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Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School

2003 Conceptual Role , Instability, and Individualism: Towards a Neo-Fregean Theory of Content Adam Sipos

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COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

CONCEPTUAL ROLE SEMANTICS, INSTABILITY, AND INDIVIDUALISM: TOWARDS A NEO-FREGEAN THEORY OF CONTENT

By

ADAM SIPOS

A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Philosophy in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2003 The members of the Committee approve the dissertation of Adam Sipos defended on 1 July 2003.

______Piers Rawling Professor Directing Dissertation

______Philip Bowers Outside Committee Member

______Russell Dancy Committee Member

The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract ...... vi

1. INTRODUCTION: FREGE’S SINN ...... 1

Knowledge, , and ...... 1 Fregean Sinn: The Classical Conception ...... 5 Sinning against Bedeutung ...... 6 Semantic Value ...... 8 Sense ...... 12 Making “Sense” of the Puzzles ...... 16 Meaning, , and Reality ...... 18 Meaning and Reality: ...... 18 Meaning and Mind: the Problem of Content ...... 22 Individualism and the Mental ...... 25 Conceptual Role Semantics ...... 29 Conceptual Role and Fregean Sinn ...... 37

2. SEMANTIC AND THE ARGUMENT FROM ANATOMICITY ...... 47

Semantic Holism ...... 47 Properties: Atomic, Anatomic, and Holistic ...... 47 Two Varieties of Semantic Holism ...... 50 Translational Holism ...... 51 Semantic and Translational Holism ...... 51 Grades of Anatomicity: Strong and Weak ...... 52 From Anatomism to Holism ...... 53 The Argument from Anatomicity ...... 53 Why Anatomicity? ...... 58 Why Not A/S? ...... 64 Quine’s Challenge ...... 65 Confinement and Failure ...... 69 The Mirror and Canonical Notations ...... 70 Canonical Notations: Extensional or Intensional? ...... 73 Intensionality and Projection ...... 73 How Damaging is Quine’s Attack? ...... 76

iii Quine’s Argument from ...... 79 The Argument from Verificationism and Analyticity ...... 88

3. INSTABILITY AND THE CRACK ...... 90

Two Challenges for Holistic CRS ...... 90 The Problem of Instability ...... 91 Robust Content Identity ...... 91 Intertranslatability ...... 91 Communication and Disagreement ...... 91 Change of Mind ...... 93 Acquisition ...... 94 Psychological Explanation ...... 95 CRS, Holism, and Instability ...... 97 The Crack ...... 97 Why Compositionality? ...... 97 The Master Argument ...... 101 Are Compositionality and Holism Really Incompatible? ...... 103 Why is Rejecting CRS the Most Plausible Option? ...... 111

4. STABILIZING HOLISTIC CRS: NARROW CONTENT, CONTENT SIMILARITY, SUPERVENIENCE, AND MULTIPLE MEANINGS ...... 112

Managing Instability ...... 112 Two-Factor Theories ...... 112 Content Similarity ...... 116 Reduction and Supervenience ...... 127 Multiplying Meanings ...... 131

5. A NEO-FREGEAN OPTION ...... 138

CRS, Instability, and Anti-Individualism ...... 138 Anti-Individualistic CRS: A Sketch ...... 141 Objects and Properties ...... 141 Sense and Semantic Value ...... 142 Grasping Contents ...... 146 Content and Explanation ...... 150 E-Appropriate Inference and A/S ...... 152 What about Frege? ...... 154 Anti-Individualism and Frege’s Anti-Psychologism ...... 154 Begriffsschrifts and the Third Realm ...... 156 Sense and Mode of Presentation ...... 158 Frege and the Paradox of Analysis ...... 160

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 163 iv

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 174

v

ABSTRACT

In the past few decades, semantic holism, primarily in the guise of conceptual role semantics, has been an influential doctrine in both the and the . In a recent challenge to such doctrines, and Ernest Lepore have inspired a spirited debate over the viability of any theory of meaning or cognition that entails semantic holism. Two general problems emerge from the debate: (i) a problem concerning the stability of content (mental or linguistic), and (ii) a problem concerning the internal consistency of typical holistic doctrines. The former problem raises serious worries about the ability of such accounts to accommodate the phenomena of communication, disagreement, change of opinion, translation, and intentional explanation, while the latter problem questions the compatibility of three doctrines typically held by holists: that meaning is compositional, that meaning is conceptual role, and that Quine successfully showed that there can be no useful analytic/synthetic distinction. In this dissertation, I aim to show that these problems are not native to semantic holism, but, rather, are the result of an assumption almost ubiquitous in these discussions: semantic individualism. To this end, I consider and reject a number of attempts to handle these worries on behalf of the individualistic holist. A holistic account of content which is free from this assumption is the only way to way avoid the problems of instability and inconsistency while remaining a holist. In the end, I suggest that one result of giving up this assumption would be the renewed possibility of a viable conceptual role semantics, and perhaps even a useful analytic/synthetic distinction. In any case, the result would be a move in the direction of a neo- Fregean conception of content.

vi CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION: FREGE’S SINN

Knowledge, Truth, and Meaning It has always been one of the main tasks of the Western philosophical enterprise to substantiate (or repudiate) a certain picture of ourselves as possessing real knowledge, or at the very least, a picture according to which there is genuine knowledge to be had, perhaps of a universal, absolute, or even necessary nature. Ideally, we would like to have stable, objective, and interesting knowledge about ourselves, the world, and the relationship between them. Such knowledge would consist in which are not somehow relative to our particular beliefs, cultures, or historical situations. Call this the happy picture; its denial the depressing one. Many of us would prefer to be happy. Depression, however, comes at us from many directions. Keeping in mind the platitude that one can only know what is true, there are at least two general paths into the abyss. On the one hand, there are available many philosophical arguments which aim to show that we do not know what we think we do, but not that what we think we know is false. For all we know, most of our beliefs are true, but these beliefs nonetheless do not amount to knowledge. The idea is that reflection on both the of knowledge and on our nature will reveal that we can never attain the strict standards required for genuine knowledge—on reflection, we learn that genuine knowledge requires certain conditions, say x, y, and z, to hold, but we also learn on reflection that given the kinds of creatures that we are, these conditions can never hold jointly. This is the strategy of the Descartes of the first Meditation, where he argues that genuine knowledge requires indubitability only to go on to show that we can never be certain about any of our beliefs about the external world, since we can never be certain that what we are experiencing is not just some extremely vivid dream.1 Many philosophers after Descartes, being

1 Descartes (1641), pp. 3-50.

1 persuaded by the first Meditation, though unpersuaded by what follows it, have taken this as a demonstration that we cannot in principle know anything about a world that transcends our own , whether or not there is one. On the other hand, one might embrace , and thus deny that we have certain kinds of knowledge, not because we cannot live up to the relevant epistemic standards, but because even if we could, there would simply be nothing to know. According to this kind of skeptic, we naively take ourselves to know, or have the capacity of knowing, some range of facts, but, once again, reflection shows that there simply is no such range of facts. Consider our ethical beliefs. informs us that we know, among other things, that murder is wrong, that beneficence is a good thing, and that torturing infants for fun is morally unacceptable. We think that we know these things, and that, in knowing them, we are holding true beliefs. True beliefs, however, are made true by facts. So, if it could be shown that there are no moral facts, then it would also follow (one might think) that we can have no moral knowledge—remember the platitude. This is the strategy adopted by the moral anti-realist J. L. Mackie and, unlike the previous epistemological strategy, this one is basically metaphysical in nature. After all, is not the very idea of intrinsically action-guiding facts “queer” and “unnatural”. According to Mackey, there simply can be no such beasts, and to think otherwise would be to offend against that proper sense of reality which is the guiding light of sound reasoning.2 So, we have two general kinds of challenge to the happy picture: one epistemological, the other metaphysical. One focuses on the nature of knowledge and our faculties, while the other focuses on the nature of truth. Intuitively, both knowledge and truth bear an intimate relation to . On the one hand, if I know that cats bite, I must believe that cats bite. And I can do this latter only if I possess the relevant concepts, viz., the concepts cat and biting. Knowledge, then, requires the possession of at least some concepts, and the conditions for both possessing them and being justifified in holding beliefs involving them will depend on the nature, as well as on the content, of the concepts to be possessed. On the other hand, I know that cats bite only if it is true that cats bite, and this will be the case just in case anything (or most anything) to which the concept is a cat applies is also something to which the concept is a biter applies. Once again,

2 J. L. Mackie (1977). In particular, see chapter 1, “The Subjectivity of Values”.

2 what it is for something to be true (the nature of truth or of being true) will depend in large part on the nature of the relevant concepts. If, as some have argued, the nature of some of concepts are such that they cannot outstrip the behavioral and psychological resources of the individuals that possess them, then there is a plausible case to be made that, when it comes to claims involving those concepts, truth cannot outstrip those resources either—that is, truth itself would be bound to our very nature, and this might just make man, as Protagoras once put it, “the measure of all things”. One might think, then, that insight into the nature of both knowledge and truth can be gained by investigating the nature of concepts. It has been the trend in recent philosophy, indeed it is often touted as one of its greatest insights, to reformulate questions regarding the nature of concepts as questions regarding the nature of the meanings of certain expressions. So, instead of asking about the nature of the concept cat, or even about the essential nature of cats, we might do better to ask about the meaning of the word ‘cat’ if your language is English, or of ‘chat’, if French, etc.3 Words, after all, are more concrete than are concepts, and so, one would think, problems concerning them and their meaning should prove to be more tractable. Accordingly, philosophy in the twentieth century has been obsessed with the notion of linguistic meaning. Aside from a pure interest in it as its own object of study, one of the great hopes has been that a better understanding of linguistic meaning might shed deeply penetrating light on the problems of knowledge and truth and might thereby reveal something vital about the ultimate status of the two kinds of challenge adumbrated above. The study of meaning became, and for many still is, the final battleground where the traditional metaphysical and epistemological battles would be waged. In recent decades, a certain conception of meaning, a holistic one, has become increasingly popular in the philosophy of language. The meaning of an expression has been thought by many to be system relative, and not merely in the weak sense in which ‘hat’ might mean one thing in English but something entirely different in German (as it does), but in some much stronger sense. The idea, very roughly, is that ‘hat’ could mean what it does in English only if it is part of a system either exactly like English in relevant respects or at least very nearly so. We shall have occasion to sharpen this somewhat in chapter 3, but for now, this characterization will do.

3 The move to this holistic conception of meaning was the result of a number of challenges to a conception of meaning that arrived on the philosophical scene in the late nineteenth century. While attempting to articulate the logical foundations of arithmetic and analysis, (a German mathematician, logician, and philosopher) provided the framework for a theory of meaning that has remained highly influential. Reacting to arguments given by W.V. Quine and in the middle of the twentieth century, many in the philosophical community, as well as those in cognitive science and , have felt forced to make some modifications in that framework, while others have abandoned it entirely. In many cases, the net result has been a substantial move in the direction of semantic holism. Despite the relative popularity of holistic positions, their weaknesses, though perhaps recognized all along, have not received serious attention until fairly recently. Much of the renewed discussion has been forced by Jerry Fodor’s and Ernest Lepore’s recent discussion of semantic holism.4 Aside from casting doubt on what may be the standard arguments for semantic holism, their extended critical discussion has served to highlight some of the most worrisome consequences of the doctrine, consequences which may seriously threaten our happiness. Ultimately, their discussion has provoked a number of last minute attempts to save holistic theories of meaning from these depressing consequences. In this dissertation, I shall attempt to show that none of these attempts to save holism are successful. Rather, the way to save it is to reject an assumption that was made, albeit tacitly, in some of the early attacks on the original Fregean conception, and which is assumed by nearly every form of semantic holism now on offer. If this suggestion is taken seriously, then the result may be a semantics that is more thoroughly Fregean in character but avoids many, if not all, of the early attacks and many, if not all, of the problems currently associated with holism. To this end, I will proceed as follows. In the remainder of this chapter I will do two things. First, I will sketch and motivate that conception of meaning which was the target of Quine’s and Wittgenstein’s attacks, i.e., Frege’s (what I take to be the classical conception of meaning). Second, I will briefly outline some connections between meaning and mind, and consider a current account of content that many believe to be an articulation of Frege’s notion of

3 Thanks to fairly recent work by and by , asking about the essence of natural kinds such as cats, gold, and water has recently become respectable again. See Kripke (1980), especially pp. 116-29 and 134- 44, and Putnam (1973). For a greatly expanded version of the latter, see Putnam (1975).

4 sense: conceptual role semantics. In chapter 2, I will consider some reasons for thinking that conceptual role semantics entails semantic holism . Then, in chapter 3, we will see why holism is thought to be deeply problematic. We will do so by examining two recent challenges to holistic CRS: the Problem of Instability and what I will call the Crack. In chapter 4, I will survey and reject some of the main attempts to save holistic CRS from these challenges. Finally, in chapter 5, I will gesture towards a solution that someone sympathetic both to the conceptual role framework and to Frege’s original conception could endorse. Fregean Sinn: The Classical Conception5 Pre-Fregean semantics, when it was not ideational, was direct-reference semantics, that is, the meaning of a term was thought to be just whatever it is that the term is used to talk about—words being mere tags. For example, the meaning of a name such as ‘’ would just be the philosopher himself, while the meaning of a general term like ‘beard’ would just be all of those things that are beards, or the set of beards, or perhaps the of being a beard. On such an account, an expression would be meaningful just in case it did in fact stand for something and someone could be said to know the meaning of a term just in case she knows what the term stands for. Such accounts, however, quickly run up against a number of well-known problems. To begin with, there is a problem accommodating the intuition that certain sentences, e.g., ‘Phlogiston is combustible’, are meaningful despite the presence of non-referring terms, in this case, ‘phlogiston’ (the Problem of Non-Referring Terms). If the meaning of an expression is the thing it refers to, how could such sentences be meaningful? Well maybe such sentences carry some meaning (though not a complete one) and because of this it is a truth-value, rather than a meaning, that they lack. Well perhaps, but there are other sentences that intuitively are not only meaningful but are true (or false). For example, we would like to say that the

4 Fodor and Lepore (1992).

5 For those who do fundamental work in the philosophy of language and are familiar with its development in the analytic tradition, that Frege was the first true philosopher of language and that he set the stage for most of the subsequent debate both have the ring of orthodoxy. It therefore comes as a bit of a surprise that some recent scholars have denied that Frege even had a theory of meaning. This is the stance taken by Weiner (1990), (1997a), and (1997b). It is, then, still somewhat of an open debate whether or not Frege did have what we would now call a theory of meaning. Of course, if Frege did not have such a theory, then one would like to know what role the sense/reference distinction is meant to play in his overall thought. These questions cannot possibly be resolved here. For now, I will suppose that he does have a theory of meaning; unfortunately, final answers to these questions will not be possible in the context of the present study.

5 ‘Phlogiston does not exist’ is not only meaningful but is actually true. Again, how could such a sentence be true if meaning is reference (the Problem of Negative Existentials)? A third problem was raised by Frege. He observes that there are certain sentence pairs, e.g., ‘Karol Wojtyla is Pope John Paul II’ and ‘Pope John Paul II is Pope John Paul II’, that intuitively can each bear a different cognitive significance for a single speaker (who understands both sentences).6 The trouble is that cognitive significance seems to be a function of meaning.7 But if meaning is reference, then the above two sentences could never diverge in cognitive significance for any competent speaker (Frege’s Puzzle about Cognitive Significance). Finally, there is the Problem of Opacity. Roughly speaking, this problem concerns the substitution of coreferential (coextensive) terms in certain contexts, e.g., contexts of . Once again, the difficulty seems to arise when we assume that the meaning of a term in such contexts must be its referent. Given a number of highly plausible semantic principles as background, this assumption forces us to regard sentences such as ‘Lois Lane that Clark Kent is Clark Kent’ and ‘Lois Lane believes that Clark Kent is Superman’ as having, as a matter of necessity, the same truth-value. The trouble is that, as a matter of intuitive judgment, they do not. It is one of the chief virtues of Frege’s theory of meaning that by rejecting the assumption that meaning is reference, it provides very intuitive and elegant solutions to each of these difficulties. Since Frege’s theory has provided the general framework for most subsequent semantic discussion as well as for the issues to be addressed here, I shall now take some time to outline that theory. Sinning Against Bedeutung Frege formally introduces his theory as a solution to his puzzle concerning cognitive significance. Once again, that problem concerns the perceived of content between sentences such as ‘Karol Wojtyla is Pope John Paul II’ and ‘Pope John Paul II is Pope John Paul II’. Insofar as the latter is a priori and trivial while the former is a posteriori and substantive (i.e., expresses what might be a significant extension of one’s knowledge), these two sentences will have (or at least might have) different cognitive significance for a speaker who fully understands both of them. If cognitive significance is a function of linguistic meaning, then this would suggest that these sentences have different

6 ‘Karol Wojtyla’ and ‘Pope John Paul II’ both in fact refer to Pope John Paul II.

7 Though it is an elusive notion, cognitive significance is roughly the role an expression has in the cognition of a speaker. It includes, but is not limited to, effects on behavior and conditions of verification.

6 meanings. This raises a problem for the direct-reference theorist, since she would have to view these sentences as bearing the same meaning. According to Frege, however, the trouble results from the assumption that the meaning of a singular term is exhausted by its reference. Furthermore, this assumption is also at play in the problems concerning negative existentials, non-referring terms, and attitude ascriptions. So, to loosen the grips of these puzzles, one might simply reject this assumption—holding instead that the meaning of a singular term is not exhausted by the thing to which it refers. This is precisely Frege’s strategy. Let us now turn to his solution. Some care is needed here. The notion of reference that is usually appealed to in developing the puzzles is non-technical and relativized to singular terms. So it would be easy to think that Frege’s sense/reference distinction is one that also applies only to singular terms, and that reference, for him, is more or less the same as designation when this is understood as that relation that holds between a name and its bearer. This, however, would be a mistake. First, although when first introducing the theory he focuses almost exclusively on singular terms, Frege is elsewhere very clear that the distinction is meant to apply to every class of meaningful expression—every kind of meaningful linguistic unit has both a sense and a referent.8 Second, the temptation to understand reference as designation stems from a failure to appreciate these previous points fully. It may be true that reference, for singular terms, is best understood on the intuitive model of the name/bearer relation, but it would be hasty to assume that this same model should be applied across the board. One should keep in mind that Frege’s actual terms are the German ‘Sinn’ and ‘Bedeutung’ and that his employment of them is highly technical. As such, we must look to his explicit comments and his actual use of these terms rather than their conventional German meanings. For this reason, I will use ‘sense’ in place of the German ‘Sinn’ and ‘semantic value’ in place of ‘Bedeutung’. My choice of ‘semantic value’ is intended to ease the temptation to conflate Bedeutung with designation. Since I am not intending these as translations, in the strict sense, i.e., since my use of them is not in itself intended to illuminate Frege’s understanding of ‘Sinn’ and ‘Bedeutung’ or to equate their meanings with the meanings

8 The three classic papers in which Frege’s mature theory of meaning and semantics are first unveiled are Frege (1891), (1892a), and (1892b). Frege (1892a), of course, is where the sense/reference distinction is first drawn, and it is here that Frege considers the puzzles. Frege (1891) and (1892b) are almost exclusively concerned with the domain of reference (or with what I below call semantic value). Frege explicitly states that the sense/reference distinction applies to all classes of meaningful expressions in the posthumously published Frege (1892-5).

7 of already understood terms, I will need to say a bit about how these surrogate expressions are to be understood. Semantic Value Intuitively, the semantic value of an expression is what we use that expression to talk about. The referent, or bearer, of a term is what semantic value is when semantic value is restricted to singular terms.9 But not all terms are singular, and since we need an understanding of semantic value that applies to all terms, singular or otherwise, we will need to cast about for a general notion of semantic value—one from which we can derive, as a consequence, rather than as a matter of definition, that the semantic value of a singular term is its referent. The needed (general) account is recoverable from Frege’s writings, not so much from his explicit comments, but from the use he goes on to make of the term ‘bedeutung’. Indeed, by the end of the present section, and after we have considered a number of positive theses regarding the notion of semantic value, it should be fairly obvious that this definition of semantic value does capture what Frege had in mind. On his behalf, then, I will say that

SV The semantic value of any expression is that feature of it that helps to determine whether sentences in which it occurs are true or false.

So, the notion of semantic value is essentially connected to the notion of truth, in particular, of a true (or a false) sentence. Now, according to Frege, there are, logically speaking, only three categories of expression that need to be considered when determining what kinds of things will serve as semantic values: singular terms, predicate expressions (of any adicity), and (declarative) sentences.10 What is the semantic value of a sentence? Given SV, this will depend on the logical behavior of sentences in more complicated sentences. If we consider the typical sorts of ways in which complex sentences can be generated from simpler ones, what naturally comes to mind are the truth-functional connectives, e.g., ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘not’, ‘if-then’, etc. Suppose that S is a

9 Since what follows is relatively uncontroversial, I will not make much effort to locate it in Frege’s texts.

10 Actually, given Frege’s doctrine that (declarative) sentences are proper names, there are really only two such categories. For our purposes, we may ignore this detail for now. Also, unless otherwise indicated, I shall, in what follows, drop the qualification ‘declarative’ and just say ‘sentence’.

8 sentence built up from two simple sentences, P and Q, by means of one of these connectives, say ‘and’. Now in determining the truth-value of S, all that we need to know about P and Q are their truth-values. Given the meaning of ‘and’, S’s truth-value is fixed once the truth-values of P and Q are, or, perhaps better, given that P and Q have the truth-values that they do, the meaning of ‘and’ guarantees that S has the truth-value that it has. This suggests the following:

SV1 The semantic value of a sentence is its truth-value.11

Given the definition of semantic value and SV1, it follows that the semantic value of a sentence is determined by the semantic values of its parts. More generally, we have

SV2 The semantic value of a complex expression is a function of the semantic values of its parts along with its structure.

This is a compositionality principle, but Frege is very clear that the kind of composition involved here is not mereological, but, for lack of a better term, logical—the value of the complex expression is uniquely determined by the semantic values of its parts but it is not the sum of them.12 Now, as was mentioned above, the only semantically significant parts that a sentence, according to Frege, could have are singular terms, predicates, and further sentences. So, in the case where the sentence in question is atomic, i.e., contains no sentences as semantically significant subparts, the semantic value of the sentence will be a function of the semantic values of some set of singular terms and predicates.

11 There is in fact much more to be said about Frege’s reasons for this identification. The argument presented here requires that we already understand the connectives as truth-conditional. But why should this be so? One reason is that intuitions about the behavior of such connectives in inference strongly suggest that they are to be understood truth-functionally. Frege attempts to elicit such intuitions in the early sections of the Begriffsschrift. Another reason for the original identification (i.e., SV1) is that it results globally in a much simpler logical system; see, for example, Frege (1893), p. 7. A third reason is that we care about the semantic values of sub-sentential expressions to the extent that we care about knowing the truth-value of a sentence. Words in literary contexts often have no semantic value, but in such contexts we are not bothered by this since it is only the sense of the sentence that matters to us. When we must also know the truth-value of a sentence, it then becomes crucial that we know what the semantic values of its sub-sentential expressions are. Given this, Frege takes it as a reasonable to infer that truth-values are the semantic values of sentences. Some have claimed to find an even stronger argument in Frege—one that is deductive and virtually a priori in character. Alonzo Church and Donald Davidson have both claimed to have found the so-called Slingshot Argument, or at least to have found its inspiration, in a passage in Frege (1892a).

12 Frege (1892a), pp. 164-5.

9 For now, let us focus on the simplest kind of case possible. Let A be the atomic sentence ‘Socrates was bald’. The semantic value of A is a truth-value, and in this case, it is true. Furthermore, its parts, viz., ‘Socrates’ and ‘bald’, must have semantic values which together uniquely determine A’s semantic value as true.13 Now, in the case of singular terms, the semantic value will be the bearer of the name, i.e., that thing to which the name refers or that thing we attempt to talk about when we use the name in normal contexts. When I utter A assertively, I use the term ‘Socrates’ to talk about Socrates, and when I do so I aim to say something true. According to Frege, if we came to discover that there was no such person as Socrates, and hence that the name ‘Socrates’ has no bearer, the sentence A itself would lack a semantic value, i.e.,

SV3 A part of a complex expression C lacks a semantic value just in case C also lacks a semantic value.

SV3 follows as a corollary from SV2 and suggests that Socrates is indeed the semantic value of ‘Socrates’. More generally, we now have:

SV4 The semantic value of a proper name is the object that it refers to (or stands for).

So, the semantic value of a sentence is its truth-value, and the semantic value of a singular term its referent; since Frege treats entire sentences as complex singular terms, both are kinds of object for Frege. But what is the semantic value of a predicate expression? Could it also be some kind of object? Suppose that it is and that ‘bald’ therefore really functions as a kind of singular term. Then we could rewrite A as ‘Socrates baldness’. This, however, is not only ungrammatical, but it is hard to see how merely drawing a list of things could possibly yield a truth value as a further semantic value. For this and similar reasons, Frege concludes that the semantic value of a predicate expression cannot be an object at all—it must be a completely

13 Given Frege’s doctrine that sentences are names (mentioned in note 12), he would say that the semantic value of A is the true, where ‘the true’ is a singular term which refers to an object.

10 different sort of thing.14 Frege’s suggestion is this:

SV5 The semantic value of a predicate is a function.

The most fruitful way to conceive of the semantic value of a predicate, according to Frege, is as a function mapping objects (or n-tuples of objects in the case of relational expressions) to truth- values.15 Accordingly, the semantic value of ‘is bald’ would be a function that maps an object like Socrates onto the value true, one like Bill Clinton onto the value false, and so on for every other object. The semantic value of a two-place relational expression such as ‘. . . loves—’ would be a function mapping pairs of objects to truth-values, and that for a three-place relational expression such as ‘. . . gave- - -to—’ a function mapping ordered triples to truth-values.16 Frege extends this functional treatment to encompass what are now the standard operators of classical logic, viz., the sentential connectives and the quantifiers (words such ‘all’, ‘some’, etc.) While the semantic value of a predicate is a first-level function from objects to truth-values, the semantic value of a sentential connective is a first-level function from truth-values to truth- values and the semantic value of a quantifier is a second-level function from first-level functions to truth-values. So, the domain of semantic values is occupied solely by objects and functions. Since senses, as we will see below, can also sometimes be semantic values, they must also be either objects or functions. Thus, for Frege everything that is, is an object or a function. Finally, Frege accepts a generalized version of the Principle of Substitutivity (PS).17 Frege generalizes the principle to cover all complex expressions; accordingly, we have:

14 See, for example, Frege (1891), (1892b), and (1892-5).

15 Frege explicitly rejects the identification of functions with sets of certain kinds, since it would force us to view functions as kinds of objects.

16 It is by viewing predicate expressions as special kinds of functions that Frege is led to treat sentences as special kinds of complex singular terms, since he also, and very plausibly, views complex, non-sentential singular terms as constructed from functional expressions and singular terms. For example, ‘the son of Mary’ is a complex singular term built up from the simpler expressions ‘the son of . . .’, which is a functional expression, and ‘Mary’, another singular term. Applying the semantic value of that functional expression to the semantic value of that singular term yields the value Jesus Christ as the semantic value of the complex singular term. It is on this model that Frege proposes that we are to understand the semantic functioning of sentences, and one of the chief reasons in its favor is the elegance and that it affords the overall theory.

11 SV6 Substitution of a constituent of a complex expression (sentence) by another expression which has the same semantic value will leave the semantic value of the complex expression (the truth value of the sentence) unchanged.

Again, this may be seen as a corollary that springs from SV2 and the very notion of a function. In the end, it is partly Frege’s endorsement of this principle that forces him to introduce the notion of sense. Sense I shall again proceed by first giving a very rough definition of the notion of sense. Then I will refine that definition somewhat by developing a number of constitutive theses regarding sense. Intuitively, sense is what one grasps when one understands the meaning of some piece of language and it is also what gives us a cognitive fix on the things we are aiming to talk about. Sense, then, is essentially connected to the notion of semantic value as well as to the notion of a language-user. With this in mind, we can begin with the following, working definition:

S The sense of an expression E is that aspect of E that determines its semantic value.

Following Frege, an expression will be said to express its sense, but designate its semantic value (generally speaking, however, designation cannot be understood on the name/bearer model). Now, since every logically significant expression has (or is capable of having) a semantic value, each must have (be capable of having) a sense as well. The idea is that for an object to be the semantic value of a name, or for a function to be the semantic value of some predicate, or for a truth-value to be the semantic value for some sentence, there must be some other feature of that name, predicate, or sentence that secures this connection. This feature also has a decidedly epistemic dimension, insofar as it is also typically taken to be something to which speakers can have more or less direct cognitive access, whereas speakers can have only indirect cognitive access to semantic values (or at least to those which are not themselves senses or mental items of some sort), since it is only through the grasping of some appropriate sense that someone can gain cognitive access, i.e., can think or speak about, a semantic value at all.

17 Roughly, this is the principle that two expressions that refer to the same thing, or apply to all and only the same things, can always be substituted for one another without disturbing the truth-value of the original sentential context.

12 Another way to bring out this epistemic character of sense is through the following thesis:

S1 The sense of an expression is what someone who is competent to use the expression, or who knows its meaning, understands or grasps.

To grasp the sense of an expression is to bear some appropriate relationship to it. It is by bearing such a relationship to an expression’s sense that a speaker can be said to be competent in the use of the expression, but the same cannot be said of semantic value in general. This stands out most clearly in the case of terms that have a sense but no semantic value. A speaker can fully well understand the expressions ‘the cat under the table’ or ‘Santa Claus’ even when there is no such animal or no such bearer of gifts. In such cases, the speaker can still be said to have grasped the sense of the expression and to have fully understood it. Clearly, the semantic values are irrelevant here, since there are no such values. In any case, what needs special emphasis is that for Frege, sense is essentially connected to understanding, as well as to the notion semantic value. Given that ‘sense’ is intended by Frege to function as a count noun, as are ‘dog’, ‘number’, and ‘neutrino’, it is important that we be able to individuate senses. Indeed, it is fundamental to Frege’s view that for any such range of entities that we wish to think or speak about, there must be a principle, whether or not we can articulate it, that determines when two such entities are the same or different.18 In particular, in theoretical matters, it is important that whenever possible, such principles be made fully explicit. In many cases, the failure to produce such a principle can be taken as evidence that there is no such range of objects. This is, of course, the point of Quine’s famous slogan “No entity without identity,” a slogan inspired, according to Quine, by Frege himself. In any case, the principle that Frege ultimately settles on seems to be this:

S2 S1 and S2 express the same sense just in case any competent speaker who grasps

the senses of S1 and S2 would judge that S1 and S2 have the same semantic

18 For example, see Frege (1894), §§ 62-9, and Frege (1893), § 10, where Frege attempts to supply such principles to the concepts cardinal number and course-of-values, respectively.

13 value.19

Once again, S2 bears witness to the highly epistemological nature of Frege’s notion of sense, since its identity conditions are sensitive to the judgments of competent speakers—those who have grasped the sense of the relevant expression. So, granted that a speaker does in fact sufficiently understand each of two expressions, which happen to express the same sense, it should be transparent to that speaker that they do so. Supposing that two expressions are so related, then the fact that some particular speaker is either unsure that they have the same semantic value or does not believe that they do is evidence that he does not fully understand one of those terms or uses it to express some different sense than the one conventionally assigned to it. This epistemological character might give one the impression that for Frege sense is more or less subjective. Such an impression would be entirely mistaken. Frege is insistent that the notion of sense is also meant to explain the possibility of genuine communication. What we communicate, when we do, are thoughts. Now since the thought that we communicate by means of a sentence must be a feature of its meaning, it must be identified with either its sense or its semantic value. Could it be the latter? We often communicate thoughts by means of sentences that have parts lacking semantic value. For example, a parent communicates a definite thought to a child when he utters the sentence ‘Santa Claus will come only if you go to bed on time’. Given the fact that ‘Santa Claus’ lacks a semantic value, it follows from SV3 that this sentence also lacks a semantic value—it is neither true nor false. But if the thought expressed by a sentence is to be identified with its semantic value, then the parent could not have communicated anything to the child after all. So, assuming that thoughts must be either senses or semantic values, what we communicate when we sincerely and assertively utter sentences of our language must be the senses of those sentences, i.e.,

19 This is a generalization of a principle that Frege, in Frege (1892a), pp. 162-3, tacitly appeals to in the course of an argument for the claim that the sense expressed by a declarative sentence is the thought associated with it and its semantic value (its truth-value). He says, “If we now replace one word of the sentence by another having the same [semantic value], but a different sense, this can have no effect upon the [semantic value] of the sentence. Yet we can see that in such a case the thought changes; since, e.g., the thought in the sentence ‘The morning star is a body illuminated by the Sun’ differs from that in the sentence ‘The evening star is a body illuminated by the Sun’. Anybody who did not know that the evening star is the same as the morning star might hold the one to be true, the other false. The thought, accordingly, cannot be what is meant [is intended as the semantic value] by the sentence, but must rather be considered as its sense,” (my emphasis).

14

S3 The thought expressed by a sentence is its sense.20

But if senses are private mental items, like mental images, or sensations, then it is unclear how such communication could ever be effected. Mental items, after all, are private property—if you and I each entertain some mental image, then those particular images are, no matter how similar, necessarily numerically distinct. Whatever thoughts are, they must be something that in some sense is public property. If I am able to communicate some thought to you, then what is communicated cannot be identified with anything whose identity conditions in any way depend on its being my thought. So, we have:

S4 Thoughts are not psychological in nature: the sense of a sentence is not to be identified with ideas, mental images, or any other private psychological items.

But what of the senses of a sentence’s parts? Frege articulates a compositionality principle for sense corresponding to the one for semantic value:

S5 The sense of a complex expression is determined by its structure and the senses of its constituents.

Unlike SV2, however, the sense of the complex expression really is the sum of the senses of its parts. Since it is hard to see how something non-psychological in nature could be constituted by psychological parts, it would seem to follow from S4 and S5 that all senses must be non- psychological in character. Finally, Frege takes sense to have a decidedly normative dimension, i.e., the sense of an expression is, in some sense, action-guiding. The sense in which sense guides action is this: once the sense of an expression is determined speakers are thereby constrained in what they can and cannot go on to do with that expression. Once ‘pencil’, for example, acquires a definite sense, it is thereby laid down which future applications of the term will be true and which false.

20 In what follows, I will use ‘thought’, ‘sense expressed by a (declarative) sentence’, and ‘’ interchangeably.

15 The reason why this is so is because the association of a sense with a predicate will thereby determine which function (in this case the function is also a property) is that predicate’s semantic value. Since a property is a function that delivers for every object either the true or the false as value, the association of a sense with ‘pencil’ will constrain all future uses of the term. If one’s aim is to speak truly, when speaking literally, then certain applications will be, in this respect, good and others bad. Generally speaking, then, we have:

S6 The sense of an expression is normative: it constitutes a normative constraint that determines which uses of that expression are correct and which are incorrect.

Sometimes it is thought that this normative dimension requires viewing the sense of a term as containing within it “directions” for all future uses of that term.21 Whether or not this is so, once an expression has been endowed with a determinate sense, it is thought to be objectively determined which uses of that term are correct, and which incorrect. Frege’s senses, then, play a crucial role in explaining linguistic understanding, are what mediate language/world relations, are subject to a kind of compositionality, are objective in character, and are normative in a certain respect. How do they help to deal with the puzzles mentioned earlier? Making “Sense” of the Puzzles Rather than illustrate how Frege’s distinction helps him to solve each of the four puzzles, I will only comment on what are usually taken to be the most interesting, and pressing, of the bunch: Frege’s Puzzle about Cognitive Significance and the Problem of Opacity. With Frege’s Puzzle, the problem is a result of holding the following principles: (1) that meaning is semantic value (reference), (2) that cognitive significance is a function of meaning, and (3) that sentences like ‘Muhammad Ali is Muhammad Ali’ and ‘Mohammed Ali is Cassius Clay’ can have a different cognitive significance for a single speaker who happens to understand both of them. According to Frege, however, coming to know that ‘Muhammad Ali is Muhammad Ali’ is true would not extend one’s knowledge in any substantive way, though coming to know that ‘Muhammad Ali is Cassius Clay’ is true would. One might be genuinely

21 Famously, Wittgenstein’s rule-following considerations are, among other things, an attack on this conception of the normativity of sense. I shall return to this issue in chapter 5.

16 surprised at coming to learn the latter and doing so might very well have significant effects on one’s overall behavior. Furthermore, the kinds of justification that we would have to offer in order to justify a in the truth of these sentences would also diverge. One could be justified solely by an appeal to the Principle of Self-Identity, whereas the other would require some appeal to the empirical facts. So, Frege is not willing to give up (3). Neither is he willing to give up (2). The solution is to reject (1), and this is precisely the effect of introducing the sense/semantic-value distinction. Content, for Frege, splits into sense and semantic value. That aspect of an expression’s content that does determine its cognitive significance is not its semantic value, but its sense, and since two sentences can be indistinguishable at the level of semantic value and yet diverge in sense, Frege can explain the above divergence of cognitive significance: the above sentences, though the same vis-à-vis truth-value, express different senses, and the reason they do is that the names ‘Muhammad Ali’ and ‘Cassius Clay’ express different senses. Frege’s solution to the Problem of Opacity is both subtle and ingenious. It will be recalled that the sentences ‘Lois Lane believes that Clark Kent is Clark Kent’ and ‘Lois Lane believes that Clark Kent is Superman’ could diverge in semantic value even when ‘Clark Kent’ and ‘Superman’ do not. This is in direct conflict with SV6, and nothing in what we have seen so far will help remove the difficulty. Frege here advances the new claim that the semantic values of expressions shift in certain contexts, in particular, in those contexts that follow verbs of propositional attitude in propositional attitude reports. The idea is that in such contexts, the semantic value of an expression is what would in normal contexts be its sense. If we call the sense of an expression in normal contexts its customary sense and the semantic value of an expression in contexts following verbs of propositional attitude its indirect semantic value, then we have:

S7 The indirect semantic value of an expression is its customary sense.

