February 10, 2009
Assertion
Wow, Geach is great, isn't he? I've just been reading through "Assertion" (Phil Review, vol. 74, no, 4 (Oct 1965)) and my favourite one-liners include:
- I do not think there is anything in this.
- this is just an idiotism of idiom
- ..and this is what Professor Antony Flew has aptly called a conventionalist sulk
I wonder if I can manage to use all of these in my next question session? (Though maybe they won't buy me dinner if I do.)
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May 14, 2008
Born to Run
Amazon writes:
We've noticed that customers who have purchased or rated books by Paul Horwich have also purchased Bruce Springsteen and Philosophy (Popular Culture and Philosophy) by Randall E. Auxier...
Now. Which one of you was it?
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May 13, 2008
Previous attempts to Define Analyticity
From Nathan Salmon's "Analyticity and A priority" (J-store access required for the link):
A number of definitions or explications of analyticity have been proposed. My favourite is a proposal by Hilary Putnam. In an exposition of W. V. Quine's famous (if little understood) attack on the analytic/synthetic distinction, Putnam suggests that a sentence may be termed 'analytic' if it is deducible from the sentences in a finite list at the top of which someone who bears the ancestral of the graduate-student relation to Carnap has printed the words 'Meaning Postulate'. This definition not only acknowledges the central importance of Carnap's contribution to the role of the analytic-synthetic distinction in analytic philosophy, but it has the additional virtue that it accords to those few among us who bear this special relationship to Carnap and authority that strikes me as only fitting.
Who'd have thought that an additional virtue of Josh Dever's Philosophical Family Tree is that it can help one to determine the extension of the word 'analytic'?
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May 07, 2008
Shazeen Samad
My first ever book has just come out, and is now available world-wide. Here's what it looks like:
It's called Truth in Virtue of Meaning and it's basically a new account of the analytic-synthetic distinction (one which is designed to fit better with phenomena like contextualism and semantic externalism than pre-Quine conceptions of the distinction did), and a defence of that distinction against about 7-zillion arguments (ok, maybe more like 15 arguments) against analyticity.
I'm going to post a bit more about the content of the book later in the week, but what I thought I'd do right now is tell you a bit about the photograph on the cover. The photo is by a Maldivian photographer called Shazeen Samad. He has a beautiful website and some of my favourite images of his are here, here, here and here. If you are looking to procrastinate while you should be grading/writing that final paper, and you won't be depressed by images of incredibly beautiful people hanging out in what appears to be the most beautiful place on earth, then the site comes highly recommended.
The photo that Shazeen very kindly let me use is called "Maldavian Reflection" and it is an image of the ocean at sunset, when the water is so still that the entire sky (which has lots of cool clouds) is reflected in it. A couple of people have remarked that the picture is beautiful, but doesn't have much to do with the topic of the book. But to those people I say two things: first, off, what did you want? pictures of bachelors? of one concept containing another? and second: not so! when you first look at the photograph it can seem pretty chaotic and hard to work out what it is a picture of. But then you look harder, and you realise that it is in two halves, with the horizon down the middle and that everything below the horizon is water, and everything above it is sky. What could be more appropriate?
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March 06, 2008
The Philosophy of Philosophy
Amazon unexpectedly coughed up an official copy of Williamson's new book today. We had a reading group on it here at Wash U, so I've read a version of it already, but this made me smile:
In this case study, our interest in giving a clear and critically reflective answer to a simple, non-technical, non-metalinguistic, non-metaconceptual question forced us to adjudicate between complex, technical, metalinguistic and metaconceptual theories. This phenomenon seems to have been overlooked by those who complain about the "arid" technical minuteness of much of philosophy in the analytic tradition. A question may be easy to ask, but hard to answer. Even if it is posed in dramatic and accessible terms, the reflections needed to select rationally between rival answers may be less dramatic and accessible. Such contrasts are commonplace in other disciplines; it would have been amazing if they had not occurred in philosophy. Impatience with the long haul of technical reflection is form of shallowness, often thinly disguised by histrionic advocacy of depth. Serious philosophy is always likely to bore those with short attention spans.
I think I might have to read that out in my philosophy of language class today.
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January 10, 2007
The Politics of ASL
Is it better to think of the deaf positively as those who speak America Sign Language, rather than negatively as those who have a distinctive kind of impairment? Sounds good perhaps but here's Lennard Davis on the reasons not to:
The central problem with defining deaf people as a linguistic group is that to do so, you have to patrol the fire wall between the deaf and nondeaf in very rigid ways. If deaf people are defined as only those who are native users of ASL, you have to define all nonusers of ASL as "other." That excludes, or at least marginalizes, deaf people who are orally trained -- that is, who were taught to eschew ASL for speech alone; have cochlear implants; or never had the chance to learn sign language. Many people who grew up in non-ASL settings in the 1950s and 1960s and who have quite happily thought of themselves as deaf would have to reassign themselves to some other camp. Likewise, the strict linguistic-group definition expels hard-of-hearing people who have not learned ASL. Ironically, the model also stigmatizes those who have been educated orally; they are seen as victims of oral education rather than as victims of audism. Since it is hearing parents who usually make the decision to educate their deaf children orally, rather than with ASL, or to give them cochlear implants, it doesn't seem fair to define those children as not deaf. The other flaw in the model is that it defines hearing, signing children of deaf adults (CODA's) as deaf, since they are native sign-language speakers. One could argue that CODA's aren't discriminated against by the hearing world, but if one takes that tack, then one has to abandon the idea that language is the key defining term.
To which we can add the following against the specific suggestion considered: it would be crazy to think of the deaf as the community of native speakers of ASL because lots of the deaf speak OTHER sign languages instead.
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October 12, 2006
Jowett Talk
Tomorrow I'll be giving a talk to the Jowett Society in Oxford. This will be the first talk I've given in the UK in 10 years, despite the fact that that's where I'm from. Ten years ago, as an undergraduate, I talked about why one should be vegetarian. Tomorrow it will be about why one should believe in the analytic/synthetic distinction. What's happened to my youthful ambition?
(There is some reason to think it's still there: I almost decided to give my new paper on the ethics of teaching karate...)
