In  The Case for Referential Descriptions Michael Devitt presents his case for the claim that definite descriptions like, for instance, ‘the author of Naming and Necessity’, are semantically ambiguous between  referential and attributive uses. The alternative to this is the Russellian view which treats definite descriptions as semantically equivelent to quantifier phrases (‘there is someone who is the author of Naming and Necessity’) and to explain the referential uses as some kind of Gricean implicature. So, one view has ‘the author of namming and necessity’ as having two meanings (just like ‘bank’) whereas the other just gives it one meaning.  

Kripke gives an argument against the referential thesis in his paper “Speaker Reference and Semantic Reference” that, as far as I know, Devitt never replies to, in the following passage

there is no reason to suppose that in making an indirect discourse report on what someone else has said I myself must have similar intentions, or be engaged in the same kind of speech act; in fact it is clear that I am not. If I say ‘Jones says the police are around the corner,’ Jones may have meant it as a warning but I need not say it as a warning. If the referential-attributive distinction is neither syntactic nor semantic, there is no reason, without further argument, to suppose that my usage, in indirect discourse, should match the man on whom I report, as referential or attributive. The case is quite different for a genuine semantic ambiguity. If Jones says, ‘I have never been to a bank,’ and I report this, saying, ‘Jones denied that he was ever at a bank,’ the sense I give to ‘bank’ must match Jones’ if my report is to be accurate. (p83 SR)

I think that argument goes like this. If I say “The author of On Denoting” was a lady’s man” and I am using the description referentially and then you report that to someone else saying ‘Richard said that the author of On Denoting was a lady’s man’ you do not have to be using the description referentially (or be giving it that sense) and vice versa. In fact you may not even be able to use it referentially, as you may not know who the author of On Denoting is. If the referential use was a pragmatic phenomenon then this is what we expect as that matches speech acts in general. If the referential use were a semantic phenomenon then this would be ruled out because in genuine semantic ambiguities we do have to report the words with the same sense. Thus since descriptions act more like pragmatic phenomena there is no ambiguity. Notice that we can also adapt this argument to the case involving names. I may say “Kripke is the greatest living philosopher” and you may go and say “Richard said that Kripke is the greatest living philosopher” you may not even be in a position to use the name referentially. If in this case you think you do get a belief about Kripke (because it is a famous name), then consider if I say “Jenny McArthur is a good cook” you then say ‘Does Jenny know how to make pheasant under glass?’ you may do so even though you do not know who Jenny is. So this is a reason to think that names are not ambiguous as between referential and attributive.

As anyone who knows me knows, I am extremely fond of swearing. I have never understood whyt some words are considered bad (aside from racial slurs that is); I don’t see anything morally wrong with using ‘foul’ language in any context…but that is another story…

One of the best swear words is ‘fuck,’ in part because it is considered one of the worst swears, but also because of its versatility. In fact I have long thought that it can be used as any part of speech, as the title of the post suggests (this is actually from a T-shirt I own 🙂 )…I haven’t ever really thought about this seriously, but recently when I mentioned this to someone they said that it couldn’t be used as a preposition. But that is clearly not the case. Consider (in response to ‘where’s the book’)

1. The book is right fucking there

this can be said quite naturally after one has already said “the book is right over there” a couple of times to no avail. Since ‘fucking’ is here taking the place of ‘over’ it is a preposition.

In fact I noticed the other night that the “fucking there!” locution is used a lot by chef Gordon Ramsey.

I also recently discovered that it can be used as a quantifier/determiner, as in “he knows fuck-all about philosophy”

Fuckin’ A!

So I wanted to finish up talking about Devitt’s view about the methodology of naturalized semantics.

Given that the semantic task cannot be solely to investigate our intuitions about meanings, we then need a way to identify what the semantic task is. Devitt’s answer is that we need to begin by asking what the purpose of meaning attributions are. From this he extracts two key tasks that a semantic theory should explain. The first is how thoughts come to have meanings which allow them to be appealed to in an explanation of behavoir. The second is to explain the property of thoughts that allows them to be a guide to reality for the person. This he calls ‘playing a semantic role’. The semantic task is then to identify which properties of thoughts (if any) allow them to play a semantic role. As you might know already, Devitt’s answer is going to be that in some cases the property is a causal/historical one, in other cases it will be inferential/conceptual connections.

