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On Our Understanding of Singular Negative Existential Statements: A Defense of Shallow Pretense Theory

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Abstract

In uttering negative existential sentences, we do not mention but use an empty singular term. A pretense account explains the use in terms of pretense. I argue that our understanding of negative existential statements can be successfully explained by Crimmins’ theory of shallow pretense if it is supplemented and reconstructed properly. First, I explain the notion of shallow pretense and supplement Crimmin’s theory with an Evansian account that we immediately grasp the phenomenology of what is pretended without a conscious effort to imagine the condition under which what is pretended can be true. Thus, shallow pretense does not consist in the counterintuitive meta-representation of the fact of pretense. Second, against the objection to Crimmins’ distinction between utterance truth-condition and modal content that it is ad hoc, I argue that there is good reason to hold the distinction for the semantics of belief reports. Finally, I argue that the distinction has a merit of explaining our intuition about the epistemic possibility associated with our use of an empty singular term.

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Notes

  1. See Everett 2013; Sainsbury 2005; Kroon 2004; Crimmins 1998; Walton 1990.

    Contrary to the commonsensical view that fictional characters such as Sherlock Holmes do not exist, some philosophers (e.g. Parsons 1974; Van Inwagen 1977; Zalta 1983; Salmon 1998; Kripke 2013) hold that they exist, although their opinions vary with respect to the ontological status of fictional characters. For an argument against the view that they refer to some exotic entities, see Sainsbury 2010 and Everett 2013. Kripke (2013) argues that fictional characters are abstract objects while acknowledging that we can truly say a negative existential statement like (1), given that the name used in (1) is a name supposed to refer to a concrete particular. Dealing with the debate over the question whether there exist fictional characters is not my concern. Here, I assume that fictional singular terms do not refer at all because the purpose of this paper is to defend a version of pretense theory based on the anti-realism about fictional entities.

  2. For Kripke’s other criticisms of the meta-linguistic interpretation, see Kripke 2013, pp.152–4.

  3. Of course, even among direct reference theorists, there is a controversy over whether the object of imagining is the real person or there is a pretense of referring to a fictional character some of whose informative aspects are based on the real person (e.g. Friend 2000). However, addressing this issue is not my concern here.

  4. Armour-Garb and Woodbridge (2015) argue for an alternative conception according to which pretense is not what occurs cognitively in the speaker’s mind but what is ascribed to the speaker by the interpreter who performs a theoretical description of the speaker’s linguistic behavior. I agree with them that the pretense involved in our understanding of a negative existential statement needs to be construed in terms of a theoretical notion. However, I do not accept their non-cognitive conception of pretense. The speaker engages in shallow pretense in a technical sense. By elaborating an Evansian account, I will argue that the speaker’s engagement of pretense at a shallow level can be defended from the so-called Engagement Complaint that ordinary speakers of (1) do not have the phenomenology that they engage in pretense.

  5. I am not arguing that a prop-oriented make-believe is purely based on an objective fact. One can pretend that the cup of mud is a cup of coffee instead of pretending that it is a cup of pie. Because the imagined content of what is pretended is at least partially up to the pretender, a prop-oriented make-believe also involves a content-oriented make-believe.

  6. In the previous example of children’s make-believe game, a child’s saying ‘John stole my pie’ implies that John took away a certain cup of mud. However, this does not necessarily indicate that what the child said (i.e., the semantic content of his utterance) is that John took away the cup of mud, even though grasping that implication is crucial to understanding the utterance. Although Walton (1990) talks about the content of what is asserted through pretense (especially, in the case of the pretense within which a negative existential statement is made), he does not hold that it is semantic because his main point is that one disavows the pretense of using a singular term when uttering a sentence like (1). This disavowal does not have to be part of what is said. (Walton 1990, pp.420–430. Also, see Richard 2000, p.226).

  7. Walton takes the notion of fictional worlds to be a convenient way of speaking because he holds that there are no such worlds just as there are no fictional propositions and fictional entities. Still, fictional worlds play an explanatory role in his account (Walton 1990, pp.63–67). For him, to imagine that P as what is fictionally true by participating in a given make-believe game is to engage in the imaginative play or activity involving the imaginations of the other fictional propositions that belong to the fictional world generated by the game. Thus, what I mean (or what I believe Crimmins intends to mean) by arguing that there is no imaginative play is that pretending that P does not require imagining the other fictional propositions that constitute the fictional world that is individuated by a given make-believe game. As we shall see, the pretense of the sort I suggest is nothing but an immediate entertainment of what it seems.

  8. See Kripke 2013, p.23ff. Our pretense that an empty singular term is about a particular object is neutral on the question what conditions for successful reference must be satisfied.

