions

c) (a), therefore ~(ii)

The reason that I focused on King's argument against (ii) is that I think there might be something fishy about it. You would think that if it were as simple as it appears above to reject (ii), Schiffer, a University level academic, would not have committed himself to such a vulnerable premise. I think the error in King's argument must lie in the nature of Belief ascription that-clauses. It does not look like they are the same type of that-clauses which Schiffer is talking about in his descriptions (even though according to Schiffer type of that-clause shouldn't matter because of how he thinks all SPT's fall prey to his objection).

I am also curious about this belief relation which King has no problem incorporating into his structured proposition theory. On page 103 King described the things, according to SPTs, that the constituents of propositions are: "objects, properties, and relations". It kind of seems like squeezing beliefs into the equation is cheating a bit. Obviously, either belief imports something into propositions which stands in the place of referring expressions (which I think King would agree with) or it is not the type of that-clause proposition Schiffer is objecting to. Other that this semi-objection to King, I think I mostly agree with his rejection of Schiffer's referrent expressionism objection.

One last note. Both Schiffer and King use variations of (2) to support their objection.

(2) Ralph believes that Fido barks, therefore (something exists x)(Ralph believes that Fido x)

Schiffer calls it incoherent and invalid. I can't figure out why this is such a problem though. Schiffer especially confuses me on the issue because of his insistence on how 'barks' is a singular term with the co-referential expression 'the property of being a barker'. So the claim above is (something exists (the property of being a barker))(Ralph believes that Fido barks ('barks' is co-referential with 'the property of being a barker' and so can be substituted in for grammarical correctness). I just don't see why this is "incoherent and invalid.

A possible worlds analysis argument, and an objection

2008-09-23T10:55:00.001-07:00

Stalnaker suggests that the possible worlds analysis of propositions will correctly interpret our intuitions about attributions of tacit, or presupposed, beliefs. We may conclude, for example, that someone literally believed a tacit or presupposed belief. However, under a linguistic view of content, according to which beliefs are sentence-like representations of propositions, we should have to concede that our attributions are not literally correct. The linguistic view, in this case, may be taken to assert the following:

1. Our beliefs are sentence-like representations of propositions.

2. If (1), then our minds must represent our beliefs

3. Our minds must represent our beliefs.

4. But, our minds are finite.

5. (1) and (2) and (3). (triple conjunction, but for brevity’s sake, let’s suppose it happened in sequence)

6. If (1) and (2) and (3), then it is not the case that our minds can represent an infinite amount of beliefs

7. If it is not the case that our minds can represent an infinite amount of beliefs, then our minds cannot represent all of the tacit beliefs we take for granted

8. If our minds cannot represent all of our tacit beliefs we take for granted, then the belief attributions of tacit beliefs are not literally correct.

9. So, if (1) and (2) and (3), then the belief attributions of tacit beliefs are not literally correct. (from 5-8)

10. Therefore, the belief attributions of tacit beliefs are not literally correct.

Stalnaker wants to reject premise (1). His suggestion is that if (7) is correct, then, we should not conceive of belief as sentence – like representations of propositions. His alternative conception of beliefs goes as follows:

11. If attitudes are primarily attitudes to possible states of the world, then a belief state can be represented as a set of possible worlds and to believe that P is to be in a belief state that lacks any possible world in which P is false.

12. If a belief state can be represented as a set of possible worlds and to believe that P is to be in a belief state that lacks any possible world in which P is false, then the finite mind could have an infinite number of separate beliefs.

13. if the finite mind could have an infinite number of separate beliefs, then the mind can literally believe all of the tacit beliefs we take for granted.

14. if the mind can literally believe all of the tacit beliefs we take for granted, then the belief attributions of tacit beliefs is literally correct.

15. So, if attitudes are primarily attitudes to possible states of the world, then the belief attributions of tacit beliefs is literally correct.

16. Attitudes are primarily attitudes to possible states of the world.

17. Therefore, the belief attributions of tacit beliefs are literally correct.

18. If (16) and (17), then (1) is false.

Hopefully this does some justice to Stalnaker’s argument against the Linguistic view of propositions, though I would appreciate some feedback. My argument notwithstanding, I would like to continue to evaluate Stalnaker’s possible worlds analysis of propositions. Stalnaker’s view holds that to believe P is to be in a belief state which lacks any possible world in which P is false. What I would like to propose is that this conception of beliefs is inadequate to explain one of our less desirable traits, that is, our ability to hold two contradictory beliefs (e.g. God exists, and God does not exist). What believing two contradictory beliefs would entail under his view, it seems, is that one represents both a world in which P is true, and a world in which not-P is true, or that P is false. But this cannot happen, since to believe that P is to be in a belief state which lacks any possible world in which P is false. Contradictory beliefs are necessary falsehoods, so let’s turn briefly to what he has to say about such matters.

Stalnaker discusses a problem for his view: if mathematical truths are necessary, then there can be no doubt about the truth of the propositions themselves. So, everyone must know that mathematical propositions which are necessarily true are true (or that those which are necessarily false are false). The problem, however, lies in our inability to know right away that some given mathematical statement which is necessarily true or false is true or false. Stalnaker locates the problem in the difficulty in our assessing which proposition is being expressed by a mathematical statement (especially if it is sufficiently complex). The objects of belief in these cases, then, are propositions about the relation between statements and what they say. Such a person’s belief, according to Stalnaker, would consist in a proposition about the relation between the statement, “God exists and God does not exist”, and the necessarily false proposition P and not P. Such a person (I am supposing) would know all the relevant information about that the relation between the statement and the false proposition. Their knowing this is not in doubt. But, just because their beliefs consist of propositions about the relation between the statement and the necessarily false proposition does not appear to explain anything about how a person can hold two contradictory beliefs. My suggestion is that there appears to be something wrong with his analysis of the content of beliefs in mathematical truths and falsehoods. And if we must rely on his previous concept of beliefs as properties of belief states, we are no better off. However, perhaps I have missed Stalnaker’s point, as may be evident, so perhaps this is not a problem for his view after all.

Soames and King are friends

2008-09-22T21:51:00.000-07:00

After reading the Soames article I noticed a few parallels between it and what was going on in King chapter 4. I'll reconstruct a simple version of Soames' argument, note some considerations from King, and then see if a moral can be drawn.
So, here's the digression from Soames as to what an unstructured proposition would be like. First, we have to build a language. Suppose we have a domain D which is a set populated with individuals {d1,d2,...}. Next, we have a stock of predicates of varying addicity. We would have a stock of constants which would function like proper names, directly referring to a single member of the domain. We would have a stock of variables, which would also refer to a single member of the domain. Logical connectives and quantifiers would work as expected.
An interpretation would assign members of the domain to the constants, and there would be another assignment function assigning members of the domain to the variables.
At first glance, the unstructured propositions advocate "UPA" would equate the proposition expressed by a sentence in the language with the set of complete and consistent interpretations which make that sentence true. This won't work because all necessary propositions would be equated, and all necessarily false propositions would be equated. So the next move is to drop the completeness requirement. There may be some n-place predicate P and some set of n individuals {n1,n2,...} such that the interpretation doesn't make Pn1n2... true, but it doesn't make Pn1n1... false either. This still has the consequence of making all necessarily false propositions be the same. The next step is to drop the consistency requirement. So, an interpretation may assign Pn1n2... true, AND it may assign Pn1n2... false. So why isn't this a fine-grained enough notion to act as propositional content? Here's where the argument comes in. Consider Soames's (7)(p.205-206)
(^ signs will act as corner quotes here)
(7a) The semantic content of a conjunction (relative to a context) is the intersection of the semantic content of the conjuncts (relative to a context)
(7b) The semantic content of a disjunction (relative to a context) is the union of the semantic contents of the disjuncts (relative to a context).
(7c) The semantic content of an existential generalization ^for some x: Fx^ is the set of circumstances E such that for some object o in E, o “is f” in, or relative to, E.
I won't need (7d) and (7e) here. It's worth noting that the UPA needs some clause like (7) to account for the semantic content of complex sentences. Here's a simplified version of Soames' argument:
(1)A proposition is a set of fine-grained interpretations that abide by (7a-c) (assume for reductio)
(2)Proper names directly refer
(3)belief is a relation between an individual and a proposition expressible as 'Rap' which is itself a sentence of the language
(4)Lois believes that Clark can't fly and that Superman can fly.
(5)Lois believes the set of interpretations that makes 'Clark can't fly and Superman can fly' true (1,3,4)
(6)Clark is necessarily identical to Superman
(7)The situations that make 'Clark can't fly and Superman can fly' true are just those situations in which Kelal (who is Superman/Clark) is in the extension of the predicate can fly and in the extension of the predicate can't fly (2,6,7a)
(8)Lois believes the situations in which Kelal is in the extension of the predicate can fly and in the extension of the predicate can't fly (3,5,7)
(9)Lois believes the set of interpretations in which Clark can't fly, Superman can fly, and there is something such that it can't fly and it can fly (3,8,7c,7a)
(10)Lois believes that Clark can't fly, Superman can fly, and there is something such that it cant' fly and it can fly (1,9)
(11)~(10)
(12)(10)&~(10)
(13)~(1)
Soames doesn't spend much time defending (2) and (3). Luckily, Soames has another version of the argument that doesn't include (2), and King spends a great deal of time defending (3). I already wrote a post about King's defense of (3), so I'll cheat here and leave that aside. (2) is a fairly trivial consequence of Millianism.(4) and (6) are stipulated.
(5) follows from (1), (3) and (4) because on the view we're considering, the proposition which Lois believes just is the interpretation described in (5). (3) comes in to complete the picture by saying Lois's belief is correctly described as a relation between her and a proposition. Let Lois be l, and the believes relation be B. If Blp and p=p' then Blp'. So we can legitimately move from the fact that Lois believes that Clark can's fly and Superman can fly to her bearing the believing relation to the thing that is the proposition that Superman can fly and Clark can't fly (I.e. the situations that make it true). It's worth noting that if the relational account of propositional attitude verbs wasn't correct (for instance, if it were a 3 place relation involving modes of presentation) this move wouldn't work.
The inference to (7) is justified from (2),(6) and (7a). (2) states that if a proper name is used, the semantic content is just its referent. The referent of Clark and Superman is Kelal. (6) could've been rephrased as 'Clark and Superman both refer to Kelal', or something like that. (7a) states that when you have a conjunction, the semantic content is just those interpretations that make both conjuncts true. The state that makes 'Clark can't fly' is the state involving Kelal (premise (2)) being in the extension of can't fly. Likewise, 'Superman can fly' is the state involving Kelal being in the extension of can fly. The situation that makes both of those true is the one in which Kelal is in the extension of can fly and in the extension of can't fly. It's also worth nothing that without (2) this move wouldn't work. For instance, it could be held that the semantic content of names are descriptions that only derivatively refer to their referents. If this were so, then under different interpretations each name could change its referent. This would allow for an interpretation in which 'Clark' and 'Superman' don't co-refer.
(8) follows from (3), (5) and (7). (5) states that Lois believes a particular interpretation. (7) describes that same interpretation in different terms. (3) licenses the inference that therefore Lois believes the newly described interpretation (which is really the same as the old one). (9) is justified in a similar way as (8), invoking 7a and 7c to construct a different description of the interpretation that Lois believes. Note that 'there exists something which can fly and which can't fly' is a consequence of 'Kelal can fly and Kelal can't fly'. That means the latter claim is a subset of the existential claim. Since & denotes the intersection of the two propositions, adding '& there exists something which can fly and can't fly' won't change the set of situations reffered to. (10) finaly states the conclusion that Lois believes the interpretation under this new implausible description.
It should be noted that Soames reproduces the argument with no proper names (using demonstratives instead). This means a Fregian is not immune from this argument by denying (2). A Fregian might deny that demonstratives directly refer, but it's hard to see how one would do that. The major heavy-lifting premise in here is (3).
Aside from his rather extensive treatment of (3), King has an argument similar to this one against FC. Cresswell says that FC combined with a few other principles leads to the conclusion that propositions are unstructured. Let's look at FC again:
FC: The semantic value of a whole sentence is obtained by functions which are the semantic values of parts of that sentence operating on the semantic values of other parts. (p.113)
Take a look at Soames's 7a-7e, and then take a look at FC. Eureka! 7a-7e is just a more precise version of FC. 7a-7e gives rules for determining the semantic value of a sentence, based on functions which are themselves semantic values of parts of that sentence.
King argues against FC, again using (3). He makes reference to a particular sentence:
(17)That first order logic is complete is necessarily true and believed by Cresswell.
He sets thing up:(117)
“A verb of attitude is more than the intension of the sentence if embeds”
and strikes:
“it would seem that being necessary and being true must also be predicated of a structured entity in (17). But then it would appear that natural language sentences containing that-clauses in which truth or modality is ascribed, as well as sentences containing verbs of propositional attitude, must have parts whose semantic values are structured meanings or structured propositions”
King takes the argument I think one step further than Soames, offering an explanation for its conclusion. When we speak of propositions, predicating truth or necessity to them, we're simply not talking about interpretations, or truth-supporting circumstances. The proof is that if we assume we are (by assuming either 7a-7e or FC) then the truth conditions are just wrong.
The only way I can see to escape this argument is to deny the relational analysis of propositional attitude verbs.

