Wolfgang Schwarz

Content, Context and the First Dimension

"Content" and its cognates are rather theoretical notions. We need them to do semantics and psychology, but we don't have immediate acquaintance with them. That's why I find it slightly puzzling when people say that the content of a sentence or a mental state can be represented by, say, a set of possible worlds or some kind of labeled tree, whereas in fact it is no such thing. What do these people think the content is in fact?

Anyway, let's assume that (at least for a certain fragment of English) sets of centered possible worlds can do duty for (or represent) the content of sentences. On this account, the content of "it is raining" is identified with a certain set of centered worlds, namely the set of worlds where it is raining at the center. By the semantics of negation, the content of "it is not raining" is the complement of this set. Analogously, the content of "language exists" is a certain set of centered worlds, namely the set of worlds where language exists, and the content of "language does not exist" is the complement of that set.

Now here is strange question: What makes it the case that some particular world w belongs to the content of a sentence s? Is it that at the center of w, the string s is uttered truely? No, for perhaps at the center of w that string, though uttered, doesn't mean what s means, but instead that horses are cows. Is it that at the center of w, a string with the same meaning as s is uttered truely? No, for perhaps no meaningful string is uttered at w at all, as in all worlds belonging to the content of "language does not exist".

The strange question can be found in many articles on Two-Dimensionalism. Probably the most extensive discussion occupies most of Chalmers' Foundations of Two-Dimensional Semantics, where, after rejecting proposals like those I just sketched, he argues that w belongs to the content of s iff the thought expressed by the conjunction of the negation of s and a certain (usually infinite) "canonical" description (in a certain ideal language) D of w can be ruled out a priori. This biconditional might actually be true, but I don't think it provides a convincing explanation of why w belongs to the content of s. (Though I'm not sure what exactly is wrong with it. Maybe I just don't see what infinite sentences in ideal languages which I neither speak nor understand have to do with English, or with my idiolect.)

In fact, it seems to me that if content is identified with sets of worlds, the strange question doesn't make much sense in the first place. It's like asking what makes it the case that 7 belongs to the set { 3, 5, 7 }. The only reasonable question here is what makes it the case that s has the content which it has -- the set w as opposed to, say, its complement. But here the available answers are quite different from the answers Chalmers discusses. One answer is provided by compositionality: s = "language does not exist" has content w because w is the complement of the content of "language exists", of which s is the negation (and that's how negation works). This way, the question eventually reduces to the question of why the basic constituents have the content they have. Here we may look at other answers, for example at how the language is used: "it is raining" has as its content the set of worlds where it is raining at the center because there is a convention in our community to utter this sentence only in situations (i.e. centered worlds) where it is raining (at the center).

So is there also a convention to utter "language doesn't exist" only in situations in which language doesn't exist, that is, in no situation at all? Sure. But that's not a special and basic convention. Rather, it derives from other, less idle, conventions we already have for "language", "exists", and "not".

Why do I say that the content I'm talking about is an A-intension, rather than a C-intension? Because the sets of worlds usually identified as C-intensions are badly suited to play the role of content, as witness Frege's puzzle and the fact that the conventions of English really don't state that "water is not H2O" may only be uttered in situations in which water is not water. C-intensions (or rather, two-dimensional intensions), like other kinds of index-dependence, are only needed for the semantics of certain intensional operators. They have little to do with content in any useful sense of that notion.

I have to think more about this. What about the content of mental states, where there are no conventions? And what if we prefer some other kind of entity over sets of centered worlds to do the work of content? Do we then have to leave the two-dimensional framework, or can it be reconstrued, and if so, does the strange question remain strange?