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This final chapter aims to build on the points made earlier to provide a defence of neo-traditionalism against a common kind of counterexample. The aim is to explain how an extremely simple system along these lines can account for belief reports. Predelli does not argue for the assumptions that underlie his particular system, simply against the charge that such a system cannot handle belief reports.

The alleged problem is with the substitution of co-referring terms in belief reports (and so it’s almost as old as this kind of philosophy). The problem is as follows:

(1) Tom believes that Bush is the President.

(2) Tom believes that Dubya is the President.

We seem to be able to represent one and the same belief by both (1) and (2), but not in all cases. But to count these as having different truth-conditions suggests that we should be able to detect a significant semantic difference, some ‘unarticulated constituent’ perhaps.

Predelli appeals to his account of the real workings of the neo-traditionalist paradigm and argues that (1) and (2) will indeed be associated with identical T-distributions, but not what are intuitively thought of as truth-conditions.

This and ch. 4 suggest lots of very interesting questions which I’m now thinking about how to answer. All in all it was a worthwhile read. 

This chapter introduces a lot of new ideas, at least they’re new to me. It’s also pretty long. I’m just going to try and summarise what I take to be the main point: a discussion of how T-distributions work and how that understanding can be used to rebut a contextualist argument.

The problem is to deal with the following kind of case. Pia has painted the (brown) leaves on the tree in her garden green. We can imagine the sentence:

 

(1) The leaves are green

 

being uttered in two distinct circumstances, to a photographer and to a botanist. It seems that in the former case what is uttered is true and in the latter it is false. But it isn’t any obviously indexical feature of the language that does it. So we have different truth-conditions associated with the same sentence and so a counterexample to the traditional theory’s claim to empirical adequacy. (I think that the definition of ‘empirical adequacy’ and ‘meeting intuitions’ is worth a serious discussion, but here isn’t the place or the time.)

Predelli’s strategy seems to be the following. The worry comes from taking the points at which the sentence is to be evaluated as ‘possible worlds’ construed as a kind of snapshot of a possible state of a world. In fact the theory will not give any such thing but will tell us whether (1) is true or false at every index. Indices can include features that fix what is to count as ‘green’ in various sorts of case. Which of these conventions is in play determines which indices are relevant. Only those in which it is fixed a certain way are relevant to an utterance in a context that so fixes the extension of ‘green’. Relevance is contextually determined, but this does not amount to conceding everything to the contextualist; there has been no alteration in the traditionalist claim that it is the sentence (or rather clause) that is associated with a T-distribution.

I’m not entirely sure what I think of this proposal yet, or even if I’ve got it right. At least there is now a pleasant symmetry established between the substitution of clause-index pairs for sentence-context pairs as inputs to the system and T-distributions for truth-conditions as outputs.

This chapter deals with an alternative to the type-orientated semantics of neo-traditionalism: token-reflexive semantics. On this view we have rules for determining the referent of each token of an indexical.

Predelli discusses a first possible objection to this: that it undergenerates logical truths i.e. that there are logical truths that it will deny to be logical truths. His response is that when the view is suitable augmented with the considerations about the difference between contexts and indices discussed in the previous chapter this worry disappears. It is reasonable to restrict the assessment of premises and conclusion of an argument to the same index. This will allow both types of view under discussion to get the right results.

The real problem with the token-reflexive view is that it overgenerates logical truths.  This is because it restricts suitable indices to those in which there is a tokening. Kaplan argued that there should be a distinction between “the verities of meaning and the vagaries of action”; the token-reflexive view does not respect this.

As part of the discussion summarised above there are useful comments made about several puzzles, for example that ‘addressing puzzle’. The general solution is an appeal to the possibility of features of the conversation in raising and lowering appropriate standards of assessment. This is reminiscent of Lewis’ ‘accommodation’, as Predelli points out.

I have to say that some of this goes by rather quickly in this chapter. A lot of pragmatics seems now to be involved in the assessment, and it also seems that features not part of an austere theory of ’semantic profiles’ are part of the assessment of some sentences. In particular in the solution to the addressing puzzle; for example a feature of the sentence that is nothing to do with fixing the reference of indexicals can trigger the adoption of a different index. I need to think about this some more…

In this chapter we get a fuller account of the ‘index’ component of clause-index pairs, and just how this is different to a straightforward context. First Predelli outlines what he calls the ’simple-minded view’. On this view an index is an ordered n-tuple consisting of, for example, an agent, a location, a time and a world. These will be the speaker, her location, the time of her utterance and the world she is in. This is equivalent to what Kaplan calls a ‘proper index’, which becomes important later.

We then have a discussion of ‘answering machine’ type situations where it becomes clear that the simple-minded view will not work. We need to evaluate some utterances at indexes other than those it prescribes. The solution is to drop the simple-minded view and allow improper indexes. There are then sketches of how this makes Kaplan’s remarks about the logical truth of ‘I am here now’ and ‘∃x Exists x’ false. There is also a discussion of how this picture can account for truth in fiction without appeal to a fiction operator but, to a suitable fictional world filling the ‘world’ parameter of the index.

The point I’m keen to take home is the difference between indexes and contexts. It’s worth emphasising that in a proper index we have <agent, location, time, world> constrained by the requirement that the agent is the speaker and the utterance occurred at the location, time and world. This corresponds to what would intuitively be thought of as the context in which something is uttered. Allowing improper indexes means that a perfectly good index can be nonetheless not obviously related to anything that could reasonably be called a possible context for an utterance. I think that this is the point of the context / index distinction.

I thought I might start posting the notes I take. I’ve started reading Stefano Predelli’s book Contexts. Here is what I thought about chapter 1 on a first reading.

The key point seems to be a kind of terminological refinement. We do not talk of sentence-context pairs being assigned truth-conditions (which are those sentences meanings). Instead we talk about clause-index pairs being assigned T-distributions. These will be distributions of truth values at points, points being where things are assessed for truth.

Two things strike me as immediately interesting:

1) I don’t yet understand what a T-distribution is, why it’s an improvement on truth-conditions etc. My naïve worry would be that unless we want to specify the truth-value of φ point by point we are going to need to say in general which sorts of points will assign φ ‘True’. That looks to me like truth-conditions, unless I’m missing something.

2) The move from assessing sentences to assessing clauses is very interesting. It seems that this is intended to side-step debates about interpreting what is said by a particular sentence, or even sentence token. What we need is to be able to say for each interpretation (which is a clause) how it interacts with the theory. There is an immediate methodological payoff here: we can avoid a lot of the tedious debates about how a particular sentence is to be ‘read’. Probably not every such debate, though. It also seems that it has been argued against traditionalism that it cannot provide the disambiguation needed (Predelli provides some textual evidence from critics.) So it looks like it’s an important point for the defence of traditionalism as well. (Traditionalism is basically the view that Kaplan style semantics is the way to go; Predelli is a ‘neo-traditionalist’.)