Abstract
A thesis I call the name-based singular thought thesis (NBT thesis) is part of orthodoxy in contemporary philosophy of mind and language: it holds that taking part in communication involving a proper name puts one in a position to entertain singular thoughts about the name’s referent. I argue, first, that proponents of the NBT thesis have failed to explain the phenomenon of name-based singular thoughts, leaving it mysterious how name-use enables singular thoughts. Second, by outlining the reasoning that makes the NBT thesis seem compelling and showing how it can be resisted, I argue that giving up the NBT thesis is not (as is usually assumed) a cost, but rather a benefit. I do this by providing an expanded conception of understanding for communication involving names, which sheds light on the nature of communication involving names and the structure of name-using practices.
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Notes
I’m assuming a structured picture of content here, rather than a possible worlds view. This is in part because it’s its unclear how to make out the distinction between singular and general content when assuming contents are sets of worlds. It’s worth noting that P2 only follows from P1 given certain assumptions about sentence content and the way that the meaning of sentence parts contribute to the content of whole sentences: namely that sentence content is structured, and that sentence parts contribute their meanings to the content of whole sentences as parts of the contents of those whole sentences.
Semantic Content Accessibility forges a link between utterance understanding and grasp of the proposition semantically expressed by that utterance. It is thus closely connected to various principles based on the same intuitive connection. The most famous is Kripke’s Disquotation Principle (from Kripke 1979, p. 248): ‘If an individual i who understands a sentence S sincerely asserts S, then i believes (and therefore grasps) the proposition expressed by S’. Kripke’s principle is widely endorsed, e.g., in Soames (2002) and Hawthorne and Manley (2012). Other principles based on the same link are Jeshion (2001) Accessibility of Content, Hawthorne and Manley (2012) Anti-Latitude and Recanati (1993) Congruence Principle.
For now, let’s assume that a singular thought is a mental state with singular content. I’ll return to the definition of singular thought in Sect. 4.
It might be noted that, discourse initially, this utterance is potentially infelicitous if I have never heard of Bruno before. See the end of this section for discussion of this point.
Surprisingly, it is often overlooked that the intuition that an encounter of this kind enables me to think thoughts about Bruno is not in itself support for the NBT thesis. Obviously, if these thoughts are descriptive, the NBT thesis is not supported.
An anonymous reviewer points out that this is the kind of thing we would expect if presuppositional accounts of names were correct (see Geurts 1997; Maier 2009, 2015). Firstly, on such a view, pure testimony cases would be cases requiring presupposition accommodation rather than satisfaction of a presupposition relative to context. Secondly, since relational information is easier to accommodate, adding descriptive information like ‘my friend Bruno’ is appropriate for facilitating communication in such contexts. As I argue in the remainder of the paragraph to which this footnote is attached, however, this does not serve to defeat the NBT thesis.
Having said this, I’ll note that the shakiness of intuitions about successful communication in pure testimony cases already weakens the status of the NBT thesis. Once we’ve isolated the kind of case that actually supports the NBT thesis, the thesis already seems less obligatory.
In theory, a similar question also arises for other cases in which we take ourselves to have reason to posit singular rather than descriptive thoughts. In the case of, say perception-based or memory-based singular thought we should ask how perception, or memory, produces non-descriptive thoughts. By focusing on name-based singular thought in this paper, I do not mean to suggest that this question does not need to be answered in other cases—in fact, I think it should. The question for perception-based and (arguably) memory-based cases is less pressing, however, because we have a clearer account available of how these cases work. See Sect. 5, in which the particular difficulties of explaining name-based singular thought are discussed, and footnote 23, for further discussion.
The most detailed contemporary defense of the identification requirement on singular thought is found in Evans (1982). A similar requirement sometimes goes by the name of the ‘knowledge-which requirement’, which states that, in order to think a singular thought about an object o, one must know which object o is. The point of including an argument involving this (admittedly controversial) premise for my purposes is not to endorse an identification requirement on singular thought, but rather to illustrate how one’s antecedent commitments about singular thoughts could lead one to reject the NBT thesis. The idea of an identification requirement on singular thought has its source in Russell (1905, 1910, 1912), from whom we inherit the contemporary distinction between singular and descriptive thought.
See Campbell (2002) for a defense of this claim, although not with a view to defending a general identification requirement.
