Notes on Modality II - "Deserving the name", the grandeur of the idea of metaphysical modality, &c.

I want to explore a 'no clear best deserver' view of the - very inchoate - role that the distinction between (metaphysically) necessary vs. contingent truths is supposed to play.

The idea is that once you drill down in the borderlands, you see that there are different ways of going.

So no clear best deserver. But also: it's not clear that anything is a good enough deserver.

The 'no clear best deserver' hypothesis raises questions: why wouldn't everyone agree? Why would this be news?

One reason might be that there really is a best desever. Or that it seemed like there was a clear best but on further reflection there are competitors and it's not clear that any one has the edge. But I think there's more to say about why this might be news. There is something very natural about thinking that there is some single distinction here. There is a strong inclination to think that there some one major, fundamental distinction between the truths that could have been otherwise and the ones that couldn't. 

So if there is a sense in which this is not so - or if we want to be circumspect about it - we could try to tell a positive story about how this comes about.

Also, it is important to remind ourselves that the strong inclination I am speaking of may not be universal, or even normal. (Think of people who encounter this philosophical discourse, feel vaguely skeptical, maybe kind of interested but not particularly compelled, don't sign up for any view in particular, or flirt with some unusual view (an undergrad fellow student of mine defended the view that all truths are necessary in a course essay), and simply move on with their lives and don't ever really think about the matter, except as something some people are concerned with.)

But, at the same time: it's not just some specific problem in some particular subliterature. Versions of it, or closely related things, come up in philosophy at many times and places. And I have the feeling that it springs from a kind of root that also gives rise to certain philosophical thoughts and frames of mind that all sorts of people have.

So, how might it come about? Perhaps: Some kind of drive towards systematic understanding run rampant. Desire to see world as mechanism with discrete states. And the point isn't that that's naive, or probably not true after all, or something like that. But one issue here may be: why should there be one clear best way of seeing the world that way? 

It is possible to get into a frame of mind where it seems like there must in some sense be a single or primary set of facts about the possible states of the world, if there really is a world at all. It is like Wittgenstein's demand for substance, for eternal objects, in the Tractatus. It can seem like if the thing you're demanding weren't so, there would be no world at all, or nothing would be true.

There's something here I want to say in connection with this 'no clear best deserver' idea, along the lines of: how little is said when the idea of metaphysical modality is introduced! How could there be enough specific information there - in phrases like 'really could have been that way' - to narrow things right down to a particular, clear distinction!  It feels completely "lay", really quite free of theory (but of course you can theorise about 'really' or formulate it in terms of 'some fundamental sense' and then theorise about that).

But on the other hand, isn't that a bit fallacious? Can't specific, detailed things come out of arrangements of ordinary, quite general concepts? And don't, for example, specific seeds produce specific trees, despite being so small?

So this thought needs to be stated carefully. There's not some general rule here that's being appealed to. Still I think there's a point here, a way to see something  - a way to break the grip of something.

The words and associated ideas we're using here are quite flexible things, on reflection. 'Things', 'really', 'could'.

You might say there's a kind of naive level of "buying into" the idea of this one major distinction between contingent and necessary truths. Just not thinking about it too much. But then if you've thought about it and seen it threatened or scoffed at or considered uninteresting, but still want to pursue it - OK, now you're after something. Now you have a dream, I feel like saying.

I think, awkward as it is to talk about, there is really no getting away from the fact that there's something fantastic about the idea, something grand. '"How things really could have been" - what could be more interesting than that?!'

* * *

Consider Kripke's suggestive remark at the end of Naming and Necessity about leaving open the extent to which metaphysical modality will turn out to be closer to physical than suspected.

It's remarkable how little investigation or facing up there has been to the issue of how such a thing might be decided. (Williamson talks about 'detailed theoretical investigation' but I can't help but feeling that this is a kind of mirage, like how Russell and the early Wittgenstein palmed off the question of what the logical atoms will turn out to be.)

Decades later, we seem to just have different viewpoints - some rationalists who are far from thinking it coincides more with physical possibility than you might think, and others who are captured by the idea of empirical insight into hard limits (due to what seems to me a kind of misinterpretation of the necessary a posteriori, but working out where the stand offs there lie would be good).

The picture I have now is this: there's a certain inchoate role, inchoate requirement or job description for this idea of the ways things really could have been (metaphysically), and then it recedes into the background when we look at cases and theories. But this needs to be scrutinised more, and this will shed light on skepticism about the notion, and on different positive views.

