Abstract
My primary goal in this paper is to defend the plausibility of Kripke’s (Naming and necessity, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1980) thesis that there are contingent a priori truths, and to fill out some gaps in Kripke’s own account of these truths. But the strategy here adopted is, to the best of my knowledge, still unexplored and different from the one adopted both by Kripke himself and by his critics. I first argue that Kripke’s examples of such truths can only be legitimate if seen as introduced by performative utterances (in Austin’s (How to do things with words, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1963) sense). And, if this is so, we can apply the machinery of illocutionary act theory (especially Searle and Vanderveken in Foundations of illocutionary logic, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1985) to these utterances to explain how one can have a priori knowledge of some contingent facts generated by the utterances themselves. I shall argue that the overall strategy can fill out two gaps in Kripke’s original account: first, we can explain the nature of the truth-makers of contingent a priori truths (they are institutional facts in Searle’s (Speech acts, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1969) sense, broadly conceived) and, second, we can explain how contingent a priori knowledge can be transmitted from one speaker to another (via the notion of illocutionary commitment).
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Notes
For now, I am following Kripke in presenting M and N as themselves expressing contingent a priori truths (e.g., in 1980, p. 54 and in footnote 33). Later in the paper I will argue that M and N must be understood differently, since they must be seen as performative utterances (with or without an explicit performative verb).
This terminology is due to Evans (1979).
Dummett’s point clearly begs the question against Kripke. Donnellan’s criticism is, at best, inconclusive, as Jeshion (2001) argues (although her point also needs some qualification, as I will comment later in this paper). It also relies on a controversial requirement of acquaintance for de re thoughts (see, e.g., Bach 2010; Jeshion 2010b; Taylor 2010 for criticism). Evans’ reconstruction of Kripke’s position involves the problematic notion of descriptive names (which are not just abbreviations of definite descriptions, and do not correspond to Kripke’s own perspective on proper names; the names that Evans calls “descriptive” are rather rare in ordinary language). Williamson (1986) argues that Evans’ claim that all cases of contingent a priori truth are superficial is incorrect. However, Williamson’s position itself needs some qualification and amendment, as Oppy (1987) and Hawthorne (2002) argue. The kind of objection raised by Salmon, Soames and Plantinga seems to take a somewhat radical view on the need for experience, and would render any form of a priori knowledge as ultimately impossible, since every such form involves in one way or another some experience. (As I will make clear later in this paper, I think that Bonjour’s (1998) perspective, which allows for some experience in the process of grasping an item of a priori knowledge, is more adequate.) Kripke addressed this latter kind of objection in a later series of lectures (1986) and takes a line of thought close to the one that I will defend in this paper, i.e., although some experience might be required for successful name fixing, the content of the experience does not remain part of the content of the name. As Jeshion (2002) notices, most of the literature on Kripke’s cases of contingent a priori truths pays no due attention to the fact that these must be the product of performative utterances (stipulative naming).
Williamson (1986) argues against Evans’ claim that there are only superficially (but no deeply) contingent a priori truths; indeed he tries to show that the contingent truth that there is at least one believer can be known a priori and, since it is indexical-free, it is not superficially but deeply contingent. My conclusion will go in a different way, i.e., I will argue that Kripke’s cases of contingent a priori truths can indeed be treated as superficial in Evans’ sense (although this needs some substantial qualification, as we will see), but their truth is not due to indexicality but to a creative illocutionary act, being therefore interesting (despite their superficiality). The fact created by the special act belongs to a special ontological category, its existence and properties can be known a priori, and it is, nevertheless, a contingent fact.
“What then is the epistemological status of the statement ‘Stick S is one meter long at t0’, for someone who has fixed the metric system by reference to stick S? It would seem that he knows it a priori.” (1980, p. 56, my emphasis)
Chisholm (1977), for instance, argues that, if at any point in a reasoning one has to rely on memory, there is no a priori justification of the conclusion.