As I’ve already acknowledged in Sect. 2, intuitions go both ways in this kind of case. If the intuition that you do understand what you have been told is felt, it is natural to think that what you have understood could be paraphrased as follows: ‘the person named ‘Ginger’ is a travelling puppeteer’, or ‘the bearer of ‘Ginger’ is a travelling puppeteer’. This paraphrase is roughly in line with an account on which names are metalinguistic predicates, as is the conclusion of Argument 2. See footnote 12 for examples of proponents of this view.
For example, Elbourne (2005, Chap. 6), who is a predicativist, claims that referential uses of names contain a free variable, which is assigned a referent directly, by context. Bach (2002) also emphasizes in the context of his ‘nominal description theory’ that referential uses of names communicate singular content in context.
The resulting position, defended in more detail later in the paper, is in a sense Russellian. Like Russell, this view holds that we think of objects of pure testimony only by description. However, the similarity with Russell is limited to the extent that it posits a clear gap (in certain cases) between the content semantically expressed by an utterance containing a name (which is singular) and the nature of the thoughts required in order to count as understanding that utterance (which can be descriptive). Russell is much less clear on the relationship between semantic content linguistically expressed by an utterance and content of the thoughts required to understand it (indeed, he is not clear on the distinction between these two things). In some places, he claims proper names are disguised definite descriptions (and thus seems compelled by an argument like Argument 2). However, as an anonymous reviewer helpfully pointed out, there are also places where he seems to presuppose 1) that an utterance containing a name expresses a singular proposition, and 2) that one can communicate with the utterance despite not grasping that singular proposition. Thus, he comes close to rejecting content accessibility. The following passage from Russell (1910) illustrates: “What enables us to communicate in spite of the varying descriptions we employ is that we know there is a true proposition concerning the actual Bismarck, and that however we may vary the description (as long as the description is correct) the proposition described is still the same. This proposition, which is described and is known to be true, is what interests us; but we are not acquainted with the proposition itself, and do not know it, though we know it is true.”
The name ‘Barack Obama’ here should be construed as an individual constant contributing Obama to the truth-conditions of the whole content.
I purposefully remain neutral between Russellian and (non-descriptive) Fregean conceptions of singular content here.
A related point about the limitations of defining singular thoughts in terms of their content is made by Jeshion (2010). She remarks that agreeing on the idea that singular thoughts have singular content does not settle questions about what it takes, cognitively, epistemically, etc., to think such thoughts.
Jeshion (2010, p. 108), agrees: ‘For descriptive thought there is widespread agreement [about what it takes to entertain such thoughts]: One must possess and grasp those constituent concepts in the general proposition, must do so in the way in which they are structured in the proposition.’ See also, Jeshion (2010, p. 129).
This is in line with Russell (1905, 1910, 1912) conception, according to which one thinks of an object by description when one has only knowledge by description of that object. It is consistent with this conception to reject Russell’s very restrictive epistemology, according to which one has merely descriptive knowledge of all ordinary external objects.
This terminology is an amended version of Bach’s (1987) distinction between satisfactional and relational reference-determination. I choose to contrast satisfactional with non-satisfactional (rather than relational) thoughts for reasons I need not go in to for present purposes.
Again, it should be noted that showing how name-use enables thought about the name’s referent is not enough to vindicate the NBT thesis, because these thoughts could be descriptive rather than singular.
By thinking about the explanatory challenge faced by the causal externalist, we can see better why explaining both perception-based and memory-based singular thought is less difficult than explaining name-based singular thought. Causal externalist theories of name-based singular thought rely on the idea that a singular way of thinking gained initially through perception be ‘displayed’ and thereby ‘transferred’ across agents and a central difficulty is in understanding what this kind of interpersonal transfer could consist in. This difficulty is not faced in the case of perception-based singular thought and, to the extent that preservation of ‘way of thinking’ intrapersonally is less mysterious than interpersonal transfer, memory-based cases (although interesting and certainly worthy of further explanation) are not as mysterious. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting that the comparison between ways the challenge of explanation arises in different cases should be kept in mind.
See Raven (2008) for an argument that those who defend the notion of communication-based singular thought have failed to account for the proposed distinctive role of communication in generating singular thought. Unlike this paper, Raven’s paper is focused, not on the question of the role of name-use in generating singular thought, but on the role of communication more generally.
On a standard causal account of information, the footprint carries information about its maker. I am not, however, thereby assuming a view on which the footprint has intentionality or aboutness—this is a further claim (compare, Dretske 1981).
Bach (1987, p. 27) claims that singular thoughts must be based on perception, memory or communication.
Note that a metalinguistic/metacommunicative description making reference to one’s interlocutor’s act of referring disambiguates between different individuals who bear the same name. Perhaps we could generate cases where there is more than one person called ‘NN’ who an interlocutor is referring to, but these cases will undoubtedly be rare.
