I’ve been reading Jeff King’s book The Nature and Structure of Content. It’s an interesting read. I’ve been thinking about an objection that seems so simple it must be wrong-headed. My assumption is that one of the things a theory of propositions must do is explain, or explain away the intuition that

(1) Tom believes that Hesperus is bright.

and

(2) Tom believes that Phosphorus is bright.

can differ in truth-value. Now I wonder whether King’s can do it. His view about what propositions are is somewhat tricky to summarise. Here is something from p. 40 of the book. A proposition is a fact, namely the fact that:

[T]here is some context c and some words a and b of some language L such that a has x as its semantic value relative to c and occurs at the left terminal node of the sentential relation R that in L encodes the instantiation function and b occurs at the right terminal node and has as its semantic value in c y.

Take the embedded clause in (1) as an example:

(3) Hesperus is bright.

(3) is an expression of a language (English) used to say that some object, the referent of ‘Hesperus’ i.e. Venus, falls in the extension of some property, the referent of ‘bright’. This meets the conditions: Two expressions of English stand in the relation described and have certain objects as their referents. The fact that this is so is the proposition, on King’s view. The embedded clause in (2) gives rise to just the same fact  because (3) and the embedded clause in (2) have identical structures and [['Hesperus]] = [['Phosphorus']]. As far as I can see, nothing about propositions so construed can explain the intuitive possibility of (1) being true and (2) being false. Certainly it would be hard to say that it is because the relata in the belief reports are different, as surely in both cases they are Tom and one and the same proposition. Am I missing something?

]]> http://snowiswhite.wordpress.com/2009/12/02/hesperus-phosphorus-and-structured-propositions/feed/ 6 twsh http://snowiswhite.wordpress.com/2009/11/17/follow-up/ http://snowiswhite.wordpress.com/2009/11/17/follow-up/#comments Tue, 17 Nov 2009 21:32:24 +0000 Tom http://snowiswhite.wordpress.com/?p=369 ]]>

Rafal Urbaniak was at our conference and he’s posted his thoughts on one of the papers here.

My friend Alex is writing a book about hope based on interviews with people who have interesting stories to tell. As I understand it he’s planning a sort of contemporary social history. He has a blog about the project here.

I’ve been back in St Andrews this last week to attend the Arché/CSMN graduate conference and an Arché workshop on expressivism. As I was helping to organise the conference I found the weekend busy and slightly stressful. I think it all went off without too many problems in the end and I think most of the people were pleased most of the time. The keynote speakers were Ernie Lepore from Rutgers and Susanna Siegel from Harvard. From my point of view Lepore’s talk was one of the more interesting. He made some remarks about the correct Davidsonian response to arguments from Scott Soames and others. He also pressed Davidson’s so-called Third Man argument as an objection against structured propositions as semantic values. I have a few vague thoughts on why a view that incorporates syntactic information into such structures can answer such objections. I might even write a post about it soon.

The expressivism workshop was extremely interesting. There is a lot to be gained by thinking about how an expressivist semantics should go. I think many people naturally think in terms of something like truth-conditions as the compositional semantic values of declarative sentences in context. But there are other options if we care to exploit them. We had talks from:

• Stephen Barker (Nottingham)
• Matthew Chrisman (Edinburgh)
• Alan Gibbard (Michigan)
• Mark Richard (Tufts)
• Michael Ridge (Edinburgh)
• Mark Schroeder (USC)
• Seth Yalcin (NYU)

I think that a lot of people are going to be looking at Schroeder’s Being For after his excellent series of talks.

I’ve found two seminars to go to at the University of London. Barry Smith is convening one called ‘Philosophical Linguistics and Philosophy of Language’. At King’s College there’s a seminar called ‘Formal Semantics and Pragmatics’ convened by Eleni Gregoromichelaki, Ruth Kempson, and Wilfried Meyer-Viol which looks like a lot of fun as well. I’m finding it hard to get my hands on a copy of Bob Carpenter’s book Type-logical Semantics for the latter, but I’m not discouraged.

The new Northern Institute of Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen is now up and running. They have a blog and a website. The AHRC Contextualism and Relativism project of which I’m a part is now partly there. I’m looking forward to having a high-level research centre near by in Scotland.

I’m in London for my visit to UCL Linguistics and the Institute of Philosophy. I’m planning to attend UCL’s Pragmatics reading group and Barry Smith’s philosophy of language seminar. Hopefully I’ll write some of my thesis while I’m at it.

is here.

I think I’m going to stop linking to them. You can sign up to a mailing list at their site if you like.

I’ve been thinking a bit about a descriptivist account of proper names. One way this gets motivated is to appeal to data that as far as I know were first presented by Tyler Burge in his 1973 paper ‘Reference and Proper Names’. He points out that proper names take definite and indefinite articles, plurals, and quantifiers. His examples:

(1) There are relatively few Alfreds in Princeton.
(2) An Alfred Russell joined the club today.
(3) The Alfred who joined the club today was a baboon.
(4) Some Alfreds are crazy; some are sane.

Others have pointed out since that in some languages unmodified singular names take the definite article as in:

(5) ho Sōcratēs aphīketo.

This is one way to say ‘(The) Socrates arrived.’ in classical Greek, so I’m told. Burge thought this was evidence for names being predicates. On his view singular names in fact occur in construction with a demonstrative that is unpronounced in English. Modern versions of the view replace the demonstrative with a definite. I like this line of thought. I’m inclined to think that there could happily be a definite or a demonstrative in different circumstances. I think this might help with ‘Paderewski is Paderewski’ type sentences, because we could treat ‘Paderewski’ as predicate combined with a demonstrative and used for an act of deferred demonstration.

In any case I’ve heard some people say something that might count as more evidence. It seems quite common to say things like:

(6) I will miss my Frank.

In many cases ‘my’ will combine with predicate, like ‘car’, to give an object. In that respect in behaves like a definite. So this looks like a case on a par with (3). In that case it should be more evidence for the view.

It might be objected that ‘my’ is semantically vacuous. In that case (6) will be taken to be just like:

(7) I will miss Frank.

I don’t think this is true. Suppose we are at a retirement party for somebody called Frank. I don’t know Frank very well, but I am close to another man named Frank who is also retiring. The natural interpretation of an utterance of (6), given that we are at a Frank’s party, is different to the natural interpretation of an utterance of (7). The two utterances are in an intuitive sense about two different Franks. One way to account for this would be in Frank were a predicate taking an unpronounced ‘the’ in one case and a pronounced ‘my’ in the other. Or so I would argue.

I’ve decided to take down my MobileMe homepage. I decided it wasn’t very useful. I’ve also been updating links and so on. This is all in some sort of preparation for the new academic year and my visits to London and Oslo. I’m looking forward to it.