Abstract
The influential response of David Lewis to the rule-following problem (posthumously described as “reference magnetism”) is described. Three distinct approaches are traced to Lewis’s seminal papers. The first treats the world’s structure as metaphysically providing resources that supplement what individuals have to determine reference. Our words (concepts) have determinate reference beyond the psychological and neurophysiological resources of any individual, and beyond what any community of such individuals can manage on its own. The second treats interpreters of natural languages as required by semantic theory (along with background scientific practice) to impose determinate reference on the terms of those languages, along with natural kinds as the relata of the kind terms of those languages. The third treats the a priori constitutive imposition of natural kinds to be required by the Moorean facts of determinate reference and by semantic theories (that presuppose determinate reference) being “the only game in town.” I show that none of these approaches to reference magnetism work.
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- 1.
Lewis (1983, 1984). As just noted, many philosophers have followed his lead. See, e.g., Sider (2009), especially 400–401, where suggestive language—like “reference magnets” and “ideal interpreters”—is invoked to rhetorically help the suggestion along. See my (2000), especially Part III, § 5, for an earlier version of the argument given in this section against this approach to reference. Lewis’s approach involves grades of eligibility, and not a simple dichotomy between pure natural kinds (that are completely eligible for our terms to refer to) and unacceptably unnatural kinds (that are completely ineligible for our terms to refer to). I get to all this in due course in this chapter.
- 2.
Well, maybe it is. But I’m not going to press this objection now.
- 3.
A relevant analogy: There is a great deal more electromagnetic radiation out there than we can detect with our naked senses. Bees see ultraviolet light; and we don’t. Despite this, were the ancient Greeks able to refer to ultraviolet light? No—and pretty much because they couldn’t see it. We’re able to do something the ancient Greeks weren’t able to do. That’s because we have instruments that can detect the radiation (and we have some theory about the stuff too). See Azzouni (2004a).
- 4.
To extend this metaphor: and if they pull on the bootstraps of one another, some people can be pulled into the air—but only in relation to others who firmly remain on the ground.
- 5.
There is irony in Sider’s invocation of Williams (2007). For Williams makes clear in that article that he thinks the approach that Sider likes ultimately fails—it faces a fatal-looking indeterminacy argument. I won’t pause to evaluate Williams’s clever argument against his interpretation of Lewis’s version of reference magnetism (since there are more basic problems with it). I only want to officially announce that I don’t see why Sider’s invocation of rich metaphysical structure provides any resources for meeting Williams’s objection to this version of reference magnetism. (Sider (2011), notably, doesn’t even indicate that Williams thinks the approach Sider endorses won’t work; consequently Sider doesn’t tell us how he would meet the objection if he did acknowledge it.)
- 6.
I’ll point out in this footnote, however, that I doubt Williams is right about Lewis. Williams structures Lewis’s view so that what Lewis thinks about science (and laws) applies directly to semantics because semantics is a special science; and in this way Lewis derives his purported interpretationalism from his broader views about science. But there is no textual evidence that Lewis derivationally structured his views this way. (And Williams gives none. On the contrary, actually—see, in particular, Williams (2007, 371), footnote 21. No new textual evidence is given by Williams (2015), incidentally.) By contrast, I see Lewis’s use of syntactic simplicity, for example, as a general-purpose tool he reached for whenever he needed it. Nothing significant turns on figuring out Lewis’s real views about these matters. I treat Williams’s suggestion the way I treat Kripke’s interpretation of Wittgenstein: as an interesting and important suggestion to be evaluated on its own merits, regardless of whether it holds of the original philosopher it’s attributed to.
- 7.
Humeanism is the background position assumed here: Lewis holds the view, Williams is working within its parameters and, for the record, I’m a Humean too—subject, however, to the significant caveat that I think sentences can be true without term-world correspondences. This caveat matters in Chap. 6 but that issue can be set aside for the purposes of the current discussion.
- 8.
Williams (2007, 375), footnote 27 “sets aside” issues of measuring syntactic complexity. But all attempts to manage this are known to have failed for so many reasons, including the various major technical obstacles they face—and that Williams alludes to. I’m also thinking, particularly, of the fact that formal simplicity has nothing much to do with ordinary scientific views about how one theory is simpler than another. I pass over all this tangled philosophy of science because conceding the point to Williams (and Lewis, on this interpretation) won’t help their case. I’ll note that Williams (2015, 373) expresses firmer opposition to the idea; he writes: “I don’t really have a clue what a “definition” of the ordinary subject matter of thought and talk—shoes and string and sealing wax—would be, if the definiens is to be drawn from microphysics. I suspect you don’t either. There’s no reason to believe that such definitions are even possible.” The problem, of course, generalizes to the relationship between the special sciences and microphysics—and even between microphysics and other branches of physics! (I discuss this point further in Sect. 4.4). Williams (2015) explores other options—but comes up short.