This thesis is given some plausibility if we are inclined to view propositional attitude reports as stating various relations between cognizers and , e.g., relations such as believing, hoping, desiring, and so on. If so, then the sentence following the ‘that’ in such reports (a that- clause) must have a proposition as its semantic value. So, at least that sentence would seem to have its customary sense as its semantic value in such contexts. But then the natural way to

17 explain this would be to accept S7 outright. We are now in a position to see why SV6 is not in fact violated in such contexts. Although ‘Clark Kent’ and ‘Superman’ have the same semantic value, they do not have the same customary sense, and so their indirect semantic values will not be the same. For this reason, SV6 does not, in fact, license the substitution of these expressions for one another in contexts of propositional attitude ascription. This concludes my exposition of Frege’s distinction between sense and semantic-value. I would now like to undertake a more general discussion of Frege’s conception of sense by relating it to issues in the philosophy of mind, in particular, to issues in the philosophy of . Meaning, Mind, and Reality Meaning and Reality: Objectivity There is a definite connection between the theory of meaning and metaphysics. The connection is brought out very nicely by a distinction, drawn by Crispin Wright, between three kinds of objectivity: the objectivity of truth, the objectivity of meaning, and the objectivity of judgment.22 First, the objectivity of truth amounts to the claim that our sentences are made true by a world that is independent of us, what we believe about it, and the kind of evidence that we have for the things we believe about it. It is to believe that it is (at least in principle) possible for certain sentences to have truth-values, and for us to understand in what their being true or false would consist, even though determining those truth-values is something that transcends our capacities. For example, to believe in the objectivity of truth would be to allow as a possibility that the sentence ‘Everything in the universe doubled in size five minutes ago’ is determinately true or false, is a sentence someone might fully well understand, and yet is also a sentence for which we can never have any direct evidence regarding its truth-value. Its being true, or otherwise, is in no way constrained by the availability, or otherwise, of evidence for or against its truth. Next, we saw above that for Frege sense is objective and it is normative. It is something that sets constraints on what we can and cannot go on to do with an expression or a sentence, something that determines which subsequent uses are correct and which incorrect. Once the sense of a sentence has been fixed, it is thereby rendered determinate which judgments regarding

22 Wright (1987), pp. 5-8.

18 the truth-value of that sentence are required by that sense and which are not. In Wright’s words, “the meaning of a is a real constraint, to which we are bound, as it were, by contract, and to which verdicts about its truth-value may objectively conform, or fail to conform, quite independently of our considered opinion on the matter.”23 Call this the objectivity of meaning. A third kind of objectivity, the objectivity of judgment, concerns the relationship between our judgments and their supposed subject matter. Here, the kind of objectivity in question directly concerns what has come to be known as the Truth-Maker Principle (hereafter, TM), i.e., the principle that for every true sentence, there is something else that renders it true. Wright puts the matter as follows: “the kind of objectivity which statements have when they are apt to record or misrecord features of the real world—features which would be appreciable by any creature possessed of appropriate cognitive powers, whatever its emotional capacities or affective dispositions.”24 TM requires that our judgments, when true, be made true by something—call that thing a fact. The objectivity of judgment, properly speaking, concerns the nature of this truth-making fact. At one end of the spectrum, it is something whose nature is completely independent of the cognizer—to remove the cognizer (or all cognizers, and assuming that the judgment is not explicitly about such cognizers) from the world would still leave that fact completely intact—while at the other end of the spectrum, remove or change the cognizer and you (potentially) remove or change the fact. Questions regarding this dimension of objectivity can be fruitfully prosecuted at the local, rather than the global, level. Indeed, it raises interesting questions about many regions of our discourse. Sentences about the necessary and the possible, about moral matters, about meaning, about the future, about the distant past, about highly theoretical (perhaps even unobservable) entities, about mathematical entities, and about the external world all prove to be interesting subject matters for reflection regarding the objectivity of judgment. If we call a class of sentences which can genuinely be assessed for truth or falsity truth-apt, then which of the above classes of sentence are truth-apt, and of those which are, what is the nature of the corresponding truth-makers? It is an extremely interesting and philosophically important question what, if any, logical relationships obtain between these three kinds of objectivity. For example, does the objectivity

23 Ibid., p. 6.

19 of meaning entail either of the other two kinds of objectivity? Is it entailed by either of them? Or is it completely independent of them? Does the objectivity of truth entail the objectivity of judgment, or vice versa? For my purposes, I would only like to consider the relationship between the objectivity of truth and the objectivity of meaning, on the one hand, and the objectivity of judgment and the objectivity of meaning on the other. In particular, I would like to consider whether or not either of the other two kinds of objectivity entails the objectivity of meaning. The reason is that if so, then any challenge to the notion of sense will also have deep ramifications elsewhere. Consider the objectivity of truth and meaning first. The objectivity of truth guarantees that the truth of (at least some of) our judgments is independent of the kinds of evidence that we are in principle capable of acquiring in favor of or against its truth. It allows that a sentence S might be determinately true or false even though we can never determine which. Now how should this be possible? In most cases (if not all), the truth of a sentence is a function of two factors: (i) the way our words mean, and (ii) the way the world is. Now one way of understanding the objectivity of truth is as saying that some our sentences may have truthmakers to which we can have no epistemic access. There may be a fact of the matter that makes either the sentence ‘I am a brain in a vat’ or its negation true even though this fact is forever beyond my reach. But what would make it the case that this particular fact is the truthmaker of this particular sentence rather than, say, the fact that Biloxi is in Mississippi? Obviously, it is the meaning of the sentence in question that sorts these things out—the meaning, as it were, reaches out to regions that are wholly beyond our epistemic grasp. It already determines which sentences we should assert and which we should not, provided, that is, we are concerned only with asserting what is true. For this reason, the objectivity of meaning is entailed by the objectivity of truth. Does the objectivity of judgment, on the other hand, also entail the objectivity of meaning? If meaning is not objective, can we infer anything about the nature of the facts that would make our statements true or false? Could they nonetheless be fully objective—their existence and nature not in any way depending upon the existence or nature of the cognizer, or would we have to view them as more subjective or even, as a kind of limiting case, non-existent? By most lights, the truth-value of a sentence S will be a function of both the meaning of S and

24 Ibid., p. 6.

20 the world. Another way to put this is that S will be true just in case the type of truth-maker fixed by the meaning of S and required by TM obtains in the actual world.25 Remember that the objectivity of meaning consisted of two claims: (1) that the meaning of a statement is a real constraint, to which we are bound, as it were, by contract (the Contractualist Assumption), and (2) that the meaning of a truth-apt sentence is something to which verdicts about its truth-value may objectively conform, or fail to conform, quite independently of our considered opinion on the matter (the Conformity Assumption). Are these assumptions logically independent of one another, are they equivalent, or does one entail the other? To begin with, the Conformity Assumption actually entails the Contractualist Assumption, since if the meaning of a sentence is something to which our judgments may conform or fail to conform, then clearly meaning is to serve as a constraint on at least some of our activities, viz., on what speech acts we are to perform with that sentence in various circumstances. The reverse entailment, however, clearly fails. Thus, since we only want to know whether or not the objectivity of judgment entails the objectivity of meaning, we need only consider whether or not the former entails the Contractualist Assumption. Accordingly, suppose that the Contractualist Assumption is false, i.e., that the meaning of some non-token-reflexive, truth-apt sentence S does not in fact carry with it any genuine constraint on what we are to go on to do with it, in particular, on what we go on to do it with respect to assertion or denial. Suppose further that John asserts S at about the same time that Paul denies it.26 Since the meaning of S places no constraints on what John and Paul do with S, the assertion of it by John and the denial by Paul must either be equally correct—if it still even makes sense to speak of these acts as correct—or neither correct nor incorrect. But now since S is truth-apt, if either John’s assertion or Paul’s denial counts as true or false, then both must count as true or false, respectively. But then the truth-makers would have to have been correlated with the utterances of their respective sentence tokens at the moment of those utterances, since otherwise there would have been prior constraints on what could be done by John and Paul with those sentences—something which could only have been provided by the meaning of S. We are now, however, flirting with the absurd, since it is completely mysterious

25 This sounds strikingly similar to the account of truth offered by J. L. Austin. According to him, “a statement is said to be true when the historic state of affairs to which it is correlated by the demonstrative conventions is of a type which the sentence used in making it is correlated by the descriptive conventions”; Austin (1950), 121-22.

21 how such a contemporaneous correlation could be affected. On the other hand, if it no longer makes any sense to speak of their respective speech acts as being correct or incorrect, then we can no longer speak of them as being true or false (or, alternatively, as saying something which is true or false). This means, however, that they cannot be correlated with truth-makers at all, since otherwise they would be either true or false. That Paul’s and John’s judgments are correlated with no truth-makers at all, however, was the limiting case for the failure of the objectivity of judgment. So, if the above argument is correct, the objectivity of judgment does in fact entail the objectivity of meaning. Such a result would have tremendous philosophical importance, since any attack on the objectivity or legitimacy of the concept of meaning (sense) would automatically count as a challenge to the belief that our judgments can record objective features of the world, and this latter challenge might be cause for concern for at least some of those who recommend that we abandon all talk of meaning. Meaning and Mind: the Problem of Content A core problem in the philosophy of mind concerns the nature of propositional attitudes, i.e., representational states of a cognizer such as believing, wishing, hoping, etc. What supposedly makes all of these attitudes propositional is that they are all content-bearing, i.e., to attribute such a state to someone is ipso facto to relate that person to, for lack of a better word, a content, and that content is both the kind of thing that might be expressed by a sentence (i.e., is propositional) and intentional (has aboutness essentially). On the one hand, for example, to say that Jane believes that she will win the lottery and that she hopes that she will win the lottery are to say two different things about her—they relate Jane in different ways to the same content. On the other hand, to say that Jane believes that she will win the lottery and that Jane believes that Duke will win the championship are ways of relating Jane in the same way to two different things. But what is it for Jane to have a content- bearing representational state at all? What is it for her to bear some attitude to a content, and what is the nature of that content? Before we consider how this question might be answered, it will be useful to generalize the notion of a sentence to include whatever representational states a cognizer might have such that (a) that state has a content, and (b) the cognizer can have an attitude of some sort (e.g., of wishing, of hoping, of believing, of doubting, etc.) to that content. Let us call such

26 I.e., that John utters S with assertoric force and Paul asserts its negation with assertoric force.

22 representational states mental sentences—it is important to keep in mind, however, that in doing so we have not thereby prejudged anything about their nature.27 In particular, I wish to leave it as open whether or not a speaker of English, say, thinks by means of English mental sentences and whether or not there is some one language of thought or many. Assuming that to believe (hope/doubt/etc.) that snow is white requires bearing a certain relationship to a certain brain state, I take myself to have committed myself to nothing further by calling the relevant representation a sentence. Such sentences may or not be part of a unique mentalese, they may or may not be compositional, they may or may not be isomorphic (in a strong sense) to what they represent, etc. All that I will be assuming is that for a cognizer to bear an attitude to a content requires that there be some vehicle which bears that content for that cognizer and that such vehicles actually be part of the physical make-up of the cognizers who entertain them. To what extent mental sentences are like their counterparts in the more familiar public , call these latter sentences linguistic sentences, is being left open. It should be noted that in making this move, I am assuming mental representationalism. This assumption is essential for the following discussion, though, in the end, I remain agnostic about its ultimate status. There are a number of very striking similarities between mental content and linguistic content (meaning). It is a commonplace to hold that linguistic sentences are semantically structured, their contents depending in systematic ways on the contents of their parts. Taking content to include both the notions of sense and semantic value, this is the net effect of the compositionality principles SV2 and S5 discussed above. Now mental sentences are like linguistic ones at least to the extent that they have content. It would seem, then, that if it makes sense to carve up the content of linguistic sentences into , then it would also make sense to do so with respect to mental ones. Mental sentences can be true or false and we can refer to things in thought. As in the case of linguistic sentences, the sense of mental words and sentences might be understood as being constituted by the way in which the referents and truth-values of our mental sentences are given to us. Furthermore, sense and semantic value, in the case of mental sentences, would have to be just as compositional as they are for linguistic sentences. To this extent, thought and language must mirror one another. Any reason for

27 When necessary, I shall follow common practice and use single quotes to refer to linguistic expressions and vertical strokes to refer to the corresponding expressions of mentalese, e.g., |cat| is that mentalese expression which corresponds, or is most similar in content, to the English expression ‘cat’.

23 thinking that a linguistic sentence is semantically complex would also be easily transformable into a reason for thinking that mental sentences must be complex. Thus, just as we can speak of linguistic sentences as being composed of logically or grammatically significant parts (words for short), we can also so speak of mental sentences.28 All of this strongly suggests that there is some systematic connection between the two kinds of content.29 Indeed, it would be extremely surprising if linguistic meaning and mental content were completely independent phenomena. This raises a very deep question in philosophy: must our understanding of the mental go through the linguistic, or must we start with the mental and then deal with the linguistic? Or perhaps the mental and the linguistic will need to be explained simultaneously. Many philosophers during the twentieth century assumed (some argued) that the true direction of explanation is from the linguistic to the mental. It is one of the virtues of Frege’s solution to the Problem of Substitutivity that it dovetails nicely with the common-sense understanding of our mental lives. What this might suggest is that a theory of sentence meaning will shed light on the propositional attitudes, since, at least on Frege’s account, that to which we bear the relation of believing, wishing, etc. will be identical to the sense expressed by some corresponding sentence. The proposition expressed by the sentence ‘Duke will win the championship’ is what it is that I believe when I believe that Duke will win the championship, i.e., when I token a mental sentence with that specific content. So, one might think that by shedding light on the problem of sentence content, in particular, on sense, one would thereby also shed light on the problem of mental content—to say what it is for a linguistic sentence to

28 Furthermore, the type/token distinction can, and should, be drawn with respect to mental words and sentences, as it is with linguistic ones. Tokens, of either the mental or linguistic, are datable, locatable entities with their own histories and causal powers. Types, on the other hand, have none of these features. They are not causally efficacious, they do not have histories, and they cannot be located in space or time. Types are, of course, tokened in space and time, but they are not themselves to be found there. Several speakers can token linguistic expressions of the same type, just as, one would think, several different thinkers can token mental sentences of the same type.

29 There are, of course, some important disanalogies between mental representation and linguistic meaning. To begin with, many words in our public languages are assigned a sense, and thus a semantic value, as a matter of convention. With mental expressions, on the other hand, it is hard to see how convention could play any such role. There is also the fact that linguistic expressions are relatively familiar kinds of objects. We all know what they “look” like and most people have relatively little trouble re-identifying them. With respect to mental expressions, on the other hand, nobody really knows what they are like or how to identify them. Crucially, it is doubtful that we can identify them independently of their content, as we can with linguistic expressions. Finally, mental representation seems to have a more direct role to play in understanding intentional explanations of behavior, while linguistic content seems to have a more direct role in understanding communication.

24 have content will provide one with the resources to explain mental content. Incidentally, even if the direction of illumination should not proceed from language to mind, but in the reverse direction, or even if neither language nor mind is explanatorily prior to the other—both needing to be explained simultaneously, if the above connection between mental and linguistic content is correct, then results concerning either would have deep significance for the other. For example, arguments to the conclusion that there really can be no such thing as linguistic content (mental content) would immediately transform themselves into arguments against the possibility of mental content (linguistic content), and vice versa.30 This alone would be an extremely important result. Individualism and the Mental Before moving on to discuss one particularly influential theory of mental content, I would like to mention what was, relatively recently, an almost ubiquitous feature of theories of mental representation: semantic individualism. Very generally speaking, we might characterize the doctrine as follows:

(IND) The property of a mental representation (of a cognizer A) bearing a certain content supervenes over properties intrinsic to A.31

30 Both Donald Davidson and Paul Boghossian argue that linguistic and mental content are mutually interdependent in this way. Davidson says, “interpreting an agent’s intentions, his beliefs and his words are parts of a single project, no part of which can be assumed to be complete before the rest is. If this is right, we cannot make the full panoply of intentions and beliefs the evidential base for a theory of radical interpretation”, Davidson (1973), p. 127, and elsewhere he adds, “A speaker who holds a sentence to be true on an occasion does so in part because of what he means, or would mean, by an utterance of that sentence, and in part because of what he believes. If all we have to go on is the fact of honest utterance, we cannot infer the belief without knowing the meaning, and have no chance of inferring the meaning without the belief”, Davidson (1974), p. 142. Likewise, Boghossian says, “There would appear to be no plausible way to promote a language-specific meaning skepticism. On the Gricean picture, one cannot threaten linguistic meaning without threatening thought content, since it is from thought that linguistic meaning is held to derive; and on the [Dummettian] picture, one cannot threaten linguistic meaning without thereby threatening thought content, since it is from linguistic meaning that thought content is held to derive. Either way, [mental] content and [linguistic] meaning must stand or fall together”, Boghossian (1989), p. 510. Elsewhere, he says that the “real difficulty with the suggestion that one may sustain differential attitudes toward mental and linguistic content stems from the fact that the best arguments for the claim that nothing mental possesses content would count as equally good arguments for the claim that nothing linguistic does [and vice versa]. For these arguments have nothing much to do with the items being mental [or linguistic] and everything to do with their being contentful: they are considerations of a wholly general character, against the existence of items individuated by content”, Boghossian (1990), p. 171.

31 A property P supervenes over properties N1, . . . , Nn just in case any change vis-à-vis some thing’s having P necessitates some change in that thing’s having N1, . . . , Nn.

25 For example, when Judy has the thought that today is Sunday she tokens some mental sentence, viz., |Today is Sunday|, and that sentence bears the content that today is Sunday. An account of mental representation that is individualistic will hold that that fact—the fact of that mental representation having the content that it does—supervenes over properties that, as it were, stop at Judy’s skin, e.g., properties concerning her neurophysiology or her brain chemistry. The supervening fact does not supervene over any relational properties of Judy, and in particular, ones that relate her to her external environment. On such a view, meaning is “in the head”.32 One reason for supposing that mental content must be individualistic in this way is that reference to mind-world relations seems to be explanatorily superfluous when it comes to explaining behavior. When we try to explain why Judy walked into her closet, we might just point out that she wants to look nice whenever she goes to church and that she believes that she will be attending church today, that her Sunday dress is in the closet, and that by putting on that dress, she will look nice. In saying this, we will be saying that she has tokened the mental sentences |I will be attending church today|, |My Sunday dress is in the closet|, |By putting on that dress, I will look nice|, and |I will look nice whenever I go to church |, and that she believes that the first three are true and desires that the third be made true. Must we also assume that the expressions that make up these sentences are related to the world in any particular way? Will it strengthen the explanation, for example, to suppose that |Sunday dress| is actually linked to Sunday dresses in some appropriate (perhaps causal) way? Well, what difference could such a connection have for Judy’s behavior? Does the connection cause the behavior, or is it Judy’s belief that there is such a connection (if she even has such a belief) that matters for her behavior. There are strong intuitions out there (motivated by Putnam’s Twin-Earth considerations, which will be discussed below) that had she been in a completely different but sufficiently similar

32 A classic argument against individualism can be found in Burge (1979). There, Burge offers his well-known tharthritis thought-experiment. We are asked to imagine someone, Jones say, who, while having a large number of correct beliefs about arthritis, incorrectly believes that he has arthritis in his thigh (as we all know, however, arthritis actually only affects the joints). When his doctor informs him that the pain in his knee is arthritis but that the pain in his thigh is not—because arthritis only occurs in the joints—he accepts the doctor’s assertion and gives up this particular belief. The intuition is that Jones’ false belief was genuinely about arthritis. Now imagine the counterfactual situation in which Jones has the exact same physical history from the moment of his birth until the encounter with his doctor but in which ‘arthritis’ is used by doctors to refer arthritis as well as to a variety of other rheumatoid ailments outside of the joints, including the thigh. In this counterfactual situation, what Jones expresses to the doctor is true. What this seems to show is that the content of some person’s thought, in this case Jones’ mental sentence |I have arthritis in my thigh|, might be different in different possible worlds even though all properties intrinsic to that person are the same—all that has changed are features that person’s external environment.

26 environment, she would have tried to do the same thing provided that her total psychology was the same. Such external relationships are often thought to be explanatorily superfluous, not because it is held that nothing external could play any causal role in producing her actions, but because no particular such relationship between a mental expression and extra-mental things and properties seems to be necessary or sufficient to produce the behavior to be explained (the Twin- Earth considerations are supposed to show that they are not necessary, while the fact that belief matters for behavior shows that they are not sufficient). Another worry might be that including such external relationships in the causes of behavior threatens the very picture that the theory of mental representation is supposed to preserve. The idea is that the only way to see ourselves as agents while at the same time seeing our behavior as caused is to see our behavior as caused in the right way. The demands of agency pressure us into seeing the relevant causal mechanisms as being completely internal, otherwise something external to us would be partly responsible for our actions. Since agency also requires action from a reason, the causal mechanisms must involve mental representations, but since those causal mechanisms must also be completely internal, no appeal to representation/external- world relationships can be made. Such relationships are simply not sufficiently local to ground a genuine notion of agency. What are sufficiently local are the happenings in a person’s head, i.e., the properties of her mind/brain that are intrinsic to her. So, there are some compelling reasons to see at least mental content as individualistic. Given the resurgence, beginning in the mid-1950’s, of psychologistic theories of linguistic meaning, many have also been inclined to see linguistic meaning as individualistic as well. Broadly speaking, psychologistic theories seek to explain meaning itself by reference to the psychological (or physical, in the case of the non-eliminative physicalist) states of individual speakers/thinkers. They begin with the psychological states of individual language users and attempt to reconstruct a notion of public linguistic meaning on this basis. The route to such a destination typically goes through the intermediate step of defining, for the individual language user A, the notion of an expression’s meaning such and such for A (speaker’s meaning). The definition of this notion will be given more or less directly in terms of the psychological states of A alone, where some account is then offered of the non-derived content of mental representations—the content of a mental state being non-derived if its content is not inherited from some other type of representation. Armed with the resulting notion of speaker’s meaning,

27 the strategy then is to define (timeless and public) linguistic meaning in terms of it. Anchored as it is on the various psychological states of individual language users, the final account of public meaning would clearly be psychologistic in nature. Even when linguistic meaning is explained in this way, however, it may nonetheless turn out to be non-individualistic, if the underlying notion of mental content is, but linguistic meaning would be individualistic, if mental content is. It might be thought that if IND is true and linguistic content does derive from mental content, then speakers must know what they mean by their use of their own terms. After all, if what I mean by an utterance reduces to (or supervenes on) my psychological states, then what I mean must be open to me on reflection, since what desires, beliefs, etc. I have will be open to me on reflection. So, it is natural to think that if one buys into the transparency of the mental (Cartesian introspectionism), then a semantic individualist must also be a semantic introspectionist. In other words, IND might be thought to entail

INT What is meant by someone’s, A’s, competent use of some expression is fully open to introspection by A.

This, however, would be a mistake. Even if one accepts both the transparency of the mental and IND, one need not also accept INT. First, if speaker’s meaning supervenes on one’s mental states, but does not reduce to them, then the entailment will fail, since it is in general false that what supervenes on something else will have all of the properties of that something else—the Indiscernibility of Identicals simply fails when the relation in question is supervenience, rather than the stronger one of identity. But even when reduction is at issue, the entailment fails. On a weak reading, the thesis of the transparency of the mental says only that when an individual has some belief, desire, etc., that individual can, upon reflection, know that she has that belief, desire, etc. It is fully compatible, however, to hold that an individual can know that she bears a certain cognitive relation to a particular representation whenever she does bear such a relation, even though the content of that representation is not fully transparent to her. To generate the desired entailment, what also needs to be assumed is that mental content is also transparent, that is, one needs to supplement IND, and the transparency of the mental, with a mental version of semantic introspectionism. Of course, such a thesis might be part of a strong reading of the transparency of the mental, and if so, then, provided that what a speaker means reduces to one’s

28 mental states, IND does entail INT. In any case, an individualist need (and probably should) be neither a reductionist nor an introspectionist.33 The relevance of individualism to the Problem of Instability, and the Crack will figure prominently in chapter 5. Conceptual Role Semantics Most of the rest of this dissertation will be concerned with a view that finds its immediate home in the theory of mental representation, but which is often extended to do work in the theory of linguistic meaning as well. Those who do so extend the view do so on the basis of the conviction that mental content is more fundamental than linguistic content and that an adequate account of the latter must be built on the foundations of an account of the former. As it is sometimes expressed, linguistic content is inherited content, being inherited from mental content, which, of all kinds of content, is the only kind that is autonomous, not having been inherited from anything else. I myself find this assumption dubious, but in what follows I will allow it. Though I cannot argue this point here, I suspect that linguistic content must be taken as fundamental or as at least on a par with mental content. In any case, since I do believe that there will unavoidably be some deep connection between the two types of content, I take it that the results established later concerning conceptual role semantics (CRS) will have important consequences for the theory of linguistic meaning. CRS takes much of its inspiration from the work of Quine and the later Wittgenstein. It attempts to retain their insight that a meaningful part of a representational system (in their case, a public language) must derive its meaning from its relationships to other parts of that system. As they might put it, a sentence of English, say, has the particular content it does by virtue of its relationship to the meanings of all (or many) of the other expressions of English or by virtue of the role it plays in our social practices, which include our use of other expressions of English. By seeing mental content as determined by conceptual role, which in turn is determined by relationships between inner mental states, CRS theorists are able to preserve this insight while also remaining realist about the mental. The idea here is that the content of some piece of mental or linguistic syntax is individuated by the position it occupies in some system of representation. This is an instance of a general, more or less holistic, strategy of analysis whereby some

33 I take it that even though one could, strictly speaking, hold INT without also accepting IND, any such position would be wildly implausible. Such a position would have to attribute to speakers nearly godlike powers of direct intuition into external affairs.

29 problematic class of entities (or properties) P are given individuation-conditions by identifying them with nodes in a structure, where these nodes are defined by identifying (i) some relevant class of relatively unproblematic entities U, (ii) a set of properties P1, P2, . . . Pn and relations R1,

R2, . . ., Rn defined over that the members of U, and (iii) specifying individuation-conditions for the members of P in terms of (i) and (ii) (in what follows, I will refer to this as the QW pattern/schema). Alternatively, one might identify certain properties (such as that of expressing the proposition that the cat is on the mat) of the members of U in the same structural way. As is well-known, Quine defines the stimulus meaning of an expression for a speaker in terms of all of the sensory stimulations that prompt assent by that speaker to a sentence and all of those which prompt dissent from it. Here, sensory stimulations and sentences are the members of U, while assenting to and dissenting from are the relations R1, R2, . . ., Rn in terms of which the relevant structures (sets, for Quine) are defined. Quine, then, instantiates the above schema, but he is a behaviorist, because he does not allow inner mental states (mental representations) into U. Given his aversion to the mental and his willingness to allow at least stimulus-meaning to our linguistic expressions, it is clear that Quine sees linguistic content as being fundamental, albeit trivially.34 CRS theorists, on the other hand, typically adopt a mentalistic stance on the above priority question. Unlike Quine, they are not squeamish about allowing inner mental states (mental sentences) into U. CRS theorists then typically go on to explain the meaningfulness of a linguistic token by seeing it as correlated (in some way to be specified/discovered later) with

34 Quine’s version of verificationism is closely tied to his linguistic behaviorism. For him, the meaning of a sentence is its method of verification. Method of verification for a speaker, however, can be understood in terms of the class of all inferences that that speaker would take as confirming that sentence in the light of various sensory stimulations. Furthermore, for Quine, such inferences are to be understood as dispositions to assent to or dissent from the sentence under certain sensory stimulations. So, for Quine, the meaning of a sentence, or what is left once all of our ordinary notions regarding meaning have been purged of their metaphysical demons, are dispositions that yield a certain behavioral output given various sensory inputs. But this kind of account removes all talk of mental states. Indeed, this is one of the hallmarks of behaviorism—it disparages mental states, insofar as they are internal states distinct from dispositions to behave under various sensory stimulations, as metaphysical fictions. Many, however, have seen this as a central defect of extreme behaviorism. CRS is a kind of functionalism, which builds on behaviorism without giving in to its anti-mentalism. Functionalism is attractive because while preserving the intuitively plausible connection between our mental states and our behavior, it does not simply reduce them to it. For the behaviorist, there simply are no mental states that are hidden from public view—no mysterious, inner happenings for which the only kind of direct access is first-person access (a functionalist, of course, need not be committed to this conception of mental states as private and cognitively transparent to their bearers). The functionalist, on the other hand, allows that mental states are essentially connected to our behavior but also allows that they are really there over and above our dispositions to overt behavior. A mental state is individuated by certain of our dispositions, but only partially—they are also individuated, in part, by their relations to other mental states.

30 tokens of mentalese, which latter derive their content from their role in the conceptual (cognitive) functioning of the individual who tokened the original expression. Finally, meaning for linguistic expression-types is analyzed in terms of the tokenings of those sentences by individual speakers. This approach, then, ultimately takes linguistic meaning as being metaphysically dependent on mental content—the meaning of a public sentence being in the end determined by the conceptual role of the relevant mental representation.35 Thus, in what follows, I shall take CRS to be a thesis about both mental and linguistic content. Clearly, the key notion for the CRS theorist is that of conceptual role. But how should this notion be understood, and what are the primary bearers of conceptual roles? Taking the second question first, CRS theorists generally identify mental sentences as the ultimate bearers of conceptual roles. The conceptual roles of non-sentential (mental) expressions, by contrast, are viewed as abstractions from, or theoretical constructions upon, the conceptual roles of (mental) sentences, and, as already mentioned, the conceptual role of a linguistic sentence is derived from the conceptual role of some corresponding mental sentence. But for the addition of items of mentalese into U, the CRS theorist’s understanding of conceptual role is actually quite similar to Quine’s understanding of stimulus-meaning. Sensory inputs, motor outputs, and mental sentences are taken to be the relevant members of U. For some suitably chosen class of relations, it is the sum total of such relations that a particular mental sentence bears to every other mental sentence, sensory input, and motor output that determines the content of that sentence. Probably since these relations always have at least one sentence as a relatum and since the relationships are meant to be cognitive in nature, the structuring relations in question are assumed to be inferential (CRS theorists often use ‘inferential role’ and ‘conceptual role’ interchangeably). Whether or not all of the inferential relations that we intuitively recognize should be included and exactly how the notion of inference is itself to be understood are further questions upon which CRS theorists themselves sometimes disagree. Generally speaking,

35 The view described here matches, in broad outline, that of Harman (1968), (1974), (1975a), (1975b), (1982), and (1993). He characterizes CRS as being committed to two claims: “(1) the meanings of linguistic expressions are determined by the contents of the concepts and thoughts they can be used to express, and (2) the contents of concepts and thoughts are determined by their functional role in a person’s psychology,” Harman (1982), p. 242. Other notable advocates for the view include Field (1977) and (1978), Loar (1981) and (1982), McGinn (1982), Block (1986), and Lycan (1988). In truth, however, not every CRS theorist sees the connection as being this straightforward. Block, for one, allows that an account of mental representation may not be adequate to ground an account of linguistic content. For expository purposes, I shall assume that the version of CRS described here is genuinely representative.

31 however, it is often supposed that the relevant conception of inference should be as liberal as possible (including even mere psychological associations) and that, in the end, the notion of inference should be given a causal analysis. With this much background, we can now sharpen our understanding of conceptual role somewhat. Taking the notion of inference for granted and construing inferences as kinds of ordered pairs, we can define an inference to a mental sentence S by an individual A as an ordered pair of which a tokening of S (in the psychology of A) is the second element and of which the first element is either a tokening of some other mental sentence (in A’s psychology) or some sensory input such that the latter causes S. An inference from a mental sentence S can likewise be defined as an ordered pair of which the first element is a tokening of S and the second element is either a tokening of another mental sentence or some sensory output such that S causes the latter. Of course, a speaker might be disposed to make certain inferences from or to S even though he has never tokened (or will never token) S. This will be the case when the speaker is in an internal state such that tokening S (or some mental sentence of sensory input) would be causally sufficient for tokening the relevant mental sentence or sensory output (S). As was mentioned above, there is a serious issue concerning which inferences to and from S should seen as meaning-constitutive for S. We might say that those inferences to and from S which are meaning-constitutive for S are just the analytic inferences for S. Whether there is some non-circular, yet informative way of specifying these inferences is a fundamental question in semantics and one to which we shall return in what follows. I shall assume, for now at least, that there is some non-circular way of specifying which inferences are analytic and which are not, i.e., one that does not make an appeal to the inference’s being meaning- constitutive. The inferential role of a mental sentence S (for a specific cognizer A) may then be defined as the set of ordered pairs O, such that O is either an analytic inference from S or an analytic inference to S, and A is disposed to accept O. Of course, unless one is willing to accept that every inference to or from S that A is disposed to accept is analytic and thus part of S’s inferential role, some significant analytic/synthetic distinction will have to be recognized, even if no criterion is actually specified. With the notion of a sentence’s inferential role now available, we may define conceptual role for both sentences and non-sentential expressions. Though there is a genuine issue concerning whether a sentence’s conceptual role should be identified with its inferential role, I

32 will suppose in what follows that it should. I make this assumption only for ease of exposition; none of the conclusions drawn in what follows depend on making it. Given this conception of conceptual role for sentences, it is now possible to define the conceptual role of a non-sentential expression E as the set of conceptual roles (sets of ordered pairs representing inferential dispositions) of all sentences of which E is a constituent. What reasons might one have for accepting some version of CRS? Block (1986) launches what seems to me the most compelling defense of the doctrine. He does so by enumerating a wide range of explanatory desiderata that, collectively, CRS apparently best satisfies. According to him, an acceptable theory of content should:

D1 explain the relation between content and semantic-value/truth,

D2 explain what makes contentful expressions contentful,

D3 explain the relativity of content to representational system,

D4 explain compositionality,

D5 fit in with an account of the relation between content and the mind/brain,

D6 illuminate the relation between autonomous and inherited content,

D7 explain the connection between knowing, learning, and using an expression, and the expression’s content, and

D8 explain why different aspects of content are relevant in different ways to the determination of reference and to psychological explanation.36

36 Loc. cit., pp. 82-4.

33 Though I cannot discuss how CRS might handle each of these demands, I will comment briefly on a couple of them. In particular, I would like to point out that an issue which seems to have been one of the main sources of embarrassment for the classical truth-conditional accounts of meaning is nicely handled by CRS, viz., D7. Standard truth-conditional accounts have had a considerable amount of difficulty explaining in what a speaker’s grasp of the meaning of a linguistic expression consists—that is, of explaining the relationship between meaning and understanding. For the truth-conditionalist, the sense/content of a sentence is to be identified with that sentence’s truth-condition. Davidson, for example, holds that the truth-condition of a sentence like ‘Snow is white’ is given by the corresponding “T-sentence”, in this case, by a sentence like ‘‘Snow is white’ is true in English if and only if snow is white’. Thus, knowing the meaning of the former requires knowing that the T-sentence is true. But how is such knowledge to be understood? Dummett has complained that this picture leads to a vicious regress if the knowledge in question is thought to be explicit knowledge, rather than tacit knowledge.37 In such a case, explicit knowledge of the meaning of ‘Snow is white’ amounts to explicit knowledge of the truth of its T-sentence. But what about this latter bit of explicit knowledge? Shouldn’t it also amount to explicit knowledge of its T-sentence, which amounts to explicit knowledge of its T-sentence, and so on? A Davidsonian, however, need not see such knowledge as being explicit. For him, knowing that the T-sentence is true need only be tacit knowledge on the part of the speaker and this requires only knowing how the T-sentence is derived from the finitely axiomatized theory of truth for the relevant object language. This requirement seems completely natural, since knowing the meaning of ‘Snow is white’ requires that one know how its meaning is systematically dependent on both its structure and the meanings of its parts, and it precisely this which is modeled by the derivation of the T-sentence from the right axiomatic base. Knowledge of the T-sentence, then, is manifested by the ability to derive the right theorem in a theory of truth (this is, of course, a highly idealized picture of most speakers’ actual linguistic knowledge). This ability, however, requires two things: (i) knowledge of the relevant axioms, and (ii) enough logical sophistication to allow one to move from these axioms to the relevant T-sentence. Must

37 See, for example, Dummett (1975) and (1976).

34 either of these be explicit knowledge? If a Davidsonian theory of meaning does indeed model what competent speakers know in knowing their language, then it is seems that neither the knowledge of the axiomatic base nor of how to construct derivations from the relevant axioms to a particular T-sentence can be explicit, since most ordinary speakers clearly do not have explicit knowledge of either of things. Such knowledge, then, must be manifested in some other way, perhaps in the observable behavior of competent speakers. If so, then the theory of truth, can be taken as modeling what speakers tacitly know in knowing their language but not how they know it. It is at precisely this point where the trouble sets in for the truth-conditional theorist. How is such tacit knowledge of axioms and derivations actually manifested by a competent speaker? Answering this question without conceding too much to the verificationist (anti-realist) has proved exceedingly difficult for the truth-conditionalist.38 Interestingly, when it comes to semantically simple expressions, Frege can only offer the metaphor of a hand grasping some physical object, a metaphor which raises more questions than it answers.39 The CRS theorist, on the other hand, can more informatively say that grasping (knowing/understanding) the meaning of some expression is a matter of tokening the conceptual-role type that constitutes the meaning of that expression. If sense can be made of the idea of something being a token of some type, then CRS has a ready and straightforward answer to demand D7. It would be a mistake, however, to take this as speaking directly against truth-conditional theories, since it is still in the cards that a CRS might be offered as an account of truth-conditions or of how they are determined or of how they are grasped, so that CRS might be viewed as complementing classical Tarski-Davidson semantics. What is not still in the cards, however, is the assumption, sometimes made by truth-conditionalists, that knowing the meaning of a linguistic sentence is always a matter of having explicit knowledge of its truth-conditions— knowledge the content of which is expressed by that sentence’s T-sentence—and that having such explicit knowledge requires grasping the proposition expressed by that T-sentence either directly or indirectly through an explicit knowledge of the relevant axioms and inferential

38 These issues are explored in Davies (1986), Dummett (1975) and (1976), Evans (1981), and Wright (1986).

39 Frege , (1893), pp. 23-4. To Frege’s credit, however, he is acutely aware of the limits of the metaphor and does attempt to say a little more about the relation, cf., for example, Frege (1918-19a), pp. 368-72; in the end, however, he seems to view the matter as one properly left for psychology. I will return to this issue in chapter 5.

35 procedures. So, a truth-conditionalist might accept CRS provided that she does not take all linguistic knowledge to lie in the possession of further (explicit) linguistic knowledge (the viciousness of the regress, I take it, is apparent). In any case, most CRS theorists would not make this mistake, since they are committed to the priority of the mental over the linguistic. Rather, they would see such explicit knowledge as lying in the tokening of a mental sentence with the same content as the relevant linguistic T-sentence. On such a view, CRS would stand as a valuable addition to the classical accounts in that it would provide a compelling story about how various abstracta, such as meanings, truth-conditions, etc., might be grasped by a mind which is in the end both finite and physical in nature. That CRS might also enjoy this particular virtue is precisely the point of desideratum D5. To claim this particular victory, however, it is imperative that a fully worked out CRS have something to say about how the abstract contents grasped by the mind determine semantic-values/truth-values, that is, it must satisfy D1 as well as how the relevant internal structures determine those abstract contents. Furthermore, D2 is satisfied by CRS insofar as what makes a meaningful expression meaningful (for a particular speaker) is that it plays the appropriate kind of general causal role in that person’s psychology.40 It is doubtful that every causal role will do, however, so it will be a substantive question just what kinds of causal roles to count as appropriate for the status of conceptual role. For example, |Cats are moody creatures| and |’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves/Did gyre and gimble in the wabe| both seem to have their own distinct causal roles, in my psychology at least. The trouble is that while the first has a content, and thus must, according to CRS, have a conceptual role, the second seems to have neither. It is possible, however, that determining which types of causal role are appropriate and which are not may turn out to be a substantive empirical question. CRS, then, seems well-suited for meeting at least some of Block’s demands. Though I will not elaborate on them here, the view does seem tailor-made to accommodate, D3, D5, D6, and D8. The real trouble for CRS, however, concerns D1 and D4. As mentioned above, CRS will have to say something regarding D1—CRS must allow that there is some important connection between conceptual role and semantic value and it must give some idea of the nature of the connection and how it is forged. Furthermore, since most theorists view compositionality

40 Block (1986), p. 114.

36 as “non-negotiable” (as Fodor likes to put it) for public as well as mental languages, a viable CRS will have to accommodate this apparently indisputable feature of thought and talk. Whether CRS can satisfy these demands raises difficult issues. Though I will say a little about the relationship between conceptual role and semantic value in what immediately follows, the bulk of my discussion of D1 and D4 will be postponed until chapters 3 and 4. For the rest of this chapter, I would like to discuss the relationship between Frege’s views and CRS. Conceptual Role and Fregean Sinn There is a tendency of viewing conceptual role as a refinement of Frege’s conception of sense. Fodor and Lepore, for example, have recently seen Frege as the fountainhead of what they call “New World Semantics” of which they regard CRS as the latest incarnation; they contrast this with the “Old World Semantics” of Locke, Mill, and themselves (among many others), according to which word-world relations are of a more-or-less direct and causal/teleological nature.41 Whether or not, and if so, how much, Frege’s conceptions and CRS should be seen as of a kin requires, of course, a much closer study of Frege’s actual writings. We shall have occasion to return to this issue in chapter 5. For now, however, I would like to raise some considerations which suggest at least a superficial similarity in outlook. Most superficially, perhaps, is the fact that Frege as well as the CRS theorists view sentences as the primary units of meaning. That sentence-meaning is to be viewed as the central notion in semantics is an explicit part of the CRS program. After all, it is, in the first instance, mental sentences which have inferential, and thus conceptual, roles. Frege, of course, sees the emphasis on sentences in semantics as so important that he cites it as one of three fundamental, methodological principles guiding his work.42 More importantly, CRS theorists, like Frege, feel the need in semantics for a kind of content distinct from, but complementary to, that of semantic value. What’s more, both require that this additional notion be more fine-grained than that of semantic value, since both see this notion as being needed to explain behavior as well as understanding, needs that cannot be served by purely referential semantics. Frege took this to be the moral of his puzzle regarding cognitive

41 F&L (1991), pp. 142-6.

42 Frege (1884), x. Frege scholars have hotly debated both the proper interpretation of Frege’s so-called as well as its role in Frege’s thought after the introduction of the sense/semantic-value distinction in the early 1890’s. I shall have nothing to say about these issues here, though I will return to them briefly in chapter 5.

