Abstract
Richard Heck, Jr. has recently (in “Intuition and the substitution argument,” Analytical Philosophy 2014) reconfigured the debate over Russellianism about proper names. Sidestepping the usual argument, which concerns “intuitions” about substitutions within “that”-clauses, he proposes a new argument based on the claims that (i) beliefs are individuated by their psychological roles and (ii) ordinary language has belief-specifying locutions that reflect that individuation. Focusing on (ii) I argue that contrary to what Heck claims, “that”-clause ascriptions are not the only candidates. In fact there are much better candidates: ascriptions involving direct quotations. I explain how the proposal is novel (it avoids the usual problems with such ascriptions) and how it answers the requirements of Heck’s argument. More broadly what Heck’s argument brings out is the diversity of resources ordinary language has for specifying beliefs; a defense of Russellianism needn’t rest entirely on claims about “that”-clause ascriptions.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
For example, Pryor (2016), citing Heck (2012) as a like-minded precursor, has recently proposed a “mental graphs” vocabulary for modelling the contents of beliefs and other mental states, arguing that “Frege Problems in thought are best modeled using graph-theoretic machinery” (1). This vocabulary lets us distinctly specify even members of a large set of beliefs that not only have the same Russellian contents but fit the same t-ascriptions—situations akin to the two-Superman-beliefs scenario I sketched above. The illustrative scenario Pryor uses is one in which “Alice believes her local baseball team has several Bobs on it. In fact, they only have one Bob...[and] the memories, information, and attitudes she associates with ‘each’ of them is the same—or as close to this as possible” (3).
Note that the problem here arises most vividly on the hearer’s side not the speaker’s. Presumably a speaker would assert a t-ascription only if they do know the truth condition of the complement sentence in the “that”-clause. Schiffer’s point is that on Davidson’s account, a hearer’s understanding of the ascription doesn’t require that they know that, contrary to what we know about what is involved in understanding t-ascriptions. I’m grateful to a referee for querying this point.
Why not exclude all locutions that aren’t truth-condition-encoding, not the just the ones at the opposite extreme? Because that woud invite the rejoinder that the Specification Challenge is stacking the deck in favor of t-ascriptions or locutions that simply state truth conditions. And it would be unmotivated, inasmuch as the thought behind the Challenge is that it’s psychological roles that belief specifications need to capture.
The argument here requires that whatever it is a direct quotation refers to, it is something that can be interpreted differently: it is words that are directly quoted, not words with their meanings somehow built in. As Max Cresswell puts it, in his exposition: “we can speak of the same language but with a different meaning assignment” (1980, 19). I’ll work with this common assumption as well. Doing so only makes things harder for me, since denying the assumption would allow me to reject the argument underwriting the worry about quotational belief specifications that I’m taking it upon myself to address.
Bigelow says that his argument is “very like” that given by Church (1950), who in turn credited Langford (1937). (Stephen Schiffer’s objection to Davidson’s (1968) account of indirect discourse (discussed above, p. 7), is of the same general sort.) Seymour (1992) attempts a rehabilitation of quotational analyses. He tries to avoid Bigelow’s argument by holding that “the sentences that occur within quotes in a substitutional formula [which he proposes as the quotational paraphrase of a t-ascription] semantically presuppose their semantical rules” (193). It is hard to judge the success of the attempt, since Seymour does not develop the idea of a quoted sentence presupposing its semantical rules.
In what Portner says is “the ‘standard theory’ of modality within formal semantics” (47), that of Kratzer (1977, 1981), context contributes a “conversational background” f, a function from worlds to sets of propositions; and modals are evaluated, at a world w, as quantifying either universally or existentially over the set of worlds in which all the propositions in f(w) are true. So our “can” concerning Lois, evaluated at a world w, introduces existential quantification over all the worlds in which the propositions capturing the conversational background—in this case, “the situation in which [Lois] finds herself” (in w)—are true. Equivalently: it is the expressive options Lois has in worlds in which her situation is the same as in w that matter to the truth (at w) of a q-ascription concerning her. So when evaluating the modal at the actual world, we needn’t worry about farfetched scenarios in which Lois’s words have changed their meanings, or she is mute, or her belief-expressing mental machinery has gone awry, etc. (Of course we do need to worry about them when evaluating at worlds in which they occur, but that’s fine: we get the right truth value by doing so.)
