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Narrow-scoping for wide-scopers

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Abstract

Many philosophers think that requirements of rationality are “wide-scope”. That is to say: they are requirements to make true some material conditional, such that one counts as satisfying the requirement iff one either makes the conditional’s antecedent false or makes its consequent true. These contrast with narrow-scope requirements, where the ‘requires’ operator takes scope only over the consequent of the conditional. Many of the philosophers who have preferred wide-scope requirements to narrow-scope requirements have also endorsed a corresponding semantic claim, namely that ordinary talk about rationality, despite appearances to the contrary, expresses wide-scope claims. In doing so, they seek to avoid attributing massive error to ordinary speakers. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that the wide-scope semantics inadequately captures the meaning of ordinary talk about rationality. It seems, then, that we are left with a dilemma: either give up the view that requirements of rationality are wide-scope, or accept an implausible semantics for ordinary talk about rationality, or attribute massive error to speakers. In this paper, I argue that this dilemma is only apparent, since we can appeal to a standard kind of contextualist semantics for modals to explain why narrow-scope talk comes out true in virtue of the wide-scope requirements. My view, then, combines wide-scoping about the explanatorily fundamental requirements of rationality with a contextualist variant of a narrow-scope semantics. I argue that this view gives us the best of both worlds, as well as solving related puzzles and challenges for the extant views in the literature.

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Notes

  1. Bratman (2009), Broome (1999, 2004, 2007, 2013: ch. 8), Brunero (2010, 2012), Dancy (1977, 2000: ch. 3), Darwall (1983), Gensler (1985), Greenspan (1975), Hussain (ms.), Rippon (2011), Setiya (2007), Scanlon (2007), Smith (2007), Wallace (2001), Way (2010, 2011).

  2. See, e.g., Greenspan (1975, esp. 273–274), Gensler (1985, p. 159); Broome (2004, pp. 29–30).

  3. Schroeder (2004, 2009), Kolodny (2005), Lord (2011, 2014a).

  4. In particular, I won’t have anything to say about the so-called “symmetry objection” to the wide-scope account, at least not about the version of it raised by Schroeder (2004) and Kolodny (2005). Myself, I actually don’t think this objection is especially worrying for the wide-scope view compared with the problem I discuss here; see especially Way (2010, 2011) and Brunero (2010, 2012) for responses to it.

  5. C.f., e.g., Broome (2013), Skorupski (2010), Raz (2011).

  6. C.f., e.g., Broome (2013), Setiya (2004), Scanlon (1998, 2007), Ridge (2014).

  7. See, e.g., Dancy (1977), Broome (2013, pp. 32, 111), Brunero (2010, p. 30).

  8. The claim could be, slightly more cautiously, that (1) is scope-ambiguous between a narrow- and wide-scope reading, but that the latter is the charitable interpretation.

  9. See Dancy (1977), Broome (2013, pp. 32, 111), Brunero (2010, p. 30).

  10. See also Silk (2014, p. 6), Dowell (2012, p. 279).

  11. Critiques of a wide-scope semantics for modal talk go back to Hansson (1969), Van Fraassen (1972), Lewis (1973) and Kratzer (1981). For more recent developments of the critique in the context of recent literature on rationality, see especially Dowell (2012) and Silk (2014).

  12. See the references in the previous footnote.

  13. The example is a variant of the so-called “paradox of gentle murder”, which was introduced by Forrester (1984).

  14. See Greenspan (1975, p. 263), Bratman (1987, pp. 23–27), Wallace (2001, pp. 16–17), Broome (2004, pp. 30, 49).

  15. Kratzer (1981) is the canonical source for the view I am drawing on. Kratzer (2012) contains a revised version of this paper along with other important papers of hers on related matters. Kratzer’s view also draws significantly on, and shares similarities with, work by David Lewis; see, Lewis (1973, 1974).

  16. Kratzer calls them the “accessible” worlds.

  17. I don’t mean this to sound too much just like any old social norms will do. The salient norms in a context may be, for example, the true moral norms, where this is specified de dicto. Speakers don’t just get to speak truly about what one morally ought to do by making their own moral norms salient. See also Dowell (2012, p. 283).

  18. I prefer to avoid the term ‘best worlds’, since it may suggest a kind of consequentialism in the ordering source that we need not be committed to; see also Wedgwood (2006, p. 149).