37 significance as well as the related problem concerning substitutivity in contexts of propositional attitude. In a similar vein, CRS theorists are impressed by the fact that is possible that two sentences such as the following,

(1) I am about to get hit by a truck, and

(2) Adam Sipos is about to get hit by a truck,

even when fully understood and accepted as true by Adam Sipos, may nonetheless have different effects on his behavior. Crucially, if the speaker is not in fact aware that he is Adam Sipos, knowledge of which does not seem to be presupposed by an understanding of (2), then ceteris paribus an acceptance of (1) will very likely have Adam Sipos’s moving as an effect (provided that he is not suicidal), while an acceptance of (2) might have only some passing, but unmotivating, sympathy as its effect. Along a similar vein, failure to move paired with a sufficiently strong desire to stay alive and avoid injuries will ceteris paribus suggest a failure to understand (1), though not necessarily (2), fully. It will have this latter effect only if the speaker has a certain additional belief, viz., that he is Adam Sipos. The upshot is that since these sentences, in the imagined context, pick out all of the same things in the world and are satisfied by all and only the same states of affairs, there must be some differences in content that explain these different effects. Since behavior and understanding are usually thought to be, among other things, cognitive in nature, these differences must reflect some difference in the cognitive contents of these sentences. The newly recognized contents will be more fine-grained than truth- conditions, since in this case at least, the truth-conditions of (1) and (2) are the same even though the relevant cognitive contents diverge. Furthermore, for Frege, as well as the CRS theorists, understanding (1) and (2), i.e., knowledge of meaning, is explained as the obtaining of some suitable relation between the cognizer in question and the cognitive content possessed by the relevant sentence; for Frege, the relation was that of grasping (S1 from above), while for the CRS theorist, it is a matter of the instantiation (tokening) of the right structural type in the psychology of the speaker. Once again, CRS improves on the original Fregean conception by substituting an illuminating and theoretically satisfying picture for what was only an obscure

38 metaphor. Of course, one might view this as a refinement rather than a genuine alternative while seeing in CRS a modern-day Fregeanism. More importantly still, an essential feature of CRS, viz., that the contents of the attitudes are individuated by their relative positions in the right causal/inferential structures, has, for some at least, appeared to be a salient aspect of Frege’s conception of sense. This is so in at least two different respects. First, Frege’s view is arguably an instance of the QW-schema. In Frege’s early writings, for example, when he first embarks on his logicist project, we find him urging that a necessary part of the general project of laying out the conceptual/cognitive content of our arithmetical talk, in particular, and of any branch of science, in general, is the construction of a begriffsschrift in which the relevant vocabulary can be situated. It is a begriffsschrift, or a conceptual notation, because it is intended to display clearly the conceptual contents of the situated vocabulary. What motivates this methodological move, as Frege sees it, is the idea that any two sentences which can figure in all of the same inferences will have the same cognitive content.43 The kind of content he is interested in circumscribing, if it is to be cognitive in nature, need only be sufficient to underwrite all of those inferences in which the language in question might figure. Properties of an expression that do not have any bearing of the inferential behavior of an expression are not, properly speaking, part of that expression’s conceptual/cognitive content.44 This is just to say, however, that one cannot display the conceptual content of an expression without also displaying certain of its inferential connections to other expressions. Frege’s views on content, then, seem to exhibit the QW pattern described above, a feature essential to CRS. The second respect concerns the role of sense, and conceptual role, in old- fashioned belief-desire (intentional) explanation. Frege explicitly identifies the semantic values of the embedded sentences in attitude reports (the phrase following the ‘that’ in sentences such as ‘Bart believes that Snowball ate his goldfish’) with the ordinary senses of those sentences. This is his well-known solution to the Problem of Opacity, and what it means is that Frege’s

43 Frege (1897), p. 12.

44 To be sure, Frege had not yet distinguished between sense and semantic value, but even when he would go on to do so, one finds basically the same motivation for the begriffsschrift. In any case, Frege himself saw his sense/semantic-value distinction as merely separating out different aspects of what he had always unconsciously grouped together under the label ‘content’ (see, for example, Frege (1892b), p. 187). Given this, it would not be implausible to suggest that when he was discussing an expression’s inferential properties as forming a part of that expression’s content it was that part of that expression’s content that he would later call its sense.

39 senses are directly relevant to psychological explanation, since the objects of the attitudes, according to Frege’s view, are just senses of a certain kind. CRS theories, of course, are designed specifically with psychological explanation in mind. So, it is at least arguable that Frege’s conception of sense has some features essential to conceptual role. Conversely, there is a property essential to Fregean Sinn that is arguably also a feature of conceptual role, or at least is a feature that most CRS theorist would like to be able to ascribe to it. Frege, recall, defines sense as that part of the content of an expression that determines the semantic value of that expression (S from above). If CRS is to be taken seriously as an articulation of Fregean Sinn, then there must be some connection between an expression’s conceptual role and its semantic value—specifically, the latter must somehow be determined by the former. The trouble with this idea is that any straightforward connection between conceptual role and semantic value seems to have been severed by Putnam’s Twin-Earth considerations.45 Putnam asks us to imagine two speech communities (in the same or different possible worlds), Earth and Twin-Earth, say, such that for any member of either community there is a member of the other community who is molecule-for-molecule type-identical to the first and whose phenomenal experience exactly mimics that of the first. Furthermore, both communities speak syntactically identical languages, English and Twin-English, say, even though one expression- type, e.g., ‘water’, refers to H2O when tokened by English speakers but refers to some other substance, XYZ, when tokened by Twin-English speakers. We are also to imagine that XYZ happens to be perceptually identical to H2O and plays the same general role in the lives of Twin-

Earthians as H2O plays in the lives of Earthians. In fact, we are to suppose that the above difference of microstructure is the only difference between Earth and Twin Earth. But given this difference, an English tokening of a sentence like ‘This is water’ by Laura will have different truth-conditions than the corresponding Twin-English tokening by Twin-Laura, since the former is about H2O while the latter is about XYZ. By hypothesis, however, the physical constitution of Laura’s brain is type-identical to that of Twin-Laura’s brain and they are in all of the same phenomenal states. What this thought-experiment is supposed to show is that meaning simply does not supervene on conceptual-role, since conceptual role is supposed to supervene on an

45 Cf. Putnam (1973) and (1975).

40 individual’s physical constitution (independently of context) and the same physical-constitution- type in different contexts will be correlated with different truth-conditions. So, if we are to hold on to the Fregean assumption that meaning determines semantic value and thus truth-conditions, we must reject the CRS theorist’s identification of meaning with something that is “in the head”, viz., conceptual role. The moral is that either there must be some extra-psychological component to meaning, if meaning is to have the connection to truth and reference that most theorists take it to have or meaning (conceptual role) does not have that connection after all. I take it that a theory of meaning (content), at the very least, must make intelligible the possibility of word-world connections, and it is beginning to seem as if this is a task for which pure versions of CRS are inherently unfit. A number of CRS theorists have responded to this worry by observing two different components to content: one broad, the other narrow.46 Broad content is that aspect of a sentence’s content that is, or is relevant to the determination of, its truth-condition. Narrow content, on the other hand, is the strictly organismic contribution to an expression’s content and is that aspect of its content that is relevant to explaining behavior. It is the organismic contribution in that it reduces to, or supervenes on, properties of the speaker/thinker that are completely internal to him, or, as it is frequently expressed, that “stop at his skin.” It is this component of an expression’s content that is claimed to be most fruitfully understood in terms of the conceptual role story. Conceptual role is ideally suited for explaining behavior, and thus is the natural candidate for narrow content. What explains why Adam moved is the narrow, not the broad, content that (1) has for him. (2), presumably, has the same broad content as (1), even though tokening a mental representation with roughly the same content would not necessarily help to explain why he moved. The interaction of the mental sentence having this narrow content with other mental sentences having other narrow contents as well as desires with their own narrow contents explains why Adam moved when he did. All of this taken along with certain assumptions about the locality of causation has convinced many theorists that a sentence’s truth-condition is

46 Since there are a number of different two-factor accounts, this characterization is necessarily a simplification. Examples of two-factor accounts have been offered by Field (1977) and (1978), Loar (1981) and (1982), McGinn (1982), Block (1986), and Lycan (1988).

41 causally irrelevant to explaining behavior. Truth-conditions are, after all, external to thinkers, whereas beliefs and desires, the things that common-sense psychology takes to cause our actions, are internal to them. Though broad content is taken to be irrelevant to explaining behavior, it is seen as needed for an account of communication. It is part of the two-factor approach that these different theoretical tasks are to be accomplished by different components of an expression’s content, rather than the same component, and it seems to be an article of faith of two-factor CRS theorists that such factors can be sufficiently teased apart from one another to serve these divergent theoretical needs. Two-factor CRS theorists might be claiming this dual explanatory victory, however, at the expense of preserving any tidy connection between conceptual role and truth-conditions. I will return to this issue in chapter 4. Though two-factor theorists no longer recognize a direct connection between the two factors, many have nonetheless conceded that there must be some sort of connection, though perhaps of a less direct nature. Why does it seem that the two factors have come unstuck? First, as Frege’s insights make clear, there cannot be a function from broad contents (truth-conditions) to narrow contents; after all, (1) and (2) would presumably have the same broad contents but different narrow ones. The Twin-Earth considerations, of course, show that there cannot be a function going in the opposite direction. The two factors cannot be completely independent, however, otherwise there would seem to be nothing to keep the conceptual role appropriate to |Adam Sipos is about to get hit by a truck| and its truth-condition, viz., that Adam Sipos is about to get hit by a truck, together. After all, if there is nothing that connects the two, then what stops the above mental sentence from having the truth-condition that Adam Sipos is about to get hit by a truck and a narrow content appropriate to something like |India is primarily a Hindu nation|. One way to remedy this problem would be to see in narrow contents, not pure determinants of broad contents, but instead functions from contexts to broad contents. It is because my use of ‘water’ and Twin-Adam’s use of ‘water’ occur in different contexts that those uses diverge in broad content, despite the identity of narrow content. The same narrow content, then, determines different broad contents in different contexts. This seems to solve our problem.47

47 Another solution along these lines is offered by Fodor (1987), chapter 2. Stalnaker (1989) raises difficulties for this proposal. Loar (1981) and (1982), and Block (1986), especially pp. 108-9 and 132-5, also offer similar solutions.

42 The main difficulty with this suggestion is that the designation of my use of ‘water’ is not selectively sensitive to the background context in this way. If I were spontaneously relocated to Twin-Earth, my utterance of ‘There is some water’ would not then have the same truth-condition as it would if it were uttered by Twin-me. Nor would its truth-condition change if Twin-me were spontaneously to find himself uttering that sentence here on Earth. In either case, the conceptual role is the same, and the context is the same, but the truth-conditions are still different.48 Viewing narrow contents as functions from contexts to broad contents, then, is a dead end. The main trouble with that suggestion was that you could find yourself in some strange Twin-Earthian context, such that in that context, the locals’ use of ‘water’ (or tokening of |water|) refers to XYZ, while yours still refers to H2O. By hypothesis, you and Twin-you associate the same narrow content with ‘water’. Since the context was the same, narrow content cannot be a function from context to broad content. Harman (1982), however, offers a simple remedy. Perhaps it is the strangeness of the context that has caused things to go wrong. In other words, perhaps narrow content is best understood, not as a function from contexts to broad contents, but as a function from normal contexts to broad contents. Twin-Earth is not the normal context in which you think and speak; perhaps after visiting for awhile this will change, but at least initially, it is abnormal. Likewise, were Twin-you to come to Earth, his use of ‘water’ would still initially refer to XYZ, since that is what it refers to in his normal context of thinking and speaking. Eventually, Earth might become his normal context, in which case H2O would become what his use of ‘water’ picks out. This suggestion seems to get things right, but there are a couple of problems. First (and this is a problem for the previous proposal as well), to say that narrow content is a function from normal context (or just context, as the case may be) to broad content is to give only a partial answer to Block’s D1. Explaining the relation between content and semantic value, or between, narrow content and broad content, requires more than merely giving the structural answer that there is a many-one (or one-one) relation that relates narrow contents and normal contexts to broad contents. It is as if one stated that 5 is related by ƒ to 17. So far, all we know is that ƒ relates 5 and 17, but we know almost nothing about the nature of ƒ. If we are then told that ƒ yields 17 when 5 is taken as its argument, then all we learn is that ƒ is a kind of function. If we want to learn something useful about ƒ, however, then we must be told the manner in which ƒ

48 Here I am assuming that a sentence’s broad content just is its truth-condition.

43 does this. It would be useful, for example, to know that the value of ƒ for a given argument is obtained simply by adding 12 to that argument, or perhaps by multiplying it by 4 and then subtracting 3, or even by subtracting that argument from 22, and so on. By describing how ƒ yields its values, one will be saying something useful about the nature of ƒ. Saying that ƒ is a function is only a preliminary to this further task, albeit a necessary one, in that it determines what kind of answer is needed. Similarly, saying that narrow content is a function from normal context to broad content is not the final answer to D1—it is a preparation for one. It determines the form that a more complete answer must take, and such an answer must go on to say how sense determines semantic value, or how narrow content plus normal context determines broad content. With this in mind, Harman’s suggestion counts as a structural answer to Putnam since it tells us what form a final answer to Block’s D1 must take. A second problem for Harman’s idea is that if it is to be of any use, that is, if it is to permit an answer to this how-question, then it should be possible to say which contexts are normal and which are not. But how is this to be done? One cannot say, on pain of circularity, that normal contexts for the use of ‘water’, for example, are those contexts in which it has its normal semantic value. Knowing what the normal semantic value for someone’s use of ‘water’ (or tokening of |water|) is presupposes some knowledge of which contexts are normal and which are not. Likewise, one cannot say, now on pain of triviality, that a normal context for Twin- Adam’s use of water is one in which his use of ‘water’ picks out XYZ. In this latter case, narrow content actually does no work in determining broad content, since that is already done by the context’s being normal. Additionally, normal contexts cannot be identified with possible worlds, since Putnam’s thought experiments are usually explicitly formulated within a single world— Twin Earth and Earth are supposed to occupy different regions of the same possible world. In any case, there must be some way of distinguishing normal from abnormal contexts for the use of some term (or for the tokening of some piece of mentalese) that does not depend on information regarding the normal use of that term or eliminate the connection between narrow and broad content. Whether CRS can handle these problems and thus provide a satisfactory treatment of Block’s D1 is a question to which I will return in what follows (in chapters 4 and 5). For now, it is sufficient to point out that the ability of CRS to do so is frustrated somewhat by Putnamian Twin-Earth considerations, which push the CRS theorist in the two-factor direction, and that one

44 result is that whatever connection is recognized by the CRS theorist will have to be somewhat indirect. Later, in chapter 4, we shall reconsider the two-factor suggestion as a possible response to two recent challenges to CRS (viz., the Problem of Instability and the Crack). Though I have been entertaining a number of ways in which CRS might be seen as an articulation of Frege’s notion of Sinn, it is important to keep in view some obvious differences. First, Frege, unlike CRS, is primarily concerned with the semantics of public languages. Treating linguistic content as derivative, CRS takes mental representation to be fundamental. Whether Frege could accept this further aspect of CRS is a question to which we shall return in chapter 5. An answer to it, however, depends crucially on whether there is a way to ground an account of linguistic content on an account of mental representation that does not run afoul of Frege’s anti-psychologism (partially encapsulated by S4 from above). A further way in which the accounts may differ, and one which is relevant to resolving this question, is that, though both accounts locate inferential relations as at least partially constitutive of an expression’s content, CRS, unlike Frege’s account, incorporates a causal account of inference. Whether this move can be understood as a refinement of Frege’s conception, and if so, as one that could in principle have been adopted by Frege, or must be seen as a fairly deep difference of outlook will be considered later in chapter 5. For example, if Frege’s account must take inference as a core notion unsusceptible to further analysis, whereas CRS grounds inference on causal relations, then this difference alone may be enough to put CRS on the naturalistic side of the fence, leaving Frege on the other side. Later, however, I will argue that when we keep Frege’s general metaphysic in mind, it is possible to give, on Frege’s behalf, a kind of causal account of the inferential structures he viewed as content-constituting. Furthermore, such an account would allow Frege to adopt the CRS expedient of grounding linguistic content on an account of mental representation while staying true to the core of his anti-psychologism. It would do so, however, at the cost of adopting a radically different conception of mental representation and, ultimately, of the mind. Here, then, is what we have: despite the above-noted (possible) differences, (a) both CRS and Frege accord a central semantic role to sentences, (b) Fregean Sinn, like CRS, instantiates the QW schema, (c) both theories take inferential relations as at least partially constitutive of the conceptual/cognitive content of an expression, (d) conceptual role, like Fregean Sinn, is usually thought to play a role in determining semantic-value, and (e) both conceptual role and Fregean

45 Sinn are meant to play a fundamental role in explaining behavior as well as understanding. Given all of this, it seems plausible to view CRS as a sophisticated articulation of Frege’s original idea. In the following three chapters, I will assume that this is correct in broad outline. Later, in chapter 5, I will reconsider it in light of the results of chapters 2-4.

46 CHAPTER 2

SEMANTIC HOLISIM AND THE ARGUMENT FROM ANATOMICITY

Semantic Holism For some time now, semantic holism, in one guise or another, has been an extremely influential doctrine.49 Crudely put, it is the view that the meaning of an expression (sentential or otherwise) of a language L (public or mental) is dependent, in some important sense, on the meanings of every other expression in L—to change the meaning of any of them would ipso facto be to change the meaning of all of them. This could, of course, stand some tightening. In what follows, I have adopted F&L’s characterization.50 I have done so for two reasons. First, while their account might not seem fully adequate (many have doubted that it is), it does seem to capture the weakest condition that any theory must satisfy if it is to be properly described as holistic. That is, any theory that really is holistic will have the feature they have used to define holism (whether or not that feature really does go to the heart of holism). Since a philosophically acceptable definition of holism, while nice to have, is not needed for my purposes, it will do no harm to use the F&L characterization as a convenient proxy. Second, one of my primary reasons for discussing semantic holism is to consider an argument F&L have directed against CRS. Since the argument is theirs, it is only fair to stick with their notions. Properties: Atomic, Anatomic, and Holistic Some properties are such that for some one thing to have them, other things must have them as well. A simple example is the property

49 1953, which saw the appearance of both Quine’s “Two Dogmas of ” and Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, was probably the single most important year for the doctrine. The philosophical world has been recovering ever since.

50 The primary source here is F&L (1992).

47 of being a sibling. Clearly, I cannot be a sibling unless there is at least one other thing that is also one. Equally clearly, there are properties that do not have this feature. For example, I can be a brother even though there is no other thing that is also a brother—after all, I might have just one sibling, who is also a female, and I might happen to be the only male left alive who is also a sibling. Let us say that a property is anatomic just in case it has the first of the above features, viz., just in case it would be impossible for just one thing to have it.51 When it is so possible, the property in question will be called atomic.52 Being a brother, then, is atomic, while being a sibling is anatomic.53 Some properties, however, are not only anatomic—they are really anatomic. In other words, not only do they require that at least two things have the property if anything does, but they require that everything (or at least lots of things), in the relevant class or system over which the property is defined, has the property, if anything does.54 Consider the property of exerting gravitational pull on x. Our current physics tells us that if any one physical thing has this property, then everything capable of having it will as well—even those objects which are most distantly related in space-time to x. Also, take the property of being ≤-comparable to x. This

51 ‘molecular’ and ‘localistic’ are also frequently used in the literature. In what follows, I will use them (and their cognates) interchangeably.

52 ‘punctate’ is also frequently used in the literature. In what follows, I will use ‘atomic’ and ‘punctate’ interchangeably.

53 Socrates, in Plato’s Lysis, considers whether or not being a friend is anatomic when he asks the title character, “Well, what about this: Isn’t it possible for someone who loves somebody not to be loved by him in return . . . Then which is the friend of the other? Is the lover the friend of the loved, whether he is loved in return or not, or is even hated? Or is the loved the friend of the lover? Or in a case like this, when the two do not both love each other, is neither the friend of the other?”, Cooper (1997), p. 696 (my emphasis).

54 As Perry (1994) observes, there is some untidiness in this characterization. The problem lies in the parentheses (at F&L (1992), p. 2, they actually admit as much). By hedging in this way, F&L are in effect requiring only that lots of things have a property if anything does for that property to be holistic (Ibid., p. 206): call this lotsism. In their introduction, however, they also say that if something has a holistic property, then endlessly many things do (Ibid., p. 2): call this position endlessism. At another point, they suggest that for any one thing to have a holistic property practically all of the things in the relevant class must have it (Ibid., p. 9): call this position practically allism. Finally, it might be required that for a property to be holistic, everything (of the relevant class of things) must have it if anything does: call this position extreme holism. I think it is fairly clear that these are different doctrines of differing strengths. Although F&L might think that they can safely vacillate between these various formulations of holism, Perry rightly points out that they cannot. The trouble is that neither lotsism nor endlessism saddles holism with the Problem of Instability (to be discussed in the next chapter). Since F&L do think that holism has an instability problem and since part of their overall argument requires that it does, lotsism and endlessism are not in the cards. This leaves practically allism and extreme holism. To simplify the following discussion, I shall identify semantic holism with extreme holism. Nothing, beyond ease of exposition, is gained by doing so.

48 property is such that if any one natural number has it, then all of them do. Call such properties that hold of everything (of a domain) if they hold of anything (of that domain) holistic. Exerting gravitational pull on something and being ≤-comparable, then, are not just anatomic, but they are holistic as well. Many deep and interesting problems in philosophy can be understood as concerning whether or not some property or another is or is not holistic. It was once fashionable to hold, for example, that knowledge is holistic—one simply could not know any one proposition without knowing all of them (the true ones at least).55 Another holistic doctrine concerns causal holism. Here, the idea is that if anything is causally relevant to some event then everything is. Physical reality, on this picture, forms a highly interconnected causal hole—one can single out particular causal relationships only relative to various of one’s subjective interests, and to single them out absolutely is to do so at one’s own peril. In any event, many holistic theses strike us as exciting (whether or not they also strike us as plausible), and this is certainly because we perceive that if sustainable, such theses will likely yield substantial philosophical payoffs. The same, of course, can be said for semantic holism, i.e., the thesis that various (generic) semantic properties are holistic in nature. Examples of such properties might include being meaningful (having a sense), have a particular sense, having a reference, is-a-translation-of-a-Russian-sentence, being-a-belief-of-Jones, etc. Given the systematic interrelations between these properties, one might very well suspect that if any of them are holistic then all of them are, i.e., that the property of being holistic is itself holistic over (generic) semantic properties, but I will not explore this here. As mentioned above, holism about any particular semantic notion is just one extreme of a continuum of possible positions. The other extreme, for any particular such notion, will be semantic atomism. For any particular semantic property F, F is atomic just in case for any expression E of language L, E’s having F does not entail that any other expression of L has F. In other words, E could have F even though no other expression in the language has F. An example of such a property might be is an expression which refers to John Lennon. There could certainly

55 Weaker forms of this brand of holism, e.g., Quinean, verificational holism (to be considered below), have recently received much attention in the philosophical world. On this view, the smallest units of empirical confirmation (which is held to be the only kind of confirmation that there is) will be entire theories rather than individual sentences—the latter simply do not admit of verification or falsification when taken in isolation. Justificational , i.e., the thesis that a belief is justified just in case it is a member of a coherent set of beliefs, is another

49 be a language L that contains the proper name ‘John Lennon’ (assuming proper names to be parts of languages), which in L refers to (or can be used to refer to) John Lennon, even though L does not contain the resources to refer to John Lennon in any other way, i.e., by means of any other expression—either simple or complex. Of course, for any semantic property, there will be positions that lie between atomism and holism. A semantic property F is anatomic just in case any expression E of some language L has F only if other expressions of L have F. As defined, semantic holism is the most extreme form of semantic anatomism. The reason for allowing this overlap is that below, we shall consider an argument for holism that goes through anatomism, so we do not want the two positions to be mutually incompatible. As for the conceptual space between atomism and holism, we might say that a property is properly anatomic just in case it is anatomic but not holistic. Two Varieties of Semantic Holism Given Frege’s distinction between sense and semantic value, there will be two general varieties of semantic holism—those which properly concern sense and those which concern semantic value. Accordingly, sense holism will be the thesis that no expression of a language can have the sense that it has unless every other expression of the language also has the sense that it actually has. Semantic-value holism (reference holism), by contrast, will be understood as the view that no expression could have the semantic value it has unless every other expression has the semantic value it actually has.56 In most of what follows, I shall be speaking exclusively of sense holism. So, unless I indicate otherwise, I shall use semantic holism interchangeably with sense holism.

form of epistemic holism which has enjoyed some recent popularity. Cf. BonJour (1985), Lehrer (1974), and Rescher (1973) and (1977) for some recent versions of the theory.

56 This is perhaps not the best way to state the thesis. Surely the connection between a specific expression and its semantic value, whether or not sense is required to determine that semantic value, is purely arbitrary—any other expression could have been selected in its place. So, we can imagine a state of affairs in which there is a language L which is syntactically identical to English and in which the class of semantic values of expressions of the former is identical to that of the latter. The only difference between these two languages would be in the specific correlations between expressions and semantic values. The reference holist would not want to rule out the possibility that some expression E of English might have the same semantic value in L that it has in English, even though some or all of the remaining expressions of English have different semantic values in L than they have in English. She can allow this possibility just so long as all of the semantic values of expressions of English are also semantic values of expressions of L. This suggests the following reformulation of reference holism: E has the reference it actually has in L1 just in case it is part of some language L2 such that everything that is a semantic value of some expression of L1 is also a semantic value of some expression of L2 and nothing else is a semantic value of an expression of L2. A similar modification would also be required in the statement of sense holism. In what follows, however, I shall stick with the original formulations except, of course, when some harm would result in doing so.

50 Translational Holism A second distinction regarding semantic holism cuts right across the above distinction between sense and reference holism. Both of these latter forms of holism regard the expressions of a single language. They tell us that expressions of a language have some property, that of bearing a certain sense, on the one hand, and that of bearing a certain semantic value, on the other, just in case every other expression of the language also has that property. Another form of semantic holism, on the other hand, concerns translating from one

language to another. Suppose that we wish to translate some sentence S of language L1 into

some other language L2. Now, is the property of being translatable into L2 an atomic, anatomic, or holistic property? A translational holist insists that it is holistic. In other words, to be holistic

about translation is to hold the view that a sentence of L1 is translatable into L2 just in case every sentence of the former is also translatable into the latter, i.e., just in case for every other sentence of L1 there is some sentence of L2 such that the latter correctly translates the former. Conversely, if there is a single expression that resists such translation, then strictly speaking no

expressions of L2 can be correct translations of expressions of L1. Translation is an all or nothing affair. Semantic and Translational Holism Do either of these doctrines entail the other? On the one hand, if semantic holism entails translational holism, then should the former turn out to be true, then if any expression of some language fails to have a correct translation in another language, then no expression of the former will have one into the latter. The implausibility of this consequence, if it is in fact implausible, would then count directly against semantic holism. On the other hand, if the reverse entailment holds, then not only will any objection to semantic holism be an objection to translational holism, but Quine’s argument for the indeterminacy of translation will count as yet another argument for the former holistic doctrine. I shall begin with the question whether sense holism entails translational holism.

Suppose, then, that translation is not holistic. Then there might be two languages L1 and

L2 such that, for some expressions E1 and E2 from L1, one of those expressions is translatable

into L2 while the other is not. Suppose further that E2 and the sentences containing it are the

only expressions from L1 which cannot be translated into L2 (nothing essential turns on this assumption—it is needed only to keep things relatively simple) and that all of the expressions of

L2 can be translated into L1. Imagine now that we replace all of the expressions (words and

51 sentences) of L2 by their translations in L1. The result should be a language L3 with exactly the expressive resources of L2, but which, in point of syntax, looks exactly like L1 with E2 (and all sentences containing it) removed. But given the supposition regarding the translatability of all expressions (save those containing E2) of L1 into L2 and vice versa, should we not really say that

L3 just is a trimmed down version of L1—after all, it looks and acts like it. But if this is right, then there is an expression of L1 that can have the sense that it actually has even though some

other part of L1 has changed, viz., E1. So, semantic holism does in fact entail translational holism. That translational holism also entails semantic holism is perhaps a bit easier to see.

Suppose that sense is not holistic, and let E1 be some expression of L1 such that its sense is in no

way affected by the removal from L1 of some other expression E2, and suppose further that L1

contains no other resources for saying precisely what could be said by means of E2 (this

assumption is actually permitted if we are assuming that sense is not holistic). Finally, let L2 be

the language that results by removing E2 from L1. Clearly, E1 from L1 translates E1 from L2,

even though E2 may or may not have a translation in L2. Hence, translation is not holistic. Translational holism, then, stands or falls with semantic holism. This equivalence will be useful in what follows, since it will allow us more flexibility in how we discuss semantic holism. Grades of Anatomicity: Strong and Weak Before I move on, it will be useful to draw a distinction within the molecularist thesis itself. There is an in the claim that the meaning of every sentence depends in some systematic way on the meanings of some of the other sentences of the language, and this is important because if holism is to be argued to follow from the molecularity thesis, of which there are really two, then the strength of such an argument may very well depend on which thesis is intended as the molecularity thesis.57 On the one hand, anatomicity might be understood as follows:

WA A semantic property F is weakly anatomic just in case for any language L and for

any expression E of L, E has F only if some other expressions E1, E2, . . ., En of L also have F.

Weak anatomism allows that the things (E1, E2, . . . En) upon which the presence of the anatomic

57 F&L (1992), pp. 27-30.

52 property F depends may vary from one expression to another (or from one speaker to another). For example, being a sibling is clearly weakly anatomic—it is a property that both Michael Jackson and I share even though the classes of objects upon which the presence of this property in each of us depends is not the same. On the other hand, being the same height as Bart, Lisa, or Maggie is such that for any two things to have it, there is some common class of things that must have it, viz., and trivially, the class consisting of Bart, Lisa, and Maggie. So, we have the following, additional reading of the molecularity thesis:

SA A semantic property F is strongly anatomic just in case for any language L there

are expressions E1, E2, . . ., En of L such that for any other expression E of L to

have F, E1, E2, . . . En must also have F.

We now have the materials needed to frame the Argument from Anatomicity. Let us, then, turn to it. From Anatomism to Holism The Argument from Anatomicity F&L attempt to show that if we give in to semantic anatomism, then we must also be prepared to accept holism with it.58 Since they go on to argue that there are no good reasons to accept semantic holism and plenty of reasons to avoid accepting it, it is natural to take them as, in the end, gesturing towards semantic atomism, even though their official aim is to refute holism and not to establish atomism. They do this indirectly by examining what they take to be the argument for semantic holism: the Argument from Anatomicity.59 In this section, I would like to present this argument. Ultimately, the main point of doing so will be to see how the argument can be leveraged against semantic anatomism (in particular, against CRS). F&L frame the argument in terms of beliefs rather than (public) sentence contents. Since I have been assuming representationalism, I shall frame the argument in terms of sentence contents, leaving ‘sentence’ as ambiguous between mental and linguistic sentences.60 Likewise,

58 F&L (1992), pp. 22-32.

59 F&L do not accept the argument as sound, though, as will become clear below, they must accept that it is valid.

53 I shall use ‘language’ as systematically ambiguous between public language and system of mental representation. Now, consider the thesis that meaning such and such (for sentences) is a holistic property—no sentence of a language L can mean what it does unless every other sentence of L means what it does. Intuitively, what explains this fact would be that having this property is a matter of occupying a place in a suitable network, or structure, of sentences, beliefs, etc. and that the content born by any single element of such a structure is itself individuated by some privileged class of non-semantic relations that it bears to all of the other elements of the structure. Let me say that the property that a (declarative) sentence has in meaning what it does is the property of its having a certain propositional content, whatever this amounts to in the end. Furthermore, if it can be successfully argued that having a certain propositional content is holistic, then there will be very good reasons for thinking that a wide class of semantic properties of sub-sentential expressions will be holistic, since it seems to be the received view in the philosophy of language (as well as in the philosophy of mental representation) that many (if not all) of the semantic properties of sub-sentential expressions are metaphysically dependent on the semantic properties of the sentences in which they figure. If some semantic property of the word ‘cat’ (or |cat|) is partially determined by its syntactic function in the language, then, since this function is dependent upon its behavior in sentences, it will follow that whether or not ‘cat’ has that semantic property is dependent upon how it behaves (logically) in sentences. So, if the original holistic thesis goes through, then it seems that we will be saddled with a number of them. What reasons, then, are there for accepting the claim that having a certain propositional content is holistic? The argument begins by asserting a more modest position on the continuum:

(1) Having a certain propositional content is an anatomic property, i.e., a sentence S

60 In chapter 1, I suggested that there is an intimate connection between thought and talk and that arguments establishing conclusions about one are typically easily transformable into arguments establishing the same (mutatis mutandis) conclusions about the other. Even while remaining neutral on the conceptual priority issue, I think that an even stronger conclusion can be sustained. In particular, if the very relevance of our thought to our talk and our talk to our thought is to be intelligible, we must view them as at least in principle capable of carrying the same content. It might be objected that a robust notion like content identity is not needed to forge such a connection, since the weaker notion of content similarity will be sufficient. Below, in chapter 4, however, we will consider an argument to the effect that content similarity itself presupposes content identity, so that, should this argument prove cogent, any concession to the effect that at least content similarity is explanatorily necessary will also be a concession that robust content identity should be possible.

54 of a language L means what it does only if there are other sentences of L that mean what they do.

What keeps an anatomic view from being fully holistic, however, is the further claim that there are some (in fact a significant number) of sentences whose meaningfulness in no way bears on the meaningfulness of S. But if so, then there must be some principled way of partitioning the sentences of the language into those upon which the meaningfulness of S is necessarily dependent and those upon which it is not. In other words, there must be some principled way of drawing an analytic/synthetic distinction (A/S). It is widely thought, however, that certain arguments due to Quine have directly undercut the possibility of drawing such a distinction in any principled way.61 Thus, we have as a second premise:

(2) For any particular sentence, there is no principled distinction between those sentences that are essentially connected to its content and those that are not.

Now if there is no such principled distinction to be had, then, in principle, there is no way, for any finite mind at least, to affect the desired partition, when doing so would require partitioning an infinite number of sentences. For even if the dependency-class for every single sentence was manageably finite, so that human minds could grasp all of their contents, without a principle in hand, there is no way to identify those manageably finite groups of sentences save by going through all of the infinitely many sentences and tagging each one of them either “in” or “out”. But if, given (1), there are some facts of the matter regarding necessary meaning-connections between S and some of the sentences of L, then it would seem to follow that every sentence is partially constitutive of the meaning of S. So,

(3) Having a certain propositional content is a holistic property.

This, then, concludes the argument. If (3) holds up, then no sentence S of L can mean what it does unless every other sentence of L means what it in fact does. To change the meaning of any

61 Below we shall review two such arguments.

55 of them would ipso facto be to change the meaning of all of them. In chapter 3, we shall move on to consider some of the consequences of (3) itself; before that, however, I want to pause for a moment to consider the cogency of this particular argument for it. To begin with, does (3) actually follow from molecularity and the rejection of A/S, i.e., from (1) and (2)? Clearly, this will depend on how we are understanding ‘anatomic’ in (1). We saw above that there are at least two different ways of being an anatomist. Will both of them support the Argument from Anatomism? Consider the following possibility. Suppose that there are indefinitely many different disjoint sets of sentences of L such that understanding the meanings of the sentences in any single one of those sets is sufficient but not necessary for understanding the meaning of some sentence S (where S is in none of the sets), and understanding the meanings of all of the sentences of one set or another from that set of sets is necessary for understanding S. Furthermore, let us suppose that the union set of the individually-sufficient-but-not-necessary sets (call it ‘U’) is so large that no non-divine mind could possibly entertain every member of it. Then under these assumptions, (1) and (2) might come out as true and (3) and as false.62 (3) would be false should it turn out that there are any sentences of L not in any of the relevant sets, while (1) would be true since the union of the sets is non-empty and (2) would be true since, the sets being disjoint, the meaning of S does not in fact depend on any single sentence at all. This would seem to show that the Argument from Anatomicity will not be able to get off the ground if anatomicity is understood in terms of WA. On the other hand, SA, for all that we have said, may still be able to ground an argument for semantic holism. After all, on that view, the class of sentences upon which the meaning of a sentence depends will not shift from speaker to speaker, so there is no possibility of there being such sufficient-but-not-necessary though jointly-necessary sets of meaning-grounding sentences. It was this possibility that made consistent the acceptance of a properly molecular theory paired with a rejection of A/S. The latter is made possible by the circumstance that there is no principled way of specifying U—it being simply too large (perhaps it is even infinite) and heterogeneous to admit of anything but an enumerative specification, while the former is rendered possible by the fact that U need not consist of every sentence of the language, since, while they will contain many sentences of L other than S, there is no reason to think every

62 This example is from F&L (1992), pp. 27-8.

56 sentence of L will occur in at least one of those sufficient-but-not-necessary and jointly- necessary sets. Our conclusion, then, is that the Argument from Anatomicity is valid only if we assume a strong reading anatomicity, i.e., SA. The argument, however, may still turn out to be invalid. Some have seen in it a kind of sorites or slippery slope—an argument form that is notorious for leading from truths to falsehoods. Oddly enough, F&L seem to be of this opinion.63 This is odd, because F&L need to see the Argument from Anatomicity as being valid (but unsound). Ultimately, they want to use the Argument from Anatomicity to defeat CRS, in particular, and semantic anatomism, in general. If semantic anatomism and the denial of A/S do indeed entail semantic holism, then either semantic anatomism or the denial of A/S would have to be abandoned should semantic holism turn out to be obviously untenable. F&L take Quine to have convincingly refuted A/S and they assume that most cognitive scientists and philosophers (CRS theorists in particular) will agree with them in this.64 What this means is that the broader significance of the Argument from Anatomicity for F&L is that it underwrites the following thesis:

AA If content is anatomic (constituted by conceptual role), then content is holistic.

AA combined with some convincing reason to reject semantic holism would then count as a compelling argument against semantic anatomism generally (and CRS in particular). With holism and anatomism thus disposed of, we would then be left with semantic atomism, their preferred view (eliminativism would still be an option, but who wants to believe that?).

63 F&L (1992), pp. 25 and 27.

64 They say, “Since we are inclined to think that Quine is right about the a/s distinction, we are inclined to think that the moral of the discussion in this chapter is that conceptual role semantics is untenable . . . quite a lot of the philosophy of language and philosophy of mind since the 1940s has taken it for granted that some version of CRT must be true. And, combining conceptual role semantics with the denial of the a/s distinction is perhaps the received position in cognitive science . . . If, as we suspect, Quine is right about the a/s distinction, then the moral of our discussion is that CRT [CRS] is false. It may be, however, that our inclination to think that Quine is right about the a/s distinction is ill-advised. In that case, the moral of the discussion is just that there is no sound inference from CRT to holism. For our purposes in this book, we would settle for either,” F&L (1992), pp. 185-6. They go on to state that the option, in the theory of meaning/content, of resuscitating “the a/s distinction and [identifying] the meaning of a with the analytic relations it enters into” is “viewed with pretty general skepticism, at least in the philosophical community,” F&L (1992), pp. 187-8.

57 This indirect defense of atomism will go through, however, only if the Argument from Anatomicity is valid, which it cannot be, if it is a form of slippery slope. F&L, then, really cannot afford to dismiss the argument as a kind of slope. Fortunately for F&L, there may be good reason to think them mistaken in thinking of the argument as a slope in the first place. Perry (1994) points out that slopes generally include both some iterative procedure (put another grain on the pile) and a principle governing that procedure (adding a single grain will not make a heap out of something that is not already a heap).65 The trouble with seeing the Argument from Anatomicity as a kind of slope is that it has neither of these features—mainly since it does not have the first. The bad news, then, is that the argument is not really a form of sorites. The good news, however, is that this is just what F&L need anyway. In what follows, I will suppose that the Argument from Anatomicity is in fact valid. This means that I am also assuming a strong reading of anatomicity. So much, then, for validity; how about the argument’s premises? Why Anatomicity? Since anatomicity for linguistic sentences requires a slightly different defense than anatomicity for mental sentences—the latter being in fact more difficult since, as was mentioned in chapter 1, we really do not even know what mental sentences look like—I will, again for the sake of exposition, relativize this discussion to linguistic sentences. This defense will depend largely on the role of linguistic content in communication. I suppose that a fairly similar defense could be mounted in the case of mental sentences. In that case, however, the role of mental content in explaining both behavior and mental processes, as opposed to communication, would have to be central. So, how might anatomicity be established in the case of linguistic sentences? First, what reasons might be given for accepting the weaker claim that the meaning of a sentence depends upon the meanings of at least some other sentences? This claim does not itself rule out SA, but should one wish to hold anything stronger than WA, additional support would still be needed. For the weak claim, one might argue as follows. First, whatever meaning is, it is correlative to knowledge—specifically, the kind of knowledge that a speaker is said to possess insofar as the speaker knows the meaning of the sentence. So, if, for any particular sentence S, knowing the meaning of some sentences other than S is required for knowing the meaning of S, then we will

65 Loc. cit., pp. 130-1.

58 have good reasons for supposing that the meaning of S depends on the meanings of other sentences. Now a speaker, the argument goes on, cannot know the meaning of S and yet not know the meaning of any other sentence. The reason for this is that we would not say that a person understands the meaning of a sentence unless we could also say that that person understands the way in which the meaning of the sentence depends in a systematic way on the meanings of its parts, or at least on the way in which the meaning of some corresponding sentence, of which the former is an elliptical variant, itself depends in a systematic way on the meanings of its parts. Suppose that I am told, in English, by a reliable, native French speaker that ‘Il pleut’ means that it is raining, but I do not know anything else about the French language. Suppose further that I fully well know the meaning of ‘It is raining’—whatever that requires. In this case, it seems perfectly reasonable to say that I know that ‘Il pleut’ means the same as ‘It is raining’. Now, are these two pieces of knowledge together sufficient for my knowing the meaning of ‘Il pleut’? What we would like to know is whether it follows from all of this that I also know that ‘Il pleut’ means that it is raining. That is, of course, what I was told, but do I know it, rather than just that the synonymy holds? If so, then I can know the meaning of just one sentence of a language after all, and from this, it would follow that the property of having a particular propositional content is atomic.66 One reason for thinking that I do not possess the requisite knowledge, even though I know both that ‘It is raining’ means that it is raining and that ‘It is raining’ and ‘Il pleut’ have the same meaning, is that I do not have the right kind of practical abilities vis-à-vis ‘Il pleut’ to be said to know its meaning. Surely, to know its meaning will, in part at least, be to have certain abilities—one must know what to do with the sentence in various kinds of circumstances. For any meaningful sentence S, there will be a range of abilities such that having those abilities is required for knowing S’s meaning. Among those abilities will be the ability to produce the sentence in the right kinds of circumstances and to anticipate certain worldly happenings consequent upon the truth of the sentence (supposing that S is declarative). The first of these

66 It cannot be objected that I could only know the meaning of the French sentence in this way because I already knew the meaning of the English sentence and that, for this reason, sentence meaning is anatomic. The reason that it cannot is that the sentence upon which my knowledge depends is from another language and, by hypothesis, has the same meaning as the French original, but the anatomic thesis that we are considering concerns the relationship between a sentence and other sentences from the same language (though this would help to establish the interesting claim that to grasp any content I must grasp other contents).

