Mind and Language

HOT Fun in the Summertime 2

Richard Brown 3 Comments

Given that higher-order theories of consciousness are committed to the claim that there are unconscious sensory states (like pains, and seeings of red, etc) and that such unconscious states are not like anything for the creature that has them, they need a way to identify the sensory qualitative properties independently of our access to those properties (i.e. independent of their being conscious). This is where homomorphism theory comes in.

Rosenthal begins by noting that we characterize our sensory qualities in terms of their resemblances and differences within families of properties. These families of properties are in turn specified by reference to the perceptible properties of things in the world. For example we can characterize red as more similar to pink than to brown and so on and these resembelances and differences are homomorphic to the family of perceptible properties (presuambly wavelength reflective properties) that give rise to the mental qualities. What we get from doing this systematically is a ‘quality space’ which is homomorphic to the quality space of the perceptible properties. Our being aware of the qualitative properties of sensory states explains how it is that we have mental access to the perceptible properties. An unconscious pain state, then, will be one that resembles and differs other pain states in ways that are homomorphic to a family of perceptible properties, and via which we gain mental access to those properties. Though there may be other ways to independently specify the qualitative properties all higher-order theories need some way to do it and homomorphism theory looks promising. It is, at the very least, an illustration that it can be done. How can we extend this to cover the requirement that there is something that it is like for a creature to have a conscious thought?

I have elsewhere argued (The Qualitative Character of Conscious Thoughts) that the propositional attitudes can be modeled as taking some specific mental attitude towards some represented proposition and that the mental attitude just is some particular way of feeling about the represented proposition. So, for instance having a belief consists in feeling convinced, that is, it is the subjective feeling of certainty that one has with respect to the truth of the represented propositon. This model of the propositional attitudes actually fits very nicely with homomorphism theory. In the sensory case we become aware of the sensory qualities, which are the properties that mental states have in virtue of which they resemble and differ each other, and which resemblances and differences are homomorphic to the resemblances and differences that hold between the family of perceptible worldly properties. Our being conscious of these properties explains how it is that we have mental access to colors. So too in thought we become conscious of the cognitive qualities and this gives us access to our thoughts. To have a conscious belief is to be conscious of oneself as having a certain cognitive quality with respect to some content. And, these cognitive qualities (that is the mental attitudes themselves) will stand in various patterns of resemblances and differences from each other in just the same way that the sensory qualities do.

What are we to say about the actual homomorphism to perceptible properties? Is there any set of properties that the mental attitudes are homomorphic to? That is, is there a set of properties that have similarities and differences which resemble and differ in a way that preserves the similarities and differences between the mental attitudes? This is important since we need a way to specify the attitudes apart from their qualitative component. Yes; we can hypothesize that the homomorphic properties are the illocutionary forces of utterances. So the differences between beliefs that p and desires that p are homomorphic to the differences between the illocutionary force of the utterance of some linguistic item in the process of expressing the belief or desire.

This even may even turn out to be an explanation of why it is that having language allows us to have more fine-grained thoughts, if we could defend the claim that being conscious of our thoughts in respect of their qualitative attitude towards some represented content gives us mental access to the properties of the language that we would use to express that thought. If this were the case then the cognitive qualities would be exactly like the sensory qualities and our theory of one could be used to explain the other. Obviously more work needs to be done to flesh this out completely, but this line of thought seems to be a promising way of extending homomorphism theory to cover propositional attitudes and so this account of the propositional attitudes should be very attractive to anyone who accepts a higher-order theory of consciousness.

Truth, Justification, and the Quasi-realist Way

Richard Brown 3 Comments

In an earlier post (The Meaning and Use of ‘is True’) I argued that when discussing minimalism about truth we need to distinguish between redundancy theories (claims about the meaning is ‘is true’) and deflationism (claims about the nature of the property that the predicate is supposed to pick out). Once we see that redundancy theories conflate meaning and use we need an independant reason to accept deflationsim about truth. In this post I will argue against deflationism by arguing that it cannot account for our common sense feelings about justification in moral judgements by looking at the way that Simon Blackburn has appealed to minimalism in formulating his quasi-realist form of expressivism.

