Abstract
Some years ago, Machery, Mallon, Nichols, and Stich reported the results of experiments that reveal, they claim, cross-cultural differences in speaker’s ‘intuitions’ about Kripke’s famous Gödel–Schmidt case. Several authors have suggested, however, that the question they asked their subjects is ambiguous between speaker’s reference and semantic reference. Machery and colleagues have since made a number of replies. It is argued here that these are ineffective. The larger lesson, however, concerns the role that first-order philosophy should, and more importantly should not, play in the design of such experiments and in the evaluation of their results.
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Notes
As Williamson (2004, 2007, 2016) keeps complaining, it is none too clear what ‘intuitions’ are supposed to be. I’ll assume here, minimally, that they are relatively spontaneous responses and, most importantly, are to be distinguished from the sorts of conclusions one reaches as a result of argument. This is in the ballpark of how Nagel (2012, p. 498) characterizes intuitions.
The difference here is supposed to be cultural, not geographical, but I shall use these labels, as they are common in the literature.
Machery (2012, p. 40) reports the results this way in a later paper. MMN&S reported their results somewhat differently.
Of course, this could be relevant, but we would need to be told how and why. One cannot simply say that the argument was only intended to apply to cases involving proper names.
Thus, Devitt (2004, p. 281) writes that “the core of the referential meaning of a description token is its reference-determining relation to the particular object that the speaker has in mind in using the description”. So different tokens will refer to different objects, depending upon which object the speaker has in mind when uttering that token.
The league was founded in 1943, in large part because so many mens’ teams had been disbanded after the United States entered into the Second World War. The league was quite successful for a time but was itself disbanded in 1954. There is now an exhibit at the Baseball Hall of Fame dedicated to the women who played in A League of Their Own, that being the title of a documentary and then a feature film about the league and the women who played in it.
See Apendix for the details.
We’ll discuss re-wordings of the question in the next section. But note that the question actually has to ask about uses: The phrase in question is context-sensitive—it uses the present tense—so the phrase itself refers to no particular object. Even if we were asking about semantic reference, then, we would have to be asking about (potential) uses of the phrase.
And it is at least arguable that, even if we want to ask a question about the semantic reference of “Gödel”, we must still ask about uses of this expression. It is widely held nowadays that proper names are general terms (see e.g. Gray 2014, Fara 2015, and references contained therein): that they do not denote one particular individual but many individuals, e.g., all the people named “Gödel”. On this view, which seems seems to originate with Burge (1973), it is only certain uses of “Gödel” that refer, even in the semantic sense, to particular, though different, Gödels. If that is the correct view of names, then the probe question must be about uses of the name, not about the name itself, even if it concerns semantic reference.
Devitt (2011, p. 428, n. 9) mentions this sort of phenomenon, too, but he ties it specifically to names of authors. Clearly, however, the phenomenon is more general. One could, e.g., use the name of a warrior attributively when talking about the plans for a certain battle. Just how widespread the phenomenon might be is not so clear, but I’d speculate that it can arise whenever a certain act is associated strongly enough with a given agent.
It is not clear from MS&D’s text whether the emphasis was included in the question itself or whether thay have added it to mark the changes. It was presumably the latter, but it won’t matter.
Both relations are probably more complicated. The latter makes reference also to a language: that of the speaker. But the gist of the point is nonetheless correct.
One might object that Deutsch’s claim can’t be true: Many participants do answer “the person who got hold of the manuscript”, and this can’t plausibly understood as an answer to a question about speaker’s reference. I’ll argue below, however (see page 12), that it can be so understood.
These were students who visited the philosophy department’s table at a college event for first-year students in October 2015 (and who, therefore, had little if any prior exposure to philosophy, and certainly not to philosophy of language). Those who were willing to participate were given a printed version of the story and were asked to circle their preferred answer. Thanks to Zachary Barnett and Tatiana Spottiswoode for helping me with this. It was quite the ice-breaker.
This was illustrated by how students reacted to my survey question. There were several quizzical smirks. A few thought it was a trick question; a couple thought it was a riddle; several asked if there was a right answer. (They were told there wasn’t and that we were just interested in how people responded to the question.) Many people thought for a long time before answering. Some even felt compelled to justify their answers. These were usually people who gave the ‘speaker’s reference’ answer, and they usually said something like, “Well, they’re talking about Jones”.
And what makes this all the more complex is that only certain sorts of intentions are irrelevant. The ‘ambiguity’ of proper names—the existence of lots of Gödels—suggests that the speaker’s intentions are relevant in to determining which Gödel is the reference of any particular use of “Gödel”, though exactly what role these intentions are playing depends upon how we resolve the issues mentioned in footnote (9).
Related points have been made by both Bach (2002) and Lam (2010, p. 326) and are even noted by MS&D themselves (Machery et al. 2015, p. 72). Indeed, the slipperiness of the semantics–pragmatics distinction has been one of the overarching themes of philosophy of language for the last twenty years or so.
Similar remarks might be made about the distinction between saying and meaning, originally due to Grice (1989), of which Kripke’s distinction is really just a special case. Deutsch (2009, pp. 460–4) has many sensible things to say about the relevance of this more general distinction to experimental philosophy. Much of it, as Deutsch is well aware, is strikingly similar to things Grice said when first introducing his distinction, though his target was ordinary language philosophy.
If it is irrelevant whom John might be intending to talk about, why do we care to whom the name refers when John uses it?