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Jowett Talk
Tomorrow I'll be giving a talk to the Jowett Society in Oxford. This will be the first talk I've given in the UK in 10 years, despite the fact that that's where I'm from. Ten years ago, as an undergraduate, I talked about why one should be vegetarian. Tomorrow it will be about why one should believe in the analytic/synthetic distinction. What's happened to my youthful ambition?
(There is some reason to think it's still there: I almost decided to give my new paper on the ethics of teaching karate...)
Posted by logican at 05:47 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
August 26, 2006
Language and Knowledge
From Bertrand Russell's "Logical Positivism" (1950) in Logic and Knowledge:
This whole subject [logic, logical syntax and semantics] has become so technical, and so capable of quasi-mathematical definiteness, that it can hardly be regarded as belonging to philosophy as formerly understood. True, it solves what were philosophical problems, but so did Newton in writing on what he still called 'natural philosophy'. But we do not now regard planetary theory as part of philosophy, and I think that on the same ground much of the recent work on logic, syntax, and semantics should be regarded as definite knowledge, not philosophical speculation.
It's nice that B. thinks so highly of logic and semantics - "definite knowledge" an' all - I just wish he thought better of philosophy...
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April 17, 2006
A distinction
Suppose I'm hanging out with a friend and I point to an object on the table in front of me and utter a subsentential expression questioningly: "-----?" Sometimes I can be construed as having asked something about the object pointed to, e.g. if I said "my coffee?" And sometimes not, e.g. if I said "that?" In the former case it would often make sense for my interlocutor to either answer the question or say that they don't know ("sure, that's your coffee"/"I don't know whether that's your coffee". In the latter they're more likely to look puzzled and say "---- what?" ("that what?").
Or suppose I utter the expression confidently. Sometimes I can be construed as having said something about the object I'm pointing to e.g. if I point to someone and say "the chair of the department". And sometimes not e.g. if I point to someone and say "him". In the former case it often makes sense for my interlocutor to agree, or disagree, or say "ok". In the later, they're more likely to look puzzled and say "what about it/him?"
Here are some examples and illustrations.
Names
Suppose I point to a man drinking coffee and wearing dark glasses in the corner and I utter a name questioningly: "Hunter Thompson?" Then I can be easily understood as asking whether that man is Hunter Thompson.
This sort of example can be messed up if I point to the wrong kind of object for the kind of name. For example, if I point to the table we're sitting at and say "Hunter Thompson?" my friend will probably decide that I'm not asking whether the table is Hunter Thompson on the grounds that he knows that I know that that isn't Hunter Thompson. But in many cases context will settle that I am asking some question or other. For example if I arrived at the cafe after my friend and there are two coffee mugs on the table, incluing a half empty coffee mug at the place to his left, and I point to it and say "Katy?", I can be construed as having asked whether that's Katy's mug.
But names also work with confident utterance to say something (rather than questioning utterance to ask something.) I could point to a picture of Hunter Thompson in a magazine and say "ooh, Hunter Thompson", and be construed as claiming, for example, that the person the picture is a picture of is Hunter Thompson.
Demonstratives
But I claim you can't do this with many demonstratives. I can't point to the man and say "him?", or "that guy?" without my friend saying "what about him?" - that is, asking me what I'm asking. Similarly I can't point to the coffee mug and say "that?" or even "that mug?" without prompting my friend to say "what about it?"
(Caveat: maybe you can do it with some very complex demonstratives. I could point to the guy in the dark glasses and whisper "that guy whose book you're reading?")
Descriptions
Unsurpisingly, it works with definite and indefinite descriptions. I can point to the guy and say "the author of the book you're reading?" and be construed as asking whether the guy is the author of the book you are reading. And I can say insistently "the author of the book you're reading" and be construed as asserting that the guy is the author of the book you're reading.Or I can point to the unfamiliar fruit in the still life my friend's child is constructing on our table and say "a dragon fruit?" or "a vision of oddness!" and be construed as asking or asserting.
Indexicals
Indexicals seem to be rather an odd case. I can't point to the man with the glasses and say "I?" or "me?" without my friend asking me to clarify what the hell I'm talking about. But maybe that's like asking whether my mug is Hunter Thomson - it's implausible that I could be asking or asserting whether that's me. But I could point to the coffee cup and ask or assert "mine?"/"mine". Or say "my coffee?"
One might think that this distinction tracks something related to the referential/attributive distinction. Perhaps it's only expressions which have an attributive reading which can be uttered alone with a demonstration like this and only expressions which have no attributive reading which cannot be so used. (You'll only think this is you think names can be used attributively, of course, but it seems to me that they could be.)
I think this distinction does track something like whether or not it's possible to use an expression predicatively, by which I mean, to say something about an object (as opposed to to pick out an object in order to say something about it.)
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March 27, 2006
Roughly speaking...
I've been reading Wittgenstein's Tractatus for a class I'm teaching tomorrow and the following line just kills me:
I think it's because, before reflection, it sounds as if it has a lot in common with these sentences:
or
or
I think these are funny in two different respects. Firstly, the embedded sentence is so absurd that the fact that the author takes the care to say "roughly speaking" - as if you might be about to jump in and correct him on some small point - is hilarious. And secondly, it's hard to see how the state of affairs described could be "roughly" right. One wants to say: look mate, do teddy-bears eat people or not? I might have children to save! What's all this "roughly" business?
But after some consideration I suppose Wittgenstein's sentence isn't really like that. He thinks that objects are strictly property-less, and so "objects are colourless" might seem like one way to express that they don't have any colour properties. But of course to say that would strictly be to ascibe a property to them (the property of being colourless) and so it isn't strictly true either.
My German copy is in my office, otherwise I'd be checking the original of the "roughly speaking" - maybe this is a translation thing.
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February 10, 2006
A Solution to a Problem about Inexpressible Propositions?
Jeff King's claims for his view of propositional structure in the introduction to "Structured Propositions and Complex Predicates" are pretty exciting. He writes:
I shall show that the account of propositions that results from my account of propositional structure has two highly desirable features. First, it is virtually undeniable that propositions as I shall construe them exist. Second, my account makes comprehensible how propositions manage to represent the world. It seems to me that these results are important.
