Category Archive

Here is something I’ve been thinking about, probably 29 years too late. There’s a certain sort of argument for externalism that goes roughly as follows:

We look at subject S in context C1 and ascribe to them a content clause A. We then imagine S in C2. In that case it would be inappropriate to use A, for reasons to do with the wider social world of A in C2. So, it is the status of the wider social world that controls our ascriptions of content clauses.

There is, of course, an extra step or two needed. (i) We need to hold that when we ascribe distinct content-clauses we are ipso facto attributing distinct mental states. Then we get the result that social environment controls which mental contents we will attribute. (ii) I suppose we also need to hold that it does so legitimately, i.e. that we are inclined in these cases to say that As contents differ that’s because they do differ.

The above argument is Tyler Burge’s in his ‘Individualism and the Mental’ as I read it. I’m sure that people have made the points I’ve just made in the intervening years, but I’d be interested if anybody who happens to be reading this can point me to where.

I’ve been thinking about teleosemantics recently, and reading David Papineau’s 2001 paper ‘The Status of Teleosemantics, or How to Stop Worrying about Swampman’ (Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 79(2):279–289). There was something in it I found odd:

“Wherever the normativity of content comes from, it can’t be from biology, since biology deals only in facts, not prescriptions. Nor is it plausible that biology offers the only way of discerning genuine truth and satisfaction conditions among the large disjunctions of possible causes for beliefs and possible effects of desires.”

To be entirely accurate, he is speaking of other peoples’ views at this point. Immediately afterwards he goes on to endorse these sentiments, though. My question would be, if he accepts this sort of thing is he still a teleosemanticist at all? It looks like the project has been abandoned. If teleology isn’t giving us normativity then why are we interested in it in philosophy of language?

Thanks to Tom for posting this interesting video.

It’s a cliché that you always think of the right thing to say after the discussion is over. I think it’s got some truth to it though. Here is what I ought to have said recently when I was talking about differences between epistemic contextualism and contextualism in the semantics of personal taste predicates.

The semantic contextualist has a real problem with keeping content fixed. It seems reasonable to say that two speakers are disagreeing iff their utterances have the same content, plus or minus a negation operator. The details may get messy but the central idea seems to be sound. It may be that some versions of contextualism try and work with only suitably similar content, but most try and claim it is identical. This tends to lead to problems for them. Not least, how is their view then contextualist rather than relativist?

On the contrary the whole point of epistemic contextualism, at least as I see it, is to deny that ‘knows’ has the same content in different contexts. Again the details are difficult but the line of approach is clear.

From this it emerges that the links between semantic and epistemic contextualism are actually pretty tenuous, at least as far as a unified approach to both topics is concerned. What helps one project in a theory is likely to harm the other.

I think I’m going to spend this evening listening to Saul Kripke’s address to the inaugural conference at the centre named for him at CUNY. It’s hard to think of a bigger honour for a philosopher, not just an eponymous conference but a whole institution.

I think that hearing a talk is going to be especially interesting because, while I’ve spent a lot of time with the very conversational style of Naming and Necessity, I don’t believe I’ve actually heard his voice before.

I gave a presentation on David Lewis’ ‘What Experience Teaches’ this morning. He makes use of the notion of information in quite a specialised way and it seems pretty important to his discussion of Jackson’s ‘Knowledge Argument’ against materialism. Some issues came up that I thought I’d mention here in case anybody has any helpful thoughts.

The picture of information Lewis paints is of something that narrows down the possible worlds that might be actual. If we take a simple case, when I learn that the Earth has one moon I am getting information. I know that I am not in one of the worlds where it has any number of moons not equal to one. Lewis goes in for this quite strongly, as he denies that anything that repeats previous information under a new guise can count as information. If it doesn’t eliminate any new possibilities then it is not just not new information but it’s not really information at all. At least that’s how I read him.

I had a thought about this. On this picture it would seem that what is, and is not, information is relative to what a particular person already knows. If I have read a book with the same content as the book you’re now recommending to me, then the book does not (for me) contain information. It might for someone else.

Is this really a consequence of Lewis’ view, and would it matter if it was?

I’m still puzzled by linguistic tests and related issues. I think that the following will do as a paradigm example. We want to test e to see if it plays the role of a gradable adjective in English. Suppose we run the test with two candidates, ‘tall’ and ‘knows’. We might then have:

‘Jane is taller than Jill.’

# ‘Jill knows more than Jane that snow is white.’

The ‘#’ is, I believe, commonly used to indicate the supposed unacceptability of an expression. One trouble i have is in being precise about just what defect is being marked. The problem is that I do see that the expression is defective, I suppose I want to say that it is in some sense not well-formed. Of course I can’t say that it’s because the sentence is false. Things in displayed contexts like the above aren’t even assertions in the usual way. (This is an important point in the later sections of the Cappelen and Lepore book that I mentioned in a earlier post.)

I suppose my main worry is in what sense such things are to count as tests, as a way to sort expressions once we have decided what categories are available for them to belong to but before we have decided to which categories they do belong. For example, take the second test described in Cappelen and Lepore’s book. This test relies on collecting expressions together in a single context. So, if we want to test ‘yesterday’ we construct certain sentences and observe that even though we can have a context in which:

‘Jane left yesterday’

and one in which:

‘Jill left yesterday.’

there need not be one in which:

‘Jane and Jill left yesterday’

Context-sensitive expressions block such collective descriptions, not in the sense that such a collective description is always false, but in that just because there are true utterances of the components there need not be any context in which there could be a true utterance of the collected expression.

Of course this is true, and plausibly all the basic set block collective descriptions and certain intuitively insensitive expressions (e.g. ‘Penguin’) do not. What bothers me about the whole practice of testing is that if I thought ‘Penguin’ were context-sensitive, wouldn’t I report that it blocked collective descriptions? And if I had no idea whether it was or not, wouldn’t I avoid committing myself? It looks like the test marks a sharp distinction between the sensitive and the insensitive but does it really count as a way of discriminating between them?

Maybe the story to be told is that the withholding or applying the ‘#’ on the basis of intuition is the real result of the test. It seems to me that everyone who uses tests, i.e. many philosophers of language, owe a story of what this consists in. I’ve not yet come across it.

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.

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 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.