59 abilities corresponds to the grasping of what have been called the language-entry rules for that sentence—they are abilities that concern the proper use of an expression in response to certain non-linguistic stimuli. The second, on the other hand, corresponds to the grasping of the so- called language-exit rules—these are abilities that concern the appropriate way to behave as a response to the use of the expression in question.67 Now, if I did not have any of these kinds of abilities, then it is implausible to maintain that I know the meaning of ‘Il pleut’. Indeed, it would seem that once I have been told that the English and French sentences are synonymous, then my failure subsequently to grasp these rules for the French sentence would heavily suggest that I did not know the meaning of the English sentence itself. In any case, the anatomist goes on, these are not the only two abilities that are required for linguistic competence. What more is required is an ability which manifests an understanding of what might be called the language-transition rules for the use of the expression. This ability amounts to an understanding of what can be done with an expression given what has previously been done with other expressions and of what can be done with other expressions given what has already been done with it. One important example would be the ability that one possesses insofar as one can correctly employ that expression in certain patterns of inference which are paradigmatic for that expression. If I repeatedly refuse to infer the truth of the sentence ‘Someone is happy’ from ‘Tom is happy’, then it could only be because I have failed to appreciate fully the meaning of one or both of them. So, the argument goes, knowledge of meaning requires at least three kinds of ability. This would mean that possession of only the first two of the above abilities for the French sentence (perhaps by way of possession of them for the English sentence), knowledge of synonymy, and knowledge of the meaning of the English sentence will not be sufficient for knowledge of the meaning of the French sentence. I will fail to possess such knowledge if I do not know anything about the inferential relations between our original French sentence and other sentences of French, even when all of the other conditions are satisfied. What I have failed to grasp about the meaning of that sentence when I have failed to grasp its place (or role) in some larger inferential network is the way in which its semantic structure is systematically related to the structures of other sentences in the language, and what this means is that I have failed to grasp how the semantic properties of that sentence are systematically determined by the semantic

67 Such rules play an important role in Wittgenstein (1953), Sellars (1963) and (1974), Dummett (1991b), especially chapter 13, and Brandom (1993) and (1994).

60 properties of its components. My failure to know the meaning of ‘Il pleut’ despite my knowing that it is synonymous with ‘It is raining’ and knowing the meaning of the latter lies in my failure to appreciate how its meaning is determined by the meanings of its parts and its syntax. Indeed, I may know these other things even when I do not know what its meaning determining parts are. To become convinced of this, one need only dream up examples from languages with a less familiar syntax, such as Chinese, Kwakiutl, or Sanskrit. To recapitulate, the propositional content of a sentence depends on the contents of at least some other sentences, since meaning is correlative to understanding, which latter requires the understanding of at least some other sentences of the language. The reason for this latter claim was that the understanding requires, among other things, the ability to employ the sentence in certain characteristic patterns of inference, and this ability itself amounts to an understanding of how certain semantic properties of that sentence depend in systematic ways on certain semantic properties of its parts. In other words, not only must a person know that the meaning of the sentence is compositionally determined, but she must also understand how it is so.68 One thing that should be noted is that the conclusion of this argument is consistent with both SA and WA. Furthermore, it is neutral also with respect to questions regarding the relative conceptual or explanatory priority between the notion of an idiolect (or of mentalese) and that of a public language. Now, assuming that the argument is cogent, what further considerations might move one to adopt SA? So, a certain amount of anatomicity seems to be guaranteed by compositionality, but that argument also made a tacit appeal to a version of the context principle, one formulation of which is that one cannot know the meaning of a non-sentential expression independently of knowing how that expression can be combined with others to form meaningful sentences. There is a considerable tension between these two principles, for taken together, they seem to entail that the dependency between word and sentence meaning is symmetric, and this seems problematic for a number of reasons. We shall return to this issue later in chapter 3. For now, however, I would like to suggest another closely related reason for holding some version of anatomicity. Later, we shall see that one reason for insisting on the principle of compositionality is that it provides an elegant explanation for some other apparently universal features of natural languages, viz.,

68 This point should be familiar from Davidson; for example, see Davidson (1984b), p. 25.

61 productivity, isomorphism, and systematicity.69 This third feature (that any language that can express certain propositions can also express other systematically related ones, e.g., one that can express the proposition that George distrusts Saddam can also express the proposition that Saddam distrusts George) seems to guarantee some amount of strong anatomicity. Perhaps the most common arguments for this stronger position, however, are arguments of a transcendental character, i.e., arguments to the effect that there are certain sentences such that the very possibility of experience, rationality, or even cognition itself, requires that the meanings of those sentences be understood, so that trivially, one will understand any other sentence of the language only if one understands all of these sentences.70 Thus, one might say that a being cannot count as rational, for example, unless it knows (believes) that everything is self-identical, that every statement is either true or false, and that a statement and its negation cannot both be true, and believing these things, in particular, grasping these propositions, requires either understanding sentences in some public language that express these propositions or tokening mentalistic sentences which have these propositions as their content. For example, a speaker of English, according to the former kind of account, would have to know the meaning of the sentences ‘2=2’, ‘Either 2 is prime or it is not’, and ‘It is not the case that both 2 is prime and 2 is not prime’, or stylistic variants thereof, in order to know the meaning of the sentence ‘2 is prime’. Frege, himself, arguably held a position of this sort. For him, thought and rationality themselves require that we have grasped certain logical laws.71 And he explicitly claims that

69 Ironically, that natural languages are systematic has been forcefully urged by Fodor and Lepore, who are eager to establish semantic atomism, not anatomism. How they should have missed this I do not know.

70 The position needs to be stated a bit more delicately. Clearly, there is no single set of sentences such that no creature can count as having experiences, or as being rational, or as possessing cognition unless it understands those sentences, since there is no single sentence that every human being understands. There are, after all, different languages. Instead, the claim will have to be that there are certain contents that any such beings must grasp, and that for any particular language, a speaker will understand a sentence of it only if that speaker has grasped the contents of the sentences of that class. In point of syntax, the classes will vary across languages; in point of semantics, they will not.

71 See, for example, Frege (1893), p. 14, where he says, “. . . what if beings were even found whose laws of thought flatly contradicted ours and therefore frequently led to contrary results even in practice . . . I should say: we have here a hitherto unknown type of madness,” Frege (1884), p. 36, where he says, “It is in this way that I understand objective to mean what is independent of our sensation, intuition and imagination, and of all construction of mental pictures out of memories of earlier sensations, but not what is independent of the reason,—for what are things independent of the reason? To answer that would be as much as to judge without judging, or to wash the fur without wetting it,” and, finally, Frege (1884), pp. 20-1, where he says, “For purposes of conceptual thought we can always assume the contrary of some one or other of the geometrical axioms, without involving ourselves in any self- contradictions when we proceed to our deductions, despite the conflict between our assumptions and intuitions. The

62 humans, at least, cannot touch the third realm directly, i.e., grasp thoughts directly, but must do so through some suitable intermediaries—sentences.72 Kant held a similar kind of view, although for him it was the very possibility of experience itself which required that we have grasped certain propositions, and, crucially, ones which he thought were a priori synthetic.73 For Kant, however, the relevant representations were mentalistic rather than linguistic. It might also be argued that the very possibility of genuine communication (or of the normativity of content, in the case of Wittgenstein, or of interpreting the words of others, in the case of Davidson) seems to require at least the acceptance of SA. Genuine communication seems to require that we endow our sentences with the same content, or at the very least, contents so similar that whatever differences there are are, from a practical point of view, negligible.74 For now, however, it is enough to point out that the demands of interpersonal communication seem to suggest the following regarding the abilities, and in particular the fact that this is possible shows that the axioms of geometry are independent of one another and of the primitive laws of logic, and consequently are synthetic. Can the same be said of the fundamental propositions of the science of number? Here, we have only to try denying any of them, and complete confusion ensues. Even to think at all seems no longer possible,” (my emphasis).

72 See, for example, Frege (1918-19a), p. 354, where he says, “The thought, in itself imperceptible by the senses, gets clothed in the perceptible garb of a sentence, and thereby we are enabled to grasp it.” But here he has in mind grasping the thought of another through communication, and doing this requires that the thought be “clothed in some perceptible garb”. The crucial kind of case concerns the grasping of some new thought—a thought that has not been grasped before. Must this be mediated by a sentence? Frege’s explanation of this phenomenon of productivity (to be further discussed in chapter 6) is that it is through the compositionality of language that we are able to grasp new thoughts—a person can grasp a new thought by understanding a sentence that expresses it, where the understanding of this latter results from a prior understanding of its structure and the meanings of its proper parts. This idea is conveyed powerfully at Frege (1923-26), p. 390, where he says, “It is astonishing what language can do. With a few syllables it can express an incalculable number of thoughts, so that even if a thought has been grasped by an inhabitant of the Earth for the very first time, a form of words can be found in which it will be understood by someone else to whom it is entirely new. This would not be possible, if we could not distinguish parts in the thought corresponding to the parts of a sentence, so that the structure of the sentence can serve as a picture of the structure of the thought. . . . If, then, we look upon thoughts as composed of simple parts, and take these, in turn, to correspond to the simple parts of sentences, we can understand how a few parts of sentences can go to make up a great multitude of sentences, to which, in turn, there corresponds a great multitude of thoughts.” Combine this explanation of productivity with a certain reading of Frege’s context principle, viz., that one can understand the meaning of an expression only by understanding the contribution it makes to the truth-conditions of certain sentences in which it is a constituent and the result is SA.

73 Frege agreed with Kant about the status of geometrical truths and that they must be grasped in order for us to have experience; see, for example, Frege (1884), §§12-14. Towards the end of his career, however, he came to agree with Kant regarding the status arithmetical truths as well; see Frege (1924/25a) and (1924/5b).

74 Below, in chapter 4, we shall consider an argument for the claim that content similarity will not do—only full- blooded content identity will turn the trick.

63 language-transition abilities, discussed above. If we are to use an instrument to meet the needs of interpersonal communication, then, since such communication necessarily involves other people who are using the very same instrument, our separate uses of that instrument must, somehow, be calibrated. What this means is that there must, in principle at least, be tests the application of which will provide reasonably strong evidence that our uses are so calibrated, and such tests, if they are to satisfy each of us, must be of a public nature. I must have at my disposal the same means as you have for determining whether or not we mean the same thing by our words. If the test is private, then I have no way of knowing whether or not I have applied it correctly.75 Indeed, it seems that once I have been inducted, through my early linguistic training, into some linguistic community through the acquisition of an essentially public instrument I will thereby also have been equipped with the ability to conduct the relevant kinds of test. Since this training occurs in public circumstances, those tests must be public as well. A manifestation of our ability to apply correctly the language-transition rules might form the basis of one such test. Now, if the test is to be genuinely applicable, then the relevant inferential structure in which the sentence is located must be the same for each of us, otherwise it is hard to see how either of us could become convinced that the other means the same thing by the use of the same sentence. Since what the language transition abilities manifest is an understanding of the inferential connections between S and other sentences of the language and ipso facto an understanding of the meaning of those other sentences, it will follow that the sentences that form the inferential structure upon which the meaning of S partially depends will be (substantially) the same across all speakers of the language. So, where public languages are concerned, sentence meaning must be molecular in the strong sense of SA. Why Not A/S? We have just considered some reasons for accepting two versions of the first premise of the Argument from Anatomicity. Now let’s turn to the second premise, viz., the claim that, for any sentence S of any language L, there is no principled way of partitioning the sentences of L into those sentences upon which the meaning of S is essentially dependent and those upon which it is not. In other words, we need to ask whether or not there are any good reasons for denying

75 This is not to say that a private language (in the much contested sense) is impossible. All that this argument requires is that where public languages—languages designed to suit the needs of communication—are concerned, the tests in question must also be public. The possibility of necessarily private languages with corresponding, necessarily private, tests is still left open. The point, however, is a basically Wittgensteinian one.

64 the possibility of a principled analytic/synthetic distinction, i.e., for rejecting A/S. If not, then should holism turn out to be implausible after all, then it would still be open to one to accept some version of proper anatomicity.76 Quine’s Challenge The most promising place to look for a challenge to A/S is Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, and specifically to its first four sections.77 One might say that Quine here showed that there is no analytic/synthetic distinction, but there are at least two distinct ways in which such a claim could be understood. First, Quine’s challenge may be taken as being intended to show that, widespread philosophical conviction to the contrary notwithstanding, there is in fact no such distinction; when philosophers take themselves to be identifying some distinction between two sentences by identifying one as analytic and the other as synthetic they are not in fact fastening on any actual difference between the two sentences—the supposed distinction is merely a deep-seated illusion; it is just that the philosophical profession suffers from a kind of mass delusion. This reading is a form of non-factualism about the analytic/synthetic distinction. Second, Quine might be thought of as making a somewhat weaker point. It is not so much that the belief in the existence of the distinction is illusory as that the belief that both of the concepts of analyticity and syntheticity are actually instantiated is; on this reading, Quine would be arguing that even though there may be conceptual room for the distinction, either nothing counts as analytic, or nothing counts as synthetic, or both. Such a claim would be analogous to the perfectly sensible, and true, assertion that while the distinction between the self-identical and the non-self-identical is perfectly coherent, nothing in fact counts as the latter, or nothing counts as the former, or both. This reading counts as a kind of error-theory regarding the distinction.78

76 One might opt for either a weak or strong version of the thesis. According to F&L (1992), p. 29, the trouble with weak anatomism is that it does not seem to be very interesting—it is strong anatomism that people usually have in mind and which is behind the interesting and prima facie plausible intuition that two people could not share just one belief. You and I might share the belief that Paris is north of Cannes, but surely if we do, we will share other beliefs as well, such as the beliefs that Paris and Cannes are cities (or at least that they are regions located somewhere on the planet Earth), that only geographical regions can be north of something, that something can only be north of a geographical region, and that two things cannot both be north of one another. The idea is that if we cannot attribute all of these beliefs (or some suitable number of them) to a person, then it seems that we cannot with all propriety attribute to that same person a belief with the content that Paris is north of Cannes. So, in the end, it would be much more interesting if some strong version could be sustained.

77 Quine (1953), pp. 20-46.

78 I borrow these labels from Boghossian (1997), pp. 340-1.

65 There is, however, a stronger and a weaker version of the error-theory. On the stronger reading, one or both of the concepts is necessarily uninstantiated. On the weaker reading, though one of the concepts is actually uninstantiated, it might not have been. Which reading should we attribute to Quine? Before answering this question, it will be useful to point out that the former reading actually implies the latter but not vice versa. The reason is that if there is in fact no such distinction, then, regarding the latter formulation, the third disjunct of the second conjunct will be rendered true, but the reverse implication fails since that third disjunct might be true, even though, while there might have been such a distinction, there in fact is not. Now which reading is required for the purposes of the Argument from Anatomicity? That argument, recall, moves from (i) the claim that for any sentence S of some language L, the meaning of S is essentially connected to the meanings of other sentences of L and (ii) the rejection of A/S to (iii) the proposition that the meaning of every sentence of L is essentially connected to the meaning of every other sentence of L. Now is the stronger reading required to get this conclusion or will the weaker one suffice? The answer to this question would seem to depend upon the intended force of the conclusion. Suppose that that conclusion is to be read in the strongest possible way, viz., as the claim that necessarily the meaning of every sentence of L . . . . (Well, perhaps not the strongest possible reading—one can distinguish between various strengths of necessity, but would the claim to logical necessity (i.e., analyticity), rather than to mere metaphysical necessity, be circular in this context? Let us just say that the necessity at issue is metaphysical in nature.) Clearly, if this is the desired conclusion, then the weaker reading of the second premise will be unavailable, since it might be true that for every actual sentence S of every actual language L, the meaning of S is connected with the meaning of every other actual sentence of L even though there might very well have been a sentence of some language for which this was not the case. If, on the other hand, the conclusion is to be read as a contingent, rather than necessary, truth, perhaps as a kind of high-level empirical generalization, then the weaker reading is all that is required (though the stronger one, of course, would also do the job). So, how should we read Quine? Interestingly, given other commitments of Quine’s, he could not use his rejection of A/S to ground the stronger reading of the Argument from Anatomicity’s conclusion; in particular, Quine is very skeptical of modal notions, so he would

66 probably be unwilling to countenance such a metaphysically loaded version of semantic holism. In any case, and more importantly, Quine’s very argument against A/S would, it seems, also undercut the possibility of a distinction between the necessary and the contingent (this will become clearer below), so that there would be an inherent instability in any attempt to ground a metaphysically necessary semantic thesis on the basis of Quine’s argument. If that is correct, then, regardless of how Quine understands his own rejection of A/S, we would only need to read him as intending the weaker version, since that is the weakest premise needed for the strongest conclusion to which we would, in that case, be entitled on the basis of Quine’s argument. Nonetheless, in what follows, I shall take the exegetical liberty of attributing to Quine the stronger of the two conclusions discussed above, even though, in the end, he might have preferred the weaker one. The reason is that semantic holism has philosophical interest only to the extent that it says something important about the nature of all languages, and the stronger conclusion would be needed to do this. Given this stronger conclusion, we must read Quine as attempting to establish either non-factualism or a strong error-theory. Of course, arguments for semantic holism other than the Argument from Anatomicity, as well as other arguments for the rejection of A/S paired with the Argument from Anatomicity, may very well also license the stronger conclusion. Finally, we turn to Quine’s argument. Stripped down to its bare bones, his argument is this: no clear/principled distinction between analytic sentences/statements and synthetic ones has ever been successfully made out; therefore, there is no analytic/synthetic distinction. The bulk of the first four sections of “Two Dogmas” is an attempt to establish the premise of this concise argument. Before discussing Quine’s argument for that premise, however, I would like to say a word about the logical strength of the argument. Clearly, the argument, as it stands, is not valid. To show that a distinction has not been made out, clearly or otherwise, is not in general also to show that there is no such distinction. Indeed, making out a distinction is typically the making out of an already existing distinction, and when it is not, we do not say that we are making it out but, rather, that we are introducing one. The history of philosophy consists, to a large extent, of variously successful attempts to make out distinctions that were already in place—distinctions that were conceived to be so important to our everyday practices and picture of the world that the possibility of improving

67 those practices and that picture demanded a better articulation of those concepts (the making out of the distinctions). If one wants a better reason for thinking that those distinctions were already in place prior to the philosophical activity, rather than being brought about by it, one need only reflect on our antecedent use of the terms that purport to mark the distinction in question. When the members of a speech-community are in broad agreement over those things to which either member of a pair of contrasting terms should be applied, those from which such application should be withheld, and over those things to which its application is indeterminate, and, crucially, when such agreement holds for novel cases as well as for the more familiar cases, then there is very good reason to suppose that the use of those terms by that community is grounded on a real distinction and that the content of that distinction counts as, at the very least, a kind of implicit knowledge on the part of those speakers. Making that knowledge more or less explicit, where this is possible, is just what it is to make out the distinction in question. For example, one might plausibly think that there was already a distinction between knowledge and mere belief before Plato offered his analysis of the former in terms of justified, true belief, an analysis which certainly shed light on the distinction (even if his account is not, in the end, entirely satisfactory). So, strictly speaking, the argument is not valid. Perhaps, however, there are considerations peculiar to the particular kind of contrast in question that, while not licensing the inference generally, will license it in this one specific case. Put another way, maybe the argument is enthymematic—the suppressed premises concerning properties peculiar to the use of these particular terms. Another suggestion might be that the argument is not intended to be deductively valid at all; rather, Quine is offering us an explanation for some range of phenomena, and thus only intends to provide less than conclusive support for his conclusion. There is the fact that analysis has repeatedly failed to shed any light at all on a certain entrenched “distinction”, and one which has its home in fairly deep philosophical discussions, where issues are very obscure and confusion reigns, rather than in everyday use. The best explanation of the fact that we are no closer to understanding the purported distinction despite our best efforts is that the distinction is just that: purported. Most distinctions, it might be argued, yield, at least partially, to sustained analysis. The fact that this one has not indicates that it is not.

68 Before we evaluate either of these suggestions as to the force of Quine’s argument, perhaps it would be best if we first considered Quine’s argument for its premise. That argument might very well shed some light on the relative merits of each of these suggestions. In defending that premise, Quine considers and rejects what he considers to be the most promising analyses of analyticity available—analyses in terms of notions such as self- contradiction, meaning (as an object, not a property), synonymy, definition, interchangeability salva veritate, and semantical rule. Quine’s attacks take on a familiar shape. First, an analysis of analyticity that exploits some favored expression E is offered. Quine then counters that E either is itself no better understood than analyticity or itself requires for its own explication either the notion of analyticity or some other notion which again is no better understood than analyticity. The trouble, as Quine sees things, is that understanding is never really improved. We are now in a position to see not only why Quine thinks that each of the various attempts at elucidating the analytic/synthetic distinction have failed but also that he thinks that they all have failed for essentially the same reason. Ultimately, each of the analyses is given in terms of, or presupposes an understanding of, other intensional idioms. Indeed, Quine seems to be suggesting that there is a family of intensional idioms, viz., analyticity, meaning, self- contradiction, synonymy, definition, and interchangeability, salva veritate, and that once you are in the circle, there is no way of breaking out of it (Confinement). Furthermore, failure to break out of this circle is intolerable (Failure), since genuine understanding can be achieved only by doing so. So, analyticity (along with, as it now seems, at least some of the other members of the family circle) is itself intolerable. To return to the above question regarding which was left unanswered, we now have an answer. Quine’s argument is not intended as an inference to the best explanation. Rather, it is to be viewed as an enthymeme. The immediately preceding discussion has served to highlight the missing steps. The premise in the original argument is not intended to establish the denial of A/S directly; rather, it is intended to establish Confinement (inductively), which when combined with Failure leads to the desired conclusion. Confinement and Failure Why does Quine accept Confinement and Failure? Let’s begin with Confinement. Quine’s reason for accepting it is just that, as the previous discussion

69 has shown, all of the best attempts to do so have failed.79 All of them have had to rely on other intensional idioms which ultimately require an antecedent understanding of analyticity. The burden of , he seems to be assuming, lies squarely on the shoulders of those who think that the circle can be broken. Until it is shown otherwise, we are justified in thinking that it cannot. The Mirror and Canonical Notations Let us leave Confinement and contemplate Failure. Why does Quine accept it? His reasons are fairly deep, stemming from his fundamentally naturalistic world view. According to Quine, physicalism is true, and for this reason, he feels that intensional languages should be eschewed in favor of fully extensional ones. But why does Quine think that physicalism demands extensional rather than intensional languages? Unfortunately, this question is far too large to handle adequately in this context. For this reason, I will only provide a very rough outline of Quine’s answer to it.80 Quine falls within a metaphysical tradition going back at least as far as Plato and which includes, among others, , Descartes, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Frege, Russell, and Carnap. His deepest philosophical interests are primarily ontological—in his own words, he is interested in “a limning of the most general traits of reality,”81 and he is fairly clear about how this is to be done. The metaphysical tradition has always been interested in discovering this ultimate structure, and until the twentieth century, it was commonly assumed that this could most fruitfully be done by first investigating the structure of thought. By discovering the most general

79 One might think that the following line of reasoning would help here: “All analyses will either be given in fully extensional terms or will exploit some intensional idioms. If an analysis of an intensional notion (analyticity) is given solely in extensional terms, then that analysis must be incorrect, since the very thing which makes the analysandum peculiar has been lost on analysis. A constraint on any acceptable analysis would seem to be that any second-order properties that hold of the analysandum also hold of the analysans. For example, suppose that we wish to provide an analysis of the relational property of identity. One thing that we know about identity, antecedent to any proposed analysis, is that identity is reflexive, symmetric, and transitive. These are second-order properties of the relation itself. It will be a criterion of adequacy on any candidate analysis of identity that that analysis preserves these properties. The same is the case with intensional notions. Intensionality, so the argument goes, is a second-order feature of properties. Since the property of analyticity is an intensional one, it follows that a constraint on any acceptable analysis of analyticity will be that it preserves intensionality. But now it is obvious that no fully extensional analysis of analyticity could be adequate, since full extensionality is incompatible with intensionality.” This argument fails, and for at least a couple of reasons. First, intensionality is not a second-order property of properties, such as analyticity, but a first-order one of representations. Second, and as far as I can see, there is no a priori reason to think that what is peculiar about intensional notions will be lost when they are analyzed extensionally. One need only be reminded of Davidson’s paratactic analysis of belief contexts, or of analyses of belief contexts which exploit the notion of conversational implication to explain away opacity. Indeed, Quine himself would not wish to rule out the possibility of giving such analyses.

80 A useful, and relatively non-technical discussion of these issues may be found in Hookway (1988), chapters 4-7.

81 Quine (1960), p. 161.

70 features of thought, we would then know the most general features of reality. The bridging principle here is that our thought of the world must, at least in very broad respects, mirror that world (the Mirror Thesis). What marks twentieth century as a new phase in the history of philosophy is not the rejection of the Mirror Thesis, indeed many analytic philosophers including Quine continue to accept it, but, rather, the conviction that, in point of order of explanation, language is prior to thought (the Priority Thesis). If we want to do our metaphysical work by discovering the structure of thought and then applying the Mirror Thesis, we must begin with a study of language. Only by discovering the broad structural features of language will we be able to discover the broad structural features of thought and then, finally, of the world. Quine accepts both the Mirror Thesis and the Priority Thesis. Indeed, he hails “the shift of attention from ideas to words” as the “first milestone of empiricism,”82 and the Mirror Thesis is implicit in his very attempt to “limn” the structure of reality by focusing on language. He differs from many other philosophers, however, in his firm insistence on two things: (i) the truth of physicalism, and (ii) the indispensability of the use of a canonical notation in prosecuting the grand metaphysical project. It is the interaction of these two commitments that leads Quine to the rejection of intensional languages in favor of extensional ones. Let us see how this works. One way to characterize physicalism is as the thesis that whatever there is—facts, things, properties, etc.—is physical in nature, and being physical in nature is just a matter of finding a place in a completed physical theory. Whatever such a theory says that there is is all that there is, and all such things are ipso facto physical. I do not wish to consider Quine’s defense of this commitment here. For our purposes we need only consider its role in Quine’s argument against analyticity, and to do that it is sufficient that we consider how it leads Quine to prefer extensional canonical notations.83 What is a canonical notation and why does Quine insist on having one? A canonical notation is an extension of the idea of a logical theory, or, perhaps better, it is the logical theory that would be needed for the formalization of our best (whether or not completed) science. It consists of a specification of a basic logical vocabulary, of syntactic categories for all non-logical

82 Quine (1981c), p. 67.

83 A discussion of Quine’s defense of physicalism can be found in Hookway (1988), pp. 70-4.

71 vocabulary by which the core notation might be supplemented, of permissible ways of combining both the logical and non-logical vocabulary to produce formulas, and of rules for deriving some formulas from others. Since Quine thinks that our best science will turn out to be nothing other than physics, the shape of our canonical notation will be determined by the needs of physical theory. By explicitly adding notations to the canonical notation to do the job of our pre-canonized physicalistic, non-logical notations, we gradually transform the former into a formalized physics. What does such systematizing achieve? Here is a nice statement by Quine on the role and value of a canonical notation:

. . . the simplification and clarification of logical theory to which a canonical notation contributes is not only algorithmic; it is also conceptual. Each reduction that we make in the variety of constituent constructions needed in building the sentences of science is a simplification in the structure of the inclusive conceptual scheme of science. Each elimination of obscure constructions or notions that we manage to achieve, by paraphrase into more lucid elements, is a clarification of the conceptual scheme of science. The same motives impel scientists to seek ever simpler and clearer theories adequate to the subject matter of their special sciences are motives for simplification and clarification of the broader framework shared by all the sciences.84

So, a canonical notation allows for the possibility of discovering the most economical way of formulating our best theories of the world. If we accept simplicity as having not only practical importance in our choice of theories but also some value in sorting out true theories from false ones, then the Mirror Thesis now allows us to draw important metaphysical conclusions from considerations regarding our supplemented canonical notation. For example, the particular syntactic categories utilized by the theory will be taken as direct evidence for the existence of corresponding, fundamental ontological categories. It is well known that Frege endorsed a logical theory that took the syntactic categories of singular term and predicate as fundamental and that on this basis he claimed that objects and properties (Fregean concepts) are ontologically fundamental.85 Quine, on the contrary, recommends a theory that makes no use of singular terms. If both theories can accommodate our best physics, then Quine’s idea is that considerations of overall simplicity recommend the theory without singular terms over the other.

84 Quine (1960), p. 161.

85 For Frege’s most sustained treatment of these views, see Frege (1892b).

72 The Mirror Thesis would then tell us that, contrary to (extremely) popular opinion, object is not a fundamental metaphysical category. Canonical Notations: Extensional or Intensional? Let us return, now, to our original question: Why does Quine prefer extensional languages to intensional ones? To begin with, this preference of Quine’s is a direct result of his response to the problem of substitutivity that was considered in chapter 1. Recall that that problem was a problem because it calls into question a very plausible principle, PS, regarding the substitution of co-referential singular terms, in particular, and co-extensive ones, more generally, in intensional contexts. The simplest semantic theories that we have for our logical languages, however, depend upon that principle. We saw that Frege responded to the problem not by giving up the principle, but by proposing that terms in problematic, intensional contexts do not have the semantic values that they have when they are used in extensional contexts. Rather, in intensional contexts, the semantic value of an expression is what would normally be its sense. Frege’s solution is indeed elegant and allows us to preserve the generalized version of PS, but it requires that we admit senses into our ontology. Elegance, then, comes at the cost of ontological economy. Others would take the problem as showing that PS really is false; but this greatly reduces overall simplicity. If the fully general version of the principle is rejected, then our semantic theory must become immensely complicated in order to handle inferences involving intensional contexts. Indeed, there are still no generally accepted theories regarding the logical forms of the various kinds of intensional context, despite decades of intense efforts. Quine urges, on the other hand, that instead of rejecting the principle, we eliminate the offending contexts. Unless a particular kind of context yields to extensional analysis, that context should be eliminated from our regimented scientific discourse. Otherwise, the presence of that context can only bring extreme over-complication, and thus metaphysical confusion. In the absence of any acceptable extensional analyses, such elimination would be extraordinarily far-reaching, since our ordinary talk is filled with intensional idioms. Indeed, Quine’s suggestion, if taken seriously, would threaten our modal talk, counterfactuals included, virtually all, if not all, of our mentalistic discourse, our evaluative language, and our ordinary talk of meaning, just to name some conspicuous examples. Intensionality and Projection There is another, independent, reason that Quine has for being suspicious of the metaphysical legitimacy of intensional idioms. Frege provided us with a

73 simple and very general way of talking about properties—one that depends essentially on syntax. The basic idea is that properties (concepts for Frege) are the semantic values of certain kinds of expression, viz., of predicate expressions. So, one way of identifying a property is by identifying some corresponding predicate expression of which it is the semantic value, and this holds good for relations as well as for properties, the former actually being subsumed under the latter. How, then, are predicate expressions to be identified? Frege’s answer, which is one of the first applications of the celebrated Context Principle, which identifies sentence meaning as (in some sense) properly basic, is that we identify such expressions through a process of “abstraction” beginning with individual sentences.86 For example, consider the sentence ‘George distrusts Saddam’. By removing the singular term ‘George’ we are left with the one-place predicate ‘. . . distrusts Saddam’ The semantic value of this expression is the property of being a Saddam distruster. If we also remove the singular term ‘Saddam’, then instead of the previous one-place open sentence, we are now left with the two-place predicate ‘. . . distrusts—’. The semantic value of this latter expression is the binary relation of distrusting. Now, these particular contexts are extensional, and given a classical semantics, the sentences that would result from them by filling in the empty places with singular terms are true or false depending on whether or not the referent of the filling expressions have the property, or are related by the relation, that is the semantic value of the filled ones. The choice of expression does not in the end matter, the only thing that does is its semantic value. For Quine, this is as it should be, since it reflects the scientific impulse towards objectivity—once the meanings of our sentences are fixed, what makes them true or false is the world and nothing else. In particular, their truth or falsity does not also depend on the way we think about or perceive that world. If extensionality holds for our language, then knowledge that a sentence is true along with knowledge of its truth-conditions would yield genuine and objective knowledge of that world. The introduction of an intensional vocabulary would, according to Quine, frustrate this cognitive ideal of objectivity. Suppose, for example that we allow our ordinary talk of beliefs. Consider the following two sentences:

86 Given Frege’s strict anti-psychologism in logic and semantics, he would certainly object to this way of putting it. Instead, he would say that predicate expressions are to be defined as the result of eliminating one or more occurrences of a singular term in a sentential context. Since Quine would not object to the above formulation, I will stick with it.

74 (1) Alfred believes that Pope John Paul II is the current pope, and

(2) Alfred believes Karol Wojtyla is the current pope.

It would not be implausible to suppose that (1) is true and (2) is false for some individual named ‘Alfred’. The trouble is that (1) and (2) share the same structure, and all corresponding expression pairs in the two sentences have the same semantic value. But SV2, a principle which was considered in chapter 1 and which is fundamental to classical semantics, tells us that the semantic value of a complex expression is completely determined by that expression’s structure along with the semantic values of its parts. The moral that Quine seems to draw from this is that the semantic evaluation of sentences such as (1) and (2) requires more than an appeal to structure and semantic value. Crucially, which words we choose to effect reference will also have effects on such semantic evaluations. Another way to make the same point is by considering the one-place predicates that result from (1) and (2) by removing ‘Pope John Paul II’ and ‘Karol Wojtyla’ respectively. Quine complains that whether or not these predicates apply to one and the same individual Pope John Paul II depends upon our choice of name. But then can we really think of the context ‘Alfred believes that . . . is the current Pope’ has a property as its semantic value, or that it even has a semantic value? And if not, then can we even think of it as a logically significant piece of syntax, let alone as a predicate? If we nonetheless continue to take such contexts seriously and accord them a serious role in our science, then we have opened the door to a significant amount of subjectivity. The idea is that if the semantic evaluation of a sentence depends on more than just structure and semantic value, in particular if it depends upon how we must think about some particular semantic value or on how we manage to refer to it, then the truth-conditions of that sentence will have been mixed with factors that depend more or less on us, our choices, and interests. In other, more vivid, words, we will have projected something onto the world that does not in fact belong there. Just as Hume viewed the necessary connection between a cause and its effect as not actually in the mind-independent world but as projected onto the world by some mind, Quine is in effect saying the same thing about intensional contexts—the failure of PS counting as direct evidence

75 for the occurrence of such projection.87 So, if our talk of analyticity and meaning is unavoidably intensional, then, once again, it turns out to be metaphysically misleading at best. How Damaging is Quine’s Attack? So, has Quine succeeded in his attack on A/S? The viability of eliminating such a distinction depends, of course, upon two things: (i) our confidence that no adequate extensional analyses will be forthcoming, and (ii) whether or not we can get by in our theorizing about the world without it. To assess the strength of Quine’s case against the analytic/synthetic distinction properly we will need to consider each of these. Unless an explicit argument is provided that only an intensional analysis of analyticity could actually count as an analysis of analyticity, I see no reason for supposing that we will not eventually discover an acceptable extensional account. Quine, however, makes no attempt to provide such an argument. It is one thing to argue that the concepts in a circle of concepts are mutually interdefinable or, put another way, that once one member of such a circle of concetps is defined all of them will be defined, but it is an entirely different thing to say that there is no way of breaking out of that circle. Indeed, the former claim allows the possibility of a single “alien” concept grounding definitions for all of the members of the family. Quine may have shown us that there is a circle, but he has not established that it is impregnable and it is still an open question whether this would be intolerable should it actually turn out to be impregnable. Furthermore, given the history of the development of the sciences, it would be hasty to conclude that because a certain problem has resisted the best efforts of the brightest minds the problem cannot be solved. No remotely adequate answer to the problem of multiple generality was given until Frege’s introduction of quantification theory in the late nineteenth century. Many of Zeno’s paradoxes baffled mathematicians and philosophers alike until the development of the calculus in the seventeenth. That a problem has resisted solution should be taken as evidence that the problem is both genuine and genuinely difficult before it is taken as evidence that the problem is insoluble or that the concepts in which it is framed are suspect. In any case, when the problem concerns concepts that are central to our way of viewing the world and when we have no reasonable substitute to do the work of those concepts, then we have all the more reason to hold out in hope of a solution. We must ask ourselves, then, whether we can get by without the analytic/synthetic distinction. What else would we have to give up

87 See Hume (1739-40), Part III, and Hume (1777), Section VII.

76 and can we live without that? Do we have theoretical needs that can be satisfied only by preserving that distinction? Are there facts that can be explained only by invoking it? To begin with, we should recall that our talk of properly anatomic meaning, when such talk is sharply separated from our talk of reference, sinks or swims with the analytic/synthetic distinction: many theorists have accepted that if A/S fails then we are stuck with holism (since they have also accepted some form of anatomicity). Now, if semantic holism is true, then there is a plausible case to be made that talk of holistic meaning is useless, and ipso facto has no place in a scientific semantics (we shall consider this argument in chapter 3). Thus, holism would in the end lead us to a kind of eliminativism about content. Quine himself can be taken as having drawn this conclusion. So, if Quine’s attack can be sustained, then scientific discourse will only have a place for talk of semantic values, and thus reality will only have a place for semantic values. Talk of sense will have been shown to be nonsense. Things only get worse from here, however. As was mentioned in chapter 1, there is clearly an intimate connection between linguistic and mental content. The connection is so close that any argument that would demonstrate the impossibility of one would also be immediately transformable into one that showed the impossibility of the other (chapter 1). The elimination of sense would thus mean the elimination of all (propositional) content in general. If there can be no such thing as meaning, then there can be nothing which is content-bearing. For example, if sentences cannot bear contents, then there cannot be mental states which bear contents either. There just cannot be propositional content, period. This would require that, at least when more theoretical interests prevail, we give up many of our ways of speaking. We could no longer speak of ourselves as sayers, believers, and knowers, or as things with hopes, desires, and fears. Such banned ways of speaking, however, would require that we form a radically different conception of ourselves. In our ordinary affairs, of course, where the impulse to metaphysical landscaping is seldom present, we could retain the old idioms. But as philosophers, we would have to be wary of taking them too seriously. On the other hand, given the prominent role they play in our practices and in our views of the world, we should also be wary of giving them up too easily. The consequences of taking Quine’s rejection of A/S seriously may not end with the elimination of talk of meaning and mind. I have argued (chapter 1) that the objectivity of

77 judgment entails the objectivity of meaning, so that if the latter fails, then so must the former.88 What we need to consider is whether or not Quine’s rejection of meaning is also a rejection of the objectivity of meaning. More precisely, does Quine’s denial that there are individuated meanings entail the falsity of both the Contractualist and Conformity Assumptions? Given the entailment of the Contractualist Assumption by the Conformity Assumption (chapter 1), however, we need only consider whether the former entails that meanings are individuated. If it does, then it appears that Quine’s arguments, if successful, will have the further consequence that our judgments, scientific ones included, do not (cannot?) cleanly record features of an objective, mind-independent world. This consequence would clearly be at odds with Quine’s deepest reason for seeking to eliminate scientific talk of meaning, viz., his ambition for metaphysical insight into the structure of reality. Indeed, it would show that that goal is unachievable. Let us suppose, then, that the meaning of an expression is not individuated. Not only are we unable to individuate them, but God himself would be unable to individuate them—there being no things to individuate. Now if meaning does place real constraints on our behavior, then it would be susceptible to individuation at least by God, since sets of such constraints would themselves be individuable, and the meanings of two expressions are the same if and only if their corresponding constraint sets are the same.89 So, if this argument is correct, then, on the assumption that the meanings of our expressions are not individuated, it follows that there are no sets of constraints that govern what we do with respect to those expressions. The Contractualist Assumption, then, entails that meanings are individuable (even if not yet individuated by us). The result of the above discussion, then, is that Quine’s arguments have the unintended consequence that even our most regimented scientific discourse will unavoidably carry with it an element of projection. So, if a criterion of adequacy of any scientific talk is that it be metaphysically pure, then Quine may have unwittingly argued that none of our scientific talk is adequate. On Quine’s picture, then, our thought and talk can reach out to the world, but they do not have content, at least when that content is conceived of as being both (properly) anatomically

88 Wright (1987), pp. 5-8.

89 If there should turn out to be such a thing as individuated meanings, then however the notion of meaning were ultimately to be analyzed, it would have to allow for this biconditional. This is not to say that the biconditional itself counts as an analysis of the concept of meaning. Rather, it places a constraint on such an analysis.