An Objection from Stalnaker, and a Reply

2008-09-21T20:44:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure if this will work. Let me know what you think.

The linguistic picture of content (LP) can be characterized as the conjunction of the following two theses:

(T1) The structure of an attitude ascription ^a v’s that P^ mirrors the syntactic structure of a sentence used to ascribe the belief that P to a.

(T2) The structure of an object of belief, P, mirrors the syntactic structure of those elements of sentences that are used to designate P.

If (LP) is true, then it seems to follow that propositional attitude ascriptions describe relations holding between agents and determinate, sentence like objects. The inference would basically look like this:

(i) If (LP) is true, then [the structure of an attitude ascription ^a v’s that P^ mirrors the syntactic structure of a sentence used to ascribe the belief that P to a] and [the structure of an object of belief, P, mirrors the syntactic structure of those elements of sentences that are used to designate P].

(ii) If [the structure of an attitude ascription ^a v’s that P^ mirrors the syntactic structure of a sentence used to ascribe the belief that P to a] and [the structure of an object of belief, P, mirrors the syntactic structure of those elements of sentences that are used to designate P], then an attitude ascription of the form ^a v’s that P^ expresses a relation between a and a determinate, sentence like object o.

(iii) So, if (LP) is true, then an attitude ascription of the form ^a v’s that P^ expresses a relation between a and a determinate, sentence like object o.

On 64/65, Stalnaker describes a case of propositional attitude ascription. If his description accurate, we have a counterexample to the principle expressed in the consequent of (iii), which would entail the falsity of (LP) (and hence the falsity of either (T1), (T2), or both, assuming that (LP) is meant to hold in all cases of attitude ascription). Here’s a version of the argument he runs.

Consider the following two true propositional attitude ascriptions:

(A1) Dan believes that Godel’s first incompleteness theorem is true.

(A2) Baby logic Bob believes Godel’s first incompleteness theorem is true.

(1) (A1) and (A2) are true attitude ascriptions.

(2) If (1), then, if an attitude ascription of the form ^a v’s that P^ expresses a relation between a and a determinate, sentence like object o, then there exists a (unique) determinate, sentence-like object o such that Dan believes o and Bob believes o.

(3) So, if an attitude ascription of the form ^a v’s that P^ expresses a relation between a and a determinate, sentence like object o, then there exists a (unique) determinate, sentence-like object o such that Dan believes o and Bob believes o. (1,2)

But consider what Dan and Bob are able to infer on the basis of the beliefs attributed to them in (A1) and (A2), respectively. Presumably, Dan is able to infer all kinds of stuff, while Bob is able to infer next to nothing. We infer that while Dan fully understands the content of his assertion, Bob does not.

(4) Dan fully understands the content of his assertion.

(5) Baby logic Bob does not fully understand the content of his assertion.

(6) [(4) & (5)]

(7) If (6), then it is not the case that there exists a (unique) determinate, sentence-like object o such that Dan believes o and Baby logic Bob believes o.

(8) But if that’s right, then it is not the case that an attitude ascription of the form ^a v’s that P^ expresses a relation between a and a determinate, sentence like object.

(9) And if that’s right, then (LP) is false.

(10) So, (LP) is false. (6-9, iii)

I think there is at least one way out of this problem for the structured propositionalist. They can block the argument in premise (7), by denying the consequent of that conditional, and say the same thing in this case that they say when faced with problems posed by the substitution of co-designative proper names in propositional attitude contexts. One way to do this is to analyze an attitude ascription of the form ^a v’s that P^ as expressing a two place relation (v) that holds between a and P iff a three place relation holds between a, P, and some mode of presentation of P. If we construe a mode of presentation as a set of propositions that one is able to infer on the basis of believing P, we can see how it is that Dan and Bob are in a position to infer different things on the basis of standing in a two place relation of belief to P. They can do this because each of them stands in a two place relation of belief to P in virtue of being one of the relata of a three place relation holding between themselves, P, and some mode of presentation of P, where the mode of presentation of P in each of their respective cases is not the same.

Stalnaker Comment Paper

2008-09-20T15:30:00.000-07:00

1. It is an apparent fact that Frege's left earlobe is smaller than Big Ben.
2. If asked (even by himself) if Frege's left earlobe is smaller than Big Ben, Russell would assent.
3. If asked (even by himself) if he believed that Frege's left earlobe is smaller than Big Ben, Russell would assent.
4. If Russell was not asked (even by himself) if Frege's left earlobe is smaller than Big Ben, he could not assent.
5. If Russell was not asked (even by himself) if he believed that Frege's left earlobe is smaller than Big Ben, he could not assent.
6. If (2) and (4), then (7).
7. If Russell was not asked (even by himself) if Frege's left earlobe is smaller than Big Ben, he would not be able to believe it.
8. If (3) and (5), then (9).
9. If Russell was not asked (even by himself) if he believed that Frege's left earlobe is smaller than Big Ben, he would not be able to believe it.
10. If (1) and (7), (or if (1) and (9) ), then (11).
11. The belief that Frege's left earlobe is smaller than Big Ben is apparent, it is only a potential belief.
12. Russell's mind is just not big enough to store representations for all of the trivial and obvious facts that he takes for granted.
13. If (11) and (12), then (14).
14. For a potential belief to be actualized, potential believers must be asked (even by themselves) if they believe a potential belief.
15. Conclusion: Russell only has a potential belief that the apparent fact that Frege's left earlobe is smaller than Big Ben is true.

Stalnaker believes that someone who models beliefs on sentence-like representations of propositions must give this answer. But he points out that apparent beliefs cannot be merely potential beliefs, because they may still play an actual psychological role in the believer's actions and reasoning even if the believer never entertains the proposition.

To deny 15, Stalnaker suggests that we should adopt a pragmatic picture of belief. We should conclude that literally Russell does believe that Frege's left earlobe is smaller than Big Ben.

16. In some contexts, Russell's attitude towards a proposition may presuppose another proposition, or take it for granted.
17. If (16), then that presupposition was available to play the same role as his belief in the explanation of his behavior.
18. If (12), we should deny that a state of knowledge or belief as something with propositions as components at all.
19. Rather, attitudes should be seen as being primarily attitudes towards possible states of affairs of the world and not to the propositions that distinguish between those states.
20. Therefore, a belief state can be represented as a set of possible worlds. To believe that P is for the proposition that P to be true in all possible worlds in the belief state.

