Abstract
According to an attractive account of belief, our beliefs have centered content. According to an attractive account of communication, we utter sentences to express our beliefs and share them with each other. However, the two accounts are in conflict. In this paper I explore the consequences of holding on to the claim that beliefs have centered content. If we do in fact express the centered content of our beliefs, the content of the belief the hearer acquires cannot in general be identical to the content the speaker expresses. I sketch an alternative account of communication, the Recentering model, that accepts this consequence and explains how expressed and acquired content are related.
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Notes
At least this is true for the cases we are interested in, i.e. the expression of indexical beliefs. For non-indexical beliefs everything can remain just as before.
Modelling contents as sets of possible worlds isn’t satisfactory for all theoretical purposes. The reason is the familiar problem of logical omniscience: logically equivalent contents are identified. This problem isn’t solved by moving to centered content. I will nevertheless put this issue to the side.
Stalnaker (2008) denies that one can be omniscient with respect to possible worlds propositions and at the same time suffer from self-locating ignorance. However, his response seems to rely on a doxastic form of haecceitism.
There may be certain problems with the framework when interpreted as a model for all attitudes (Nolan 2006), (Ninan 2008). A note on terminology: even though strictly speaking all content is now conceived of as centered (as sets of possibilia/centered worlds), I will nevertheless continue to talk of uncentered content—by that I am referring to centered propositions which correspond to standard possible worlds propositions.
This label is stolen from Moss (2010) who calls it “the package delivery model”.
The two principles aren’t strictly necessary or sufficient for successful communication. For instance, there are cases of successful communication, in which the hearer merely recognizes what the speaker wants her to believe, without actually coming to endorse it. Moreover, it seems that even when she does, she has to do so because of the speaker’s assertion, and not just by luck. These complications will not concern us here.
Egan (2007) and Moss (2010) have suggested a response along these lines. More accurately, the relevant claim should be labelled the Expressibility of Malignant Centered Content. The above problem doesn’t arise for each and every piece of centered information. There are cases of centered content where everything would go well. One might then distinguish between benign centered content, which is expressible, and malignant centered content, which isn’t. This is in fact the approach of Egan (2007). As my discussion of this strategy is independent of this distinction, we can here skip over this subtlety.
After completion of the manuscript, it has been pointed out to me that both Heim (2004) and Feit (2008) sketch a model like this, without endorsing it. After an interesting discussion Feit opts instead to identify utterance content with the uncentered semantic value of the uttered sentence. I think this proposal doesn’t work for the reasons given in Sect. 7. Jackson (2010) also provides an account of communication that involves centered utterance content. However, within his framework the centered worlds which model a sentence’s content don’t always represent something about the speaker; e.g. for sentences involving names, the center represents the referent of the name. As a consequence, both principles of the FedEx model fail within Jackson’s account. For the relevant cases, neither speaker nor hearer have a belief that corresponds to the utterance content. Another proposal for handling indexical utterances was suggested both by Torre (2010) and Ninan (2010a). They argue that we should understand utterance content in terms of sequenced worlds, i.e. centered worlds which allow for infinite sequences of individuals at the center. This strategy is hinted at in (Stalnaker 2008, p. 73–74). As Ninan (2010b) proposes to also assign sequenced content to beliefs, he has the prospect of maintaining the FedEx model. The cost, however, is that Ninan endows every subject with her own primitive belief relation.
As we will see in Sect. 6 it may be possible to do things the other way around.
I am assuming that, metaphysically, contexts are centered worlds. Contextual parameters are determined by the features of the respective centered world (Lewis 1980). Again, we can translate talk about centered worlds back into talk about Lewisian possibilia. The centered world that is the utterance context corresponds to the speaker, understood as the time-slice of the world-bound individual that produced the utterance. In the following I will go back and forth between the two formulations.
Admittedly, there are cases that cannot be handled that straightforwardly, e.g. utterance tokens that don’t have a unique author, utterance tokens which are being re-used, i.e. for which the context of utterance doesn’t coincide with the context, in which the utterance was produced etc. This suggests that things need to be refined. Still, I take it that these cases don’t present a special problem for the Recentering model.
As we noted in footnote 7, this isn’t always the case. We might then want to replace the Trusting step with something weaker: e.g. the speaker wants me to believe that she has made a true utterance.
In fact, the hearer might not even have to go through anything like a subconscious inference to get at the acquired content from the information provided in step 2. and 3. I am sympathetic to a holistic picture of belief, according to which “beliefs” may be a “bogus plural” (Lewis 1995, p. 423). On that picture, once the hearer has acquired the information of step 2. and 3., she will thereby have gained the acquired content as well, (unless that information is compartmentalized).
For instance, imagine A and B riding together in a car, and A saying: “The Coombs building is just a couple of blocks ahead”.
The required information is quite often exactly the information the speaker is trying to convey, e.g. in the case of “It is t1 now”. The hearer can figure out what the speaker asserted only by antecedently knowing what time it is. But then, she cannot learn anything interesting from the utterance.
One reason for focussing on disagreement is that our judgments are much more robust here, than in the case of same-saying.
I doubt that we will get a completely satisfactory account of disagreement by restricting ourselves to uncentered content. Here are some problematic examples for which the uncentered account would, against appearances, predict a disagreement:
1: A: “Water is H2O.” B: “Water isn’t water!”
2: (In a situation in which it is raining), A: “It isn’t raining.” B: “It is raining if and only if it is actually raining!”
Note that we aren’t presupposing that the utterance content is the same as the acquired centered content. The explanation in centered terms can then be the one provided by the Recentering model.
It isn’t the case that uncentered propositions never imply centered ones. Firstly, the uncentered proposition p entails the centered proposition p or c, where c is a centered proposition. However, the centered information in question is typically not of that form. Secondly, the uncentered proposition that everything is F entails the centered proposition that I am F, that you are F, etc. This will not help either, since whenever the general uncentered information is available, the entailed centered information isn’t discriminatory at all, whereas the information we acquire in communication often is.
It is conceivable that there are other kinds of communication, which don’t involve such vehicles, e.g. telepathy. The following doesn’t apply to these.
Of course, I cannot completely exclude the possibility that I may have overlooked an alternative assignment of centered background information and uncentered utterance content, which could also cover all relevant cases.
To be clear, I am not questioning the existence of singular (i.e. de re) beliefs about objects, but merely that they are best understood as beliefs in singular propositions.
For cases in which the hearer encounters several utterance tokens at the same time, she can pick out a single token by its position within her sensory field, or as the one that is the focus of her attention.
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Acknowledgments
For helpful comments and discussion, I would like to thank Jochen Briesen, David Chalmers, John Cusbert, Andy Egan, Edward Elliott, Peter Fritz, Frank Jackson, Dirk Kindermann, Jens Kipper, Dilip Ninan, Daniel Nolan, Peter Pagin, Josh Parsons, Jonathan Schaffer, Wolfgang Schwarz, an anonymous referee, as well as audiences at seminars in Canberra, Cologne, Dunedin, and Stockholm. Financial support for this work was provided by an International Postgraduate Research Scholarship from the Australian National University.
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Weber, C. Centered communication. Philos Stud 166 (Suppl 1), 205–223 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-0066-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-0066-6