  9. Walton also argues that this is the case. However, his account differs crucially from the account of shallow pretense in that he holds that there is a pretense within pretense. He argues that there is an unofficial make-believe game within which the predicate such as ‘… does not exist’ is used. The unofficial game plays the role of revealing the pretense within which the attempt of reference is made by using an empty singular term. In short, he holds that we indicate the pretense of referential attempt within a further pretense of an unofficial make-believe game. (Walton 1990, pp.420–30) Therefore, Walton’s account entails that we understand negative existentials through a kind of meta-representation about pretense.

  10. However, this does not mean that we commit ourselves to Meinongianism.

  11. Also see Walton 1990, p.424. Kroon disagrees that there is a distinction of the ontological properties within pretense. He argues that the predicate ‘exists’ simply refers to the universal ontological property that everything possesses (Kroon 2000, pp.98–100 et passim). I shall criticize his account in Section 3.

  12. Hereafter, following the notation in Crimmins (1998), I abbreviate as ‘[E]’ the mode of presentation associated with a singular term E used in an utterance.

  13. This account of the truth-condition might appear to be a variety of the view in which the existential predicate such as ‘exists’ expresses a second-order property, given that a mode of presentation is a concept. That is, the truth-condition is that the concept associated with the subject expression denotes nothing or has no real instance. However, I hold that modes of presentation are non-descriptive and that they are individuated by the contextually relevant piece of information to which the conversational participants should respond to have proper understanding. According to this account, modes of presentation are so fine-grained that they are not identical with a single concept that persists across different contexts of use. The truth-condition proposed by Crimmins is not the truth-condition of a sentence type, but that of an utterance made in a given context. Therefore, the account I suggest differs from the view proposed by Wiggins (1999), for instance.

  14. Evans 1982, p.397. Without sharing the minimal (mis)information that can be associated with the empty name used in a negative existential statement, it is not clear whether the conversational participants are talking about the same thing.

  15. This Kripkean view of rigidity, which is based on Kripke (1980, 2013) is proposed by Kaplan (1973) and Sainsbury (2005). Crimmins (1998), Richard (2000), and Kroon (2004) all accept this view.

  16. Although the basic idea comes from Evans 1982, p.122 and pp.327–8, my account of an information-based thought is an extension of it. Surely, it is possible that the details of the perceptual information about the man differ from person to person. However, the success of a referential communication does not require all the conversational participants to share exactly the same information. What is required is that there exist ‘a certain overlap between the information possessed by the speaker and that information possessed by the hearer’ to the extent that they base on this overlap their judgment of which object is meant. (Evans 1982, pp.333–334) This requirement is a sort of ceteris paribus rule because difference in people’s background knowledge or beliefs can affect their disposition to evaluate a given thought even though the thought is entertained by responding to the same piece of information.

  17. Evans 1982, pp.40–41.

  18. Evans (1973) argues that it is necessary to consider contextual factors to disambiguate homophonic names in a given utterance. This requirement is elaborated in Chapter 11 from Evans (1982), where he develops the notion of name-using practice. Distinct homophonic names and all the other types of proper names belong to different name-using conventions. Each practice needs to be differentiated based on relevant information, and thereby we participate in a specific name-using practice. (Also, see Recanati 1993, pp.133–181) Given what Evans argues about pretense in Chapter 10 from Evans (1982), we can infer that the existing practice of using an empty name and the information used by the participation in the practice constitute the props that enable us to engage in a prop-oriented pretense/make-believe.

  19. In opposition to the Descriptivist interpretation of modes of presentation (or senses) that is mainly responsible for Kripke (1980), Evans (1982) construes them as non-descriptive ways of thinking. (Evans’ view here is indebted to McDowell (1977)) Of course, there is a complication in regard to Evans’ treatment of the issue over whether there are modes of presentation associated with empty singular terms because he holds that senses are Russellian in that there are no senses without referents because they are ways of thinking about referents. Although I disagree with him regarding this issue because I hold that our uses of empty singular terms involve the associated modes of presentation, I accept his view that our pretend uses of them are based on information as props. (Evans 1982, ch.10. Especially, see p.353) The difference between his view and mine lies in my claim that the information that plays an important role in the pretense contributes to the modes of presentation associated with the used empty singular term. For another view that modes of presentation are non-descriptive, see Recanati 1993, 2010, 2012 and Sainsbury 2005. While Sainsbury accepts non-descriptive senses, he is not committed to the pretense account because he argues that adopting Negative Free Logic in the meta-language of a semantic theory enables us to talk directly of the sense of an empty name without pretending that the sense determines any particular object. Discussing his view in detail lies beyond the scope of this paper.