I don't mind if you settle on a best deserver and are happy with it, but I will want to be clear that this is what is happening, and be wary of an alternative way of thinking about the matter as something which has been investigated and a view found correct. <-- Inadequate, but there is an important feeling here that I don't want any smoke and mirrors.

A large part of the worry is: that this process of coming to rest upon a choice of best deserver gets misrepresented as investigation into how things could have been. A failure to distinguish between getting to a concept and investigating what it applies to. But there are dangers with this hypothesis too.

'Philosophers framed the question of how things really could have been, and detailed philosophical research has led to a convergence on the view that this turns out to be a matter of ...'

In terms of what we want from the term, what gives it its life and feeling of importance - this is so easy to write off as a trifling, preliminary thing. Almost indecent to talk about. But it is very important. And it's amazing how far it reaches, so to speak. 

Worrying about Facts

This is the last in a series of posts on facts (the four links are to the earlier members).

There is an inchoate kind of worry about facts which, while closely related to projection-based skepticism (discussed in the last post), is not automatically discredited once we discredit projection-based skepticism. One way of expressing it would be to say that facts – or certain classes of facts, perhaps – seem like shadowy or queer entities. I will try to say something about what is going on here, but it is a large and profound theme which affects a lot of philosophy, so what I say here can do little more than scratch the surface and indicate a broad sort of viewpoint. The line I take on this is broadly Wittgensteinian.

Such an inchoate worry seems to animate the following remarks of Russell's in the Atomism lectures:

I do not suppose there is in the world a single disjunctive fact corresponding to “p or q”. It does not look plausible that in the actual objective world there are facts going about which you could describe as “p or q”, but I would not lay too much stress on what strikes one as plausible: it is not a thing you can rely on altogether. For the present I do not think any difficulties will arise from the supposition that the truth or falsehood of this proposition “p or q” does not depend upon a single objective fact which is disjunctive but depends on the two facts one of which corresponds to p and the other to q: p will have a fact corresponding to it and q will have a fact corresponding to it.

And a bit later:

One has a certain repugnance to negative facts, the same sort of feeling that makes you wish not to have a fact “p or q” going about the world. You have a feeling that there are only positive facts, and that negative propositions have somehow or other got to be expressions of positive facts. When I was lecturing on this subject at Harvard4 I argued that there were negative facts, and it nearly produced a riot: the class would not hear of there being negative facts at all. I am still inclined to think that there are. However, one of the men to whom I was lecturing at Harvard, Mr. Demos, subsequently wrote an article in Mind to explain why there are no negative facts. It is in Mind for April 1917. I think he makes as good a case as can be made for the view that there are no negative facts. It is a difficult question. I really only ask that you should not dogmatize. I do not say positively that there are, but there may be.

There is obviously something weird about this way of talking. It has a certain charm, even, for some – I confess even I find it charming and not just strange. The same holds for much of the Atomism lectures. Nevertheless, I think we need to get beyond this sort of talk, and submit it to philosophical scrutiny. Wittgenstein has done more toward this than anyone else I know of.

It was certain sorts of facts Russell was worried about above – negative and disjunctive facts. But other considerations, such as our considerations above about concepts or modes of presentations getting into the individuation of facts, and granularity considerations' applying to facts, may give rise to similar worries about positive, atomic facts. Others, like Quine, Strawson, and perhaps William James, have been more generally worried about facts.

Also, similar shadowiness and queerness worries come up in other areas: thoughts, meanings, sensations, and mathematical objects. And then there are cases where the very things which worry these worriers are seized upon and embraced, e.g. mystical Pythagoreanism and Platonism.

One of the fundamental things going wrong in these worries, I believe, is that the worriers are making the mistake of passing over the question of sense, and going straight for the question of truth. A similar thing occurs when writers opposed to Platonism about mathematical objects go all autobiographical and tell us that they find the view 'wildly implausible' or the like.

In both sorts of cases – incredulity about facts, or particular sorts of facts, and incredulity about the mind-independent existence of mathematical objects – the worriers are onto something, some problem in their way of looking at things, and perhaps that of others (such as quasi-mysterian metaphysicians embracing facts and numbers with a lot of hocus pocus). But they mistakenly read it into the forms of expression which gave rise to their misunderstandings – forms which in themselves are not guilty. They then make the mistake of, instead of clarifying how these forms really work, what they really mean, casting doubt on the truth of what they may be used to say.

This is very clear in Russell's remarks above. ('I would not lay too much stress on what strikes one as plausible: it is not a thing you can rely on altogether', 'I really only ask that you should not dogmatize. I do not say positively that there are, but there may be.' All of this suggests a difficult factual question - none of it suggests any difficulty with our understanding of what we are saying.)

