Lewis Powell

This is one of those times when I post without having looked into things carefully first, which means I run the risk of rehashing well worn ground or the like. However, I'd rather post this, and have someone link me to a good discussion of it than let the blog stagnate (especially after I officially declared an end to the hiatus and promised a post today).

This is something I've been thinking about since watching an episode of the West Wing in which it (sort of) came up.

When someone asks "Do you know the time?", it is rarely, if ever, the case that a correct affirmative answer to the question would be satisfactory.

At one point in thinking about this I was wondering if maybe a maxim of courtesy was in play, something like, "don't ask a question which you lack sufficient evidence to believe that others in the conversation will be able to answer." That formulation requires tweaking if we consider "I don't know" to be an answer to the question "What time is it?". It's also possible that such a maxim would be superfluous, and existing machinery can already explain what's going on there.

The phenomenon seems to be potentially related to what goes on in situations like this: "What time is it?" "I think its around 5", where the "I think" serves to generate an implicature about the speaker's confidence in that guess.

I haven't really looked into it any literature on implicature and questions, but investigating issues for implicature that are specific to the domain of questions is something I want to do in my spare time this semester (if I have any such time).

If you know of anything good to read on, or related to, this subject, please let me know.

Lewis Powell

At the session on Epistemic Relativism, Paul Boghossian was comparing epistemic and/or ethical relativism to a relativism that might be more palatable; relativism about motion. This post is about 'motion' talk, itself.

Basically, since modern science tells us that no motion is absolute, and the only applicable concept of motion is motion relative to some reference frame.

At one point, Boghossian was discussing what to say, once we've concluded how 'motion' talk works now, about what was going on with speakers before we discovered the relativity of motion.

One option discussed was that they were attributing some non-existent absolute motion property and were just wrong all the time. Another was that they were slyly and unawaredly doing whatever we do now. It is from this option that I came up with the title of the post. Retconning is something done in comic books wherein the history of the fiction is revised by current developments in the plot (and similar phenomena).

At first glance, something seems somewhat worrisome about a modern scientific discovery altering the semantics of, say, dead languages. However, to be fair, someone endorsing such a view would almost certainly think that languages have been this way all along and that fact about language is something that we only put together after this scientific discovery. Also, I think that, if one endorses semantic externalism for other reasons, that could reduce worries about this.

Lewis Powell

Some of the claims made about titles of artwork in the Title paper I recently stumbled across on JSTOR are:

1) Titles, unlike names, are parts of the things they title.
2) Titles, unlike names, are essential to the things they title.
3) TItles, unlike names, have descriptive content (or at least, something that functions as a guide to interpretation, and thus does more than just denote).
4) Titles can only be given by the author of the work.

I'm inclined to think that (1) is true, and (3) is plausible, though the words that make up the title can also be used simply to refer to the artwork.

(2) seems like it would be the first step towards some sort of view wherein every aspect of a piece of art is essential, which I don't know would be very plausible, and I'd like to see an argument for four. I didn't see one in the paper, but I was skimming parts of it and so I might have missed it.

What do other people think about these claims, and how close names are to titles.

Lewis Powell

In Insensitive Semantics, Chapter 7: Objections to Radical Contextualism (I), Cappelen and Lepore give three tests for context sensitivity.

Test 1: Blocking inter-contextual disquotational direct reports
Take a clearly context-sensitive term like, "she" in the sentence "She is a banker".

Utterance made in context C1, by Jones, while in a bank, demonstrating a female bank employee: "She is a banker."

Indirect report in C2, made by Smith, who knows Jones, demonstrating a lawyer: "Jones said that she is a banker."

This is what test 1 blocking looks like. The indirect report is unacceptable because there was a context sensitive term and so Smith's disquotation is insufficient for a true report.

Test 2: Blocking collective descriptions
Staying with "she", consider the following:
Utterance 1: Jones, demonstrating the manager of the First Bank of Fredonia: "She is a banker"
Utterance 2: Smith, demonstating the manager of the Second Bank of Fredonia: "She is a banker"

The following is clearly false: "Jones and Smith both said that she is a banker" (note that it really doesn't matter who is indicated, since there is no one female who both Jones and Smith said was a banker.

Test 3: Admit of Real Context Shifting Arguments
The final test is, I think, slightly more confusing.
Consider:
U: "She is a banker"

(1) There can be false utterances of "She is a banker" even though she is a banker.
(1*) There can be true utterances of "She is a banker" even though she is not a banker.

If one imagines a demonstration accompanying the non-quoted she, it should be clear that (1) and (1*) are true.