It seems to me that he's right in thinking that those virtues are important, but further reading of the paper reveals that the view also has an terrible vice: it seems that in order for a proposition to exist, on King's view, it has to be the case that some sentence exists which expresses it.
King is well aware of this, though he doesn't accept that this feature is a vice, and after acknowledging that it is a consequence of his view, he tries to make it a plausible consequence:
Thus on the present view, there may be propositions even in the absence of any public natural languages. However, without vehicles that express propositions, whether they be mental sentences or sentences of a public language, there are no propositions. For on the present view, the propositional relation binding together the constituents of a proposition is composed of the relation binding together the lexical constituents of a vehicle expressing it (i.e. the sentential relation of the vehicle) and the relations connecting the lexical constituents of the vehicle to their sv's. For the propositional constituents to stand in this propositional relation (i.e. for the proposition to exist) is for there to be lexical items that stand in the relevant sentential relation and that have the propositional constituents as their sv's . Thus for propositions to exist, there must be vehicles consisting of lexical items standing in some (sentential) relation, where these lexical items bear semantic relations to propositional constituents.
Unlike King, I think this is unquestionably a bad consequence, since it seems to me that there are true propositions which we cannot express. Consider the real numbers, for example. There will always be real numbers that we don't have natural language expressions for (even language of thought expressions), since there are more reals than there are natural language expressions. Though I can quantify over real numbers using expressions like `all the reals between 0 and 1', I cannot express the proposition that would be expressed by "x is a real number" if I were to replace 'x' with a name for one of those reals that I don't have a name for. And no matter how many names I introduce, there will always be examples of such propositions that I can't express.
But perhaps things get more interesting if we're more liberal about what we count as a language. It's hard to see that it really matters that the language is natural, right? And mathematicians have some pretty odd and abstract ideas about what we might count as a language. For example, why should the expressions of a language be words that we can write down or speak? Why not let numbers be expressions? (Not numerals, mind, but numbers.) There's loads of them. In fact, let every real number be a name for itself. Add those new names to English and now, for every real number, there is a sentence (not always one I can right down, unfortunately) which expresses the proposition expressed by the sentence "x is a real number' when the "x" is replace with a name of the number.
Expanding our conception of a language in this way would seem to solve the problem. So I'm wondering: why not?
Posted by logican at 06:36 PM | Comments (16) | TrackBack
January 17, 2006
Back to School
Well, today was the first day of my undergraduate philosophy of language course. I'm using Martinich's Philosophy of Language
...modern philosophy of language is highly inaccessible. It is very hard for the ordinary student ... to appreciate the problems it explores, or the methods it uses. The interest of the results ... is thus largely hidden... Naturally it would not do merely to survey various positions on various issues. For the point of the book was not to enable a student to go through the hoops, but to enable him to understand why the hoops are placed where they are. (v-vi)
My idea for addressing this problem was this:
often the problems discussed by a writer are easier to appreciate if they have occurred to you independently beforehand. So perhaps if I could get my students to run into some of the problems that arise in thinking about language all by themselves, then they'd be less suspicious of them as introduced by, say, Frege, or Russell, or Grice.
So part of the class today was getting students to brainstorm answers to questions like:
- What is a language?
What do we use language for?
Do these two sentences mean the same thing?
- George Bush lives in the White House
The president of the United States lives in the White House
Could someone understand two words that meant the same thing and not know that they did?
And, er,...
What would a theory of meaning be like?
Questions 3 and 5 worked particularly well and it was nice to see students coming up with alternative views and producing sketches of arguments for them. I was a bit worried that I'd run into the crazy answers (e.g. word learning works by telepathy, all words just sound like their referents etc, both of which I'd met before) but instead I got the argument that the two sentences must mean different things because when George Bush is not president one is false while the other is true, and the counter-suggestion that the meaning of the sentence with the description changes, so that the two sentences mean the same thing while George Bush is in power, but different things as soon as he leaves.
I don't know how much more receptive to the section of the course on names and descriptions this will have made the class, but I have hopes...
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November 22, 2005
Bookfinder News
I've just realised that Nathan Salmon's Reference and Essence
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September 27, 2005
Natural Kind Terms
Sometimes people object to the thesis that languages contain natural kind terms on the grounds that there are (or might be) no natural kinds in nature. In doing this, they often point to interesting and substantive discoveries in the sciences, e.g. they claim that there is nothing distinctive which all and only members of the species tiger possess, or that, given the discoveries of various isotopes of water, there is is nothing distinctive which all and only samples of water possess.
That there is nothing common to all and only tigers would certainly be a surprising and interesting discovery, but I think the objection to natural kind terms is mistaken. And I think it's a bit like suggesting that languages cannot contain singular terms on the grounds that there are (or might be) no objects.
Frege considered just such an objection from idealists in "On Sense and Reference". He responded:
I reply that when we say 'the Moon,' we do not intend to speak of our idea of the Moon, nor are we satisfed with the sense alone, but we presuppose a reference. To assume that in the sentence 'The Moon is smaller than the Earth' the idea of the moon is in question, would be flatly to misunderstand the sense. If this is what the speaker wanted, he would use the phrase 'my idea of the Moon.' Now we can of course be mistaken in the presupposition, and such mistakes have indeed occurred. But the question whether the presupposition is perhaps always mistaken need not be answered here; in order to justify mention of the reference of a sign it is enough, at first, to point out our intention in speaking or thinking. (We must then add the reservation: provided such reference exists.) (Max Black's translation, p. 61-2 of the 1977 edition)
I tend to think of languages as a kind of publically available technology which people learn to use (rather than of everyone speaking their own language, to which they impart their own intended meaning, which everyone else has to figure out), so I'm less inclined than Frege to say that it is individual speakers' intentions which make it the case that, say, the first person indexical is a singular term. But I think something similar to Frege here anyway. Even if there are no objects, it still seems to me that there are expressions which (to speak loosely) try to refer to objects; things like names, indexicals like `I', definite descriptions and the like. Maybe they fail sometimes. Maybe they fail always. But that's still what they're about. And similarly, natural kind terms try to pick out kinds. Even if there weren't any kinds, it wouldn't follow that an account of language which said that some terms were natural kind terms was false.
