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Millian descriptivism defended

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Abstract

I reply to the argument of Caplan (Philos Stud 133:181–198, 2007) against the conjunction of Millianism with the view that utterances of sentences involving names often pragmatically convey descriptively enriched propositions.

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Notes

  1. Fodor (1990) is an example of a Millian who rejects this sort of principle.

  2. The fullest defense of the view is provided in Soames (2002).

  3. The parenthetical qualification is needed because in at least a large (though difficult to delimit) class of utterances—utterances which are not ironic, sarcastic, etc.—it seems as though the speaker is counted as having conveyed whatever proposition is semantically expressed by the sentence uttered, even if this proposition is uninformative, relative to the assumptions of the conversational participants. But the cases relevant to the evaluation of Millian descriptivism are cases in which a speaker conveys p without uttering a sentence which semantically expresses p.

  4. The Fregean descriptivist could abandon this sort of ‘orthodox Fregeanism’ and adopt the propositions expressed by sentences like ‘Hesperus is a planet’ express propositions like that expressed by

    [the xx is the brightest object in the morning sky & x = o] x is a planet.

    relative to an assignment of Hesperus to the free variable ‘o’. On this view, as with Millian views, the object to which a name refers is a constituent of the propositions expressed by sentences involving the name; unlike Millian views, the name figures in those propositions as part of the content of a definite description. This would avoid the problem discussed above, since on such a view the descriptive information which, along with the object, gives the content of the description, needn’t be uniquely satisfied by that object.

    However, I doubt that many Fregean descriptivists will be attracted to this sort of view, since many Fregeans object to the idea that objects could be constituents of propositions at all. This is both because of Frege-style incredulity (‘Mont Blanc with its snowfields is not itself a component part of the thought that Mont Blanc is more than 4000 m high’) and because of worries about conflicts between the idea that objects can be constituents of propositions and certain sorts of actualist and presentist theses. See, for example, Plantinga (1983).

  5. Even those who find Frege’s view that the meaning of a name varies from occasion to occasion plausible—such as Burge (1979)—don’t appear to contemplate the sort of wild context-sensitivity involved in the claim that the contents of names vary in the relevant way. For criticisms of the view that names could exhibit this kind of context-sensitivity, see the arguments against radical contextualism in Cappelen and LePore (2005). For criticisms of the view that Frege endorsed this sort of semantic variance, see May (2006). Thanks for helpful discussion of these points to Ben Caplan.

  6. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pressing this reply on behalf of the Fregean descriptivist. Caplan also mentions this sort of move as a possible Fregean descriptivist response to the semantic argument (192–194).

  7. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this way of putting the point.

  8. We can, of course, construct cases in which an utterance of a sentence \(\ulcorner \hbox{The } F \hbox{ is } G \urcorner\) does pragmatically convey a singular proposition involving the unique satisfier of \(\ulcorner \hbox{the } F \urcorner\)—this would just be a case in which the description is used referentially to pick out the object which uniquely satisfies it. (Of course, the usual examples of referential uses of descriptions are ones in which the object which the description is used referentially to pick out does not satisfy the description—as in the example of the referential use of ‘the man drinking a martini’ in Donnellan (1966)—but this is just a dramatic device to emphasize the gap between referential and attributive uses. The cases could just as well be set up so that the relevant object does uniquely satisfy the description.) The point is just that is is not a typical feature of utterances of sentences which express descriptive propositions, as the present defense of Fregean descriptivism would require.

  9. The Fregean descriptivist might respond to this worry by limiting the scope of the suggestion: perhaps singular propositions are not conveyed by assertoric utterances of all sentences which express descriptive propositions, but only by utterances of such sentences which include names—this again would be a sort of inversion of the Millian descriptivist’s position, since the Millian’s semantic distinction between names and descriptions would be mirrored by the Fregean descriptivist’s pragmatic distinction between names and descriptions.

    But this position is an awkward one, for on this sort of view it is not even clear that the distinction between names and descriptions can be drawn in the right way. One might, first, be tempted to draw the distinction on syntactic grounds; but then the problem discussed above re-emerges, since we can surely introduce an abbreviation, like Kaplan’s ‘Newman 1’ (see Kaplan 1968), which has syntactic form of a name but the content of the description it abbreviates. One can, as above, use such an abbreviation in a sentence without being in any position to entertain singular propositions about the object which uniquely satisfies the relevant description.

    And there’s obviously no semantic way of drawing the distinction, since the Fregean descriptivist just is someone who identifies the semantic contents of names with the semantic contents of descriptions. So this sort of view amounts to the claim that some sentences which express descriptive propositions convey singular propositions, though others do not, and that there is no systematic way to explain which sentences which express descriptive propositions fall into which category—except that all sentences of the sort that might be used to construct an intuitively convincing instance of Kripke’s modal or epistemic arguments are in the former category. Absent further explanation, this does not seem like a satisfying position.

    Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for helpful discussion of these points.

  10. Thanks to Ben Caplan and an anonymous reviewer for very helpful comments on previous versions of this paper.

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Speaks, J. Millian descriptivism defended. Philos Stud 149, 201–208 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-009-9345-2

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