On this conception, beliefs are something negative: to believe that P is simply to be in a belief state which lacks any possible world which P is false. We can understand how a person has beliefs by default, or even if they are unimaginative.

Stalnaker considers an objection to (20): there surely area an infinite number of possible worlds compatible with anyone's belief state. He accepts this, but adds that a believer's representation of a space of possible worlds need not distinguish between them all; just as a finite perceiver might see a space which consists of an an infinite number of points. So too may a finite believer represent a space of possible worlds which in fact consists of an infinite number of possible worlds.

As for my 10¢, I'm happy to accept 15. I don't see why they should be given up. It seems intuitive to me that beliefs are something involving awareness. Jones may act in accordance with a rule or with his believing something, yet be unable to ascribe to himself his own rule-following or believing. He is, as it were, apeing or simply going through the motions. I think that one's acting like one believes isn't enough to make one an actual believer. I may be tempted to ascribe to Jones or a dog that they have a belief or know something given instances of behavior or whatever which I take to be actions that are in accordance with a rule or belief, but I think that self-ascription is important to differentiate a iron filing being attracted to a magnet, a thermometer rising when heated, or a dog digging for a bone from a contemplative and reflective Russell or Jones.

I think that we must deny that Russell literally believed the apparent belief that Frege's left earlobe is smaller than Big Ben, even if Russell's belief states were compatible with only worlds where Frege's left earlobe is smaller than Big Ben. I presume that Russell didn't speak Egyptian or Cree, so it seems plainly absurd to think that he literally believes all sorts of Egyptian or Cree sentences because they are compatible with his belief states. Russell never entertained such sentences anymore than the proposition that Frege's left earlobe is smaller than Big Ben. So how could he literally believe it?

I suppose someone like Stalnaker may think: "If Russell would assent to the sentence "Russell believes that P" this shows that Russell believes that P, and that Russell believed that P before he was asked." But I'm inclined to think: "If Russell would assent to the sentence "Russell believes that P" this shows that Russell believes that P, but that Russell did not occurrently believe that P before he was asked. Perhaps in some sense Russell was disposed to believe that P, but this isn't enough for him to literally believe that P."

A Kantian Benacerraf

2008-09-19T19:33:00.000-07:00

Might a Kantian improve the argument:

1) The forms of human experience are space and time
2) If abstracta / noumena exist, they exist entirely outside of space and time
3) ( (1) & (2) ) → (4)
4) Humans cannot have knowledge of abstracta / noumena because they are situated outside of human experience
5) If Platonism / noumenal realism is true, then ~(4)
6) Platonism / noumenal realism is not true.

It seems that we might conclude that transcendental idealism is the best we can do. This leaves open a heavy instrumentalism for AE, or a pragmatic justifications of AE.

Now, an obvious Sellarsean move is to deny (4) because it equates knowledge to some sort of empirical conception of knowledge. Just because noumena are located outside of human experience doesn't mean that we cannot know about them. An ABE or hypothetico-deductive argumentation might fit the bill. We then would still have room for a transcendental realism about noumenal entities, given that our scientific realism is radical and critical enough to allow it.

But, this being said, if we move to a transcendental realism which is sufficiently radical and critical, we may well face something like the original Benacerraf Dilemma, since such a critical and radical scientific realism presumably wants to still be in some sense physicalist about events and things. I certainly would want to resist Platonism, even if I deny the empiricism Kant uses to motivate (4). Platonic realism just seems to be plain old idealism to me.

Thoughts?

Einstein and Benacceraf

2008-09-18T17:06:00.001-07:00

The improved benacceraf epistemological argument went something like this:
1) humans exist entirely in space-time
2) if abstracta exist, they exist entirely outside of space-time
3) ((1)&(2))->(4)
4) it's likely that humans cannot have knowledge to abstracta
5) if platonism is true then ~(4)
6) platonism is not true

Consider the following argument that the previous argument is unsound:
1') humans exist entirely in the present
2') future events exist entirely outside the present
3') ((1')&(2'))->(4')
4') it's likely that humans cannot have knowledge of the future
5') ~(4')
6') (4')&~(4')
7') ~(1')v~(2')v~(3')
8') (7')->(9')
9') ~(1)v~(2)v~(3)

The claim is that (1')-(3') lead to absurdidty, and if this is right there must be something wrong with (1)-(3). Wes argued that (3') is false, since there's a way of knowing about the future. We simply reflect on the upstream causation that we've become aquainted with, and project that downstream. However, (3) can still be true, since there's no straitforward way of predicting what abstracta are like. I countered by saying that since causation makes sense only when looking at multiple times, (1') prevents us from knowing about causation as well (a similar argument could be formulated against knowledge of causation, instead of knowledge of the future). Appeal to memories doesn't seem to work, because if that's allowed then appeals to beliefs should be as well, and that would put pressure on (3). It was then considered that humans might be 4 dimensional time-worms, and thus (1') could be false. I countered that the argument could be run, not about humans, but about time-slices of humans. Hence the new absurdity would be that there's no human timeslice that knows anything about causation or the future (we don't know about the future or causation at any time). Curtis noted that I'm relying heavily on the notion of the present (in the first case) and on the notion of a timeslice (in the second case). Special relativity holds that there's no absolute present to appeal to, and similarly a timeslice in one inertial reference frame might be a 4-d time worm in another inertial reference frame. Thus appealing to timeslices is no good either. I believe I can counter this (blow the whistle on me if I'm doing any of this wrong Curtis).
Spacetime even A can cause spacetime event B iff B is in the future light-cone of A. Again, correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe if this relation holds between B and A, then B and A are said to be timewise seperated from each other. If neither B nor A is in the others future light-cone, then they are said to be spacewise seperated from each other. If they're right on the border, they're said to be lightlike seperated from each other. Ok so far?
So consider the huge 4-d mass of points that a human occupies. We can collect something that will act like a time-slice (for our purposes) by choosing a set of them that intuitively correspond to a complete body, such that no two of them are timelike seperated. By hypothesis, no two of these points are in a position to be causally related. Furthermore, that's an absolute, there's no reference frame in which they could be causally related.
I only need the claim that such a set of points exists that corresponds to a complete body. Then I can run the same argument about this entity to the effect that it cannot know anything about causation. Since it corresponds to an entire human body (and supposedly brain) then it will do for a timeslice that should know about causation, but does not not bennaceraff sorts of reasons.
I can think of a response or two to this, but I think I'll stop here.

Question for Dan

2008-09-18T16:56:00.001-07:00

So the original argument does run:

1) humans exist entirely in space-time
2) if abstracta exist, they exist entirely outside of space-time
3) ((1)&(2))->(4)
4) it's likely that humans cannot have knowledge to abstracta
5) if platonism is true then ~(4)
6) platonism is not true

But for (1) and (2) you substitute 'space-time' for 'the present'. Thus:

1') humans exist entirely in the present
2') future events exist entirely outside the present

But it seems to be that (1') and (2') are counterparts not of (1) and (2) but:

A) humans exists entirely here
B) if abstracta exist, they exist entirely outside of here

Which seems to be a queer formulation. I think that being in the present 'time-wise' is the equivalent to being here 'space-wise'. If you are in the present, you are located in a segment of time. If you are here, you are located in a segment of space.

Is this ok? It seems that instead of (1') and (2') we should write (A') and (B'):

A') humans exist entirely in time
B') future events exist entirely outside time

where B') is false. I think that even if (1') is the correct rendering, it is false. Consider Wes qua spacetime worm. I exist in the present, where the present is Sept. 19, 2008 @ 11:10am. If we roll back the present to Sept. 19, 2007 @11:10am I exist there as well. Now, I don't exist if we roll back the present to Sept. 19, 1983 @11:10am, since I wasn't born yet. If we roll the present to Sept. 19, 2999 @11:10am I won't exist here either, But from the time I was born until I die, any segment of time we want to make the present, I exist.

Am I correct to see a disanalogy here? Or, if there is no disanalogy, that (1') is false?

A Wes Musing

2008-09-18T16:56:00.000-07:00

In Time and the World Order Sellars writes:

"Now in the thing framework it is things which primarily exist, and in the 'event'framework it is 'events' which primarily exist. The contrast, in each case, is between items which are named (by both proper and common names) and the items which are either contextually introduced (e.g., events in the thing framework, and 'things' in the 'event'framework) or are at bottom linguistic entities (thus qualities, relations, facts)." p.594.

I bring this up for two reasons, both of which I hope are interesting.

1. a. When we talk about spacetime or spatiotemporal locations, do we run into a problem with pure processes? I mean by 'pure' 'objectless'. Sellars is interested to motivate that we may well end up with fundamental processes and not fundamental particles. We always could, as it were, conceptually cut up particles; or we could just focus on an event framework which tracks something like a C# through time.

It seems to me that a C# is an objectless process, just like a lightening flash. I guess, in a sense, a C# C#s, and a lightening-flash lightening-flashes. But even if we grant that in some sense a C# or a lightening flash is an entity, it doesn't seem to be a thing like a table or a chair, or like a electron or molecule.

So: I assume that a pure process is in time, since it is in the event framework. Need it to be in space? I hope it is still in the causal order, even if it is objectless.

2. Sellars seems to have something like Dorr's notion of superficial existence and fundamental existence in mind. In our framework we have a model and a commentary. The linguistic entities that are qualities, relations, facts, etc. are not pictured in the model but are given in the commentary. So it seems we could attribute to them a sort of superficial, albeit highly useful, existence. The fundamentally existing stuff, the events or things of the framework, are given in the model and have a sort of real and physical existence.

Someone who is 'just friends' with propositions might offer such a notion to show that propositions exist, even though they don't have a physical existence. If propositions occur, they may be like pure events and be in some sense objectless and without a spatial location. Does this really matter?

