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Pleonastic propositions and de re belief

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Abstract

In The Things We Mean, Stephen Schiffer defends a novel account of the entities to which belief reports relate us and to which their that-clauses refer. For Schiffer, the referred-to entities—propositions—exist in virtue of contingencies of our linguistic practices, deriving from “pleonastic restatements” of ontologically neutral discourse. Schiffer’s account of the individuation of propositions derives from his treatment of that -clause reference. While that -clauses are referential singular terms, their reference is not determined by the speaker’s referential intentions. Rather, their reference is determined in a top-down manner—in Schiffer’s words, “by what the speaker and audience mutually take to be essential to the truth-value of the belief report.” While this accounts for a deep disanalogy between belief reports and other relational propositions—a disanalogy emphasized by Schiffer—I argue that the proposal runs into trouble when we consider the case of de re belief. I close by showing how a modification of Schiffer’s approach—one differing in essential ways from the theory developed in Things—is capable of handling these difficulties.

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Notes

  1. Schiffer (2003). All stand-alone parenthetical references will be to this work.

  2. Arriving at these criteria will involve assigning references to the simple singular terms occurring in the report. But this process will not by itself determine a referent for the that-clause.

  3. I’m indebted here to Ray Buchanan.

  4. While the face-value theory concerns the logical form of (1b), it makes no claim about the nature of the entity referred to by the contained that-clause, other than the fact that it is a proposition—for current purposes, an abstract, mind- and language-independent entity possessing truth conditions, and possessing them essentially and absolutely.

  5. The theory is also motivated by substitution failure in de dicto reports, as exemplified, for example, in the inference from ‘Adele believes that groundhogs are herbivores’ to ‘Adele believes that woodchucks are herbivores.’ The application to these cases is unproblematic, so I will not discuss them further.

  6. One might wish to question this. Rosefeldt (2008) raises the possibility that the quantifiers in (A) are non-nominal quantifiers—quantifiers that are not instantiated by singular terms. (See also Hofweber 2016.) Consider the argument:

    Whatever Yvette does irritates Ada.

    Yvette smokes.

    So, smoking irritates Ada.

    Clearly, ‘smoking’ does not function here as a singular term, even if it instantiates ‘whatever Yvette does.’ But then we are led to wonder: what’s the basis for thinking the that-clause in (A) is a singular term? The mere fact that it instantiates a quantifier phrase doesn’t settle the question, since for all that we know, the quantifier is a non-nominal quantifier.

    While I am sympathetic to the worry, I will set it aside for present purposes. It should be noted, however, that if Rosefeldt is correct, then the contrast between (1a) and (1b) would not require explanation, as the two differ in logical form.

  7. For discussion, see Ostertag (2016). See also Buchanan (2012: 13–16). As Schiffer points out (77–79), analyses of numerical expressions in the tradition of Frege’s Grundlagen (e.g. Wright 1983) are motivated by similar concerns and also adopt a top-down approach.

    Recanati (1993: 356) also endorses a “top-down constraint” on that-clause reference, although not in the context of a pleonastic theory.

  8. Another aspect of neo-Fregeanism that the pleonastic theorist eschews is the thesis that that-clause reference is compositionally determined.

  9. The classic discussion is Salmon (1996); see especially the Introduction, pp. 1–9.

  10. The neo-Fregean also endorses the idea that ‘he’ “does more than refer to Superman.” On her view, it refers to a mode-of-presentation of Superman, which combines with the mode of presentation of the property flies to form the proposition that serves as the referent of (4)’s that-clause. But this fails to make sense of the clear discrepancy between the speaker’s referential intentions in uttering (1a) and (1b). Schiffer also denies, on independent grounds, that there are “propositional building blocks” of the sort required by the neo-Fregean analysis; see, e.g., pp. 80--82.

  11. I’ve fixed a typographical error.

  12. A parallel argument can be constructed in which the first premise is: (4) (‘Lois believes that he flies’), with the pronoun understood as referring to Superman. In what follows I will, following Schiffer’s discussion in (2016), focus on (9a) and its negation, but the choice of example doesn’t affect the argument.

