I (somewhat randomly) picked up Kripke 2011 the other day. This is Kripke's first engagement with the problem of empty names. What struck me is the biased selection of examples. Most of the paper is concerned with names of fictional characters like 'Sherlock Holmes', and Kripke only seems to consider simple utterances in which they figure as the subject, like (1).
In discussions of the raven paradox, it is generally assumed that the (relevant) information gathered from an observation of a black raven can be regimented into a statement of the form Ra & Ba ('a is a raven and a is black'). This is in line with what a lot of "anti-individualist" or "externalist" philosophers say about the information we acquire through experience: when we see a black raven, they claim, what we learn is not a descriptive or general proposition to the effect that whatever object satisfies such-and-such conditions is a black raven, but rather a "singular" proposition about a particular object -- we learn that this very object is black and a raven. It seems to me that this singularist doctrine makes it hard to account for many aspects of confirmation.
Noam Chomsky's New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind contains a famous passage about London.
Referring to London, we can be talking about a location or area, people who sometimes live there, the air above it (but not too high), buildings, institutions, etc., in various combinations (as in 'London is so unhappy, ugly, and polluted that it should be destroyed and rebuilt 100 miles away', still being the same city). Such terms as 'London' are used to talk about the actual world, but there neither are nor are believed to be things-in-the-world with the properties of the intricate modes of reference that a city name encapsulates. (p.37)
I don't know what Chomsky is trying to say here, but there is something in the vicinity of his remark that strikes me as true and important. The point is that the reference of 'London' is a complex and subtle matter that is completely obscured when we say that 'London' refers to London.
When reading technical material outside philosophy, I am often struck by the widespread use of non-rigid names and variables. A typical example goes like this. You introduce 'X' to stand for, say, the velocity of some object under investigation. When you want to say that at time t1, the velocity is 10 units, you put exactly this into symbols: 'at t1, X = 10'. If the velocity changes, we get a violation of the necessity of identity:
At t1, X = 10.
At t2, X = 20.
Or suppose you have a population of n objects with various velocities. Your statistics textbook will tell you that the variance of the velocity in the population is defined as
I gave a talk about the Canberra Plan on Tuesday (slides) in which I mentioned that I disagree with Lewis and Kim about the semantics of "pain": they say "pain" denotes whatever occupies the pain role in the species under consideration (or whatever is the relevant kind); I think "pain" rather denotes the property of being in a state that realises the pain role. One of the reasons I gave for my preference is that "pain" would be rather exceptional if it worked as Lewis and Kim believe.
Robbie has some interesting posts about rigidity. That made me wonder about "the actual number of planets", which no longer denotes the number 9 now that Pluto doesn't count as a planet any more. So what should we say?
I think the third option is the only credible one. Would people with sympathies for reference magnetism go for the second? (If you would, do you think it's possible that the members of the IAU, who voted about the new definition last week, might have got the definition wrong?)
*) Oskar Minkowski discovered that dogs whose pancreas is removed develop the symptoms of diabetes.
Suppose this is the first time you've heard the name "Oskar Minkowski". Cases like this are good candidates for causal descriptivism. According to causal descriptivism, my utterance of (*) is true iff there is a person standing at the origin of a certain chain of communication leading to my present use of "Oskar Minkowski", and this person discovered that dogs whose pancreas is removed develop the symptoms of diabetes. This comes close to many people's intuitions about possible cases.
Sentences aren't just about the things they name. You can write an entire book about the Second World War without ever mentioning the whole war by name.
Very roughly, a sentence is about something X iff the way X is matters for the truth value of the sentence. "It's raining" is about the weather because differences with respect to the weather affect the truth value of the sentence. By contrast, "it's raining" (or at least "it's raining in Berlin on July 11, 2006") is not about the Second World War because any way the Second World War might have been is compossible with (just about) any state of the current weather. (Arguably, the current weather counterfactually depends on details about the Second World War. But what counts is compossibility, not counterfactual dependence.)
