Essence, Belief and Epistemic Modality (Part 2 of Sketch)

This is part 2 of a Sketch of a Way of Thinking about Modality. In this part we shall consider:

- Essences and the de re/de dicto distinction,
- The indefiniteness of necessity,
- Intentional contexts ("propositional attitudes"), and
- Epistemic modality.

The first topic is really the main one. What I say about the remaining topics will be very scant - a rough indication of how these issues are to be approached according to the way of thinking being sketched out here, rather than an attempt to really deal with them. (I hope to really deal with them in my book.) They fit quite naturally here, since intentional contexts come into the more substantial discussion of the first topic. If nothing else, the brief discussion here should prevent readers from thinking that I have given no consideration to such issues, or that my account of modality is straightforwardly unable to deal with them.

Three Interpretations of Modal Claims about Individuals

As a preliminary, it should be noted that epistemic modal claims are not counted in this taxonomy. Consider, to begin with, sentences of the form 'a is necessarily F'. I distinguish the following three interpretations of such statements:

(1) The contextual interpretation. The locus classicus for this interpretation is Lewis in On the Plurality of Worlds, who expresses it better than I can:

I suggest that those philosophers who preach that origins are essential are absolutely right - in the context of their own preaching. They make themselves right: their preaching constitutes a context in which de re modality is governed by a way of representing (as I think, by a counterpart relation) that requires match of origins. But if I ask how things would be if Saul Kripke had come from no sperm and egg but had been brought by a stork, that makes equally good sense. I create a context that makes my question make sense, and to do so it has to be a context that makes origins not be essential.' (p. 252)

There is one ruffle here: Lewis (who is notorious for playing fast and loose with ordinary modal language) talks of 'how things would be if Saul Kripke had...', rather than how things would have been. This might suggest a kind of epistemic reading, concerning what it would be like if it turned out that Saul Kripke actually had such-and-such an origin. But the range of possibilities in this sense - the things which could turn out to be true of an individual, for all we know (or all we know a priori) - is something quite different from what we are discussing here. In two-dimensional semantics, this corresponds roughly to the difference between A- and C-intensions.

(2) The "unrestricted" interpretation. In contrast to the above, we are now beginning to enter the realm of what could more legitimately be called 'essence'¹, and are looking at proper metaphysical (or subjunctive) modality. On this interpretation, something like the following holds: 'a is necessarily F' is true iff 'a is F' is satisfied by all configurations of the host system of these propositions, and the concepts involved are adequate to their objects with respect to 'a is F'. (This form of account is introduced more generally in part 1.)

Thus, in this case, we might say that the necessity, as opposed to contingent truth, of 'a is F' stems from the nature of the individual concept of a, rather than any contextual restrictions placed on our representations. Why, then, are there scare-quotes around 'unrestricted'? This is because the present way of looking at things may over-dramatize the difference between the contextual restrictions of Lewis's account, and the constitution of concepts in the relevant fine-grained sense. We might think of the nature of these concepts as being at least partly determined by more-or-less invariant restrictions of some more general apparatus. This more general apparatus can be used to understand epistemic modality (and epistemic space).

On this interpretation, to say that a is necessarily F is to say something like: according to the way I think of a - and this way is adequate - it could not have failed to be F. (This isn't meant to be a proper analysis.) But we will probably want to recognize the possibility of slightly different concepts in other systems which have a as their object, and are adequate. Thus while we might think of John in such a way that we may say, intending the present "unrestricted" interpretation, that he is necessarily F, we might recognize that other people might legitimately think of John in such a way that they may say that he is contingently F. (This could be called 'adequacy pluralism about concepts'.)

(3) The generalized "unrestricted" interpretation. Clearly, we will want an interpretation of modal claims about individuals which does not tie their truth to one particular conceptualization (namely, that embodied in the host system of the modal claim). This interpretation gives us that. On this interpretation, something like the following holds: 'a is necessarily F' is true iff all configurations of all systems containing an adequate concept of a represent a as being F. (Another, less natural interpretation would be to substitute 'at least one system' for 'all systems'. This interpretation would be natural for 'a is possibly F'.)

A Simplification

I have simplified the above by concentrating on subject terms and ignoring different construals of the role of the predicate. One might distinguish interpretations analogous to (2) and (3) above, i.e. an evaluation involving a particular F-concept in a system, versus one involving all systems with some concept of the property F. An analogous simplification will be made below in the discussion of ascriptions of intentional content. 

The Indefiniteness of Necessity

The account of necessity given here, based on the notion of all configurations of a conceptual system, may give the impression that I think a sharp boundary can be drawn between necessary and contingent truths. It is important to realize that this is not the case. (I probably should have emphasized this already in part 1.)

One way of responding to this would be to try to modify our picture of modality - instead of picturing a conceptual system as being like a mechanical apparatus which can be put into a definite set of configurations, one might imagine a device with an indefinite set of configurations; one might, for example, imagine growing resistance as one manipulates the apparatus into further out configurations (i.e. further from what we think is actually the case).

