Abstract
It is widely held that propositions are structured entities. In The Nature and Structure of Content (2007), Jeff King argues that the structure of propositions is none other than the syntactic structure deployed by the speaker/hearers who linguistically produce and consume the sentences that express the propositions. The present paper generalises from King’s position and claims that syntax provides the best in-principle account of propositional structure. It further seeks to show, however, that the account faces serve problems pertaining to the fine individuation of propositions that the account entails. The ‘fineness of cut’ problem has been raised by Collins (The unity of linguistic meaning, 2007) and others. King (Philos Stud 163(3):763–781, 2013) responds to these complaints in ways this paper rebuts. Thus, the very idea of structured propositions is brought into doubt, for the best in-principle account of such structure appears to fail.
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Notes
By sententialism, I mean the notion that sentences (somehow understood) can serve all the roles of propositions (cf., Quine 1960; Collins 2003). There is a narrower ‘sententialist’ doctrine, which claims that that-clauses as the complements of propositional attitude reports refer to sentences (somehow construed). There are various ways of being a sententialist in this sense; see, for example, Carnap (1956), Quine (1956), Davidson (1969), Higginbotham (1986), Schiffer (1987), Larson and Ludlow (1993), among many others. King is not a sententialist in either sense.
Notwithstanding Frege’s ‘Platonism’ about thoughts, he was clearly sensitive to the need for them to be accessed and communicated with via linguistic vehicles; see, for example, Frege (1897/1979, p. 255; 1924–1925/1979, p. 269).
It is worth noting, if only because of the confusing proliferation of jargon in the field, that I am not suggesting that most theorists endorse ‘unarticulated constituents’ in the sense Perry intended, only that they do acknowledge the phenomena Perry described in terms of ‘unarticulated constituents’.
The problem for a structured proposition view here is an analogue of the Benacerraf problem regarding a set-theoretical reduction of natural number to sets. The idea advertised does not so much as solve the problem but lets one settle for a kind of structure that is independently fixed.
An anonymous referee raised this objection.
The same holds for the effects of extraposition and clefts:
-
(i)
Bill seems to be tired—It seems that Bill is tired
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(ii)
Bill wants a car—It is a car that Bill wants—What it is that Bill wants is a car
One may also consider ‘conflation’ cases:
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(iii)
Bill bathed—Bill took a bath
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(iv)
Bill walked the dog—Bill took the dog for a walk
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(v)
Bill shelved the books—Bill put the books on a shelf.
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(i)
I do not mean to suggest that a passive construction is derived from an active one, only that the difference between the two is morpho-syntactic.
The notion of ‘what is said’ and so what is involved in ‘same-saying’ has proved to be highly contentious. I take the construal offered in the text, though, to cut across the varied disputes, insofar as it is ecumenical about whether what is said is fully available to consciousness or corresponds to a complete sentence or amounts to what is literally (as opposed to figuratively) said. See Carston (2002) and Recanati (2004) for overviews of the disputes.
Such is King’s example, but it does not really reflect Lewis’s (1980, p. 41) animus to ‘what is said’, which is based on the phrase being useable to describe everything from the very words uttered to the propositional content, making ‘same-saying’ thus unable to track propositions in particular. The example King employs is one everyone should accept, as we shall see.
The putative synonymy of active–passive pairs has been extensively discussed within linguistics. The generator of much of this discussion was the hypothesis of Katz and Postal (1964) that transformations, such as between an active and a passive, do not affect meaning.
I thank Jeff King for these examples and lengthy discussion of the issues hereabouts.
I presume that most speakers would count the belief that sons are sons as distinct from the belief that sons are male children. Of course, it doesn’t follow that propositions as theoretical posits need be so fine-grained as to track ‘Frege and Mates cases’, but some explanation of the cases should be forthcoming (cf. Salmon 1986; Soames 1986).
If there were some such sieve, then King could plausibly appeal to it as the syntactic basis upon which to answer the ‘too much syntax’ problem discussed above.
This kind of construction is a bit marginal, but let that pass. The point is that Jo is asked to deduce some proposition.
Consider the various ways in which Gödel’s incompleteness theorem is expressed. Sometimes, precision about what Gödel exactly proved in the 1931 paper is appropriate—other times not.
King’s argument for a hyper-fine individuation of propositions also rests on a claim he dubs Same Syntax, Same Structure (SSSS):
(SSSS) Sentences of a given language with the same syntactic structure and that differ only in having lexical items with different semantic values occurring at the same places in their syntactic trees express propositions with the same structure that differ at most in having different constituents, corresponding to the lexical items with different semantic values, occurring in the same places in those propositions (King 2013, p. 775).