The basic problem for the deflationsist is that whatever account of moral contradiction they give will also be the correct account of contradiction in matters of taste. So ‘broccoli is disgusting’ will be true if and only if broccoli is disgusting and someone who said that it was not would really be contradicting me. From within the ‘taste framework’ broccoli is disgusting and I can just see that the Broccoli-ban and their feelings about the taste of broccoli are just objectively wrong. Of course all that any of this means is that I accept or agree with the sentiment that I expressed when I said that broccoli was disgusting. The story we tell here exactly parallels the story that is told in the case of moral judgments about cruelty, the Taliban, or whatever.

But clearly there could not be more of a difference between these two kinds of judgments. In particular, it seems obvious that this story about broccoli is just wrong. Common sense tells us that our feelings about broccoli may depend on two things. One, we may think that broccoli has a certain specific kind of taste and some people like that taste and others dislike it, which one it is may depend on what the person can taste, or it may depend on how they were raised, or just simply that they are disposed to like it or not and all of these vary from person to person. So there is nothing wrong with a person who thinks that broccoli tastes good, they simply have different tastes than ours and which you have doesn’t really matter. On the other hand we might say that broccoli has no determinate taste, it all depends on the person who does the tasting and the way that their taste buds are constituted.  Taste is a secondary property whose reality is totally mind dependant. So whether it is disgusting or not is relative to a person’s make up. Either of these common sense explanations of what is going on in the broccoli case differs dramatically from the common sense view of moral discourse. Only a madman would claim that our feelings about Saddam Hussein, the slaughter of children, truth telling, or promise keeping depended on us in either of the two ways mentioned above. Even Blackburn is not that reckless! He explicitly denies that anything like this is the right way to characterize moral disagreement. But the problem is that there is no way to distinguish these kinds of claims from the theoretical stand point of quasi-realism.

Since the theory is unable to distinguish these obviously distinguishable kinds of judgments, there must be something seriously wrong with deflationism about truth as it relates to a theory of justification. In fact, it seems obvious what is wrong with it. It very obviously and flagrantly turns moral matters into matters of personal taste. It does this by invoking redundancy and claiming that all there is to truth is its function in natural language of voicing agreement. To say that something is true is simply to repeat what we have said. If we happen to have said something about rape or the taste of broccoli makes no difference. Once we take the deflationary account of truth seriously we are no longer able to take moral discourse seriously.

Blackburn cannot respond that we can distinguish talk about broccoli and talk about genocide by the level of emotional commitment that we have to claims in one area as opposed to claims in the other because it is not inconsistent, on his view, that there be people who take broccoli as seriously as we take suffering. Thus the Broccoli-ban are every bit as serious about people who disagree with their feelings about the taste of broccoli, even to the point of putting dissenters to death. It may be the case that Simon Blackburn does not take talk about broccoli that seriously, but so what? If this is to be anything more than a mere autobiographical report what we need is a way to say that someone who did take talk about broccoli as serious as the Broccoli-ban is mistaken and further that their being mistaken is not simply an opinion of mine. Something, in short, that allows us to distinguish our talk about what depends solely on us and what does not. The deflationary theory of truth fares very badly here. It will only seem plausible if one thinks that that is all there is to truth, but this belief is not forced on us.

Not only does quasi-realism have no way to distinguish between the Taliban and the Broccoli-ban that is not mere autobiography we can see that the very same problem arises for other moral claims. Suppose someone from the Taliban were to respond to Blackburn that their views on women were the correct ones to have and that
Blackburn was wrong when he says that they (the Taliban) are objectively wrong. Let us suppose that they laugh at the idea that women are equal to men in any serious way. Then, according to the analysis that is on offer we are to conclude that what they have said is true just in case they really hold the attitudes that they say they do.
Blackburn then points out that they are ‘blind to the nature of women and the possibilities open to them’ and so on, but the important question of WHY it is that the Taliban have to agree with him on this point is left begging to be addressed. Of course by this I do not merely mean that the Taliban may irrationally refuse to admit that the evidence against them is compelling but rather the stronger claim that in some deep sense there is no way to really say which is right here. Each is saying something true when they express their moral sentiments about women. This is, of course, nothing more than relativism.

