Abstract
In this paper I argue that propositionalism (the doctrine that the contents of thoughts and utterances are propositions to be evaluated with respect to possible worlds) is what generates a tension between referentialism and harmony (the traditional idea that cognitive values can be fully explained by means of truth-conditional contents). Harmony can be preserved if we replace propositionalism by centred referentialism, according to which referential thoughts and utterances about an object have descriptive contents that must be evaluated relative to a world centred on that object at the relevant time. By disentangling (absolute) truth-conditions and (relative) contents, this move allows us to dissolve the tension between referentialism (taken as a thesis about truth-conditions) and descriptivism (taken as a thesis about contents). The view that emerges has three main components: (i) the (absolute) truth-conditions of a referential utterance or thought involves its referent (referentialism); (ii) its reference is determined by causal relations of acquaintance in the context of use (pragmatic picture); and (iii) its cognitive value is fully explained by associated descriptions or (relative) truth-conditional contents (harmony).
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Notes
See Recanati (1993, Chapt. 2) for a clear presentation of these ‘Neo-Fregean’ and ‘Neo-Russellian’ trends.
I will henceforth use ‘term’ indistinctly to cover occurrences of linguistic and mental terms.
It is notoriously difficult to find unambiguous exegetical evidence demonstrating that Frege commits to the idea that Senses should be identified with descriptive conditions. On the one hand, his illustrations of Senses often involve descriptions, and he explicitly allows for the possibility that Senses and Thought lack reference. Thus in a letter to Russell (13.11.1904, in Beaney 1997, pp. 291–292), he writes: ‘Now, can we not be satisfied with the sense of the proposition and do without a Bedeutung? For it does sometimes happen that a sign has a sense but no Bedeutung, namely in legend and poetry. Thus the sense is independent of whether there is a Bedeutung. Accordingly, if all that matters to us is the sense of the proposition, the thought, then all we need to worry about is the sense of the signs that constitute the proposition; whether or not they also have a Bedeutung does not affect the thought. And this is indeed the case in legend and poetry.’ On the other hand, he claims that concepts correspond to unsaturated functions whose arguments can be ordinary individuals. Thus in Function and Concept, he says that in the sentence ‘Caesar conquered Gaul’, the argument of the function ‘conquered Gaul( )’ is the individual Caesar (1891/1970, p. 31). In this paper, I follow the mainstream interpretation according to which Fregean Senses are purely descriptive. I do this for two reasons. First, from a historical point of view, this has been the most common interpretation, and the one that has been attacked and refuted during the referentialist revolution in the 1970s. Second, I hope to show here that a suitably amended version of the descriptivist view attributed to Frege remains compatible with this revolution.
Various versions of truth-relativism have been proposed to deal with faultless disagreement, aesthetic and taste predicates, epistemic modals, future contingents, etc. For recent overviews and developments, see García-Carpintero and Kölbel (2008), MacFarlane (2014). I will not be concerned with these other versions of truth-relativism in what follows. I will confine my discussion to ‘centred worlds’ whose centre involves an objective and concrete individual.
See Recanati (2007a, p. 34) on the thesis he calls ‘Distribution’: ‘The determinants of truth-value distribute over the two basic components truth-evaluation involves: content and circumstance. That is, a determinant of truth-value, e.g. a time, is either given as an ingredient of content or as an aspect of the circumstance of evaluation.’
Torre (2010) and Ninan (2012, 2013) invoke ‘multi-centred worlds’ to deal with assertion and de re attitudes. Although the present account is compatible with the idea of possible worlds centred on multiple referents, there is an important difference. In the wake of Lewis (1979), their accounts remain egocentric: the centred worlds they appeal to may involve objects of acquaintance and individuals other than the subject (beyond what Lewis recommends), but they always involve (at least) the subject of the attitude. On the present account, the centred worlds do not need to feature the subject. They can be directly centred on the object(s) to which the subject is appropriately related, without involving the subject herself. I think that this account will have advantages over its egocentric counterparts in the realms of perception and communication. For lack of space, I must leave these issues for another occasion.
Unlike mental files (Recanati 2012b), the clusters I invoke are collections of descriptive conditions, not vehicles of thought (Recanati rejects harmony: he denies that descriptive conditions suffice to explain cognitive values).
Millikan (2004, p. 49) calls such truth-conditional ingredients ‘reflexive signs’: ‘Times that represent times and places that represent places are perfectly ordinary ingredients of natural signs ... We can invent a special term for the case where a sign element represents itself. Call these sign elements ‘reflexive’.’
See Recanati (2007a, pp. 285–286).
See also other recent essays on Donnellan’s work in Almog and Leonardi (2012).
Cf. Recanati (2004, pp. 120–121) for a formulation of the same suggestion.
Thus a ‘liberal’ might hold that acquaintance is not necessary to refer to an object, and so to have it mind. For a recent and detailed defence of liberalism, see Hawthorne and Manley (2012).
For different views on the role of acquaintance in singular thoughts, see the essays collected in Jeshion (2010).
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Acknowledgements
I am currently Chargé de Recherches by the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique, Communauté française de Belgique (F.R.S.-FNRS), at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), in the Centre of Research in Linguistics LaDisco. I am grateful to the F.R.S.-FNRS for its support. I warmly thank my colleagues from ULB and from the Université de Liège, Philippe De Brabanter, Mikhail Kissine, Philippe Kreutz, Bruno Leclercq, and Sébastien Richard, for helpful discussions on a previous version of this paper in a joint seminar in October 2015. I also thank colleagues from the LOGOS research group at the Universitat de Barcelona, where I spent the fall of 2014 as a visiting researcher, especially Manuel García-Carpintero and Marie Guillot, for sharp and inspiring conversations about de se thoughts while these ideas were being developed. Finally, thanks to my former teacher at ULB, Marc Dominicy, as well as to three anonymous referees and the editor of Synthese, for their advices and helpful comments on ancestors of this paper.
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Bochner, G. Singular truth-conditions without singular propositions. Synthese 195, 2741–2760 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1354-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1354-7