In August, I posted an argument purportedly showing that if it is common knowledge within a linguistic community that everyone refers to the same thing by some name N, then the descriptions individuals associate with that name can only differ for very remote possibilities. The argument went like this:
If we know something, it holds in all possible situations that might, for all we know, be actual. So if we know that our terms corefer, they do corefer in all situations that might, for all we know, be actual. And if I know that you know that our terms corefer, they do also corefer in all situations that might, for all I know, be situations that might, for all you know, be actual. And if I know that you know that I know that our terms corefer, they do also corefer in situations I believe you might believe I might believe to be actual. And so on. In conclusion, our terms corefer in all situations that have some chance of being believed (or believed to be believed, etc.) to be actual in our community. So if we consider the corresponding functions from possible situations to extensions, our idiosyncratic functions will only differ for quite remote possibilities.
There must be something wrong with this argument, for its conclusion is false. Suppose the description you associate with "quicksand" is "a bed of loose sand mixed with water forming a soft shifting mass that yields easily to pressure and tends to engulf any object resting on its surface", whereas what I associate with the term is "what you call 'quicksand'". Suppose also it is common knowledge between us that that's the description I associate. So it is common knowledge between us that our descriptions pick out the same stuff. But clearly, I do not know what kind of phenomenon "quicksand" refers to. That's why I don't know how to behave when you tell me that there's quicksand nearby. For all I know, you could be telling me that there's watery stuff nearby (and mean watery stuff by "quicksand") or that there are houses nearby (and mean houses by "quicksand"), and so on.
Some forms of descriptivism say that when I utter a sentence with a proper name in it, communication only succeeds if there is a description, a set of properties, you and I both associate with that name. But often such descriptions are hard to find, so some conclude that instead it suffices if you and I refer to the same object with that name, no matter what properties mediate our reference or if it is mediated by associated properties at all.
In fact, shared reference doesn't quite suffice for successful communication. We should also require that the shared reference is common knowledge. If I tell you that Ljubljana is pretty but you have no idea whether by "Ljubljana" I refer to the town you call "Ljubljana" or whether instead I refer to my neighbour or the moon, you don't understand what I'm trying to tell you.
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
Thought experiments about reference often focus on cases where a term intuitively refers to something other than what a certain theory would predict. This way, we can find sufficient conditions for reference. I think it is just as interesting to consider cases where the term does not refer at all, which gives us necessary conditions.
For example, suppose "hydrogen" and "Aristotle" refer causally, that is, denote whatever stands in a certain causal relation to our use of these expressions. Then what would it take to find out that hydrogen does not exist? We would have to acquire etymological information about the causal-historical origin of the term "hydrogen": only if something went wrong in that causal path could we conclude that there is no hydrogen.
Suppose
1) the facts about use etc. underdetermine the semantic value of term x (to a certain degree).
But
2) the semantic value of x is not underdetermined (to that degree).
Let V1,V2,... be the semantic values between which x is underdetermined, and suppose V2 is in fact the value (or range of values) of x. What is it about V2 that makes it the semantic value? Not 'use etc'. But suppose all obvious candidates like causal facts are part of 'use etc.'. Then the relationship between x and V2 -- let's call it "reference" -- is inscrutable insofar as knowing all ordinary facts about use and causation and so on is not enough to find out that x refers to V2. There must be something over and above all this that privileges V2. Let's say (with Lewis) that V2 is a reference magnet (with respect to x).
A few more comments on why I think the setup of Weinberg, Nichols and Stich's experiments on intuitions is unfortunate. The problem seems particularly obvious in the experiments on semantic intuitions reported by Machery, Mallon, Nichols and Stich, but I think it carries over to many (though perhaps not all) of the experiments of Weinberg, Nichals and Stich. Here is one of the questions Machery, Mallon, Nichols and Stich asked:
In The Conceivability of Naturalism, Crispin Wright notes:
When we disjoin or existentially generalise on names, the results -- for instance, "Tom or John was to blame", "Someone was to blame"-- had better not be conceived as forms of expression involving reference to disjunctive, or existentially general objects. There are no such objects.
