Whoops!: 29 November

Bad job with the blog upkeep lately.  This week, on 29 November, we read chapter 3 of Stefano’s book.  I think folks may be wanting to post some stuff about it.  Feel free to do so in comments to this post, or to create your own!

6 December

For Thursday 6 December (11.30) we’ll be reading Nunberg, “Indexicality and Deixis” (distributed).

22 November

We will meet at 10 AM, my office. And we’ll discuss Ben Caplan’s “Putting Things in Contexts”. Apologies to those who can’t make this time.

When should we meet next?

Here’s the thing. Many of us are unavailable next week, and at least some of us are unavailable at the normal time the week after. I’m trying to figure out when it is next worthwhile to meet. So it would be great if you could answer the following questions, by commenting on this post.

(1) Are you available to meet at 11.30 next week, 15 November?

(2) Are you available to meet 11.30 next week, 22 November?

(3) What is your availability before 11.30 next week, 22 November?

Thanks!

Stefano, Salmon, and kaplan

For me, this (“Dem. and Nec.”) was not easy to read at all. But it’s worth trying to read the whole thing, especially since the main point of the essay comes way into the second half. And in fact it might be a good idea to start reading the Caplan as well, since he gives a very clear and (I think) accurate summary of Salmon’s view. (I also agree with Ben on every single point of his essay, though, so I may be a bit biased). As a background for some of the semi-technical parts of Salmon’s essay, I have the following two points to make.

(1) character and cognitive value (for me, the least attractive part of Demonstratives). Note that there are two different notions of character in Kaplan. According to the official definition, characters are functions. But in the informal exposition, Kaplan often thinks of them as descriptive material (e.g., being the agent as the character for ‘I’). These are different notions, since different descriptions are representable by the same character-function (being the agent, being the individual the agent sees when s/he looks into a mirror, being an x such that either x is the agent or 2+2=4, all get mapped into one function). Characters-as-functions have very little hope to serve as cognitive values. But I’m not sure even the thicker notion is of any use in this respect. (It’s definitely the thick notion Salmon has in mind, by the way. David Braun has a couple of interesting papers on the distinction).

(2) ‘dthat’. There are two different notions of ’dthat’ as well. One is the official one: in ‘dthat(the F)’, the description ‘the F’ occurs within the input for semantic evaluation (it’s just that ‘dthat’ operates on it, in the manner of an intensional operator). The other occurs casually in Dem., and is more explicit in Afterthoughts: ‘the F’ is ‘off the record’ in ‘dthat(the F)’, what the semantic ‘sees’ is the lone term ‘dthat’ (perhaps the description works at some pre-semantic level, and assigns a character to the occurrence of ‘dthat’ in question). Kaplan does not give any formal rendering of this, and Salmon seems to think it is not too far away from nonsense (see his footnote on Afterthoughts).

Stefano on Frege (an aside)

Stefano’s comment on Salmon on Frege. Yes, I think that Frege’s view (at least in the quoted passage) is what Salmon thinks it is. Incidentally, it is a view that may have some interesting consequences with respect to an unrelated issue, having to do with what linguists call Verb Phrase ellipsis (VP-ellipsis).According to a plausible view, in examples like ‘I like icecream and so does Mary’, the second conjunct mut be ‘unpacked’ by ‘copying’ the VP in the first conjunct, as in ‘I like icecream and Mary likes icecream’. Suppose also, as it is eminently plausible to do, that it is the unpacked item that provides the input for semantic evaluation. Consider then a case of VP-ellipsis with demonstratives (or any indexical), ‘I like that and so does Mary’. Merely copying the relevant material yields ‘I like that and Mary likes that’. But this latter sentence has a reading that is unavailable for the original sentence, namely one true when I and Mary like different demonstrata.Take now Frege’s view, according to which the contextual items are ‘part of the expression’. In that case, what would be copied is not the lone verbal expression ‘that’, but the full expression, including the demonstratum. This has the pleasant consequence of explaining the difference betwen ‘I like that and so does Mary’ and ‘I like that and Mary likes that’.

For 8 November

We’ll be reading (as much as we can of) Nathan Salmon’s “Demonstrating and Necessity”, Phil Review Vol. 111, No. 4, 2002, 497-537.

Stefano on Stefano (and wide scope)

Stefano says: I’m the one who posted the two replies to Bob, on logical truth and on double-index. And while I’m at it, another note. I sometimes hear people say that Kaplan’s example establish that indexicals ‘always take wide scope’. There was a parallel reply to the modal arguments against descriptivism about names (which Kripke and his followers seemed to take seriously, since they gave counter-arguments). I am (sincerely) unsure about what it means, though.

Scope as a syntactic property is well understood (go upwards the parsking tree, both for formal and natural languages). But then the notion that an expression (an indexical, a name) is ‘forced to take wide scope’ would need to be backed by syntactic considerations, and I am not sure what they could be, in any reasonable syntactic system (I am sure they are not provided by ‘widescopist’ philosophers, though). To say that x ‘always takes wide scope’ only in a semantic sense is not a theory, it is the explanandum.

Demonstratives and Double-Index Semantics

Bob Hale: “Earlier on in the paper. K is rather dismissive of two dimensionalism—the kind which distinguishes two propositions associated with sentences which have been taken to express a posteriori necessities and a priori contingencies—but here it appears that K is merely replacing that bifurcation of propositions by a bifurcation in the notion of truth. So in what lies the superiority of K’s way of doing it?”Fully agree. In fact, I suspect that Kaplan’s ‘clear conceptual understanding’ of what the two indexes are supposed to do in standard (Kamp/Vlach) double-index semantics, far from providing the needed philosophical background, is in fact a mistake.

A terminological note: I prefer to talk of the semantic apparatus at issue (the Kamp/Vlach, and also in the formalism of Demonstratives) as ‘double-index’ semantics (which I find natural and powerful). I reserve the term ‘two-dimensionalism’ for a (wide) variety of philosophical views that some have thought could be fuelled by that semantics (including Stalnaker’s views on diagonal propositions and the related industry on natural kinds, internalism, etc.).

Demonstratives and Logical Truth

Demonstratives and Logical TruthBob Hale: “One might respond: well, one only needs to grasp the meaning of ‘2 < 3’ or ‘vixens are female’ to see that these sentences cannot (i.e. with their customary meanings) be uttered falsely—but no one takes that as a reason to think they should come out as logical truths!”True, but I don’t think much hinges on this. What Kaplan calls ‘logical truth’ (and sometimes analytical truth’) is truth-by-virtue-of-character, in a well defined, intelligible sense of the term. Given the stipulated sense, some conclusions turn out to be presumably surprising and interesting, such as that there exist sentences guaranteed to be true by their character, which turn out false if prefixed by intensional operators such as ‘necessarily’ or ‘always’. Of course, the definition leaves open the further question whether Kaplan’s use of ‘logical truth’ reflects some presumably intuitive (?) or at any rate philosophically interesting sense of the term. I suspect this boils down to the traditional question of which expressions qualify as ‘logical constants’, an issue independent from considerations of indexical languages.By the way, once the two issues are distinguished, the conclusion that ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus’ is a logical truth, in Kaplan’s sense, appears less shocking than at first sight. At any rate, incidentally, it is not a conclusion entailed by the system in Demonstratives, but only by Kaplan’s independent considerations about proper names. Indeed, many have take Kaplan’s distinction between character and content as the basis for a (very non-Kaplanian) descriptive treatment of names, immune from the traditional modal attacks: at least on some views proper names as associated with a non-constant character (as, for instance, for Recanati), ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus’ is not logically true.