We might imagine:

``````````````````````````````````
````/ \```————————``|||||`````
````\ /`````````B``````````C``````
`````*````````````````````````````
`````*````````````````````````````
`````*````````````````````````````
`````A````````````````````````````

Which is a crude-as-hell model. This is the commentary: A is Jones. B is the 'says' relation. C is the saying 'Hello'. I want to say that the model is in the world, that Jones is in the world, that his saying occurs, and that what he says is in the world. I want to say that Jones has a spatial location, but not so much that his saying or the thing said does.

Might I not give a new commentary: A is Jones. B is the 'thinking' relation. C is the proposition that it is cold. Can't I make the same moves and give us propositions existing? It seems that either the proposition modeled by C is fundamentally real and in the world, or superficially real and in the commentary. It seems to be fundamentally real and in the world to me.

I hope this is not too crude or too obscure. Please tell me what you think.

argument against relational analysis of propositions

2008-09-17T16:57:00.000-07:00

Bach's objection to RABR:
(RABR) verbs of propositional attitudes expresses a relation between persons and propositions; the claim that 'the semantic value of a “That” clause is a proposition': and the claim that in a true belief report, a proposition that the subject of the report believes must be specified.
(1) RABR
(2) (1) → (3)
(3) Propositional attitude verbs take as complements agents and propositions,
(4) The only thing relevant to the truth value associated with a well-formed sentence involving only an agent, a propositional attitude verb and a proposition, is which complements the relation denoted by the propositional attitude verb receives
(5) (3)&(4)
(6) (5) → ~(7)
(7) There is sometimes a change in truth value when substituting a that clause for a proposition description and vice versa, where the TC and the PD denote the same proposition.
(8) ~(7)
(9) (7)&~(7)
(10) ~(1)
This is set up as a reductio to RABR. Not much is said about how this argument is supposed to run, so I formulated an argument that fits neatly to the objections King considers. (1) is assumed for reductio. Part of the thesis of RABR is that propositional attitude verbs are relations between propositions and agents. Thus (2) is true. (4) is intuitively true. If, in fact, propositional attitude verbs are relations between agents and propositions, then the only thing that should matter to the truth value of a simple sentence involving only that relation and two relata, is whether or not the two relata are in fact related via the relations. Premise (6) is supported by the intuitive idea that proposition descriptions and that-clauses sometimes contribute only a single proposition to be evaluated as one of the relata of a propositional attitude verb. That is to say, they play the same role (contributing a proposition as a relata) and that a propositional description is capable to contributing the same proposition as some that-clause. If that's true, then substituting a TC for the appropriate PD should never change the truth value of a sentence. However, in support of (7), there are apparent cases in which substituting a TC for a PD or vice versa changes the truth value of a sentence, where intuitively the TC and PD contribute the same proposition.
King examines an objection to (4) that claims that syntax is also relevant to the truth value of propositions involving attitude verbs (142-143) but claims that the response is uninteresting. It's uninteresting in the sense that it can't explain ALL instances of substitution failure. He then goes on to examine denials of (7). There are various ways he considers of claiming that in instances of apparent substitution failure, the TC and the PD actually don't denote the same proposition (or denote other things as well) (145-146). While formally, it's possible that the TC and the PD don't denote the same proposition, he finds no plausible way of fleshing out the idea. He considers the proposition forms:
7a':[o[R[p]]]
7b':[o[R[q]]]
Where p is a that clause, and q is the corresponding PD, or vice versa. His dilemma is as follows:
(Lettered sentences are not themselves premises in the argument)
(1') 7a' and 7b' diverge in truth value
(2') (1') -> (3')
(3') (A) OR (B)
(4') ~(A)
(5') ~(B)
(6') ~(A)&~(B)
(7') ~(3')
(A) one of p or q determine some entity (or entities) o* in addition to the proposition, and this entity is relevant to the truth value of 7a' or 7b'. (the way the conglomeration is arranged will also be relevant)
(B) 7a' requires for its truth that o, R and p be arranged in one way, and 7b' requires those same things to be arranged in a different way for its truth.
In support of (2), the forms 7a' and 7b' are meant to stand for paradigmatic cases in which two sentences differ in truth value, but differ only in that a TC is substituted for a PD (or vice versa) where it appears the TC and PD denote the same proposition. King claims there are only two ways this could happen. One way is if there is more to the semantic content of the PD or the TC than merely denoting a proposition. This extra addition is denoted by o*. The only alternative King sees is that the TC and the PD make the proposition true or false in different ways, that is, they each require the proposition to be structured differently.
He claims (A) is false, simply because this o* is mysterious and elusive. Furthermore, there's not principled way to decide whether p contributes the o*, or q does. It's a merely ad-hoc construction that avoids the problem instead of addressing it.
He claims that (B) is false. I actually had a tough time phrasing (B) in such a way that it wasn't obviously false. In general, we've been speaking as if the logical structure of the propositions expressed by 7a' and 7b' were simple. In fact they are simple. And there's simply no way of restructuring them in the ways that (B) commands.
You'll notice that the last argument was a reductio of the consideration that 7a' and 7b' diverge in truth value. In fact King things they don't diverge in truth value, if the R remains constant in each case. This bring us to King's solution.
King denies (4), he does this by claiming that some propositional attitude verbs are ambiguous between two relations. So, in a case with apparent substitution failure, the TC is merely forcing one disambiguation of the propositional attitude verb, while the PD is forcing another. So, it's not the case that the only thing relevant to the truth value of the pertinent sentences is which relata the propositional attitude verb receives, it's also relevant which way the propositional attitude verb is disambiguated. He gives lots of independent evidence that these propositional attitude verbs are indeed ambiguous between relations.

Jubien's Second Argument

2008-09-17T00:05:00.000-07:00

Jubien’s second argument against propositions concerns the arbitrary procedure by which we distinguish between propositions of the following sort:

i) All dogs are canines.

ii) All canines are dogs.

These propositions have a subextensive relation, which is the relation between properties expressed by ‘all’ (King, 132). However, the mereological fusion of the constituents of these propositions by itself does not differentiate between (i) and (ii), for they both have the same constituents: being a canine, being a dog, and being subextensive. What we must do is take into account the order of these properties with respect to the relation of subextensiveness. His solution may be abstracted as follows: we may take the property of being the property of being x, the property of being y, and subextensiveness to assert that all x’s are y’s. Therefore, by taking the property of being the property of being x we can distinguish which property is subextensive to the other. However, claims Jubien, this account is arbitrary and stipulative, for we could just as well have taken the subextensive property to be the property of being x (while the other is the property of being the property of being y), instead of requiring that it be the property of being the property of being x. Since this appears to show that neither mereological sum has any more claim to being the proposition in question, we are confronted by the Benacerraf dilemma (henceforth B – dilemma). The B – dilemma leaves us with two equally suited entities as propositions with no principled reason to claim one over the other. We may conclude that ontological theories of propositions cannot provide us with an account of what propositions are and hence fail.

Lets extract a logical argument from Jubien’s dialectic:

Lets suppose that z is the mereological sum of the property of being the property of being a dog, the property of being a canine, and subextensiveness. Let us also suppose that z’ is the mereological sum of the property of being a dog, the property of being the property of being a canine, and subextensiveness.

1. z

2. z’

3. if (1), then z is the proposition all dogs are canines (henceforth (i)).

4. if(2), then z’ is the proposition (i).

5. z is the proposition (i).

6. z’ is the proposition (i).

7. (5) & (6)

8. if (7), then there are 2 different mereological sums equally suited to be proposition (i).

9. There are 2 different mereological sums equally suited to be proposition (i).

10. if (9), then there is no principled reason by which we could favour one over the other.

11. There is no principled reason by which we could favour one over the other.

12. If (11), then neither z nor z’ is the proposition (i).

13. Neither z nor z’ is the proposition (i).

14. if (13), then it is not the case that ontological theories of propositions can provide us an account of propositions.

15. It is not the case that ontological theories of propositions can provide us an account of propositions.

King, however, argues against both 3 and 4. What Jubien assumes, for these conditionals to be true, is (a) that propositions are mereological sums of properties, relations, etc (King, 133). Furthermore, it is also assumed that (b) there is only one unique some given parts (King, 133). The problem got started up because these assumptions constrained the account of propositions. They required a distinction between 2 mereological sums so that they could be the two different propositions (i.e. (i) and (ii)). King rejects these assumptions, and argues that his alternative account allows properties to occupy different positions in the proposition. King’s account allows a proposition such as all x’s are y’s to differ from the proposition all y’s are x’s, since these properties (x and y) would occupy different positions in the proposition. King gives the following examples of how this might work: [ALL [x] [y]] for one proposition (such as (i)), and [ALL [y] [x]] for the other proposition (such as (ii)). Jubien’s argument, concludes King, is limited to accounts of propositions which assume both (a) and (b), and that his (King’s) account is immune from Jubien’s argument, since it does not accept (a) and (b) and still accounts for the two different propositions.

Jubien, however, does not hold assumptions (a) and (b) just to make the propositionalist’s life harder. He claims that for an ontological account of propositions to succeed, it must be consistent with our intuitions about propositional constituency, which, as King agrees, include properties and relations. However, the type of propositions he considers are Platonic propositions, that is, propositions that are mind-independent and a-temporal. If, propositions are Platonic propositions, then perhaps we have some reason to believe that (I) the truth value of a proposition is due to the representing nature of its internal constituents themselves, as he argues for in his first objection to ontological propositional accounts. Now, it can be argued (and Jubien seems to argue), that if propositions are Platonic propositions, it cannot be that they received their truth value from something external, since we would be left to wonder if these propositions are merely surrogate accounts. Furthermore, if this worry is warranted, then we must try to account for this internal representing, and perhaps the best way to accomplish this and still be consistent with Platonic intuitions is to accept assumption (II): propositions are mereological sums of properties and relations. However, that this is the best way to accomplish this is left un-argued for here, but at least the possibility is left open.

Benacerraf Dilemma, Quine, Kripkenstein

2008-09-16T20:43:00.000-07:00

