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I’ve been looking at some of the literature on linguistic tests for context-sensitivity. I’d like to write something here about some thoughts I’ve had about the notion in general, but I’m going to leave that for another time. Now I’m just going to mention something that struck me about one of the tests described in Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore’s Insensitive Semantics. It’s test 3 described on pp. 104-106. The thought is that we can test the context-sensitivity of expression e by thinking up a sentence S that includes e. Then we put S in the following schema and see what happens:
There can be false utterances of ‘S’ even though S.
An example of something to test would be ’she’, as in:
There can be false utterances of ‘She is French’ even though she is French.
And this is indeed so, people are frequently mistaken about who is French even if I am right that the woman I’m pointing at is. So far so good for the test as ’she’ is a common ground context-sensitive expression. What about things that we think shouldn’t be, like ‘penguin’? The problem I have is that I think, purely intuitively, that the following is true as well:
There can be false utterances of ‘Penguins are happy’ even though penguins are happy.
Penguins might not have been happy and even though they’re happy now they may well have been unhappy in the past and they may have dark times ahead. It seems to me that you could rule out enough things that these possibilities don’t seem relevant. In this case we might say that nobody in @ and now can utter it falsely and that seems right. But if you fix who you’re pointing at then we can’t get the result in the ‘She is French’ case. This is not the intuition I’m supposed to have. I would also like to report that I’m not inclined to say that ‘penguin’ ought to behave like ’she’. Of course it’s possible that I’m just missing the point, but it makes me wonder about the test a little.
It looks like it was my attempt to meddle with forces I don’t understand (i.e. html) that lead to the recent problems. It’s been fixed for me now.
It looks like my blog has taken a unilateral decision to do something odd with the comments. As soon as I work out what’s wrong I’ll try and fix it.
I’ve found another namesake. He sounds quite interesting because he’s a published philosopher, but not a professional one. I think that’s pretty rare these days. As I’m at least somewhat interested in the areas he writes on (philosophy of mind and free will) I think I’ll read some of his stuff when time permits.
I thought I would post about this because I like the word. It denotes the view, apparently held by David Chalmers, that all matter has mental properties. At least in some latent form.
It occurred to me to wonder what exactly makes this view distinct from pretty much any view of the mind that’s held today. Suppose that I have mental properties, and suppose that that’s something to do with my brain in some significant way. My brain is made up of molecules. Each molecule could, I presume, be replaced with another (token-)identical molecule and the whole thing would carry on working. So it looks like any molecule has the property of being a potential component of a system that has mental properties. I would have thought that most people will agree with all that, so is everybody a panprotopsychist?
If my chosen project is to give a contextualist alternative to relativism it looks like I’m going to need to be clear that they’re different things. Here is one way I might try and explain the distinction.
It’s clear that in order for it to be an interesting case the relevant tokenings of ‘The haggis is tasty’ and ‘The haggis is not tasty’, by John and Mary respectively, must be both in contexts that have one and the same salient haggis. Otherwise they’re simply not disagreeing. And they may well have to have the same contextually determined comparison class for tastiness. It seems that the contextualist holds that each tokening is able to come out as true in each one’s context. But they do not hold that there is some single context (of assessment) such that both come out as true. Whereas the relativist does allow for such a case.
I don’t know if that quite reports the positions taken in the literature by people like Michael Glanzberg but it seems to make a distinction clear. It also makes the relativist look rather like a dialethist, which I believe is a respectable but rather rare thing to be in the philosophy of logic. That might be a connection worth following up.
When we were reading §5 of the Tractatus yesterday we got confused by some dots. Thanks to Francesco for pointing out that they’re the punctuation convention from Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica. I’ve always been fond of symbolism.
I’ve now heard that St Andrews won’t be putting me forward for an AHRC award. I am, however, going to be interviewed for an Arché studentship. I suppose that’s now rather important.
I was looking for philosophical namesakes and I was quite pleased to find this one. He helped found the Aristotelian Society and had an obituary in Mind when he died on the 13th of June 1912.
I’ve been doing some reading about Donald Davidson’s ‘Swampman’ thought-experiment, as introduced in his ‘Knowing One’s Own Mind’. Something interesting I’ve found so far is that, according to Wikipedia anyway, it could well have been inspired by the comic book character Swamp Thing. In particular in some versions of its backstory Swamp Thing believed itself to be a person that it in fact was not.
