Propositional attitudes have an attitude type (belief, desire, etc.), and a content. A popular idea in the literature on intentionality is that attitude type is determined by functional role and content in some other way. One can find this view, for example, in Fodor (1987, 17), Dretske (1995, 83), or Loewer (2017, 716). I don't see how it could be correct.
I've decided to write somewhat regular short pieces on interesting papers I've recently read. This one is about Smithies, Lennon, and Samuels (2022).
Smithies, Lennon, and Samuels (henceforth, SLS) criticise the view that there are a priori connections between having a belief with a certain content and other states that would be rational given this belief. A simple example of the target view says that believing P is being disposed to act in a way that would bring one closer to satisfying one's desires if P were true. A more complicated example of the target view, on which SLS focus, is Lewis's. According to Lewis, for a mental state to be a belief state with such-and-such content, the state must, under normal conditions, be connected in a certain way to behaviour, perceptual experiences, and other propositional attitudes. SLS deny this.
Friends of singular thought typically assume that in order to have a singular attitude towards an object, one must either stand in a special acquaintance relation to the object, or have a special kind of mental representation for it. Both of these views face a challenge from our practice of attitude reports: we can seemingly attribute attitudes with singular content even if neither condition is satisfied.
In a well-known example from Sosa 1970, the army generals decide that the shortest man should go first. The Sergeant tells Shorty: 'they want you to go first'. Here the generals need not be acquainted with Shorty, and it is doubtful that they must have a "mental file" for him.
So far, we have looked at cases in which an agent has a descriptive belief (e.g., "the creature approaching through the woods is a bear"), which gets reported as a singular belief ("Mary beliefs Mark is a bear"). But sometimes we attribute singular beliefs even though the subject appears to have only a general (quantified) attitude about the relevant individual.
A murder has been committed. The detective has figured out that the culprit probably comes from a certain mountain village. She knows little about that village, but believes that all its inhabitants are poor peasants. You are one of the villagers. We might say:
Compare the following three sentences.
(1) I thought my husband was a bear.
(2) Mary thinks her husband is a bear.
(3) I think my husband is a bear.
(1) and (2) are ambiguous between a "de re" reading and a "de dicto" reading. But (3) only seems to have the "de dicto" reading. How come?
According to the semantics I have described in earlier parts of this series, an utterance of (3) is true on its de re reading iff (roughly) there is a suitable role R such that (i) in all the speaker's belief worlds, whatever plays R is a bear, and (ii) in the actual world, the speaker's husband plays R.
In the previous post, I have assumed that conversational context somehow determines a unique "suitable role" for each individual under discussion, relative to every epistemic subject. This is an unrealistic assumption.
For example, I believe that Canberra gets cold in winter. But Canberra is known to me as the occupant of many roles. Among other things, I know it as the capital of Australia, as the city in which I lived for most of 2012, and as the destination of my most recent international trip. When I say that I know (or believe) that Canberra gets cold, none of these roles may be particularly salient.
In this post, I'm going to present a first stab of a formal semantics for de re belief reports.
As I explained in the last post, I'm going to assume that for every epistemic subject at every time there is a set of doxastically accessible worlds, representing how the subject takes the world to be. I will sometimes refer to these worlds as the subject's 'belief worlds'.
On that background, we can make the guiding idea behind the Quine-Kaplan model more precise: 'S believes that x is F' is true iff there is a suitable role R such that (1) in all worlds doxastically accessible for S, whatever plays R is F, and (2) in the actual world, x plays R.
This is part 3 of a series on epistemic counterpart semantics (part 1, part 2).
Recall the guiding idea: A de re report 'S believes that x is F' is true iff there is a suitable role R such that (1) S believes that whatever plays R is F, and (2) in fact, x plays R.
I said that these truth-conditions naturally emerge if we treat 'believes' as a modal, quantifying over a set of accessible worlds. So I am going to assume that for any relevant subject in any relevant situation there is a set of "doxastically accessible" worlds which somehow characterise what the subject believes. I want to say a few words to clarify this assumption.
This is part 2 of a series on epistemic counterpart semantics. Part 1 is here.
I want to defend what I called the "Quine-Kaplan model" of de re belief ascriptions. According to this model, 'S believes that x is F' is true iff there is a suitable role R such that (1) S believes that whatever plays R is F, and (2) in fact, x plays R.
In this post, I mainly want to explain what I mean by a "suitable role". This will also bring to light some arguments in favour of the Quine-Kaplan model.
I have decided to write a series of posts on epistemic applications of counterpart semantics, mostly to organise my own thoughts.
Let's start with a motivating example, from Sæbø 2015.
On September 14 2006, Mary Beth Harshbarger shot her husband, whom she had mistaken for a bear. At the trial, she "steadily maintained that she thought her husband was a black bear", as you can read on Wikipedia.
Teaching for this semester is finally over.
Last week I gave a talk in Umea at a workshop on singular thought. I was pleased to be invited because I don't really understand singular thought. Giving a talk, I hoped, would force me to have a closer look at the literature. But then I was too busy teaching.