(There's a secondary confusion here as well. For historical reasons we still call such terms "natural kind terms'' but the way the expression is usually used in the philosophy of language, the "natural'' is misleading. What matters is that the kind is out there in the world, waiting to be talked about, independently of language. Even if there were no natural kinds (in the sense the philosophers of biology and chemistry mean), there could still be natural kind terms (in the way philosophers of language mean) which picked out artificially constructed kinds. Perhaps "chair'', "coin'' and "badge'' are examples?)
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September 01, 2005
Gellner's Words and Things
I've been meaning to link to this for a while. It's Kieran Setiya's review of Ernest Gellner's recently rereleased (that's what they used to call it on TOTP) Words and Things (which I've now added to the "to read, possibly on the subway" pile under the window in my apartment.)
Kieran begins ominously:
Philosophy has never recovered from the damage done to its image around the middle of the last century: it came to seem dull, insipid and mechanical, a pedantic exploration of how language works.
I found this ominous because I've always been drawn to linguistic philosophy. I remember, as an undergraduate, reading Tarski's "Semantic Conception of Truth" and Hempel's "Studies in the Logic of Confirmation" and being stunned by the way in which analysis and attention to language allowed progress to be made on apparently intractable problems. Where Kieran saw philosophy as in danger of being "dull, insipid and mechanical, a pedantic exploration of how language works", I saw it as exposing a gap in the armour of every tough problem. Exploration of how language works need be neither pedantic, nor trivial, but questions about language often look more tractable than questions about free will, or induction or consciousness or values and it's common for results in the philosophy of language to have application in other areas (recent examples have included externalism, possible world semantics and context-sensitivity.) When Al Hájek gave his Heuristics paper at the ANU a few weeks back (it's a paper that lists heuristics for coming up with philosophical ideas) I thought that one thing that could be added was "do some philosophy of language and try using what you've learned when working elsewhere."
Yet Gellner's book sounds fun anyway:
you can see why it was explosive, with its combination of wit and flagrant disavowal of interpretive charity. Gellner is happy to attribute bad motives, bad ideas and sheer confusions to the philosophers he dislikes, and he is often very funny in doing so.
And there's often more need for us to read the work of our critics than that of our friends. This was a little close to the bone, for instance:
Academic environments are generally characterised by the presence of people who claim to understand more than in fact they do. Linguistic Philosophy has produced a great revolution, generating people who claim not to understand what in fact they do. Some achieve great virtuosity at it. Any beginner in philosophy can manage not to understand, say, Hegel, but I have heard people who were so advanced that they knew how not to understand writers of such limpid clarity as Bertrand Russell or A. J. Ayer.(Gellner)
I find it so tempting to think of myself as just having higher than average standards for the application of the word "understanding", but then i) wouldn't that make me rather like some whiney old behaviourist, asking for behavioural criteria for the application of words before they'll admit them to polite company and ii) if everyone else was using "understand" differently, wouldn't it be me that was mistaken about what the word means? I'd be like one of those students that defends their paper by saying "I know I wrote the crazy thing, but what it meant was the correct thing." Damn.
Well, the weather is closing down already here in Alberta - I'll be spending some time on the subway with Words and Things.
UPDATE: Dave Chalmers has pointed out the following critique of the book which makes, as Dave says in the comments, good companion reading.
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August 18, 2005
Routes to Montague
Here's an update on the old "getting to know Montague" post. From Rich Thomason's 70-page introduction to Formal Philosophy (1974):
A paper by Barbara Partee, Partee [11], contains detailed comparisons of the grammar of Chapter 8 [Montague's "The Proper Treatment of Quantification in Ordinary English] with transformational grammar, and her work in Rodman [13] contains, as well as syntactic extensions of Montague's fragments, further material helping to make Montague's work accessible to linguists. In this introduction we will therefore try to illuminate Montague's work on English in a different way, which may help to make it understandable to those familiar with logic. (16)
(Partee [11] is a reference to "Comments on Richard Montague's "Quantification in Ordinary English" in Hintikka, Moravcsik and Suppes (eds.) Approaches to Natural Language, (Dortrecht, 1973) and Rodman [13] is Papers in Montague Grammar, (LA, 1972) and (charmingly) $3 per copy to Mr Robert Rodan, Linguistics Department, UCLA, Los Angeles, Calif. 90024)
I don't know whether that address will still work. I'm definitely on the logic track though - Thomason's introduction is super-clear.
UPDATE: If I were in Melbourne on Friday, I'd be going to this:
Melbourne Logic Seminar
Allen Hazen (Melbourne)
English as a Formal Language: Montague for Beginners and Others.
11am, B07, Old Quad.
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May 17, 2005
Dear Morty,
At the end of this post about Tarski, I was wishing that I knew what drove him to reject the analytic/synthetic distinction. Fortunately, in the comments, Juhani remembered a letter from Tarski to Morton White, in which Tarski lays out his reasons. I have managed to track it down, so here, for anyone with J-stor access, is a link to the letter.
At the beginning of the letter, Tarski remarks that he does not have much to say beyond what he has already said "in my article on logical consequence and in the recent one on truth (notice, in particular, my remarks in S14.)" Morton White tells us that these two articles are "On the Concept of Logical Consequence" and "The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations of Semantics" (jstor) respectively. I was surprised by this, since I know these two articles reasonably well, and I had no suspicion, until I spoke to Bernard Linsky last week, that Tarski rejected the analytic/synthetic distinction.
Section of 14 of "The Semantic Conception of Truth" is the beginning of the "polemical" part of the paper, and it contains five major paragraphs. In the first Tarski declines to claim that his semantic conception of truth is the only right one, saying that he has no wish to contribute to debates over whether it is the right conception of truth, since the question makes no sense. In the second paragraph two he writes:
Disputes of this type are by no means restricted to the notion of truth. They occur in all domains where - instead of an exact, scientific terminology - common language with all its vagueness and ambiguity is used; and they are always meaningless, and therefore in vain.