Note that this principle does not assert that syntactic structure is propositional structure; it only asserts the weaker claim that sameness of syntactic structure determines (is sufficient for) sameness of propositional structure. As with DCDP, I am happy to agree with King (see below) that an advocate of the structured proposition view must endorse SSSS and that, wedded to DCDP, it delivers the conclusion King wants, i.e., that structured propositions must be as finely cut as syntax. For my purposes, however, DCDP is a far better target. SSSS is a claim internal to the structured proposition view that has no independent plausibility, whereas DCDP, as will become clear, has direct empirical consequences that SSSS lacks. At any rate, SSSS is not sufficient to deliver King’s desired conclusion, for SSSS is perfectly consistent with syntactically distinct sentences expressing the same proposition.
In standard mathematical treatments, both of these relations are distinguished from asymmetrical relations (if xRy, then ¬yRx) and anti-symmetrical relations (if xRy and yRx, then x = y). Ultimately, all four relations matter for an accurate account of linguistic structure, but for present purposes the existence of linguistically encoded symmetrical relations is all that matters.
A standard test is reciprocal entailment. Thus:
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(i)
Bill is next to Sam; therefore, Bill and Sam are next to each other
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(ii)
#Bill loves Mary; therefore Bill and Mary love each other
Complications arise with this test, but it clearly serves to distinguish at least some symmetrical tokens of predicates from other predicates that cannot be construed symmetrically. For example, meet is often symmetrical by the above test, but clearly isn’t where the object of the transitive construction is abstract.
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(i)
To the best of my knowledge, the issue of symmetrical versus non-symmetrical predicates first properly arose by analogy to the figure-ground distinction from (gestalt) perceptual psychology (Tversky 1977; Gleitman et al. 1996; Gauker 2011). Whatever fidelity language might have to this perceptual distinction, I assume that there is a linguistically marked symmetrical/non-symmetrical distinction (see, for example, Partee 2009; Dimitriadis 2008, 2009). See footnote 23.
For present purposes, we may assume that semantic roles correspond to the linguists’ theta roles. There are great disputes about what theta roles are and how they are assigned, but it is broadly assumed that classes of verb determine distinct semantic construals of their syntactically realised arguments. None of the considerations I shall marshal against King, however, depend upon a particular theoretical elaboration of ‘semantic role’ as so understood. See Levin and Rappaport Hovav (2005) for an authoritative survey of the positions in the field.
Of course, this claim depends upon how diverse theta roles might be. For example, by way of the familiar ‘figure-ground’ distinction, there seems to be a difference between the a-b pairs below:
(i)
a
Our neighbour resembles Obama
b
Obama resembles our neighbour
(ii)
a
The Bacon resembles the Velázquez
b
The Velázquez resembles the Bacon
The difference resides in the occupier of the object position being the thing to which things are compared (the ‘ground’). So, given the public prominence of Obama relative to one’s neighbour and the temporal precedence of Velázquez relative to Bacon, the b-cases can seem questionable. It would be rash, though, to think that such a difference showed that resemble could not be symmetrical in terms of one of its tokens contributing to the expression of a proposition equivalent to its converse. That, recall, is all that is required to refute King’s guiding principle according to which combinability must matter. After all, for a quite ignorant speaker-hearer, all of the cases might be on a par, with no prominence given to either argument position. Knowledge of politics or art history is not constitutive of linguistic competence. Also note, trivially, that resemble can be used to describe a pair of objects with no prominence of any kind obtaining between them, such as identical twins.
Ziff (1966) makes this point in order to undermine the general thesis that passivisation does not affect meaning (a consequence of the Katz-Postal hypothesis). Ziff makes no argument, however, to the effect that propositional identity turns on the identity of the predicates predicated with a sentence.
King (2013, p. 780) recognises that some such option is available. My present aim is to push this option against King’s own favoured proposal.
This example is originally due to Barbara Partee and is first discussed in Heim (1982).
I think the ‘*’ judgement on (7b) is somewhat harsh. It is true that the discourse is not as smooth as (6), but (7) is hardly gibberish or flat-out unacceptable. Of course, if we read ‘*’ to mean ungrammatical or ill-formed, then the judgment is not a datum, but a theoretical claim that should be judged relative to the level of acceptability of (7).
Of course, one may, in the example at hand, construe someone as meaning at least one person, which is consistent with more than one person. Even granting that, though, the discourse anaphora resolves the matter so that, in the example, the agent is not plural. Independently, other examples serve to complicate the matter, where a verb (e.g., kill) takes both animate and inanimate agents. However the pie is cut, the anaphora data precisely involve resolving the agent construal (number, gender, animacy, etc.) of the antecedent sentence that is not definite in the short passive itself.
A version of this paper was delivered at Propositions a workshop at CSMN (Oslo). I thank Thomas Hodgson (who organised the event and raised interesting objections) and the rest of the audience, especially Peter Hanks and Andreas Stokke. Another version of the paper was delivered at Unity of the Proposition a workshop at Durham University. I thank Uli Reichard, Wolfram Hinzen, and David Kirby for organisation and questions. I especially thank Jeff King and anonymous referees for patient explanation of where my previous drafts were in error. I disagree with Jeff, but his work continues to be an intellectual inspiration for me.
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Collins, J. Cutting it (too) fine. Philos Stud 169, 143–172 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0163-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0163-1