Abstract
A central job for propositions is to be the objects of the attitudes. Propositions are the things we doubt, believe and suppose. Some philosophers have thought that propositions are sets of possible worlds. But many have become convinced that such an account individuates propositions too coarsely. This raises the question of how finely propositions should be individuated. An account of how finely propositions should be individuated on which they are individuated very finely is sketched. Objections to the effect that the account individuates propositions too finely are raised and responses to the objections are provided. It is also shown that theories that try to individuate propositions less finely have serious problems.
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Notes
Obviously, one could take propositions to be structured entities with other kinds of things (Fregean senses, possible world intensions, etc.) as constituents.
(King 1994, 1995, 1996, 2007, 2009). Though I have tended to assume that individuals, properties and relations are constituents of propositions, I have also been clear that my main concern is with what holds the constituents of propositions together, how/why propositions have truth conditions, etc. Thus, I am open to the idea that propositions have other sorts of entities as constituents [e.g. see King (2007) pp. 6–7].
For ease of exposition, I ignore contextually sensitive sentences here. It should be clear how to reformulate this biconditional to take contextual sensitivity into account.
See King (2009) for more on the idea of speakers interpreting syntactic concatenation in certain ways.
Ofra Magidor, who as a commentator on my presentation raised a version of the objection from fineness of grain against my account of propositions at the Philosophical Logic Conference at Princeton University May 2009, took this attitude (pc).
Collins (2007) seems to take this attitude. Similarly, for John Burgess and Sarah-Jane Leslie, judging from the strenuousness of their presentations of the worry (in personal communication and the question session for the presentation mentioned in the previous note, respectively).
P. 820.
Collins (2007) p. 820.
Lewis makes the point about “what is said”, but the context of the following quotation shows that he clearly has in mind various cases in which speakers judge that “what is said” by two sentences (relative to a context) is the same: “Unless we give it some special technical meaning, the locution ‘what is said’ is very far from univocal. It can mean the propositional content, in Stalnaker’s sense (horizontal or diagonal). It can mean the exact words. I suspect it can mean almost anything in between.” p. 41.
You say ‘I am hungry.’ and I say ‘I am hungry’; Annie notes to me that you said the same thing. Jason says ‘I think aliens are controlling my mind’ and Alan utters the same sentence. I say to Alan that Jason said the same thing, etc., etc. Nor is the point limited to sentences containing indexicals: if Joanna says ‘John is acting oddly’ and Fall says ‘There is something wrong with John’, it would seem very natural to follow Fall’s response with ‘Joanna said the same thing.’ This is simply how we talk!
The objection was raised as part of a comment on a paper discussing certain features of my view of propositions delivered at the Philosophical Logic Conference at Princeton University in May 2009. See note 5.
I adopt a similar neutrality in responding to John Burgess below. See notes 13 and 15.
To seem truly to say one of these sentences of someone is to utter the sentence referring to her with ‘She’ and to seem to speak truly. I suspect Burgess thinks that, according to any bilingual, anyone of whom it is true to say (2E) is such that it is true to say (2G) of her and vice versa. But I shall stick to the claim about it seeming true to say, because only it is warranted by the raw data. All the bilingual can tell us is whether these sentences seem true in this or that situation. Hence I remain neutral here on the question of whether one really is speaking truly in such cases.
Richard (1990) argues that from the fact that necessarily, for any x: x believes that P iff x believes that Q it does not follow that the proposition that P is the proposition that Q. And of course Richard is right. For it could be that P is distinct from Q but one cannot be believed without believing the other. Does this provide a response to Burgess? No. I construe Burgess as claiming that given the uses to which we put propositions, we should say that any propositions P and Q such that anyone believes P iff they believe Q are such that P = Q (note Burgess’ rhetorical question about what use propositions are if we individuate them more finely). Hence, Burgess is making a recommendation as to how propositions should be individuated, given the uses to which we put them, not claiming that from the fact that anyone believes P iff they believe Q it follows that P = Q. To respond to Burgess one must give reasons that we should not accept his recommendation as to how propositions are individuated. Richard’s argument does not do that. I do below.