In paragraph three he recommends a course of action:
we should reconcile ourselves with the fact that we are confronted, not with one concept, but with several concepts which are denoted by one word; we should try to make these concepts as clear as possible, (by means of definition, or of an axiomatic procedure, or in some other way); to avoid further confusions we should agree to use different terms for different concepts; and then we may proceed to a quiet and systematic study of all the concepts involved, which will exhibit their main properties and mutual relations.
In paragraph four he notes that in the case of truth, some people recommend the pragmatic conception, or the coherence conception.
Then in the final paragraph of section 14 he says that none of those conceptions has been stated sufficiently clearly, but that that may change, and then, when we have several clearly stated but different conceptions of truth, we should invent new terms to express them:
Personally, I should not feel hurt if a future world congress of the "theoreticians of truth" should decide - by a majority of votes - to reserve the word "true" for one of the non-classical conceptions, and should suggest another word - say, "frue," for the conception considered here. But I cannot imagine that anyone could present cogent arguments to the effect that the semantic conception is "wrong" and should be entirely abandoned.
What is there in here that is in tension with the analytic-synthetic distinction? Nothing very much, on a casual reading and there is plenty that is unQuinean (definitions giving the meanings of words, "axioms" that look very like meaning postulates, the study of concepts and the view that nothing could show his view of the meaning of "true" to be wrong.) I'll come back to this in another post and see if I can reconstruct anything like a plausible argument against the analytic/synthetic distinction.
Posted by logican at 04:11 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
May 12, 2005
Performatives and Embedded Sentences
Suppose someone sincerely and reflectively utters the following sentence:
I declare that the Earth is flat.
Have they said something false? Is that very utterance false?
Had they sincerely and reflectively uttered:
The Earth is flat.
then, of course, the answer to both questions would be 'yes,' but that's not what they utter, they utter:
I declare that the Earth is flat.
Lewis, touching on this briefly in "General Semantics," says that the sentence is true, though "one might be tempted to say he [the utterer] has spoken falsely, because the sentence embedded in his performative - the content of his declaration, the belief he avows, is false."
The sentence seems to be one of Austin's performatives. Just like with these:
I promise to pay you five pounds.
I hereby declare you man and wife.
I name this ship "Pride of Bridlington."
uttering "I declare that the Earth is flat" is a way of doing something, in this case, a way of declaring that the Earth is flat. Similarly, uttering the sentences above are (if conditions are right) ways of promising to pay someone 5 pounds, declaring someone man and wife, and naming a ship. (In Austin's memorable phrase, they allow us to "do things with words.")
What's interesting about the flat earth sentence, is that what uttering that sentence allows us to do is say something false, and even odder, we do it by uttering a sentence which says something true.
So I think it is natural to answer the two questions above as follows:
The sentence token is true (since the speaker really does declare that.) The speaker thus says something true by uttering it, but, as it is a performative, he also, by uttering that very sentence, does something: he says something false (by which I mean that he also asserts a second, false, proposition, not that he asserts a proposition that is both true and false!) The sentence-token, however, does not say the false thing (the false proposition is not its content.) Only the speaker achieves that.
(Similarly, when I say "I name this ship "Pride of Bridlington," " my sentence token is not the baptiser - only I am the baptiser.)
Posted by logican at 04:53 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
May 10, 2005
Acer and Bandit
Nat "Metathought" Simeon thinks almost any philosopher worth his salt has thought up a paradox or two. Luckily, I was doing some paradox-mongering in February, otherwise I don't know what I'd have told the Dean.
I'll include some of the lead-up here, but if you want you can just skip ahead to the paradoxes.
Paradox and Semantics
Since the Liar is a paradox concerning a semantic property - truth - it has been natural for us to call it a semantic paradox. Close relations of the traditional Liar, such as truth-tellers, multi-sentence (or proposition) Liars and strengthened Liars also concern truth and others still, such as Grelling's, rely on other semantic properties and relations, such as the satisfaction of predicates. This might encourage us to think that there is something peculiar to semantics which explains the paradoxes and pathologies.
But are there related paradoxes which do not concern semantic expressions? And does it matter if there are?
The notion of relatedness in play here is vague, yet our intuitions about the relatedness of paradoxes matter to the extent that we value a uniform treatment of closely related paradoxes. In "Semantical Paradox" (Journal of Philosophy 76), Burge wrote of one solution to the traditional Liar which had nothing to say about strengthened Liars:
[S]uch an approach, though technically feasible, promises little philosophical illumination. The semantical paradoxes are remarkable in their similarity. The strengthened Liar does not appear to have sources fundamentally different from those of the ordinary Liar. What is wrong with the proposed account is that it gives no insight into the general phenomenon of semantical pathology and offers instead a hodgepodge of makeshift and merely technical remedies."(92)
Are there any non-semantic paradoxes which are closely related to the semantic ones? I will argue that there are. Will this mean that the Liar is an instance of some more general, non-semantic pathology which requires a more general, non-semantic (or, at least, not merely semantic) solution? I will argue that though the problem is not restricted to semantics in the sense that it is not a problem restricted to semantic predicates such as 'true' 'satisfies' etc, it is a semantic phenomenon in that it arises because of a problem with the meaning of the pathological expressions, whether those expressions are themselves semantic ones or not. (In fact I probably won't get that far in this post.)
Non-Semantic Paradox
We are looking for a paradox related to one of the semantic paradoxes, yet not involving a semantic relation or property. The most obvious candidate is Russell's, which seems similar to the Liar, yet is generated by the membership relation of naive set theory. It does not look as if that membership relation is a semantic relation, rather, it looks as if it belongs to the non-semantic realm of set theory. Yet perhaps there is room for doubt on this point; some philosophers think that second-order logic is set theory in sheep's clothing. Is there room for someone to claim that set theory is, in some sense, semantics in disguise?
Perhaps, but the plausibility of such a claim need not concern us, since I will now present two paradoxes which clearly turn on non-semantic properties - that of being an American Paint, and that of being an even winner. I believe that that these paradoxes should receive the same diagnoses as the truth-teller and the Liar.
