Sunday, September 24, 2006
Kripke's Puzzle again
I've just read Gillian Russell and John Doris' new paper criticising Stanley's sensitive invariantism (I'm sure I met both Deadbeat and Richboy when I was in St Andrews - maybe Gillian did too), and they reminded me of a line attributed to Grice: 'that's not an objection to my theory, that's my theory'. And I'm worried that people will think my last post is guilty of making such an "objection" to the ambiguity thesis which I attributed to David Sosa and one of my temporal parts.
Here's the worry. It's not really an objection to the ambiguity thesis that some entailments go missing - the proposal was expressly designed to block certain entailments. In David's case, he reconstructs Kripke's argument in 'A Puzzle About Belief' so that one needs to move from 'Peter believes that Paderewski has musical talent and Peter believes that Paderewski does not have musical talent' to 'Peter has contradictory beliefs'. The entailment looks pretty good, but David suggests it requires something like the following principle (388): (H) 'If a name in ordinary language has a single referent then it may correctly be represented logically by a single constant'. And David urges two things; firstly that Kripke's puzzles can be treated as a reductio of this principle, and secondly this principle is, like Shakespeareanism, a distinctive committment of the theorist who holds that the semantic contribution of a proper name is exhausted by its bearer, i.e. the Millian. The non-Millian can allow that different occurrences of coreferential names do not share meaning, since their meaning isn't exhausted by that common referent. This means the non-Millian, but not the Millian, can reject principle (H) and thus block the entailment. I'll spare the details, but I was trying to block some related entailments.
I still think the entailment I discussed last time, from 'Paderewski is a musician and Paderewski is a politician' to 'there is some single person who is both a musician and a politician' is a deeply unwelcome casualty. Even if there is more to the meaning of the proper names than their referents, it looks like the mere fact that the two occurrences of the proper name are coreferential looks like it should guarentee the truth of the conclusion. It won't guarentee that someone who has been initiated into the 'Paderewski'-using practice will be able to recognise that entailment; but my point last time was just that this is a different issue.
Notice the contrast to the kind of entailment David wished to block. In effect, he blocks the entailment from 'Peter believes that Paderewski has musical talent and Peter believes that Paderewski does not have musical talent' to 'Peter has contradictory beliefs' by denying that 'Paderewski does not have musical talent' is genuinely the negation of 'Paderewski has musical talent'. This time, the mere fact that the two occurrences of the proper name are coreferential doesn't look like it should guarentee the truth of the conclusion; for that, we need more, namely that the semantic contribution of each occurrence is the same. But that's just what's in dispute between the Millian and David's non-Millian.
So, just to attempt to get clearer, here's what I'm taking to be the germane contrast. The acceptability of the entailment discussed by David turns on the issue which is the real point of contention between the Millian and the ambiguity guy; whether the semantic contribution of a proper name is uniform on different occurrences. In contrast, the acceptability of the entailment I discussed in discussing closure last time looks like it should be settled by something that is common-ground between these guys; that these distinct occurrences are coreferential. That's why I think the entailment I discussed is a genuine casualty of war, and not just a part of the ambiguity proposal which it would be question-begging to call into question.
Here's the worry. It's not really an objection to the ambiguity thesis that some entailments go missing - the proposal was expressly designed to block certain entailments. In David's case, he reconstructs Kripke's argument in 'A Puzzle About Belief' so that one needs to move from 'Peter believes that Paderewski has musical talent and Peter believes that Paderewski does not have musical talent' to 'Peter has contradictory beliefs'. The entailment looks pretty good, but David suggests it requires something like the following principle (388): (H) 'If a name in ordinary language has a single referent then it may correctly be represented logically by a single constant'. And David urges two things; firstly that Kripke's puzzles can be treated as a reductio of this principle, and secondly this principle is, like Shakespeareanism, a distinctive committment of the theorist who holds that the semantic contribution of a proper name is exhausted by its bearer, i.e. the Millian. The non-Millian can allow that different occurrences of coreferential names do not share meaning, since their meaning isn't exhausted by that common referent. This means the non-Millian, but not the Millian, can reject principle (H) and thus block the entailment. I'll spare the details, but I was trying to block some related entailments.
I still think the entailment I discussed last time, from 'Paderewski is a musician and Paderewski is a politician' to 'there is some single person who is both a musician and a politician' is a deeply unwelcome casualty. Even if there is more to the meaning of the proper names than their referents, it looks like the mere fact that the two occurrences of the proper name are coreferential looks like it should guarentee the truth of the conclusion. It won't guarentee that someone who has been initiated into the 'Paderewski'-using practice will be able to recognise that entailment; but my point last time was just that this is a different issue.
Notice the contrast to the kind of entailment David wished to block. In effect, he blocks the entailment from 'Peter believes that Paderewski has musical talent and Peter believes that Paderewski does not have musical talent' to 'Peter has contradictory beliefs' by denying that 'Paderewski does not have musical talent' is genuinely the negation of 'Paderewski has musical talent'. This time, the mere fact that the two occurrences of the proper name are coreferential doesn't look like it should guarentee the truth of the conclusion; for that, we need more, namely that the semantic contribution of each occurrence is the same. But that's just what's in dispute between the Millian and David's non-Millian.
So, just to attempt to get clearer, here's what I'm taking to be the germane contrast. The acceptability of the entailment discussed by David turns on the issue which is the real point of contention between the Millian and the ambiguity guy; whether the semantic contribution of a proper name is uniform on different occurrences. In contrast, the acceptability of the entailment I discussed in discussing closure last time looks like it should be settled by something that is common-ground between these guys; that these distinct occurrences are coreferential. That's why I think the entailment I discussed is a genuine casualty of war, and not just a part of the ambiguity proposal which it would be question-begging to call into question.
Labels: Epistemology, Philosophy of Language
# posted by Aidan @ 8:56 PM 