Applying Frigidity

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As commonly understood Kripke’s notion of rigidity is a property that some terms have and that others lack. I argue that there is no such property that is had by some terms and lacked by others; hence there is no rigidity as commonly construed . Recent discussions of rigidity have, I claim, forgotten the importance that stipulation plays in Kripke’s original account. In short the argument is that the truth-conditions of sentences with supposed rigid designators in them can vary depending on the stipulative act of the speaker. But if rigidity were a property of the terms themselves the truth-conditions should not vary! I introduce the notion of frigidity which is not a property that terms have, but something that we do and is a tool that we use to evaluate counter-factuals (Introducing Frigidity). We decide to ‘freeze’ the referent of a term and then try to evaluate counter-factual statements in terms of the constant referent. The ‘freezing’ is accomplished by a stipulative act on the part of the speaker.

Thus it follows that there are two ways to perform the thought experiment of frigid stipulation corresponding to taking one or the other terms flanking the identity sign as frigid and asking ‘what about that in another possible world?’ We decide that we are going to stipulate, trivially as Kripke says, that we want to find out about X in a possible world. So for water=H20 we can ask ‘what if H20, this very chemical substance, was in a world that was different from ours?’ If it turns out that H20 is not ‘watery’ that is OK. We can then also ask ‘what about water? Stuff that acts like this, fills our lakes and etc? What if we found a world that had watery stuff that was not H20?’ And that is OK as well. This has the advantage of explaining why people’s intitions vary about whether twater is water.

However Kripke (Kripke 1980) makes the claim that when it comes to mental kinds we cannot do this because in the case of pains and whatnot their properties are not separable in this way. But once we switch from rigidity to frigidity this is less obvious. We can hold the brain state frigid and ask ‘what is it like to have this brain state in a world that is different from ours?’ It may turn out that that very brain state is not like anything to have at all. On the other hand we can hold the sensation of pain frigid and ask questions about worlds with that sensation. It certainly seems logically possible that some of those worlds will have that sensation and yet not have any brain states at all!

This is just what Kripke’s bjection to the identity theory is. He says “this notion seems to me self-evidently absurd. It amounts to the view that the very pain I now have could have existed without being a mental state at all,” (p.147). Well, yes this is true if what he means is that the very brain state he is in and which is his pain might have existed but was not painful for the creature that had it. This is to do no more than admit that there might exist an unfelt pain. He is wrong if he means that a pained creature, one that felt pain, would not be in pain.

The Meaning and Use of ‘is True’

Richard Brown 4 Comments

The first thing that we need to do is to make a distinction between the redundancy theory of truth, which is a claim about the use of the predicate ‘is true’ in a natural language, and deflationsim, which is a metaphysical claim about the nature of the property picked out by ‘is true’. Usually what you find is that people just use ‘minimalism’ and ignore this difference though they seem to think that redundancy is true and so therefore deflationsism is true (Blackburn is a classic example of this).

The main motivation for redundancy is a collapsing of the meaning/use distinction that is characteristic of Horwich and other neo-Wittgensienians. If the meaning of a word just is the way that that word is used, the function it conventionally plays in a public language game, then finding out how people use the truth predicate and abstracting the rule that defines its function (the T-schema) is finding out the essence of our concept of truth. But there are reasons not to conflate meaning and use (which I won’t go into here). While I do think that people often use the word ‘true’ as a way of communicating that they agree with either what they themselves, or someone else, has said this communicative use of the predicate ‘is true’ depends on its having the correspondence meaning. ‘True’, the English word, means something like ‘being in accordance with the actual state of affairs’ and so it is easy to see how I could use it to express agreement with what has already been said; to say that something is true is to say that it is really the way things are. So in conversation I am able to exploit that meaning in order to indicate that I agree with something that has been said, I am in effect saying ‘yes, that is in accordance with the facts’.

We exploit the meanings of words in this way quite often. Searle (Searle 1969/2001, p. 142) pointed out a similar phenomenon with ‘promise.’ Suppose a parent says to their lazy child “clean your room or I promise I will take away your cell phone!” It is very odd to think the parent is actually promising to do anything here since the thing promised is not something that the child wants the parent to do. In fact this kind of utterance is most likely a threat or a warning. Or consider a professor confronting a student suspected of plagiarism. The professor says “this passage is taken from Wikipedia” and the student says “I didn’t plagiarize! I promise I didn’t!” This doesn’t look like a promise either, how can you promise that you did not do something? This is rather an emphatic denial of the professor’s accusation. How is this possible? It is because the verb ‘to promise’ is one of the strongest indicators of commitment in the English language, and so we adapt it in these cases as a way of indicating that we are really committed. It would be very hard to explain, from Horwich’s view, how the predicate came to have the function of indicating agreement in the first place without appealing to the correspondence meaning that the word has. If this is right then one of the motivations for accepting deflationsim about truth falls apart.