The Paradoxes
An American Paint is a kind of horse. A horse is an American Paint if and only if i) its sire and dam are both American Paints and ii) it exhibits a distinctive patchy kind of colouring, including a certain amount of white hair over unpigmented skin. The patchy colouring will not play a large part in what follows, and hence forth I will express condition ii) simply as `the colouring constraints.' (For now I'll ignore complications about how there could ever have been a first American Paint. I suppose, if pushed, we could add some kind of `base clause' to this definition. Adapted from the definition on the website of the American Paint Horse Association.)
Let's represent this information about the meaning of "American Paint" in the following definition:
[A] For all horses x, (x is an American Paint if, and only if, x's Dam and Sire are themselves American Paints and x meets the colouring constraints.)
Now consider Acer and his pedigree. Acer is a horse who meets the colouring constraints. Condor, Acer's Dam, is an American paint, but things are less clear on the sire's side. Bandit is Acer's sire and meets the colouring constraints. Bandit's dam is Dundee, an American Paint herself. But Bandit's sire---Acer's grandsire---is Acer himself, thanks to the machinations of a pair of ambitious horsebreeders who sent Acer back in time and mated him with his granddam. The resulting family tree looks like this:
Given the situation I have described, the sentence
[1] Acer is an American Paint
is pathological in a very similar way to the truth-teller. The question of whether Acer is an American Paint cannot be decided until we know whether his sire is an American Paint, and that depends crucially on whether Acer is an American Paint. We may consistently assume either that Acer is an American Paint, or that he is not, yet this would not change the fact that our assumption would be groundless.
In a similar way, we can construct sentences containing only non-semantic concepts which mirror the Liar itself. Suppose that a group of serious yet suggestible punters began to study patterns in horse bloodlines, with the aim of eventually making (even) more accurate predictions about the outcomes of races. Unsurprisingly, they show a special interest in the thoroughbred breed - the descendants of the so-called foundation stallions, a small group of horses brought to England from the Mediterranean at the start of the 17th century. (For the purposes of this example, I will assume that any horse with one thoroughbred parent is a thoroughbred.) In their obsession, our gamblers develop complicated theories about inheritance and traits which are inherited on one side or another, and which may or may not skip generations. They also develop a terminology for discussing such traits. They define an even winner as follows:
[Bi] The foundation stallions are all even winners.
[Bii] Any other thoroughbred is an even winner iff its sire is not an even winner.
Now consider Ain't Misbehavin''s pedigree. All of his ancestors going back three generations are thoroughbreds (though none of them are foundation stallions). Once Ain't Misbehavin''s finest years on the turf were over, his trainers sent him back in time, where he was mated with Head Over Heels and subsequently sired his own grandfather. The resulting family tree looks like this:
Now we can construct the following paradox:
Suppose that Ain't Misbehavin' is an even winner. Then, by the definition of "even winner" his sire, Bit of Bother, is not an even winner. That means, again, by the definition, that Bit of Bother's sire, Drop Dead, was an even winner, which in turn means that his sire was not. But Ain't Misbehavin' is Drop Dead's sire, and, by hypothesis, he is an even winner. Contradiction.
We have shown by reductio that Ain't Misbehavin' is not an even winner. That means (by the definition) that Ain't Misbehavin''s sire was an even winner, and that his grandsire was not an even winner, and hence that his great-grandsire was an even winner. But Ain't Misbehavin' is his own great-grandsire, so it follows that Ain't Misbehavin' is an even winner, contradicting the result of the previous paragraph.
Posted by logican at 01:37 AM | Comments (15) | TrackBack
May 09, 2005
Montague Intrigue
I decided that I wanted to know more about Montague grammar, in part because I have always been curious about Montague and his work, and in part because I have a hunch that it might help me with the chapter I am writing. Not really knowing where to start, I searched Amazon and the university library, which taught me that the only book of his that really looked promising (Formal Philosophy - his selected papers) wasn't owned by the University of Alberta library system and was out of print, though I could have a photocopy from Amazon for US$109 (the latter fact is amazing in two distinct ways.)
Not to be thwarted, I went to check out the few library search results that promised even a glimmer of a suggestion of hope, and discovered Montague Grammar, a collection of articles edited by Barbara Partee. Partee also has a two-page summary of his life and work here. Here's what she writes in the preface to the collection:
[T]hose linguists, philosophers, and other students of language who have heard of Montague grammar but have not become aquainted with it may well find some of the papers in this book a gentler introduction to the subject than Montague's work or the few explications of it in print. For the reader with little or no aquantance with Montague Grammar, I would suggest the following order of reading the articles: (1) Lewis (2) Partee ...
Bingo. So er (sheepishly) that's where I've been for the last week.
Meanwhile, it seems Amazon don't even have Partee's volume listed - intrigue upon intrigue. If I were (even) more self-absorbed I would assume that this was all part of a conspiracy to leave me completely obsessed with Richard Montague. But how come so many interesting books on the border of logic and the philosophy of language are so hard to find, or so expensive? Some examples: Kaplan's Demonstratives: first you need to know that you're looking for "Themes from Kaplan", not something called "Demonstratives," and second, you have to cough up US$78 (The book does have the best Amazon cover photo ever though.) I remember looking for this book when I realised that I should probably replace my 2nd battered photocopy of it, and passing over the innocuously titled Themes, not realising that it was exaclty what I was looking for (there are a lot of search results for "Kaplan".) Another example: Priest's In Contradiction, list price: US$244, Amazon.com price: US$244 (I guess that makes sense really, as if 5 bucks off would swing it for you...) Approaches to Natural Language US$74 but they aren't promising anything...
Posted by logican at 12:20 AM | Comments (18) | TrackBack
May 03, 2005
Austin and the Exploding Canaries
Dear Reader,
I need your help tracking down an example...