This solution would not handle cases, if such are possible, of the sort that Pryor discusses (see above, n. 1): Alice’s believing that there are multiple Bobs on her baseball team, without believing anything distinguishing about any of them. For she would have nothing distinguishing to say about any of them in a relative clause. As cases of this sort are much more exotic than Frege cases or even Paderewski cases, I assume that Heck would not count it against a proposal that it fails to offer a specificatory solution that works in this sort of case. (I’m grateful to a referee for pointing this out.)
One might wonder whether this introduces a regress of t-ascriptions, if knowing a sentence’s truth condition comes from knowing its meaning. For that knowledge is itself knowledge of what meaning t-ascriptions state: “Superman can fly’ means that Superman can fly. But we don’t here have the same challenge, for coarse-grained (i.e. Russellian) meaning ascriptions are enough to get to knowledge of truth conditions: “that Superman can fly” and “that Clark Kent can fly” specify the same truth condition. (I’m grateful to a referee for posing this question.)
See also Stalnaker’s (1984, 4–5) discussion of the “pragmatic picture” and the “linguistic picture” of mental representation.
It is indeed remarkable that the Frege cases philosophers discuss always concern substitution of codenoting terms or noun phrases, rather than verb phrases, quantifiers or other parts of speech. Of course this fact about us, if it is a fact, is contingent; but our practice does develop in response to contingencies, if they are widespread.
I will not try to justify this claim here, as doing so would require a full inquiry into the lexical semantics of “believes.” We would have to decide, for example, whether we want the semantics of “Susan believes John” to run along exactly the same lines as “Susan believes ‘Robin wins’.”
Not all philosophers have neglected such uses. Geach (1967) vigorously defended the legitimacy of what he called “the oratio recta construction”—his example being
James believes “My wife’s fear is ‘I have cancer’.”
He claimed that “Philosophers have a curious prejudice against” this form even though it is “common in all vernaculars” (167).
I say “complex” because mixed quotations are not conjunctions of direct and indirect quotations. See Geurts and Maier (2003), criticizing Potts (2007) (which was circulating in manuscript several years before being published) on this point. That exchange concerns mixed quotation, but Geurts’s and Maier’s reasoning applies also to mixed belief ascription. (I have proposed an account of the logical form of mixed quotation in McCullagh (2007).)
References
Bach, K. (1999). The myth of conventional implicature. Linguistics and Philosophy, 22, 327–366.
Berg, J. (1988). The pragmatics of substitutivity. Linguistics and Philosophy, 11, 355–370.
Bigelow, J. (1978). Believing in semantics. Linguistics and Philosophy, 2, 101–144.
Braun, D. (1998). Understanding belief reports. Philosophical Review, 107, 555–595.
Cappelen, H., & Lepore, E. (1997). Varieties of quotation. Mind, 106, 429–450.
Carey, S. (2009). The origin of concepts. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Carnap, R. (1947). Meaning and necessity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Church, A. (1950). On Carnap’s analysis of statements of assertion and belief. Analysis, 10, 97–99.
Collins, P. (2009). Modals and quasi-modals in English. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi.
Cresswell, M. (1980). Quotational theories of propositional attitudes. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 9, 17–40.
Crimmins, M. (1992). Talk about beliefs. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Davidson, D. (1968). On saying that. Synthese, 19, 130–146. Reprinted in Inquiries into truth and interpretation (pp. 93–108). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Davies, M. (2008). The corpus of contemporary American English. Online resource. http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/.