This sort of response has its place, but we needn't respond like that. We can also hold on to our simpler, more definite picture, but with due regard to the indefiniteness of its application.

Either way, it is important to note that there are clear cases. Some propositions are clearly necessary, and some are clearly contingent, and the distinction between them is of fundamental importance.

The following analogies from Wittgenstein are very helpful in connection with this theme:

The use of the words 'proposition', 'language', etc. has the haziness of the normal use of concept-words in our language. To think this makes them unusable, or ill-adapted to their purpose, would be like wanting to say 'the warmth this stove gives is no use, because you can't feel where it begins and where it ends'.

from Philosophical Grammar, Part 1. p. 120.

It is essential to logic to draw boundaries, but no such boundaries are drawn in the language we speak. But this doesn’t mean that logic represents language incorrectly, or that it represents an ideal language. Its task is to portray a colourful, blurred reality as a pen-and-ink drawing.

from The Big Typescript, p. 144.

The De Re/De Dicto Distinction(s)

This is widely acknowledged to be a confusing topic. The pair of terms 'de re' and 'de dicto' appear to get employed in philosophy to mark several important distinctions (or sorts of distinction). Complete clarification of this will have to wait for another time, but for now I want to characterize two basic sorts of distinction for which these terms can be used:

(1) De re: Generalization (universal or existential) over dicta involving a particular object vs. De dicto: specification of a particular dictum. (Dicta here are contents, propositions - something like that.) The distinction above between the "unrestricted" and generalized "unrestricted" interpretations of modal claims about individuals is an instance of this. It echoes, at least in part, Quine's distinction between believes-notional and believes relational.

In intentional contexts (for example, belief-reports), the distinction appears in the following way. The name 'Hesperus' in a belief report like:

(A) Ralph believes that Hesperus is F.

can be read as doing two things at once. (1) specifying the object of Ralph's belief, and (2) specifying the concept (or mode of presentation) via which he has it. On such a reading, (1) could be expanded to:

(B) Ralph believes, of Hesperus, via his Hesperus-concept, that it is F.

(A similar thing could be done for the 'F'.) Some belief reports, on the other hand - purely de re belief-reports - may be read as only specifying the object. (A) read this way could be expanded to:

(C) Ralph believes, of Hesperus, via some concept(s), that it is F.

(Cases such as 'John believes that Santa Claus exists' suggest that there are also readings where the name just functions to indicate an individual concept or intension involved in the propositional attitude, i.e. does not specify any real extension.)

Substitution of co-referring terms salva veritate (i.e. without change in truth-value) will fail in modal and intentional contexts which are de dicto in this sense.

(2) De re: Involvement of a dictum featuring a rigid (or rigidified) designator vs. De dicto: Involvement of a dictum featuring a non-rigid, unrigidified designator. This distinction most clearly makes its appearance with definite descriptions.

To illustrate: as a result of these two distinctions together, a sentence like 'The winner could have been shot' - once we rule out salient epistemic readings and Lewis-style contextually restricted readings - still has three readings left:

De dicto in both senses (1) and (2): true iff the non-rigid dictum 'The winner was shot' is satisfied by at least one configuration of the host system. (In this configuration (so to speak), the winner might be someone else.)

De dicto in sense (1) and de re in sense (2): using 'The winner' to indicate an individual concept - the concept of the actual winner, that very person - i.e. as a rigidified description, and true iff that dictum is satisfied by at least one configuration of its host system.

De re in sense (1) and therefore neither de re nor de dicto in sense (2): using 'The winner' purely to indicate a particular object, and then making a claim about all dicta which are rigidly about that object and which fulfil certain conditions (in this case: saying that the object was shot, or saying that the object was shot using some particular concept of being shot). It is only on this sort of reading, I submit, that substitution of co-referring terms salva veritate will be valid.

Clarifying and separating these distinctions helps to clarify Quine's skepticism about de re modality, and Kripke's famous arguments against Quine's attitude, as well as making it clearer why this debate is so confusing. Below is a lengthy quote of an important passage of Naming and Necessity. The above discussion can help us disambiguate the ensuing talk of particulars having modal properties independently of how they are described: this may be indicating de re-ness of the second kind (involvement of an individual concept rather than a non-rigid, unrigidified designator), or the first (generalizing over concepts of a particular object, rather than fixing on a particular concept).