This has just occurred to me, I hope it's not totally off base. But it seems that the line of argument behind the Benacerraf dilemma is something like a case of a failure of theoretical identification. So we can imagine that Mr. Body gets killed. The detective shows up and he creates a theory:

1. The victim was killed with a pipe. The victim is a male. He is...

And we can later, given certain facts we know about the victim, we can identify him with Mr. Body.

But if we don't have much to go on with regards to his killer, we just have our theoretical killer in our detective story. We know that this killer killed the victim, and that the victim is to be identified as Mr. Body.

It would seem that the Benacerraf dilemma applies when we think that either Jones or Smith killed Mr. Body. If we are sure that there was only one killer, say because there was only one set of foot prints, or one intruder captured on camera, it seems that we cannot identify both Jones and Smith as the killer. Since we cannot conclusively say that Jones or Smith is the killer, and since both are the best possible candidates, neither can be identified as the killer. We are stuck and have to come up with a better picture.

It seems to me that the Benacerraf dilemma runs the same way with Platonic propositions. If we say that there is a real entity out there that our theoretically posited Platonic entity (proposition) links up to, we need a specific and conclusive entity. If we just say it is some entity or other, this is like saying that Mr. Body was killed by some person or other. This seems to be uninformative and unhelpful.

So when we say:

2. The sentence "There is a date" expresses the proposition that there is a date

it seems that we'd have to give some account of what this proposition is. If it is an entity, which one? If we just say: "Ya, it is some entity or other" or decide to name this entity "p" we don't help ourselves. It could literally be anything. It's like calling Mr. Body's killed "Ned." But who is Ned?

Do I understand this correctly?

This seems like Quine with Radical Translation, that since we can always offer different systems of interpretation for sentences, meanings cannot be nicely pinned down like we want. This seems like Kripkenstein as well, with the worry that past patterns of behavior cannot be linked to rules or generalizations which justify future patterns of behavior. Since we can always offer different systems of interpretation for behavior, dispositions cannot be used to nicely justify conduct.

It would seem that a middle ground position like King, and something similar in Sellars and I'm sure others, nicely avoids the problems for propositions from the Benacerraf dilemma, the Quinean paradox about meaning and the Kripkensteinean paradox of rule following, and the related Wittgensteinean paradox of rule following.

I don't know if this going to be informative to anyone, but it seems rather interesting to me.

King's response to Jubien's first ontological objection

2008-09-16T20:07:00.000-07:00

According to King, Jubien's objections to the existence of propositions somewhat do not apply to his version of what propositions are. King says that Jubien classifies his theory of propositions as an ontological account (as opposed to a mathematical variety). Jubien's definition of an ontological account is something that explains propositions as platonic in nature and having constituent parts (properties). King's propositional theory states that propositions actually are dependent on conscious entities and would not have existed without them. King's account of Jubien's 1st objection can be written as follows:

1) Propositions represent or have truth conditions as a result of their "internal make up".

2) Because of (1), the representational capacity of propositions must be grounded in the representational capacity of its constituents.

3) The representational capacity of the constituents of propositions must be grounded in the nature of the constituents themselves.

4) The nature of the constituents of propositions are unique mereological fusions or sums of properties and relations.

5) But mereological sums of properties and relations do not give way to unique propositions

6) Anything that is both necessarily unique and not unique at the same time cannot exist

7) Propositions must not exist

King responds by addressing the validity of the first Premise. The reason Jubien takes (1) to be the case is that if it were the case that propositions could represent or have truth conditions as a result of external causes, then something else could have been the proposition in question. If two things have the same claim to something then, according to Jubien, they fall prey to the Benacerraf dilemma and neither can say they are the real proposition (instead they are merely surrogates or models of it). In notational form this can be as follows:

i) An external cause that gave truth conditions to a proposition could have given it to other propositions.

ii) All propositions with the same truth conditions have an equal claim to being the true proposition.

iii) If more than one proposition can claim to be the true proposition then they fall prey to the Benacerraf dilemma

iv) Externally caused propositions fall prey to the Benacerraf dilemma.

At this point, King questions premise (i); whether Jubien means a) something actually has an equal claim to the proposition in question, or b) something could have an equal claim to the proposition in question.

In the case of (a), King outright rejects it as false. King states that "the facts I claim are propositions are intrinsically the most eligible facts for that role".

In the case of (b), King rejects this because only things that "actually are" can cause a Benacerraf dilemma.

By showing that premise (1) does not apply to his theory of propositions, King has in effect shielded his theory from all subsequent consequences of that premise, namely all of Jubien's arguments against propositions (kind of chopped the legs off of him).

It seems to me that King had already pointed out that his theory of propositions does not fall under the category of those objected to by Jubien. I would have been very surprised if, having already stated that, he ran into trouble defending his theory. I think at one point he even says that he will defend his theory from Jubien's objections for the "intrinsic interest of his arguments".

The only problem that I have is that I didn't quite catch where King does attribute his proposition's truth conditions from (an external source I imagine seeing how he is not a fan of the internal view). All I know is that according to him it could be an external source without having to worry about the Benacerraf dilemma.

Is King a Meinongian about possible propositions? If he is, does he need to be?

2008-09-16T18:54:00.000-07:00

This post overlaps Wes’s post below to some extent. King argues that representation is external to propositions, but that no Benacerraf dilemma follows from this. The argument appears to rely on something like Meinongianism about possible propositions. But it’s not clear to me that it needs to.

Here’s a sketch of the argument. Let’s call the proposition semantically encoded by the sentence (S)

(S) ‘John loves babies’

‘p’

(assuming there is such an entity). The argument begins with the assumption that representation is external, and concludes by showing that no Benacerraf dilemma follows from this assumption.

(1) Representation is external.

If (1) were true, then, given Jubien’s argument for internal representation, in addition to p, either there actually exists some entity q that has an equal claim to being the proposition encoded by (S), or there could have existed an entity q that could have been the proposition encoded by (S).

(2) If (1), then some entity q actually exists and has a claim to be the proposition semantically encoded by (S), or some entity q could have existed, and could have been the proposition semantically encoded by (S).

Assuming (1) (as King does), we have (3):

(3) Some entity q actually exists and has a claim to be the proposition semantically encoded by (S), or some entity q could have existed, and could have been the proposition semantically encoded by (S). (1,2)

According to King, the first disjunct of (3) is false. It’s not the case, he argues, that the intentional activities of speakers that in fact brought p into existence also brought q into existence. If they did, then q would have actually had equal claim to being the proposition encoded by (S). But they didn’t. So the first disjunct of (3) is false.

(4) It’s not the case that some entity q actually exists and has some claim to be the proposition semantically encoded by (S).

So, given (3) and (4), we have (5):

(5) So, some entity q could have existed and could have been the proposition semantically encoded by (S). (3,4)

But the truth of (5) is not sufficient to generate a Benacerraf dilemma, since it’s not the case that more than one entity exists and has equal claim to being the proposition encoded by (S).

(6) If (5), then it is not the case that more than one entity exists and has equal claim to being the proposition semantically encoded by (S).

(7) So, it is not the case that more than one entity exists and has equal claim to being the proposition semantically encoded by (S). (5,6)

(8) So, representation is external, and it is not the case that more than one entity exists and has equal claim to being the proposition semantically encoded by (S); i.e., no Benacerraf dilemma follows. (1,7)

My concern is with the consequent of the conditional in (2), and so with the move from the subconclusion in (3) to that in (5). Given that King thinks (4) is true, it seems like holding (5) commits King to Meinongianism about possible candidates for being the proposition encoded by (S). At least, this much seems true: if (5) is true, then there are possible propositions that do not actually exist. Assuming that King takes actual existence to just BE existence, then this claim seems to commit King to saying that there are possible, non-existent entities. And this seems equivalent to some version of Meinongianism (Meinongian possibilism, I guess). Do the two disjuncts in the consequent of (2) exhaust all the options?

Let’s say we were uncomfortable with Meinongian possibilism. Maybe we think that whatever is in any way exists, and whatever exists in any way actually exists. If we thought this, then we’d probably be uncomfortable with Meinongian possibilism. But consider whatever activities on the parts of intentional agents King thinks are sufficient for bestowing truth-conditions (and hence representationality) on p. I’m not sure what these activities are (it sounds like he goes over it at some length in ch.2), but maybe it’s like this. Maybe together these activities constitute some complex relation R such that it is in virtue of intentional agents bearing R to p that p (actually) is the proposition semantically encoded by (S). Given that intentional agents do, actually, in fact bear R to p, why can’t King accept that there exists some entity q that intentional agents could have borne, but do not actually in fact bear, R to? King’s worry is that there might actually exist an entity q such that intentional agents actually bear R to both p and q. This would lead to a Benacerraf dilemma. But this isn’t the case here. In the case under consideration, there is only one entity that intentional agents bear R to. We may not know exactly which entity it is, or what it’s like (that seems like a job for the metaphysics of propositions). But if these thoughts are sound, we could rewrite (2) as (2’):

(2’) If (1), then some entity q actually exists and could have been the proposition semantically encoded by (S), or some entity q could have existed, and could have been the proposition semantically encoded by (S).

The foe of Meinong could then accept the first conjunct of (2’), deny the second, and still generate a conclusion that is the same as King’s (8). I suppose the real worry then is King’s claim that intentional actions on the parts of conscious agents literally bring p into existence. If intentional actions literally bring propositions into existence, then it wouldn’t be possible to say that some entity distinct from p actually exists and could have been the proposition encoded by (S). Could we avoid this worry by holding that the entity that is now, in fact, p- some type of structured complex, presumably- existed before the intentional actions of conscious agents, but that these actions somehow bestowed upon p its ‘propositionality’? This is admittedly vague, but if we could, then something like (2’) might work. What do you guys think?

