Abstract
Joseph Almog pointed out that Kripkean causal chains not only exist for names, but for all linguistic items (Almog 1984: 482). Based on this, he argues that the role of such chains is the presemantic one of assigning a linguistic meaning to the use of a name (1984: 484). This view is consistent with any number of theories about what such a linguistic meaning could be, and hence with very different views about the semantic reference of names. He concludes that the causal theory is ‘rather trivial’ (1984: 487). In this paper I argue that Almog is correct to hold that the causal theory is trivial, but, contra Almog, argue that the triviality of the existence of causal chains is not a matter of such chains having a presemantic role in assigning linguistic meanings to utterances. Instead, such triviality is due to the fact that the causal theory reflects no more than a truism about the epistemology of convention acquisition.
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Notes
Almog accepts Millianism and formulates the linguistic meaning of a name like ‘Hillary Putnam’ as ‘to-refer-to-H.-Putnam’ (1984: 482).
While his paper has received significant citation, subsequent authors have not engaged with his charge of triviality specifically. Strangely, such neglect is also true of Almog himself. In a later paper ‘The puzzle that never was – referential mechanics’ (Almog, 2012), and despite the fact that it is explicitly billed as a sequel to ‘Semantical anthropology (Almog, 1984), the issue of causal chains being trivial in virtue of being presemantic does not reappear. The same holds for his subsequent book, Referential Mechanics (2014).
I take it for granted that Kripke’s causal theory is not typically interpreted as trivial. For example, Putnam writes: "Kripke’s work has come to me second hand; even so, I owe him a large debt for suggesting the idea of causal chains as the mechanism of reference" (Putnam, 1975: 198, my italics). Relatedly, Kaplan ends ‘Demonstratives’ with a remark about ‘the power and the mystery of the causal chain theory’ (1989: 563).
I would like to thank an anonymous referee for pressing this issue.
Kripke requires, as a condition on the type of causal chain that serves to secure reference, that language users in such a chain must intend to use the name as the speaker that they inherited the name from did (1981: 96).
It is unlikely that this reductive analysis of reference is what people have in mind when they say that Kripke showed that causal chains are the ‘mechanism of reference’. We don’t, in general, express the claim that phenomenon X turns out to reduce to phenomenon Y by claiming that ‘Y is the mechanism of X’. Rather we just say that ‘X turns out to be Y’ or something similar.
See Cohen 2002 for a defense of the idea that names are generic.
Almog, while never pointing out that such chains exist for all conventions, comes close to casting the matter in explicitly epistemic terms in ‘E.T.’s general picture’. Immediately upon presenting this picture, however, he discards epistemic matters and starts to make his argument for the linguistic assignment view (1984: 481).
Stine (1977) defended such a neo-Gricean view of semantic reference.
Of course, we can involve the past if we adopt the causal theory of name-individuation, as explained earlier.
I follow Kripke in treating both baptism by ostension and baptism by reference-fixing description as cases of baptism. See, for instance, Kripke (1981: 96).
For a rare dissenting note, see Wettstein (1999: 454).
For a discussion of epistemic transparency, see Boghossian (1994).
One implication of the present work is that we should not take the existence of causal-historical chains as (non-trivial) evidence in favor of reductive causalism. Even if we assume that reductive causalism is false, the epistemology of convention acquisition guarantees that such chains will exist.
For example: ‘Obviously the name is passed on from link to link. But of course not every sort of causal chain reaching from me to a certain man will do for me to make a reference’ (Kripke, 1981: 93).
My own view is that Russell’s adoption of such a view was due to a conceptual confusion concerning different types of linguistic conventions. See Smit (2021).
Note that Kripke introduces the causal theory rights after soliciting intuitions about cases (‘Feynman’, ‘Einstein’, ‘Gödel’) that trade on the weakness of viewing the semantic reference of names as idiolectical.
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Smit, J. Almog was Right, Kripke’s Causal Theory is Trivial. Philosophia 51, 1627–1641 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-023-00625-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-023-00625-0