Abstract
Jeffrey King has famously argued that there are several prima facie problems with the direct reference theory of the semantics of complex demonstratives, three of which (the objection from belief attributions, the objection from modality, and the objection from quantifying in) apparently resist solution. King concludes by observing that, if these outstanding problems cannot be solved, then the prospects for a direct reference semantics for complex demonstratives will be poor. I shall focus on just one of these outstanding problems—the objection from belief attributions—and suggest that it, at least, can be answered.
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Notes
Other outstanding objections to the direct reference view include Elbourne’s (2008) arguments from apparent bound cases of complex demonstratives, as well as his arguments from descriptive indexical cases in the style of Nunberg (1993, 2004) (the term is due to Recanati, but the pioneering work in this area was done by Nunberg). For further criticisms of the direct reference treatment of complex demonstratives, see e.g. Nowak (2014) and Roberts (2002).
Braun (2008, pp. 74–79) has already emphasized the role of these two claims in King’s objection from belief attributions, and he has already suggested some other ways to deny them. Although I will not have space to go into this matter, I do not think that his attempts to reply to King’s objection are successful. I hope to present my own reasons for questioning Braun’s replies in some future publication.
Kaplan (1989b) has subsequently changed his view and become an acquaintance theorist.
I say ‘a proposition which is about, or purports to be about, an individual object’ because it is possible for a particularized general proposition to fail to be about any individual object. Indeed, this is what happens when nothing turns out to satisfy the uniquely individuating complex of properties that such a proposition contains.
It should be noted that the class of general propositions not only includes particularized general propositions, but also non-particularized general propositions. Non-particularized general propositions are propositions which, unlike particularized general ones, neither are about, nor purport to be about, an individual object. Examples of these are the propositions expressed by sentences containing expressions of the form ‘some F’ or ‘every F’ (where ‘F’ is a predicate). For similar classifications of general propositions, see e.g. Jeshion (2010a). See also Fitch and Nelson (2018).
Braun (2008, p. 77) draws a similar conclusion when he discusses King’s objection, but his path to it is quite different.
Another, much more radical, manoeuvre that a direct reference theorist might make in order to say that Greg’s belief is singular is to claim that the phenomenon of singular thought should be defined by the truth of belief attributions whose embedded sentence contains a directly referential expression, so that an agent a can be appropriately described as having a singular thought if we can truthfully utter a sentence of the form ‘a believes that α is G’ (where ‘α’ is to be replaced with a referential expression and ‘G’ with a predicate). See Hawthorne and Manley (2012) for a defence of such a proposal. (Curiously enough, King (2020) has recently expressed some sympathy for this sort of view.) Now, the direct reference theorist can argue that the fact that we can truthfully utter (2) should be taken as a reason to think that Greg has a singular thought about the student who scored one hundred on the exam, rather than as a reason to question the direct reference theory of complex demonstratives. Although I will not have space to go into this matter, my own view is that this move is very unpromising, since the characterization of singular thought on which it is based seems to lead to unstable commitments. For compelling defences of the claim that such a characterization results in an unstable theory of singular thought, see Goodman (2017) and Recanati (2012, p. 153).
The notion of “surroundings” is intended to capture the external features of the context of utterance, i.e. who is speaking, when, where, to whom, and so forth. See Recanati (1993, p. 363, fn. 4).
It should be noted that, although it is similar in spirit, there are a few notable differences between the proposal I shall present here and Goodman’s and Openshaw’s specific accounts (and there are also important differences between these two accounts themselves). Let me mention just one of these differences. As I have previously announced, the proposal I shall outline here involves rejecting the harmony assumption. However, neither Goodman nor Openshaw would be happy for their theories to be presented in this way. Indeed, they would prefer to present their respective theories as rejecting what, following Hawthorne and Manley (2012), we may call the ‘sufficiency assumption’ (i.e. the assumption that believing a singular proposition about a certain object is sufficient for having a singular thought about that object). I think that the reasons for this preference are merely terminological. Very briefly, I take the predicate ‘believing a proposition’ to be a theoretical term of art that does not contain context-sensitive elements. More specifically, I take the predicate ‘believing proposition p’ to amount to the theoretical predicate ‘having a belief whose content is given by proposition p’. On the contrary, both Goodman and Openshaw take ‘believing a proposition’ to be an ordinary language predicate. More specifically, they take ‘believing proposition p’ to be equivalent to the ordinary language predicate ‘believing that p’, and assume that this ordinary language predicate is context-sensitive, in that, depending on the interests and intentions of the speaker and the audience, there are many relations it may express, some of which do not require the possession of a belief whose content is given by p. My own view is that we can hardly treat predicates such as ‘believing a proposition’ as ordinary predicates, since they essentially involve the notion of a proposition, which is plainly a theoretical notion.
Here I would like to quote Richard, so as to highlight the need to distinguish between metaphysical questions about belief states and semantic questions about the verb ‘believes’:
[There is] an unfortunate, if unavoidable, ambiguity in the expression ‘belief’. By ‘belief’ we can mean either (a) the relation that a correct semantics for English assigns to the verb ‘believes’, or (b) the psychological state or states that underlie ascriptions of belief. These need not be identical. (Richard, 1990, p. 39).
We need to distinguish the semantic issue of which relation a correct semantics for English must assign to the verb ‘believes’ and the metaphysical issue of what belief states are. One can perfectly well maintain that belief states are three-place relations holding between a believer, a proposition and a mental representation while maintaining, at the same time, that a correct semantics for English must assign a two-place relation to the verb ‘believes’. Indeed, as we shall see below, this is what Richard does. On the dangers of conflating questions about the metaphysics of belief states with questions about the semantics of ‘believes’, see Barbara Partee (1988, p. 47) and Richard Heck (2014, p. 9).