E.g., “We could make the definition more precise by stipulating that one meter is to be the length of S at a fixed time t0” (Kripke 1980, p. 54); “we have determined the reference of the phrase ’one meter’ by stipulating that ’one meter’ is to be a rigid designator of the length which is in fact the length of S at t0” (ibid., p. 56). Also in Kripke’s later lectures on the topic (Kripke 1986) we have statements such as “But that is obtained a priori solely in terms of a stipulation.” (p. 67).
One might hold a stronger view that, in some cases, the content of the utterance is neither true nor false before the utterance takes place (if, e.g., one is introducing a new word in a language by means of it).
Later in (1962) Austin abandons the distinction.
From this point on it seems more adequate to suppress the existential clause from the propositional content since, from the perspective of illocutionary acts that I want to motivate, existence fits better as a felicity condition than as part of the propositional content.
An exception is Jeshion (2002) who points out that “within this debate, philosophers have tended to forget that all acts of naming-ostensive and descriptive alike-are genuine performatives, often explicit performatives” (p. 63). Kripke’s examples are based on the introduction of rigid names and, hence, depend on performatives. She goes on proposing a list of felicity conditions peculiar to the act of naming, and concludes that many (or most) examples of naming in the literature concerned with Kripke’s thesis are actually infelicitous (i.e., some of the conditions are not met). Her main goal is actually to defend the possibility of acquaintanceless de re beliefs, and her felicity conditions (which deviate, e.g., from Searle’s 1969) include some sincerity and psychological clauses that make this kind of belief more palatable to a skeptic. Incidentally, I find her list of felicity conditions not quite convincing because they include the speaker’s interest in introducing a name, something that appears to be very vague and not clearly relevant. But anyway, she focuses only on the primary performatives M* and N* and their credentials as possible sources of acquaintanceless de re beliefs, but leaves aside what I will call M** and N** as possible sources of contingent a priori truths. Another exception is Horowitz (1983), as I shall mention later.
Searle and Vanderveken (1985) divide all possible illocutionary acts into five big classes: assertives (e.g., assertions, descriptions, suppositions, etc.), commissives (promises, acceptances of invitations, etc.), directives (orders, permissions, invitations, etc.), expressives (greetings, regrets, etc.) and declaratives (stipulations, nominations, definitions, etc.). Performatives are, in their approach, particular cases of declaratives. In one aspect, this deviates from Austin’s original view since, for the latter, performative utterances are neither true nor false, but rather a special kind of action. But declaratives are, in Searle and Vanderveken’s approach, true if successful, and they are made true by the very utterance itself. In another aspect, their approach is close to Austin’s view, since it regards each performative (orders, questions, etc.) as a distinct speech act. That is to say, orders are orders, promises are promises, requests are requests, etc., and not indirect speech acts derived from a more basic and primitive act such as assertion. Recanati (1987) has a similar account, but with some differences. He divides performatives into three big classes: directives, commissives and declarations. The main feature of directives and commissives is that bringing about the state of affairs represented in the propositional content is intended to be the responsibility of the speaker and hearer, respectively, while in the case of a declaration, bringing about this state of affairs is meant to be nobody’s responsibility, but simply an immediate consequence of the declaration itself. The main alternative view (defended, among others, by Hedenius 1963, Lewis 1970, Bach and Harnish 1979, Ginet 1979 and García-Carpintero 2013) treats all performatives as assertions from which orders, promises, etc., can be inferred by means of Gricean-like processes. So, according to this approach, most performatives are indirect speech acts, derived from assertions. Searle (1989) forcefully criticized this approach, basically insisting that in an adequate treatment, an order should be regarded as an order, a promise as a promise, etc., although his own account would have these performative utterances as being, at the same time and derivatively, assertions (i.e., an order such as ‘I order you to do A’ is at the same time an assertion that I order you to do A). Pagin (2004) and Jary (2007) follow Searle in this criticism. In the proposal here outlined, I am basically using Searle and Vanderveken’s approach without arguing for it (since this would go beyond the limited goals of this paper). In particular, I am exploring the following picture of declaratives:
By definition, a declarative illocution is successful only if the speaker brings about the state of affairs represented by its propositional content in the world of utterance [...] All successful declarations have a true propositional content and in this respect declarations are peculiar among speech acts in that they are the only speech acts whose successful performance is by itself sufficient to bring about a word-world fit. In such cases, “saying makes it so”. (Searle and Vanderveken 1985, p. 57)
One could perhaps object here that there is no real baptism being performed by the GCWM since ‘One kilogram’ already had a reference (fixed in terms of ‘the weight of Le Grand K’). One way to articulate this criticism is that we do not have another entity (one kilogram) getting the name ‘One kilogram’, but just the old entity being selected by a different description. This question belongs, I believe, to the philosophy of science, and I shall forgo a deeper discussion of it here. I shall only say that there are some reasons for thinking that this is not the case. One of them is that there was a margin of error and vagueness of ‘the weight of Le Grand K’ that made the old stipulation imprecise. Hence, what was baptized was not a precise weight (or a single entity), but a fuzzy range of weights (a fuzzy range of entities), and the elimination of vagueness is what motivated the GCWM’s act in the first place. I shall assume that the result of the GCWM’s utterance in IA1 is an entirely new baptism, giving a new meaning to (or fixing a new reference for) ‘One kilogram’, even though the new meaning resembles in some ways the old one.
I am using here Searle and Vanderveken’s (1985) notion of illocutionary commitment, which is a relation holding between two illocutionary acts A and B if, by performing one of them, a speaker is committed (in some special way) to perform the other one. This does not happen primarily because of logical entailment between propositional contents, but rather because of a relation at the level of illocutionary forces so that one cannot consistently perform one of them and not the other. There are, according to them, two forms of such commitment. First, it might be impossible to perform A in any context without effectively and explicitly performing B. This is what they call strong commitment. Second, it might occur that, by performing act A, the speaker is committed to act B, although she might never come to actually perform it. (This is because performing an illocutionary act incompatible with B would generate a special kind of inconsistency not explainable in terms of the propositional content, but in terms of the felicity conditions of A and B.) They call this weak commitment. E.g., a report strongly commits the speaker to an assertion because reporting is just a special case of asserting. By asserting that P implies Q and asserting P, a speaker is weakly committed to assert Q, although she might never actually do so; by ordering that P a speaker is weakly committed to a permission that P. Some forms of illocutionary commitment hold simply because performing an act with a stronger illocutionary point entails a commitment to acts with weaker illocutionary point. But some forms of illocutionary commitment occur between acts with different illocutionary points. E.g., a declarative illocutionary act at t0 commits the speaker to assertions at later times performed in specific ways. If a speaker successfully nominates L her legal representative at a certain time, the nomination commits her to assert that L is her legal representative at later times. Moreover, the later assertion has to be done having as justification the former declarative illocutionary act itself.
What I claim here is that a performance of IA1 seems to weakly commit the speaker (the GCWM) to a performance of IA2.
Closely related to illocutionary commitment is the notion of illocutionary inconsistency, which occurs when two acts cannot be both successfully performed at the same time (e.g., utterances of ‘I order you to leave’ and ‘I forbid you to leave’). The conditions of success of one of them are incompatible with the conditions of success of the other one (putting it in Austin’s terms, if one of them is felicitous, the other one must be a misfire), and the incompatibility is not necessarily at the propositional level (see Vanderveken 1990, p. 29, 152). Austin points at something along these lines when he talks about “self-stultifying procedures” parallel (but not identical to) contradictions:
‘I promise but I ought not’ is parallel to ‘it is and it is not’ [...] Just as the purpose of assertion is defeated by an internal contradiction (in which we assimilate and contrast at once and so stultify the whole procedure), the purpose of a contract is defeated if we say ‘I promise and I ought not’. This commits you to it and refuses to commit you to it. It is a self-stultifying procedure. (1962, p. 51)
One clarification: I do not mean to include here declarations such as ‘this tree is five meters high’ or ‘this tree is out of bounds’ if these are not the utterances made to fix the general rules (measurement standards or the bounds of a property), but only to apply such rules that were already fixed by some other (more fundamental) stipulations. These declarations are true or false not solely because of the declaration itself, but because of empirical facts (in these examples, the height and location of the tree).