What Kripke Really Thinks

Richard Brown 1 Comment

In an earlier post I introduced a distinction between rigidity, a semantic property that some words have and that others lack, and frigidity, a pragmatic property whereby reference is determined by how a word is used. In this post, I argue that frigidity actually better captures what Kripke is talking about. Upon looking at what Kripke says it seems undeniable that what he is concerned about is the truth conditions of utterances that express singular thoughts. Thus our intuitions about the truth of sentences like 1. and 2. are really intuitions about the thoughts that these sentences are taken to be used to express.

1. The first great analytic philosopher might not have been the first great analytic philosopher
2. Bertrand Russell might not have been Bertrand Russell

That is, our intuitions are about particular uses of sentences and Kripke is talking about token utterances. This means that who these sentences depend on for their truth can vary depending on how they are used, and hence that frigidity better captures Kripke’s idea.

This becomes much clearer when we look at Kripke’s later article, “Speaker Reference and Semantic Reference,” (Kripke 1977/1991) where he is much more explicit about what the jobs of semantics and pragmatics are.  He begins, following Grice, by distinguishing between speaker and semantic meaning.

The notion of what words can mean in a language is semantical: it is given by the conventions of our language. What they mean on a given occasion is determined, on a given occasion, by these conventions, together with the intentions of the speaker and various contextual features. Finally what the speaker meant, on a given occasion, in saying certain words, derives from various further special intentions, taken together with various general principles applicable to all human languages regardless of their special conventions (Cf. Grice’s maxims) (SR p 84)

So, in effect we have three kinds of meaning. We have the general meaning of the words as given by the conventions of the language (what Grice called timeless meaning (Grice 1957/1994)), we have the meaning of the words on a given occasion which is determined by the conventions of the language and the intentions of the speaker and ‘various contextual features’. This allows us to resolve any ambiguities, figure out what any indexical or demonstrative elements are being used for and in general determine what proposition the sentence expresses. Finally we have what the speaker meant on a given occasion in saying what they did, which may diverge from what the sentence that they said means on that occasion.

So far this all looks like standard the Gricean picture. Kripke then goes on to distinguish the semantic referent of a term from the speaker’s referent, which he says are special cases of semantic and speaker meaning. 

…the semantic referent of a designator is given by a general intention of the speaker to refer to a certain object whenever the designator is used. The speaker’s referent is given by a specific intention, on a given occasion, to refer to a certain object (p 84)

The semantic referent is given by a general intention which means that I have a general intention to refer to Kripke by using ‘Kripke’.  This means that I have something like a standing intention; I generally use tokens of ‘Kripke’ as a way of referring to Kripke. As he says,

…he uses ‘Jones’ as a name of Jones-elaborate this according to your favorite theory of proper names-and, on this occasion, simply whishes to use ‘Jones’ to refer to Jones,” (ibid).

The reason that I am able to do this is elaborated by his favorite theory of names, which is a causal theory. So, who it is that I have in mind is determined by the causal link that the name (token) has to an individual. This determines who the thought is about.The picture he is developing seems to be like this. When things go right, the speaker has someone in mind, that is, has a singular thought about a particular person, has a word that he (generally) uses as a name for that person (this person is the semantic referent of the term) and on this occasion he intends to refer to that person by using the name (this is the speaker reference).