Field, H. (2001). Attributions of meaning and content. In Truth and the absence of fact (pp. 157–174). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Frege, G. (1892). Über sinn und bedeutung. Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik 100, 25–50. Translated as On sense and meaning. In P. Geach & M. Black (Eds.), Translations from the philosophical writings of Gottlob Frege (pp. 56–78). Oxford: Blackwell.
Geach, P. (1967). The identity of propositions. In Logic matters (pp. 166–174). Oxford: Blackwell.
Geurts, B., & Maier, E. (2003). Quotation in context. Belgian Journal of Linguistics, 17, 109–128.
Heck, R. (2012). Solving Frege’s puzzle. Journal of Philosophy, 109, 132–174.
Heck, R. (2014). Intuition and the substitution argument. Analytic Philosophy, 55, 1–30.
Heim, I., & Kratzer, A. (1998). Semantics in generative grammar. Oxford: Blackwell.
Kratzer, A. (1977). What ‘must’ and ‘can’ must and can mean. Linguistics and Philosophy, 1, 337–355.
Kratzer, A. (1981). The notional category of modality. In H. J. Eikmeyer & H. Rieser (Eds.), Words, worlds, and contexts (pp. 38–74). Berlin and New York: de Gruyter.
Kripke, S. (1979). A puzzle about belief. In A. Margalit (Ed), Meaning and use (pp. 239–283). Dordrecht: D. Reidel. Reprinted in Salmon and Soames (1988), pp. 102–148.
Langford, C. H. (1937). Review of the significs of pasigraphic systems: A contribution to the psychology of the mathematical thought process by E. W. Beth. Journal of Symbolic Logic, 2, 53–54.
Lewis, D. (1976). The paradoxes of time travel. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 13, 145–152.
Lewis, D. (1986). On the plurality of worlds. Oxford: Blackwell.
McCullagh, M. (2007). Understanding mixed quotation. Mind, 116, 927–946.
Portner, P. (2009). Modality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Potts, C. (2007). The dimensions of quotation. In C. Barker & P. Jacobson (Eds.), Direct compositionality (pp. 405–431). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pryor, J. (2016). Mental graphs. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 7, 309–341.
Rieber, S. (1994). Review of talk about beliefs, by Mark Crimmins. Philosophical Psychology, 7, 395–397.
Salmon, N. (1986). Frege’s puzzle. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Salmon, N. (1989). Illogical belief. Philosophical Perspectives, 3, 243–285.
Salmon, N., & Soames, S. (Eds.). (1988). Propositions and attitudes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Saul, J. (1997). Substitution and simple sentences. Analysis, 57, 102–108.
Saul, J. (1998). The pragmatics of attitude ascription. Philosophical Studies, 92, 364–389.
Saul, J. (2007). Simple sentences, substitution, and intuitions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schiffer, S. (1987). Remnants of meaning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Schiffer, S. (1992). Belief ascription. Journal of Philosophy, 89, 499–521.
Sellars, W. (1962). Truth and correspondence. Journal of Philosophy, 59, 29–56.
Seymour, M. (1992). A sentential theory of propositional attitudes. Journal of Philosophy, 89, 181–201.
Siegel, J., & Shuster, J. (1938). Superman. Action Comics, 1, 1–13.
Soames, S. (1987a). Direct reference, propositional attitudes, and semantic content. Philosophical Topics, 15, 47–87.
Soames, S. (1987b). Substitutivity. In J. J. Thomson (Ed.), On being and saying: Essays for Richard Cartwright (pp. 99–132). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Soames, S. (2002). Beyond rigidity: The unfinished semantic agenda of naming and necessity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Soames, S. (2005). Naming and asserting. In Z. Gendler Szabó (Ed.), Semantics versus pragmatics (pp. 356–382). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Stalnaker, R. (1984). Inquiry. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Wettstein, H. (1986). Has semantics rested on a mistake? Journal of Philosophy, 83, 185–209.
Acknowledgements
I’m more than usually grateful to an anonymous referee, who prompted significant improvements to the discussion in § 6.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
McCullagh, M. Russellianism unencumbered. Philos Stud 174, 2819–2843 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0812-2
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0812-2