Abstract
The thesis of Ineffability has it that no proposition can be fully expressed by a sentence, this meaning that no sentence-type, or even sentence-token whose indexicality and ambiguities have been resolved, can fully encode a proposition. The thesis of the propositionality of thoughts has it that thoughts are propositional. An implication of the joint endorsement of these two theses is that thoughts are ineffable. The aim of this paper is to argue that this is not the case: there are effable thoughts, and we can even safely say that, generally, thoughts are effable. In order to defend this insight, I first counter the thesis of the propositionality of thought by bringing some counterexamples to it, which amount to cases of non-fully propositional thought. I then argue that, if thoughts can be and often are non-fully propositional, they can be expressed by sentences that fail to fully express a proposition. I also show that the propositional thoughts that we can entertain are after all effable (in a suitable, relevant sense) and resist some alleged examples of insurmountable ineffability.
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Notes
As a referee observes, the ‘gap’ obtains not just between language and an individual’s thought, but also between language and what hearers understand. This depends on some implicit assumptions concerning the role of thoughts in communication. According to these assumptions, thoughts could be: (a) the content of an individual’s mental states (beliefs in the paradigm case); (b) the content of the individual’s utterances. Insofar as, by performing an utterance, we express our thoughts and make them available to our audience, then a hearer can grasp our thoughts by understanding what we assert. So, in virtue of (a) and (b) obtaining, it is the case that: (c) thoughts are what a hearer ‘understands’ or ‘grasps’ as the content of an utterance. In this sense, ineffability holds with respect to what the hearer understands, too, insofar as this coincides with the thought the speaker expresses through her utterance.
The proponent of the propositional conception of thoughts could object that the view is precisely held at a suitable level of idealisation, which abstracts away from the shortcomings and defects which belong to the activity of thinking as it is carried out by real-life thinkers. If this is true, then my claim that thought can be, as a matter of fact, non-fully propositional, doesn’t engage with the main tenet of the propositional conception of thought, because the latter is a claim that regards idealised thinkers and the former is an empirical claim that regards actually existing and hence potentially non-ideal (even though otherwise normal) subjects. I think this line of response is not in the spirit of such theorists as Fodor (or as Carston), who seek a theory that has a psychological plausibility. So, replying that the theory holds at a suitable level of idealisation would be self-undermining if the aim of the theory is precisely that of making sense of the psychology of human thinkers.
I will use the following notation in order to indicate the content of a thought: either a sentence enclosed in slashes, like /The leaves are green/, or a sentence embedded in a that-clause, like that the leaves are green.
An attitude is de re if it consists of ascribing a property to an object that is directly (non-descriptively) presented to the attitude-holder. For instance: John believes of g that he is a spy, where \(g\) is an individual John is presented with directly. An attitude is de dicto if it consists of ascribing a property to an object that is not directly (non-descriptively) presented to the believer, but which is simply thought about by means of a name, a definite description or through quantification. For instance: John believes that Smith/the barber/someone is a spy, where there is no individual John is presented with to which he ascribes the property of being a spy.
Even though she may not explicitly represent Paris (see Perry 1986).
What if I were to try to describe the very je-ne-sais-quoi that characterises my thoughts about myself or my mother? Or, for that matter, what if I were to try to describe any other subjective, private experience, like what-it-feels-like to perceive a certain shade of red, or a certain pain? Deep ineffability seems to feature in these cases as well and, moreover, no strategy that separates the content of the thought proper and the thought-colouring seems effective, because now the supposed thought-colouring itself is part of the content! In this case, I believe we should concede that no linguistic resources will fill the gap between language and thought. However, the good news is that pragmatic processes won’t probably work either. As a consequence, the gap may have to be accepted as something ineliminable, but this acceptance would not be in any way decisive for settling the debate against the non-gappy picture.
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Acknowledgments
This work has been funded by the research project CONACyT CCB 2011 166502, led by Mario Gómez-Torrente at the Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Special thanks to Maite Ezcurdia, Carmen Curcó and Andrea Onofri for careful discussion of a previous version of this paper, and to two anonymous referees for their insightful comments.
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Belleri, D. You can say what you think: vindicating the effability of our thoughts. Synthese 191, 4431–4450 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0537-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0537-8