Now let us return to the question at hand. When we evaluate sentences like 1. and 2. what is it that we are evaluating? I have suggested that Kripke thinks we are evaluating sentences that are taken to express singular thoughts. That is, thoughts about a particular individual. It is in this way that we can understand why Kripke thinks that the test for rigidity is a metaphysical one. This emerges clearly when Kripke says,

In practice it is usual to suppose that what is meant in a particular use of a sentence is understood from the context. In the present instance, that context made it clear that it was the conventional use of ‘Aristotle’ for the great philosopher that was in question. Then, given this fixed understanding of [Aristotle was fond of dogs], the question of rigidity is this: Is the correctness of [Aristotle was fond of dogs], thus understood, determined with respect to each counter-factual situation by whether a certain single person would have liked dogs (had that situation obtained)? …this question is entirely unaffected by the presence or absence in the language of other readings [of the sentence]. For each such particular reading separately, we can ask whether what is expressed would be true of a counter-factual situation if and only if some fixed individual has the appropriate property. (NN P.9)

Kripke means to be talking about sentences as used on a particular occasion. What he is concerned with is particular uses of sentences, and their meaning and reference are determined by who the speaker has in mind and his intentions. So the big picture is that we express a singular thought about something and we want to know the truth conditions for it. The way we determine the truth conditions of the thought is by looking at the token utterance that we take as expressing it and as we have seen this is done partly by the speaker’s intentions (since ‘Aristotle’ names more than one object), and partly due to the context of utterance. This is called semantics because we are talking about truth-conditions, but it is important to see that on this view it is token sentences that get evaluated and that these token sentences are taken as expressing singular thoughts.

Introduing Frigidity

Richard Brown 4 Comments

Recently there has been a lot of talk, here at this blog (Kripke, Consciousness and the ‘Corn, and Two Concepts of Transitive Consciousness)  and over at the Brain Hammer (Me So ‘Corny, Kripkenite, and Crushing Puppies, Superman) about kripke and causal theories of reference. I have been arguing that a causal theory of reference is independently motivated and if we happen to like higher-order theories of consciousness it gives us a very nice answer to several objections that seem wide spread and in fact gives us an implementation of the higher-order strategy and saves very many of the Cartesian intuitions that people have about consciousness.

But even though I think that all of this is true, I do not think that there is any such thing as rigidity. That is I do not think that there is a semantic property that names have and that definite descriptions lack. Following Kent Bach, I deny that there are any rigid designators in natural languages. I addressed this in my PMS WIPS  Kripke, Devitt, Bach where I introduce ‘Frigidity’ and ‘frigid stipulation’ as a contrast to rigidity and rigid designation but I thought I would bring it up again…

The semantic thesis of rigidity is that the meaning of a name is its reference and since the meaning of our terms stay the same when we evaluate modal scenarios then the individual that is relevant to determining the truth of the sentence in question stays the same, whereas for descriptions the meanings of the terms stay the same and the individual that is relevant to determining the truth of the sentence can vary. So consider the following pair of sentences.

   1. The greatest living philosopher likes tea
   2. Saul Kripke likes tea

The meanings of all the words in (1) stay the same but its truth will vary depending on when you say it. It is true now because it (arguably) picks out Kripke (and he does like tea), but it might have been false if said in 362 BCE, and true again in 1905 because its truth depends on different people at different times (Aristotle and Russell respectively). (1) also behaves this way when we evaluate it with respect to modal scenarios. So we can imagine that Kripke never became a philosopher (maybe he became a shoe salesman) (1) would then designate someone else (perhaps Putnam).  The name ‘Saul Kripke’ on the other hand names the same person in all modal contexts where the actual Saul Kripke exists (hence it wouldn’t name him before his birth, or in fact before his initial baptism). The truth of (2) depends on just one individual for its truth if it depends on anybody; the truth of (1) can depend on many individuals.

The pragmatic thesis of frigidity, on the other hand, separates meaning from reference. The meaning of a name is one thing, how it is used to refer another. The meaning of a name contributes to determining the truth-conditions of the sentence in which it occurs but the sentence can only be true when it is used to perform some speech act or other.  So in order to evaluate the following sentences for truth we must first take them to be particular utterances, said by someone.

3. The first great analytic philosopher taught Wittgenstein
4. Betrand Russell taught Wittgenstein

(3) and (4) by themselves are not true or false; they have conditions which specify when they would be true, but it is only the sentence as used that actually has a truth value. Who is relevant to determining the truth of an utterance is a property of how language is used, so whether (3) and (4) depend on the same individual or not depends on how someone uses them rather than on the meaning of the words.

The obvious fact that the truth conditions for sentences like (4) and (2) vary depending on who the speaker means to be referring to is an argument against rigidity and for frigidity. But again, this is all a clam about sentences, not about thoughts. On this view, the causal theory of reference is a theory that tells us how it is that we can have singular thoughts.