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Fregecide

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Peter Alward
Peter Alward
Affiliation:
University of Lethbridge
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Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 42 , Issue 2 , Spring 2003 , pp. 275 - 289
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Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 2003

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References

Notes

1 Alward, Peter, “A Neo-Hintikkan Theory of Attitude Ascriptions” (unpublished manuscript, College of Charleston, 2000).Google Scholar

2 Kripke, Saul, “A Puzzle about Belief,” in Propositions and Attitudes, edited by Salmon, Nathan and Soames, Scott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 102–48.Google Scholar

3 Schiffer, Stephen, “Belief Ascriptions,” The Journal of Philosophy, 89, 10(1992): 499–521.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Some non-Fregeans take the meanings of predicates to be properties and relations as opposed to extensions. For present purposes, this is not a difference that has any bearing here.

5 Kripke, Saul, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 For a more detailed account of the connection between the truth of such ascriptions and rationality, see my “A Neo-Hintikkan Solution to Kripke's Puzzle” (unpublished manuscript, University of Lethbridge, 2001).Google Scholar

7 Schiffer, “Belief Ascriptions,” pp. 507–508.

8 Schiffer offers the following functional definition of a mode of presentation: “a rational person xmay both believe and disbelieve that a certain thing or property y is such and such only if there are distinct modes of presentation m and m′ such that x believes y to be such and such under m and disbelieves it to be such and such under m′ … [and] there are distinct modes of presentation m and m′ such that rational person x believes y to be such and such under m and disbelieves y to be such and such under m′ only if x fails to realize that m and m′ are modes of presentation of one and the same thing” (ibid., p. 502).

9 It really is puzzling to me why Schiffer ignores this idea given that he explicitly raises it in his discussion of the “hidden indexical” view in the very same article (ibid., p. 503).

10 But suppose that on a previous occasion Mary had overheard Peter saying “Paderewski does not have musical talent” and bases her ascription on this utterance rather than what he says at the piano concert. Would not that make ascription (a1) false in context #1? To avoid this result, one could, perhaps, give an account of the individuation of contexts of utterance according to which Peter's earlier utterance is excluded from the context of the ascription. But there are analogous cases in which this move would be quite implausible. Consider a situation in which Joe is making a racist diatribe which Fred is trying to drown out by saying “Nyah, nyah, nyah nyah,” or something along these lines. And suppose that Janice says “He's being a jerk.” Disambiguating Janice's claim by supposing that either only Fred's utterance or only Joe's utterance occurred in the relevant context is simply untenable. What is needed is an account of what feature of the single context in which both utterances occur Janice's claim depends on or is tied to. What I am doing is simply presupposing that the contextual feature to which Mary's utterance is tied is Peter's utterance at the piano concert. As long as Peter, Paul, and Mary are talking (to one another) about the same event—Paderewski's performance— each of their uses of “Paderewski” occurs in the same context.

11 A simpler version of the argument here might go as follows: suppose that in context #1, “Paderewski” in (a1) means the same as “Paderewski” in (b), and that in context #2 “Paderewski” in (a2) means the same as “Paderewski” in (b). Now given that Paul is not confused about Paderewski, “Paderewski” in (b) in context #1 means the same as “Paderewski” in (b) in context #2. But given the transitivity of “means the same as,” this implies that “Paderewski” in (a1) means the same as “Paderewski” in (a2), which undermines the Fregean solution to Kripke's puzzle. Hence, we need to give up the supposition that “Paderewski” has the same meaning in ascriptions to Peter as it does in ascriptions to Paul. The reason I deploy the more complex variant of this argument is because not all Fregeans would concede that Paul's lack of confusion regarding Paderewski need suffice for the sameness of meaning of “Paderewski” in the pair of ascriptions to him.

12 See, e.g., Clapp, Leonard, “How to Be Direct and Innocent: A Criticism of Crimmins and Perry's Theory of Attitude Ascriptions,” Linguistics and Philosophy, 18, 5 (1995): 529–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar. As Clapp puts it, “the posited thoughts … must be individuated finely enough such that it is nomologically impossible for there to be a normal subject who assents to an occurrence of Σ(α), yet dissents from an occurrence of Σ(β), where these occurrences are associated with the same mode of apprehension” (ibid., p. 537).