In an earlier post I distinguished two kinds of semantic tasks. The semantic role that Devitt is here talking about is what I call P-semantics. Strictly speaking Devitt cannot say that sentence types have meaning, as sentence types do not play the semantic role that he has identified. According to Devitt the sentence type is there merely to give us a clue to the speaker’s meaning, or to the meaning of the thought. The sentence meaning is determined by the conventions of the language in question.  I will have to wait and see how serious Devitt is about claiming that sentence types do not really have any meaning at all.

Update:

Devitt discussed this issue in class two weeks later. I report and comment on it here.

Devitt on Intuitions

As I talked about in a previous post, Devitt argues that there is only one way of knowing, which is the empirical way. He calls this the epistemological thesis of naturalism. From this standpoint semantics is a science. When we look at other sciences we do not see them being interested in the intuitions of the common folk about their subject matter (a point an actual scientist has been making against me over at Brains…). So, Biologists are not concerned about folk intuitions about life forms, nor is their science given the task of systematising the intuitions that people have about life forms. So, he continues, why should we think that semantics, as a naturalized science, would be any different. The subject matter of biology is life forms not intuitions about them, the subject matter of semantics is meanings, not intuitions about meanings.

Now this does not mean that he gives no role to intuitions. Intuitions can be ‘reliable’ in so far as the person who has them is an expert in the theory from which the intuitions flow. His example is one of a paleontologist who is able to spot a certain white thing in the sand as a such-and-such bone. I asked him if he thought that ordinary language users counted as expert in English, and if so mightn’t that be the reason that their intuitions are important? I *think* he agreed. Neale at that point asked if Devitt thought that the paleontologist and the English speaker were in exactly the same boat and Devitt said ‘yep’. Neale, like most philosophers, attributes a certain weightyness to intuitions that Devitt does not. I hope we can hash this out a bit more…

Devitt on the Methodology of Natural Semanitcs

There is a lot to say about this, but I think I’ll eat dinner and get back to it later..

So, since I am auditing these courses and I do not have to do any work for them I figured I would instead keep track of what is going on here…any comments are welcome.  

Russell’s Argument Against Existence as a Predicate

In the lecture’s on Logical Atomism Russell says, in response to a question, that the problem with treating existence as a property is that it then couldn’t fail to apply, and this is characteristic of a mistake. Kripke argued that we can eaisly define the existence predicate as ‘(Ey)(y=x)’ which can fail to apply. Russell must have been thinking of (x)Ey(y=x) which just says ‘everything exists’, but this isn’t a predicate…

Kripke on Fiction 

Kripke takes fictional characters to exist as abstract objects. So ‘Sherlock Holmes’ is a name for an abstract fictional object. These abstract objects are not supposed to be thought of as some shadowy things (“no abstract object ever lived on Baker Street”) but, as he puts it, “exist in virtue of the story”. We can ask all kinds of empirical questions about these abstract objects, like ‘which fictional character is most written about by literary critics?’ etc.

In the story it is assumed that whatever conventions for naming are, they have been met. So fiction cannot be evidence for or against ANY semantic theory of names.

In the story existence claims are true. ‘Sherlock Holmes exists’ is true in the story ‘considered as actual’ in just the same way as ‘Kripke exists’ is true here in the actual world (because we assume that in the story we assume that whatever the right theory how names get their reference is met). But when evaluated outside of the story the sentence, though still true, is not true in the same sense. It does not pick out a person who was detective and who lived on Baker street, it picks out a certain fictional abstract object…is Kripke a two-dimensionalist with respect to fiction? Sounds like it to me….

These abstract objects can be vauge, depending on the story. So take the ghost that Hamlet sees. Suppose the story had been written so that it was unclear whether that ghost was real (in the story) or a hallucination. Then it would be the case that (metaphyscially, not epistemically) it would be undertermined what kind of abstract object the ghost was. Or to take an example more to my liking, take Pan’s Laberynth (SPOILER ALERT); we never really find out whether Pan and the other-worldly stuff is real or not. So the status of those fictional character’s is indeterminate…

 The ‘fictional’ operator iterates. So there can be fictional fictional characters. An example of this is the Play that is put in in MacBeth…or one more to my tastes, Itchy and Scratchy from the Simpsons. They are fictional fictional characters.

When I asked if he thought that fictions were mini-worlds, he said no because some stories deliberately contain contradictions, whereas possible worlds don’t. When I asked if he thought possible worlds were fictions, he said no. But I don’t see why not. He claims that possible worlds are abstract objects, fictional worlds are abstract objects…when I pressed him on this he said ‘there is some connection’…I am interested to see how this will play out…It seems to me that the possible worlds should be a subset of the fictional worlds