What does he mean? Is his point merely the semantical hypothesis that "Tom or John" and "someone" should not be treated as refering expressions? It is probably easy to create a semantics where they are assigned a reference. I'm not even sure (though I believe it) that such a semantics would be perverse, given that lots of people have argued that expressions like "Tom and John" should be assigned some kind of reference to account for sentences like "Tom and John ate the cake". But at any rate, this presumably isn't Wright's point. For even if there was a disjunctive object consisting of Tom and John, it doesn't follow that "Tom or John" must be interpreted as refering to it. So the converse is also invalid: it doesn't follow from the fact that "Tom or John" doesn't refer that there are no disjunctive objects. The passage rather sounds like Wright has independent reason to believe in the non-existence of disjunctive and existentially general objects; a reason that merely gives further support to the semantic claim that "Tom or John" and "someone" don't refer.
There is a curious problem about rejecting both premise 2 and 3 in this familiar argument:
I believe that premise 3 is almost certainly false: why can't 'pain' denote CFF at our world and D-fiber firing at other worlds? Or, even better, CFF in humans at our world and other states in other beings here and elsewhere? Some claim that 'pain' must rigidly denote a kind of diagonal state that all beings who are in pain share. But I've never seen a convincing argument why this should be so. Crispin Wright argues (in "The Conceivability of Naturalism") that a) the reference-fixing description for 'pain' is something like 'state of feeling painful', which is itself rigid, and b) necessarily, pain satisfies this description. But it is not at all obvious to me that the reference-fixing description for 'pain' is 'state of feeling painful', rather than, for example, the non-rigid 'state that feels painful' or something physicalistically more acceptable.
I want to write something about rigidity in the philosophy of mind. But first I have to say more about rigidity. (Apologies in advance: this is all going to be rather basic. But I'll need it, and I found that many people disagree with it.)
Recently I argued that the assumption that ordinary proper names are rigid designators leads to an implausibly excessive form of essentialism. But I don't want to deny the useful distinction between rigid and non-rigid designators. That is, in a sense I do believe in rigid designators. But they are not quite what rigid designators are usually supposed to be.
Linguistic expressions have all kinds of properties. In other words, they can be alike in all kinds of ways. For example, two sentences (of a particular language) can be alike in that
and so on. All these properties are, I believe, worth investigating into, and all of them might be called "semantic".
In part II of Meaning and Necessity Carnap defines 'L-determinate designators' for rather specific languages (coordinate languages). I think that a more general definition is possible that pretty much meets Carnaps ideas. This more general definition simply identifies L-determinacy with what we nowadays call rigidity.
This is a continuation of my last post and also partly a reply to concerns raised by my tutor Brian Weatherson.
Imagine a small community consisting of three elm experts A, B, and C.
First case: Each of A, B, and C knows enough to determine the reference of 'elm', but their reference-fixing knowledge differs. However, they belief that their different notions of 'elm' necessarily corefer. This is the case Lewis discusses in 'Naming the Colours'.
Don't miss Brian Weatherson's very insightful answer to my posting on rigidity (from which I've just stripped some irrelevant formalities). I happily agree with everything he says, so I'll just add a footnote here.
Many advantages of the counterpart theory derive from its denial of the equivalence between 'a=b', 'possibly a=b', and 'necessarily a=b'. For example, this allows for a statue to be identical to a lump of gold even though it might not have been. Since, as Weatherson argues, the rejected equivalence is built into the customary ('strong') concept of rigidity, that concept must be weakened to be useful for counterpart-theorists.
I wonder how rigidity can be characterized without begging the question against a lot of good semantic theories.
Usually, a rigid expression is defined as an expression which has the same extension in all possible worlds (that is, as an expression with a constant intension, or C-intension).This characterization presupposes literal trans-world-identity between extensions, which is bad, since it carries a commitment to precise essences of individuals on the one hand and (presumably abundant) universals as extensions of predicates on the other, thereby ruling out counterpart theories and accounts on which tropes or classes are the extensions of predicates.