78 individuated and distinct from semantic value. Furthermore, Quine’s argument may actually threaten the objective character of our best scientific talk as well. But is either of these consequences plausible? Since my aim here is not to refute Quine’s position decisively, but, rather, to show what would be its consequences as well as that the burden that he has taken on has not been met, I shall decline answering this question. For our purposes in this chapter, it is enough to have shown that we have a considerable interest in holding on to the challenged distinction, enough of an interest that it would be hasty to give up on it on the basis of a few failed attempts at clarification. Quine’s Argument from Verificationism In the last two sections of “Two Dogmas”, however, Quine launches a second argument that can be taken to undermine A/S, and, unlike the previous one, many have taken this one as casting considerable doubt on A/S. The argument directly establishes semantic holism. The denial of A/S is then established as a corollary.90 The idea is that if meaning is holistic (and in the particular way in which Quine thinks it is), then there are meaning-constitutive connections between any two sentences of one’s idiolect. What this means is that every sentence and every inference between sentences has to be viewed as analytic or all of them must be viewed as synthetic. The corollary to be drawn from this argument, then, is an error-theoretic denial of A/S.91

90 Since this argument has semantic holism as its immediate conclusion from which the rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinction may be drawn as a corollary, in the context of a discussion of the Argument from Anatomicity, where one would be considering the best reasons for rejecting A/S in order to motivate semantic holism, an appeal to this argument of Quine’s would be circular. Nonetheless, I will consider the argument, since most writers on this topic seem to have missed this dialectical problem.

91 This brings out an odd tension in Quine’s position. Quine’s conclusion regarding the analytic/synthetic distinction is generally interpreted in one of two ways. The first represents him as arguing for the non-factualist alternative considered above. He would ipso facto be arguing that there are no analytic sentences. The second would represent him as arguing for error-theoretic denial of A/S, regarding the class of analytic sentences as empty. In either case, there would be no analytic sentences. But if Quine really is endorsing semantic holism, then it seems that he should be forced into saying that every sentence of L has an analytic connection to every other sentence of L—that analyticities abound. After all, it is typically taken as a defining characteristic of semantic holism that if the meaning of any sentence of L shifts, or if the truth-value assigned by a speaker to any of the sentences of L shifts, then the meaning of every sentence of the language (for that speaker) also shifts. But isn’t this just to say that, for any two sentences of the language, there is a necessary connection between their content? How, then, can Quine consistently deny the analytic/synthetic distinction, or, more weakly, that there are any analytic sentences, and yet maintain semantic holism?

79 The Argument from Verificationism rests on just two premises: the Quine/Duhem thesis (hereafter, Q/D) paired with the strong Verification Principle.92 The former claim is a generalization of Duhem’s thesis and states that no sentence is verified in isolation of the rest of the sentences in one’s overall theory of the world—in short, verification is itself holistic. The latter is the thesis that meaning is method of verification. So, if the only things that admit of direct verification are entire theories and meaning is method of verification, then meaning can only be properly ascribed to entire theories. Another way of putting this is that meaning-for-a- theory is atomic, while meaning-for-an-individual-sentence, being metaphysically dependent on the entire background theory, i.e., network of sentences, is holistic.93 I will consider each premise in turn. Let’s begin with verificationism. The strong verification principle, upon which Quine’s argument depends, identifies the epistemic properties of an expression with its semantic ones. Insofar as there is sense over and above semantic value proper, where the former is correlative to understanding, the sense of a declarative sentence S must be located in those procedures available to a competent speaker of the language such that the execution of them would terminate in the speaker either being warranted in asserting S or in asserting ~S—in other words, in the corresponding confirmation procedures for S. The meaning of a sub-sentential expression, then, would be located in the contribution it makes to the determination of the confirmation procedures of sentences in which it appears.

92 There are two closely related propositions that go by the name ‘verification principle’: (i) the proposition that the meaning of a (declarative) sentence is its method of verification, and (ii) the proposition that a sentence is meaningful if and only if it is verifiable. (i) certainly entails (ii), but it is not obvious that the reverse implication holds as well. Since I am inclined to think that it does not, I regard the former as the stronger of the two.

93 Quine later retreats to a more moderate position. In Quine (1981c), he says, “When we look thus to a whole theory or system of sentences as the vehicle of empirical meaning, how inclusive should we take this system to be? Should it be the whole of science? or the whole of a science, a branch of science? This should be seen as a matter of degree, and of diminishing returns. All sciences interlock to some extent; they share a common logic and generally some common part of mathematics, even when nothing else. It is an uninteresting legalism, however, to think of our scientific system of the world as involved en bloc in every prediction. More modest chunks suffice, and so may be ascribed their independent empirical meaning, nearly enough, since some vagueness in meaning must be allowed for in any event. . . . Thus the holism that the third move brings should be seen only as a moderate or relative holism. What is important is that we cease to demand or expect of a scientific sentence that it have its own separable empirical meaning” (p. 71). What Quine seems to be doing here is endorsing some form of proper semantic molecularity, and such an endorsement would seem to open the door to some form of analytic/synthetic distinction. In what follows, however, I shall ignore this later position of Quine’s and consider only the argument from strong confirmational holism to full-blooded semantic holism.

80 So, should sense be understood epistemically as the verificationist is recommending? Note that so far, the proposal is highly schematic. We have only been told something about the general character of a theory of meaning (sense), viz., that it must proceed with properly epistemic concepts as basic; of course, those epistemic concepts may themselves be explained in terms of others, but then we are no longer, properly speaking, engaged with the theory of meaning, but with unless, of course, such an analysis has an effect on the kinds of confirmation relation that we are willing to recognize. In any case, there still remains much room for variation regarding the nature of the relevant confirmation relations, and to give more details of this kind will be to further articulate one’s theory of meaning. Indeed, the other premise of Quine’s argument, viz., Q/D, is designed to fill in precisely this kind of detail. In any case, I am somewhat pessimistic about the prospects of a verificationist theory of meaning (at least in the traditional mold). The main reason is that the confirmation relations that I associate with some sentence (or that some community associates with it) cannot constitute that sentence’s meaning since I (we) often know the meaning of a sentence and yet remain ignorant about how to verify it. Some of the most creative moments in the history of science have involved the discovery of ways of testing hypotheses that had already been well understood but for which there was previously no known confirmation procedure. This, alone, seems to cast serious doubt on the more simplistic versions of the thesis, though there may well be more sophisticated versions which are unaffected by it.94 Since an extended discussion of verificationism requires far more space than I have to give, I will move on to Quine’s second premise. How plausible, then, is Q/D? Duhem’s original observation concerned the structure of empirical verification—and only that kind of verification which is affected in the course of properly scientific enquiry.95 His conclusion was that any particular claim could be verified only against the background of a set of further assumptions. Empirical verification involves generating empirically testable predictions from some theory and then checking those predictions against actual observations. No theoretical claim worth considering, however, can generate empirical predictions on its own. What is needed are further assumptions about one’s

94 E.g., Dummett’s.

95 Duhem (1906).

81 experimental boundary-conditions (auxiliary assumptions), and perhaps further theoretical claims. The point is, to a large extent, a purely logical one. Stripped to its bare bones, it can be understood as saying little more than that no single statement S deductively entails (or inductively supports) any single observation sentence O. Suppose that I wish to test some theoretical generalization, e.g., the truth of the sentence ‘All college freshmen like cheap beer’. Which observation sentences could be used to test this generalization? Well, suppose I know that my friend Jason is a college freshman. Then certainly ‘Jason likes cheap beer’ and ‘Jason does not like cheap beer’ might very well be two such sentences—the former could be used to confirm, and the latter to disconfirm, the original. Should the relevant observations convince me that the latter is true, I would have a good reason for giving up the generalization. Duhem’s point, however, is that, despite superficial appearances to the contrary, I could not extract the relevant observation sentence from the generalization alone; I need to appeal to some background knowledge, viz., my knowledge that Jason is a college freshman. The generalization itself does not entail the sentence about Jason; only taking that sentence along with the further sentence ‘Jason is a college freshman’ can we generate the relevant prediction. This example, of course, is perhaps much simpler in structure than even the simplest case of genuine scientific verification. Typically, the number of further assumptions that will be required to generate the relevant predictions will be much larger. When we have generated an empirical prediction in this way and that prediction is not born out by the relevant, future observations, then we will take this as disconfirmation of S only if none of the auxiliary assumptions to which we made an appeal is less secure than S itself. In other words, we will take O as disconfirming S only if S is the least certain of all of the sentences we needed to generate O, or if this formulation sounds too subjectivist, if our canons of theory selection counsel us to abandon S before abandoning any other part of our overall theory. Quine takes Duhem’s observation a couple steps further, and in two different directions. First, every single sentence, theoretical and mundane alike, is essentially in the same boat.96 All of our beliefs about the world, “from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic”97, are verifiable only

96 Quine hedges on this point somewhat in allowing that some of the sentences at “the periphery” may be exceptions, but never mind this.

97 Quine (1953), p. 42.

82 when taken in conjunction with other things that we believe—all of the sentences that are empirically verifiable are so only when taken in conjunction with other sentences. This is the first axis across which Quine generalizes Duhem’s thesis. The second concerns the number of sentences that figure in the verification of any single sentence. Quine’s recommendation here is radical. According to him, all of the sentences that constitute our theory of the world are required to verify any single one of them.98 In other words, verification is radically holistic. But why should Quine recommend this over the seemingly more sensible recommendation of Duhem? The answer to this question seems to lie in the nature of the standards to which we can appeal in deciding how to respond theoretically to any particular observation. How do we decide which particular belief to give up when a prediction does not comport with our observations? If our decision is to be rational, then there must be some standards to which we could appeal. The standards that most recommend themselves are those such as simplicity, conservativeness, predictive power, systematicity, etc. That theoretical move which would render greater overall simplicity in our theory, or would require less modification of our previous theory, or would yield a more powerful instrument for predicting future experiences, or would better integrate a greater number of more disparate sub-theories is the one which is rationally preferable. But these standards are ones which apply only to entire theories; according to Quine, they properly apply only to the most encompassing theories that we have—one’s theory of everything, i.e., that theory which is comprised of everything a person believes. Duhem’s observation seems to me to be fundamentally correct, but should we stop there or go on to follow Quine down the path to a robust ? It has recently been urged by Elliott Sober, and others, that we should not.99 There are several reasons for resisting Quine here. First, confirmation, whatever its precise structure turns out to be, is in an important sense symmetric. By this, it is not meant that for any thing (or set of things) that confirms another thing the latter also confirms the former. Rather, what is meant is that if the presence of

98 As mentioned above (see note 80), Quine later waffles on this point somewhat, but again, never mind this.

99 Sober (2000).

83 something confirms another, then the absence of the former disconfirms the latter.100 For example, the presence of high levels of radiation confirms the hypothesis that there was a nuclear detonation only if the absence of such radiation would have disconfirmed that same hypothesis. Another way of putting this is that something C increases the likelihood that some statement S is true only if C’s absence decreases the likelihood that S is true, or, alternatively, only if C’s absence increases the likelihood that the negation of S is true. If this is correct, then Quine has a problem. One consequence that Quine draws from confirmation holism is that the justification that mathematics and logic receive comes indirectly through the direct confirmation of more obviously empirical theories such as physics, chemistry, etc. Since confirmation is holistic, and mathematics and logic form a part of our overall theory of the world, anything that counts as confirmation for physics, chemistry, etc., will also serve to confirm mathematics and logic. This would be fine except for the fact that Quine does not also take the disconfirmation of those more obviously empirical theories to impugn mathematics and logic as well. If confirmation is symmetric, in the above described sense, and holistic, then why does not the disconfirmation of phlogiston theory, of the geo-centric model of the universe, or even of Newtonian mechanics also serve as disconfirmation of mathematics and logic?101 If confirmational holism forces on us the idea that the confirmation of any single one of our beliefs would ipso facto be confirmation of all of our beliefs, then symmetry would seem to entail that disconfirmation of any single one of them would likewise disconfirm all of them. Quine might reply that the reason we do not give up mathematics and logic in these cases is that we tacitly apply “the maxim of minimum mutilation”, i.e., when adjusting one’s overall theory in response to disconfirming observations, then ceteris paribus make only those changes that result in the least overall damage to the theory. Since giving up mathematical or logical beliefs would almost always result in greater mutilation than any other alternative, we in fact never consider that as a real option. Interestingly, given Quine’s semantic holism, in its most extreme form, any modification in the theory will, in a way, amount to giving up everything in the theory, so no sentence in the resulting theory will mean what it did before the change. Given

100 More formally, P(S/C) > P(S) just in case P(S/~C) < P(S).

101 Sober (2000), pp. 264-5.

84 Quine’s semantic holism, then, mutilation is always global. So, given Quine’s acceptance of strong verificationism, his maxim of minimum mutilation does not seem to help him very much. The above objection, put simply, is that, given Quine’s own principles, disconfirmation should be seen as being far more ubiquitous than Quine actually realizes. A second objection, however, is that confirmation is, on Quine’s story, far easier to obtain than it should be. If confirmation really is holistic, then to confirm anything that one believes ipso facto will be to confirm everything that one believes. If I want to improve my warrant for believing in quantum theory, I need only confirm, say, that my neighbor has bad breath, or that cats are moody, or that it is raining out, and so on. This consequence of Quine’s view is bad enough, but matters soon get much worse. Suppose that I believe that the stock market will crash in July while Smith believes that it will not. Furthermore, suppose that both Smith and I confirm that Jones is depressed. Then, given confirmation holism, Jones’ being depressed confirms both that the stock market will crash in July and that it will not. This is certainly an intolerable result. Quine might reply here that, properly speaking, confirmation is a three-place relation, whereas the objector has mistakenly taken it as two-place. Something confirms another thing only relative to some particular cognizer. Once this fact about confirmation is recognized, the air of absurdity vanishes. There is nothing particularly troubling about the thought that C will confirm S for one person, whereas it will disconfirm it for another. This rejoinder would be successful but for the fact that it makes completely useless the notion of confirmation as it is needed in science or in any arena where disputes might need to be resolved by objective, or barring that, intersubjective, means. Often in science, observations are needed to settle disputes—to determine which of a number of incompatible theories should be accepted. But if confirmation is really three-place, then observation could not serve this very practical function. A better Quinean response would be that confirmation is a three-place relation between a sentence, an observation, and a theory. Often, it is true, different people will have different theories, so it might still turn out that an observation might confirm S for one person but not for another. When this happens it will be because they hold different background theories, not because they are different people. In any case, provided that sense can be made of sameness of background theory, the above problem regarding objectivity will not arise. In science, we can

85 settle a dispute over the truth-value of some sentence by appealing to observation because investigators typically share a background theory. It is because of this shared background of belief that the scientific method can be used to adjudicate disputes. The trouble with this response is that overestimates the amount of agreement that investigators will really have. True, all investigators will have a background theory, but if Quine’s extreme confirmational holism is true, then background theories will almost undoubtedly, not to say necessarily, vary over speakers. It is highly unlikely that any two speakers will have exactly the same belief set. Extreme confirmation holism, however, requires literal identity of background theory (total belief set) if an appeal to observational evidence is to carry any interpersonal weight. Another consequence of Quine’s extreme confirmation holism is that any observation that confirms one thing must confirm everything in one’s belief-set. Suppose that someone, e.g., Al, confirms the statement that there is water on Mars (call it ‘M’) in light of some sophisticated observation involving differentially reflected light rays. Given confirmation holism M is confirmed by the relevant observation only relative to Al’s total belief set T. Strictly speaking, that observation confirms T taken together with M; thus the observation will confer additional warrant on M as well as every member of T. Now in addition to certain core logical and mathematical statements and other statements of a more-or-less theoretical nature, T will most likely contain countless, mundane statements such as that Amsterdam is a dirty city, that today is Monday, that the Yankees will win the world series this year, that Tom has a crush on Alice, etc. It is hard to see how either the statement about Mars or the relevant observation could have any relevance, particularly epistemic relevance, to any of these beliefs. Confirmation holism, however, has the consequence that, apparent irrelevance notwithstanding, the observation concerning differential patterns of light waves emanating from the Martian surface does in fact increase one’s warrant for believing any of these things provided only that one already believes them. The absurdity of this consequence is made more vivid when we realize that were Al to lack one of these beliefs, say the belief that Tom has a crush on Alice (call it ‘A’), the fact that the Martian observation confirms M (against the theoretical background of T minus A) would in that case provide Al with no warrant for accepting A.102 One might be tempted to respond that it

102 Quine has also been criticized for taking the structure of confirmation to be hypothetico-deductive, rather than, as the Bayesians would have it, probabilistic.

86 is false that A is irrelevant to M, since A will be relevant, by virtue of semantic connections, to those beliefs of Al’s that are relevant to M. The only reason to accept this, however, would seem to be on the basis of semantic holism. Of course, in the present context, it would be circular to attempt to counter this objection by an appeal to semantic holism—one cannot appeal to semantic holism in order to motivate confirmation holism so that one can then go on to motivate semantic holism. A final criticism of Quine’s Argument from Verificationism concerns not so much the truth of its premises as its validity. F&L argue that even if both of the above premises are true, semantic holism would still not follow, since the argument would in such a case be invalid.103 They reason very roughly as follows. Both the premises and the conclusion of Quine’s argument are formulated as claims about statements, but they identify a three-way ambiguity in the word ‘statement’.104 It could be understood to mean either uninterpreted sentence (type or token), sentence-independent conditions of semantic evaluation (i.e., proposition), or sentence taken together with its condition of semantic evaluation. They claim that when the use of ‘statement’ in Quine’s argument is consistently understood in terms of just one of these notions, then one or more of its premises will be false, but when we read the premises in such a way that they are individually plausible, then the argument turns out to be invalid, since ‘statement’ will have to be understood differently at different places in the argument. Their discussion is long and raises a number of considerations. The core of their argument, however, comes in the form of a dilemma. On the one hand, if we understand ‘statement’ as ‘uninterpreted sentence’, then it makes no sense to speak of confirmation relations between sentences, and Q/D becomes trivial and uninteresting. After all, what could it possibly mean to say that ‘The cat is on the mat’ confirms ‘Something is on the mat’ independently of how these sentences are interpreted? Confirmation, if it is anything, is a relation between propositions. Furthermore, what interest could there be in saying that if push comes to shove, one can hold onto any uninterpreted sentence simply by making compensatory adjustments elsewhere in one’s theory (which is itself to be thought of as a set of uninterpreted sentences)? On the other hand, if statements are semantically interpreted, then QD has as a consequence that

103 F&L (1992), pp. 44-54.

104 In the above discussion of Quine’s argument, there was considerable looseness in the use of the term ‘statement’—the looseness was intended.

87 statements bear their confirmation relations contingently. The trouble here, however, is that it follows from verificationism that statements have their confirmation relations essentially since, on the proposal now under consideration, statements must have their conditions of semantic evaluation essentially. F&L conclude that verificationism and Q/D are incompatible and that the incompatibility can be avoided only by rendering the argument invalid. Furthermore, this situation has gone unnoticed because no one has bothered to consider what Quine meant by ‘statement’ or to ask which reading of it would be needed to support his Argument from Verificationism. I will not rehearse further the particular details of F&L’s argument or consider responses to it. For my purposes, it is enough to point out that there is some serious cause for concern over the validity of Quine’s argument, not to mention the truth of Q/D. The Argument from Verificationism and Analyticity Suppose, however, that we grant the cogency of Quine’s argument. What consequences can it be taken to have for A/S? A number of philosophers have pointed out recently that, at the most, this argument of Quine’s has undermined the possibility of providing an epistemic criterion for analyticity.105 In particular, they argue that Quine may have shown that the notions of unrevisability and aprioricity may be unsuitable (since, given Q/D, both of these properties are uninstantiated, if they are even coherent) for doing the job but that he has not undermined the possibility of providing some non-epistemic criterion, or perhaps some other suitable, epistemic criterion. Whether or not he has in fact undermined these possibilities depends on the answers to two further questions. First, is Quine right about verificationism—does meaning reduce to (or supervene over) confirmation relations? If so, then it would seem that we are constrained to giving an epistemic criterion for the analytic/synthetic distinction. In that case, we should ask whether or not Quine’s understanding of confirmation is correct. Setting aside confirmation holism for the moment, we might ask whether confirmation, and thus meaning, should be understood individualistically (in the sense of IND from chapter 1). Quine’s particular brand of verificationism, however, presupposes individualism, and that it does should not be surprising when it is recalled that Quine’s view is an early fore-runner to CRS. His view differs from CRS in that it does not countenance internal, representational states. Instead, he identifies “conceptual

105 For example, Boghossian (1993), Devitt (1993), and Rey (1993a) and (1993b) have all made this observation.

88 roles” with behavioral dispositions, and these latter are clearly individualistic. If individualism fails, however, then perhaps there is some hope for finding either a non-epistemic or an epistemic but non-individualistic criterion for A/S. We shall return to this issue later.

What we have so far is this: if Quine’s attacks on A/S are successful, then CRS entails semantic holism. But why should this matter?

89 CHAPTER 3

INSTABILITY AND THE CRACK

Two Challenges for Holistic CRS In the previous chapter, we considered an argument for the claim that CRS must be holistic. The idea was that CRS and the denial of A/S lead directly to semantic holism. Since, according to the argument considered earlier, A/S was successfully refuted by Quine (and this is something most CRS theorists accept anyway), all CRS theorists will be committed to holism, whether or not they want to admit it. This, however, raises a serious worry for the CRS theorist. It is widely believed that holism has a number of consequences so troubling that it would be better just to abandon the doctrine—for example, it is thought to place considerable stress on the possibility of robust, interpersonal identity of content, which in turn raises worries about genuine communication, change of opinion, and a host of other relatively mundane phenomena (the Problem of Instability), but in light of AA, this would require that CRS be abandoned as well. The other problem was raised by F&L and aims to show that whether or not CRS is construed holistically it is untenable. In this case, the problem results from an inconsistency in three of the fundamental semantic principles held by (nearly) all CRS theorists—they claim to have discovered a large crack in the theoretical foundations of CRS (The Crack).106

106 There are, of course, other problems associated with semantic holism, problems which, for lack of space, cannot be considered here.

90 The Problem of Instability Robust Content Identity A robust notion of content identity would allow individuals to share beliefs without having to share all beliefs, or more generally, to grasp contents without having to have all of the same beliefs and inferences. If meanings are conceptual roles or dispositions to verbal behavior, however, and such roles and dispositions are holistically individuated, then it would seem that there would be no room for a robust notion of content identity. The following problems are consequences of this apparent feature of semantic holism, and as such, fall under what I have previously referred to as the Problem of Instability. Intertranslatability Earlier, I argued that semantic holism and translational holism are equivalent doctrines. This means that any problems for the latter will also be problems for the former, and vice versa. Translational holism, however, has as a consequence that if two languages differ in their expressive resources at all then they do so completely. That is, if there is any expression of one language that cannot be adequately translated into the other, then no expressions (sentences) from either language can be legitimately translated into the other. It is perhaps uncontroversial that many natural language pairs, German and English, say, have terms that simply do not have accurate translations into the other. For example, ‘Schadenfreude’ might very well be an expression of German that resists exact translation into English; likewise, I’ve been told that there just is no expression in English that can capture the precise sense of the French word ‘ennui’. Whether or not the above examples are genuine examples of translation failure, it seems to be true that such failure is possible. For example, it is hard to imagine that ancient Greek had all of the conceptual resources of modern English, if we suppose the latter to include the vocabulary of the natural sciences. For example, it seems doubtful that Aristotle could have uttered a sentence that expresses the proposition that neutrinos have no mass. Since this proposition can be expressed in English but not in ancient Greek it cannot be translated from the one to the other. Translation holism would then entail that no sentence from either language could be translated by a sentence of the other (despite the protests of ancient scholars). No modern reader of the Republic will have grasped any of Plato’s thoughts unless that reader is reading it in the original Greek (and if individualism is correct, even this may not be enough). Communication and Disagreement Not only does semantic holism threaten to undermine translation from one language to another, but given two assumptions almost

91 ubiquitous in semantic discussions of the past few decades, it also threatens to undermine the very possibility of interpersonal communication. The assumptions I have in mind, very roughly put, are that the intensional content of public-language expressions (expression types) is derived intentional content—it being derived from the intentional content of one’s idiolect, of one’s mentalese, or of both, and that these non-derived contents are individualistic (and perhaps even introspectible). On this view, the timeless meaning of publicly accessible expression types is to be viewed as an abstraction from, or a theoretical construction upon, the meanings of expression tokens (or types relativized to an individual). It is often further suggested that these latter are then to be understood as deriving what meaning they have from suitably correlated mental expressions. For example, ‘cat’ means what it does in English because that is what most English speakers mean by it when they utter sentences containing it. ‘cat’, in the mouth of any English speaker, the story might then go on, will have the meaning it does for that particular speaker because it is correlated in some way (typically the connection is held to be a causal one) with some mental expression that means cat. Finally, some story is given explaining what is for mental expressions to mean what they do—the standard story being that that mental expression plays the right kind of conceptual role in that person’s thinking, CRS, where this role is individuated by means of the causal connections between it, other mental expressions, certain sensory inputs, and certain motor outputs. Since it is usually held that the other expressions will include the entire mentalistic vocabulary of the cognizer in question, i.e., since such theorists usually endorse a mentalistic form of anatomicity while also rejecting the mentalistic version of A/S (it being supposed that there are no prospects for isolating the causal relations between expressions that individuate functional roles from those that do not), such meanings are individuated holistically. What it is for some expression type E of public language L to have the meaning it does, then, is that for most speakers of the language, tokens of that type are correlated (in the right way) with mentalistic expressions that play the appropriate functional role in those speaker’s psychologies. Meanings for (public) expression types are thus individuated holistically at the level of mentalistic tokens. Given the internalist assumption and the denial of the mentalistic version of A/S, meanings now appear to be decidedly unstable fellows. The reason is that since functional roles are individuated holistically by their position in a fabric of actually held beliefs, two mental

92 expressions can play the same conceptual role only if they are (a) related to all of the same mental expressions and (b) related to them in the same way. This means that differences of conceptual resource, of belief, of levels of certainty, etc. will result in differences of conceptual role and ipso facto to differences in meaning. The upshot is that since for any two speakers there will almost certainly be some difference in conceptual resources, belief, levels of certainty, etc., it is doubtful that any two speakers can ever mean the same thing by anything they say. But if this is right, then there can never be such a thing as genuine communication, if that notion requires interpersonal sameness of meaning. If for me to communicate successfully to you I must utter some sentence which means the same thing for me as it does for you, then the view under consideration would certainly seem to have it as an extremely likely consequence that you and I never successfully communicate. The conclusion that there is never genuine communication is contingent since, though highly unlikely, it is nonetheless possible that for any public language expression two individuals should correlate with it the same functional role (indeed, if functional roles are holistically individuated, then they could do so for any particular expression only if they did so for all of them), in which case genuine communication would be possible after all. In such a case, however, communication would be rather dull (at least for philosophers) since the two individuals could never disagree about anything, and this, unlike the previous consequence, would follow necessarily. Suppose that Bill and Ted disagree over the truth-value of the sentence ‘Cold fusion is possible’. This disagreement would then correspond to a difference in the conceptual role of the mentalistic items correlated with that sentence. But since these items would have different conceptual roles, they would also have different meanings. So what might seem to be a genuine dispute fails to count as one since the proposition Bill expresses by means of that sentence is different from the one Ted expresses by means of it. If meaning is conceptual role, holistically individuated, then genuine disagreement goes the way of the round square or the male sister. Change of Mind If one also makes the plausible assumption that conceptual roles can change within a single individual, then the internalist holist is in for more trouble, for then not only does interpersonal disagreement appear impossible but so does intrapersonal diachronic disagreement, i.e., change of opinion. If a speaker accepts that the sentence ‘Semantic holism is

93 implausible’ is true at one moment but later comes to think that this sentence is false then, again, the functional role of the mentalistic expression corresponding to this sentence, and thus the meaning of the sentence itself, will have changed for that speaker. But if the meaning of the sentence has changed, then in what sense could the speaker be said to have changed his mind? On the classical view of propositional attitudes, change of opinion is possible only if an individual bears, at different times, contrary attitudes to the same proposition, not just to the same sentence, however interpreted. Unless one holds the implausible view that the objects of attitudes are uninterpreted sentences, semantic holism would seem to preclude the possibility of change of opinion. Language Acquisition If the above picture of internalist holism is correct, then such a view would also have radical consequences for our understanding of how it is that we acquire our linguistic skills. We typically suppose that the linguistic neophyte first conquers some core portion of a given language and then gradually and painstakingly increases her linguistic command by adding to that stable core. The picture is one of adding tools to one’s tool kit. When a new tool is added one increases the number of tasks that one can perform, though any task that could be performed before the addition can also be performed after it. Of course, we are all in the position of the neophyte to some degree—our command of the language is always improving. Unless we are completely insulated from the outside world, we are always learning the meanings of new words and refining our understanding of old ones. All of this, however, is commonplace. Commonplace may be out of place, however, if semantic holism is correct. For on that view, there is no stable core of meaning that survives changes in the overall functional organization of one’s cognition. Adding a new piece of vocabulary or a new grammatical device will necessarily change the functional role of every lexical item in one’s idiolect or every expression of one’s mentalese if an expression’s conceptual role is indeed holistically individuated by reference to its causal relations to every other lexical or mentalistic expression. The additions that are relevant here are not merely abbreviations of already learned, but complex, expressions or devices. What we are imagining here are additions to one’s conceptual resources that genuinely add to what one can say or think, and thus they must be seen as extending the expressive capacity of one’s idiolect or cognitive system. Internalist holism seems to be committed to the idea that such “extensions” are not really extensions at all. Instead they are

94 global revisions to one’s idiolect or mentalese. Adding new expressive resources to one’s vocabulary will change the meanings of every expression already in that vocabulary. The idea is that what happens when we acquire new linguistic skills is not adequately represented by the previous tool metaphor. Better would be a model that emphasizes replacement rather than continuity and extension. It is as if every time one buys a new kind of screw, one must also buy an entirely new set of tools to use it. Psychological Explanation Commonsense propositional psychology, as well as the more scientifically minded cognitive sciences, may also be casualties of semantic holism. If no sense can be made of robust content identity, then any mode of explanation which requires framing laws that connect mental states with behaviors may be paralyzed. For example, a standard way, maybe the standard way, of explaining someone’s behavior is by citing the beliefs and desires that produced it. I explain little Johnny’s midnight visit to the refrigerator by citing his desire for a snack and his belief that there is something to snack on in the refrigerator.107 Perhaps there might be a need to generalize here so that the behavior of others could be predicted or explained; the result might be the claim that if someone desires a snack and believes there are snacks available in the refrigerator, then she will raid the refrigerator.108 Now, such a generalization will be useful only if others can have mental states with the contents that I should have a snack and that there are snacks in the refrigerator, for it will only apply to individuals with concepts in question. But if holism is true, then whether or not someone has the concepts subsumed by the generalization will depend on all of the other beliefs that one possesses. The generalization could not usefully be applied to any two individuals who differed in any of their beliefs. Since it is virtually certain that no two people share all of the same beliefs, the likely conclusion is that such generalizations could be applied to at most one person. But which one? This will depend on how the concepts that make it up are fixed, and on an individualistic CRS, this will be the framer (in thought or speech) of the generalization. So, such a generalization

107 A full explanation would likely require reference to more beliefs and desires than just these two, but, for the sake of simplicity, I shall ignore this.

108 It is doubtful that this particular generalization would find much use in a rigorously developed science of psychology. Other more plausible candidates might include generalizations such as if you see the moon as being on the horizon, then you will see it as oversized, or if someone asks you what the first thing husbands make you think of, you’ll think of wives, or if you believe, of two objects seen in the distance but which actually appear the same size, that one is larger than the other, then you will believe that one is closer to you than the other, whether or not it actually is.

95 would apply only to the person who is considering it, if to anyone. This could hardly be useful to anyone interested in serious cognitive science. Recently, Michael Devitt has offered a far more general argument against the explanatory usefulness of holistic properties, of which the previous line of reasoning is an instance. If cogent, it would defeat holism across the board and not just in semantics. The main idea is that, generally speaking, explanations are more useful to us the more general they are, or the more capable they are of supporting generalizations. So, in a particular area of theorizing, we should always seek to identify and ascribe properties that can underwrite generalizations. Holistic properties, however, are very poorly constituted to meet this particular theoretical end. For example, we ascribe contents because we want to explain behavior, and learn about the world, but doing so requires, and is useful to us only if we have, suitable generalizations about those contents. But if contents are likely to be unstable across different minds at the same time or for the same mind at different times, then such generalizations will not be possible, and thus such ascriptions will not be useful. So, there is really no point in ascribing holistic contents.109 Now, if this point is correct, then one might draw one of two, variously optimistic conclusions. On the one hand, if one thinks that sense can be made of intentional notions, then one might draw the still hopeful conclusion that only atomic or anatomic meanings should be sought and ascribed. On the other hand, if one is convinced that the only things that could pass for meanings must be holistic in nature, one might prefer to draw the less sanguine conclusion that sciences such as semantics (if it requires intentional notions) and intentional psychology are dead ends. Given the connections between the objectivity of truth, meaning, and judgment sketched in chapter 1, such a conclusion might have disastrous consequences. Whether it does would depend on whether the fact that there can be no science of a certain purported class of phenomena is good grounds for denying the existence of that class. In other words, if lack of scientific legitimacy is sufficient grounds for lacking ontological legitimacy, and the connections drawn in chapter 1 are correct, then Devitt’s argument might be fashioned into a very strong argument for the claim that semantic properties must be legitimate and either atomic or anatomic. In any case, the connection between science and ontology is a fundamental assumption of any philosopher with a naturalistic disposition, and to the extent that a naturalistic

109 Devitt (1996), pp. 101-127.

96 semantics leads to semantic holism, such a position, if the above reflections are correct, may be inherently unstable. CRS, Holism, and Instability We are now in a position to frame the first of our challenges to CRS. In the last chapter, we considered some reasons for thinking that CRS entails semantic holism. In particular, we examined F&L’s argument that Quine’s attacks on A/S and CRS jointly entail holism about content. If, as a large number of philosophers now do, we assume A/S to have been refuted by Quine, then we are left with the idea that any content recognized by CRS must be holistic. In this chapter, however, we have seen that holism apparently leads to the Problem of Instability. If this is correct, then CRS is saddled with the Problem of Instability. Not only would CRS be incapable of saving the appearances of communication, disagreement, change of opinion, and language learning, but it will also be incapable of playing a useful role in any serious psychological theory—something for which CRS is widely thought to be inherently fit. If, as seems completely reasonable, you think that Instability simply incurs too high a cost, then the only available conclusion would be to reject holism and with it CRS. The Crack So, the above challenge to CRS depends on both CRS being holistic and holism being unstable. F&L offer another challenge that apparently does not depend on this last assumption, one which they regard as disturbing the very theoretical foundations of CRS. Ultimately, F&L charge that compositionality, holism, and the denial of A/S form an inconsistent triad. This constitutes a crisis for CRS, since, as they see things, the only viable versions of the theory are committed to each of these doctrines. According to F&L, the problem is so serious that it leaves a large crack in the foundations of much of contemporary semantics. For this reason, I have been calling this second challenge of theirs the Crack. I have already considered holism and the denial of A/S at some length (the upshot of chapter 2 was that if F&L are right, then CRS entails holism; below we shall see that, according to F&L, the only plausible versions of CRS are those which reject A/S). Before I turn directly to the Crack, let me say a few things about compositionality. Why Compositionality? Compositionality, recall, is the claim that the meaning of a complex expression is a function jointly of its structure and of the meanings of its proper parts. This is prime facie a plausible enough doctrine, though, on reflection, there seem to be numerous

97 counterexamples. In particular, a strong case for the principle can be made when attention is restricted to the literal use of language but quickly breaks down when it is extended to include figurative language such as metaphor. Leaving the difficult case of figurative language to one side, I would like to focus on language in its literal uses, since it is an account of such uses which I take to constitute the core of any philosophical account of language. In any case, one can avoid the problem of figurative language by stipulating that compositionality is a principle that pertains only to literal content. So then, what case can be made for the principle? In recent years, much has been made of certain apparent features of natural languages. Philosophers of language have placed much emphasis on the fact that languages are isomorphic to the propositions they express, productive, and systematic. Much of the plausibility that the compositionality of meaning enjoys lies in its ability to provide a simple, elegant, and uniform explanation of these, as well as other, features of natural languages. Let me say a bit about the above three features. Natural languages, or most of them anyway, are productive in the sense that anyone who speaks one will have at his disposal the wherewithal to produce and understand a potential infinity of sentences—at least if we abstract away from the obvious cognitive limitations of human speakers—and to do so despite our finite nature. As Davidson once put it, an “infinite [linguistic] aptitude can be encompassed by finite accomplishments.”110 This is a striking fact which calls out for explanation. It merits emphasis that a speaker of a language is thereby equipped to understand a potential infinity of new sentences, sentences that have never before been encountered by that speaker (and thus could not have been learned directly), and which are understood immediately once reflected upon, provided of course one understands the mode of composition and the meanings of the new sentence’s lexical constituents. Again, explanation is needed. Systematicity, on the other hand, is the idea that for just about any given proposition, if a language can express it then there will be a host of other systematically related propositions also expressible by that language. For example, a language that can express the proposition that if evil exists, then God does not will also be able to express, among others, the propositions that if God exists, then evil does not, that if God does not exist, then evil does, that if God exists, then

110 Davidson (1965), p. 8.

98 God exists, and that if evil exists, then evil exists. Likewise, any language that can express the proposition that Cain smote Abel, can also express the propositions that Abel smote Cain, and that Cain smote himself. Interestingly, if this is indeed a general and uncontroversial feature of natural languages, then there is at least one anatomicity thesis which holds uncontroversially. Should every sentence turn out to be systematically connected to others in this way, then we would have the following anatomicity thesis: a sentence expresses the proposition it does, say p, just in case there are sentences in the language that express those propositions systematically related to p. It might turn out to be an empirical matter how to understand the relation systematically related propositions, but one a priori candidate would be that two propositions are systematically related just in case one can be obtained from the other by rearranging propositional constituents of the same (semantic) category in the latter. This suggestion would, of course, presuppose some prior inventory of semantic categories. It would be a question of fundamental interest whether or not there are propositions that are systematically related in other ways. For example, are the propositions that Tom is a bachelor and that Tom is a male systematically related, and if so, in virtue of what are they so related? Though these questions are about propositions and not sentences, it seems clear that a positive answer to the first would commit one to the existence the variety of analytic sentences that Quine had worked so hard to disparage, while an answer to the second would be no easier than spelling out a principled analytic/synthetic distinction. Should this second question prove to be more tractable than the corresponding problem for sentences, however, then this would suggest a starting point for answering Quine’s worries. On a polemical note, the insistence that “systematicity is a . . . perfectly universal feature of natural languages”111 appears to be incompatible with the claim that semantic properties are atomic, a claim to which Fodor and Lepore are also committed.112 The reason is that expresses such and such a proposition is a perfectly legitimate semantic property, provided of course that talk of propositions is perfectly legitimate, and, as we have just seen, to hold that languages are all systematic is to hold that (for at least some of the sentences of any language) that property will be anatomic. It seems then that one cannot consistently affirm systematicity while also

111 Fodor and Lepore (1991), p. 147.

112 Ibid., p. 155, and Fodor and Lepore (1992), pp. 32-35.

99 denying semantic anatomism across the board. If languages are systematic, as I suspect they are, then at least one important semantic property is anatomistic. For those who are not squeamish about talk of propositions, isomorphism is that feature a language has when, as Fodor and Lepore put it, “the structure of sentences is . . . isomorphic to the structure of the propositions they express.”113 This characterization is of course somewhat vague, but, at a minimum, it commits one to the idea that the lexical constituents of a sentence S that expresses a proposition p will themselves express constituents of p, and further, when S is neither token-reflexive nor elliptical, its lexical constituents will express all of the constituents of p. The sentence ‘Dinosaurs are extinct’, for example, expresses the proposition that dinosaurs are extinct and has ‘dinosaurs’, ‘are’, and ‘extinct’ as its lexical constituents. Furthermore, the meanings of these three terms, whatever they turn out to be, are that proposition’s constituents.114 I accept that productivity, systematicity, and isomorphism are genuine features of at least some natural languages, though Fodor and Lepore take them to be true of all of them. Since it is largely an empirical issue just how widespread these characteristics are I will not insist on the stronger claim, though, for the sake of the discussion, I will grant that Fodor and Lepore are correct. As Fodor has long insisted, one very compelling motivation for accepting compositionality is that it provides a very natural and uniform explanation for productivity, systematicity, and isomorphism—so much so that, when doing semantics, compositionality is best considered as “non-negotiable”.115 Another motivation would be that it dovetails nicely with the classical conception of language acquisition, since on that conception each addition to one’s conceptual repertoire— whether a new piece of vocabulary or a new grammatical device—enlarges the stock of things that one can say and think by adding to what one could already say and think, rather than by

113 Ibid., p. 147.

114 To say that isomorphism holds for some language is not incompatible with the claim that some sentences of the language are not isomorphic to the propositions they express. For example, ellipsis is an extremely widespread phenomenon which would seem to undermine the isomorphism claim. The tension here, however, is only apparent, since all that is required is that for any proposition expressible in a language, there is some sentence of that language with which it is isomorphic. Since as far as I am aware, for any elliptical sentence there is a sentence which is its fully explicit expansion, this weaker requirement is generally satisfied.

