Raisins at Dawn #2

Topics this time include: false thoughts, psychological impossibility, metaphilosophy, losing the use of a concept as it gets problematized or worked on, interdefinability as a sign of non-basicness, intuitionism, and the Russell-Copleston debate.

Granularity and the Paradox of Analysis

This is another instalment in the 'Applications of Granularity' series, the earlier members of which are listed at the bottom.

The doctrine of semantic granularity offers us a way of resolving the paradox of analysis: if the expression on the right-hand side of an analysis gives the meaning of the expression on the left-hand side - the expression (for the notion) to be analyzed - then, if the analysis is correct, both sides mean the same. But in that case, how can an analysis be informative?

Now, it might be that some things worth being called analyses - even if they take the classical form of a biconditional - do not, and do not purport to, 'give the meaning' of the left-hand side. They may merely be intended to shed light on the meaning of the left-hand side by exhibiting a connextion between it and the right-hand side.

For such cases, there is no paradox of analysis. But it seems to me, and evidently many others, that there are indeed analyses which go beyond this exhibiting-a-connection, and really do purport to 'give the meaning', in some sense, of the left-hand side.

I propose that considerations of semantic granularity can resolve the paradox here. All such cases, of true, meaning-giving, non-trivial (i.e. informative) analyses - but note that whether an analysis is trivial may depend on its precise meaning in the idiolect of the subject considering it - are such that, at some reasonably granularity, the LHS and the RHS mean the same, but at another, finer granularity, they do not.

The RHS's of many good meaning-giving analyses, for instance, will have more structure than what they are analyses of. And this itself may make it the case, at a certain granularity, they have different meanings. In general, there will be differences between the LHS and RHS - where they occur, the effects they have on thinkers and speakers, and so on - which may be counted as meaning-constitutive, in which case we are operating at a granularity on which they should be said to be non-synonymous. But nevertheless, if they are good meaning-giving analyses, there will be another granularity at which these differences are not made to count, and at that granularity the LHS and RHS may be said to mean the same.

Earlier posts in the series:

Granularity and Quine (in which the series is introduced)

Metaphysical Realism and Conceptual Relativity: An Application of Granularity

Granularity introduced:

Kripke's Puzzle and Semantic Granularity

Also: 

Facts and Granularity

Granularity and Relativism about Truth

The doctrine of semantic granularity can, I think, shed considerable light on the meaning and motivation of relativism about truth. It may even help resolve debates surrounding it.

In this post I will try to briefly indicate how I think this is so. I had a post on granularity and the paradox of analysis lined up for this month, but I will postpone it and get this one out now, in response to this related post on the blog language goes on holiday.

This may not be very clear to others yet, although I think I have it fairly clear in my own mind. Reading the other posts on granularity here, including future ones, will certainly help. (Soon I will do a granularity "roundup" post, collecting them all in one place and sumarizing their contents, but for now see the bottom of this post.) I will try my best under present constraints, in the hope that some reader gets something clear out of this.

Why bother? Well, I think this may be a pretty powerful and important application of granularity, since relativism about truth is such a vexed and widely ramified issue in our intellectual culture. Anyway, here goes.

Granularity and Relativism about Truth

Once the doctrine of granularity is on the table in its basic form, questions of this sort arise (among others): OK, meanings and the like can be carved up at different granularities, but what is the range of possible carvings up?

Surely there are limits; it is far from being the case that, for every two instances of thought or talk, there is a granularity at which they are counted as meaning the same. And it seems quite probable, although this is more debatable, that it also isn't the case that, for every two instances of thought or talk, there is a granularity at which they are counted as differing in meaning.

And do these different possible carvings up fall on a continuum, or are there multiple dimensions of what may count and what may not count towards difference in meaning? (I think the answer is that there are multiple dimensions, and I will try to say something about this in future.)

Now, these sorts of questions suggest a basic constraint on possible or "admissible" granularities for carving up propositions: if two instances of propositions are to be counted as meaning the same, they had better not differ in truth-value.

And now we can see relativism about truth in a new light, namely as the rejection of this constraint.