  19. Needless to say, the exact picture just sketched is the subject of controversy, and some recent contextualist accounts of ‘ought’ depart from Kratzer’s framework in important ways. See, e.g. Finlay (2010), Björnsson and Finlay (2010). But I think that an account that utilizes at least the basic Kratzerian framework will be partially justified by the explanatory power that we’ll see it to have shortly. Of course, that does not mean that we must accept every detail of Kratzer’s view; many semanticists want to tinker with it in one way or another, and I myself do not agree with everything that Kratzer says.

  20. So, on this view, the ordinary ‘if...then’ does not express the material conditional, or indeed pick out any operator.

  21. This picture is slightly complicated in Kratzer’s later work by so-called “double modalization” readings of conditional modal claims, whereby the overt modal is interpreted as being within the scope of an additional, covert epistemic modal. See (Kratzer (2012), pp. 106–107). I’ll ignore this complication. Kratzer does not think that these double modalization readings should be the only readings of conditional modal claims, except in special cases. Dowell (2012, see esp. 283–285, 293) gives an account of how to achieve desirable contextualist results on an account where conditional modal claims are generally interpreted as doubly modalized. I think one can also get the results she wants with the simpler account, but cannot pursue this here. I work with the simpler account here simply for the sake of ease.

  22. See also Silk (2014, pp. 7–8), Dowell (2012, p. 286).

  23. This notion of detachment assumes that it is something one does with a sentence, involving a kind of utterance. But it’s natural to think that there is another notion of detachment on which it is something one does with propositions, involving a logical operation or deduction. However, on this notion of detachment, it’s not clear that the question of whether one can detach the consequent of an ordinary language conditionalized modal claim really even makes sense on the Kratzerian semantics. On the Kratzerian semantics, the ordinary language conditional is a restrictor, not a two-place operator that takes two propositions as its arguments. Thus, on this view, there is no intelligible question of whether one can detach the “proposition in the consequent” of the ordinary language (as opposed to the stipulatively material) conditional. There is only the question of whether one can truly utter the sentence that follows the restrictor clause, omitting the explicit restrictor (and the answer is: it depends on context).

    This bears on the vexed question of whether Kratzerian contextualists need deny modus ponens (c.f. Finlay 2010, 82ff; Kolodny and MacFarlane 2010). One would think that modus ponens is a logical rule that relates propositions, not sentences. (After all, if we have an argument which looks superficially like an instance of modus ponens, but turns out to rest on an equivocation between two different uses of a word, we do not take the invalidity of such an argument to be a counterexample to modus ponens.) Now obviously, a contextualist does not have to deny the validity of modus ponens for the material conditional. When it comes to the ordinary language conditional, however, it’s again not obvious that the question of whether modus ponens holds for it makes sense, as long as we are understanding modus ponens as a logical rule that relates propositions. The contextualist does need to say that utterances of the sentences that follow restrictor-clauses may come out false when those restrictor-clauses are omitted. But it’s not obvious to me that this counts as a failure of any putative logical rule any more than the equivocation cases do.

  24. That’s not to say that this is the only way a proposition can get into the modal base is by being uttered, but it is what gets this particular proposition into the modal base.

  25. I think this holds even if we know the proposition. This is an important feature of the contextualist account that I favor. Again, I think there are independent grounds to think this. I develop this point with respect to epistemic modals in Worsnip (ms.-a).

  26. I’m inclined to think we can reject proposals to add them to the modal base, as a kind of refusal to treat them as fixed.

  27. C.f., e.g., Dretske (2005, pp. 18–19). David Lewis, a prominent contextualist about ‘knows’, encourages this confusion in his (1996).

  28. See DeRose (2009, ch. 6, esp. 212–225).

  29. The idea of utterances as proposals to add propositions to the modal base (or “common ground”) is familiar from the work of Stalnaker (1999, chs. 1–5, 2002) as well as from the “update semantics” of Veltman (1996) and Gillies (2001).

  30. See Broome (2013, pp. 159–163).

  31. Broome (1999, 2004), Hill (1973), Greenspan (1975), Dancy (1977), Darwall (1983), Gensler (1985). See also Wallace (2001, p. 17).

  32. For two very different reasons to worry, see Setiya (2007) and Worsnip (ms.-b).

  33. Silk (2014, pp. 4–5) makes a similar argument to the one I’m about to make. See also Greenspan (1975, pp. 261–262), Kratzer (2012, p. 67), Dowell (2012, p. 274).

  34. The materiality of the conditional might in and of itself be thought a good reason to doubt the wide-scope semantics, since the English ‘if...then’ does not normally express a material conditional. See Dowell (2012); but see also Silk (2014, p. 3).