Ok, so that's how the tests are supposed to work. In the chapter, Cappelen and Lepore argue that quantifiers do not pass the test, using the quantifiers "at least one" and "at least two". My intuition is that "at least one" is able to be used disquotationally, and so that is evidence against its context sensitivity (test 1). My intuitions are substantially weaker for test 2, where it is alleged that the following is acceptable:
If there is a true utterance in some context of "Jill bought at least two penguins" and a true utterance in some context of "Jill bought at least two ducks" then it is perfectly natural to say: "Jill bought at least two penguins and ducks". Set aside that worry for a moment though. In fact, set aside the quantifiers they've chosen for a moment, and consider the following:

(2) There can be true utterances of "every bat is flying" even though not every bat is flying.
(2*) There can be false utterances of "every bat is flying" even though every bat is flying.

(2*) strikes me as obviously false. (2) on the other hand, is far less objectionable, and were my intuitions not so skewed, I might find it utterly unproblematic. Consider the utterance as made by a Zookeeper who is showing a tour group the bat cage, and none of the bats in the cage are at rest. Now say sentence two stressing the non-quoted "every" so that it reads like this:

(2) There can be true utterances of "every bat is flying" even though not every bat is flying.

This sounds fine to me. Stressing the every seems to be a fair counterpart to imagining the "she is a banker" case with a demonstration for the non-quoted "she".

For the sake of completeness, I'll put "every" through the first two tests.
T1:
Beth, a zookeeper standing in front of the bat cage, in which no bat is at rest: "Every bat is flying".

Report by Steven, who is in a cave filled with many sleeping bats and who just got off the phone with Beth. He turns to his fellow spelunkers and says: "Beth said that every bat is flying"

Evaluation: "Every" seems fine to use disquotationally here, and I intentionally chose a case in which the context of the report was one in which not every bat was flying. This type of result is claimed by Capellen and Lepore to indicate that the word tested (in this case, "every") is not context sensitive. I suspect that contextualists would have something to say about this case, but I hardly think its necessary in light of the following two tests.

T2:
Beth, a zookeeper standing in front of the bat cage, in which no bat is at rest: "Every bat is flying".

Steven, having just dropped his flashlight, startled the bats in the cave so that none of them remained at rest. He says, "Every bat is flying."

Ming the Merciless, watching both Beth and Steven on some sort of monitors turns to an advisor and says, "they both said that every bat is flying"

Evaluation: Something seems wrong about this attribution.

So, T1 indicates non-context-sensitivity, while T2 and T3 indicate context sensitivity for "every" (or, arguably, "bat", but my money is on "every").

Most people probably don't see it as a startling discovery that there is evidence for context sensitivity for quantifiers, but Cappelen and Lepore claimed that the tests came down on the side of quantifiers not being context sensitive, so I thought I'd see if my reasoning above seemed right to others.

(this post is due in part to discussion I had with Geoff Georgi, a USC Graduate Student and all around good guy)

Lewis Powell

One of my favorite passages from Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass" (which, I should point out, is among the many free works on Project Gutenberg), is between Alice and the white Knight, and is largely a conversation about reference.

'You are sad,' the Knight said in an anxious tone: 'let me sing you a song to comfort you.'

'Is it very long?' Alice asked, for she had heard a good deal of poetry that day.

'It's long,' said the Knight, 'but very, VERY beautiful. Everybody that hears me sing it--either it brings the TEARS into their eyes, or else--'

'Or else what?' said Alice, for the Knight had made a sudden
pause.

'Or else it doesn't, you know. The name of the song is called "HADDOCKS' EYES."'

'Oh, that's the name of the song, is it?' Alice said, trying to feel interested.

'No, you don't understand,' the Knight said, looking a little vexed. 'That's what the name is CALLED. The name really IS "THE AGED AGED MAN."'

'Then I ought to have said "That's what the SONG is called"?'
Alice corrected herself.

'No, you oughtn't: that's quite another thing! The SONG is called "WAYS AND MEANS": but that's only what it's CALLED, you know!'

'Well, what IS the song, then?' said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered.

'I was coming to that,' the Knight said. 'The song really IS "A-SITTING ON A GATE": and the tune's my own invention.'

I started reading a paper today about titling artwork, it had a citation for an article about this very passage, which I need to find. I also need to figure out what I think about how titles for artwork relate to names for objects generally, and if there are is any interesting crossover between the two issues. I'll probably post some thoughts about that sometime soon.

Lewis Powell

Last week in Scott Soames and Jeff King's Pragmatics/Semantics course, we spent some time discussing appositives.