This is a classical point made by Frege (1879 §24, 1914, p. 211), i.e., that the content of a definition cannot originally be the object of assertion because it introduces a new term and, hence, before the utterance is made, does not even express a proposition (or a judgeable content, in Frege’s terminology). The content of a definition is first established and also made true by the very act of the definition (for which Frege has a special sign, distinct from the assertion sign). In the mathematical practice, however, one might find exceptions to this rule since sometimes one takes a true mathematical content (e.g., that an infinite set can be brought into a bijection with a proper part of itself) and decides that this is to count as a definition (in this case, of infinite sets). I shall leave the discussion of these exceptions for another occasion. Anyway, the nature of the content of a mathematical definition is quite a delicate matter.
Any definition in mathematics contain explicitly or implicitly a performative verb such as ‘define’, ‘call’, ‘name’, etc. Austin (1962, p. 163) classifies ‘define’ as an “expositive” performative, while Searle and Vanderveken (1855, p. 205) classify ‘call, ‘name’, etc. as “declarative” illocutionary verbs.
In the case of a mathematical definition, I have in mind information such as that the defined term (or notion) was not previously defined in a different way within the same theory (in which case the new definition could perhaps be seen as a misfire since its purpose is defeated), also that the definiens does not contain any term that is not either primitive or has been previously defined, also that the definition came out corresponding to the author’s intentions, and that its author was using language properly, etc. See also Belnap (1962) and Gupta (2019) for a discussion of some criteria of admissibility of definitions such as consistency with antecedent assumptions, conservativeness and uniqueness. Of course, after a mathematical definition is successfully made, one might have to provide yet another sort of justification such as that it is fruitfull (i.e., yields interesting results), or materially adequate, or that it captures an intuitive pre-theoretical idea. But this is a different level of justification in terms of the methodological advantages brought by the new definition. The content of it is always true anyway if it was the subject of a successful declaration; whether it is satisfactory and useful for scientific purposes is quite another matter.
This is not to say, of course, that there are no differences in the preparatory conditions of mathematical definitions and stipulations such as M* or M**. E.g., the latter might require a special kind of authority of the stipulator, while the former perhaps requires no special authority except being a working mathematician, etc.
This holds for declarative acts, but not necessarily for other illocutionary acts. If, e.g., an order (or a promise) is successfully performed, this does not mean that its propositional content is thereby true, since it might not be obeyed (or fulfilled). I do not mean that any successful speech act generates a fact that one can know just because the act is successful. My claim here is restricted to declarative speech acts: these are acts whose illocutionary point is to make a proposition true by means of the very utterance.