As an anonymous reviewer points out, one might nonetheless ask whether an argument related to Kripke’s modal argument establishes that the thoughts in pure testimony cases are singular. After all, one can wonder what would have happened if Bruno’s parents had chosen a different name, and can make sense of the idea, say, that, if Bruno had been named otherwise, he would have been better off. However, the possibility of entertaining these counterfactuals does not establish that the thoughts about Bruno in this case are singular. Firstly, we can make sense of these possibilities by responding that thinkers employ actualized descriptions in these cases. Secondly, although there is more to say about this particular response, we can see that this argument does not establish the singularity of the thoughts in such cases by considering the possibilities for counterfactual thought in other comparable descriptive cases. For example, imagine Beth reports to me, ‘I met a therapist yesterday. He asked me if I had a happy childhood’. As a result of this testimony, I might think, ‘I wonder if the therapist Beth met would have been so interested in her childhood if he had never become a therapist’. I take it the possibility of considering this counterfactual does not establish that my thoughts about the therapist are singular.
Examples are Kaplan (1989a, b), and Robin Jeshion (2002, (2009, (2010). Jeshion’s view differs from Kaplan’s in important ways: Kaplan is a semantic instrumentalist, whereas Jeshion rejects semantic instrumentalism and defends a view she calls cognitivism about singular thought. Here I abstract from certain differences between Jeshion’s and Kaplan’s positions in order to illustrate that they are both committed to functionalism about the NBT thesis as I define it in what follows.
This conception of files is in line with the recent account of mental files given in Recanati (2012).
Centrally, when information is co-filed, this allows for the thinker to presuppose the identity of the reference of this information. When information is stored in different files, this means and identity judgment is required if the thinker is to exploit facts about co-reference in her inferences. Thus, co-filing of information explains the possibility of inferences that ‘trade on identity’ (See Campbell 1987 for an explanation of this concept which is independent of the file-theoretic framework). Filing of information in different files explains Frege cases (See Recanati 2012 and Goodman 2016) for further explanation of the role of mental files).
See Perry (1993) for elaboration of the role of files in accounting for continued belief.
I lack space for a full account of descriptive files here but see Goodman (2016) for such an account.
The claim here is not that all file-based thoughts are descriptive but rather that some are.
A full account would focus also on the features mentioned in the previous paragraph: the reference determination and individuation story for name-based files.
For discussion of the claim that name-based files are associated with descriptive information-marshaling procedures, and for citations of relevant psychological literature, see Gray (2016).
Although I have emphasized that my strategy here is to accept a Millian semantics for names for the purposes of argument, it is worth reminding ourselves that, even if one prefers a predicativist semantics, many predicativists will hold that, in cases of referential uses, there will still be singular content expressed in context and, thus, the datum of understanding in pure testimony cases still produces a similar result. See Sect. 3 for discussion.
In the example just given, the sortal/categorical person plays this role.
As an anonymous reviewer pointed out, one might wonder at this stage why we would claim that the metalinguistic/metacommunicative descriptive content grasped here is pragmatically conveyed rather than, say, presupposed (as it would be according to a presuppositionalist account like Maier 2015 or Geurts Geurts 1997). The reason is dialectical: my argument is intended to show how we can and should reject the NBT thesis despite accepting Millianism about names. This aspect of the view could be altered if it turned out, for independent reasons, that some sort of presuppositional account of names was preferable to Millianism.
Note that, while the content conveyed here is descriptive with respect to Bruno, the way I have spelled it out here makes it singular with respect to one’s interlocutor (the content contains, ‘...who x is talking about’ where the x is an individual constant assigned to the interlocutor). Thus, communication with x may always involve a way of having singular thoughts about x, but I do not need to deny this to deny the NBT thesis.
It may be helpful to compare this position to that taken by Russell (1905, 1910, 1912). In footnote 14 I claimed that Russell (1910) comes close denying content accessibility (despite the fact that he is not clear about the distinction between content semantically expressed and content pragmatically conveyed). In the passage cited there, however, he also comes close to claiming that the knowledge enabling successful communication is metalinguistic: interlocutors describe a singular proposition about Bismarck.
Thus, recognition that the name is a name is required. This is the sense in which understanding requires general knowledge of the way that the truth of sentence containing a name depends on the referent of the name.
For a similar picture of pragmatic modulation, see Recanati (2004), p. 131.
I’ve heard the following question raised: If we adopt a Kaplanian account of demonstratives, we will think that what is being grasped in the perceptual demonstrative case is the linguistic meaning, or character of the demonstrative. Am I claiming that pure testimony cases involve grasping the character of names, without grasping their content? Wouldn’t this be at odds with the claim that names are Millian? I’m not sure it would, but I’ll leave the issue aside. I do not need to commit to the view that what we are grasping in pure testimony cases is the ‘character’ of a name. What I have claimed instead is that we generate a metalinguistic predicative content by means of a general inference. This is not at odds with Millianism about names.
See Campbell (2002) for an account of singular thought that relies on this intuition.
I am not claiming there are no cases in which a perceptual demonstrative is used in a way such that the point of the utterance could be fulfilled despite the hearer not grasping the singular content expressed. For example, consider a case in which I am facing away from someone who is poised to attack me and you yell, ‘He’s coming for you!’ in order to warn me of the attack. In such a case, the point of the utterance is arguably to let me know that someone is coming for me. I can allow for such cases, while still claiming that, on balance, there is a difference between the use of names and the use of demonstratives in this respect. My claim is that cases of this form, where the point of the utterance is fulfilled despite lack of availability of the singular content expressed, are more common with names than with perceptual demonstratives. The fact that successful communication in pure testimony cases is common attests to this.
There will perhaps be fewer cases in which both speaker and hearer have no independent grip on the referent of a name being used in communication since, if none of the conversants have an independent grip on the object of communication, there will be less point in communicating about it.
Cases like this clearly arise despite the point I acknowledged in Sect. 2, that it might sometimes be infelicitous to refer to someone by name when one is aware that one’s interlocutor does not know the person in question. In such cases, speakers often provide some contextualizing information to go along with the name (for e.g. ‘My friend Bruno is..., ‘Bruno, an old friend of mine, is...’, ‘I have a friend, Bruno, who...). But, this actually serves to bolster my claims about how we manage to communicate with and understand names in such cases. It points to the fact that communication succeeds by way of speakers signaling to their interlocutors what kind of object or person is being discussed because they know their interlocutors will be engaged in the process of building a descriptive identification of the name’s referent.
See footnote 1 for discussion of this presupposition.
You may become a producer not just by an act of baptism or the observation of an act of baptism, but also by introduction (‘This is NN’) or by observing the practice (‘Look, now NN has the ball!’). In these ways, producers can introduce other speakers into the practice as producers. (See, Evans 1982, pp. 376–377).
There is delicacy in part because we do not want to rule out well-functioning practices in which all the producers have died, for example. We may also wish to make space for special practices that lack producers, such as practices for descriptive names. See also footnotes 55 and 57 for further discussion of reasons why the reliance of the practice on the judgments of producers requires delicacy to spell out.
Consumers can act as both speakers and hearers in communications involving the name. The term ‘consumer’ should not be understood to entail that consumers in a name-using practice can only receive testimony involving the name. The mark of a consumer in the practice is that she can only grasp the content pragmatically conveyed by uses of the name (including her own uses), not the content semantically expressed by it.
It’s worth noting that the pragmatic picture of communication given in Sect. 6.1, according to which conveyed contents are generated via a non-gricean procedure triggered by general knowledge of the way that names contribute semantically to the truth-conditions of utterances containing them is not found in Evans (1982). What I take from Evans is the claim that name-using practices have a two-tier structure, and the producer/consumer distinction.
As we know, the producers may disappear at some point, and the names can remain meaningful. This happens most obviously in cases of people whose lives are well documented for historical purposes. It’s worth noting that, in a case where the producers of a name have all disappeared and there is little documentation of the name’s referent, the reference of the name is in fact less secure.
Unless the description is rigidified, or indexed to a particular time, that is.
The case therefore also illustrates why, even setting aside cases of practices with no producers, some delicacy is required in spelling out the sense in which the semantic value of a name is dependent on the judgments of producers.
The ‘Madagascar’ example in Evans (1985) is similar in illustrating the way that a name’s referent is connected to the judgments of users of the name, although he had not yet introduced the producer/consumer distinction at this point in time.
See also Soames (2002).
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Jason Bridges, Aidan Gray, John Hawthorne, Robin Jeshion, Michael Kremer, and Josef Stern for discussion, as well as to an audience at PLUK (Philosophy of Language in the UK) 2014. The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013) / ERC Grant Agreement n. 312938.
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Goodman, R. On the supposed connection between proper names and singular thought. Synthese 195, 197–223 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1202-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1202-1