  35. One could object, as an anonymous referee suggested, that (6) and (7) sound bad for pragmatic reasons, in the same way that ‘you have most reason to either get a good night’s sleep or murder all your enemies’ sounds bad. Here the badness is explained by a violation of a Gricean maxim of informativeness, since the failure to specify that you have most reason specifically to get a good night’s sleep (rather than to murder all your enemies) implicates that you have good reason to murder all your enemies. But if this were right, (5), on the current interpretation, should sound bad for the same reason. For it too involves your having most reason specifically to satisfy one disjunct and not the other (namely, you have most reason to give up your murderous end), yet (5), if it is a claim about what you have most reason to do, violates the maxim of informativeness by not saying which. By contrast, this is not a problem if we interpret the ‘ought’, as I will, as a sui generis ‘ought’ of rationality, rather than as the “unqualified” ‘ought’ of what one has most reason to do. Then no maxim is violated in (5), while (6) and (7) come out false simply because there is no sui generis rational requirement connected the ends and means that they mention.

  36. In his first article on the subject, Broome (1999, pp. 400, 402) tries to capture this by saying that the conditional involved is the material conditional plus “determination”, where that means that in some way there has to be some relation between the attitude in the antecedent and that in the consequent. As far as I can tell, he drops this practice later. If one gives up the view that the conditional is material, one loses the explanation sketched above of why one always (unqualifiedly) ought comply with the instrumental requirement. So this just underscores the incompatibility of that explanation with strategies to defuse problems of triviality.

  37. One might worry about whether a similar objection trading on trivial instances of the wide-scope material conditional can be generated just for the view that there are wide-scope requirements (irrespective of our semantics). I’ll address that in Sect. 6.3 below.

  38. See esp. Broome (2013, chs. 5–6).

  39. This semantics forces us to give the English use of “requires” what Broome (2013, pp. 109–110) calls its “property” sense, i.e. that it states what is required to have a particular property, in this case that of being rational. This is to be contrasted with the “source” sense, in which we can talk of a particular source of requirements—rationality—requiring things of you, in the sense that it is rationality that issues these requirements. I think this is OK, since “rationality requires” is something of a term of art, as Broome recognizes (Broome 2007, p. 361). Most of our ordinary talk about rationality does not use the term ‘requires’. I will explain how to translate it into ‘ought’-talk below.

  40. Of course, there’s room to argue that this requirement should be more complicated, but I use a simple version of it for ease of explanation. The form of the explanation would go just the same way for a more complicated variant.

  41. An arguable exception is a context where it’s in the modal base that you violate (IR-Wide). (Thanks to Bruno Whittle for pointing this out to me.) This raises significant complications that I cannot deal with here fully. I will just note that (i) in some situations, we may indeed want to talk about what would be the most rational thing for you to do given that you violate (IR-Wide); (ii) if we don’t want to do this, we can exclude your violation of (IR-Wide) from the modal base, even if we know that you violate it (see Sect. 2 above).

  42. What if, given what we are holding fixed, intending the means would cause you to violate some other salient rational requirement? One can imagine multiple ways of going here. On one view, there will be some kind of fixed and general weighting of the different rational requirements for the purposes of the ordering source. In that case, there could be some special utterances of (8) which are false, in unusual contexts where given what is being held fixed, intending the means would cause you to commit some more gross form of irrationality. This raises the difficult question of how such a weighting would go. More plausible, in my view, is the claim that which rational requirements take priority in the ordering source is itself contextually determined by which rational requirements are salient. In particular, utterances like (8) make the instrumental principle salient since they explicitly bring out the connection between intended ends and intended means.

  43. Dowell (2012, p. 283) makes this proposal, but does not develop it.

  44. I also think we should be able to omit the ‘plan to’ in the consequent, which also seems natural, if we are assuming that a failure to purchase a beehive would reveal a failure to intend to do so, and thus a violation of a rational requirement (c.f. Broome 2013, p. 151). Again, we see here a way in which the contextualist semantics helps to mitigate purported problems with the wide-scope coherence account.

  45. See Silk (2014, p. 6), Wedgwood (2006, p. 152).

  46. Thanks to an anonymous referee for suggesting this objection.

  47. This analysis is compatible with acknowledging that the mention of the preference to keep bees in particular sometimes renders this preference especially salient as compared with other preferences for the purposes of determining the ordering source. But I acknowledged that the same thing is possible with the rational ‘ought’ that invokes the wide-scope requirements in fn. 42 above.