What I am saying here is reminiscent of the following remarks of Wittgenstein's:

PI: 194. When we do philosophy we are like savages, primitive people, who hear the expressions of civilized men, put a false interpretation on them, and then draw the queerest conclusions from it. (PI.)

Zettel: 450. One who philosophizes often makes the wrong, inappropriate gesture for a verbal expression.

451. (One says the ordinary thing—with the wrong gesture.)

This idea of 'saying the ordinary thing with the wrong gesture' gives us a way of thinking about what is going on when the mysterian metaphysician and the worried doubter alike use the forms which give rise to these worries.

Russell's colourful talk of facts 'going about' in 'the actual, objective world' as it were expresses just such a wrong gesture, putting cues for it into the words themselves, so that the words themselves become more inherently misleading.

The treatment I suggest for these residual worries about facts, then, is the same sort of treatment instanced in this passage in the Investigations (where the topic is not fact-talk, but our inclination to say that, when we have grasped the meaning of an expression, its use is then 'present', or 'determined'):

195. “But I don't mean that what I do now (in grasping a sense) determines the future use causally and as a matter of experience, but that in a queer way, the use itself is in some sense present.”--But of course it is, “in some sense”! Really the only thing wrong with what you say is the expression “in a queer way”. The rest is all right; and the sentence only seems queer when one imagines a different language-game for it from the one in which we actually use it. (Someone once told me that as a child he had been surprised that a tailor could 'sew a dress'--he thought this meant that a dress was produced by sewing alone, by sewing one thread onto another.)

When we fail to look sufficiently closely, in a sufficiently unprejudiced way, at the way fact-talk works, we assimilate its working with that of other talk we know, and it looks funny to us. We sometimes react by doubting that there really are facts, or that there really are certain kinds of facts. But we may also react with an overly thin and superficial deflationism, which doesn't do sufficient justice to the real office of fact-talk.

References

Bertrand Russell (1985). The Philosophy of Logical Atomism. Open Court.

Ludwig Wittgenstein (2003). Philosophical Investigations: The German Text, with a Revised English Translation. Blackwell.

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1967). Zettel. Oxford, Blackwell.

 

Individual concepts and modality at Philosophy etc.

I've got a guest post at Philosophy etc., 'An advertisement for individual concepts'. The comments are more substantial than the original post.

The proposal made there is closely connected with the ideas featured in my Sketch of a Way of Thinking about Modaliy, part 2 of which will be posted in the next few days.

Mind-Independence and Propositions

I will try to say something about a profound confusion or blindness which occurs in connection with the notion of mind-independence. What I will say will be reminiscent of some of Wittgenstein's ideas from his mid-late period, especially the ones which influenced Waismann's work on 'language strata' (see references).

This post was prompted by a recent lecture of David Macarthur's, wherein he emphasized that propositions were not linguistic items for Moore and Russell. (Nor, I would add, were they linguistic items (signs) in a projective relation to the world, as in the early Wittgenstein.) Instead, they were supposed to be abstract objects1 which do not in general depend on minds or on language for their existence. This aspect of Moore and Russell's early post-Hegelian thought is often labelled 'Platonism' or 'Platonic realism'. Macarthur wanted to emphasize that this is quite a difficult idea - i.e. to think of propositions as being 'so completely language-independent' (I think he used some such expression).

I want to say: no, not necessarily - this last statement has to be qualified, although it is appropriate enough in connection with the philosophical views of Moore and Russell. I will try to explain what I mean.

We talk of concepts, meanings, propositions, statements and the like. Our talk about these things has a certain logic and grammar; it makes sense to say that a concept is used by somebody, but it makes no sense to say that a concept is three metres away from somebody. It makes sense to call a proposition true, but not red.

I think it is plausible to think of the notion of a proposition, or statement - in something like the sense of 'that which is asserted by a meaningful declarative sentence' - as ordinarily not coming into direct contact with the notion of dependence as it applies to minds and spatiotemporal things. In Wittgensteinian-Waismannian terms, the relevant notion of dependence is part of one stratum of language, and the notion of a proposition is part of another. We don't talk of a proposition depending for its existence on this or that mind, thing, process, etc., any more than we talk of a house being tautological.

At least, this is how it is in the ordinary, or primary language-game. (I think the term 'primary' is perhaps better, since I don't mean to imply that there is anything especially folky about the primary language-games we play with the word 'proposition'.) And this, I believe, is what - in the first instance - makes it correct to say 'Propositions do not depend for their existence on minds', just as it is correct to say 'Houses do not themselves possess arithmetical properties'.