  13. Schiffer does not gloss the idea of arguments’ being necessarily equivalent, but I assume he means that arguments X and Y are necessarily equivalent just in case (i) the conjunction of the premises of X and the conjunction of the premises of Y are each true with respect to the same possible worlds, (ii) the conclusions of X and Y are each true with respect to the same possible worlds, and (iii) X and Y are both modally valid or are both modally invalid (where an argument is modally valid just in case every world at which all its premises are true is a world at which its conclusion is true, and modally invalid just in case some world at which all its premises are true is a world at which its conclusion is false).

  14. If fact, Schiffer needs to tell us a story as to why it doesn’t entail the following, which, with (10c), does give us an explicit contradiction:

    ¬∃x, p(p is an x-dependent proposition that is true iff x flies & Lois believes p)

    I will let this consideration pass for now. But the problem presented for the direct reference theory in Ostertag (2005) seems to apply with equal force to Schiffer’s current proposal.

  15. The requirement concerns the validity of statements in ordinary language and makes no assumptions about logical form.

  16. That is, even if we assume that an argument is modally valid, it does not follow that one who grasps both the premises and the conclusion thereby grasps that the conclusion follows from the premises. One can grasp what is expressed by both ‘There is water in the bottle’ and ‘There is H20 in the bottle’ and not recognize that the propositions are the same and thus that the inference from the former to the latter is valid. (On modal validity, see note 13, above.)

  17. Perhaps not; see Sect. 6, below.

  18. I take (C) and (9) to be similar in point of being intuitively valid. What the quoted argument is intended to render dubious is the attempt to explain the validity of an analytic inference—an inference that is intuitively but not formally valid—by appeal to a “necessarily equivalent” inference that is formally valid.

  19. Schiffer (p.c.) tells me that this is the reading he intended.

  20. In addition, it’s worth mentioning that the analyticity strategy would fail to apply to the inference from (4) to (6). This cannot hold solely in virtue of the linguistic meaning of the sentences, since the premise, (4), contains a context-sensitive item.

  21. There are of course inferences of the following sort:

    (*)

    John saw a cat. So, John saw an animal.

    These involve logical quantifiers and yet are unproblematically analytic. Why are they acceptable and not (9)? The answer is that inferences like (*) are not really basic, but logically valid given previously accepted analytical statements (in the case of (*), ‘Cats are animals’).

  22. As mentioned above (note 7), Recanati (1993) endorses a “top down constraint.”.

  23. One thing worth mentioning, however, is that the current view is consistent with the compositionality of that-clause reference: the referent of ‘that Superman flies’ at a given context is the Russellian proposition, 〈Superman, flying〉, supplied by the semantically valued components of the that-clause, paired with a mode of presentation m of that proposition, supplied by context, yielding 〈〈Superman, flying〉, m〉.

  24. Propositions thus conceived are “quasi-singular” in the terminology of Schiffer (1978). The approach here described has broad similarities with that developed in Chapter 18 of Recanati (1993), itself influenced by the earlier Schiffer paper.

  25. This is true even though the proposition that the resulting that-clause refers to is truth-conditionally equivalent to the proposition referred to by (9a)’s that-clause.

  26. See the discussion of “Quine’s alleged theorem” in Kaplan (1986).

  27. Although the explanation the direct reference theorist offers may break down in certain contexts. See Schiffer (2006).

  28. This paper was presented to the New York Philosophy of Language Workshop on April 9, 2018. I’d like to thank the audience at that event for their feedback and to thank, as well, an anonymous referee, Oliver Marshall, Frank Pupa, Stephen Schiffer, Joanna Smolenski, Richard Stillman, Rosemary Twomey, and (especially) Ray Buchanan for helpful comments on an earlier draft.

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Ostertag, G. Pleonastic propositions and de re belief. Philos Stud 177, 3529–3547 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-019-01381-2

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