Some philosophers have distinguished between essentialism, the belief in modality de re, and a mere advocacy of necessity, the belief in modality de dicto. Now, some people say: Let's give you the concept of necessity. A much worse thing, something creating great additional problems, is whether we can say of any particular that it has necessary or contingent properties, even make the distinction between necessary and contingent properties. Look, it's only a statement or a state of affairs that can be either necessary or contingent! Whether a particular necessarily or contingently has a certain property depends on the way it's described. This is perhaps closely related to the view that the way we refer to particular things is by a description. What is Quine's famous example? If we consider the number 9, does it have the property of necessary oddness? Has that number got to be odd in all possible worlds? Certainly it's true in all possible worlds, let's say, it couldn't have been otherwise, that nine is odd. Of course, 9 could also be equally well picked out as the number of planets. It is not necessary, not true in all possible worlds, that the number of planets is odd. For example if there had been eight planets, the number of planets would not have been odd. And so it's thought: Was it necessary or contingent that Nixon won the election? (It might seem contingent, unless one has some view of some inexorable processes....) But this is a contingent property of Nixon only relative to our referring to him as 'Nixon' (assuming 'Nixon' doesn't mean 'the man who won the election at such and such a time'). But if we designate Nixon as 'the man who won the election in 1968', then it will be a necessary truth, of course, that the man who won the election in 1968, won the election in 1968. Similarly, whether an object has the same property in all possible worlds depends not just on the object itself, but on how it is described. So it's argued.

It is even suggested in the literature, that though a notion of necessity may have some sort of intuition behind it (we do think some things could have been otherwise; other things we don't think could have been otherwise), this notion [of a distinction between necessary and contingent properties] is just a doctrine made up by some bad philosopher, who (I guess) didn't realize that there are several ways of referring to the same thing. I don't know if some philosophers have not realized this; but at any rate it is very far from being true that this idea [that a property can meaningfully be held to be essential or accidental to an object independently of its description] is a notion which has no intuitive content, which means nothing to the ordinary man. Suppose that someone said, pointing to Nixon, 'That's the guy who might have lost'. Someone else says 'Oh no, if you describe him as "Nixon", then he might have lost; but, of course, describing him as the winner, then it is not true that he might have lost'. Now which one is being the philosopher, here, the unintuitive man? It seems to me obviously to be the second. The second man has a philosophical theory. The first man would say, and with great conviction 'Well, of course, the winner of the election might have been someone else. The actual winner, had the course of the campaigner been different, might have been the loser, and someone else the winner; or there might have been no election at all. So such terms as "the winner" and "the loser" don't designate the same objects in all possible worlds. On the other hand, the term "Nixon" is just a name of this man. When you ask whether it is necessary or contingent that Nixon won the election, you are asking the intuitive question whether in some counterfactual situation, this man would in fact have lost the election. (Kripke, Naming and Necessity, first lecture.)

Epistemic Modality and Ascriptions of Intentional Content

For the purposes of understanding metaphysical or subjunctive modality, I have been talking about conceptual systems in a fine-grained sense such that changing one's mind about an empirical identity statement involving individual concepts, for example, constitutes a change in the system itself. Since we believe that Hesperus is Phosphorus, there is no configuration of our fine-grained system which satisfies 'Hesperus is not Phosphorus'. And yet we can truly say things like 'It could turn out that Hesperus is not Phosphorus after all', and even (despite worries of Kripke's) 'It could have turned out that Hesperus was not Phosphorus'.

This is connected with the idea of 'two spaces of possible worlds' in other approaches. (Cf. Chalmers' 'The Nature of Epistemic Space'.) When we say that it could be that Hesperus isn't Phosphorus, we are not considering a configuration of our existing system in the sense we have been talking about, but are rather considering a change in our system. But in another sense, of course, making this change would constitute a reconfiguration of some "wider" system - the system relevant to epistemic modality. Making various abstractions and idealizations, we can imagine a space of possible ways things could be for all we know a priori - epistemic space. Moving from that to the space of ways things could have been involves getting rid of epistemic possibilities which are not metaphysically possible (the lesson of the necessary a posteriori), but also adding epistemic impossibilities which are metaphysically possible (the lesson of the contingent a priori), i.e. things which couldn't be the case, but could have been, such as this room being bigger than it is. (This latter thing will occupy us in part 3.)

So, we can configure our systems in the wide sense to represent ways things might be, and the way we think things are. But, speaking roughly, such a configuration of the wide system yields a system in the fine-grained sense, of ways things could have been. Sometimes, when we change our beliefs, this can be understood as simply moving to another configuration in the fine-grained system (and thus not directly changing any of our metaphysical modal judgements), whereas other times this must be regarded as involving change of the fine-grained system itself (e.g. going from believing that Hesperus is not Phosphorus to believing that it is).

(Note that I am not saying that the ways things really could be all have corresponding configurations in some system of ours, nor that the ways things really could have been all have corresponding configurations in our fine-grained system - not only may we be wrong, there will be possibilities we haven't dreamt of. Clearly much more needs saying here about these notions of 'the ways'. Some speculations can be found here.)