Furthermore, it is not hard to see how, in certain areas, it may be tempting to reject the constraint. Between two instances, there may be so much of the sort of stuff which usually counts toward sameness of meaning in common that it is really tempting to count them - at some granularity - as meaning the same, while nevertheless certain other important stuff differs so as to make (it best to say that) the truth-values come out differently in the two instances.

This may be particularly likely to happen with the rich and complicated concepts in the moral and aesthetic domains. And perhaps others too. And so we get a new perspective on the motivation of relativism about truth as well.

Of course, in many areas this sort of thing just won't happen - the motivation won't be there. It has often been observed (most saliently in my memory by my former teacher Adrian Heathcote, in unpublished writings) that relativism about truth appeals to people in some domains, such as morality and aesthetics, where it would never seem appealing in others. And so the general, woolly-seeming doctrine that all truth is relative can be and often is condemned as being based on a far too narrow diet of examples: you may be tempted to say such a thing after considering some moral or aesthetic matter (for instance), but with other matters such as basic geography or facts about how many chairs there are in some easily observable room, the notion that something may be true for me, while something else is true for you, would never occur to anyone, and seems completely absurd.

But relativism about truth need not be maintained that way - it may be maintained that in some areas, or with some propositions, truth is relative. Call this moderate relativism.

And, as I have tried to indicate, granularity considerations can shed some light on what this may mean, and what may motivate it. This in itself is, I think, a good advertisement for the power of granularity considerations, as relativism about truth is a big deal, especially in the borderlands of philosophy.

OK, good. But now a further question comes up: is it true? Are there, in some areas or with some kinds of propositions, admissible granularities on which two instances of propositions get counted as meaning the same but differing in truth-value?

I think that here we need to consider allowing the possibility of a kind of pluralism - slightly different sets of concepts such that, on one set, the issue gets decided one way, and on another set, the issue gets decided the other way. For instance, it could be that the maintainer of moderate relativism has a slightly broader or more flexible notion of meaning/proposition than the denier. And perhaps realizing that may enable them to resolve their dispute.

Still, it may give way to different disputes about how best to use certain words, and about which concepts to deploy where - but these may be more tractable.

(Here we get into the difficult and important topic of verbal disputes. Chalmers has recently had things to say on this topic, which was arguably being neglected before he did so. See his paper 'Verbal Disputes'.)

So, granularity considerations can be fruitfully applied to relativism about truth. They may help to (i) clarify its meaning, (ii) shed light on what motivates its adoption and (iii) help show the way to a resolution of debates over it.

Related Posts

Kripke's Puzzle and Semantic Granularity

Facts and Granularity

Granularity and Quine

Metaphysical Realism and Conceptual Relativity: An Application of Granularity

Philosophers' Carnival #168

Welcome to the 168th edition of the Philosophers' Carnival, a monthly digest of substantive analytic philosophy from around the blogosphere.

It seems like substantive philosophy blogging is in pretty good shape at the moment - but the landscape has been changing, so that things may not look healthy if you just stick to the old popular venues. Quite a few writers came out of the woodwork recently when Brian Weatherson started his new tumblr blog, And Another Thing. (He has a few posts on this theme, here, here and here.)

Raisins at Dawn #1

Topics this time include: logical space and Wittgenstein, method and semantic notions in philosophy, the idea of metaphysics, Lichtenberg on selfishness, modality, semantic granularity, and F.P. Ramsey on what the vastness of the universe doesn't mean for us.

Modality and 'Epistemic'

...plus a preview of forthcoming analyses of a priority and analyticity.

This is a correspondence-inspired followup to 'Two Concepts of Metaphysical Modality'.

What I there called 'metaphysical modality in the broad sense' should probably be thought of as including what David Chalmers calls the logical or epistemic modality (also sometimes the 'indicative' modality), tied to what is a priori consistent. This despite my characterizing it in part with the term 'non-epistemic'.

What's going on? It may look like there is some disagreement between me and Chalmers about whether some modality has some status which we both call 'epistemic'.