I’ve been reading Jerry Fodor’s paper ‘There Are No Recognitional Concepts; Not Even RED’. There’s an argument in it that goes something like this. Concepts are compositional, in the sense that a concept such as RED APPLE is composed out of RED and APPLE. Recognition-conditions for concepts are not compositional. The ability to pick out a red apple does not require being able to pick out red things and apples. More importantly being able to pick them out successfully does not imply that one can pick out red apples. So, recognition-conditions are not possession-conditions and so there are no concepts such that their possession-conditions just are some recognition-conditions. Q.E.D. I have to say I find it quite convincing on a first reading.
I was, however, moved to wonder about the following. Fodor makes a point of saying that not all complex concepts are intersective in the set theoretic sense. That sense is that in not all cases does {x : x is a FG} = {x : x is a F} ∩ {x : x is a G}. This seems fair enough in a case like RED HAIR or, more clearly, BIG ANT. (Some big ants just aren’t big.) My first thought is that if all complex concepts were intersective the view Fodor argues against would look a lot more attractive. Apparently the claim that FG is compositional iff it’s intersective is not unpopular in the field and I think I should take some time to find out why.
I also had some possibly related worries about the distinction between simple and complex concepts. If BIG ANT is not intersective, what evidence is there that it’s made up of ANT and BIG at all? Other than the fact that it’s lexically complex and has a morphological sort of relationship? (In a way I find it hard to put precisely!) I then got to thinking that some lexically complex and non-intersective concepts are probably not compositional, such as PUB CRAWL. I think there might well be a way to make this a principled distinction but I don’t see it clearly at the moment.
I’ve been thinking about the following puzzle. Suppose Jane wakes up in the cockpit of a crashed plane in a jungle clearing in Borneo. A blow to the head has given her complete amnesia. It’s 18.55 on 1/2/08. She says ‘I am here now’. A story I think is plausible would tell us that she has said that Jane is in a particular jungle clearing at the relevant time. But she doesn’t believe that she is. That might seem fair enough, but it looks like it clashes with the equally plausible claim that, whenever S says that P, she believes that P.
I have to admit that I’m not sure how to respond.
I think things went ok on Thursday. As always there were questions I couldn’t answer and objections I couldn’t meet. Here is a selection of them, and what I think might be a reasonable response.
Several people thought that it would be better to go with one of the other sorts of response to cases such as ‘Jones’ Note’. I think Keith and Ed were the main advocates of this line. The popular option seemed to be a kind of ambiguity for ‘I’ (and other indexicals). For example, perhaps ‘now’ can pick out either the time of utterance or the time at which the utterance is ‘consumed’. I have two connected worries about this. The first is that indexical expressions are now ambiguous, potentially between lots of senses. I think that this is more troubling than the thought that they can be used in lots of ways. Secondly, on this picture there is no obvious reason to think that the use of indexical expressions is governed by determinate rules at all. As was pointed out, I reject the most obvious rule for their use, but not the idea that there is a rule at all.
Various people asked for an example of a case where ‘I am here now’ turns out false. Here is one: Suppose I were to say ‘I am Aristotle. I am here now.’ The first sentence creates a content where the index for assessing the second will have Aristotle as its speaker parameter. If I said it in St Andrews on the 1st of March we would get those in the index as well. What would then be said by ‘I am here now’ would turn out to be the false claim that Aristotle is in St Andrews on the 1st of March. (Assume a tenseless ‘is’ if it helps.) That is false.
Ruth objected that I was assuming that the meaning of certain indexical containing expressions was equivalent to some expression not containing them. It’s certainly true that I would need to say a lot more about meaning to make my view work. Nonetheless I think that I’m actually quite happy to say that what the particular utterance of an indexical expression says is equivalent to an indexical-free expression.
Elia had two criticisms. Firstly he suggested that if I reject that ‘I am here now’ is an analytic truth then I must reject that other candidates such as ‘P iff P‘ are as well. I think I tried to say something complicated at the time. Looking back, I think it would have been better to point out that ‘P iff P‘ doesn’t have an indexical in, so for all I’ve said it is safe as an expression of an analytic truth. Admittedly it’s a schema, and if we put in a sentence with indexicals we may have a problem. The solution is to have a restriction such that if we have two occurrences of a sentence in such a schema they must get the same index. Then everything works out ok.
The second worry was about the use I wanted to put this in the contextualism vs. relativism debate. The thought was that if we had a language L for which there was no context-sensitive terms, but there was still pressure towards relativism, then the project would collapse. So far my only response would be to say that what I’m interested in is English and I don’t care about L. But I can see that that’s not going to be terribly satisfying.
I think that’s enough writing for a while. Thank-you for all the feedback so far and for any comments you’d like to leave now…