13 See, e.g., Hill, Christopher, “Toward a Theory of Meaning for Belief Sentences,” Philosophical Studies, 30 (1976): 209–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a view that takes meanings to be nearly this fine-grained.

14 Personally, I do not think this is a promising line of response. I include it only for the purpose of being thorough.

15 It is far from obvious what the connection between the beliefs of groups and the beliefs of their members needs to be in order for ascriptions to groups qua believers to be true (assuming such talk should even be taken literally). For present purposes, however, this question need not be addressed.

16 It might be thought that talk of the “proposition expressed in ordinary extensional contexts” is unhelpful here because (i) the proposition expressed by a sentence is just the proposition asserted in the speech act in which the sentence is produced and (ii) assertion contexts are just as non-extensional as belief contexts. Now, while (i) and (ii) are both true, they do not undermine the utility of the aforementioned idiom. Distinguish between the sentences (a) “Bob Dylan sings like a toad” and (b) “Mary said that Bob Dylan sings like a toad.” The occurrence of “Bob Dylan sings like a toad” in (a) is extensional in the following sense: the proposition expressed is the same as the proposition expressed by “Robert Zimmerman sings like a toad,” despite the fact that the proposition expressed by each sentence is the proposition asserted in the respective speech acts. But the occurrence of “Bob Dylan sings like a toad” in (b) is non-extensional, because (b) and “Mary said that Robert Zimmerman sings like a toad” can differ in truth-value. The reason for this is that the proposition asserted/expressed in the production of a sentence does not serve as the meaning of the sentence when it occurs in opaque indirect-discourse ascriptions. In such ascriptions what is at issue is not merely what proposition was asserted, but how the speaker conceives of the objects of talk.

17 It is worth noting, however, that the Fregean is no worse off than the non-Fregean on this particular score. In fact, according to the non-Fregean, the individual ascriptions, (iii) Lois believes that Superman can fly and (iv) Lois believes that Clark Kent can fly, cannot differ in truth-value either. Non-Fregeans typically account for our intuitions to the contrary and our ability to use ascriptions in explanations of behaviour by appeal to the distinction between the information literally expressed by ascriptions and the information pragmatically imparted by them. See, e.g., Nathan Salmon, Frege's Puzzle (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986). It is worth noting that exactly the same difficulties arise for the non-Fregean's account of the information pragmatically imparted by ascriptions as arise for the Fregean's account of the information literally expressed by opaque ascriptions.

One final note: Schiffer offers what he claims to be a “devastating” objection to the sort of Fregean strategy under consideration. In response to the analysis of “Ralph said that Fido is a dog” as “(∃m)(∃m′)(m is a mode of presentation of Fido & tri is a mode of presentation of doghood & S [Ralph, the proposition that m has m′])” Schiffer says, “[the] trouble with this is that it is extremely unlikely that Ralph, in his utterance of “Fido is a dog,” will have said any such mode-of-presentation-containing proposition. If he did mean some such proposition, then there would be a specification of what he said that is other than “that Fido is a dog” and that refers to a mode-of-presentationcontaining proposition. But it is clear that there need be no such alternative specification of what he said” (“Belief Ascriptions,” p. 506, n.10). Schiffer seems to be presupposing that the meanings of the complement clauses of belief and indirect discourse ascriptions need to conform to our intuitions regarding what is believed or what is said. The reason I say this is as follows. As long as there are expressions denoting the relevant modes of presentation, there exists a “that”-clause that refers to the mode-of-presentation-containing proposition in question: “that m has m′.” So the problem Schiffer must be identifying is that this does not count as a specification of what was said. And presumably this is because it fails to conform to our pre-theoretical intuitions on the matter.

But this presupposition is highly contentious. The meanings assigned by semantic theories are theoretical entities that are invoked for specific theoretical purposes. There is no guarantee that they will be commensurable with our pre-theoretical intuitions, nor is it reasonable to require that they do so. Moreover, given failure of substitutivity phenomena and the fact that our specifications of what is intuitively believed or said are expressed in an extensional idiom, it is hardly surprising that a semantic theory of such expressions will be counterintuitive. It would be nice if our semantic theories conformed to our pre-theoretical intuitions, but their failure to do so is hardly devastating.

18 See, e.g., my “Simple and Sophisticated ‘Naïve’ Semantics,” Dialogue, 39 (2000): 101–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for such an explanation.