People seem to mean different things by 'singular thought'. The target of my talk was the view that one can usefully understand the representational content of beliefs and other intentional states as attributing properties to individuals, without any intervening modes of presentation. This view is often associated with a certain interpretation of attitude reports: whenever we can truly say `S believes (or knows etc.) that A is F', where A is a name, then supposedly the subject S stands in an interesting relation of belief (or knowledge etc.) to a proposition directly involving the bearer of that name.
A lot of what I do in philosophy is develop models: models of rational choice, of belief update, of semantics, of communication, etc. Such models are supposed to shed light on real-world phenomena, but the connection between model and reality is not completely straightforward.
For example, consider decision theory as a descriptive model of real people's choices. It may seem straightforward what this model predicts and therefore how it can be tested: it predicts that people always maximize expected utility. But what are the probabilities and utilities that define expected utility? It is no part of standard decision theory that an agent's probabilities and utilities conform in a certain way to their publicly stated goals and opinions. Assuming such a link is one way of connecting the decision-theoretic model with real agents and their choices, but it is not the only (and in my view not the most fruitful) way. A similar question arises for the agent's options. Decision theory simply assumes that a range of "acts" are available to the agent. But what should count as an act in a real-world situation: a type of overt behaviour, or a type of intention? And what makes an act available? Decision theory doesn't answer these questions.
Let's assume that propositional attitudes are not metaphysically fundamental: if someone has such-and-such beliefs and desires, that is always due to other, more basic, and ultimately non-intentional facts. In terms of supervenience: once all non-intentional facts are settled, all intentional facts are settled as well.
Then how are propositional attitudes grounded in non-intentional facts? A promising approach is to identify a characteristic "functional role" of propositional attitudes and then explain facts about propositional attitudes in terms of facts about the realization of that role. (We could also identify the attitude with the realizer, or with the higher-order property of heaving a realizer, but that's optional.)
Consider a long list S1...Sn of sentences such that (a) each Si is trivially equivalent to its predecessor and successor (if any), and (b) S1 is not trivially equivalent to Sn.
For example, S1 might be a complicated mathematical or logical statement, and S1...Sn a process of slowly transforming S1 into a simpler expression. For another example, S1...Sn might be statements in different languages, where each Si qualifies as a direct translation of its neighbor(s) but S1 is not a direct translation of Sn.
Dilip Ninan has also argued on a number of occasions that attitude contents cannot in general be modelled by sets of qualitative centred worlds; see especially his "Counterfactual attitudes and multi-centered worlds" (2012). The argument is based on an alleged problem for the centred-worlds account applied to what he calls "counterfactual attitudes", the prime example being imagination.
Since the problem concerns the analysis of attitudes de re, we first have to briefly review what the centred-worlds account might say about this. Consider a de re belief report "x believes that y is F". Whether this is true depends on what x believes about y, but if belief contents are qualitative, we cannot simply check whether y is F in x's belief worlds. We first have to locate y in these qualitative scenarios. A standard idea, going back to Quine, Kaplan and Lewis, is that the belief report is true iff there is some "acquaintance relation" Q such that (i) x is Q-related uniquely to y and (ii) in x's belief worlds, the individual at the centre is Q-related to an individual that is F. For example, if Ralph sees Ortcutt sneaking around the waterfront, and believes that the guy sneaking around the waterfront is a spy, then Ralph believes de re of Ortcutt that he is a spy.
If we want to model rational degrees of belief as probabilities, the objects of belief should form a Boolean algebra. Let's call the elements of this algebra propositions and its atoms (or ultrafilters) worlds. Every proposition can be represented as a set of worlds. But what are these worlds? For many applications, they can't be qualitative possibilities about the universe as a whole, since this would not allow us to model de se beliefs. A popular response is to identify the worlds with triples of a possible universe, a time and an individual. I prefer to say that they are maximally specific properties, or ways a thing might be. David Chalmers (in discussion, and in various papers, e.g. here and there) objects that these accounts are not fine-grained enough, as revealed by David Austin's "two tubes" scenario. Let's see.
One of the grave threats to the development of mankind in general, and philosophy in particular, is the assumption that the objects of propositional attitudes can be expressed by that-clauses. The assumption is often smuggled in via a definition, e.g. when propositions are defined as things that are 1) objects of attitudes and 2) expressed by that-clauses. No effort is made to show that anything satisfies both (1) and (2) -- let alone that the things that satisfy (1) coincide with the things that satisfy (2).
I'm trying to catch up with Dave Chalmers's reading of Scott Soames's Reference and Description. I'm still at chapter 4, and my reaction to it is not quite the same as Dave's. (I began this entry as a comment over there, but it somehow grew way too long.)
Let's stipulate that "Lee" (rigidly) denotes the youngest spy (if there is one). Soames argues that if
Meinongians say that some things do not exist. In other words, existence is a property that befalls only some of the things there are. It follows that by 'existence' these Meinongians do not mean the trivial property that every thing whatever has. What else do they mean? Maybe they mean by 'existence' being in space or time, as Meinong sometimes does. Or maybe they mean an alleged primitive property of certain things. At any rate, I have no objection to this except that I'd rather not use the word 'existence' for that. But I can't really say that ordinary usage is on my side, given that a) ordinary quantification is almost always restricted (though not always in the same way), and b) there is hardly an ordinary usage of 'existence' at all. So far, Meinongianism is utterly trivial. It merely holds that some objects lack a certain property.