  20. Of course, in the case of empty singular terms, the hearer has no tacit intention to refer to or think about the same existing referent of the empty term used by the speaker. However, as I have said above (‘if it refers at all’), the hearer still has an intention of conditional co-reference and can exploit the existing communicational chain traced back to the event of initiating the empty term in question. It is worth noting that my account is similar to Perry’s explanation of conditional co-reference and network (Perry 2012, pp.165–195). The difference is that, unlike Perry, I appeal to the notion of shallow pretense to argue that our uses of empty singular terms do not involve a conscious representation of the relevant communicational chain. The representational content is roughly equivalent to the network content in Perry’s account.

  21. Regarding the idea that sharing a mode of presentation is sharing the same information, Crimmins in fact proposes a similar account that sharing the same concept among the language users of the linguistic community is to have the notions (as dossiers of information) that store the common information taken to be normal (Crimmins 1989 and 1992, ch.3). The basic idea of his account does not differ from what I have suggested by using Evans’ idea except that Crimmins’ notion of normality does not reflect the variation of contextual salience from utterance to utterance.

  22. A signal is a medium that carries information. A conscious perceptual experience is an example of it. Signal tokens of the same type, i.e., identical patterns can carry different pieces of information individuated by different causal sources. For instance, pictures that are perceptually indistinguishable can represent different things. Coincidently, two people draw the pictures that cannot be distinguished while they depict different persons. (e.g. John draws a picture of his father. Jane draws a picture of her father. Although their fathers are distinct, their pictures look exactly the same by coincidence. In this case, two pictures carry different information because they are about different persons.).

  23. The sameness of the signal type means that the proximal causes that occur internal to the mind are the same. The same inputs under the same internal condition activate the same type of cognitive process and the same conscious output that are internally indistinguishable.

  24. Crimmins considers the response that a mode of presentation ‘essentially’ denotes its referent. This appears that he has in mind McDowell’s (1977) definition of the sense of a proper name as ‘essentially’ de re mode of presentation that is object-dependent because Evans' (1982) account of Fregean sense as a way of thinking is indebted to McDowell (1977).

  25. Kripke (1980) holds that a rigid reference of a singular term as a linguistic tool to describe possibilities is ‘stipulated.’ Thus, the rigidity is de jure in contrast with the de facto rigidity of a definite description such as ‘the immediate successor of 1 in the sequence of natural numbers’ in which the property of immediately succeeding 1 in the sequence of natural numbers singles out 2 in every possible world. See Kripke 1980, p.21, fn.21.

  26. I have already argued that modes of presentations are non-descriptive. By ‘the external circumstance’, I mean the communicational chain traced back to the initial baptism, regardless of whether the baptism successfully fixes a certain object as the referent of the term. The notion of an external circumstance, in this respect, is the same as Perry’s notion of network and Sainsbury’s notion of practice (Perry 2012, ch.8; Sainsbury 2005, ch.3, sec.6). A network or a practice associated with a singular term can exist without its referent. Furthermore, their identities do not change under the possibility that they are related to different objects as the origin of the baptism or to nothing. This is crucial with respect to what I argue about the epistemic possibility in Section 4.

  27. See footnote 26.

  28. Of course, if John is reading the story and he does not read yet the part that reveals that Mr. Mills is Holmes, then he believes that Mr. Mills actually does not exist. But the point is that the beliefs expressed by (6) and (7) respectively are not the same because we cannot infer (7) from (6) through the substitution of ‘Mr. Mills’ for ‘Sherlock Holmes’.

  29. Furthermore, as I have argued, different tokens of ‘Sherlock Holmes’ can be associated with different modes of presentation. For instance, John may utter (1) to assert that the fictional character of the novel written by someone other than Sir Doyle does not exist. In this case, we have to differentiate the relevant mode of presentation associated with John’s use of ‘Sherlock Holmes’ from the mode of presentation associated with the use of the same physical type expression to talk about the main character of Sir Doyle’s novels. This is especially so in the case of a belief ascription like (6): John would not accept, ‘John, you believe that Sherlock Holmes, the man who is a smart detective, does not exist’ if the fictional character of someone else’s novel that John thinks about is not a detective.

  30. For the semantic theories according to which modes of presentation are components of the truth-condition of a belief ascription sentence, see Crimmins and Perry (1989), Crimmins (1992), and Recanati (1993, 1995, 2012).

  31. Of course, since Kroon holds that the content of what is asserted by a negative existential statement is pragmatic, he would not accept the truth-conditional relevance of the mode of presentation associated with the use of an empty singular term. However, this does not negatively affect the point that the shallow pretense theorist has good reason to distinguish between utterance truth-condition and modal content, in so far as she concerns the semantic content of what is asserted. It is Kroon who takes the burden of proving that the content of assertion is pragmatic, not semantic, in order to argue that the distinction is ad hoc.