I am in search of things that have been written about them, but I don't know where to go for literature about them.

For those unaware, here is an example:

Benjamin Franklin, the inventor of the bifocals, was the first Postmaster General of the United States.

The phrase "the inventor of the bifocals" in the above sentence is an appositive.

I'm interested, specifically, in knowing what has been said about what those clauses do to truth conditions, but really anything about them would be good.

If you have a recommendation, or a recommended method for determining a recommendation for myself, please let me know in the comments.

Lewis Powell

First and foremost, I want to see if an intuition I have is shared, then I want to ramble a bit about the relationship between speaker's intentions and meaning.

So, the intuition in question:

Case:
Smith is a monolinguial English speaker abroad in the Republic of Somewhere Else, where pretty much everyone is a monolingual Else-ish speaker. Luckily Smith has a English-to-Else-ish phrase book. Smith uses it to determine (correctly) that sentence X is the equivalent in Else-ish of the English sentence "I need to go to the Hospital." Smith comes down with some illness, and, says sentence X to the nearest person she can find.

Did Smith assert that she needed to go to the hospital?

I think that she did.

Now, for a twist on the case:
The book is innaccurate, and instead of X translating "I need to go to the hospital" it translates the English sentence "I need to go to the moon."

In this case, did Smith assert that she needed to go to the moon?
Does it make a difference if, instead of the word for "moon" it substituted the Else-ish word for something that isn't a location? What if the whole structure of the sentence is wrong? What if Smith has only a transliteration, and could not even identify individual words in the sentence she uttered?

Now, for the ranting on what I think is important about this.

Lewis Powell

I recently discovered Nick Bostrum's Simulation Argument and accompanying website.

The paper argues that, given certain theories in phil mind, and our knowledge about trends in technological advancement, we should believe one of three things (a) the human species will not last long enough to become 'posthuman', (b) posthuman societies are unlikely to run ancestor simulations, or (c) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.

It is worth noting that Bostrum does not argue in favor of any particular disjunct, just that we should accept the disjunction as a whole.

Since I read the paper, I've been trying to sort out some of the consequences of (c) for claims about our knowledge and our language. My preliminary thoughts on this are what follow.

Lewis Powell

Perhaps someone who knows about various views of the Trinity can answer this question.

If Millianism (about reference for names) is true, how does that impact what has to be said about the trinity and beliefs about god so that it isn't the case that, for instance, Jewish people believe that Jesus is god, in virtue of believing that god is self-identical?

Lewis Powell

I think that most natural speakers who are not philosophers and who are familiar with mythology would tend to assent to the following sentences:

Peg1: Pegasus is a white winged horse.
Peg2: Pegasus does not exist
Peg3: Pegasus is a white winged horse that does not exist.

I don't think that popular assent guarantees that they are true, but, I'm pretty partial to being able to talk about fictional characters.

If one was willing to take on and defended a 'bloated' ontology (as Quine called it) they could endorse a Meinongian theory which gets (Peg1-3) true, at the cost of some things having being without existence.

A gappy proposition view about so-called empty names does not allow us to accept (Peg1) or (Peg3), though some versions do allow us to accept (Peg2) as true. It also requires us to maintain a sameness of content between "Santa Claus is a white winged horse" and "Pegasus is a white winged horse". In other words, (Peg1) has the same meaning as this sentence (San1).

San1: Santa Claus is a white winged horse.

A mythical/fictional objects view (where mythological and fictional characters/things are abstract objects) allows for meaningful utterances about fictional characters (with a 'fictionally' operator). However, it also results in the following setence being literally true, I think:

Peg4: Pegasus exists and is not a white winged horse.

The questions I am asking anyone who cares to weigh in are:
1) Are there any Millian-friendly views about (so-called) empty names that I am overlooking? (I assume that there are)
2) How bad does swallowing the claim that the content of (Peg1) is the same as the content of (San1) seem to you?
3) How bad does accepting (Peg4) as true seem to you?
and a bonus question,
4) How bad does accepting a distinction between being and existence seem to you?

EDIT: I wanted to note that David Braun has a paper online, "Empy Names, Fictional Names, Mythical Names" that defends Millianism against objections from empy names.

Lewis Powell

I realized recently that Gandalf, upon meeting Bilbo in "The Hobbit", utters a nice, succinct introduction which seems to commit him to a Direct Reference view of names.

As you may recall, he introduces himself with the line:

"I am Gandalf, and Gandalf means me."

As long as a fictional character is endorsing a theory I'm inclined towards, I'm glad that it's a protagonist, and a powerful wizard to boot.