But there is something which makes the statement about propositions significant to us, in a way which the statement about houses is not likely to be. As a piece of grammar, this statement can be said to warn us against a mixing up of language strata which – for reasons which I will not inquire into here – we are especially prone to when philosophizing.

However, 'Propositions do not depend for their existence on minds' is not a reliable guard against this confusion, due to its superficial similarity to non-grammatical statements such as 'The nobility in fourteenth century England did not depend for their existence on the King'. This leads to what might be called a Platonic interpretation of this statement. Rather than being taken as a grammatical warning or prohibition against bringing the mind-(in)dependence concept into direct contact with the proposition concept, these concepts are brought together, and propositions are thought of as, so to speak, being positively independent.

This supports, and is supported by, strange uses of “pictures” of propositions which resemble our pictures of physical objects, ideas of durability and hardness being applied to propositions, Plato's Heaven, and the like. (This is of course very loose talk.) Also, consider the expressions used in this remarkable statement of Russell's in the Logical Atomism lectures: 'To suppose that in the actual world of nature there is a whole set of false propositions going about is to my mind monstrous.'

We should be careful not to confuse the grammatical sense of 'Propositions do not depend for their existence on our minds' with an apparently material sense which arises from a confused mixing of levels (or from a language-game which goes beyond the primary ones we play with 'proposition' and related words).

In the primary game, we simply don't talk about existential dependence on minds in relation to propositions, and this is perfectly in order. That is what is hard to see.

The idea that we simply don't, or can't, talk about propositions (in the ordinary or primary sense) depending on this or that mind, may have an air of quietism and renunciation about it. 'Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent' etc. Even worse, it might seem depressingly parochial and conservative. To a great extent, this would be a mistaken reaction. We are not prevented at all from talking about 'propositions' 'depending' on minds - however, if we do so, and if this is anything more than a mere grammatical confusion, then we are simply not playing the primary game.

Despite the anti-metaphysical political stance of the historical antecedents for this sort of view (particularly in the Vienna Circle), I don't see these points as being hostile to philosophical speculation, or the development of new ways of thinking. And perhaps a lot of what is called 'metaphysics' can be thought of as an attempt to develop such new ways of thinking (and talking) about the world. (None of this, by the way, should be taken to imply any sort of Rortian antirealism, excluding considerations of objectivity and correspondence to reality, or anything like that.)

Consider in this connection the growing attention paid by metaphysicians to the way they are using language, especially quantifiers and terms like 'real' and 'exists' (e.g. Hofweber) and also - more relevantly - terms like 'depends on' and 'grounds' (e.g. Schaffer). Investigations into such matters are increasingly common, and often go under the headings 'metametaphysics' and 'metaontology'.

The remarks above are not very well-made, nor are they particularly original. I make them anyway because they seem to embody an important sort of consideration which seems somewhat neglected in contemporary post-linguistic-turn philosophy (although hopefully this is changing).

The relative obscurity of this sort of consideration today has, of course, to do with the fact that it involves something like an analytic-synthetic distinction, or perhaps more like Wittgenstein's arguably non-exhaustive distinction between grammatical and empirical propositions. Such distinctions sit under a dark cloud today. This in turn has to do with the ideas of Quine in 'Two Dogmas' and 'Truth by Convention', and a shift in emphasis toward certain modal notions, arising from Kripke's clear isolation of them.

Tristan Haze

Cf. this freely available copy of Waismann's article, 'Verifiability', which has some material on language strata. (Note however that one can use the notion of language strata without accepting a verificationist view of meaning.)

References:

Thomas Hofweber (2005). A puzzle about ontology. Noûs 39 (2):256-283.

Thomas Hofweber (2007). Innocent statements and their metaphysically loaded counterparts. Philosophers' Imprint 7 (1):1-33.

Saul A. Kripke (1980). Naming and Necessity. Harvard University Press.

Willard Van Orman Quine (2010). Two dogmas of empiricism. In Darragh Byrne & Max Kölbel (eds.), Arguing About Language. Routledge.

Willard Van Orman Quine (1951). Two dogmas of empiricism. Philosophical Review 60 (1):20-43.

Jonathan Schaffer (2009). On what grounds what. In David Manley, David J. Chalmers & Ryan Wasserman (eds.), Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology. Oxford University Press.

Friedrich Waismann (1946). The many-level-structure of language. Synthese 5 (5-6):221 - 229.

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1975). Philosophical Remarks. University of Chicago Press.

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1974). Philosophical Grammar. Blackwell.

1 Or at least partly abstract objects; Russell thought propositions about concrete objects had those concrete objects as constituents.