Abstract
According to some views (Carston, Fodor), natural language suffers from underdeterminacy, but thought doesn’t. According to the underdeterminacy claim, sentence types underdetermine the truth-conditions of sentence tokens. In particular, the semantics of a predicate type seems to underdetermine the satisfaction conditions of its tokens. By contrast, mental representation-types are supposed to determine the truth-conditions of its tokens. In this paper I critically examine these mixed views. First, I argue that the arguments supporting the indispensability of including in one’s theory mental representations that are free of the underdeterminacy exhibited by natural language are not sound. As a result, the possibility that mental representation-types are as underdetermined as natural language sentence-types has not been ruled out. Second, I argue that Carston’s ad hoc concept-types are as underdetermined as word-types. I finish by arguing that mental representations are also underdetermined in a second sense—mental representation-tokens only determine a partial function from possible worlds to truth-values.
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Notes
Charles Travis has made this point by presenting a variety of examples in which the satisfaction conditions of some predicate shifts across contexts. His examples involve colour predicates (‘is green’), artefact terms (‘is a desk’), magnitudes (‘weighs 80 kg’), etc.
Truth-conditional pragmatics is the view that the meaning of a sentence does not determine the truth-conditional content of an utterance of it (even after fixing the referent of indexicals), for truth-conditions need to be pragmatically supplemented.
In Sect. 5, I introduce a different notion of underdeterminacy, namely Token-Underdeterminacy. I am indebted to an anonymous referee for helping me distinguish the two notions.
By ‘structured representational item’ I mean a representational item that is identified by its structure, such as a sentence. The definition is intended to apply both to sentences in natural language and to sentences in Mentalese.
I call these approaches ‘mixed’ because they include two sorts of representations—type-underdetermined and non-type-underdetermined.
Travis (2000) calls this the Janus-faced picture of thoughts.
Besides rejecting eternal predication, Carston also rejects eternal reference. However, here I will only consider the underdeterminacy that can be traced to predication.
I use capital letters for encoded concepts. Ad hoc concepts are marked with an asterisk.
Let me note that Carston’s proposal has two problematic aspects. The first has to do with the relation between encoded concepts and ad hoc concepts. It is not at all clear whether lexically encoded concepts as HEXAGON are being conceived here as determining an extension, or whether it is only ad hoc concepts as HEXAGON* that do so. In her (2002), Carston holds both that there is no eternal predication (one of the reasons why natural languages are underdetermined), and that lexically encoded concepts have extensions. For example, she writes, about narrowing, that ‘the extension of the concept pragmatically constructed is a subset of the extension of the lexical concept from which it has been derived.’ (2002, p. 325). This presupposes that the lexical concept has an extension. However, Carston’s radical underdeterminacy claim is incompatible with lexically encoded concepts having extensions: if the lexically encoded concept BACHELOR has an extension, then ‘is a bachelor’ should have a constant extension. And if so, then there is eternal predication. Nonetheless, simply dropping the assumption that lexically encoded concepts determine extensions is also problematic, for encoded and ad hoc concepts have the same structure. As long as encoded and ad hoc concepts are described in analogous terms it is mysterious why they should behave differently. The second problematic aspect has to do with the supposed atomic character of ad hoc concepts. Ad hoc concepts, just like lexically encoded concepts, are supposed to be atomic. Carston writes: ‘This term [ad hoc] is used to refer to concepts that are constructed pragmatically by a hearer in the process of utterance comprehension. The idea is that speakers can use a lexically encoded concept to communicate a distinct non-lexicalized (atomic) concept, which resembles the encoded one in that it shares elements of its logical and encyclopaedic entries, and that hearers can pragmatically infer the intended concept on the basis of the encoded one.’ (Carston 2002, p. 322. Emphasis added.) However, it is not clear what is meant by ‘atomic’ here, given that they are created by adding or subtracting information from already existing atomic concepts, and so they seem to be complex. I will argue (Sects. 3 and 4) that both options are problematic. If ad hoc concepts are atomic, then Carston cannot avail herself of the productivity argument (Sect. 3.1)—something she can do if ad hoc concepts are complex. However, if they are complex, as the description of the creation of BACHELOR* suggests, i.e., if they are compositions of lexically encodable concepts, then one should expect that they be as underdetermined as combinations of words are (Sect. 4).
Carston (2002) admits some context-dependence in thought, namely the presence of indexicals. However, she doesn’t admit context-sensitive predicates at the level of thought.
Fodor (2001) does not state any principle of compositionality. However, it is in this sense of ‘compositional’ that language fails to be compositional.
Following Carston (2002), I have framed the discussion in terms of underdeterminacy. However, instead of talking about sentences of natural language and Mentalese being Type-Underdetermined one could talk of them failing Truth-conditional Compositionality.
It is already odd that Fodor is here taking language to be compositional, when he explicitly rejects it. I will not try to solve this apparent contradiction.
As I noted in Sect. 2, Carston’s description of the process of creation of ad hoc concepts raises some doubts that they are not a combination of pre-existent representations. If they are, in this sense, complex, then she can avail herself of the productivity argument. However, a different worry would arise, as I argue in Sect. 4.
Perry (1986) argues that something similar happens with the location needed to get the truth-value of an utterance of ‘It’s raining’. Although the location is not, as he puts it, articulated in the sentence, it is necessary in order to get a truth-value. His proposal is that it is provided by the context.
Wittgenstein ([1953] 2009, pp. 139–141) considers whether understanding a word (in his example, ‘cube’) can be explained as having a picture before one’s mind (an image of a cube) and asks the question whether it is correct to apply the word ‘cube’ to a prism. He argues that the picture, the mental image, can be both made to fit and not to fit this particular use of the word ‘cube’, depending on the method of projection one applies. Now, if the method of projection is made part of the image that comes before one’s mind, then the same problem arises again: how am I to know how to apply the image of the method of projection? Even if one abandons the idea that understanding a word has to do with having a mental image, the meaning of a general word seems to involve some kind of descriptive content. The method of projection problem arises for this descriptive content as well.
I owe this objection to an anonymous referee.
The externalist approach would need to be one according to which the world determines the content of the concept-type—a concept type that is created during the conversation. If the world were supposed to determine the content of the concept-token, the approach would be compatible with Type-Underdeterminacy.
It is not at all clear that this kind of externalism will even be applicable to all cases. Although it might sound appealing for cases of singular representation, it is not easy to see how the world could resolve the equivocation involved in (3), given that a mental representation corresponding to this sentence will not be about any particular individual.
In the previous sections I have addressed the problem of underdeterminacy as it arises in the literature concerning language and thought (mainly, in Carston’s work). This section addresses a separate problem concerning a different notion of underdeterminacy.
See Travis (1989) for this kind of approach to underdeterminacy.
Belleri (2014) defends a related view according to which the notion of determinacy for the contents of our thoughts is context-relative.
As an example of an account along these lines, see Corazza and Dokic’s situated minimalism (2012).
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Acknowledgements
This work has been funded by the research project “Objectivity-Subjectivity in Knowledge and Singular Representation”, FFI2015-63892-P (MINECO/FEDER, UE). Some of the ideas developed here were presented at the 1st Context, Cognition and Communication Conference. I thank the participants at this conference for their feedback. I am also indebted to Manuel Pérez Otero and two anonymous referees for comments on previous drafts of this paper.
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Picazo Jaque, C. Are mental representations underdeterminacy-free?. Synthese 196, 633–654 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1494-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1494-9