  48. Assuming that ‘requires’ is given its “property” sense—see fn. 39 above.

  49. As I noted in fn. 4, some have thought this “symmetry” is actually a disadvantage of wide-scope accounts. But let me register that (14) sounds pretty good to me! I think it is an advantage of an account that it can preserve its truth.

  50. I don’t want to rule out the possibility that there might be some requirements of rationality which are to be understood as wide-scope, diachronic requirements of analogous form to (First Attempt). Perhaps this is the right way to understand rational requirements on belief updating like conditionalization, for example. However, if there are such requirements, we will clearly have to accept that they don’t have the sort of symmetry that wide-scopers have wanted to preserve for requirements like (IR): once you have taken attitude in the antecedent (at t1), the only way to satisfy the requirement will be to form the attitude in the consequent (at t2): it is no longer an option to make the antecedent false, since t1 is now in the past.

  51. Could Lord alter his account and forbid t1 and t2 from being the same time to avoid this proof? Yes, but it’s not clear what the motivation for this would be. (IR-Wide-Diachronic) would then still often forbid one from simultaneously intending an end and failing to intend the believed means, but only when one has had the intended end at some previous point in time. Since that previous point in time could be a nanosecond in the past, it’s unclear what would motivate one to say that it is rationally permissible to lack the intended means while having the end at the first moment that one has the intended end, but not rationally permissible to have the intended end while lacking the intended means the nanosecond after. It’s not like the extra nanosecond somehow gives one the time to execute a process of explicit reasoning from the end to the means. Not allowing t1 and t2 to be identical for the purposes of (IR-Wide-Diachronic) thus seems arbitrary, as I think Lord himself recognizes in allowing them to be identical. Thanks to an anonymous referee for pushing me on this.

  52. The more complex form of (IR-Wide-Diachronic) compared with (First Attempt) doesn’t matter here, provided one can substitute logical equivalents within the scope of ‘rationality requires’.

  53. Thanks to Steve Darwall for raising this objection.

  54. Adding (IR-Wide-Diachronic) to the ordering source obviously doesn’t make our account vindicate (17), since, as proved earlier, it is just logically equivalent to (IR-Wide-Synchronic).

  55. See Lord (2011, 2014a). In the latter Lord calls this problem the “real symmetry objection,” but Lord’s objection is really an entirely different objection to the one voiced by Schroeder and Kolodny which I said I would not address with here.

  56. See also Wedgwood (2006, pp. 149–150).

  57. Note that we’ve had to pick a different example from that which we used for the triviality problem for the unqualified wide-scope ‘ought’ in Sect. 4. This is because there we could use anything which you (unqualifiedly) ought not do, whereas here we need something what it would be irrational to do (or believe).

  58. See, e.g., Lord (2014b, p. 1).

  59. Relatedly, perhaps the wide-scope requirements are those which are true given a “source” sense of ‘requires’—see fn. 39 above. If that’s right, it might help to answer a worry put to me by Bruno Whittle: if the semantics for ‘requires’ appeals to an ordering source constituted by requirements which themselves have to be stated using the word ‘requires’, do we have some kind of problematic circularity or regress? Not if these statements can be understood as using ‘requires’ in the source sense. (One could also think of them as fundamental demands.) As I noted above, it is the property sense of ‘requires’ that is more clearly amenable to a Kratzerian treatment. So the semantics for ‘requires’ in the property sense utilitizes requirements stated using ‘requires’ in the source sense as the ordering source, removing the potential circularity. What if one rejects the notion of “source” requirements of rationality? Would Whittle’s objection then spell trouble for the view defended here? Not necessarily. If one rejects the “source” conception, then one is likely to take the view that there is simply a property – rationality – and one can then say that the ordering source is simply the extent to which the agent exemplifies this property. Then the statements of requirements come out true, without our having to invoke the notion of a requirement in our semantics. (Thanks to Ralph Wedgwood for this suggestion).

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Acknowledgments

In writing this paper, I have benefitted from conversations with from Steve Darwall, Keith DeRose, Daniel Fogal, Tamar Gendler, Justin Khoo, Josh Knobe, Jessie Munton, Jonathan Phillips, John Pittard, Zoltán Szabó, and, Quinn White. Special thanks to Ralph Wedgwood, Bruno Whittle, and three anonymous referees for detailed comments.

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Worsnip, A. Narrow-scoping for wide-scopers. Synthese 192, 2617–2646 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0681-9

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