The Metaphysical Possibility of Metaphysically Impossible Thoughts

Hesperus could be distinct from Phosphorus after all, if we're radically deceived, but given that it is Phosphorus, it could not have been distinct from Phosphorus. So 'Hesperus is not Phosphorus' is not satisfied by any configurations of our fine-grained system. And yet 'John believes that Hesperus is not Phosphorus' is metaphysically possible, is satisfied by configurations of our fine-grained system.

This may be quite puzzling given a certain way of visualizing the fine-grained system and its relation to the wider epistemic system which gives rise to it. For a while it seemed like a real problem to me, and I called it 'the containment problem'. The bothersome thing is the way in which epistemic modal space seems to be contained in metaphysical modal space via our machinery for ascribing intentional states and propositional attitudes - our machinery for representing the thoughts and representations of others - despite epistemic modal space outrunning the metaphysical in the well-known Kripkean way.

It is very tempting to try to "fix" this "problem" by going metalinguistic. I.e. saying something like: 'When we say that John believes that Hesperus is not Phosphorus, we aren't really simulating, constructing, or dealing directly with a thought that Hesperus is not Phosphorus. Rather, we are simply employing our concepts of Hesperus, the Hesperus-concept and the Phosphorus-concept, and forming an idea of a proposition in another system which has the relevant properties.' That may be a good view of what we do sometimes (especially with very foreign thoughts), but it seems wrong - gratuitous, even - to suppose that this is always how we do it. After all, we naturally and frequently envisage epistemic possibilities which fall outside our current fine-grained system. We step outside it all the time. So, when we think something like 'John believes that Hesperus is not Phosphorus', we can think of this as employing - in tandem - our fine-grained system together with a configuration of our wider system which falls outside it, but which is "pointed to": to give ourselves the thing John believes, we step outside our fine-grained system and construct the thought directly, so to speak - and all of this in a sense just constitutes a configuration of our fine-grained system, but of a special kind.

Compare Russell's treatment in the Logical Atomism lectures of 'propositions with more than one verb', and his remark about Wittgenstein's 'discovery' that propositions like 'A believes that p' are 'a new beast for our zoo' (p. 226, Logic and Knowledge).

A Desultory Postscript about Water

Contrary to plan, I haven't included a proper section on 'Water is H20' and related examples (or apparent examples) of the necessary a posteriori. I don't have much to say about such examples for now, except that it is very difficult to avoid dogmatism when treating them; specifically, in the move from the fact that water is H20 - something we've all learned - to a particular interpretation and logical explication of 'Water is H20'.

One might regard this sentence as expressing a 'theoretical identity' as in Kripke. Scott Soames critically examines this way of going in detail in his book Beyond Rigidity. Alternatively, one might regard the 'is' here as being "the 'is' of constitution", and this in turn might be construed as a (non-symmetric) relation. Or one might simply interpret 'is H20' as a predicate. On the 'water' side, one may construe this as being tied to a concept of water in the Kripke-Putnam way (i.e. such that 'Water is H20' is necessary), or it may be construed functionally or phenomenologically, such that 'Water is H20' is contingent.

All these contents seem to exist, so to speak, and all seem like natural ways of interpreting 'Water is H20'. So we must be wary not to fall into holding views which might implicitly suggest otherwise; we can and should develop simplified, systematic, abstract views of logic and language, but we hinder and discredit this very development if we neglect the underlying variety of language use. Among other things, this may give the false appearance that the whole logico-philosophical enterprise depends on there not being this variety.

(Part 1, recently edited, is here.) 

(See this paper for a newer presentation of the basic ideas of part 1.)

1. For present purposes, I pass over Kit Fine's contention that not all necessary properties are essential in an intuitive sense (roughly because they are not all intrinsic to the thing in question). The classic example of a necessary property which is arguably not an essential property is Socrates' membership in his singleton set {Socrates}. There may be something important which distinguishes the essential properties from the merely necessary ones, but they will still be necessary properties, and hence will be amenable to my view.

Wild Thoughts on Modality, Propositions and Concepts

Here. (Readers who like Sprachlogik for its clear-headedness are duly warned that this title is no joke.)

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.

Quine and Lewis on Semantic Relativity

This post is by guest author Timothy Scriven.

In 'Ontological relativity' Quine suggests that the linguist's translation of a term into another language is radically indeterminate. Neither the intension nor the extension of terms can be deduced from behavior alone. In his famous example “Gavagai” might refer to a rabbit, an undetached rabbit part, a time slice of a rabbit or any number of other entities. This under-determination is not merely an epistemological problem (perhaps one we could solve via inference to the best explanation), for if anything is meaning constitutive, it is behaviour.

Quine does concede that the linguist is likely to make certain sorts of translations and not others. Quine says that “Enduring and relatively homogenous object[s]” which “[move] as a whole against a contrasting background” are likely to be selected as the translations for short expressions. We might call this “the rule of moving blocks” (RMB). Surely though there will be other rules that linguists tend to use to resolve indeterminacy, let’s call these rules R collectively.