Or, perhaps better, to the person who is (wrongly) known as the author of the theorem. I’ll speak, though, of the person who published it, for ease of exposition. (Note, by the way, that if the description theory were correct, Gödel would not be wrongly known as the author of the theorem. Schmidt would be so known, though under the name “Gödel”. Which is part of Kripke’s point.)
And if they did, would they still be reporting their ‘intuitions’? Or would they be making reasoned judgments?
Kaplan (1989§II) would later change his mind about this issue.
I’ve discussed such cases in more detail elsewhere (Heck 2014, pp. 351–2).
The probe question does not actually ask about this particular utterance, but since this is the one utterance that has been mentioned, one might expect it to be particularly salient to the subjects.
It is not a problem if some of these sources of confusion conflict with one another. Different subjects could be liable to different sorts of confusion, and a single subject could even be subject to conflicting confusions.
Lam (2010) once suggested that some subjects might think that “Gödel” is a so-called descriptive name, like “Jack the Ripper”: one whose reference is, by stipulation, the unique object satifying some description. Machery et al. (2010, p. 364) have replied that to regard “Gödel” as a descriptive name “just is to have descriptivist intuitions about” it. But this is confused. Someone who says that, had some other person committed all those grisly murders, the name “Jack the Ripper” would have referred to them, is not reporting a ‘descriptivist intuition’. They are simply registering their appreciation of the fact that “Jack the Ripper” is a descriptive name, i.e., that, as a matter of the specific meaning this name has in our language, it refers to the person who committed certain grisly murders, whoever that may be. Someone who made a similar claim about “Gödel” would just be registering their mis understanding of it.
Though, on the other hand, Sytsma and Livengood (2011, p. 323) failed to replicate at least part of those results.
Thanks to Nat Hansen and Max Deutsch for conversations that contributed to my writing of this paper; to Nat and to Brian Weatherson for comments on a draft; and to Isobel Heck and Paul Egré for help with the statistics. Thanks also to anonymous referees whose comments on earlier drafts helped to improve this one.
In fact, all four of these students chose answer (A).
Cullen expresses a number of concerns about the way surveys are used in experimental philosophy. His main conclusion, that “what has been regarded as evidence for the instability of philosophical intuitions is, at least in some cases, better accounted for in terms of subjects’ reactions to subtle pragmatic cues contained in the surveys” (Cullen 2010, p. 275), is obviously compatible with what has been argued here.
These were on a second page, so this question was asked after the answer to the first question had been recorded.
The one student who chose answer (B) answered (2) on the follow-up question.
As I argued in Section 3, in the case of the Gödel–Schmidt vignette, the speaker’s reference interpretation is compatible with both answers. That is not plausible here.
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Appendix: The Baseball Experiment:
Appendix: The Baseball Experiment:
Students from my Fall 2016 introductory logic class were invited to participate in what was described to them as an experiment connected with my research. They were assured that no identifying information would be collected and that no one would ever know whether they chose to participate. Those who did choose to participate were directed to a webpage hosted at Survey Monkey where they found the following story:
Grace is a ten-year old girl who lives at the Laughing Pines apartments with her family. Grace is obsessed with baseball. And all summer long now, her neighbor Bob has been regaling her and some of the other kids with stories about how he used to be a professional baseball player. In fact, however, and unbeknownst to Grace, Bob never even played amateur baseball. He just enjoys the company of the children and is, perhaps, a bit delusional. By coincidence, however, there is an elderly woman, Lily, who also lives at Laughing Pines and who played for several years in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. Grace, though, has never met Lily.
They were then asked:
When Grace uses the phrase “the baseball player who lives at Laughing Pines”, is she talking about:
- (A)
Bob, who never played professional baseball? or
- (B)
Lily, who did once play professional baseball?
Students were also asked whether they had previously taken a course in philosophy of language. Four of the forty-three respondents said they had, and their answers were discarded, since their prior experience with philosophy of language might be thought to distort their ‘intuitions’.Footnote 30
Of the remaining thrity-nine students, only one chose answer (B); the other thirty-eight chose answer (A). It is sufficiently clear that this is statistically significant. A two-sided binomial test confirmed the fact, with p < 10−9, the null hypothesis being that subjects would have no preference between the answers.
One might worry that various details of the vignette, which could easily be changed, might have encouraged students to prefer answer (A).Footnote 31 That, however, is the point. What Machery and Stich (2012, p. 506) claim, recall, is that the fact that “no specific utterance is mentioned and no contextual information is provided” should force subjects to prefer answer (B). But the story and question I presented to my students have those features, which therefore cannot by themselves be sufficient to prevent the speaker’s reference interpretation.
I also asked my subjects how they felt about the answer they gave, offering them three choices:Footnote 32
-
1.
I could just as easily have given the other answer. Both seemed pretty good to me.
-
2.
Although I am confident in my own answer, I can easily see why someone else might have wanted to give the other one.
-
3.
My own answer seems completely right to me. I can’t really see why anyone would give the other one.
I expected most students to give answer (1) or (2). That is, I expected students at least to be aware of the ambiguity in the probe question. In fact, however, the thirty-eight students who chose answer (A) answered the follow-up question this way:Footnote 33
Most students, then, not only interpreted the probe question in a way at odds with Machery and Stich’s prediction but could not understand why anyone else would interpret it the other way. This might be regarded as some confirmation of Deutsch’s suggestion, quoted earlier, that “the vignette question… nearly forces a speaker’s reference interpretation” (Deutsch 2009, p. 454, fn. 7).Footnote 34
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Heck, R.G. Speaker’s Reference, Semantic Reference, and Intuition. Rev.Phil.Psych. 9, 251–269 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-017-0362-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-017-0362-3