Jubien's First Argument Against Ontological Theories

2008-09-13T20:31:00.000-07:00

(0) Background: A friend of propositions can offer two kinds of accounts. (A) Mathematical Accounts. (B) Ontological Accounts. Mathematical accounts offer: (i) Models or "proposition surrogates", or: (i) Arguments that propositions really are such mathematical constructs.

(0.1) If (i), then we are still owed an explanation of propositions. If (ii), then we face a Benacerraf Dilemma. King finds this "compelling". Thus, (A) fails to be satisfactory.

(0.2) What of (B)? To succeed, such an account must tell us what propositions really are. It cannot offer surrogates or models.

(0.3) Jubien assumes that we must talk about Platonic propositions. We must give their intrinsic nature. We must assume that they are a special kind of entity. They are complex, and stand on their own.

(0.4) The two main assumptions are: (i) That propositions must be Platonic. (ii) That propositions must be structured and have constituents.

(1) Jubien's first argument assumes an Argument for Internal Representation. This argument contains the following assumptions: (i) Propositions represent the world as being so-and-so. (ii) If (i) were false, then propositions would not be the ultimate bearers of truth value. (iii) The represening a proposition does must be an internal feature of the proposition. (iv) To ground the representational force of a proposition outside of the proposition would be sabotage the idea that propositions really are entities and not surrogates. (v) It must be the case that no other entity could be the proposition in question.

(1.1) Jubien is of course concerned with the following: That if the 'propositionality' were derived from some representational activity outside the entity, the uniqueness would be lost. This would be a mere mathematical account of propositions, subject to the Benacerraf Dilemma.

(2) Given (1), Jubien holds that the representational capacity of propositions must be grounded in the representational capacity of it and its constituents.

(2.1) He further assumes: (i) Properties represent their instances. (ii) Propositions are mereological fusions or sums of properties and relations. (iii) There is an uniqueness of composition.

(2.2) Unfortunately, a problem arises from these views. Consider: (i) The property of being a swimming dog. (i) is the mereological sum of the properties of being a dog and of swimming. But now consider: (ii) The proposition that swimming dogs are swimming dogs. (ii) must be the mereological sum of the property of being a dog, the property of swimming, and coinstantiation. But this produces a problem: the mereological sum was also supposed to be the proposition that dogs are swimming.

(2.3) But if this is so, then the one mereological sum of the properties of being a dog, of swimming and the relation of coinstantiation is both: (i) The proposition that some dogs swim. (ii) The proposition that swimming dogs are swimming dogs. This means that the two propositions are identical.

(3) Given that this is false, it must be the case that the positions held in (1) and (2) are false.

(3.1) King notes that the argument for internal representation got us into trouble. His view avoids it. The assumption that propositions are mereological sums of their constituents properties and relations, and that there is an unique mereological sum of their given parts, is also problematic. His view also avoids it.

I hope that this is adequate...

A Novel Attempt at a Novel Case for Propositions

2008-09-12T19:02:00.000-07:00

Hope you don't mind me sharing...

1. Let us assume a simple Verbal Behaviorism model, such that if S thinks that p, S utters aloud "that p". We shall call this 'thinking-out-loud' and assume S only thinks-out-loud when he thinks.

2. We shall assume that there are 'inner' utterances of the sentence along with the overt utterance, such that thinking-out-loud is the culmination of a process which begins with inner speech. We can revise this model later to account for non-thought-out-loud thoughts, but we will stick to the simple notion for now that all thoughts are thought out loud.

3. We can say: When S thinks that p, S has a tokening of the inner-speech type 'that p' and then has a tokening of the outer-speech type 'that p'. We can assume that Mentalese is in English and that S utters sentences in German.

4. It seems that we can say: When S thinks-out-loud that p, S tokens an inner and an outer sentence of the same type. S tokens two tokens of the •that p• type. One token-class is of the inner (English) kind, one token-class of the outer (German) kind.

5. Let us imagine S is presented with some rain. S thinks: "It rains". He thinks-out-loud: "Es regnet." His thinking-out-loud and his thinking are both •It rains•.

6. It seems reasonable to think that "Es regnet" (in German) is true iff it rains. We can understand more generally: •It rains• is true iff it rains. Because 'Es regnet', his thought-out-loud, and his thought 'It rains' are both tokens of the same type, one being in Mentalese (English) and one in German, both should have the same truth-conditions.

7. Presumably our simple correspondence theory, ' "P" is true iff P is the case', tells us that the left-hand bit 'maps' onto the right-hand bit. We can crudely say that the left-hand bit 'pictures' or 'models' the right-hand bit. So 'It rains' is true iff it maps onto how things are in the world.

8. Some sentences have a 'sense' or are 'significant' because they are about the world. Presumably the motto: "Intentionality is the mark of the mental", is pretty good for our purposes. We can say that even if not all sentences are intentional, or have sense or significance, or whatever, all mental sentences are intentional. All thoughts-out-loud, being overt expressions of thoughts, will be intentional as well.

9. Mental sentences, being about things, will be 'encoding sentences'. Such encoding sentences not only may have appropriate contexts of utterance as ordinary sentences like "Hello Jones" do, but have something more. It has an encoding function which maps onto the world.

10. When S sees rain, in an important sense his seeing of rain makes him respond by saying to himself: "It rains." This makes him, on our model, think-out-loud: "Es regnet." His thinking is not only caused by the world, however. It is also importantly about the world and not a mere reaction to sensory stimulation.

11. We might say: 'His stimulus-meaning of "Es regnet" is rain. When he encounters rain, he responds by thinking "Es regnet" to himself.' But his thinking is about the world. His thought: "It rains", which is of the •It rains• type, encodes information about the world. If S told us: "It rains", we would not only say: "S must be having such-and-such sensory stimulations" or "S must be in such-and-such a state," but we also would say: "S must be seeing rain" or "S is reporting that it rains," for it seems that we take S to be offering a reliable report of how things are in the world and not merely what his current sensory states are. S seems to be telling us that it is raining.

12. Intuitively, S is an agent. S has acts of belief. When he thinks-out-loud: "Es regnet", he is asserting something he takes to be the case. What is he asserting? Presumably more than merely what he is uttering. It seems he is asserting that what he said is true. What makes the sentence true? We might say: It is true if the proposition it encodes obtains in the world. If it rains, then 'Es regnet' is true. If 'Es regnet' is true, and if an 'Es regnet' (in German) is a •It rains•, then any •It rains• is true when 'Es regnet' is true.

13. It seems that on this model some sentences are intentional or about the world, by virtue of stating that thus-and-so is the case. They 'picture' or 'encode' or 'present' something as being the case, which then maps onto the world. If it maps, it is true. If it fails to map, it is false.

14. The thought 'It rains' encodes or implies that it rains. Thus the thought encodes a proposition. If the proposition obtains in the world, i.e. if it is the case that it rains, then sentences of the type •It rains• are true. ' "P" is true iff P' seems to tell us that language encodes how the world is. A bit of encoding language is a proposition.

16. It seems most reasonable to have propositions along with types. Propositions are the sort of things that types which are intentional encode. "Es regnet" and "It rains" both play the same role, the •It rains• role. But in addition, both sentences express the proposition that it rains. Any •It rains• encodes the proposition that it rains.

Platonism Again?

2008-09-11T22:29:00.000-07:00

So recall that the arguments we considered for Platonism could be resisted if we can make good on something like the true in/true at distinction. But a point that I should have emphasized, as Dan reminded me, is that even if we countenance the distinction, we still need to worry about (e.g.) the actually existing proposition that there are rocks. Does it have a spatiotemporal location? If not, then it seems that it must be acausal, if all things that causally interact are spatiotemporally located. And if it is spatiotemporally located, the obvious question is: ok, where is it? If we can't give a good answer, then perhaps we're stuck with Platonism about propositions in Swoyer's sense. Is that right?

One Over Many argument

2008-09-10T01:36:00.000-07:00

McGrath in sec 4.1 of the SEP article briefly mentions an argument for propositions, I'll give a formulation here.

1) 'yesh balagan b'mita sheli' means the same thing as 'there's chaos in my bed'.
2) There is something 'there's chaos in my bed' and 'yesh balagan b'mita sheli' have in common.

(2) takes the form of an existentially loaded statement. The thing quantified over is supposed to be a proposition-like entity. A common response, says McGrath, is to deny that the inference from (1) to (2) is valid.
Let e be 'there's chaos in my bed', h be 'yesh balagan b'mita sheli' and p be that there's chaos in my bed.
All parties would allow use of a -means the same as- relation R between the sentences such that eRh. The opponents of the argument claim that it's unwarranted to presume yet another relation R' -means- that both bear to another entity (eR'p and hR'p).
I don't think it's such a leap to take that step though. Helping ourselves to resources of second-order logic, let P be a relation such that for a particular a, aPb -> aRb and for all x, xRa -> xPa&aPx.
It's 4 AM so I hope I got the details right. I attempted to define a relation such that a is related to everything that has the same meaning as it, and everything a is related to is also related to each other (an equivalence class).
We can define a second order relation R' such that aR'B iff a is one of B's relata. All these taken together (I hope) imply that for any relation V, aVb -> aR'V&bR'V -> EX(aR'X&bR'X). This is the inference that was being denied in the first place. It was obtainable only by assuming second order quantification and the R' relation. Applied to our particular example, eR'P and hR'P. P is the third thing that both e and h bear a relation to.
So what can we take from this? Well, we can really stick it to the (I'm sure very few) philosophers who are happy with (serious) second order quantification and unhappy with propositions. We also have another candidate for what a proposition is, i.e. the relation that utterances with the same meaning bear to one another. It's shareable, and probably not hard to define a notion of truth and falsity for (maybe sellars could pull a trick or two here, this isn't unlike dot quotes).
It occurs to me that once you take higher order quantification seriously you get a lot of abstracta for free, so perhaps this argument will only convince the choir, so to speak.

Best Explanation Argument

2008-09-10T00:02:00.000-07:00

Though it is unclear after reading “Abstract Entities” which position (realist or anti-realist) Swoyer takes on abstract entities of any kind, the following is an attempt to capture some of the positive points he makes regarding their existence. Swoyer begins by placing abstract entities into a context. He contends that abstract entities are often postulated to solve certain philosophical problems, and it is these circumstances for which abstracta are given existence. We must, then, concentrate on the tasks these abstracta are given, and proceed to evaluate them accordingly.