Imagine a linguist considering lexicons from a variety of languages, and noticing a pattern of R-preserving meanings. For example, languages tend to have words for “Horse” but not “The undetached lower half of a horse”. A linguist might think that they have uncovered a human universal in RMB, and in whatever other rules they may extract. Quine, however, thinks this is purely an artifact of our interests, and the way we do linguistics. Roughly speaking, translations consistent with R rules tend to be more natural.

Quine thinks that if we are being purely philosophical and bracketing our values and interests, we cannot make a choice between the alternative translations, one of which preserves R as much as possible, and one of which disregards R. Only facts about our interests determine which translation it is best to adopt. Quine says that he would recommend adopting the semanticist’s practice of sticking with R-friendly or natural translations to anyone. But this is only for practical reasons, from what we might think of as a purely theoretical perspective, we’re stuck with massive indeterminacy.

There’s a ruffle in the carpet for Quine’s view that isn’t urged by commentators often enough. Quine sets up a dialectic in which he is being philosophical, refusing to attend to pragmatic interests at least for a while, and considering alternative translations schemas without referring to human interests. The semanticist on the other hand attends to the mucky practical requirements of her field. What she should say is relative to her interests. Not her pecuniary, ethical or emotional interests, but certain cognitive interests- simplicity, tractability etc. No blame falls on the semanticist for this, but the projects of the philosopher and the semanticist are clearly divergent.

How does Quine come to the view that semanticists typically make assignments on the basis of adjoining words to natural things or types? Why, by parsing the semanticist’s language of course. Presumably he reaches his understanding of the semanticist’s language through an interpretive theory, but either this theory is incomplete and does not uniquely select an interpretation, or it is laden with interests. Thus Quine “shows” that linguists interpret relative to a set of pragmatic concerns, but he can only show this by smuggling in pragmatic concerns of his own, inferences about meaning beyond what his cherished behavioral data would permit. There is no strict self-refutation here, but it is surely compromising nonetheless.

Lewis is famous for expounding the view that natural properties play a vital role in fixing meaning (c.f. 'New work for a theory of universals'). For Lewis, it’s not that, as a contingent psychological matter, people tend to refer to natural properties instead of unnatural properties. Instead it’s part of the meaning of “meaning” that translation schemes which are “higher scoring” with respect to certain virtues, like mapping onto natural properties, win out over lower scoring schemas.

At heart, these views have very little separating them. Perhaps this is unsurprising. In my view, Lewis can be read as Quine, with greater respect for Moorean facts.¹ Both Quine and Lewis acknowledge the role of something like naturalness in deciding our theories of meaning. Quine just insists that naturalness gets a role for “pragmatic reasons”. When the difference is put so, I think it becomes difficult indeed to give a reason to be a Quinean rather than a Lewisian. One might insist that Quine has one less ontological commitment than Lewis, he doesn’t need to hold there is anything actually like natural properties. But if Quine can do without these properties in his semantics and metaphysics, I think we can reconfigure the Lewisian thesis as simply stating that the correct meaning theory is the competitor that preserves naturalness the best². as captured by R, without a commitment to any particular ontology.

It is not even clear that there is a material difference between the views. One could talk about the set of meaningsQ and the set of meaningsL. The meaningsQ of a word W are those that are compatible with all available data on F that Quine would consider acceptable. The meaningsL of a word W are those that are compatible with all available data on W that Lewis would consider acceptable. The set of MeaningsL for W will hopefully consist in just one meaning, since, unless there are ties, there will only be one top ranked meaning for each term, accounting for all of Lewis’s ranking criteria. MeaningQ is underdetermined, meaningL is not, so we are inclined to use meaningL. 

Timothy Scriven

The University of Sydney 

References 

David Lewis (1983). New work for a theory of universals. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 61 (December):343-377. 

Quine, W. V. (1968). Ontological relativity. Journal of Philosophy 65 (7):185-212. 

1 Compare for example Quine’s reasons for accepting Platonism, and Lewis’s reasons for accepting modal realism. Of course Lewis is a modal realist, but even this position was reached by trying to respect deep principles of commonsense.

2 Of course there may be other criteria.

Philosophers' Carnival - July 18, 2011

Welcome to the July 18, 2011 edition of Philosophers' Carnival. Marvel at the range of different topics discussed! No analytic-continental divide here!

Crazyism - Eric Schwitzgebel of The Splintered Mind introduces the concept of crazyism about some given area of inquiry - the view that something crazy (in a certain sense) must be true about that area. (I think the 'must' here is just epistemic, but I may be wrong.)

Logical Positivism and the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics - by Aaron Kenna of the Florida Student Philosophy Blog.

Constitution - Kevin Somerville of dthat discusses the relation 'x constitutes y' in connection with the philosophy of mind.

Atheism, agnosticism and theism 2: What it is to have a belief - by John Wilkins of Evolving Thoughts.

