Abstract
Intensional contexts are typically characterised by an apparent failure of either (A) the principle of the inter-substitution of co-referring terms salva veritate, or (B) existential generalisation. The difficulties which are seen to occur do so in contexts involving either modality or the propositional attitudes. In this paper attempts are made to determine whether or not Scheffler’s inscriptional analysis can provide a viable means of accounting for the problems which are thought to occur in intensional contexts. Somewhat unexpectedly, little effort has been made in the past to address this issue. In this paper it is shown that Scheffler’s theory may be employed to account for the difficulties mentioned above, though further work needs to be done to show precisely how his analysis may be adapted so as to handle modal statements. Popular objections to Scheffler’s inscriptionalism are also addressed, particularly in the light of his theory being used to account for the problems of intensionality. It is found that, with certain qualifications, the aforesaid objections do not show Scheffler’s theory to be an unviable means of accounting for the intensionality problems.
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Notes
For instance, see Montague’s intensional logic as axiomatised by Gallin (1975).
For instance, see Zalta (1988).
Bealer (1982) indicates that Scheffler’s theory might successfully account for at least some of these problems, but does not provide any detailed support for his view. Elgin (1993) provides an exposition of Scheffler’s theory in which she shows (somewhat indirectly) how Scheffler’s theory may account for the apparent failure of principle (A) in attitude contexts. However, she does not show how it may be brought to bear upon any of the other problems of intensionality.
Scheffler also allowed that believes-true, etc., can be treated as relating agents to utterances (Scheffler 1963, pp. 75 & 100).
However, Anderson, op. cit., p. 357, Zalta, op. cit., pp. 4–5 and Garson op. cit., p. 807, include it in their list of intensionality problems.
That the content of an agent’s attitude might be ineffable seems pretty contentious. If there were ineffable beliefs, desires, and so on, then there would be a situation where an agent (say) believes such and such to be the case, though that ‘such and such’ could not be described in any language by anyone, including the agent in question. But then, why would the agent believe something which he cannot describe? And how could the agent believe something which he cannot describe? Are special powers of intuition required? On the other hand, if it supposed that animals have beliefs, desires, and so on, and that they have no genuine language skills, then perhaps there is evidence of creatures who can (say) believe such and such to be the case, yet be unable to describe this ‘such and such’. It is unclear to me where one should stand on this issue. At any rate, it cannot be properly dealt with in this paper.
Feldman op. cit., p. 352, thinks that Scheffler is wrong to hold that quantified attitude reports won’t feature in teleological explanations of agent behaviour. Whether Feldman is right about this has no bearing upon the issue at hand, as will be shown directly.
Furthermore, while Scheffler recognised that his analysis was limited in being unable to account for cases like (10), he did not regard this as a significant price to pay if one had the benefit of being able to reconstruct teleological explanation in a manner that would ‘… avoid the obscurities of intension and abstraction’ (Scheffler 1971, p. 367).
Feldman, op. cit., p. 353, footnote 6, makes this objection.
Of course, as mentioned above the number and length of inscriptions will be limited if the universe is spatio-temporally limited. So, strictly speaking, there may still be gaps in the proof of an inscription which is required as a theorem. However, Goodman and Quine suggested that this might be remedied by strengthening the rules of inference of the system in question so that the aforementioned gaps are avoided. Goodman and Quine claimed that this can be achieved without compromising nominalistic principles (Goodman and Quine 1947, p. 121).
Presumably, some inscriptions might also be too small to see, or comprised of characters separated in space and time to such an extent that they can’t be seen in just one viewing by any one perceiver.
It is not hard to illustrate this point. On the assumption that on average an English word has 5 letters, a single copy of an English-language translation of War and Peace will contain close to 3,000,000 inscribed English characters. Given the account of inscriptions suggested by Martin, every possible concatenation of those characters is assumed to exist, and is to count as an inscription. So, the number of inscriptions generated by a single copy of War and Peace is pretty large. It is safe to say that one could not (literally) comprehend the number of English-language inscriptions which exist given all the inscribed English characters which exist, and ever have existed, in all forms of English-language media (i.e., newspapers, books, magazines, journals, junk mail, road signs, computer screens, telephone books, etc., etc.). Of course, many of these inscriptions will be meaningless strings of characters, but many will not.
This means of extending Scheffler’s analysis is just an inscriptionalist version of an approach suggested by Quine. See Quine, op. cit., pp. 212–213. Feldman op. cit., p. 353, footnote 5, also more or less suggests this method as a response to Corrado’s objection.
The meta-linguistic approach may be the commonly employed approach, but not the universally employed approach. For instance, according to dialetheists languages should be treated as semantically closed (i.e., as containing their own truth predicate).
This was outlined by Scheffler in correspondence with me. In response to my question ‘Are That (P) predicates meta-linguistic?’ Scheffler there responded: ‘In a minimal sense, yes, insofar as they denote linguistic objects, i.e., inscriptions. Do they inhabit a Metalanguage applicable to inscriptions of a suitable Object-Language? I did not assume this. My that-P predicates in an expanded English refer to relevant English inscriptions (along, possibly, with rephrasals in other languages) without problematic consequences, just as the word “word” in English refers to other English words (along with words in other languages) without difficulty’.
As mentioned above, Scheffler cites Martin and Woodger’s (1951) work and suggests that the truth definition provided therein could be employed in dealing with Church’s problem sentence (d). But Scheffler provides no details about how Martin and Woodger’s work may be reconciled with his own.
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Parsons, D. Inscriptionalism and Intensionality. Philosophia 41, 567–585 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-012-9410-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-012-9410-5