  32. Kroon argues that the grasp of how the referential device works is implicit (Kroon 2004, p.1 and p.22). However, he does not cash out the implicitness of the cognitive grasp and how it is possible while claiming that there is a ‘robust grasp’ of the contrast that forces us to be conscious of the determination of reference and the failure of the reference made within pretense.

  33. I concede that Kroon holds that pragmatic pretense, like Crimmins’ shallow pretense, does not involve an imaginative play (Kroon 2000, pp.112–3 and Kroon 2004, p.15). However, even if this is a true consequence of his theory, his explanation still entails that we have to infer what is pragmatically asserted from the conscious awareness of the contrast of what is pretended (that there is something referred to by the use of an empty singular term) with the real fact (that there is no such a thing, which is meant by the use of the predicate such as ‘…does not exist’). This kind of inference does not essentially differ from the inference of a Gricean conversational implicature from the appearance of the obvious violation of the cooperative principle. (Of course, there is a difference because the former is the inference from what is pretended while the latter is the inference from the semantic content as what is said. However, what matters is the fact that both involve inferential processes.) However, our understanding of a negative existential statement is as direct, i.e., non-inferential as our grasp of simple utterances containing genuinely referring singular terms.

  34. For more detailed objections to Kroon’s pragmatic pretense account, see Armour-Garb and Woodbridge (2015), pp.56–60.

  35. Crimmins holds that the modal content of a statement in which genuinely referring terms are used is a hybrid proposition that contains their referents in addition to the modes of presentation associated with them. For instance, the complement clause of the belief ascription ‘Hammurabi believed that Hesperus was brighter than Phosphorus’ has as its modal content the proposition as follows: Venus thought of under [Hesperus] is brighter than Venus thought of under [Phosphorus] (Crimmins 1998, p.32). This kind of hybrid content has already been proposed by some philosophers including Crimmins and Perry (1989) and Recanati (1993, 1995). Still, Crimmins’ account does not directly deal with the problem of the modal content when there is an empty singular term in use, although he claims that the relevant mode of presentation or the relevant condition of reference becomes a propositional constituent.

  36. Philosophers note that we have two conflicting intuitions about metaphysical and epistemic possibilities (e.g. Kroon 2000, p.115, n.106; Perry 2012, pp.190–193. I agree with their interpretation of modal claims about non-existent objects because I hold that the information about the reference-determining mechanism is a component of the content, as we shall see). Kripke (2013) does not deny that we have such an intuition that a sentence like (8) is true. His point is that it cannot be true because of the rigidity of reference, while arguing that the intuition is rooted in our grasp of the epistemic possibility.

  37. I do not regard the meaning of an empty singular term as a definite description. As Kripke (2013) points out, within the pretense involved in the use of such a term, we use it as if the condition for the referential success is satisfied, whatever it would be. Furthermore, Kripke provides several reasons to deny the descriptivist interpretation of a fictional singular term: (1) the introduction or the use of a fictional term in a story does not always involve a certain definite description associated with it (e.g., a simple existential quantification like ‘there is a man whose name is ‘John Smith’). (2) If a fictional term in a story has as its meaning a definite description, and if there is coincidently a person who uniquely satisfies the description, then the term refers to this person and the story cannot be a fictional story anymore. (We should note that many fictions contain the disclaimer like ‘all the characters and events in this film –even though they are based on real people- are entirely fictional.’) (3) The truth of the claim like ‘Sherlock Holmes does not exist’ has nothing to do with the truth of the claim like ‘there is no person who uniquely satisfies a such-and-such description.’ The descriptivist consequence that both mean the same fails to distinguish a fiction about a historical person from a fiction about a fictional character (Kripke 2013, pp.24–28. For his discussion about a fictional natural kind term, see Kripke 2013, p.46f).

  38. This is a consequence of Kripke’s account of the identity of a material object (Kripke 1971, 1980).

  39. As we have seen in Section 2, Evans argues that engaging in pretense is understanding a counterfactual conditional whose antecedent supposes that what is not actually such-and-such is really so, and that the content of this sort of antecedent is metaphysically impossible (Evans 1982, p.355. Also, see Walton 1990, p.32 and p.64). The shallow pretense theorist can accept his point while regarding the grasp of the relevant counterfactual conditional as a rational reconstruction of our understanding of pretense, as I have argued.

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Lee, P.S. On Our Understanding of Singular Negative Existential Statements: A Defense of Shallow Pretense Theory. Philosophia 49, 2133–2155 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-021-00340-8

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