115 Many, including Frege (1918-19) and Davidson (1965) and (1967), have seen in compositionality the key to explaining at least productivity.

100 replacing it en bloc. The intuitive idea is that by adding a new piece of vocabulary, for example, I exponentially increase what I can say, since I can now combine the new expression with a large number of expressions already learned, and whose meanings are relatively stable, by means of already mastered modes of composition. The Master Argument So, there seems to be good reason to accept compositionality. F&L, however, have argued that if we do accept it, as we should, then the Argument from Anatomicity is unsound.116 This claim is a corollary of a master argument they launch against CRS. They proceed by defending the claim that CRS, compositionality, and the denial of A/S form an inconsistent triad. Their defense comes in two waves. The first wave of the attack is to show that meaning is not global conceptual role. The reasoning is very simple: meaning is compositional, but global conceptual role is not. Hence, the two cannot be identified. The key premise here is the second. If it is false and meaning is nonetheless compositional, then the global conceptual role (for a particular speaker/cognizer) of ‘brown cow’ should be a function of the global conceptual roles of ‘brown’ and ‘cow’ along with the operation of predicate addition. The trouble is that it is hard to see how this could be so. For example, I might be disposed to infer ‘dangerous’ from ‘brown cow’ even though I might also be disposed to infer ‘not dangerous’ from both ‘brown’ and ‘cow’ when taken individually.117 After all, I just might believe that an overwhelming number of brown things are not dangerous, that an overwhelming number of cows are not dangerous, but that an overwhelming number of things that are both brown and a cow are highly vicious. But if so, then it is very hard to see how my global ‘brown cow’ conceptual role is a function of my global ‘brown’ and ‘cow’ conceptual roles. So, assuming compositionality, meaning cannot be global conceptual role. The second wave concerns the only other reasonable option for CRS, viz., that the meaning of an expression for an individual is constituted by a non-arbitrary sub-class of those inferences associated by that individual with that expression. That the sub-class is to be non- arbitrary is just another way of saying that the meaning of the expression is to be identified with its role in analytic inferences. Fodor and Lepore point out two problems with this maneuver. First, there is a kind of circularity involved in analyzing meaning as role in analytic inferences,

116 F&L (1991). Also, see F&L (1992), pp. 174-86.

117 The example comes from F&L (1991), pp. 147-9.

101 since analytic inferences would presumably be those inferences licensed solely by the meaning of a term. One can discount this objection, however, since such a CRS theorist would most likely attempt to provide some non-circular analysis of analyticity. Boghossian, for example, has pointed out that identifying conceptual role with role in analytic inference is not necessarily circular, since, as he puts it, ‘identifying conceptual role with analytic inference’ is ambiguous between ‘identifying conceptual role with role in analytic inference, under that very description’ and ‘identifying conceptual role with role in inferences that possess the property P, where P is necessarily equivalent to the property of being analytic’—the first reading, but not the second, being circular.118 Here, being necessarily equivalent is just a matter of being, as a matter of necessity, coextensional, and there is no reason to think this relationship presupposes analyticity (witness the necessary coextensionality between ‘having three angles’ and ‘rectilinear figure with three sides’). In any case, it is possible, and perhaps expected, that the type of CRS theorist under consideration would have this kind of identification in mind, but even so, this leads directly to the second, and more important, problem. Identifying conceptual role with role in analytic inference (on either reading) requires accepting A/S, but Fodor and Lepore clearly view this assumption as dubious at best.119 So, assuming the falsity of A/S, meaning cannot be role in analytic inference. Since global inferential role and role in analytic inferences are the only two real options for CRS, the final step in the master argument is to conclude that CRS is false. That is, if compositionality holds but A/S fails, then CRS is false. So, the three doctrines form an inconsistent triad (given other plausible assumptions). Since most CRS theorists accept both compositionality and the denial of A/S, and since both of the latter are more plausible than CRS, the only reasonable conclusion to draw, as Fodor and Lepore see things, is to reject CRS. If their reasoning is correct, then we now have some reason to reject the key premise of the Argument from Anatomicity—semantic anatomicity and (thus) CRS are both false.

118 Boghossian (1993), pp. 29-31.

119 Fodor and Lepore have in mind a robust understanding of the distinction. They concede that a weakened version of the principle, one that only recognizes as analytic relations between complex expressions and their lexical constituents, e.g., an inference from ‘brown cow’ to ‘cow’, is relatively unproblematic. What they reject is extending the notion to include relationships between lexical simples, e.g., inferences from ‘cow’ to ‘animal’ or from ‘red’ to ‘color’.

102 They go on to argue that the above considerations, if correct, would be enough to show that the Argument from Anatomicity is unsound.120 They reason as follows. Either A/S holds or it does not. In the former case the second premise of the argument is false, since that premise just denies A/S. In the latter case, the second premise would be true, but given the above reasoning and assuming compositionality (we are already assuming the denial of A/S) it would follow that the first premise of the argument is in this instance false. In either case (and assuming excluded middle, there are no others), the argument has a false premise and thus is unsound. This, of course, is just another way of saying that compositionality, CRS, and the denial of A/S form an inconsistent triad and that compositionality is true. So, if one is a believer in compositionality, one had better not endorse any version of the Argument from Anatomicity. Are Compositionality and Holism Really Incompatible? One might still wonder whether compositionality is incompatible with holism itself, rather than just with one argument for it. If the meaning of every expression of some language is systematically dependent upon the meaning of every other expression of it, could it nonetheless be the case that the meaning of a complex expression is determined by its structure and the meanings of its lexical constituents? Here is one reason to think it could not. If the meaning of an expression depends upon the meaning of every other expression then it will ipso facto also depend upon the meaning of every sentence of which it is a constituent. But then how could it be possible that the meanings of those sentences are also determined by the meanings of their lexical constituents (all of whose meanings are partially determined by it)? It would seem that we have here a case of mutual determination, something which many philosophers might find hard to swallow. The problem is not just a problem for holism but it is also a problem for some celebrated (properly) anatomic theses as well. Most notably, this is also a problem for Frege who simultaneously endorsed compositionality and the context principle, i.e., the thesis that we are “never to ask for the meaning of a word in isolation, but only in the context of a proposition.”121 It is somewhat controversial what Frege meant by this and whether it was something to which he subscribed after the Grundlagen. One standard reading, however, is that the meaning of a word is dependent upon the meanings of all of the sentences of which it is a constituent. Perhaps what

120 Fodor and Lepore (1991), p. 153.

121 Frege (1884), x.

103 is meant here is that (as some, including Quine and Davidson, have claimed) its meaning is an abstraction from the meanings of the sentences in which it occurs. Whether or not Frege himself ever held such a view, and if so, when, it is undoubtedly the case that others have, and doing so makes them vulnerable to the same worry about mutual determination that was described above. In fact, the problem is nicely isolated in this case, and a solution for it here might very well count as a solution for the holistic case as well. But is the worry a genuine one? Clearly, whether it is will depend on what is meant by phrases such as ‘depends on’, ‘is determined by’, etc. In particular, if there are plausible readings of compositionality and semantic holism (or the context principle) which employ these terms in different senses, then there need be no conflict at all between the principles, there being no prima facie inconsistency in declaring, for example, that F’s depend only on G’s but that F’s also depend on H’s which happen to be distinct from G’s, provided one means something different by ‘depend’ in each case. Just this has been suggested by Dummett in the hopes of rescuing Frege from inconsistency and by Peter Pagin with similar hopes vis-à-vis semantic holists.122 In a nutshell, Dummett’s main idea is that the difference in the dependence involved in each principle is a matter of scope.123 The compositionality principle (for sense) holds universally for complex sentences. The meaning of every such sentence is indeed determined by the meanings of its lexical parts, and this must be understood in such a way as to presuppose that those parts have stable, separable meanings. The context principle, on the other hand, informs us that it is folly to think of those meanings as being completely separable from all sentential contexts. Since a word means what it does partly because of its behavior in complete sentences, to understand the meaning of a word completely in isolation is, to borrow a phrase from a different but related context, “to wash the fur without wetting it.”124 So, we cannot hope either to understand or explain the meaning of a word independently of its occurrence in at least some sentential contexts. This does not mean, however, that the meaning of a sub-sentential expression is dependent on the meanings of all of the sentences in which it might occur, for then

122 Dummett (1973), (1981), and (1991a), and Pagin (1997).

123 Dummett (1991a), pp. 202-4.

124 Frege (1884), p. 36.

104 an important part of the explanatory value of compositionality would be rendered useless, viz., its ability to explain how a speaker can grasp almost instantly the meaning of a sentence with which he has had no prior acquaintance. Rather, what is required is that for any meaningful expression, there is some special class of sentences containing that expression an understanding of which constitutes a grasp of the sense of that expression—perhaps the classes of those sentences which illustrate the most basic use of the expression in question. For example, to understand the count noun ‘horse’ one must understand sentences such as ‘This is a horse’, ‘This horse is the same as that horse’, and ‘This horse is not the same as that horse’, sentences an understanding of which demonstrates a knowledge of how to identify and individuate horses—something which must be known if one is to understand the role that ‘horse’ plays in the language. Once such an understanding is achieved, one will then be able to understand the contribution that the meaning of ‘horse’ makes to the meaning of other sentences in which it might occur. How one is to arrive at an understanding of the sentences in the dependency-class without already understanding the meaning of the expression in question, however, remains to be seen. So, on Dummett’s proposal, compositionality would hold for every sentence, while the context principle, properly understood, would only concern special sub-classes of them. In this way, the above tension could be avoided, but precisely because this solution depends on a difference in generality, it cannot be extended to solve the problem for semantic holism. Pagin, on the other hand, explores two possible solutions. One solution regards the kind, rather than the extent, of the determination/dependency involved in each principle to be different. The other solution takes the two principles to involve the same kind of determination/dependency but to be using it to relate different classes of things. On either solution, however, Pagin takes semantic holism to be a metaphysical thesis about the nature and constitution of meaning.125

125 A theory of meaning which determines, in this sense, the meanings of the expressions of some language L will, generally speaking, do three things. First, it will specify the basic properties P1, . . . , Pn and relations R1, . . . , Rn over which all facts about meanings will supervene. Second, it will specify a class C constituting the entire range of all of these properties (intuitively, this will be the class of meaningful expressions of L). Finally, for every element e of C, the theory will specify the relevant meaning determining facts but it must do so solely in terms of which of the properties P1, . . . , Pn e has and relations R1, . . . , Rn e bears to other elements of C. A semantic holist views meaning in much the same way that a structuralist about mathematics views numbers—just as numbers are individuated solely by virtue of their positions in certain structures, the meaning of an expression, say e, will be individuated in terms of the complex of relations it bears to every other element of C (and furthermore for every other element of C it does bear some of these relations). When such a holist is also a naturalist, the properties P1, . . . , Pn and relations R1, . . . , Rn will all be non-semantic in nature.

105 To begin with, if compositionality is understood as a thesis about the metaphysical constitution of the meanings of complex expressions, then it might very well be incompatible with the above understanding of semantic holism. The latter regards meaning as constituted by vast networks of relations, while a metaphysical reading of compositionality would seem to locate the identity conditions of sentence meanings internally rather than relationally. The meaning of a complex expression is literally constituted by the meanings of its lexical constituents, and since the meanings of these constituents are the only things that constitute its meaning (along with its structure), those meanings must be atomic in nature rather than holistic, or even properly anatomic (otherwise, since constitution is presumably transitive the complex expression’s meaning would also be partially determined by, or dependent upon, the meaning of any other expression to which one of its lexical constituents is anatomically related). Instead of reading compositionality as involving a strong form of metaphysical determination/dependence, we might instead read it as involving a weaker kind of “mathematical” determination. On such a reading, compositionality requires only that, once meanings have been determined, whether holistically, atomically, or whatever, there be some abstract function from syntactic structure and meanings of constituent expressions to meanings of complex expressions. On such a construal, compositionality would be completely neutral as to the precise character of any such function. One can see Block (1993) as adopting something like this strategy. There Block concedes that holistic CRS entails that the semantic identity of any word in a language will carry information about the properties of every word in that language. The resulting kind of compositionality, which he regards as the limiting case of genuine compositionality, is what he calls hyper-compositionality. Normally, the compositionality constraint is taken to require that however the meanings of, e.g., the lexical constituents of ‘Rattling snakes are dangerous’, are to be explained the meanings of ‘rattling’, ‘snakes’, and ‘dangerous’ must, when combined in the right way determine the meaning of that sentence. Hyper-compositionality does in fact satisfy this constraint, since the meaning of each of these expressions, taken individually, determines the sentence’s meaning. Somewhat trivially, then, they do so when combined in the right way. Anticipating the obvious rejoinder by F&L that compositionality is needed to explain productivity and systematicity, something which is not done by hyper-compositionality, Block

106 distinguishes between semantic compositionality and psychosemantic compositionality.126 Semantic compositionality, the kind of compositionality that is relevant to a formal semantic theory, requires only that there be some function from the semantic values of parts to the semantic values of wholes. Psychosemantic compositionality, on the other hand, is the requirement, of a theory, that it tell us how people represent the meanings of words and then use them to form representations of the meanings of sentences. Pace F&L, it is psychosemantic, not semantic, compositionality that is needed to explain systematicity and productivity, and a CRS need not be expected to accomplish these tasks by itself. CRS allows for hyper- compositionality, a genuine form of semantic compositionality, and this may be all that is required of an unsupplemented CRS. This response of Block’s depends on two key assumptions: first, it assumes that CRS is meant only as a formal semantic theory, and second, it seems to assume that semantic and psychosemantic compositionality need not be inter-related notions. Given that CRS is explicitly designed to play a central role in some kind of rigorously developed psychology, the first assumption seems dubious at best. The second assumption seems at least equally problematic. Block’s two kinds of compositionality are intimately related in the sense that they must dovetail in such a way as to be mutually constraining. Psychosemantic compositionality cannot be completely independent of semantic compositionality, since the meanings that are represented are the meanings ascribed by the formal semantic theory. Semantic compositionality, on the other hand, cannot be given completely independently of psychosemantic compositionality, since what meanings a formal theory can ascribe will have to be constrained by empirical facts about what meanings speakers/thinkers can represent. This is, of course, just another incarnation of the old point that meaning and grasp (understanding) must be mutually constraining. If this is right, and if the notion of content recognized by some particular formal semantic theory is hyper- compositional, then that account of content will be inadequate, provided that a hyper- compositional conception of content is indeed inadequate to the needs of a psychosemantic

126 Pagin (1997), makes basically the same point in response to a purely formal treatment of compositionality. As he puts it, “it is not obvious that the explanatory purposes that compositionality is to serve can be served by a mere mathematical principle,” (p. 15). In particular, it is doubtful that we would still have a plausible explanation of productivity, and it seems that to preserve this particular virtue of compositionality, we would have to give it a stronger, metaphysical reading. In F&L (1993b), p. 677, a similar objection is made in response to similar suggestions by Block and McLaughlin.

107 theory. If such notions of compositionality could be provided, however, such that they really do inform one another in the desired way, then Block’s solution might pan out after all. Another option would be to find a way of avoiding the conflict while reading both holism and compositionality as metaphysical principles. According to Pagin, doing so may not be inconsistent, since compositionality does not in fact say anything about how the meanings of the simple parts themselves are determined.127 If compositionality commits us to seeing the meanings of complex expressions as being dependent upon the meanings of their parts, then semantic holism will be incompatible with it if it (semantic holism) includes sentences as well as simple expressions under its purview. If the meaning of an expression depends on the meaning of every other expression of the language, then, should both sentences and simple expressions be included, by compositionality a sentence will constitutively depend for its meaning on its lexical constituents while, by semantic holism, its lexical constituents will constitutively depend upon it for their meanings. Might the problem be avoided by viewing semantic holism as concerning only complex expressions (in particular, sentences)? Again, it seems that this solution would do nothing to solve the problem, since once again the meaning of a sentence would depend constitutively on its structure and the meaning of its parts (by compositionality) and on the meaning of every other sentence of the language (by holism). But then given the latter assumption and compositionality, applied to every other sentence, it would seem that the meaning of the original sentence would also depend constitutively on the meaning of every simple expression of the language, provided that constitution is transitive. But then any explanatory advantage gained by compositionality would have been lost, since it could only be read as saying that, among other things, the meaning of a sentence is determined by the meanings of its lexical constituents and its structure—those other things including the meaning of every other simple expression in the language. What, if anything, is really left of compositionality? Furthermore, on this proposal, semantic holism would seem to lose much of its interest, since if it were not taken as a doctrine applying to simple expressions, then, for many philosophers of language (or mind), one of the main motivations for accepting holism would have been lost, viz., that for many simple expressions, and in particular

127 Pagin (1997).

108 those that express our most fundamental concepts, semantic holism offers a plausible way of understanding meaning determination. Pagin’s way out of the thicket would be to endorse a metaphysical reading of compositionality while also endorsing a metaphysical reading of semantic holism, but the latter only as applied to simple expressions. If semantic holism is understood as a doctrine pertaining only to simple expressions, then compositionality might nonetheless still hold, since there is no apparent conflict, circularity, or inconsistency in the idea that while sentences depend for their meaning on the meanings of their lexical parts, simple expressions depend for their meanings on all of the other simple expressions of the language. But does Pagin’s suggestion really perform as advertised? In particular, does this proposal really restrict the dependencies in such a way that it insulates the compositional holist from the above worries? First, Pagin concedes that on this construal the meanings of all expressions of a language, simple and complex alike, will nonetheless be determined together.128 Let S and S′ be sentences of L. By compositionality, the meaning of S will be determined by its composition and the meanings of its proper parts, while by the version of holism under consideration, the meanings of those proper parts and the meanings of the proper parts of S′ are interdependent, being determined together. But given compositionality and the composition of S′, S′’s meaning is fully determined, since the meanings of its parts have been determined. This fully general linguistic interdependence raises a pressing question for Pagin: In what does the difference of dependence between simple expressions and that between complex and simple expressions consist? One suggestion might be that keeping the meanings of the simple expressions constant, we could change the meanings of the complex expressions by changing the principles of semantic composition. Pagin rejects this suggestion, however, on the basis that it is primarily in virtue of the interaction of simple expressions through the principles of semantic composition that the meanings of simple expressions are interdependent at all. This is just a manifestation of one version of the context principle, viz., one according to which simple expressions mean what they do by virtue of the role the play in determining the meaning, semantic value, or whatever, of complex expressions (in particular, of sentences). We cannot, then, change that role without changing those meanings. The right answer, according to Pagin, is

128 Ibid., p. 16.

109 that what distinguishes the kind of dependence at issue is that “you can take away subsets of sentences from the language while retaining the old semantics for the remaining fragment. The idea is that what remains is semantically independent of what is taken away, while what is taken away does not retain any meaning in isolation. Thus take any complex expression α of language L. Form a new language L′ by removing from L every expression that has α as a constituent part. Then any expression in L′ has the same meaning as it has in L. And if you add to L′ the set of syntactic objects that were taken away, then the result is precisely L, since the principles of composition of L′ will assign meanings, to those syntactic objects, which coincide with the meanings they have in L. The result is that no simple expression semantically depends on any complex expression and that every complex expression depends on its parts.”129 Pagin’s response, however, simply fails to resolve the difficulty. If L′ is indeed to be thought of as a language (a set of meaningful syntactic objects governed by recursive rules of semantic composition) which happens also to be a proper fragment of L, then either some simple expression in L is not also in L′ or some mode of composition of L is not one of L′. In either case, however, the meanings of the simple expressions of L and L′ must be different. Given semantic holism (restricted to simple expressions), the removal of a simple expression would change the meanings of all of the remaining simple expressions. Given Pagin’s concession as to the way in which simple expressions must interact in order to be holistically interdependent, the removal of a compositional rule would also have the same effect. Pagin has thus failed to show how the dependence at the level of simple expressions is symmetric while that between complex and simple expressions is asymmetric. Since both dependency relations are to be viewed as concerning metaphysical constitution, it seems that the holism involved cannot be restricted to primitive expressions alone, and thus Pagin’s preferred solution fails. I here draw the tentative conclusion that a metaphysical reading of semantic holism is indeed incompatible with a metaphysical reading of compositionality, or at the very least, that we have not yet been given any plausible interpretation of these principles that would make them compatible. We do have Dummett’s solution, but since this only reconciles compositionality with the context principle, we still have been given no way of avoiding the problem for holism.

129 Ibid., 17.

110 If holism and compositionality really are incompatible, then the problem is not so much the triad, but this particular pair of doctrines. So, unless either (i) some suitable metaphysical interpretations of compositionality can be fashioned or (ii) some inter-related notions of semantic and psycho-semantic compositionality can be supplied, either holism or compositionality must go. Why Is Rejecting CRS the Most Plausible Option? F&L take it for granted that it is, and their reason is fairly straightforward: because it entails semantic holism and semantic holism is far less plausible than either compositionality or the denial of A/S. But now why do they think semantic holism is the least plausible option? Block has convincingly argued, to my mind at least, that their reason must be that doing so would require seeing sentences such as ‘Rattling snakes are dangerous’ (|Rattling snakes are dangerous|) as analytic whenever they are accepted as true (believed), and that the only real reason they could give for finding this problematic would be that doing so would make it nearly impossible for us to make sense of communication, disagreement, change of opinion, and psychological explanation.130 In other words, what lies at the bottom of their quick dismissal of holism as a response to the Crack (the inconsistent triad) is a failure of nerve in the face of Instability.

The Crack, then, actually depends on the Problem of Instability, since it seems that the only rationale that F&L can give for rejecting semantic holism, rather than compositionality or the denial of A/S, is that retaining it simply incurs too high a price and brings with it too few benefits to outweigh the costs of either alternative. So, pace F&L, the Crack is really not independent of the Problem of Instability. In response to the Crack, the CRS theorist can deny that she is guilty of accepting an inconsistent triad either by showing that there really is no inconsistency or by denying that she must accept the triad. If she adopts the latter tack, then, assuming that CRS does in fact entail holism, she must still confront the Problem of Instability. Supposing that F&L have indeed put their finger on a genuine inconsistency, a solution to the Problem of Instability might also count as a solution to the Crack. How, then, might the CRS theorist handle the Problem of Instability?

130 Block (1993), pp. 3-11.

111 CHAPTER 4

STABILIZING HOLISTIC CRS: NARROW CONTENT, CONTENT SIMILARITY, SUPERVENIENCE, AND MULTIPLE MEANINGS

Managing Instability A number of responses have been offered on behalf of semantic holism which, if successful, would either disarm the Problem of Instability completely or at least render it harmless. I shall now consider what I take to be some of the more compelling (or at least more interesting) suggestions. After arguing that none of them succeeds, I will, in the final chapter, outline what I believe to be a more promising alternative. Two-Factor Theories One common approach to dealing with these holistic worries is to admit them while limiting their reach. This has been the approach of many CRS theorists who have advocated a two-factor approach to meaning/content. On any non-eliminativist account, the meaning of a sentence (mental or linguistic) is relevant to at least two different kinds of explanation: one that concerns the sentence’s truth-conditions and referential relations to reality and another that concerns behavior. The two-factor theorist is a CRS theorist who concedes that Putnam’s Twin-Earth considerations show that these two jobs cannot be performed by some one thing. As mentioned in chapter 1, the narrow aspect of a sentence’s content is that aspect which is relevant to explaining human behavior. Such explanations will be psychologistic in the sense that they will be framed in terms of categories such as belief and desire and they raise the possibility of framing laws connecting various distributions of beliefs and desires with various observable behaviors. Since the CRS theorist is a functionalist, her story will be tailor-made to accommodate such belief-desire explanations of behavior. The broad aspect of a sentence’s content, on the other hand, is to be located in that sentence’s truth-conditions, and, unlike the narrow factor, is constituted by direct word-world links.

112 The suggestion, then, for a CRS theorist of the two-factor stripe is that the effects of semantic holism are sufficiently isolated, since holism applies only to narrow, but not to wide, content.131 The idea is that since CRS properly applies to narrow content, and there is no hope of reviving A/S, we must indeed accept that such content is holistic and learn to live with its consequences. But we can live with such consequences, since wide content might still be as atomic (or properly anatomic) as you wish. So, there is an aspect of meaning which can be recognized as perfectly stable and as subject to the principle of compositionality, even though semantic holism is true. Furthermore, while narrow content may be holistic and thus unsuitable to ground an account of communication, or to explain how agreement, disagreement, or change- of-opinion are possible, broad content can accommodate these facts. What one attempts to communicate to another by uttering some sentence is the truth-condition of that sentence. Such communication will be successful provided that the utterer and the hearer associate with the tokened sentence the same truth-condition, and since truth-conditions are not individualistic in nature, but are grounded in word-world relations, doing so will be possible. The same will be the case mutatis mutandis for agreement, disagreement, and change of opinion. Though this suggestion might seem promising at first blush, it really does little to weaken the sting of Instability. First, as we saw in chapter 1, there is an issue regarding the precise relationship between narrow and wide content. If narrow content corresponds to Fregean Sinn, with wide content corresponding to semantic value, then one would think that narrow content determines wide content. But as the Twin-Earth considerations show, this cannot be the case. Two speakers can be molecule for molecule type-identical, and thus associate exactly the same narrow content with a sentence, even though the sentence has different truth-conditions for the two speakers. Indeed, one of the primary reasons for moving to the two-factor view was to accommodate this insight. As we saw in chapter 1, however, narrow content plus context and narrow content plus normal context do not fare any better. Conversely, wide contents cannot determine narrow contents and for familiar reasons. ‘Cicero is Cicero’ has the same truth- condition as ‘Tully is Cicero’, even though these two sentences will, for most speakers anyway, have different cognitive significance. The two-factor theorist will explain this by insisting that the two sentences have, for most speakers, different narrow contents. Indeed, the very fact that

131 E.g., Field (1977), and Block (1986). Lormand (1996) occasionally seems to adopt this strategy as well; see, for example, p. 58.

113 conceptual role is appealed to in order to explain these phenomena is the primary reason why the conceptual role factor of a sentence’s content is called its narrow content—such contents are more finely sliced than truth-conditions, being individuated by properties that are “in the head”. So, two-factor CRS theorists must see neither factor as being determined by the other and thus as seeing the two as being only contingently connected. But then we are faced with F&L’s question: “What keeps the two factors stuck together?”132 For example, what is to prevent ‘The cat is on the mat’ from having the wide content (the truth-condition) that the cat is on the mat but the narrow content that Aunt Peggy is coming to dinner? If both features are genuinely semantic, then a two-factor CRS will be plausible only if it can explain why they cannot come apart, or at least why they generally do not. That explaining this connection is urgent is conceded by Block, one of the chief spokesmen for CRS. Indeed, it is the first of eight desiderata he officially recognizes as applying to any viable semantic theory.133 That wide and narrow contents are not firmly stuck together raises another serious difficulty for the account. It is supposed to be a virtue of two-factor CRS that (a) narrow contents are well-adapted to the needs of a scientific, intentional psychology while (b) wide contents are well-adapted the needs of truth-conditional semantics, communication, etc. But if neither factor determines the other, then it seems that much of the explanatory value of (a) and (b) will have been lost, since the two kinds of explanations are highly interdependent. After all, communication, agreement, disagreement, and change of opinion can all affect one’s behavior. For example, when Bart tells Lisa that Homer is sad, he has communicated to her. On the present account, then, he has communicated to her the wide content that Homer is sad. But now suppose that Lisa, desiring to improve the mood of her sad father, tells Homer that Marge is making pork-chops for dinner. What explains this particular piece of behavior of hers are the following facts about her: (a) she believes that Homer is sad, (b) she desire that Homer not be sad, and (c) she believes that Homer will be happier if he can expect to eat pork-chops in the near future. Now, the objects of the beliefs and desires mentioned in (a) though (c) must be narrow contents, since they figure in a psychological explanation of Lisa’s behavior. We also want to say, however, that Bart’s having communicated to her that Homer is sad should fit into the above

132 F&L (1992), p. 170.

133 Block (1986), p. 82.

114 explanation as well. After all, if Bart had not told her, she would not have done what she did. But if what Bart communicated to her is not identical to what she believed in believing that Homer is sad (and they cannot be, since the former must be a wide content while the latter must be a narrow one) and if wide and narrow contents do not determine one another, then it is very hard to see how Bart’s act of communication could have any place in such an explanation. Surely, whatever content Bart communicates to her must be the same content as that which ultimately moves her or must determine the content which ultimately moves her. But if wide and narrow contents can at best be only accidentally paired, then it seems that Bart’s act of communication does not do much in helping to explain Lisa’s behavior. Two further points deserve emphasis in this connection. First, if narrow contents are themselves really contents, and thus are intentional (if they are not intentional, then it seems to me somewhat inappropriate to call them contents), then they must be susceptible to truth- evaluations, and thus must have their own truth-conditions. If so, then how is this truth- condition related to the sentence’s wide content. Is it the same, or different? If it is the same as the former, then why were wide and narrow content divorced in the first place? But if it is not, then how are these truth-conditions related, and which one determines the truth-value of the sentence in question? Second, if narrow contents do indeed have truth-conditions, then, as the Twin-Earth considerations apparently show, they cannot be individualistic either, i.e., such contents cannot supervene over mental and physical properties which “stop at the skin”. All of this suggests a certain dilemma for the two-factor CRS theorist. On the one hand, that there is some connection between some proposed notion of content C for an expression E and E’s semantic value is a necessary condition for viewing C as intentional. The narrow content theorist, however, is forced into severing any connection between broad and narrow contents and thus ipso facto is forced in to severing any connection between an expression’s narrow content and its semantic value. But that C is intentional seems itself to be a necessary condition for C’s even counting as a kind of content—if something is not intentional, it is not a content. What the Twin-Earth considerations suggest, on the other hand, is that if something is intentional, then it cannot be narrow. Since, everything is either intentional or not, nothing can be both narrow and a content. Hence, narrow contents are impossible (we might call this the Narrow Content Dilemma).

115 The moral here might very well be taken to be the following: the organismic contribution to content cannot be teased apart from the inorganismic components while leaving anything that truly counts as content; whatever is sorted out as properly “beneath the skin” might be relevant to something like neurophysiology and might very well figure in certain kinds of explanation, but it will not be relevant to any science concerned with intentional explanations or with semantics, generally speaking. Whether or not solutions can be found for the above problems, it remains the most serious defect of the current proposal that it does not actually insulate holism from the threat of Instability. As was noted, the Instability problem is a direct result of the inability of holistic conceptions of content to provide for a robust notion of content identity. This particular bullet is not dodged by limiting holistic conclusions to narrow contents. Ironically, if psychological laws presuppose a robust notion of content identity, then the CRS conception of narrow content appears just as incapable of meeting its explanatory raison d’être. But if such laws do not presuppose such a strong notion as robust content identity, but only some weaker notion, then perhaps some version of two-factor CRS can be sustained after all. This brings us to the next suggestion. Content Similarity A number of different theorists have responded to the Problem of Instability by rejecting the assumption that content identity is really needed to meet our explanatory ends.134 The instability accompanying semantic holism does seem to rule out the possibility of content identity, but no worries, since all that we really need is a workable notion of content similarity. If we could suppose that while the meanings of two persons’ terms are, while not the same, similar enough for practical purposes, then corresponding conceptions of intertranslatability, communication, disagreement, change of mind, and language acquisition could be fashioned accordingly. A further, perhaps more fundamental, reason for seeking a replacement for the notion of content identity is that such a notion would be necessary to support robust intentional generalizations, i.e., intentional generalizations across individuals. The worry was that if holism rules out identity of content, then such generalizations might not be available, in which case the possibility of rigorous intentional explanations would collapse. Might content similarity save the day?

134 For example, Block (1986), Churchland (1991) and (1998), and Harman (1975b) and (1993) have all adopted such a strategy.

116 What would be needed, of course, is a clearer understanding of the relation similar enough for practical purposes. For starters, this relation, unlike content identity, would not be an equivalence relation, since, while reflexive and symmetric, it would not be transitive. Furthermore, on any such account, what would make two expressions more (or less) similar in meaning would be that they, for some appropriate set of properties and relations, have sufficiently many (or few) or the same properties or enter into sufficiently many (or few) of the same relations. It would be the task of a particular theory of meaning to identify the relevant properties and relations and, if possible, to indicate, even if only vaguely, how many of the shared properties and relations are required to underwrite intertranslatability, communication, etc. For example, a CRS theorist such as Field might say that two sentences are more similar in meaning for one speaker (or one sentence for two speaker’s) the more similar are one’s (or the two speakers’) subjective assignments of relative probability,135 while Churchland says that two expressions are similar in meaning when they express concepts that occupy similar positions in the same state space.136 I shall not consider, here, how such accounts might handle the second problem. F&L have argued that accounts which dispense with a robust notion of content identity in favor of one of content similarity fail on the grounds that such accounts will themselves presuppose a robust notion of content identity.137 Their general idea seems to be this. A robust notion of content identity would be one which allows some identity of content between expressions as used by two people, or by one person across time, even though their total conceptual resources, sets of beliefs, assignments of subjective probability functions, or whatever, only partially (though perhaps mostly) overlap. According to most versions of semantic holism, however, content identity between parts entails overall identity of content. The problem is thought to be avoided by settling for mere similarity of content between parts. But just what does such similarity amount to?

135 Field (1977). Field endorses a two-factor version of CRS in which the narrow factor is determined holistically by subjective probability functions.

136 Churchland endorses a state-space semantics, according to which the semantic properties of an expression are determined by the position it occupies in a state-space of arbitrary dimensions.

137 F&L (1992), pp. 17-21.

117 There seem to be two general possibilities. Remember that semantic holists individuate content bearing items holistically by specifying (i) a class of things to be related (representations, whether lexical or mentalistic), and (ii) ways of relating them. What it is, then, for some thing to bear the particular content it does consists in all of the relations (as specified in (ii)) it bears to all of the other things specified in (i)—this is, of course, just what it was that made content identity non-robust. Two expressions would be similar in content, then, just in case they occupy similar positions in the same, or similar, structures. Importantly, the items and relations specified by (i) and (ii) will either be intentional or they will not. Naturalistically minded theorists will want to opt for the latter alternative, selecting only naturalistically acceptable things, properties, and relations to constitute the appropriate structures over which intentional contents supervene. F&L complain, however, that even if identity of content does supervene over identity of physical constitution, it would not follow that similarity of content would supervene over similarity of physical constitution. As they put it, “No doubt there are indefinitely many ways in which the brains of molecular cousins are similar; but there are also indefinitely many ways in which they aren’t, and we have no idea how to decide which similarities and differences are the ones that determine whether their beliefs are similar. Which is just to say that nobody has a better idea of how to explicate a notion of physical similarity that is relevant to psychological taxonomy than of how to explicate a notion of content similarity that is relevant to psychological taxonomy.”138 So far, the naturalistic options fail to provide much insight, but it is a bit unclear, at least from these comments, exactly why F&L see a problem of principle here rather than just a lack of effort. Their discussion of a specific such attempt, viz., Churchland’s, might help to fill in some of the gaps of their general argument.139 Recall that, on a holistic account of content, content similarity presupposes either the notion of sameness of global structure or the notion of similarity of global structure—similarity being defined as similar position in the same, or similar, structure (as above). Put another way, one’s total language (representational system) can be seen as a complicated network constituted by individual expressions as its nodes which are then connected by semantically relevant relations (usually causal/inferential ones). Since nodes are defined by

138 F&L (1992), p. 20.

139 Ibid., pp. 189-205.

118 their place in the network, identifying contents with nodes means that two networks can token expressions with the same contents just in case the networks are type-identical. Content similarity, on the other hand, requires only that two nodes occupy a similar place in type identical networks or the same or similar place in similar networks. Traditional empiricist ways of understanding such networks allow that certain of the nodes will count as “fixed points”, which are non-holistically identified, being tied more or less directly to observation. This observational vocabulary fixes the net empirical content of the entire representational system, and the contents of those expressions which are not found on this observational periphery are determined by all of the relations such expressions bear to the observational vocabulary, whether directly or indirectly through their relations to other non- observational terms (this is, of course, the standard Quinean picture). Such traditional accounts, aside from “strik[ing] one as intolerably empiricistic”140, will, to the extent that they recognize terms whose contents are determined independently of the contents of other expressions (i.e., something like an observational vocabulary), constitute a move away from semantic holism. Churchland’s state-space semantics is an attempt to “free the network picture of semantics from its empiricist assumptions.”141 Since the resulting picture is more thoroughly holistic, its very legitimacy as a scientifically useful framework will depend on the possibility of providing a workable metric for similarity of content. Churchland’s basic idea, as summarized by F&L, is that

A “Quinean” network semantics . . . can be thought of as describing a space whose dimensions correspond to observable properties and in which each expression of the object language is assigned a position in the space. . . . Since the empiricism of the standard network proposal resides in the requirement that all the dimensions of the semantic space in which the concepts are located must correspond to observable properties, all you have to do to get rid of the empiricism is to abolish this requirement. What’s left are semantic state spaces of arbitrary dimensions, each dimension corresponding to a parameter in terms of which the semantic theory taxonomizes object language expressions in which similarity of content among the object language expressions is represented by propinquity relations among regions of the space.142

140 Ibid., p. 191.

141 Ibid., p. 192.

142 Ibid., pp. 192-3.

119

To begin with, F&L assume that Churchland is attempting a non-eliminativist account of content determination.143 There are two cases to distinguish. On the one hand, one might take such contents as being determined by non-semantic/non-intentional properties and relations. On this model, the various dimensions of the state-space would be specified in terms of psychophysical (or perhaps neurological) properties and relations. On the other hand, the dimensions of Churchland’s state-spaces might be taken to be genuine semantic dimensions— dimensions which individuate mental states by their contents. To taxonomize mental states in terms of psychophysical (neurological) properties, however, is to specify them according to their causes and not by their contents. The former kind of model, then, will not provide an account of content determination, in the relevant sense. Furthermore, if the dimensions of a state-space are given in terms of such properties and relations, then intentional contents will have been individuated by reference to properties that are non-essential to them. But then it is possible that two different state-spaces might be different and yet have the same content or be the same and have different contents, in which case contents would not supervene over those kinds of structures after all—we might dub this the content inversion problem.144 F&L conclude from all of this that the first path is a dead-end. Consider now the case where the dimensions of Churchland’s state-spaces are bonafide semantic dimensions, being dimensions that individuate mental states by their contents and contents by their semantic properties. In this case, those contents will have been individuated by means of properties which are themselves semantic/intentional. But then similarity of content, which presupposes sameness of structure determining properties and relations, will now presuppose a robust notion of sameness of content. The reason is that since a robust notion of similarity of content must be understood in terms of two expressions occupying similar positions in the same state-space, and since two state-spaces will be of the same type only if they have all

143 They note that Churchland is often officially eliminativist, but at other times his comments seem to commit him to “intentionality up to his neck” (pp. 188-9). Since to provide an account of content similarity would seem to commit one to at least a bit of intentionality, they read his attempts to do so as non-eliminativist.