Where I am at with Hume's is-ought distinction - by Maryann Spikes of Ichtus77.

The Open Question Argument - Richard Yetter Chappell of Philosophy, et cetera issues a call for objections to a defence of the Open Question Argument. Please try to refute him as soon as possible.

Kevorkian's Legacy And The Right To Die - by David Fryman of The Bennett Commentary.

Paradoxes for "expresses the proposition" - Wolfgang Shwarz of wo's weblog discusses a Liar-related paradox which arises when propositions are treated as sets of possible worlds. Dustin Tucker has made some detailed and learned comments.

Public sector pension reform: my advice to the Prime Minister - thanks to Thom Brooks of The Brooks Blog for giving me the unexpected pleasure of posting a link, on this blog, to an article in which a philosopher gives advice to a head of state. I mean this in the best possible way.

And now for two special sections, exclusive to this edition of the carnival:

Criticisms of Readings of Great Philosophers

Why Kant Was Not A Cognitive Scientist - Matt Whitlock of A Rigid Designator presents a criticism of Andrew Brook's reading of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.

Nietzsche on Agency and the Will - the mysterious Carlos AKA Narziss criticizes an aspect of Brian Leiter's reading of Nietzsche.

Arguably Inappropriate Submissions

Deconstructing Godel (sic) - I include this post because it's about Goedel. It's essentially a short and maybe slightly dubious biographical sketch. (I don't think Goedel was ever actually part of the Vienna Circle, but someone please correct me if I'm wrong.) I feel bound by duty to inform the prospective reader that the title is a bit misleading; whatever it may mean to deconstruct Goedel, I'm pretty sure it doesn't occur here. Some may say this is for the best.

7 Reasons To Never Lie Again - by Kyle Warren of Follow the FLOW (indeed). I'm pretty sure this isn't meant to be a serious piece of philosophy, but it was submitted, and I include it because it made me laugh several times. It was posted over a year ago, which adds to the arguable inappropriateness.

That's all for this edition of the carnival. The next one is at the Blog of Noah Greenstein on August 8.

Sketch of a Way of Thinking about Modality - Part 1

[This is old and my thinking on the subject has changed quite a bit (for the better I'm pretty sure). It may be of historical interest, or interesting if you're interested in how my ideas have developed. See my more recent 'Necessity as an Attribute of Propositions' - 22/10/15]

[UPDATE: This sketch, except for parts of part 2, will soon be made mostly redundant by a paper I am working on. I expect to make a draft of this paper available in early November. A link will appear here. - TH 13/10/2011]

[UPDATE 2: The paper mentioned above is here.]

[UPDATE 3, March 2013: What appears below has been left so far behind that I'm almost embarrassed about it. For my latest on these topics, see An Account of Subjunctive Necessity.]

This is the first installment of a two-part series of posts where I aim to sketch some ideas about modality which will feature in a book I am working on, Necessity and Conceptual Systems. The material is still very much under development, and I apologize for the obscurities which the reader will inevitably find in it. Comments and criticisms are very welcome.

In this first part, I will introduce the approach, and indicate how it handles the necessary a posteriori, using 'Hesperus is Phosphorus' as a case-study. In part 2 I will discuss the notion of de re modality, of essence, and natural-kind examples such as 'Water is H20', as well as some more general issues which arise on my approach (especially to do with epistemic modality and ascriptions of intentional content).

In the Golden Age of analytic philosophy, necessarily true propositions were widely taken to be those which are satisfied by (or 'come out true' on) all configurations of some conceptual or linguistic system. Possibility was understood in terms of satisfaction by at least one configuration. Our conceptual system, our means of understanding the world, is here thought of as something like a model, or a machine, which has moving parts, and which can be put into various positions or configurations. Each configuration can be thought of as corresponding to, or satisfying, or even being, a set of propositions. (I have taken many liberties in the formulation of this description.)

Conceptual or linguistic systems of the kind in question were thought to be describable with "semantical rules" for a language, and necessary propositions were thus commonly taken to be a priori and true "in virtue of the meaning" of the terms involved (cf. Carnap's Meaning and Necessity, Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic). This yields a notion of necessity reminiscent of the notion of truth-functional tautologousness. (Earlier, in the Tractatus - which was a major inspiration to both Ayer and Carnap - this relationship is much closer than mere reminiscence.)

This sort of view was attacked by Quine in at least two ways (cf. his 'Truth by Convention', 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism'). Quine's undifferentiated picture of language had a sobering or worrying effect, but it did not stop people carrying on with some version of the view in question. This is connected with the fact that it amounted to a kind of quietism or abstinence with respect to the relevant sorts of notions (semantic, modal), rather than a sustained attempt to attain positive insight about them.