- 9.
Williams’s discussion of this point is tortured. He admits that the trick he describes isn’t conclusive because the simple theory the trick yields has no deductive powers, and surely deductive power is a theoretical virtue as well. Nevertheless, ruling out syntactically-simple axiomatizations (of theories) due to this kind of trick is the crucial justification—on his interpretation of Lewis—for supplementing the notion of simplicity with a distinction between “perfectly natural,” or “fundamental” properties, and “the rest.” But if this is right (if this is all Williams has to justify his wedding simplicity to metaphysical naturalness), Williams has in effect admitted (explicitly in footnote 23: “the case is not decisive”) that his justification for the natural/non-natural distinction fails.
- 10.
Here’s a reason to think positing a rich chunk of metaphysics is better: Laws are to operate counterfactually, and laws with empty antecedents don’t have empty antecedents in certain possible worlds. But the best Humean solution to that problem seems to be to stipulate conditions on when possible worlds are relevant to the counterfactuals rather than messing with the actual metaphysics to exclude laws with excess (but vacuous) conditions.
- 11.
This, incidentally, gives a second reason to think that Williams’s reconstrual of Lewis’s approach isn’t Lewis’s original one. Lewis, as I indicated in Sect. 4.2, seems to reject the sensitivity requirement; but Williams’s reconstrual requires taking account of it.
- 12.
See Azzouni (2000), especially Part I, § 2, for discussion of this, and for citation of other philosophy of science literature that makes the same point. But of course the continued and widespread use of various aspects of Newtonian physics is an example pretty much everyone knows about.
- 13.
Fodor (1975) famously—among philosophers, psychologists and linguists, anyway—uses the phrase “the only game in town” and runs versions of this argument on behalf of various theses in philosophy of mind—especially RTM (the representational theory of mind). One of his cutest allusions to the argument is his (1975, 27) quotation from Lyndon Johnson: “I’m the only President you’ve got.” The only game in town argument, of course, is a version of inference to best explanation—but in the special case where it’s argued only one explanation is available.
- 14.
I think this third position—one that should be clearly distinguished from the other two—is really Lewis’s. Williams’s interpretation of Lewis is ruled out for the reasons I’ve already given. The crude view of Sect. 4.2 is ruled out because it’s, well, crude.
- 15.
Well, qualifications are called for because these are facts about usage, and they turn out to be far more intricate than Lewis realized. They’re also generally invisible to natural-language users (which makes them bad candidates for Moorean facts), and this invisibility point is one Chomsky makes regularly. Finally, they also strongly resist treatment via the standard semantic theories that Lewis likes. For details about some of this, see my discussion of Chomsky and Pietroski later in this section. Also see Azzouni (2013), where all this is discussed at more length.
- 16.
If they did, then the theorems that Putnam’s indeterminacy results rely on would fail—permutation results and the Löweinheim-Skolem theorems. See Azzouni (2003) for the technical details.
- 17.
- 18.
- 19.
This applies not only to the Moorean Lewis that I’m currently discussing, but also to the more moderate interpretational Lewis of Sect. 4.3.
- 20.
Davidson presumes this about “reference.” See, e.g., Davidson (1973, 74).
- 21.
- 22.
Consider Chomsky’s (2000, 37), “London is so unhappy, ugly, and polluted that it should be destroyed and rebuilt 100 miles away.” Notice that “London” is functioning in a way that resists standard Tarskian reference-treatment in a single sentence. This is a phenomenon rampant in natural language: a single use of a name—“London”—taking in a single sentence predicates that presuppose disparate referential targets. Also see Pietroski (2003), on various attempts to modify truth-conditional-semantic approaches to handle these examples systematically.
- 23.
Chomsky often directly attacks the standard notion of reference—describing it as useless for linguists, e.g., in Chomsky (2000, 40). For discussion of this aspect of Chomsky’s thinking, see Azzouni (2013). Note the contrast with the opening paragraph of Williams (2007, 361); he writes, “The subquestion I focus upon here concerns the semantic properties of language: in virtue of what does a name such as ‘London’ refer to something or a predicate such as ‘is large’ apply to some object?” Notice also that there are two issues with the notion of reference. One is how it’s to be explained (or not explained) in the context of semantics; a related—but importantly different—idea is the theoretical/explanatory role that “reference” plays in the science of semantics. When Sider talks about “explanatory role” he’s focused on the second idea; the opening paragraph of Williams (2007) is officially focused on the first. In Tarskian approaches, they dovetail together. In the approach to semantics urged by Chomsky and Pietroski they are both largely sidelined for the same reason: theoretical intractability.
- 24.
- 25.
- 26.
For further discussion, see Azzouni (2010c), section V.
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Azzouni, J. (2017). Reference Magnetism. In: The Rule-Following Paradox and its Implications for Metaphysics. Synthese Library, vol 382. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49061-8_4
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