Here I rely on Fitch and Nelson’s (2018) classification of propositions.
Openshaw (2018) labels such mental representation/content pairings as cognitive ‘sticky propositions’.
Richard actually represents cognitive RAMs as hybrids that result from pairing off the constituents of a mental representation of a proposition (recall that mental representations are structured entities) with the objects and properties contained in the proposition. Similarly, he construes linguistic RAMs as structures that result from pairing off the constituents of a sentence with the constituents of the proposition which that sentence expresses. Thus Richard’s representation of both cognitive and linguistic RAMs is more complex than the one I use in explicating his view. But the additional complexity is not relevant to my purposes here, so I ignore it for the sake of simplicity.
Both Goodman (2017) and Openshaw (2018) can also be understood as suggesting a revised translational theory in which the sameness-of-content requirement is removed from the notion of a translation manual. However, they are not very specific about what requirement is to take the place of the sameness-of-content requirement in the correct characterization of translation manuals. For more ideas in this direction, see also the translational system advocated by Kjell Johan Sæbø (2015).
For the sake of simplicity, I speak here of replacing one content with another within propositions. But I would like to note that it would be preferable to speak of replacing occurrences of contents within propositions, since, e.g., we might want the cognitive RAM <<r, Superman, the mild-mannered reporter from Smallville working for the Daily Planet, being identical>> to be an indirect version of the singular proposition <Superman, Superman, being identical>. My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pressing me to highlight this question.
Let me briefly examine how the indexical theory operates in a case similar to the one involving Mutt, Jeff, and Odile, so as to give a rough idea of how this account works. This other case comes from Stephen Schiffer (1977). Someone—call him ‘Smith’—snatches Thelma’s purse, but Thelma does not get a very good look at his face. As she is chasing him, it is acceptable to point at Smith and utter the following:
-
(A)
Thelma believes that he is a thief.
However, suppose that later on, Thelma is unable to pick him out of a line-up at the police station. In this context, even if we know that the third man in the line-up is the man that she was chasing, we could not point at him and truthfully utter (A). So is (A) true or false? The right answer seems to be that the truth value of (A) varies between the chase and line-up contexts of utterance. And this is exactly what the indexical theory allows us to say. That the truth value of (A) may vary between these contexts is, of course, due to the indexicality of that-clauses: a that-clause refers to whatever is the contextually salient subclass of the cognitive domain of the proposition which its embedded sentence would express, were it uttered in isolation. (Recall that, if the indexical theory is correct, the semantics of that-clauses is governed by a linguistic rule like the one encapsulated in (IT-ii).) Now, it seems clear that the salient subclass of the cognitive domain of the proposition <Smith, being a thief> in the chase context is not the same as the one that is salient in the line-up context. In the chase context, it could be argued, the salient subclass of the relevant cognitive domain will probably be one that picks out only those cognitive RAMs of the cognitive domain whose propositional part contains Smith as a constituent, and whose mental-representation part requires thinking of Smith as the individual who is running with a purse in his hand. In the line-up context, on the other hand, the salient subclass of the relevant cognitive domain will probably be one that picks out only those cognitive RAMs of the cognitive domain whose propositional part contains Smith as a constituent, and whose mental-representation part requires thinking of Smith as the third man in the line-up. If this is so, then the class of cognitive RAMs referred to by (A)’s that-clause, ‘that he is a thief’, will be different in the chase and the line-up contexts (since, as mentioned before, according to the indexical theory, the semantic function of a that-clause is precisely to refer to the contextually salient subclass of the cognitive domain of the proposition which its embedded sentence would express, were it uttered in isolation). Then, given that the class referred to in the chase context arguably contains a cognitive RAM that individuates one of Thelma’s beliefs, while the class referred to in the line-up context does not, there is no problem for the indexical theorist in saying that the truth value of (A) may vary between one context and the other. More specifically, there is no problem for the indexical theorist in saying that whereas (A) is true in the chase context, this same sentence is false in the line-up context.
-
(A)
Recall that the indexical theory tells us that a that-clause is a referential indexical expression whose referent is a contextually determined subclass of the cognitive domain of the proposition which the embedded sentence would express, were it uttered in the same surroundings in which the that-clause is used. In this respect, belief-attributing sentences are like other sentences containing overt indexicals like ‘so’.
I am indebted to an anonymous referee of Synthese for bringing up this objection and the example on which it is based.
Again, one move that a harmony theorist might make in response to the above argument would be to claim not to have the intuition that (9) is true in the situation described. And once again, to this I can only say, first, that I have found that informants who are not philosophers of language would find Mary’s utterance of (9) straightforwardly and unproblematically true in such a case; and, second, that the situation is not radically different with philosophers of language (for more examples of intuitions analogous to those described above, see e.g. Eaker 2002, 2009; Goodman 2017, pp. 15–16).
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to the audience at the Sign-Language-Reality seminar (University of Warsaw, January 2021), where a previous version of this paper was presented. I am indebted to the people who attended this event, and to others who have read previous written versions of the ideas contained in this work. Thanks particularly to Javier González de Prado, Jesús Vega, Ignacio Vicario and two anonymous referees of this journal. My gratitude also extends to John Horden for linguistic correction. Financial support: Project “Intellectual autonomy in environments of epistemic dependence” (FFI2017-87395-P, MINECO/FEDER, EU).
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Project “Intellectual Autonomy in Environment of Epistemic Dependence” (FFI2017-87395-P), Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (Spanish Government).
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Viejo, J.M. Complex demonstratives, singular thought, and belief attributions. Synthese 200, 3 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03463-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03463-x