Abstract
In Hanks (Philos Stud 134:141–164, 2007; Mind 120:11–52; 2011; Philos Phenom Res 86:155–182, 2013, Propositional Content, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2015) I defend a theory of propositions that locates the source of propositional unity in acts of predication that people perform in thought and speech. On my account, these acts of predication are judgmental or assertoric in character, and they commit the speaker to things being the way they are represented to be in the act of predication. This leads to a problem about negations, disjunctions, conditionals, and other kinds of embeddings. When you assert that a is F or b is G you do not assert that a is F, nor do you commit yourself to a’s being F. According to my theory, however, in uttering the disjunction you predicate F of a. What is going on? I account for these cases using the concept of cancellation. In uttering the disjunction, the act of predicating F of a is cancelled, and when an act of predication is cancelled it does not count as an assertion and does not commit the speaker to anything. But what is it for an act of predication to be cancelled? One immediate concern is that cancelled predication won’t provide a unified proposition to be the input to disjunction. In this paper I answer this and related objections by explaining and defending my concept of cancellation.
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Notes
In recent work Soames explains this extra element of endorsement in terms of the formation or activation of cognitive and behavioral dispositions. Soames prefers to think of the formation of these dispositions, not as an additional act alongside the act of predication, but as the way in which the act of predication is performed. So, to judge that a is F requires predicating F of a in a special affirmative way, which involves forming or activating certain dispositions. See (Soames 2015, pp. 18, 23, and 220).
I will say more about hypothetical predication in Sect. 6, note 15.
It’s worth noting that on the traditional account of propositions, as found in (Frege 1918), entertainment is neutral but not truth-evaluable. When you entertain a proposition, the proposition you entertain is true or false, but your act of entertaining it is not. You cannot accurately or inaccurately entertain a proposition. By contrast, judgment is truth-evaluable, but of course not neutral. When you judge that p you can get things right or wrong, but doing so requires taking a stand about whether p is the case. It is no accident that these two features, neutrality and truth-evaluability are kept separate on the traditional, Fregean view, since combining them leads to incoherence. There is no single act or state in the Fregean picture that is both truth-evaluable and neutral.
This is a requirement of Davidson’s principle of semantic innocence, (Davidson 1968).
I got this wrong in earlier work, where I wrote that in the utterance of ‘George is clever or Karla is foolish’ a speaker “neither predicates cleverness of George nor foolishness of Karla” (Hanks 2011, p. 21). That was a mistake.
It might be suggested that the theatrical context makes it impossible for the actor to have the necessary beliefs and intentions. Assuming that she understands the nature of this context, she will know that it is impossible for her to perform assertions for herself during the course of the play. If knowing (or believing) that \(\upphi \)-ing is impossible rules out intending to \(\upphi \), then the actor cannot intend to perform assertions. But this reinforces the point that the reason the actor is not making assertions is ultimately because of the context in which her utterances take place and not because of the presence or absence of various attitudes. Thanks to David Taylor for discussion of this point.
In recent work Soames inclines toward the view that to assert something is to perform an act of predication in a special assertoric way (Soames 2015, pp. 23–24). (This is similar to his idea that to judge something is to perform an act of predication in a special, affirmative way— see note 1.) Presumably, whether an act of predication is performed in this special assertoric way is up to the speaker. If that’s right then one could assert the disjuncts in a disjunction just by performing the relevant acts of predication in the right way. But it is not possible to assert the disjuncts in a disjunction. Soames’s account predicts that something is possible when in fact it is not. This problem is independent of whether Soames’s notion of predication is incoherent. Thanks to an anonymous referee for pointing this out.