Whether it does show that anyone who says, knows, believes or whatever the proposition expressed by the German sentence embedded in (2G) does the same for the proposition expressed by the English sentence embedded in (2E) depends in part on whether it is true to say (2E) of someone iff it is true to say (2G) of her or whether it merely seems true to say (2E) of her iff it seems true to say (2g) of her. See note 13.
Add ‘ineligible’ if you feel the need to rule out the Pope.
I say ‘felicitously say’ rather than ‘truly say’ to dodge the question of whether what we say is literally true. The idea is that it is taken to be true in such a case, helps us coordinate activities with the Logins and etc.
I mean that it is metaphysically possible that there are such aliens. If someone denies this I am really not sure what to say to them.
I assume that in both sentences, ‘she’ is anaphoric on ‘Joanna’ and ‘them’ is anaphoric on ‘ten marbles’ or ‘marbles’.
The essence of this point was made in Cresswell (1985) pp. 77–85. As Cresswell notes, the fact that Joanna could have been working with French sentences should be enough to discourage those tempted to think that 13a and b are making assertions about the sentences embedded under ‘given’ and ‘deduced’.
I do not want to put too much weight on this argument, because a similar argument would seem to show that ‘Mark Twain is Samuel Clemens’ and ‘Samuel Clemens is Mark Twain’ express different propositions. So many structured proposition theorists will not be happy with this argument.
I ignore contextual sensitivity here since none of the sentences I am going to be considering are contextually sensitive (except perhaps for tense, which I will ignore).
I say ‘differ at most in having different constituents…’ because I want SSSS to allow that even sentences with lexical items having different semantic values might express the same proposition (e.g. perhaps the lexical items are parts of phrases that make the same contribution to propositions even though the phrases contain lexical items with different semantic values). Of course on my view this cannot happen, since it violates condition (ii) on the right side of IB.
p. 224.
I am assuming that for atomic sentences to have the same syntactic structure, they must have predicates of the same adicity. Surely this is true of English: in the sense in which I am using the term, ‘Usain runs’ and ‘Joanna loves Phil’ do not have the same syntactic structure.
Of course if sentences S and R themselves differ in syntactic structure, then so will ‘~S’ and ‘~R’. But the point is that if S and R do not differ in syntactic structure but only have lexical items with different semantic values occurring at the same places in their syntactic trees, then ‘~S’ and ‘~R’ will express propositions with the same structure. And the propositions the latter express will differ only in having different constituents (corresponding to any lexical items with different semantical values) occurring in the same places in those propositions. Similarly for conjunctive sentences.
I assume 15a and 15b express different propositions even though both are false. I also assume that these sentences have the same syntactic structure as 9a/9b. The argument will go through as long as there is any coordinating conjunction *, such that A*B and B*A express different propositions and have the same syntactic structure as 9a/9b.
See Karen Lewis (2011, ‘Static and dynamic semantic theories’ “unpublished manuscript”) for a good, detailed discussion of these issues.
One way, adopted by Stalnaker (1998), is to deny that when a sentence is uttered, the update to the context in which it is uttered is only due to the proposition expressed by the sentence in the context. In addition, the contexts get updated with the fact that the relevant sentences were uttered. Hence, in this way, the utterance of 18a and 19a in identical contexts result in different updates. However, Stalnaker never explains why/how this difference in the resulting contexts (in one, it is common ground that 18a was uttered; in the other that 19a was uttered) makes the pronoun fine in one case and not in the other. Nor do I, in the body of the paper, explain how the difference in update on my view explains why the pronoun is fine in one case and not the other. So whether my explanation is superior to Stalnaker’s is a matter for further research. My point is just that my explanation looks prima facie attractive.
I do not mean to claim that difference in proposition expressed must result in difference in how the context gets updated. But to explain the marble example in the way I am suggesting, we need to suppose that in this case, difference of proposition expressed results in difference in update.
References
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Karen Lewis and Kent Bach for helpful comments and suggestions. Thanks also to Ofra Magidor for helpful discussion. A version of this paper was delivered at the Pacific Division Meetings of the American Philosophical Association in San Francisco on March 31, 2010. My thanks to the audience for helpful discussion.
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King, J.C. On fineness of grain. Philos Stud 163, 763–781 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9844-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9844-9