The driving question in this paper is the same as Horowitz’s (1983), i.e., what is involved in the act of stipulation that serves as basis of Kripke’s cases of contingent a priori truths. But the conclusion that I am suggesting is quite different from the one that she takes as unavoidable. She expresses an overall skepticism concerning the prospects of what she describes as an “epistemological privilege” (i.e., the possibility of a priori knowledge) resulting from stipulative reference fixing, in the same spirit as the Quine-Putnam attack on the empiricist philosophy of language. Horowitz’ main point is based on the observation that there are preparatory conditions to be met for a successful stipulation (such as, e.g., that the stipulator has the required authority to introduce a name, that the stipulation came out according to the stipulator’s intentions, that other participants in a public language will follow the same use of that name, etc.) and, since knowing all these conditions involve in one way or another empirical information, there can be no a priori knowledge at all in Kripke’s cases. In my view, her overall skepticism is exaggerated because she does not fully appreciate the fact that the relevant speech act in such cases is a declarative one, and that the illocutionary point of such acts is to make a propositional content true by the very act. Typically knowing a contingent proposition of the form \(\phi\)a (in which a contingent property \(\phi\) is predicated of an object a) requires some characteristic empirical experience (e.g., measuring a). But if \(\phi\)a is the content of a successful declarative act then this particular experience is not required anymore in the case of a, and the ultimate justification for attributing \(\phi\) to it is that \(\phi\)a was the subject of a successful declaration. (There might be the need for further justification of this content qua stipulation in terms of methodological advantages or adequacy of the same kind that was mentioned earlier (see footnote 18) for mathematical definitions, but this is another matter, and does not have to do with the justification of the truth of the content.) This is in contrast with any other proposition \(\phi\)x (for x other than a), because the latter does require the characteristic experience. Of course knowledge of the preparatory conditions of the act almost invariably requires some empirical information. This is, I suppose, the reason for Kripke’s careful note in his later lectures on contingent a priori truths:
But then a startling— or to some people startling, anyway—conclusion seem to follow: the agent who has introduced this knows, apparently a priori (or anyway very close to it) just by making this stipulation that if stick S exists, S is one meter long at t0. (Kripke 1986, p. 7, my emphasis)
The qualification “or anyway very close to it” is meant, as I see it, to leave room for the fact that knowledge of the surrounding conditions of success might be empirical. Horowitz seems to think that, because of this, the whole thing is dependent on empirical information, being therefore a postertiori. But, as already said, if she is right her argument precludes the possibility of any a priori knowledge of any definition or even assertion in mathematics (or logic), since in every such situation there is some relevant residual empirical information of the preparatory conditions of the corresponding act.
Moreover, some such a priori knowledge is required, in the kripkean perspective, to ground, e.g., a measurement system, without which there is no empirical experience concerning measurement (and, hence, no a posteriori knowledge either). Kripke makes this point (in the same lectures) in reply to Salmon (1986):
[O]n the contrary, if no one can know this a priori, then no one can know it at all and, as far as I can see, no one can know the length of any stick a posteriori, or a priori, or anything at all. (ibid., p. 10)
The same point could be made in reply to Horowitz’s skepticism as well.
If we apply this perspective to the example of the new definition of a kilogram made at the GCWM in terms of the \(\Phi\)(h) we can see that some empirical information is necessary to understand the description, since it involves (h) (i.e., Planck’s constant, relating the energy of a photon to its frequency). But this still leaves open a margin of decision for the GCWM as to the exact amount of Planck’s constant to be taken as the kilogram, and the particular decision taken (i.e., the exact amount) and proclaimed as the new definition was not mandatory by any law of nature: its ultimate justification does not rest on empirical information (otherwise there would be no need for a voting at the end of the conference, as it in fact happened, but just the need for more accurate research to find out how nature is), but on the fact that a decision was made by the competent authority. Again, it might well be that the new definition has to be justified in terms of methodological adequacy, but this does not concern its truth.
There might be exceptions, as mentioned in footnote 16.
Kripke himself seems to oscillate between M, M* and M** and to think that utterances of all three kinds are equivalent (although, of course, he does not formulate the discussion in terms of illocutionary acts). Although most of the time he says that the relevant stipulation is the act of naming (i.e., something like M*), in some passages he thinks of the stipulation as something like M**:
We could make the definition more precise by stipulating that one meter is to be the length of S at a fixed time t0. Is it then a necessary truth that stick S is one meter long at time t0? Someone who thinks that everything one knows a priori is necessary might think: ‘This is the definition of a meter. By definition, stick S is one meter long at t0. That’s a necessary truth.’ (1980, pp. 54-5; my emphasis.)