Swoyer points out that the tasks assigned to abstracta are typically explanatory, and so we must analyze them in terms of what they are postulated to explain. In section 3.1 He presents 9 explanandum in number theory for which the existence (among other things) of numbers is supposed to be the explanans.

Swoyer’s main assertion is that we should view arguments for the existence of abstract entities as inferences to the best overall available ontological explanation. Here is where I would like to take some liberties in constructing a positive argument for the existence of abstract entities based on Swoyer’s approach and analysis.

My problem, as I shall outline next, is the conclusion Swoyer wishes to establish based on the inference to the best overall available ontological explanation. Now, let us give Swoyer the explanations he wishes numbers to achieve in his example in section 3.1. The 9 explanandum are accounted for by postulating the existence (among other things) of such abstract entities as Numbers. This is great. We had 9 things that are generally accepted in number theory, and to explain them, we have numbers, abstract entities. Hence, Numbers exist. Perhaps I am being too hasty to conclude their existence, for Swoyer used them in an example to show simply what role they would play in explaining those 9 points. But I wish to abstract from these considerations, and take his example as a paradigm of how things might look were we to conclude the existence of abstract entities from their being the best overall available ontological explanation. Let me formulate the situation as follows:

1 If numbers are the best overall available ontological explanation, then we may infer the existence of numbers.

2 If numbers can explain points 1-9, then numbers are the best overall available ontological explanation.

3 Numbers can explain points 1-9 (remember this is what I gave to Swoyer).

4 Numbers are the best overall available ontological explanation (from 2 and 3)

5 Therefore, we may infer the existence of numbers (from 1 and 4).

It appears that numbers do wonderful things. They explain 1-9 (so I suppose). Now it is what numbers do that I am focusing on, taking cue from Swoyer, that we should analyze abstract entities in terms of what they are postulated explain. However, my objection is that the success of Numbers in explaining 1-9, and being the best overall available ontological explanation does not bestow truth on the assertion that Numbers exist. What we have is success in explaining, and perhaps being the best explanation. But this alone does not establish the existence of numbers. Let us say that numbers successfully explain, and are the best explanation for, the 9 explanandum. But surely just because they have true consequences, i.e. the 9 explanandum, we should not conclude that Numbers exist. Upon reflection we can see that even a false postulates can have true consequences. Take for example Plato’s theory of Body and Soul. The soul, for Plato is what animates the body. Well, there are living bodies. But what is still in question is: Is there a soul? Citing it as the best overall available ontological explanation will not do. Hence, this type of realism falls into the following fallacy:

1 If there are numbers, then there will be true consequences.

2 There are true consequences.

3 Therefore, there are numbers.

Swoyer does not attempt to provide a deductively sound argument for the existence of abstract objects, but provides an alternative way of seeing the arguments for their existence. However, my point is that although it appears that no conclusive argument will establish their existence, it is impossible for the inference to the best overall available explanation to do so, for it involves the fallacy of begging the question.

(The above points on the fallacy of affirming the consequent are taken from Larry Laudan's A Confutation of Convergent Realism)

Anti-realism based on the origin and biology of language

2008-09-09T11:53:00.001-07:00

This post is going to be on Swoyer's "Abstract Entities". After I read this article I came to the conclusion that I am an anti-realist on the issue of abstract entities. Lots of my arguing centers on language, so any comments from a philosophy of language perspective would be appreciated!

The first thing that plucked my anti-realism heartstring was on pg. 12 of the article where Swoyer starts describing the properties of different things. He says that:

A table: weighs six pounds, is brown, is a poor conductor of electricity, and is heavier than the chair.

Fair enough.

Then he goes on to say that WWI was: bloody, and fought mainly in Europe.

This seemed so weird to me. That an event could be bloody. I quickly decided that the term bloody was employed for convenience and the evoking of emotion rather than to actually be considered a true "property" unto itself of WWI. If you were to replace the term bloody with all the constituent facts about WWI which would make someone want to say "WWI was bloody" (for example: many people died in WWI, if someone looks at pictures from a WWI battlefield they will be disgusted, etc.), then you could eliminate the property of "bloody-ness" from the properties of WWI.

It would seem that assigning the term bloody to WWI is purely a result of our use of language to convey information quickly and efficiently to others. But isn't ALL language for the purpose of conveying information quickly (more quickly than demonstrating/showing the person you are communicating with what you are talking about) and efficiently? I think it is. I think that the only reason there are any properties or abstact entities is because language contains them for the purpose of approximating information and conveying it to others in a commonly accepted and agreed upon manner.

I do realize some of the implications of this view. Without relational properties, you could never say to someone"I see three flowers" (well you could, but you would have to realize that what you are saying is a mis-representation or warping of information). You would instead see a flower, and a flower, and a flower. "Three" is nowhere in the picture. In fact, I do not think that animals who do not use language have any concept of "properties". They just see what is in front of them.

Someone might argue that this is not true because we are born with the idea of propositions (we use abstract noises to represent what we want) before we ever learn language.

In response, I would remind these people that our brains have developed over millions of years of evolution and are actually physically hardwired to receive language. Just as our occipital lobe is ready to receive visual information before we ever open our eyes, our cognitive centers are hardwired for language. To take this even further, one could probably argue that it is because of this language hardware that we are so ready to believe abstract entities exist; we simply lack to physiology to imagine a world without them!

From here, all of the realist arguments Swoyer presents sort of fall apart. The fact that different languages can assert the same thing ceases to be a problem at all. Snow is white; Schnee ist weiss... great! These two people have just approximated something that they wish to tell a friend into a means of oral representations, the art of doing so (both presenting and interpreting oral representations) their physiology has nearly perfected over millions of years. No need to invent magical abstract properties when there is no need for them; law of parsimony and Ockham's razor sort of double team anybody of says otherwise.

The most ridiculous reason that Swoyer gives for the existence of abstract entities is on pg. 15 where he says "If there are no abstract objects, nothing that transcends the spatiotemporal causal order, then there may well be no transcendent values or standards (eg: no eternal moral properties) to ground practices and evaluations". What kind of bad philosophy is Swoyer suggesting here? That we do not rule out something (abstract entities) because we really really want there to be something more? Because then we would have to face up to some facts we do not want to be true?!

Again in the Numbers section, Swoyer presents some arguments for the existence of abstract things in math. I think that the language objection I gave earlier covers this as well, seeing as math is simply another form of language. The example with the three flowers is what I think best responds to those who would object to the language objection by saying that in math you do not approximate information (numbers are precise). No, you do no approximate natural numbers in math, but just because we use precise terms (one, two, three) to linguistically represent them does not mean that they are not part of our language hardwiring. They still have to play by the rules in order for us to convey them as information, and as such should not be considered a special case.

Swoyer also has a section where he outlines the five Desiderata which, if satisfied, make an argument all the more compelling. I believe that the anti-realist position based on the origins and biology of language which I have taken up can definitely meet all five desiderata. I am, however, going to stop this post here.

Professor Tillman, please let me know if this is adequate for a comment paper.

Thoughts on Dorr (an attempt at a comment paper)

2008-09-08T16:58:00.000-07:00

I think I generally agree with the gist of Dorr's paper. He seems to say:

1. We ordinarily talk about the existence of abstract objects, or talk in such a way as to imply their existence.
2. In a more formal manner of speaking, we find ourselves concluding that only physical objects exist.

Dorr seems to conclude that in a funny sense of 'exist', abstract objects exist. But properly understood, we see that abstract objects do not exist.

But it seems to me that abstract objects exist, and that it is only in a funny sense of 'exist' that abstract objects can be said to not exist. A restricted sense of 'exist' seems to me to be a funny sense of 'exist'.

I think that I can spell out my uneasiness in another manner. Consider his notion of 'superficial' and 'fundamental' sentences. It seems that I can superficially say:

3. This brick is red and rectangular.

But it seems that fundamentally we may have deep reasons to doubt that colors and shapes exist in the world in the same way that physical stuff like bricks exist in the world. It might be a fundamental truth that color and shape is a state of a perceiver. There may be a very real sense in which the ultimate particles or processes of theoretical physics are colorless and without a definite shape.

So far so good, it seems to me. But consider: if I am making the claim that fundamentally everything is physical, what can I mean by 'physical' here? If fundamentally there are no abstract entities, or even any middle sized entities which I observe in every day life, what is there?

It seems likely to me that the honest-to-god 'real' and 'noumenal' entities of the world are the theoretically posited unobservable entities of science. I'm going to assume that

4. Only the theoretically posited entities of science exist

has to be taken in a fundamental sense. It seems that this is false in some superficial sense, since someone could show me their hands and say: "These exist don't they? And they are not theoretically posited!"

But I think we have good reason to doubt the accuracy of the Manifest Image of the world which is painted by common-sense alone, and accept the accuracy of the Scientific Image of the world which is painted by theoretical sciences. But then: even if we accept a physicalism which holds that only the physical entities posited by theoretical science exist, don't we still have room to posit abstract entities in the same method?

Given how far modern science, even thoroughly materialistic in nature, has drifted from the simple notion of physical atoms bouncing around in the void, why cannot we at least in principle make room for abstract objects in our science next to 'pure' or 'objectless processes' which we may posit, or the fundamental particles which themselves seem rather abstract and hardly concrete.

It seems perhaps we should have a sort of narrow and broad sense of physicalism. Abstract entities may not be narrowly physical like particles, but they still may be construed as being broadly physical, like lightening is physical, or a C#ing. I hope we can resist a reductive or eliminative materialism, and an urge to reduce or eliminate abstract entities.