144 Ibid., pp. 195-7. F&L frame this side of the dilemma in terms of well-known problems concerning qualia inversion and the qualitative content of sensations (which are de re, rather than de dicto, mental states). Churchland offers his state-space semantics as a solution to these problems, as well as to problems concerning propositions and concepts. Since F&L intend this discussion to be relevant to the possibility of state-space semantics, providing a notion of content similarity for the latter kinds of de dicto contents, I have modified this side of the dilemma accordingly.

120 of the same semantic dimensions, similarity of content will presuppose the notion of same semantic dimension. Given Churchland’s move away from empirical dimensions to arbitrary dimensions, however, sameness of semantic dimension amounts to general sameness of content. Here the holist might suggest that one does not actually need sameness of state-space, just similarity of state-space. On this new proposal, what would make two state-spaces similar is either that they have mostly the same structure-determining (and in this case semantic) dimensions or that they have mostly similar structure-determining semantic dimensions. Clearly, the former alternative will not work for the same reason that sameness of structure would not work. The latter alternative also fails, however, since it puts us right back where we started—we were looking for an explication of similarity of content. So, every viable suggestion (those which actually individuate mental states by their contents (and contents by their semantic properties) rather than by their causes) either presupposes a robust notion of content identity, and thus fails if holism rules out such a notion, or presupposes a robust notion of content similarity, and thus is circular. The upshot, then, is that one cannot sidestep difficulties regarding Instability by adopting a notion of similarity of content as conceptually prior to one of content identity, since the former actually presupposes the latter and thus inherits all of its problems.145 I would like to consider briefly a reply to F&L which grants to them the soundness of their argument while denying that it need be fatal to the friend of content similarity. Pessin (1995) argues that while F&L’s argument may be sound, a holist need not panic, since a rough and ready notion of concept similarity, i.e., one that is good enough for practical purposes, is still available. To this end, he offers three, increasingly sharp suggestions. His first idea is not so much a suggestion as an assurance. According to Pessin, it is highly unlikely that speakers of the same language will attach significantly different concepts to the same term, especially the more concrete the term and the more frequent its interpersonal use. So, when the use of the expression at issue is relatively concrete, and frequent, and when that use by and large serves, rather than frustrates, our interpersonal ends, we should feel satisfied that the

145 Since I find it very hard to see how any of Churchland’s responses to this attack actually address the fundamental issues at stake, I shall not take the time here to consider them. The responses I have in mind are Churchland (1993) and (1998). F&L (1993b) and (1999), respectively, are replies to Churchland’s responses.

121 concepts individual speakers express by means of it are relatively similar.146 Since this really does not address the issue at hand, viz., how we are to make sense of content similarity, I shall not consider it further. Perhaps his other two suggestions will prove more useful. His second idea is that we might “ask two different agents (or different time-slices of the same agent) to list all the properties they associate with some given concept. Then even if these lists don’t match perfectly, as assumed, the degree of match can serve as a working measure of concept similarity.”147 Clearly, Pessin is assuming some version of CRS. As with the previous suggestion, however, this one is of no use. Here similarity of content presupposes either identity of content or similarity of content for the items that make up two lists, and thus the suggestion fails to escape F&L’s attack. In a footnote, Pessin recognizes this difficulty and lamely attempts to counter it by reminding us that this suggestion provides “only a working measure . . . In theory we should go on to measure similarity of those concepts [the items on the list], and so on indefinitely. What stops the regress in practice, however, are the points made just above [his first suggestion], since we get diminishing returns as our lists are extended.”148 So, this suggestion just amounts to the previous one. The problem is that that suggestion is theoretically useless, as Pessin concedes in the above quote—it really amounts to no more than a philosophical “shrugging of the shoulders”. How about his third idea? Here we are supposed to ground similarity of conceptual content in similarity of extension across all possible worlds. Suppose the word in question is ‘apple’. We are to imagine our two speakers “visiting” every possible world and selecting every object in each of those worlds to which her actual world concept of apple applies. We then compare the piles for degree of overlap. Greater overlap means greater similarity, while less overlap amounts to less similarity. A naturalist might object to the use of possible worlds here, but let’s waive such difficulties. A more telling objection is that even if this suggestion is plausible in this case, there are a vast number of other cases to which it cannot obviously be extended. How, for example,

146 Pessin (1995), p. 275.

147 Ibid.

148 Ibid., note 12; his emphasis.

122 can it be made to work for linguistic categories other than count nouns and attributive adjectives? In particular, what will be the relevant extensions for articles (both definite and indefinite), prepositions, adverbs, and apparent nouns such as ‘dint’, ‘sake’, and ‘behalf’. One might go the way of Montague and attempt to assign highly abstract extensions to every such term, but the more abstract such extensions become the less plausible it is that they can serve the needs of a theory of content similarity since direct recognitional capacities would then arguably be less relevant to the sorting and subsequent tallying. One would then need to assume a substantial amount content identity in order to check for content similarity, and F&L would then get to say “We told you so.” In any case, such a response depends on a highly complex, some might say artificial, theory. Another, and more damning, difficulty is that the notion of extension across possible worlds is not fine-grained enough to individuate (compare) meanings, even if only non- robustly. Presumably, the expressions ‘figure with three straight lines’ and ‘rectilinear figure with three angles’ are necessarily co-extensive even though most people with some knowledge of geometry would judge them as having different (dissimilar) meanings. A final worry for Pessin’s third proposal is that, while it may (arguably) work in the case of concepts for which there is in fact a considerable degree of overlap in their extensions, it will not provide a metric for similarity when the concepts are disjoint. For example, the content ‘house cat’ is intuitively more similar to that of ‘lion’ than it is to the content of the word ‘computer’. All three concepts are presumably disjoint as would be the “piles” that would result from Pessin’s trans-world sorting. If an account of similarity of content is to earn its keep, however, then it would seem that it must judge ‘house cat’ and ‘lion’ as having more similar contents than ‘house cat’ and ‘computer’. On Pessin’s proposal, they would be equally (dis)similar.149 The upshot, then, is that where Pessin’s approach does not amount to just so much shrugging, it is insufficiently general. I would like to end this section by considering some additional worries. In the most recent installment to this debate, F&L have responded to Churchland by claiming that a theory of meaning/content grounded on the notion of content similarity will be unable to satisfy a number of very reasonable demands—demands which have traditionally been placed on theories of

149 F&L (1999), pp. 384-6, make the same point but in a slightly different context. See especially their note 7, p. 385.

123 meaning.150 In particular, it has usually been supposed that a useful theory of meaning must allow us to do at least some of the following: (i) provide satisfaction conditions for the semantically evaluable expressions of the system of representation in question (be it a public language or a system of mental representation) and do so in a way that certain sentences that we all take to be true do in fact come out as true under the assigned satisfaction conditions, (ii) respect the constraints of compositionality, i.e., it must make clear how the semantic value of a complex expression is systematically dependent on both its structure and the semantic values of its proper parts, (iii) provide a notion of meaning that makes the pre-theoretical intuition that good translations preserve meaning come out true, and (iv) provide a notion of meaning that is useful in our practices (either folk or scientific) of intentional explanation (and in particular, belief/desire explanation). F&L go on to argue that theories based on a notion of similarity of content will (probably) be unable to satisfy any of these demands. Since all interesting cases of translation require an appeal to compositionality, if an account cannot make any sense of the latter, then it will be unable to make sense of the former.151 For that reason, we need only consider (i), (ii), and (iv). Let’s begin with (i). Consider the sentence ‘Nixon is dead’ (call it ‘N’). According to F&L, (a) N is clearly true, (b) N (at time t) is true if and only if Nixon is dead (at t), and (c) no semantic theory for English could be adequate unless it entails (b) and is consistent with (a). The trouble for the content-similarity theorist is that a similarity-based theory which satisfies (b) is very unlikely to satisfy (a). The reason is that while traditional semantic theories generate T- sentences for a subject-predicate sentence like N by correlating Nixon with ‘Nixon’ and the property of being dead (or the extension of dead things) with ‘is dead’, content-similarity based theories will assign to ‘is dead’ “a range of properties all of which are similar to being dead, and . . . to ‘Nixon’ a range of individuals all of whom are similar to Nixon.”152 Given that similar contents need not be coextensive (and usually are not), it follows that content-similarity based theories will not in general satisfy (a)—they will assign to many sentences satisfaction

150 F&L (1999), pp. 382-90.

151 F&L make this point in §1.3, pp. 387-8.

152 Ibid., p. 384; their emphasis.

124 conditions under which the sentences come out with what is intuitively the wrong truth-value. After all, as they put it, “being comatose on one’s death bed is pretty similar to being dead; but it is not the case that, if Nixon is comatose on his death bed at t, then Nixon is dead at t.”153 Now let’s briefly turn to (ii). F&L point out that compositionality requires context independence in the following sense:

CI If m is part of the meaning of ‘a’ and ‘a’ is a constituent of ‘b’, then m is part of the meaning of ‘b’.

For example, part of what it is for expressions like ‘lost cat’ and ‘lost dog’ to be compositional is that ‘lost’ means the same in the context ‘ . . . cat’ as it does in the context ‘ . . . dog’, and to say this is just to say that if the meaning of ‘lost’ is part of the meaning of ‘lost’ and ‘lost’ is a constituent of ‘lost cat’ and of ‘lost dog’, then the meaning of ‘lost’ is part of the meaning of both ‘lost cat’ and ‘lost dog’ (by ‘part’ F&L are quick to point out that they mean a relation which is reflexive). The trouble for a content-similarity based theory is that, when combined with compositionality, it would entail

CI′ If m is similar to part of the meaning of ‘a’ and ‘a’ is a constituent of ‘b’, then m is similar to part of the meaning of ‘b’.

CI′, F&L now suggest, is clearly false, and they give the following example: “. . . the meaning of ‘cat’”, they say, “is similar to part of the meaning of ‘The leopard is on the mat’ (cats and leopards are both felines) and part of the meaning of ‘The leopard is on the mat’ is similar to part of the meaning of ‘The explosion caused a lot of damage’ (leopards and explosions are both dangerous). But the meaning of ‘cat’ is not similar to any part of the meaning of ‘The explosion caused lots of damage’.”154 As Abbott (2000) has pointed out, however, the trouble with this counterexample is that it is not a genuine counterexample to CI′ at all (I’ll let the reader verify this for himself), and it is

153 Ibid., pp. 384-5.

154 Ibid., p. 387.

125 hard to see how to modify it to make it genuine.155 Indeed, the more one attempts to do so, the more one gets the impression, pace F&L, that CI′ is true. I take it, then, that F&L have failed to make their case about content-similarity based theories being incapable of accommodating compositionality (and with it translation), though, for all I know, they may nonetheless be correct. Finally, let’s consider (iv). F&L suppose that paradigm intentional explanations (at least belief/desire explanations) make (perhaps tacit) appeal to the following principle:

BD If an agent a desires that p and believes that not-p unless q (where a believes that q is contingent on an action that he believes himself able to perform), then, ceteris paribus, a tries to bring it about that q.156

F&L then claim that this principle “is sound only if the formulas that substitute for P are identical or synonymous throughout.”157 The trouble is that it is entirely unclear what they mean here and their following discussion does little to clear things up. Here are two possibilities. First, perhaps what they mean is that when a particular sentence replaces p in each of its two occurrences in BD and some other sentence replaces q in each of its three occurrences, those two sentences must mean the same, not merely similar, things in each of their two and three appearances, respectively. The trouble is that to say this would be completely irrelevant to the discussion. It is not a possible consequence of content-similarity based theories that such a constraint would not be met, since such theories are meant to solve the Instability Problem for different speakers or the same speaker at different times, where the times are sufficiently distant to allow for the possibility of a change in conceptual role, state-space structure, or whatever. A tokening of BD, however, will only be made by one speaker (except for those cases where someone finishes another’s sentence), and furthermore, on most holistic theories, the two appearances of p’s replacement (and likewise for the three appearances of q’s) will be insufficiently separated in time to affect a change of meaning.

155 Loc. cit., p. 455.

156 F&L (1999), p. 388.

157 Ibid.

126 Second, perhaps what they mean is that for any particular instantiation of BD for p and q (which still generalizes over persons), that generalization will be useful only if the antecedent could be satisfied exactly by a number of different people, rather than only approximately. Perhaps, but that need not diminish the utility of BD, since one might still be able to employ the principle to explain the behavior of individuals—and it seems that this is the most typical use of the principle anyway. In any case, that different individuals rarely, if ever, have exactly the same thoughts or mean exactly the same things by their words does nothing to challenge the truth of BD. I conclude, then, that Fodor and Lepore have failed to make out their case that content- similarity based accounts cannot satisfy demands (ii), (iii), and (iv), though I have granted that their case for (i) goes through. In this latter case, if they are right about (c), then it appears that (i) is all they need anyway. In any case, I have already sustained their general claim that such theories must ultimately presuppose a notion of content identity and thus will inherit all of its problems, and I have rejected a recent attempt by Pessin to mitigate the consequences that their argument has for the content-similarity theorist. Appealing to content-similarity in order to save semantic holism from the Problem of Instability is a dead end. Reduction and Supervenience Another way to handle all of the original difficulties with holism is by denying that it is actually incompatible with a robust notion of content identity. Semantic holism was thought to threaten our basic assumptions about communication, disagreement, change of opinion, language acquisition, and psychological explanation because it was assumed that the relation between global conceptual roles and meanings is one-to-one. Some theorists have argued, however, that if we give up this assumption and allow that the relation is really many-one, then holism will thereby avoid all of the above problems. In other words, we should see meaning as properly supervening over global conceptual role rather than as being fully reducible to it.158 So, an expression might mean the same thing for two speakers (or

158 McLaughlin (1993), Pagin (1997), and Jackman (1999), for example, have all argued in favor of this suggestion. Warfield (1993) uses this point to refute F&L’s argument against CRS (considered in the previous chapter). His idea is that their argument will be recognized as unsound once it is realized that CRS is committed only to the supervenience of meaning over conceptual role. Recall that their master argument was that since meaning is compositional but global conceptual role is not, meaning cannot be conceptual role. But “New World Semanticists”, as F&L like to call them, are not committed to the conclusion of this little argument. The proposition to which CRS theorists are committed, i.e., that content supervenes on conceptual role, does not follow from the above premises, since the Indiscernibility of Identicals does not work for supervenience—only for identity. A similar point was made in chapter 1 in reference to the relationship between IND and INT.

127 the same speaker at different times), even though meanings are determined by global conceptual role and the two speakers attach different conceptual roles to that expression—semantic holism does not necessarily rule out robust content identity. Semantic holism, according to Jackman, “requires only that the content of any one of one’s beliefs [sentence tokens] depend upon or be a function of one’s other beliefs [sentence tokens], and this claim need not commit one to the instability thesis.”159 To motivate this suggestion, Jackman draws an analogy between semantics and mathematics.160 The idea is that the final grade one receives in a course will typically be determined by many different factors: by quiz scores, test scores, homework scores, etc. Such dependence, however, is not incompatible with the obvious fact that two people could receive the same final score even though they received different scores on some (even all) of their individual assignments, quizzes, etc. In other words, most arithmetical functions are many-one, not one-to- one. Obtaining 5 as a value from the addition function depends upon what pairs of numbers one begins with: either {1, 4} or {2, 3} will do the job, but {1, 3} will not. Jackman’s suggestion, then, is that one should view the relation between conceptual roles and meanings in a similar way. So, intentional contents supervene over, but do not reduce to, conceptual roles. Now, reductive theories provide tidy, albeit trivial, explanations of the supervenience of semantic facts over the subvenient ones; after all, if specific contents can be identified with specific conceptual- roles then there is really no mystery about why it is that particular meanings supervene over the particular conceptual roles that they do or about the precise way in which they are a function of (are determined by) them. Non-reductive, many-one theories, on the other hand, must be supplemented by such accounts. On the one hand, facts about specific patterns of supervenience are unlikely to be brute. Could it be a brute fact that content C could be instantiated by conceptual roles R1, R2, or

R3, but not by R4 or R5? In any case, corresponding explanations are available for the mathematical analogue, being provided by, for example, the underlying set theory one adopts, or at least by the particular set of axioms one takes to characterize arithmetical structures. Surely, the fact that the natural number pairs {0, 5}, {1, 4}, and {2, 3} are the only such pairs (of natural

159 Jackman (1999), p. 363; his emphasis.

128 numbers) that yield 5 when addition is applied to them cannot be brute. The set theoretical structure of the addition function and the natures of each of the individual natural numbers may make it clear why 5 is the value of the addition function for some pairs but not for others. Why shouldn’t such explanations be required in semantics as well? Well, they should, and the question regarding which such explanation should be accepted I shall call the pattern of supervenience question. On the other hand, more must be said about the nature of the dependency relation involved. We saw above, in our discussion of compositionality, that one might avoid the apparent incompatibility between holism and compositionality by seeing the latter as merely a function from structures and contents to propositional contents, while reserving the stronger, metaphysical relation of constitutive determination for semantic holism. With respect to the relationship between conceptual roles and meanings, we might now ask: what kind of determination is involved? We are told that many different conceptual roles can determine the same content, but do they do this in the weak way in which arithmetical functions determine values for specific arguments or do they do this in some more robust way characteristic of something that might be called metaphysical constitution? Call this the mode of determination question. I shall now argue that a holistic, CRS theorist cannot accept Jackman’s solution to the instability problem while at the same time providing plausible answers to both of these questions. Let’s begin with the mode of determination question. Can a CRS theorist really opt for the weaker relation of mere functional determination? It seems unlikely that one would, since one of the main motivations for accepting CRS is that doing so is thought to help in the project of naturalizing intentionality. By identifying meanings with conceptual roles and then explaining the latter in terms of causal relationships between items of a lexical or a mentalistic vocabulary, sensory inputs, and motor outputs one can demystify (at least part of) the mental and the semantic. This virtue of the CRS account (if it is one) would be lost if supervenience here amounted to mere functional determination. But what motivation could there be for settling for the weaker relation instead? It seems that the only reason for doing so would be to facilitate identification of intentional contents. If such contents supervene over conceptual roles even though they are not constituted by them, then establishing a functional relationship between them

160 Ibid., p. 363.

129 would be useful insofar as the function provides sufficient conditions for identifying specific contents. That is, if one knows how the function correlates specific conceptual roles with specific contents and one also has an independent way of identifying conceptual roles (perhaps some purely physiological/chemical way) then one can, in principle at least, identify contents in a naturalistic way. The contents themselves would still be non-naturalistic, but at least we would know how to find them, and this would be extremely useful to the cognitive sciences. The trouble with this approach is that it seems to be nearly (if not quite in principle) impossible to execute. Now, it is trivial that there is a function from any class of things to any other class of things (at least for a realist about these matters). Take any two classes you like, and there will be some function which correlates (arbitrarily) elements of one of the classes with elements of the other. But if the function is to be theoretically useful, the function will need to be non-arbitrary, and we would need to figure out how it does, that is, we would need to know on what principle it delivers the particular content it does when given a particular conceptual role as argument. Determining some such function, however, I would imagine is a similar, but even more difficult, task than that of identifying a workable analytic/synthetic distinction, something most CRS theorists take to be hopeless. So, it seems that the better alternative is to view the relationship as one of metaphysical constitution and to take the naturalization of content (rather than the naturalization of the identification of content) as its primary payoff. But now, how should the CRS theorist answer the pattern of supervenience question?

Why, that is, do R1, R2, and R3, say, individually constitute the intentional content C while R4

and R5 do not? Certainly, there must be differences which account for this. The differences between R1, R2, and R3, on the one hand, are not enough to determine a different content, while

at least some of the differences between these and R4 and R5, on the other hand, are. Why do some differences matter but not others, and in any case, which ones? The differences, of course, must amount to some difference in either belief or causal/inferential role. Of course, these answers to our two questions (i.e., metaphysical constitution and difference of causal/inferential role) are not incompatible. On the contrary, they may even complement each other. What is important to recognize is that the holistic CRS theorist cannot give them. Her partial answer to the pattern of supervenience question is that some differences between conceptual systems are relevant to determining meaning, while others are not, while her answer to the mode of determination problem is that the determination at issue is constitutive

130 rather than mere correlation. But to give both of these answers simultaneously is just to uphold some (nontrivial) distinction between the analytic and the synthetic, and this she cannot do, since one of the main reasons she is a holist in the first place is that she denies such a distinction. Remember, she argues that some inferential relations are constitutive of meaning, but since there is no way to distinguish those inferential relations which are constitutive of a sentence’s meaning from those which are not, all inferential roles are constitutive. Even if one does not incur an additional explanatory obligation by preferring proper supervenience over reduction, the resulting form of CRS is not holistic, and so, either way, Jackman’s solution does not really solve the instability problem for the holist. For if there is a many-one function from conceptual roles to meanings/contents, then should two distinct

conceptual roles R1 and R2 yield the same meaning/content, then either the belief sets corresponding to R1 and R2 must be different or the inferential relations between the corresponding elements of those belief sets must be different. This is just to say that the differences must amount either to a difference in at least one belief or in at least one inferential relation. But this means that that particular content does not depend on either the acceptance or the rejection of that particular belief (inferential relation), even though an acceptance of it might very well form a part of the conceptual system that determines that content. What, then, is left of holism?161 So much, then, for denying reduction. Let us turn to the final suggestion. Multiplying Meanings In a recent paper, Eric Lormand offers a novel way to handle the Problem of Instability.162 He begins by observing that instability is a problem for holism because most people unquestioningly accept the following inference from (1) to (2):

(1) If a representation in a system RS changes meaning, all representations in RS change meaning.

(2) If a representation in RS changes meaning, no representation in RS has the same meaning it had before the change.163

161 F&L dismiss the instability solution on the grounds that it would preserve only a weak anatomism, which they regard as too uninteresting to take seriously; see F&L (1992), pp. 28-30, and (1993b), p. 677.

162 Lormand (1996).

131

It is precisely this inference that generates the worries over communication, translation, psychological explanation, etc. Strictly speaking, (2) is what generates the radical instability that seems to damn holism, while (1) is what directly follows from semantic holism. But if it can be shown that (2) does not follow from (1), then the main assault on holism will have been blocked. Now, most people take for granted that a tokening of an expression (representation) has only one meaning. If this is true, then (2) follows from (1), and thus holism falls. Lormand’s idea is that expressions (strictly speaking, tokenings of them) actually have many meanings,164 and that this is enough to block the inference from (1) to (2), since (1) and (2) would then have to be rephrased as follows:

(1′) If a representation in RS changes one or more of its meanings, then every representation in RS changes at least one of its meanings.

(2′) If a representation in RS changes one or more of its meanings, no representation in RS has any of the same meanings it had before the change.

It would then be possible that some one meaning of an expression might change forcing a change in at least one of the meanings of every other expression, even though other meanings of those expressions might nonetheless remain unaffected. So, if this idea of (tokens of) expressions having multiple meanings can be adequately worked out, then there will be no reason for the semantic holist to be anxious about meanings being unstable. How, then, does Lormand spell out this idea of multiple meanings? Again, it is important to realize that Lormand is not just pointing out the uncontroversial fact that expression types can be ambiguous, meaning one thing at one tokening while meaning something entirely different at another. The idea is that the tokens themselves bear many distinct meanings all at once.165 We

163 Ibid., p. 57.

164 Versions of this view are also endorsed in Bilgrami (1992), and Devitt (1994), though neither uses it to defend semantic holism.

165 Lormand uses square brackets to refer to mental representations, e.g., ‘[bird]’, whereas I have been using vertical strokes.

132 are asked to consider all of the causal/inferential links some particular speaker/thinker might associate with some representation, e.g., |bird|. Each of those inferences (or every group of them) which constitutes a “separable rough test for the acceptable use of that representation” is to be thought of as a discrete unit.166 Lormand’s suggestion is that each of these units counts as a different meaning, while the meaning of the representation might then be loosely identified with the set of these meanings. Holism can be rendered compatible with stability if it is seen as applying to the individual meanings rather than to the collection of them—the content of each individual unit being constitutively dependent on at least one of the units associated with every other representation in the system. So, to consider an example, possible units for |bird| might include |feathered flying

animal|, |thing called ‘bird’ by mommy|, |thing that is similar enough to B1, B2, . . ., Bn| (where 167 B1, B2, . . ., Bn are things taken to be birds). One speaker might associate with |bird| all three of these units, while another, who is blind, say, associates only the first two. According to Lormand, even though there is some difference here, there is still enough stability to allow for genuine communication, disagreement, etc., since our speakers share at least one common unit, i.e., meaning.168 If one speaker believes that some birds taste good while the other believes that no birds taste good, the two can genuinely disagree since they associate at least one of the same meanings with |bird|. Perhaps Lormand’s proposal strikes one as a little ad hoc—after all, what reason do we have for accepting the multiple meaning account (hereafter, MM) other than that it squares semantic holism with stability? Why multiply meanings when we could just as easily take tokenings of expressions/representations as carrying one meaning which is constituted by all of the units associated with it? What would be needed is some independent motivation for carving up the meanings of an expression in the particular way that Lormand recommends. For example, what explanatory purposes would such carving serve? Maybe it is enough to answer that there

166 Lormand (1996), p. 57.

167 The example is Lormand’s.

168 Lormand actually goes on to claim that this multiple meaning view not only saves the holist from embarrassment but actually allows for more stability than purely referential theories, since (1) the multiple meaning view can always add those referential relations to the list of meanings in which case there would be at least as much stability as on a referential view, and (2) the multiple meaning view allows for the possibility of shared meanings not recognized by referential theories.

133 are very compelling explanatory reasons for accepting a semantic theory like CRS, which entails semantic holism. The theoretical utility of introducing multiple meanings would then be that it eliminates certain undesirable consequences of an otherwise plausible and explanatorily rich theory. When seen in this light, one might forgive MM for seeming a bit ad hoc. More damaging, however, is the charge that MM does nothing to solve the stability problem. Lormand’s task was to show how stability is perfectly compatible with even the most extreme form of semantic holism; so, let us assume, for the moment, that the most extreme such position is true, i.e., that the meaning of every expression of a language (system of representation, more generally) depends constitutively on the meaning (content) of every other expression in it. By introducing MM, Lormand then reinterprets this as requiring only that every meaning of an expression must constitutively depend on some meaning of every other expression. There are, however, a number of reasons why this fails actually to solve the initial problem. First, it is unclear that the resulting position is really a form of holism at all, let alone the most extreme form. It is clear that Lormand conceives of the units corresponding to an expression, and constituting its various meanings, as themselves content-bearing expressions (representations). To return to the above example, |bird| might bear a number of different meanings for a thinker depending on which units, e.g., |feathered flying animal|, |thing called

‘bird’ by mommy|, |thing that is similar enough to B1, B2, . . ., Bn|, etc., she associates with it. But these units will confer meanings on |bird| only if they themselves bear contents. Thus, the units must themselves be holistically connected to every other representation. The more isolated one takes these units to be from one another, the more one has moved away from the most extreme form of semantic holism. Furthermore, since these units must be members of the system of representation in question, the same concern over stability can be raised for them as was raised for the other representations in the system. That is, if stability is to be achieved by reference to shared units, then it will be required that the units that two different speaker/thinkers attach to a representation have the same content. So, when will two units have the same content for two people (or for one across time)? Well, since units are representational and since we are assuming extreme holism, they will bear the same content just in case there is complete coincidence in the intentional contents of the respective systems—once again, instability threatens. Lormand might respond

134 here that MM will apply to the units as well, so that stability only requires that at least one of the meanings (again to be understood in terms of units) the unit bears for each of the two individuals is the same, but I trust that, at this point, it is obvious that this suggestion would be of no help, since we could simply reiterate the same line of reasoning as before. The bottom line is that every unit that is appealed to in securing stability is itself a part of the original representational system and thus must be sensitive to variations in the meaning of any other single element of that system. Where, then, is the stability Lormand promises? To recapitulate a bit, if Lormand takes the units as being semantically isolated, then he moves away from holism, while if doesn’t then he loses stability.169 One way in which Lormand might attempt to escape from this dilemma is by adopting the two-factor gambit discussed above and then limiting holism to the narrow factor. Margolis and Laurence, however, point out that, by moving to a two-factor theory, Lormand can no longer claim to have made holism compatible with stability, since stability would then be achieved by the wide, non-holistic component.170 In any case, he would then have failed to show that the most extreme version of semantic holism and stability are compatible. In a footnote, Lormand somewhat desperately distinguishes between representations with primitive meanings and those with non-primitive meanings:

. . . the meanings of all the representations in a system can be specified completely in terms of a relatively small set of semantically atomic (or simple, primitive, basic) representations in the system. A representation can have a primitive meaning—and so be a semantic atom while also having other nonprimitive meanings—and so satisfy inferential role semantics and meaning holism. Units consisting entirely of atomic representations, then, can yield meanings which are independent of other representations in the system. 171

This passage seems to run together two different ideas: (i) the idea of a compositional semantics complete with semantic primitives, and (ii) a two-factor CRS, on which narrow content is holistic. As the discussion from the previous chapter should make clear, these two suggestions are likely to be incompatible. Since I have already considered the possibility of (ii) providing an

169 Similar complaints are raised in Margolis and Laurence (1998), pp. 259-60, as well as in Becker (1998), pp. 638- 9.

170 Margolis and Laurence (1998), p. 261-2.

171 Lormand (1996), p. 58.

135 adequate holistic solution to instability, I shall read Lormand as recommending (i). A primitive meaning, then, is semantically basic, and apparently atomic, while non-primitive meanings are holistically related to all of the other expressions/representations (primitive ones included). This, of course, just constitutes a denial of holism, since it would then be false that the meaning of every expression depends on the meaning of every other one. Finally, even if Lormand’s suggestion does perform as advertised and provides for some stability, it still faces some problems when communication, disagreement, agreement, and change of opinion are of a less direct nature. Intuitively, one might think that these phenomena enjoy a certain kind of transitivity. For example, by communicating directly to a sergeant that an offensive will be launched tomorrow, a general can communicate indirectly with that sergeant’s soldiers, provided the sergeant relays the message to his soldiers. On Lormand’s account, however, that x can communicate that p to y by means of sentence S, and y can communicate that q to z by means of S, does not guarantee that p and q are the same proposition, even though there is nothing like straightforward ambiguity involved and y intends to use S in the same sense as it was used by x. Likewise with agreement, disagreement, and change of opinion—Bob may disagree with Bill about the truth of a sentence S, Al may disagree with Bill about the truth of the same sentence, and yet there may nonetheless be no agreement (or disagreement for that matter) between Bob and Al, even though none of them is agnostic about the truth-value of S. Again, Bob may agree with Bill, and Bill with Al, even though Bob and Al are neither agreeing nor disagreeing. In each case, “transitivity” (the case of disagreement is not really one of transitivity) fails when no units are shared by Bob and Bill which are also shared by Bill and Al.

As for change of opinion, we need only imagine the possibility that the sets S1, S2, and S3 of units associated with an expression by someone at distinct times t1, t2, and t3 are such that S1 and

S2 share no units that are shared by S2 and S3. If this is possible, then it is also possible that someone accepts the truth of some sentence S (mental or otherwise), and then rejects it only later to accept it again, even though that person does not end up believing what she originally believed. Furthermore, by the same line of reasoning, one might accept the truth of some sentence at t1, accept it again t2, and then deny it later at t3, even though (i) that person does at t2 genuinely agree with her t1-self, (ii) she does at t3 genuinely disagree with her times t2-self, and

(iii) she does not at t3 genuinely disagree with her times t1–self. It seems, then, that even if MM

136 does allow for some stability, the chances of such stability decrease the less direct is the line of communication, agreement, disagreement, or whatever. So, MM either fails to reconcile stability with something that can genuinely be called (extreme) semantic holism, or if it does (which is doubtful), it is only a very limited and tenuous kind of stability. The bottom line: MM does nothing (or very little) to relieve worries about instability.

Adopting a two-factor CRS, settling for a notion of content similarity, rejecting instability, and recognizing expression tokens as having multiple meanings are the main strategies for defending holism from the Problem of Instability. We have seen, however, that none of them will turn the trick. In the following chapter, I would like to suggest an option that may fare a little better.

137 CHAPTER 5

A NEO-FREGEAN OPTION

CRS, Instability, and Anti-Individualism I do think that CRS has many desirable explanatory features, so it would be nice if some version of the view remained viable. This would require showing that some version of it is immune to the Crack as well as the Problem of Instability. In the last chapter, however, I argued that if the CRS theorist accepts that the triad of holism, no A/S, and compositionality really is inconsistent and that CRS must be holistic, then, in even in case of the Crack, the CRS theorist must confront the Problem of Instability. Otherwise, the CRS theorist has two options: (i) he must either show that there really is no inconsistency or (ii) he must argue that CRS need not be holistic. The former option would require articulations of both holism and compositionality such that they are not in fact inconsistent and such that holism remains a thesis about the nature of meaning while compositionality is still capable of playing the desired role in our future theorizing. The latter option, on the other hand, would presumably require assuming that there is some way to partition sentences (inferences) as required by A/S after all.172 In that case, the CRS theorist would have to confront Quine.

172 It has been pointed out that both of F&L’s arguments depend on the following principle: if someone’s being disposed to make the inference from S1 to S2 is constitutive of what S2 means for that person, then the inference from S1 to S2 is analytic for that person (i.e., true/valid by virtue of the meanings of S1 to S2 alone). Block (1993) and Boghossian (1993) and (1994) respond to F&L by, one way or another, challenging this principle. Block does so on the grounds that conceptual role pertains to narrow, not wide, content, and since truth and validity do not properly apply to narrow content, analyticity (truth/validity by virtue of meaning) does not either. Boghossian rejects the principle on the grounds that to say that an inference, for example, is constitutive of the meaning of some term for some person is only to say that it must be accepted as valid by that person if it is to mean what it does for her. Analyticity of an inference, however, requires more than that it be accepted as valid: it must actually be valid by virtue of its meaning. Since I have already rejected the coherence and utility of narrow content, I have nothing much to say about Block’s objection. The solution that I will offer in what follows accommodates Boghossian’s point without severing the connection between conceptual role and analyticity.

138 I would now like to argue that F&L’s main arguments against it are successful only when CRS is construed a certain way, but that there is another, more plausible, alternative for the CRS theorist—an alternative that respects Twin Earth intuitions without disrespecting Tharthritis ones (mentioned in chapter 1). Recall that F&L argued that compositionality, CRS, and the denial of A/S form an inconsistent triad and that the only way out is to deny CRS while sustaining the other two. The idea was that compositionality is incompatible with holistic CRS, and the reasoning behind this claim was that since holistic inferential roles cannot be compositional, they cannot be meanings. Non-holistic inferential roles, on the other hand, require an A/S distinction, and since Quine showed us that there can be no such distinction, there can be no non-holistic CRS. But since there can be no holistic CRS either (that is, if we, as we should, hold onto compositionality), there can be no CRS, of any stripe. Should we be convinced by this argument? Well this depends on answering two questions. Are F&L correct about their claim that inferential roles cannot be both holistic and compositional? And just how much did Quine show, if anything? We addressed the second of these questions in chapter 2. There we concluded that Quine’s arguments are less than conclusive, and that even if they were successful, they would only undermine certain conceptions of analyticity and meaning. In particular, Quine at the most showed that the analytic/synthetic distinction could not be given an epistemic criterion like aprioricity or unrevisability, and thus meaning could not be reconstructed in non-holistic, epistemic terms. Being a verificationist, Quine thought that epistemic terms were the only terms suitable for reconstructing the notions of meaning, analyticity, and syntheticity. As was pointed out earlier, however, the hidden and crucial premise in Quine’s thought here is individualism, i.e., the doctrine that meaning/content supervenes over features intrinsic to individual speakers/thinkers (IND from chapter 1). Individualism and physicalism are the two springs from which many of Quine’s most characteristic doctrines flow. Crucially, Quine never showed that both a non- individualistic understanding of the concept of meaning and a principled, but non-individualistic analytic/synthetic distinction are impossible (chapter 5). So, if we reject individualism, then the door is open to fashioning a notion of content that might support some kind of analytic/synthetic distinction. I cannot here attempt to provide even so much as a hint of how such an account might go. Nor can I here mount a positive defense of

139 non-individualism.173 I merely wish to suggest which options are still open. A CRS theorist might escape the Crack, then, by endorsing a non-individualistic and non-epistemic conception of A/S, and she would, in the end, avoid the inconsistency by denying that CRS entails semantic holism. This response, then, would also afford her a way out of the Problem of Instability, since that will be a problem for her only if CRS entails unstable holism. Interestingly, by rejecting individualism, the CRS theorist can avoid both Instability and the Crack, even while denying A/S and viewing CRS as holistic. The reason is that by denying individualism, there is no longer any reason to accept the premise of the Problem of Instability that holism is unstable. In discussions of Instability, it is always tacitly assumed that mental content is individualistic. If content is inferential role and inferential role is both individualistic and holistic, then, of course, content will be highly unstable. But the instability lies in the individualism, not in the holism. It is simply not the case that holism is the culprit here, for the same problems could in principle result from any type of individualistic theory, whether atomic, properly anatomic, or holistic. Any such account would be unstable if there were any likelihood that the individualistic facts/properties relevant to content determination might vary from individual to individual. So, CRS need not entail unstable holism, and if individualism is rejected, a stable, holistic version of CRS may very well be available. So, why has there been so much fuss in the literature over semantic holism? The reason, I think, is that F&L, and others, have supposed that holism can serve as the basis of a knock- down argument against CRS. But this will be so only if it is also supposed that CRS must be individualistic. I take it that the primary reason why conceptual roles are thought to be individualistic is that the only coherent account of mental causation requires that that they be so. Many have thought that only things that are completely internal to an agent could be immediate causes of the behavior of that agent—at least the kinds of causes relevant to those explanations sought by a rigorously developed cognitive psychology. The thought is that if we are really to retain the idea that we are the authors of our behavior, and thus responsible for it, then the immediate causes of our behavior must be states or events completely internal to us. It is felt that if we give up individualism, then we must also give up this picture of mental causation, since the primary causes of behavior—beliefs and desires—would be at least partially constituted

173 For the main arguments against individualism, see Putnam (1973) and (1975), and Burge (1979).

140 by factors external to the agent, since their contents would be. We might not have to give up that picture, however, if we were willing to alter our conception of agents—perhaps agents (and not just wide contents) extend “beyond the skin”. In any case, whether that particular tack is adopted or not, if we were to give up individualism, we would then be faced with the possibility of a non- individualistic CRS, and we would not need to bother with two-factors, content similarity, rejecting instability, or multiple meanings—at least, not in order to avoid a perniciously unstable holism. So, two of the premises of the Problem of Instability make a tacit appeal to individualism, and the Crack works only for those versions of CRS that presuppose an individualistic conception of content (narrow content, for two-factor theories). In this latter case, what F&L have really established (if anything) is that holism, individualism, compositionality, and the denial of A/S form an inconsistent quartet. It seems, then, that one need not give up any of their original trio, since one can just reject individualism (Fodor himself does). But then one would no longer have any good reason to deny A/S. So, rather than give up CRS, which has much to recommend it, why not just let go of individualism? On such an account, conceptual role might be identified with role in analytic inference, where the relevant notion of analyticity is non- individualistic, but it need not be so. One might still opt for some kind of holistic, but non- individualistic conception of inferential role. Happily, it seems there are a number of options still open to the CRS theorist. I would now like to sketch one such possibility—arguably, one that Frege himself could have endorsed. Anti-Individualistic CRS: A Sketch Since my aim here is neither to offer nor to defend fully a fully worked out theory but to point in what I think is a promising direction, I will only provide a rough sketch of the position I have in mind. The limited defense I can offer is, in the first instance, that it provides the CRS theorist with an answer to both the Problem of Stability and the Crack. By doing so, the position inherits many of the virtues of classical CRS while avoiding some of its major weaknesses. Below, after I have outlined the view, I will add to this defense, but only somewhat. Objects and Properties To begin with, I shall assume a metaphysic of objects and properties—everything there is one of the two. ‘Property’ is intended in the most inclusive sense. In particular, I wish to include all relations and functions. I also want to allow that some

141 properties might be properties of other properties and functions (rather than of objects) as well as functions of properties and functions. Nothing much hangs on this particular choice of metaphysic. The view I am about to outline could be made to accommodate other choices. Nothing in it, as far as I am aware, rules out a metaphysic which includes facts, or events, or situations, or possible worlds, for example. My main reason for choosing a metaphysic of objects and properties is that it is the one Frege endorsed and I am interested in showing that a position very close to Frege’s is still available. Sense and Semantic Value Semantic values, intuitively, are what we talk about, and, by definition, are what make our thought and talk true or false. Now, given our dualistic metaphysic, semantic values must be either objects or properties. What about senses? It is sometimes supposed that senses constitute a third metaphysical category, since Frege often talks about them inhabiting a “third realm.”174 This, however, is a mistake. Frege’s third realm is to be contrasted with the realms of the mental and physical—it is the world of the abstract. Just as there can be mental objects and properties, and physical objects and properties, there can be abstract objects and properties. Minds, beliefs, and desires are examples of mental objects, if anything is. Tables, chairs, and trees are among the most familiar examples of physical objects, though some sophisticated physicalistic ontologies recommend recognizing only the fundamental particles of physics. Abstract objects are those objects that can be neither dated nor located, and the most typical examples would include the numbers (if, indeed, they are not properties), sets, and, arguably, properties themselves. What makes a property mental or physical is the nature of the things to which it applies. The property of being deciduous applies only to trees, and thus is a physical property, since trees are physical in nature. Conceivability applies only to thoughts, and thus is mental, if thoughts are. So, whether the present account is to view senses as objects or as properties, if it is to be Fregean, it must take them as abstract, rather than mental or physical, in character. As with individualistic CRS, the present account is an instance of the QW-schema. Senses are to be identified with certain structures. Part of what leads to the individualistic character of classical CRS is that the nodes of the relevant structures are taken to be mental sentences, sensory inputs, and motor outputs—items that do stop at the skin—and the structuring relations are inferential, where the relevant notion of inference is that of the inference actually

174 See, for example, Frege (1918-19a), p. 363.

142 accepted by a speaker. This notion of actual inference, sometimes understood as a disposition to infer, is then given a purely causal analysis. The nodes and the relevant causal relations between them are all features internal to the body of the thinker/speaker in question, so the structures defined in terms of them are also intrinsic properties of that thinker/speaker. Now, it is because classical CRS attempts to identify content with structures structured by relations of actual inference that it is committed to individualism, while it is the appeal to inferential relations that makes it a form of CRS. Since what we are seeking is a non-individualistic CRS, we can get what we want by replacing the grounding notion of actual inference with some other, non- individualistic conception of inference. What I would like to suggest is that a viable, non- individualistic CRS can be obtained by replacing the notion of inference actually accepted with that of inference that ought to be accepted and then construing this latter notion non- individualistically.175 Conceptual role, then, is to be understood as what one ought to do with an expression, and not what one actually does with it.176 The choice of the relevant content- determining structures, then, will be guided by this constraint. What kind of structure, then, will determine what one ought to do with an expression? Here, I will baldly describe the kind of structure I have in mind. Then I will suggest how such structures might have this action-guiding character. To simplify, consider a language L (mental or linguistic) with only names, predicate expressions, and the usual logical operators, and consider some arbitrary expression E from the non-logical vocabulary of L. The nodes of the content-determining structure for E will consist of other semantic values of primitive expressions of L, rather than other expressions of L. This means that at least some, perhaps all, of the objects and properties that are the semantic values of the expressions of L are partially constitutive of E’s content-determining structure. What are the structuring relations for these nodes? What we need are relations that hold between other properties and relations, between objects and other objects, and between objects and properties. If we are also interested in preserving A/S, then we will need relations that hold, when they do, necessarily, not contingently. In any case, the kinds of relation I have in mind are subsumption (the analog, for properties, of set-theoretic inclusion),

175 Rey (1992), (1993a), and (1993b) also recommends such an approach.

176 It seems doubtful that what one actually does with an expression can determine what one ought to do with it for the basically Wittgensteinian reason that one’s actual use of a term can never be mistaken if it also determines what would be a mistaken use (and thus is not already constrained). If meaning is to be normative, however, then it must be possible for one’s actual use to be mistaken.

