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Semantic relationism, belief reports and contradiction

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Abstract

In his book Semantic Relationism, Kit Fine propounds an original and sophisticated semantic theory called ‘semantic relationism’ or ‘relational semantics’, whose peculiarity is the enrichment of Kaplan’s, Salmon’s and Soames’ Russellian semantics (more specifically, the semantic content of simple sentences and the truth-conditions of belief reports) with coordination, “the very strongest relation of synonymy or being semantically the same”. In this paper, my goal is to shed light on an undesirable result of semantic relationism: a report like “Tom believes that Cicero is bald and Tom does not believe that Tully is bald” is correct according to Fine’s provided truth-conditions of belief reports, but its semantic content is (very likely) a contradiction. As I will argue in the paper, even the resort to the notion of token proposition, introduced in Fine’s recent article “Comments on Scott Soames’ ‘Coordination Problems’”, does not suffice to convincingly eliminate the contradiction; moreover, it raises new difficulties.

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Notes

  1. Hoping to correctly understand the notion of coordination, I have added in Characterisation 1 the second ‘only if’ to Fine’s (2007: 39–40) original formulation.

  2. On the contrary, if neither your statement contains particles like ‘same’, ‘also’ nor do the presuppositions of the discourse make clear your intention to co-refer, a hearer of the statement “Cicero was an orator and Cicero was astute” (in particular, one who knows that two famous Ciceros have existed, the Roman orator and the German spy) may sensibly question whether the two tokens of ‘Cicero’ in this statement co-refer, consequently making coordination between them negative.

  3. Although Fine does not explicitly mention the coordination/uncoordination distinction (he generally uses the terms ‘coordination’ and ‘uncoordination’ as synonyms of ‘positive’ and ‘negative coordination’ respectively), such a distinction—I think—implicitly emerges e.g. in the passages of Semantic Relationism (2007: 93, 101) where, talking of the reports “Peter believes that Paderewski is musical” and “Peter believes that Paderewski is not musical”, he distinguishes between the case in which these reports are considered individually, in isolation (i.e. as belonging to different pieces of discourse, to the effect that the two tokens of ‘Paderewski’ within them will be uncoordinated) and the case in which they are taken as one pair of reports (and therefore as belonging to the same piece of discourse, with the result that the two tokens of ‘Paderewski’ within such reports will be coordinated).

  4. By simple sentence I mean “a sentence that does not contain any quotational, psychological, or other obviously non-extensional linguistic contexts” (Braun and Saul 2002: 2).

  5. The notions of coordinated proposition and coordinated pair of propositions are more sophisticated than presented here: they involve a coordination-scheme (2007: 55–56) rather than a single coordination link. However, for the objectives of this paper, the proposed characterisations of these notions suffice.

  6. CONJ is the relation of Conjunction and NEG is the property of Negation.

  7. The notion of occurrence of a real individual could perplex the reader. Actually, although it is implausible to maintain that a real individual has multiple occurrences in space–time, there seems to be nothing wrong with the claim that such an individual has multiple occurrences in abstract objects, e.g. in ordered sets or in Russellian propositions.

  8. See Fine (2010: 479–80).

  9. S does not believe that p’ is nothing but the negation of ‘S believes that p’.

  10. In response to this objection of mine, Fine has claimed that (9p) and (9p*) are not genuine contradictions. By contrast, the coordinated proposition formed by (9p) plus positive coordination between the two occurrences of Cicero in (9p) is genuinely contradictory. This positively coordinated proposition, which e.g. is expressed by the weak de dicto reading of “Tom believes that Cicero is bald and Tom does not believe that [the same] Cicero is bald”, is not true under our previous supposition that Tom sincerely asserts “Cicero is bald” and “I do not believe that Tully is bald”, since co-coordination does not hold. My point, on the other hand, is that semantic relationism contains violations of the standard principle of non-contradiction; and, undoubtedly, the true propositions (9p) and (9p*) are (or incorporate) standard self-contradictions.

References

  • Braun, D., & Saul, J. (2002). Simple sentences, substitutions, and mistaken evaluations. Philosophical Studies, 111, 1–41.

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  • Fine, K. (2007). Semantic relationism. Oxford: Blackwell.

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  • Fine, K. (2010). Comments on Scott Soames’ ‘Coordination problems’. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 81, 475–484.

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  • Salmon, N. (1986). Frege’s puzzle. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Bradford Books.

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  • Salmon, N. (1989). Illogical belief. Philosophical Perspectives, 3, 243–285.

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Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to Kit Fine, Kevin Mulligan and Marco Santambrogio for their insightful comments to this paper. I would also like to thank the participants at the 2012 New York Philosophy of Language Workshop for their helpful suggestions.

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Bonardi, P. Semantic relationism, belief reports and contradiction. Philos Stud 166, 273–284 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-0017-2

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