I guess maybe I'm hinting at this: we may posit entities superficially in a rather superficial picture of the world. Maybe this is how we come to posit abstract entities. Instead of dropping this superficial picture altogether, it seems we should look for its fundamental counterparts in a fundamental picture of the world. I don't see why even superficially posited abstract entities couldn't find counterparts in our more fundamental picture of the world.

Lastly, it still seems that even if abstract entities only have a 'nominal' or superficial existence, they still have an existence. And if we do end up pushing down fundamental existence to the fundamental particles of science, then the existence of tables and chairs seems perfectly on par with the existence of abstract entities!

Is the notion of token-classes helpful?

2008-09-06T16:07:00.000-07:00

It seems to me that we might add another notion to the notions of Types and Tokens which we were discussing last time in class. If we consider the type:

A

We can say that there are three tokens of it below:

A A A

But consider a case of the type •red• (where I will put types in dots, I hope that there are dots there, following Sellars to bring attention to the 'role' that this word plays and not to the English word token 'red' or to the inscription *red*):

red red rouge rot

It would seem here that we still have one type in play, the •red• type. Those four words above all mean what 'red' means (in English). Roughly, 'red', 'rouge' and 'rot' all mean the same thing. But it seems that we have three distinct kinds of tokens: there are two English tokens, one French token and one German token.

With something like this in mind, Sellars has a notion of Token-class. We can say that there is one type above, but three token-classes: the English 'red', tokened twice; the French 'rouge' tokened once; and the German 'rot' tokened once.

I hope that I have done an adequate job of spelling out the position. Does it prove to be helpful?

UMass Metaphysics Graduate Conference

2008-09-06T09:37:00.001-07:00

Details here.

Grad conferences are a great way for you to practice polishing and presenting written material while getting to know other young philosophers with similar interests. I encourage everyone to submit.

objection to Swoyer

2008-09-06T01:55:00.000-07:00

In the Swoyer paper, he describes a problem for abstract objects:
"Epistemology is the Achilles' heel of realism about abstracta. We are biological organisms thoroughly ensconced in the natural, spatiotemporal causal order. Abstract entities, by contrast, are atemporal, non-spatial, and causally inert, so they cannot affect our senses, our brains, or our instruments for measuring and detecting"
A couple paragraphs down he elaborates:
"Indeed, even if abstracta did exist, it is difficult to see how they could make any difference to our cognitive processes. Things would seem just the same whether they existed or not" P.27

I have two responses:

1)
On page 24 he states:
"We can rarely explain much with the bald assertions that numbers exist or that properties exist. These claims are typically part of a longer story, a philosophical theory, that tells us something about what the relevant abstract entity is like. The theory also needs to explain how the entity is related to other things ... The account also needs to tell us how its abstracta are related to the phenomena around us that led us to postulate them in the first place"

Any theory worth its salt will have these components. This means that the abstracta are in fact related to the (observable) phenomena around us. If properties are posited to explain why certain things are similar to other things, then properties will have a special relationship with those things that the theory must elaborate on. Once it does, a very real tie is established between the abstracta and something observable. I'm betting that in most cases this can easily be exploited to shed light on the epistemic problem.
Consider properties. They don't cause anything. However, objects do instantiate properties. There are observable differences between things that instantiate some properties rather than others. We can come to know of these abstracta by observing such differences.
Consider numbers. They must be in some way related to collections of objects if we're to say there are a certain number of objects in a collection. Moreover, how many objects there are in a collection is an observable fact, even though the number itself is not. Given strict relationships between numbers, once we come to know of a few it's not hard to gain knowledge of the rest.
A side note about the second quote. He states that if abstracta didn't exist then things would seem exactly the same to us. This is far from obvious. For instance, if abstract objects called properties are in fact responsible for the differences between objects and the relationships between them, then if there were none then no objects would ever be related to have any properties. You can sure bet that if that was the world we were in, we'd be experiencing it a heck of a lot differently.

2)
He actually describes an epistemic rout to abstracta in his paper. We argue for abstracta by considering the merits of theories which posit them. How is that not a good way to gain knowledge of them? Why doesn't that qualify? Why must we posit an entity with great explanitory value, and then explain how we could have gained knowledge of it in another way?

propositions as 0-place predicates

2008-09-04T20:04:00.000-07:00

I don't intend this post to be my comment paper, but I thought one (in particular) distinction brought up in class was interesting. Consider the sentences:
(H) Harry likes horses.
(C) Harry likes chickens.
(&) (H)&(C)

Suppose margaret asserts all of (H), (C) and (&). Margaret asserts that Harry likes horses. Therefore there is some thing that is asserted by Margaret using the sentence (H). That is the thing asserted by (H). Fine.
By asserting (&), Margaret asserts the same thing about horses and chickens: that Harry likes them. Therefore there is some thing asserted of horses, and some thing asserted of chickens, and those two are one and the same thing.
From these two little facts we drew the distinction between the 'thing asserted' and the 'predication'. If this is a genuine distinction, then 'asserted' is ambiguous (or the other thing) about these two uses. I don't think this is in fact a genuine distinction. I believe the 'thing asserted' is just a special case of predication.
Consider (H) again. There is another thing asserted. It's asserted that the non-symetrical liking relation holds between Harry and horses. There's a third thing asserted, that liking horses applies to Harry. The liking relation is asserted of two things, Harry and horses (in that order). However the inclination to draw a distinction between asserting of (two things) and asserting of (one thing) isn't so pressing. I'd like to say that simple assertion is just a case of asserting of (0 things). It's not unheard of in logic to treat propositions as 0-place predicates. The idea seems exactly right to me.
One could say that there's a genuine distinction, since simple assertions are truth evaluable, while predicates aren't. I'd simply respond that the addicity of the predicate (whether it's firts, second place etc.) is simply the number of things that the predicate must be applied to in order to evaluate truth. Treatment of propositions as 0-place predicates falls neatly in line. If this is all right then we have a collapse of assertion-of and assertion, and we have a hint as to what propositions might be.
If anyone wants a formal argument, I guess it would go like this:
(1) There's no ambiguity in the word 'assert' between uses where it's used to speak of assertion of an individual or assertion of multiple individuals.
(2) (1) -> (3)
(3) Addicity of predication doesn't cause ambiguity in the word 'assert'
(4) 0-place predication makes sense.
(5) (3)&(4)
(6) (5)->(7)
(7) There's no ambiguity in the word 'assert' when asserting things of individual(s) or asserting things of no individuals

Results and Readings

2008-09-04T18:58:00.001-07:00

Today's results were mostly negative: propositions, if they exist, are not general or specific acts of assertion, general or specific acts of uttering, linguistic meanings of sentences, or sentence types or tokens. Positively, if they exist then they are truth-apt, shareable objects of attitudes. So it seems that what is asserted is a proposition, speaker-meanings are propositions, and semantic contents of sentence types or tokens with respect to contexts are propositions. It is important to note that the results, so far, are compatible with many different views on the nature of propositions: are they sets of a certain type or some sort of "structured" entity?

Or maybe, as some philosophers have held, they do not exist at all. Next time our focus will be on arguments for and against the existence of propositions generally. A good idea for Tuesday's comment paper would be to discuss (i.e., consider an objection to) some argument for or against the existence of propositions. The best way to do that is to present the argument in numbered premise-conclusion form (like I did on the board), make sure it is logically valid, and say which premise is least plausible and why. An ambitious comment paper would attempt to uncover a novel argument for or against propositions. We'll start with some of the considerations that can be uncovered in Swoyer and McGrath. Then we may spend some time on arguments from Dorr before moving to the more difficult arguments in King's chapter 5. Our question is simply, do propositions exist? Why or why not? Approach the readings with our question firmly in mind. (Read: feel free to skip over stuff in the reading that doesn't bear directly on the question.) It's also a good idea to go over the Cartwright paper. It's very similar to what we covered today but there are some additional considerations in the paper that we weren't able to address.

Finally, please let me know if you're having trouble signing in to blogger. Everyone has been sent an invitation to join the blog.

Welcome!

2008-09-01T12:43:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the class blog for Philosophy 3650/7160: Contemporary Metaphysics I: The Metaphysics of Propositions. This blog is for course updates and discussion.

This seminar will focus on the metaphysics of so-called abstract objects, propositions in particular. Propositions are supposed to be shareable objects of attitudes that are truth-apt, or capable of being true or false.

By 'attitudes' we mean propositional attitudes: belief, knowledge, desire, etc. As a rough guide, attitudes that involve 'that'-clauses indicate attitudes toward propositions. So for instance, if I believe that the children are the future, then if there is a thing that I believe, that thing is a proposition.

By 'shareable' we mean that more than one person can have an attitude toward that proposition. Your believing something is not something someone else can do; your experiencing something is private. But the proposition that the children are the future is not private; both of us can believe it.

To be truth-apt is to be the sort of thing that can be true or false. Chairs are not truth-apt; sentences and propositions are. It is generally held that propositions are the primary bearers of truth or falsity; a sentence that is true or false is so because the proposition it semantically encodes is true or false.

Why think there are or are not propositions? Here's what McGrath calls "the Metaphysics 101 Argument":

1. With respect to any belief, there is what is believed and the believing of it, and these are distinct.

2. What is believed is something that may be rejected, denied, disbelieved, etc. by multiple subjects, and is something that may be true or false.

3. There are beliefs.

4. So, there are propositions (i.e, sharable objects of the attitudes and bearers of truth-values).

Is the Metaphysics 101 argument any good?

What reasons are there to believe there are no propositions? For that, see Dorr's article to the right along with the rest of McGrath's article.

Are there other compelling reasons to think there are abstract objects? For that, see Swoyer's article, "Abstract Objects", that Dorr is responding to.

But first, we should think more about just what propositions are supposed to be so we can carefully distinguish them from their neighbors and keep our quarry in clear sight. For that, see Cartwright's magnificent article, "Propositions".