The really decisive blow to the Golden Age view of modality came from Kripke. His fundamental contribution was to persuasively argue that the a priori does not coincide with the (metaphysically) necessary, and relatedly, that epistemic modality ("what could be the case") is to be distinguished from metaphysical modality ("what could have been the case" in a certain unrestricted sense). This contribution was closely bound up with Kripke's ideas concerning naming and reference, more on which in a moment. The recognition of the necessary a posteriori in particular, and the associated idea that conceivability doesn't entail possibility, has led to a reaction against views of modality of the Golden Age sort.

(About 'metaphysical modality': one sometimes hears it said of a philosopher that they countenance metaphysical modality, as though this indicates that the person holds some sort of doctrine, which may be quite esoteric. But 'metaphysical modality' is just a label for me - synonymous with 'subjunctive modality' - for a notion "detected" in the logic of language. That said, someone who felt this notion was, e.g., a trivial artifact of the way we happen to talk, rather than a deep artifact of the way we think, would probably not want to use this label.)

My approach to modality retains the view that necessity - metaphysical necessity - can be fruitfully understood in terms of invariance through all configurations of a conceptual system. But it also takes Kripke's separation of the a priori and the metaphysically necessary fully to heart. This latter point is one respect in which my approach differs from that of the two-dimensional semanticists. Another key contrast is that the possible worlds framework is not fundamental to my view.

Broadly speaking, I handle the necessary a posteriori by doing two things. Firstly, I work with a much more fine-grained notion of 'conceptual system' than did the logical empiricists. (The sense of 'fine-grained' here should become clearer in a moment.) Secondly, I embrace a certain kind of semantic externalism - roughly, the view that sense doesn't determine reference (other ways to put this which for me are roughly equivalent: intension doesn't determine extension, concept doesn't determine object).

I will illustrate how this works with respect to a classic example of the necessary a posteriori: 'Hesperus is Phosphorus'.¹

I follow Kripke in holding that proper names do not have reference-determining senses (which hangs together with semantic externalism via Putnam's idea of Twin Earth), and also that proper names do not have a semantics which can be given in the form of general conceptual content such as definite descriptions, or clusters thereof (irrespective of whether this content can be said to determine reference).

I do not, however, accept the (to my mind very strange and confused) idea that proper names are 'mere tags' (Ruth Barcan Marcus's phrase), that all there is to the meaning of a name is its referent, etc. This idea is sometimes associated with Mill's claim that names have no 'connotation', only 'denotation', and also with the phrase 'direct reference'.²

We have individual concepts - concepts of individuals, of particular objects - and we often associate these with proper names. This sheds light on Kripke's rigid designation thesis (the thesis that a referring proper name designates the same object in all possible worlds at which that object exists). If names are associated with individual concepts - concepts of particular objects - then it is immediate that they will designate the same object in all possible worlds where that object exists; designating another object is out of the question, since we are holding fixed the associated individual concept. We may thus distinguish rigid designators such as ordinary proper names, which designate rigidly because they are directly associated with individual concepts, from other rigid designators such as definite descriptions in mathematics.

Once we recognize individual concepts in this way, we can say that when someone accepts that Hesperus is Phosphorus (having previously taken them to be distinct), there is a change in their conceptual system - in the relevant fine-grained sense. Of course, in a more coarse-grained (and more ordinary) sense, we can say that they have before and after the same conceptual system. The fine-grained change consists in the unification of two individual concepts. The original concepts, we might say, are not blended irrevocably but remain as aspect-concepts united under a common master. From now on, it should be kept in mind that conceptual systems will usually be individuated here in this fine-grained sense.

In the former conceptual system (call this 'the Babylonian system'), where the Hesperus-concept is separated from the Phosphorus-concept, the distinctness of Hesperus and Phosphorus is invariant through all configurations of the system; if one positively believes that Hesperus and Phosphorus are distinct, one will say that, although it might conceivably turn out that Hesperus is Phosphorus after all, given that it isn't, Hesperus could not have been Phosphorus. (And one will of course be wrong.) In the latter conceptual system (call this 'our system'), where the Hesperus- and Phosphorus-concepts are unified, the identity of Hesperus and Phosphorus is invariant through all configurations of the system; when one knows that Hesperus is Phosphorus, one will say that, although it might conceivably turn out that Hesperus is distinct from Phosphorus after all, given that it isn't, Hesperus could not have been other than Phosphorus.

Now, with our fine-grained understanding of conceptual systems in place, I maintain that we can still say that all (metaphysically) necessarily true propositions are satisfied by all configurations of their host conceptual systems. We can even say that a truth is metaphysically necessary iff it is satisfied by all configurations of its host system. We just can't say that all propositions which are satisfied by all configuration of their host systems are necessary truths. So far, then, we can say what distinguishes necessary from contingent truths, but we can't say what distinguishes necessary truths from other proposition which are satisfied by all configurations of their host systems - we might call these 'false propositions of necessary character'. What can we say that will do this?