Donnellan actually proposes to understand the stipulation made by Leverrier in terms of something like N**:
Because I think it somewhat illuminating to do it this way, I am going to propose instead that we think of the introduction as consisting of stipulating that a certain sentence shall express a contingent truth. If we want to introduce the name N by a description “the F” then the formula we would use would be:
- (a):
-
Provided that the F exists, let “N is the F” express a contingent truth.
It is condition on the stipulation that the F exists and should it turn out that it does not, the stipulation, we might say, has been an unhappy one and not to be taken as being in effect. (1977, p. 19)
In the last sentence of the passage he seems to come very close to understand the stipulation as a special illocutionary act (although, unfortunately, he does not fully appreciate the consequences of doing so).
As Searle puts it,
If God decides to fry an egg by saying, “I hereby fry an egg,” or to fix the roof by saying, “I hereby fix the roof,” He is not misusing English. It is just a fact about how the world works, and not part of the semantics of English verbs, that we humans are unable to perform these acts by declaration. But there is nothing in the semantics of such verbs that prevents us from intending them performatively; it is just a fact of nature that it won’t work [...] There is nothing linguistically wrong with the utterance, “I hereby make it the case that all swans are purple.” The limitation, to repeat, is not in the semantics, it is in the world. (1985, p. 554)
Kripke seems to think that Leverrier can succeed in performing N** (if some preparatory conditions are in place), while Donnellan thinks that he must fail.
In some relevant passages in which he tries to isolate special features of illocutionary acts (as opposed to perlocutionary acts) Austin mentions the connection between some such acts and subsequent acts:
The illocutionary act ‘takes effect’ in certain ways, as distinguished from producing consequences in the sense of bringing about states of affairs in the ‘normal’ way, i.e., changes in the natural course of events. Thus ‘I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth’ has the effect of naming or christening the ship; then certain subsequent acts such as referring to it as the Generalissimo Stalin will be out of order” (p. 117)
[T]he performative ‘I define X as Y’ (in the fiat sense say) commits me to using those terms in special ways in future discourse, and we can see how this is connected with such acts as promising. (1962, p. 137)
As we saw, things are less straightforward in the case of N** because there are doubts regarding the possibility that the act can ever achieve its illocutionary point. But the point I am trying to make here holds of N** anyway in the hypothetical (and somewhat fictitious situation) that the illocutionary point could be achieved. (It certainly holds of N*.)
The position here defended is different from the one criticized by Quine in “Carnap on Logical truth” (1954). (Incidentally, Quine wrote his criticism before Austin’s theory of performatives and the development of contemporary speech act theory. Neither was Carnap thinking of anything like the illocutionary force behind meaning postulates as generator of logical truths.) The point is not that of logical truths created by linguistic convention (a conception that Quine takes to be quite void and uninformative), but rather the implementation of contingent truths (e.g., that a meeting is adjourned or that someone is nominated my legal representative). This can be achieved by performing declarative illocutionary acts (of which performatives are a particular class according to Searle and Vanderveken’s approach). It is a distinguished feature of such acts that the truth of the propositional content is first made true by the very act itself; hence the propositional content cannot be (or become, in Quine’s sense) a logical truth, since a logical truth must be true independently of any illocutionary act.
See, e.g., Reinach (1983) for an early attempt to connect the notion of civil law with a priori knowledge based on performative utterances.
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Acknowledgements
I am indebted to Ernst Lepore, François Recanati, Célia Teixeira, Eros Corazza, Peter Ludlow, André Léclerc, Santiago Echeverry, Philip Atkins, Filipe Martone, and to an anonymous referee for many suggestions on previous drafts of this paper. I am also indebted to FAPESP (Grant 2018/17011-9) and to CNPq (Grant 301317/2017-8).
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Ruffino, M. Contingent a priori truths and performatives. Synthese 198 (Suppl 22), 5593–5613 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02762-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02762-5