I've just been chatting to Professor Linsky (henceforth, Bernie) about the various reasons that people reject the analytic-synthetic distinction. I said that one of them is connected with intensional vagueness. Some people think that the rules which govern our expressions need not, and often do not, extend to cover all possible cases. To take an example from Carnap, it might be indeterminate whether the expression "Mensch" (the German word meaning person) can be correctly applied to a creature which is half hawk, half man - the rules for using the expression, which work perfectly well in everyday life, just don't extend to decide that case. Or to take Donnellan's example, it might be indeterminate whether "mammal" can apply to a creature which breathes normally out of the water, but through gills under the water, so that if we discovered that some whales had (tiny, hidden, rarely used) gills, the rules for our language do not yet legislate on whether we should still think that all whales are mammals. It would be up to us, as speakers of the language, to decide on the best way to use the expressions "whale" and "mammal" in those circumstances. As a result, here and now, the content of the sentence "all whales are mammals" is not straight-forwardly necessary.
The related argument against analyticity goes like this: if a (non-indexical) sentence is analytic, then it expresses a necessary truth. But where the intensions of expressions are not defined for all possible cases, there may be no fact of the matter about whether the sentence is necessary. Yet if it were analytic, there would be. So the sentence is not analytic. (Usually it is then suggested that such partially defined intensions are widespread in natural language, and the conclusion is drawn that there are hardly any analytic sentences.)
Here's what I need from you: Bernie thinks that J. L. Austin once argued (like Carnap and Donnellan) that expressions need not be defined for all possible cases, and gave an example involving exploding canaries (or goldfinches?) which was later picked up and used by someone else. (Possibly Morton White?) I'd like to track down the Austin example in particular. Does anyone recognise it? If so I would be grateful if you could point me in the right direction, either in the comments (which may be anonymous, or, if you would prefer a more private method of communication, by emailing me at grussell - AT - artsci - DOT - wustl - DOT - edu (you get the actual address by uniform substitution of "@" for each occurrence of " - AT - " and "." for each occurrence of " - DOT - .") Thank you very much!
Update: 3/5/05 David Chalmers has alerted me to the fact that the passage in question (which concerns goldfinches) can be found in Austin's "Other Minds," reprinted in his Philosophical Papers which is available online if your library subscribes to Oxford Scholarship.
Posted by logican at 03:48 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
April 29, 2005
Mothers of Invention
I had thought that Putnam, Harman and Kripke had the imaginative-counterexamples-to-necessary-truths market sewn up, but I have just learned that I was wrong. You might remember that Putnam, for example, argued that "all cats are animals" expresses a contingent truth by describing a situation in which we would say the sentence is false: if it turned out that all the things which we call "cats" were (extremely sophisticated and well-disguised) robot spies from Mars, then we would say that "all cats are animals" is false.
Harman described a similarly unlikely situation that would make the sentence "red is a colour" false, and though I forget the exact description and I don't have the book handy, this is roughly it: if we discovered that we have the visual experience of redness in response to a certain frequency of sound emitted by an object, rather than in response to a certain wavelength of light, then we would say that "red is a colour" was false.
Kripke turns a similar trick for "Gold is a yellow metal" (which was one of Kant's examples) and there's a good chance that I'll be posting more about what these kinds of examples show, since I have quite a bit to say about it.
These examples are sometimes - though not always - used in defence of radical empiricisms, where by radical empiricism I mean versions of empiricism which reject any kind non-a posteriori knowledge, even that based in meaning. One criticism of such views is that they cannot explain de dicto necessities, such as "2+2=4" or "triangles have three sides" or "all cats are animals;" suppose we allow that experience may somehow bring us to believe such claims, how could it ever bring us to believe that the claims are necessary?
One response open to the radical empiricist is to say that the claims are not necessary; we only think that they are because we are not imaginative enough to come up with the possible situations which would make them false.
In the history and philosophy of mathematics, something like the radical empiricist view is usually associated with John Stuart Mill, and so I should not have been surprised to learn from Coffa's The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap (though I was a little surprised - I had mistakenly thought these hyper-imaginative counterexamples were a relatively recent phenomenon) that Mill also ran the no-imagination-crazy-counterexample defence.
In arithmetic, for example, our commitment to the law that 2+2=4 would vanish if whenever two pairs of things "are placed in proximity or are contemplated together, a fifth thing is immediately created and brought within the contemplation of the mind engaged in putting two and two together." The production of this fifth thing must be "instantaneous in the very act of seeing, [s]o that we never should see four thing by themselves as four: the fifth thing would be inseparably involved in the act of perception by which we would ascertain the sum of the two pairs."...Clearly Mill was thinking about adding up things like rabbits or cows, not things like solutions of third degree equations or Roman consuls. As Frege would point out in the Grundlagen (1884, secs 7 and 8), the later are not easily "placed in proximity" or involved in "acts of perception." A world in which, when someone adds the first two Roman consuls to the next two a fifth one appears, presumably with his distinct proper name, his own political record, and so on, is not a world at all, but the product of a confused mind; for in that world the decision to add would alter the past, and on pain of contradiction there could not be one person adding a group of objects and another not.(47-48 of Coffa)
Coffa's choice of rabbits, and then cows, as examples of things which Mill must have had in mind confused me on a first reading, since these are creatures capable of reproduction, and in fact rabbits are famous for breeding like...rabbits. Solutions to equations and Roman consuls cannot, so the examples might suggest that the crucial thing is that certain objects, when left together long enough, can produce more objects. But I think Coffa recognises that Mill's counterexample is even more imaginative than this.
Sometimes when one watches television, channels which feel bound to protect their viewers or subjects will cover a part of the image with a solid black rectangle. Sometimes the rectangle covers a suspect's eyes, in an effort to protect the suspect's anonymity, and sometimes it covers a subject's genitalia, in an effort (presumably) to preserve the delicate flower of our viewing innocence. Now suppose your eyes and perceptual system did this kind of thing automatically (I can't help wondering whether there are mental disorders like this.) And now, to take things a step further, suppose that instead of covering up something with a rectangle, your perceptual system instead creates an extra object whenever two pairs of objects are brought together. For example, suppose you look to your left and see two apples, then you look over to your right, and see two more apples. Then you close your eyes, reach out to the right and grab the apples that are over there. You bring them over to the apples on the left and then open your eyes and look left. What you see is the four original apples, plus a fifth - the product of your perceptual system under these kinds of circumstances. This, I'm guessing, is the kind of thing Mill is getting at with his:
[The production of this fifth thing must be] instantaneous in the very act of seeing, [s]o that we never should see four thing by themselves as four: the fifth thing would be inseparably involved in the act of perception by which we would ascertain the sum of the two pairs."