I don't think this is so, however. It seems there are just different uses of 'epistemic' at work here. Chalmers doesn't think that what he calls the logical or epistemic modality depends upon our knowledge or conventions (any more than logic does). Whereas I was using 'epistemic' in 'non-epistemic' (and tend to use it elsewhere) to mean something like 'depending on or having to do with knowledge'.

This also connects with a bit in Chalmers's short piece on the tyranny of the subjunctive, where he fields the objection 'But indicative necessity is epistemic!' and says 'So?'.

For me that always seemed like a bullet that really didn't have to be bitten - in fact, on that ought not to have been. But this is probably because I was reading 'epistemic' to mean something like 'depending on, or having to do with, knowledge'. I now suspect I was reading it contrary to Chalmers's intention. One moral: take care using and interpreting overworked philosophical words!

Now for the preview...

For my part, I think the core notion behind the a priori/a posteriori distinction in propositional typology - which distinction is tied to what Chalmers calls the logical, epistemic or indicative modality - isn't really 'epistemic' in the sense that I tend to give that word. 'A priori' could of course be stipulated to be about knowability without experience or whatever, but what underlies and explains that knowability has to do with the nature of the proposition itself.

I'm working on cashing that out in terms of the internal meaning determining the truth value. And that sounds like analyticity, but to that I reply that it's the full internal meaning in question here, which need not be fully grasped in order to pass as understanding the proposition in question. To define analyticity, I want to use a notion of a 'meaning-radical' - something like a bit of conceptual structure such that having it on board suffices for you to count as understanding the proposition in question - and say that a proposition is analytic iff its meaning-radical determines its truth value. Or one of its meaning-radicals, if there can be more than one. (Meaning-radical/analyticity are pretty vague notions, I think.)

This also provides a nice pithy answer to Kant's big question; the synthetic a priori is possible because full internal meaning can outrun meaning-radicals. This connects to the idea of the linguistic division of labour, and Wittgensteinian points about the widely-scatteredness of the determinants of meaning.

Metaphysical Realism and Conceptual Relativity: An Application of Granularity

This is another instalment in the 'Applications of Granularity' series I introduced in the last post. To learn what is going on here, have a look at the first paragraphs of that, and the original post on Kripke's puzzle and semantic granularity.

Let us characterize metaphysical realism as the view that there is exactly one true and complete description of the world, and let us characterize conceptual relativity as the denial of that claim.

These two opposing views, at least in name, come from Putnam's discussions in, among other places, the books cited at the end of this post, and have since been discussed by many philosophers. It is not clear to me whether Putnam ever took the characterizations I have given as full characterizations, but they have certainly been for him at least part of what is involved in the two views.

Putnam used different characterizations at different times, and plenty of people have worked at sorting that out a bit. I'm not getting into any of that. I just want to stipulate the above characterizations, and briefly indicate how the doctrine of semantic granularity can dissolve the appearance of a hard- or impossible-to-resolve philosophical disagreement here.

It can do this as follows. If a complete description of a domain D is a set of propositions such that every proposition which says something true about D means the same as one of the propositions in the set (or a conjunction of them), then whether we say a description of the world is complete depends on the granularity we are operating at. Conceptual relativity may hold at a certain granularity, but once you make the granularity finer, it may collapse into metaphysical realism.

Seen in this way, where one claim, conceptual relativism, holds at one granularity or set thereof and the other, metaphysical realism, holds at another (finer) one or set thereof, they are not inconsistent with each other, and each has its own point.

Conceptual relativity as it were emphasizes the possibility of attaining the same or similar goals by different cognitive and linguistic means. Metaphysical realism on the oher hand emphasizes what we might call the sovereignty, the special individuality, of the different ways of doing things.

Relevant Works

Putnam, Hilary (1978). Meaning and the Moral Sciences, Routledge & K. Paul.

Putnam, Hilary (1981). Reason, Truth and History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Putnam, Hilary (1985). Realism and Reason, volume 3 of Philosophical Papers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Putnam, Hilary (1990). Realism with a Human Face, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Not to mention the innumerable writings by others dealing with Putnam's philosophy.