An anonymous referee wondered about examples like ‘Either I’m hallucinating or the UK just voted to leave the EU’, or ‘Clinton will win the U.S. election or I’m a monkey’s uncle’, in which, intuitively, the speaker is asserting one of the disjuncts. I think these cases are best handled as examples of indirect speech acts (cf. Searle 1979, ch. 2). Directly or literally, the speaker asserts the disjunction but neither disjunct. Indirectly, the speaker asserts one of the disjuncts. The obvious falsity of one disjunct would make it easy for a hearer to work out that the other, non-absurd disjunct is being indirectly asserted.
I won’t take a stand on exactly what this conditional relation is, but if it helps to fix ideas it can be thought of as the material conditional relation, i.e. either__ is falseor __is true.
Note that (3) contains parentheses around the two disjuncts, whereas (4) contains angle brackets. This is supposed to capture the fact the order of the disjuncts can change in (3) without changing the resulting type, whereas this is not the case for (4). (3) is the type of act one performs by uttering either ‘a is F or b is G’ or ‘b is G or a is F’, whereas tokens of (4) require ‘a is F’ to occur as antecedent. See (Hanks 2015, §3.3).
It might be argued that in asserting a conjunction a speaker does not assert each conjunct. You might think that this is an illusion generated by the fact that each conjunct is an immediate logical consequence of the whole conjunction. But we often quite easily distinguish between what gets asserted and what follows immediately and obviously from what we assert. For any p and q, ‘p or q’ is a trivial and immediate logical consequence of p. But no one thinks that an assertion that p is also an assertion that p or q. Furthermore, take any account of the necessary and sufficient conditions for assertion – pick whichever account is your favorite. If those conditions hold for the utterance of the conjunction then they will surely also hold for the utterances of each conjunct. Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this issue.
Thanks to John Keller for suggesting this.
There’s no reason not to have something similar for disjunction, conjunction, and other two-place connectives. For example, ‘a is F or b is G’ can be classified as an instance of:
3b. \({\vdash \langle \langle {{\varvec{a}}}, {{\varvec{b}}}\rangle , \langle \textsc {or}, \langle \textsc {f,g}\rangle \rangle \rangle }\)
or is a function that maps pairs of properties to two-place relations, in this case the relation __is F or __ is G. In a token of (3b) a subject predicates this relation of the pair of a and b. Like predicate negation, there is no cancellation in this case. Tokens of (3b) are truth-conditionally equivalent to tokens of (3a) – the difference is a matter of how we classify and impose structure on the acts performed in the two cases. There can also be degenerate cases of this, as in ‘a is F or G’:
3c. \({\vdash \langle {\varvec{a}}, \langle \textsc {or-d}, \langle \textsc {f, g}\rangle \rangle \rangle }\)
or-d is a function that maps pairs of properties to one-place properties, e.g. the one-place property of being F or G. In a token of (9b) a speaker predicates this one-place property of a, where this act of predication is uncancelled. See (Hanks 2015, §4.3).
What about cases of hypothetical predication, e.g. supposing or hypothesizing that a is F? I am inclined to treat these as cases of cancelled predication. When a speaker says ‘Suppose that there is a greatest prime number’ she creates a cancellation context for her act of predication, which extends to other acts of predication that she performs within the scope of the supposition. This allows her to draw inferences from her supposition without taking on any commitments. As I argued earlier, hypothetical predication is impure predication. It is impure because it takes place in a cancellation context. See (Hanks 2015, §4.4) for discussion.
See Hanks (2015, ch. 9) for more on interrogative propositions, along with an extension of this approach to wh-questions.
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I presented earlier versions of this paper at the 2014 Texas Tech Propositions Workshop, the 2015 Ninth Barcelona Workshop on Issues in the Theory of Reference, and at Lawrence University in February 2016. Thanks to all the participants at these events for their questions and comments, with special thanks to Alex Grzankowski, Christopher Hom, Jeremy Schwartz, Manuel García-Carpintero, Bjørn Jespersen, Mark Phelan, Tom Ryckman, and Indrek Reiland.
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Hanks, P. On cancellation. Synthese 196, 1385–1402 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1260-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1260-4