It is very unclear to me that Mill's story can be told consistently. Whilst I think the non-standard story about the apples is perfectly clear, and conceivable, Mill takes it that this story can be generalised, so that "we never see four things by themselves as four." But suppose I see two (sterilised) rabbits. How many rabbit ears do I see? Mill's answer should be five, but, I wonder, where is the extra ear attached? Is it just floating in space near the whole rabbits? Perhaps Mill would tranquilly absorb this bizarre consequence - it's not as if he is trying to persuade us this is actually what happens with our perceptual systems. But suppose I am counting attached rabbit ears? Then perhaps Mill could say the extra rabbit ear is attached in an abnormal place. But suppose I am counting rabbit ears attached in the normal place? Can we fit two ears in one normal place? And here's the clincher, I think, suppose I want to consider both how many ears attached to normal-looking rabbits there are and how many normal looking rabbits there are. If there are two normal looking rabbits there, then, on Mill's assumptions about our perceptual systems, what we should see is exactly 5 ears-attached-to-normal-looking-rabbits and two normal-looking rabbits. But that is surely something that it is not possible for our perceptual systems to represent.
Mill's attempt at a counterexample to the claim that "2+2=4" expresses a necessary truth reminded me of my old German linguistics teacher Chris Beedham, who once tried to convince me, not just that "1+1=2" was contingent, but that was not really true, since if you add one raindrop to another raindrop, the result is one larger raindrop, not two. I think my response at the time was to say that he should not think of addition as bringing things together (and perhaps doing a little pushing to overcome the surface tension.) And though I wasn't quite sure of the correct positive response, I was fairly sure (and am still sure) about the negative part: this example doesn't show that 1+1 is not 2, and the problem with the example is something to do with the misinterpretation of the addition symbol.
People are always trying to talk me out of believing the basic truths of arithmetic. On a Greyhound bus two years ago I met an "FBI interrogator" who argued that "our math" was only true for us, since a different culture might interpret "2" as meaning 5 - in which case "2+2=4" would be false and "2+2=10" would be true. I imagine - though I do not recall - that he was a little less careful about the use/mention distinction that I have been in the retelling of this argument. And my grounds for thinking this is that the argument as a whole is based on a confusion between a sentence and its content: yes, relative to some other language, "2" might refer to 5, and that would make the sentence "2+2=4" false (with respect to that language), but does not show that what the sentence says (namely that 2+2=4) could be false, since in that language "2+2=4" does not say that 2+2=4, but that 5+5=4. This didn't convince the FBI interrogator, but then, he wasn't really listening and we moved on to talking about whether it was ok to "get a bit rough" with suspects if the crime they were charged with was especially horrible...he was wrong about that too. Greyhound - it's the new Clapham omnibus.
Posted by logican at 01:18 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack
April 28, 2005
Google Definitions
Warning: causal theory of reference geekery ahead.
At a 1962 conference in Helsinki (the same conference at which Kripke presented "Semantic Considerations on Modal Logic"), Ruth Barcan Marcus said the following:
[T]o discover that we have alternative proper names for the same object we turn to a lexicon, or, in the case of a formal language, to the meaning postulates, ...[o]ne doesn't investigate the planets, but the accompanying lexicon.
(Aside: this Barcan-Marcus quote is taken from John P. Burgess' "Quinus ab Omni Naevo Vindicatus", a paper which John usually refers to excitedly and mysteriously as "the paper with the Latin title." The title, he explains in the paper, echoes Saccheri's Euclidus ab Omni Naevo Vindicatus or Euclid freed freed every blemish, and the paper defends (successfully in my opinion, and I have an extremely fractious relationship with Quine's writings) Quine's argument that de re modality cannot be reduced to de dicto modality.)
Of course, Barcan-Marcus' claim here looks crazy. One cannot always tell that a single object has been given two names just by looking up the meanings of the names in the dictionary. The discovery that 'Hesperus' names the same object as 'Phosphorus' for example (they are both names for Venus), required substantial empirical research in astronomy, not just the consultation of a dictionary. I used to think this quote was an example of someone saying something crazy because an attractive theory seems to imply it. And I thought the train of thought probably went something like this: names are just tags and their meanings are just the objects tagged - like names in modal logic. How does one find out about the meaning of a linguistic expression? One looks it up in the dictionary (right?) So if two names have the same meaning (tag the same object) then we'll be able to tell from the dictionary entries.
And you might think that Barcan Marcus' comment contained some important and radical semantic ideas but wasn't yet very clear on one of the epistemic possibilities that could go along with those ideas (namely that two names, e.g. "Hesperus" and "Phosphorus" could have the same meaning without it being possible to tell, on the basis of one's semantic competance alone, that a sentence expressing the identity of the object(s) referred to is true, e.g., without being able to tell that "Hesperus is Phosphorus" is true. (Forgivably of course, no-one else got there until Kripke's "Naming and Necessity" lectures at Princeton 8 years later.)
However I have just discovered Google Definitions. If one feeds Google the expression "define: " followed by the term one wants defined (it's a little too late for corner quotes,) it will return definitions from all over the web. So naturally I had to feed it all the old philosophical examples, and behold:
Hesperus
evening star: a planet (usually Venus) seen at sunset in the western sky
www.cogsci.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/webwn
Phosphorus
Phosphorus means Venus when it is seen in the morning (the morning star).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphorus_(morning_star)
There you go, Ruth Barcan-Marcus was right and all that hard astronomy was for nothing.
Except, er, not. My new electronic super-lexicon is surprisingly quiet on the identity of the referent of '2' with the referent of either '{0,{0}}' (a la van Neumann) or with '{{0}}' (a la Zermelo), and it didn't have anything to say about the identity of Plumwood with Routley. (Though it did tell me that "Londres" was a name for London, and that "Tully" is a name for Cicero.)
Posted by logican at 09:54 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack