Abstract
This paper defends the view that perceptual ascriptions such as “Jones sees a cat” are sometimes intensional. I offer a range of examples of intensional perceptual ascriptions, respond to objections to intensional readings of perceptual ascriptions, and show how widely accepted semantic accounts of intensionality can explain the key features of intensional perceptual ascriptions.
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Notes
For example, Moore (1905), Ayer (1940), Smythies (1956), Anscombe (1965), Hintikka (1969), Coburn (1977), Harman (1990), Chomsky (1995, p. 52), Moltmann (2008), Brogaard (2012), and Brogaard (2015). Interestingly, Montague (1974, p. 169) has “no serious objection” to distinguishing intensional and extensional readings of perceptual ascriptions but ignores intensional readings as part of his seminal treatment of intensional transitives “for simplicity.” The last section of this paper sketches an extension of his views on intensional transitives to perceptual verbs.
A better formulation of existence-neutrality would allow that there are non-vacuously existence-neutral readings of constructions involving no names or existential quantifiers (e.g. “I ordered all cars”), but the pursuit of such a formulation would take us too far afield.
If it turned out that the stating-conveying distinction is not viable, this would at best call for a reformulation of my thesis in more precise terms. Ultimately, my view is that perceptual ascriptions involving quantifiers allow narrow scope readings like other mental ascriptions. This view is perfectly intelligible independently of the stating-conveying distinction. I approach the issue in terms of the latter distinction because that is how it has traditionally been formulated.
If we don’t assume this, it is possible that contextual enrichment of literal meaning can yield either an intensional or an extensional proposition, which provides another reason for denying that (b) implies (a). Contextual enrichment is consistent with my position, and consistent with maintaining a stated-conveyed distinction (it simply gives a greater role to pragmatics in determining what is said). However, this is not how I ultimately want to account for the intensional–extensional distinction, so I set this possibility aside for simplicity here.
See the quotes from Austin and Dretske in the next section.
Note that appearance-neutrality, as stated, is compatible with there being systematic constraints on phenomenology in order for one to see something. For example, appearance-neutrality is compatible with the relatively weak phenomenological constraints outlined by Siegel (2006).
Ayer (1940, ch. 1) makes a similar observation.
None of the alleged IPAs discussed in this section contain names as part of the object of the verb. The reason is that singular perceptual ascriptions such as (18) and (19) elicit mixed intuitions.
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I see Barack Obama.
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I see Santa Claus.
Speaking for myself, I have difficulty hearing (18) intensionally: if it turns out that “Barack Obama” does not refer (not merely that Obama is not within sight), this statement will have turned out to be false or meaningless. However, I can easily see how (19) might be true despite the fact that Santa Claus does not exist.
One possibility is that singular perceptual ascriptions have intensional readings only when the names occurring in them are not “real names,” i.e. when they are names that, unlike names such as mine or yours, merely stand in for descriptions. There seems to be a reading of “Santa Claus” on which it is treated as (something like) a description along the lines of “a bearded man with a red jacket.” This makes it easy to hear (19) as intensional. However, if “Santa Claus” is taken to be the name of an individual presumed to exist, it is harder to hear the intensional reading of (19). Space being limited, I am going to assume that true names do not lend themselves to IPAs. This simplifies the discussion of possible accounts of the intensional–extensional distinction in Sect. 3. Without this assumption, the approach I suggest needs to be extended to singular ascriptions, which is only possible under the assumption that names are generalized quantifiers (a view widely accepted among semanticists; see Barwise & Cooper 1981 and Westerståhl 2011).
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Austin’s extensive discussion of Ayer’s views contains several other objections, but all target idiosyncrasies of Ayer’s views, so I am not going to discuss them here. Several of Austin’s objections target idiosyncratic features of Ayer’s glosses on appearance-neutrality and existence-neutrality. For example, Ayer’s way of characterizing these features seems to commit him to Meinongian objects.
As a historical note, I am doubtful that Ayer’s claims are fairly characterized in terms of “senses.” Ayer talks about the “usage” of perceptual verbs, not their senses.
Some might say that this is due to a necessary connection between lying and stating: an utterance is lie-prone with respect to P if and only if it states P (see Stainton, in press). However, we need not assume such a connection to agree that stating a falsehood exposes one to blame in principle.
Note that “visually hallucinating a pink elephant” does not fit the bill because it also says something about what is going on in the world outside.
Normally, what is communicated is not altered by changes in wording that don’t affect what is stated. In the case of conversational implicatures, this is known as detachability (Grice 1989). There are exceptions to this generalization; it is certainly possible to convey messages with specific word choices. However, when this is the case we can generally use devices such as intonation to reinforce the message. Here it is very hard to see how intonation could be used to reinforce an existence-neutral reading.
As noted earlier, this also seems to be an objection to the view under consideration, but it is not hard to see why Grice might have been more aware of it as an objection to an application of his theory of conversational implicatures than he was aware of it as an objection to the unstated qualification view.
Incidentally, this explains why (21) is a poor choice to convey the content of a hallucination.
One might think that this is not true on a phenomenal reading of “seems” or “appears.” First, I don’t think there are such readings (see the next objection below). Second, even if there were such readings, they would yield the wrong result: (20) expresses that one stands in the first-order mental state of experiencing a pink elephant, not that one stands in the higher-order mental state of experiencing seeing\(_{\mathrm{e}}\) a pink elephant. The content of the higher-order experience would be I am seeing a pink elephant, whereas the content of the first-order experience is There is a pink elephant.
As highlighted in the preceding footnote, a non-epistemic, phenomenal “It appears that” qualification would have other unintended implications.
ibid.
While I think that non-specificity and referential opacity can be explained in this way, this is not very important for my purposes, because existence-neutrality is the defining feature of intensionality for my purposes. I am skimming over many details for this reason.
One major simplification is that, in Montague’s treatment, the object of the want is the intension of the sublimation of the variable (\({{\hat{}}}\, \lambda P[P(x)]\)).
See Montague (1973).
Perceptual ascriptions complemented by relative clauses (e.g. 33, 34) do not uniformly allow intensional readings.
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I see that a car is turning.
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I see who is turning.
Relative clause ascriptions seem to involve metaphorical uses of perceptual verbs. Consider the fact that “seeing that” constructions are factive while “hearing that” constructions are not, and “smelling that” and “tasting that” constructions seem senseless. Moreover, “seeing that” and “hearing that” imply no perceptual experiences at all, whereas other uses of “to see” and “to hear” do. This heterogeneity suggests that relative clause ascriptions involve metaphorical extensions of the core, perceptual meanings of perceptual verbs.
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Sense-datum theory is now considered a marginal view. See Bourget and Chalmers (2014).
I expand on this topic in a companion article entitled “Implications of Intensional Perceptual Ascriptions for Representationalism, Relationalism, and Disjunctivism” (ms). I defend the kind of representationalism motivated by the present approach in Bourget (2010b, a, 2015a) and in press (see also Bourget and Mendelovici (2014). This representationalist view plays a key role in Bourget (2015b).
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Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Angela Mendelovici and Rob Stainton for helpful feedback and discussion. Thanks also to Adam Pautz, Alma Kabe, Alex Byrne, Alex Manafu, Berit Brogaard, Cathal O’Madagain, Chang Liu, Daniel Stoljar, David Chalmers, Dimitra Kourmatzis, Helen De Cruz, Helen Saradi, Joel Walmsley, Kati Farkas, Mika Jiang, Pawel Grabarczyk, Pekka Väyrynen, Tim Crane, and Una Jurkevica for their linguistic intuitions and/or other feedback.
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Bourget, D. Intensional Perceptual Ascriptions. Erkenn 82, 513–530 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-016-9830-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-016-9830-x