143 necessary instantiation (for an object of a property or for property of another property), and other nomological relations, e.g., causal and logical ones. To get a notion of an expression E’s conceptual role from structures of this type, we will need some notion of inference that corresponds to the structures described above. Since the inferences that form E’s conceptual role must actually depend on E and its semantic value, I shall restrict my attention to inferences that contain E and whose validity depends at least partially on its semantic value. Accordingly, we have:

AI For any expression E, an E-appropriate inference is an inference (to or from E) that is rendered (nomically) valid directly by subsumption or nomological relationships between the semantic value of E and other properties (or objects).

As before, I am taking inferences to be relationships between expressions (mental or linguistic), or, more accurately, they are ordered pairs of sets of expressions. Nomic validity is just what ordinary validity becomes when the notion of necessity implicit in the latter is replaced by the weaker notion of nomic or physical necessity. The conceptual role for E, then, can be identified with all of the E-appropriate inferences. Better, we can take E’s conceptual role as including the set of E-appropriate inferences, leaving it open whether anything else should be included as well. What we have, then, is a structure defined by the semantic value of E and all of the objects and properties to which E’s semantic value is nomically and metaphysically related. The inferences that are to be included in E’s conceptual role are those inferences that (i) correspond to such relationships, and (ii) are nomically valid. For example, if E’s semantic value is the property of being a dog, and if being a dog is subsumed by being an animal, then the inference from ‘dog’ to ‘animal’ (or from |dog| to |animal|) will be nomically valid and hence part of E’s conceptual role. To take another example, if E1’s semantic value is George W. Bush, and if

George W. Bush is necessarily a human, then the inference from E1 to ‘human’ (or from | E1| to

|human|) will be part of E1’s conceptual role. If, as Kripke contends, a human is metaphysically related to his parents—your identity depending in part on your having the parents that you do— then the inference from E1 to ‘son of George H. W. Bush’ will likewise be part of the conceptual role of E1.

144 So, why might such a structure determine what one ought to do with an expression? Here, as elsewhere, I can only offer a vague answer, but I think that what I can say is suggestive enough to be useful. Here I follow Frege and other truth-conditional theorists in taking the notion of truth as the underlying cognitive norm. Though there are other relevant norms and ends, the ultimate purpose of thought and talk is to acquire and pass on truths. As representational systems, languages have value only to the extent that they represent truly— should a system represent completely falsely or should it be incapable of representing truly, then I think that most of us would judge it as being nearly (if not wholly) without value—perhaps some aesthetic value might still be recognized. Truth, of course, is the point of inference, and thus should play a fundamental normative role in any CRS, since inference does. Now, the metaphysical and nomic relations that structure conceptual roles serve this end because they tell us what inferences we have to accept if we want to end up with truths as a result of our reasoning. It is both because we value truth and because these structures model truth-preserving inferences that such structures can ground normativity. I have described conceptual role as being only partially constituted by such structures. The reason I have done so is that unless there is something that connects a particular expression E with a particular node in such a structure then such structures will be impotent to ground any kind of content for E. To put things somewhat graphically, the aspect of an expression’s content that I have described so far is what we might regard as its horizontal dimension. What I am now asking about is what would more properly be described as its vertical dimension—that component of E’s content that makes the semantic value of E the semantic value of E. This component is what mediates the most direct connections between minds/languages and reality. I would also like to point out that if our account is to be Fregean in nature, then there must be some such component of an expression’s content. That it must is guaranteed by S from chapter 1. How this vertical component is to be understood is a matter which I must leave unsettled, partly because I do not have the space and partly because I do not have a worked out answer. I will, however, make two comments. First, I am supposing that this vertical component is not determined by the horizontal component but complements it. In a way, the horizontal component is determined by the vertical one, insofar as the vertical component determines the expression’s semantic value. Once the expression is locked onto a particular semantic value, it is

145 ipso facto locked onto the corresponding structure, since that semantic value is already connected to that structure. Now there may indeed be a sense in which the structure (minus the semantic value) does in fact determine the relevant semantic value. What I am denying is that it also determines the vertical component itself. There might be any number of such “tethers” that could connect an expression to some one semantic value. Second, there are a number of candidates for this vertical component already in the literature. Notable examples would include accounts that explain reference directly in terms causal or nomological relations between the use of an expression and its semantic value,177 or in terms of sociological facts about the expression,178 or in terms of some notion of the proper function of the expression in the psychology or cognition or behavior of the user.179 It just may be possible to fashion a viable account from one of these notions or from some combination of them. Grasping Contents Which beliefs about the semantic value of E must someone have and which inferences must someone accept to be said to know the meaning of E? Certainly only true beliefs and valid inferences should count, and only beliefs that are necessary rather than contingent. This means that any beliefs (inferences) that are required to know the meaning of an expression, must be beliefs (inferences) made true (valid) by the relevant nomological structure. So, how much of the content-determining structure associated with E must a speaker/thinker believe in order to be said to grasp the content of E? The answer: none. Since such structures partially constitute the contents of expressions, it would seem that a failure to manifest any of the beliefs or inferences modeled by such structures would have the unavoidable consequence that the content of the relevant expression had not really been grasped at all. Such a strict criterion for grasping, however, would introduce a substantial amount of instability back into thought and talk, something this account is supposedly designed to avoid. For this reason, it is a mistake to insist on it. But then when can we say that someone has grasped a certain content, and what, if anything, do the content-determining structures considered above have to with such a grasp?

177 E.g., Fodor (1990), and Dretske (1981).

178 E.g., Putnam (1973) and (1975), and Burge (1979, and maybe the later Wittgenstein.

179 E.g., Millikan (1984).

146 The problem, I will urge, lies in viewing grasp as an all or nothing affair. Its solution, I will again urge, can be found in what I take to be a fairly obvious distinction, but one which most theorists seem to have missed. What is missing is some distinction between a minimal and a complete grasp of the content of an expression. Ultimately, the desired distinction must allow for stability as well as intentional explanations of behavior. Above, I mentioned that there must be some vertical component to content—some component that connects expressions to things. My suggestion is that this component may itself be identified with what I will call minimal grasp—the bare requirement for someone’s use of a term to be connected to a certain semantic value. So, whatever kinds of facts or properties constitute the vertical component of an expression’s content, the obtaining of that fact or property in the case of a specific expression and a specific speaker/thinker will be necessary and sufficient for that speaker/thinker to have a minimal grasp of that expression. To be sure, this is merely schematic for a completed account of mental and linguistic minimal grasp, but it does have the highly desirable feature that it allows that a speaker/thinker can have grasped the content of some piece of vocabulary even though that speaker has no true beliefs about that piece of vocabulary, and it does this without denying that that piece of vocabulary has a content-determining conceptual role. It can do this because such conceptual roles are not directly relevant to minimal grasp. What conceptual roles are relevant to, however, is not minimal grasp but to improving one’s grasp of the content of the expression. As mentioned above, one of the mistakes of classical CRS is that it operates with an all or nothing conception of grasp, rather than with a graded one. By defining some corresponding notions of partial (not necessarily minimal) and complete grasp, this defect can be remedied. Since a content is completely constituted by the expression/world link (which constitutes minimal grasp) and the nomological structure determined by that link, the notion of complete grasp is most naturally characterized as follows:

CG A has a complete grasp of the content of E just in case A has a minimal grasp of the content of E and A accepts all E-appropriate inferences.

Accepting an E-appropriate inference from a set of sentences Σ to some sentence S (at least one of which contains E) requires at a minimum a minimal grasp of S and a minimal grasp of every

147 member of Σ. It also requires that there be some appropriate causal relationship between the members of Σ and S, but just how this relationship is to be understood I will leave open. The notion of complete grasp, then, is built on the notions of acceptance of an E-appropriate inference and minimal grasp. By appealing to the latter notion, the account avoids simply collapsing into the standard two-factor view according to which grasping a narrow content—a conceptual role—is something that is individualistic. By appealing to the notion of an E- appropriate inference, on the other hand, the account pays respect to the intuition that knowing what to do with an expression matters. Complete grasp, is an idealized notion—a complete grasp of an expression is something that a perfectly competent user of that expression has.180 It is extremely doubtful, however, that many actual people ever manage to obtain such a grasp, but it is also extremely likely that people often do achieve more than a mere minimal grasp of many expressions’ contents. What is needed, then, is some intermediate notion: a notion of partial grasp. This can be readily obtained from the two notions just introduced:

PG A has a partial grasp of the content of E just in case A has a minimal, but not a complete, grasp of the content of E.

So, A will have a partial grasp of E’s content just in case (i) there is some E-appropriate inference A is disposed to accept, (ii) there is some E-appropriate inference A is not disposed to accept, and (iii) A has a minimal grasp of E’s content (since (i) actually entails (iii), (iii) is superfluous here). The more E-appropriate inferences A accepts the stronger A’s grasp of E’s content (provided, of course, that A has a minimal grasp to begin with). Grasp, then, is to be viewed as a graded notion ranging from the minimal to the complete. Perhaps a more refined

180 Whether such a complete grasp will require a complete grasp of every other expression of the language will depend on one’s view regarding A/S. If one follows Quine and rejects A/S, then complete grasp may turn out to be holistic, even though partial grasp is not. This suggests a resolution of the tension between compositionality and holism (considered in chapter 3). If A/S is not sustained, then content might turn out to be holistic because its horizontal component is, and this brand of holism would be of the metaphysical sort. A metaphysical reading of compositionality, and one which could still explain productivity, systematicity, and isomorphism, would nonetheless be compatible with this sort of holism if the compositionality is only read as concerning the vertical component of content. This kind of semantic compositionality would also suit the needs of psychosemantic compositionality despite the holistic aspect of content.

148 account could distinguish between different degrees of grasp of a term based on some working hypothesis about the details of the relevant structure. One desirable consequence of this picture is a move towards linguistic and conceptual . When someone’s grasp of some content is only partial or minimal, then INT (chapter 1) will fail with respect to that person and the relevant expression. In having a minimal grasp of E, a person A’s use of E will carry E’s full content, even when much of that content is unknown to A. This has the further consequence that A can improve his understanding of E’s content by discovering new conceptual relationships involving E’s semantic value, i.e., new E-appropriate inferences. This is important because it provides an answer to the so-called Paradox of Analysis. There the problem is to understand how one could achieve any substantive knowledge through conceptual analysis, for if one is in a position to carry out such an analysis, and hence recognize a correct one, one must already know the meaning of the term in question. In that case, however, one would already know what is revealed by the analysis. So, such analyses can never really be informative. If one gives up IND, however, then there will be no temptation to accept INT. But if meaning is not open to introspection, since it does not supervene on things that are “in the head”, there is no longer any reason to think that a correct conceptual analysis should be obvious to anyone who has a basic competence with the concepts being analyzed. On the present account, then, one can, in one good sense, know the meaning of a term and yet still benefit from such analyses: anyone who has only a partial grasp of some content will stand to gain from such analyses. Conceptual analysis will be uninformative only for those speakers/thinkers who already have a complete grasp of the content in question. Furthermore, such knowledge may well turn out to be a posteriori. This will depend, of course, on how one can acquire knowledge of the nomological structure that grounds E’s content. Since I have allowed non-logical and non-metaphysical, nomological relationships as structuring, it seems that a substantial amount of such knowledge will indeed be a posteriori. Whether knowledge of the remaining metaphysical and logical relationships must be a priori is a matter better left to the epistemologists. All of this suggests a revised version of S2, Frege’s principle of individuation for senses. In chapter 1, we saw that, according to the standard view, Frege regards the senses of two expressions as the same just in case any competent speaker would judge them to have the same semantic value. Since, on the present account, one can grasp the content of a term and yet not

149 know all of the consequences of doing so, i.e., not grasp completely the term’s conceptual role, and since a minimal grasp of the contents of two co-extensive terms does not itself guarantee knowledge that the terms are co-extensive (this is so because the vertical component is itself anti-individualist in nature), individuation conditions cannot be framed in terms of the judgments of actual speakers/thinkers. Since INT fails for speakers with only a partial grasp of the meaning of an expression, those speakers may fail to recognize that two synonymous expressions are indeed synonymous, even though those speakers are competent to use both terms. What all of this suggests is the following, idealized principle of individuation:

S2′ S1 and S2 express the same sense just in case any competent speaker who completely

grasps the senses of S1 and S2 would judge that S1 and S2 have the same semantic value.

The trouble with this is that, as noted above we have no reason to think that it would be transparent to any speaker/thinker that the vertical components of two expressions’ contents were

the same or different. Even if A has a complete grasp of the content of two expressions, E1 and

E2, which happen to have the same (or different) content(s), there is no guarantee that A will know, or even believe, that their contents have the same (or different) vertical component(s), though A might very well know when they have the same horizontal component. It is possible that, given the externalist, and most likely non-cognitive, character of this vertical component, S2′ will fail, but it is also possible that such an ideal speaker would know, and hence judge, that two expressions have the semantic value if she also knows that their contents have the same horizontal components (as they must if the expressions are indeed coextensive). If such knowledge would in fact guarantee the appropriate judgment, then S2′ might be acceptable after all, whether or not sameness of vertical component is necessarily accessible to someone with a complete grasp of the relevant contents. In any case, I consider it a virtue of the present account that it is not committed to semantic introspectionism and that it allows for an acceptable solution to the Paradox of Analysis. Content and Explanation One of the primary motivations for identifying content with conceptual role has always been that it allows content to play a prominent role in explanations of

150 behavior, and that it should play such a role is required if one wants to preserve our practice of intentional explanation and everything that comes with it. This desideratum, as I have argued, is what has led to the individualistic versions of CRS. I have also been arguing, however, that individualism should be rejected. But this raises a serious worry. The reason that so many theorists have assumed that content must be individualistic is that they have supposed that it is only under such an assumption that content could have any explanatory relevance at all. To say that non- individualistic content has no explanatory relevance, however, is just to say that it really does not play any role in explanations of behavior, in which case such an account would appear to jeopardize our ordinary practices of intentional explanation (as well as hopes for scientifically minded ones). The reason such content could play no such role is that it is not sufficiently local to have a hand in mental causation. Individualistic content, on the other, if it is anything, is local in the required sense. Can someone who is a realist about the attitudes and who accords content a significant role in explanations of behavior really afford to accept a non-individualistic CRS? What I would like to argue is that while it may be true that non-individualistic contents do not have any direct explanatory relevance they do have indirect explanatory relevance. It is true that the content-determining structures themselves, being external to the agent, cannot be regarded as the immediate causes of his behavior. This does not mean, however, that they have no relevance. What does have direct relevance to an agent’s behavior is the strength of his grasp of the content in question. Someone who has a nearly complete grasp of an expression E’s content will ceteris paribus most likely behave differently than someone who has only a minimal grasp of the same content. It should come as no surprise that accepting more and more E- appropriate inferences will have some effect or another on someone’s behavior. What I am suggesting, then, is that psychological explanation should proceed not merely in terms of beliefs and desires, and not merely in term of beliefs, desires, and the strength of those beliefs and desires (where strength is a matter of the degree of commitment to a belief or the relative urgency of a desire), but in terms of beliefs, desires, their strength, and their clarity, where clarity is to be understood in terms of the strength of one’s grasp of the propositional content of the attitudes appealed to in the explanation. So, someone who has a partial grasp of the content of |Minds are kinds of computing devices| and who also believes that minds are kinds of computing devices will have a clearer belief than someone who has the same belief with only a

151 minimal grasp but a less clear belief than someone who has that same belief with a complete grasp. So, it is the clarity of one’s beliefs and desires—the strength of one’s grasp of their content—through which content has the most direct explanatory role in explanations of behavior. In what sense, then, does content itself play an indirect role? Well, in this sense: one can have a grasp of a content of some strength or another only if there is some such content and one has a minimal grasp of it. Where there is no content, there is no minimal grasp, and where there is no minimal grasp there is no partial grasp (of whatever degree) or complete grasp. So, any explanation that makes an appeal to the strength of one’s grasp depends indirectly on some content or another that can be, and has been, grasped. E-Appropriate Inference and A/S Another nice feature of this account is that it allows us to divorce analyticity from the idea that knowing the meaning of a term requires believing all of its analyticities. Traditionally it was assumed that if a sentence S is analytic and some speaker A does not accept S as true, then (assuming that A understands S’s syntax) there must be some expression E in S such that A either fails to grasp the content of E or E has a different content for A. This principle is crucial to Quine’s most penetrating attacks on A/S, and that he assumes it is partly why he can only be taken as having refuted an epistemic conception of A/S, if he can be taken as having refuted anything. The reason why Quine is committed to seeing analyticity as bound up with this principle is that he takes meaning to be method of verification, where this latter is understood in terms of inferential dispositions. Since for him, facts about such dispositions are metaphysically constitutive of facts about what one means by one’s terms and hence of what those terms mean, differences of accepted analyticities (which will amount to differences of underlying dispositions) will guarantee some difference of content. Though a defender of the above account need not accept any form of A/S, he could accept a non-epistemic conception. It is open to such a CRS theorist to identify an expression E’s analyticities with all, or some suitable subclass, of the E-appropriate inferences. On such a conception of analyticity, a speaker need not accept any of the analytic E-appropriate inferences in order to have grasped (though minimally) E’s content. So, two people could disagree about what conceptual relations a certain content has without talking past one another. They could do this provided they both have the right minimal grasp. The idea, then, is that anti-individualist CRS can have A/S while at the same time accepting Quine’s point that there is no distinction

152 between those sentences (inferences) one must accept to know the meaning of some expression and those one need not accept provided that it rejects the above principle. That principle forges a tight connection between necessary assent and analyticity, a connection that is shattered on the present view. To summarize, classical CRS takes contents to be causal/inferential structures that reside in the brain (plus the nervous system), or which supervene over such structures. These structures somehow become tethered to external things, properties, and states of affairs. The version of CRS here on offer locates these structures on the other end of the tether. Instead of the contents themselves explaining behavior directly, it is one’s grasp of such contents that does so. As with the contents of classical CRS, it takes inferential relations as supervening over certain kinds of causal/nomological relationships: the former locates these subvening relationships “in the head”, while the latter locates them in the external world but explains understanding (the grasping of a content) partially in terms of those same “in the head” relationships. We have seen that this account has a number of nice features. I have argued, for example, that (i) it accommodates the normativity of content (something individualistic theories have trouble doing), (ii) it is not committed to any form of semantic introspectionism or , (iii) it allows for an intuitive solution to the Paradox of Analysis, (iv) it disarms the Problem of Instability by making content stable, (v) it stops up the Crack, and (vi) it allows for the stability of content while at the same time allowing for such contents to play a genuine role in explanations of behavior. The account clearly has much to recommend it, even if it is, as it stands, somewhat sketchy.181

181 Though I cannot deal with them here, there are some difficulties that will have to be addressed. First, can an anti-individualistic account solve the four puzzles that were taken to recommend a sense/semantic-value distinction in the first place, viz., the Problem of Vacuous Singular Terms, the Problem of Negative Existentials, Frege’s Puzzle, and the Problem of Opacity? One problem here is that the resulting kind of account, though it would no longer individuate meanings too finely, might seem to fail to individuate them finely enough. After all, ‘rectilinear figure with three sides’ and ‘rectilinear figure with three angles’ do seem to have different meanings even though they are necessarily coextensive. In short, such externalist solutions seem to fail to provide an answer to Frege’s puzzle about cognitive significance. The trick, then, would be to provide an externalist understanding of confirmation that is fine-grained enough to differentiate between the meanings of necessarily coextensive terms, and I know of no reason to dismiss such a possibility out of hand. Indeed, the combination of the horizontal, but anti- individualist conceptual roles with the vertical “tether” under the heading ‘content’ just might solve this problem. Second, can a notion of minimal grasp be fashioned that avoids the Disjunction Problem? If the vertical component of content is to be explained, for example, in terms of nomological relations between tokens of an expression and things in the world, then it is incumbent on such accounts to specify which nomological relations matter. Otherwise, if it turns out that a speaker’s tokenings of ‘cow’ are nomologically related both to cows and very overweight horses, then it would seem that that person’s ‘cow’ tokens mean is either a cow or a very overweight horse, in which case that speaker would not be mistaken in tokening ‘cow’ when demonstrating a particular, obese horse. Finally,

153 What About Frege? My primary objective in this chapter has been to present a version of CRS that would fare better against the worries developed in chapters 2 and 3 than the CRS solutions considered in chapter 4. I have also hinted in places that the desired account would be Fregean in character. I would now like to motivate this last claim. However, since this is not a work on Frege, I will limit myself to a few brief remarks. The main elements of the above account are (i) anti-individualism, (ii) the content determining structures and the corresponding E-appropriate inferences, (iii) a provisional division of content into horizontal and vertical components, and (iv) the corresponding, graded conception of understanding. My strategy here will be to indicate to what extent any of these components can be attributed to Frege. Anti-Individualism and Frege’s Anti-Psychologism Given Frege’s anti-psychologism, establishing that Frege is an anti-individualist should be relatively straightforward. To begin with, if individualism really does entail that content cannot be normative or play the role in communication that we typically accord it, then, as a matter of rationalistic reconstruction, we can conclude that Frege would be required to reject individualism, since his central reason for rejecting psychologism in semantics is that it fails to accommodate normativity and communication. Furthermore, if individualism counts as a form of psychologism, then, Frege’s attacks must be seen as applying to it, whether or not he ever considered the doctrine itself. I have argued that individualism really does have trouble with normativity and communication. So, I might very well stop here with the conclusion that Frege should have rejected it. I also think that individualism is clearly a form of psychologism, so I could also conclude that Frege’s arguments count against individualism as a sub-case, even though he may never have reflected on that particular thesis. I believe, however, that we are entitled to the stronger conclusion that Frege did actually consider, and reject, reductionist individualism and perhaps even supervenience individualism as well. At the end of a lengthy tirade against the incursion of psychology into logic and mathematics, Frege says this,

can the account be extended to other kinds of expression than natural kind terms and singular terms? Can it, for example, be extended to cover the logical constants, adverbs, attributive adjectives, and all of the other kinds of expression we feel obliged to recognize?

154

If we want to emerge from the subjective at all, we must conceive of knowledge as an activity that does not create what is known but grasps what is already there. The picture of grasping is very well suited to elucidate the matter. If I grasp a pencil, many different events take place in my body: nerves are stimulated, changes occur in the tension and pressure of muscles, tendons, and bones, the circulation of the blood is altered. But the totality of these events neither is the pencil nor creates the pencil; the pencil exists independently of them. And it is essential for grasping that something be there which is grasped; the internal changes alone are not the grasping. In the same way, that which we grasp with the mind also exists independently of this activity, independently of the ideas and their alterations that are a part of this grasping or accompany it; and it is neither identical with the totality of these events nor created by it as a part of our own mental life.182

“To emerge from the subjective” is Frege’s shorthand for the accommodation of communication, truth, and normativity in one’s theorizing about logic, semantics, and mathematics. Leading up to this passage, Frege had been arguing against ideational accounts of semantic value, i.e., accounts according to which what we talk and think about are ideas in the psychological sense. Such accounts, he contends, slide inevitably into solipsism and thus should be resisted. In this context, however, Frege has shifted his attention to sense, and this is made clear by the appearance of the notion of grasping in the discussion. What we grasp are senses. As with semantic value, what we grasp is already there to be grasped and not created by the grasping, and neither is it identical to, or created by, anything else in our mental life. Admittedly, what this passage most clearly supports is only a partial denial of individualism, since what it seems to be ruling out is just that senses can be reduced to items found in an individual’s mind (or brain). Individualism, however, makes the weaker claim that contents (senses) supervene over such things. Identity is one kind of supervenience though it is not the only kind. Moreover, supervenience is a notion that had not yet been introduced when Frege was writing and thus we are unlikely to find a clear denial of sense/brain-state supervenience in Frege’s writings. Be that as it may, I do think that such a denial is true to the spirit of the above passage. Furthermore, the last sentence of the passage is somewhat suggestive. Here Frege denies what seem to be two distinct possibilities: (i) that senses are identical to ideas or events in (states of) the brain and (ii) that senses are created by them. If Frege is not just repeating himself here, then there is the possibility that he is dimly aware of

182 Frege (1893), pp. 23-4.

155 something like supervenience. The previous clause may offer an even clearer case, since to say that what is grasped “with the mind also exists independently of this activity, independently of the ideas and their alterations that are a part of this grasping or accompany it” is to deny more than mere identity. Supervenience is a kind of dependence between one kind of property and another, so if Frege is here denying all dependence of semantic properties on mental ones (or physiological ones), then it would appear that this passage does indeed count against individualism (either reductionistic or supervenience). It seems fairly clear, then, that Frege is an anti-individualist. So, from this perspective at least, classical CRS is something Frege could not have accepted, and the move to the above anti- individualist CRS is one that he would find congenial. Begriffsschrifts and the Third Realm A harder task will be showing that Frege recognized something like the above anti-individualist content-determining structures and their corresponding E-appropriate inferences. Here, my comments will be mostly suggestive. I will argue that given certain aspects of Frege’s views, Frege is committed to recognizing something very much like these structures and their corresponding inferences but that it would have been open to him to recognize exactly such structures and inferences. To this end, what needs to be shown is (i) that Frege is an anti-individualist about sense, (ii) that Frege’s conception of sense does in fact instantiate the QW-schema, and (iii) that Frege views properties as abstract, rather than as mental or physical, in nature. When seen in the proper light, this trio provides compelling grounds for the above two claims. Since we have already established (i), we only need to consider (ii) and (iii). The best reason for seeing Frege’s conception of sense as instantiating the QW-schema lies in his views on the nature and purpose of his Begriffsschrift. Frege’s very choice of language here is itself revealing, since ‘Begriffsschrift’ is reasonably translated as either ‘concept notation’ or ‘concept script’. The idea is that his Begriffsschrift is a necessary instrument for the purpose of clearly revealing the content of expressions of certain kinds of discourse. Frege’s explicit goal, of course, is to produce a notation in which the content of mathematical expressions can be clearly revealed, and he wants to do this to support his master thesis that mathematical concepts and truths are at bottom logical ones. How does he plan to display mathematical concepts in a perspicuous manner? What aspects of an expression’s use and ordinary meaning should count as

156 cognitive content and thus determine how that expression’s content should be displayed? Frege gives a hint early in the Begriffsschrift, when he tells us,

. . . all those features of language that result only from the interaction of speaker and listener—where the speaker, for example, takes the listener’s expectations into account and seeks to put them on the right track even before a sentence is finished—have no counterpart in my formula language, since here the only thing that is relevant in a judgement is that which influences its possible consequences.183

At this point in Frege’s career, he had not yet distinguished between sense and semantic value, though he indiscriminately included both under the generic head of ‘content’. Later, however, when Frege had the sense/semantic-value distinction at his disposal, he would offer essentially the same explanation for the utility of the Begriffsschrift.184 Keeping the sense/semantic-value distinction in mind, Frege’s idea is that since sense is what determines semantic value and since the semantic values of sentences are truth values, and since he accepts compositionality for both sense and reference, the only aspects of a sub-sentential expression’s ordinary meaning that should be included as part of its sense are those aspects that are relevant to determining the truth values of the sentences in which that expression occurs. Inference, however, plays a crucial role in such determinations, since it is only by considering what sentential structures need to be recognized in order to explain why intuitively valid inferences are valid and intuitively invalid ones invalid that one can even identify the primitive expressions required by compositionality. The idea, then, is that the sense of an expression must be essentially connected to the role that that expression plays in inferences from or to sentences containing it. The upshot, then, is that sense, cognitive content, can only be clearly displayed in the context of a Begriffsschrift. By completing such a concept notation (that is, by rigorously representing all of the possible inferences involving the primitive vocabulary) one has effectively represented everything that must be known (in one sense of that term) for one to have fully grasped the sense of its primitive expressions.

183 Frege (1879), p. 12.

184 See, for example, Frege (1892b), p. 187, where he says, “When I wrote my Foundations of Arithmetic, I had not yet made the distinction between sense and meaning; and so, under the expression ‘a content of possible judgement’, I was combining what I now designate by the distinctive words ‘thought’ and ‘truth-value’. Consequently, I no longer entirely approve of the explanation I then gave, as regards its wording; my view is, however, still essentially the same.”

157 So, a proper understanding of Frege’s Begriffsschrift shows that his understanding of sense does fit the general QW model: in the Begriffsschrift, which represents conceptual contents, sentences are the nodes and the inferential relations between them are what yield the relevant content determining structures. Given his anti-individualism, however, senses cannot be conceptual roles, at least as they are understood by classical CRS. Rather, senses must be external to the agent and as such must inhabit either the abstract realm or the physical realm (in the latter case, they must be external to the physical bodies of agents as well). Now, it is a cardinal tenet of Frege’s views on sense that they are to be found in the “third realm”—the realm of the abstract. What this means is that if Frege also views all properties as abstract, then he is free to take senses as at least partially constituted by properties and their relations to other properties (which latter would also be abstract). This would establish half of what we wanted— the other half being that acceptance of E-appropriate inference could play a role in his theory of understanding (I shall return to this other half below when I discuss Frege’s views on linguistic understanding, i.e., on grasping). Though I cannot argue this here, my sense is that Frege did view properties as abstract in nature. Of course, even if Frege did not see properties in this light, it would nonetheless have been open to him to hold that, while senses do not reduce to such structures, they do supervene over them. Sense and Mode of Presentation I have already established that, for Frege, anti- individualist QW-structures are at least partially constitutive of senses, that is, I have made a case for recognizing the horizontal component of the above anti-individualist account in Fregean senses. What remains is to see that for Frege such structures are not (or at least need not be) completely constitutive. Here I will content myself with just a minimum of textual support. What I want to point out is that Frege did not think that the sense of an expression E need be completely constituted by some particular mode of presentation of E’s semantic value. In “Sense and Meaning”, after arguing for the necessity of a notion of sense to complement that of semantic value, he says the following,

It is natural, now, to think of there being connected with a (name, combination of words, written mark), besides that which the sign designates, which may be called the meaning of the sign, also what I should like to call the sense of the sign, wherein the mode of presentation is contained.185

185 Frege (1892a), p. 158; my emphasis.

158

As the emphasized phrase shows, Frege does not identify sense with mode of presentation, an explicitly epistemological notion, outright. Rather, he allows that there might be more that needs to be recognized. But doesn’t this violate Frege’s own definition of sense (S from chapter 1) as the mode of determination of an expression’s semantic value? The answer is that it does not, provided that some care is taken in distinguishing between modes of determination and modes of presentation. Here is one way of doing this. Mode of presentation is both a determinant of an expression E’s semantic value and an epistemic relation that holds between a particular mind and that semantic value. A determinant of a semantic value, on the other hand, need not, but may, be epistemic in nature—indeed, it is open that there are such determinants that are inaccessible to the actual speakers of a language and thus cannot count as modes of presentation for them (there are certain functions that are so complicated that evaluating them for certain arguments might outstrip even the most brilliant human’s psychological resources). Nonetheless, such a non-presenting mode of determination would still count as part of E’s sense even though it does not help the users of E establish any kind of cognitive contact with E’s semantic value. With this distinction in mind, we can see how a sense might contain both accessible and inaccessible modes of determination. One way of reading the above anti-individualist CRS is that the vertical component of E’s content is to be regarded as a mode of presentation, since it is what connects minds to things. The external, inference-determining structures, on the other hand, could very well be modes of determination determined for an expression once that expression’s vertical component is established. By tethering a mental or linguistic expression to some part of the world that expression is thereby also tethered to the appropriate kind of structure. If it is held that this structure (minus the original semantic value) determines that semantic value, though perhaps in some inaccessible, purely metaphysical way, then one has grounds for including such a structure in the sense of the original expression. So, Frege includes modes of presentation in sense and leaves it open that there are other sorts of determination. For the anti-individualistic CRS currently on offer, the vertical component of content would count as a mode of presentation (and hence as a mode of determination) while the horizontal component would typically count only as a mode of determination, though under certain circumstances, it might also count as a mode of presentation.

159 In any case, both components are modes of determination and thus could be recognized by Frege as constituting sense. Frege and the Paradox of Analysis Frege’s official position was that spelling out the details of what grasping a content amounts to is a matter for psychology and thus should be kept out of semantics proper. I would like to point to a couple of passages that strongly suggest, despite his official policy of avoiding psychology when doing semantics, logic, and mathematics, that Frege thought that grasp, however it ultimately is to be understood, must be graded rather than all or nothing. The key passage comes in the context of a discussion of the logical value of definitions. In an unpublished work written late in Frege’s career, Frege distinguishes between constructive and analytic definitions. The former consists of an assignment of an old sense to a new term and is basically what is now known as stipulative definition. Frege’s attitude to this kind of definition is that it is logically dispensable but psychologically indispensable.186 The addition of such a definition to a formal system does not enrich the expressive or deductive capacity of the system. Rather, it facilitates our ability to construct derivations in the system. Analytic definitions, on the other hand, aim to articulate the sense of some simple sign by identifying that sense with the sense of some complex expression. Unlike constructive definitions, such analyses may very well increase the deductive capacity of the system—more accurately, they improve deductive possibilities by allowing us to replace one system with some other, closely related but more powerful system. At this point, Frege makes an interesting observation—one that seems almost to anticipate the Paradox of Analysis. How, he asks, could it be possible that “it should be doubtful whether a simple sign has the same sense as a complex expression if we know not only the sense of the simple sign, but can recognize the sense of the complex one from the way it is put together?”187 Frege’s point is that such analyses often count as important discoveries in science and, as such, are not self-evident. Much earlier, in the Grundlagen, he says,

186 See Frege (1914), p. 209, where he says, “So if from a logical point of view [constructive] definitions are at bottom quite inessential, they are nevertheless of great importance for thinking as this actually takes place in human beings.”

187 Frege (1914), p. 211.

160 Often it is only after immense intellectual effort, which may have continued over centuries, that humanity at last succeeds in achieving knowledge of a concept in its pure form, in stripping off the irrelevant accretions which veil it from the eyes of the mind.188

But if we really have grasped both the sense of the simple expression and that of the complex expression that is being offered as its analysis, then how could conceptual analysis be so difficult and informative? Frege’s answer is that

. . . if we really do have a clear grasp of the sense of the simple sign, then it cannot be doubtful whether it agrees with the sense of the complex expression. If this is open to question although we can clearly recognize the sense of the complex expression from the way it is put together, then the reason must lie in the fact that we do not have a clear grasp of the sense of the simple sign, but that its outlines are confused as if we saw it through a mist. The effect of logical analysis . . . will then be precisely this—to articulate the sense clearly.189

Clearly, Frege sees the need, at certain moments at least, for distinguishing between complete and partial grasp in some way. Interestingly, this passage also hints at the role of the begriffsschrift in achieving a more complete grasp and at the structured nature of sense. So, there are hints in Frege’s texts that at one time or another he recognized something like each of the four components of the anti-individualist CRS on offer. Whether he actually did so at any single time, and whether an acceptance of these components could, when seen in the context of the rest of his commitments, form a single coherent view are different matters, matters that I will not attempt to settle here. What I have shown is that the above anti-individualist CRS is not far off from Frege’s actual views and that, if push had come to shove, it is something he could have adopted.

What, then, has been accomplished? I have argued that all of the available individualist proposals for solving the Problem of Instability fail. A better option, I have suggested, is to reject individualism. This would open up the possibility of an anti-individualist CRS and one which could be either holistic or properly anatomic, depending on whether A/S is accepted or rejected. Furthermore, I have tried to sketch one such account and we have seen that it has a

188 Frege (1884), vii.

189 Ibid.

161 number of desirable features. Finally, I have tried to show that such an account would be more thoroughly Fregean in character than is classical CRS. In the end, I suspect that we will be happier with this sort of account than with an individualistic CRS.

162 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abbott, Barbara (2000), “Fodor and Lepore on Meaning Similarity and Compositionality”, Journal of Philosophy, 97 (8), pp. 454-5.

Austin, J. L. (1950), “Truth”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supplement, 24, 11-128; reprinted in J. L. Austin, Philosophical Papers, edited by J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 117-133. All page references to the reprint in Austin 1970.

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173 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Adam Christian Sipos was born in Oakland, California on January 18, 1972. In 1990, after graduating from the Lovett School, a college preparatory school in Atlanta, Georgia, Adam received a scholarship to study music at the Florida State University (FSU) in Tallahassee, Florida. Adam graduated with honors in August 1995 receiving the Bachelor of Arts degree in both music and philosophy. In September of that same year, he began graduate study at FSU and was awarded the Master of Arts degree in philosophy while en route to his doctorate in the same subject. While a graduate student at FSU, Adam served as an Instructor, teaching introductory and intermediate level courses on general philosophy, logic, and the philosophy of language. In 2001, he was awarded the Edward H. and Marie C. Kingsbury Award.

174