I think we can say something like: a proposition P is necessarily true iff it is satisfied by all configurations of its host system and the concepts involved in P are jointly adequate to their objects with respect to P.

First I want to say that I am not concerned to provide a reductive analysis of modal concepts. Relatedly, I am happy for the relevant modal notions and my ternary relation of 'adequacy' to be explanatory of each other; I do not suppose it is a one-way street, where my notion does all the explaining, nor do I take my notion to be more "fundamental" in any metaphysical sense. I am interested in showing (and making) connections.

I will make a start at explicating the above proposal by indicating how it applies to the 'Hesperus is Phosphorus' case. In the Babylonian system, the Hesperus-concept and the Phosphorus-concept are not unified (are taken to represent distinct objects), but they both have the same object, the same extension, and so together (jointly) they are inadequate to their objects with respect to 'Hesperus is not Phosphorus'. So their proposition 'Hesperus is not Phosphorus' fulfills the first condition given above, before the 'and' - it is satisfied by all configurations of their system - but it does not fulfill the second. Our Hesperus- and Phosphorus-concepts, which also have the same extension, are in contrast united, as aspect-concepts, under a common master concept (the concept of Venus). Hence they are adequate to their objects - or object - with respect to our proposition 'Hesperus is Phosphorus'.

Why do I not simply say that a proposition is necessarily true iff it is satisfied by all configurations of its host system and its concepts are jointly adequate to their objects? Why do I add 'with respect to that proposition'? I will explain this with an example. Assume for the sake of argument that Hesperus (Venus) is necessarily not intelligent - i.e. that Hesperus could not have been intelligent. Now, suppose someone believes that Hesperus is intelligent, and necessarily so - loosely speaking, that it is part of their concept of Hesperus that it is intelligent. In that case, their concept of Hesperus would not be adequate to its object with respect to 'Hesperus is intelligent'. But they may know, for all that, that Hesperus is Phosphorus, and so their concepts of Hesperus and Phosphorus might be jointly adequate to their object with respect to 'Hesperus is Phosphorus'.

Conversely, someone may know that Hesperus is necessarily not intelligent, while mistakenly believing that Hesperus is not Phosphorus, thus having an adequate conceptual situation with respect to propositions about the intelligence of Hesperus, but not with respect to propositions about the identity of Hesperus and Phosphorus.

Speaking broadly, necessity is, on this understanding, not simply a matter of a proposition having a certain status in a conceptual system. It is, as well as that, a matter of the system being adequate to its objects with respect to that proposition. The adequacy of some set of concepts to their objects obviously depends on the identity (and nature) of those objects - and this is not in general determined by the system. (This is how semantic externalism fits in.) Hence you cannot, in general, tell simply by looking at a proposition in a system whether or not it is necessarily true - there are a posteriori necessities.


The compatibility of externalism with rigid designation
(Postscript added 14 August, 2011.)

It may look as though there is a tension between my externalist claim that the extension of an individual concept is not in general determined by the concept itself, and the claim that names rigidly designate: if names are tied to individual concepts, and individual concepts do not in general determine their extension, it looks like a given individual concept can have different extensions in different environments. This is so (at least, when we individuate concepts internally) but there is no real tension here: the rigidity applies to names in use - names tied to token individual concepts embedded in an environment. Individual concepts are not like general concepts: the whole point of them is to apply to one particular object. And so the contrast between names and definite descriptions remains: when we consider counterfactual scenarios and hold the meaning of our terms fixed, our names which are tied to individual concepts always refer to 'the same object'.

This is all perfectly compatible with the fact that the same concept, in a different environment, might be connected up to a different object. The extension of our individual concepts may in some cases even change over time: if an object we know is replaced with a substitute, and we don't notice, after a while it will become true to say that our individual concept has changed its extension. But we don't let the extension change "across possible worlds" when representing counterfactual scenarios using a particular individual concept in a particular environment.

Part 2.

Individual concepts are under-discussed in contemporary philosophy. For further online reading on what they can do, see:

- My post at Philosophy, et cetera, 'An advertisement for individual concepts'

- A recent article by linguist Barbara Abbott, 'Support for Individual Concepts'.

- John McCarthy's article, 'First Order Theories of Individual Concepts and Propositions'. (Warning: arguably contains some use-mention confusion.)

Interestingly, neither of these authors are (primarily) philosophers.

1 I pass over one well-known issue here, to do with the fact that Hesperus/Phosphorus might not have existed. There is a discussion of this on Greg Frost-Arnold's blog. If one is really worried about this, consider instead the example 'If Hesperus exists, then Hesperus is Phosphorus'.

2 It should be noted, however, that Mill's claim is appropriate if 'connotation' is interpreted to mean 'reference-determining sense' or 'general conceptual content', and likewise that the phrase 'direct reference' is appropriate if 'direct' is interpreted to mean 'not via general conceptual content' or 'not via reference-determining sense'.