1 on Emplacing: Reference, Coherence, Truth, and Paradoxes
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1 ON EMPLACING: REFERENCE, COHERENCE, TRUTH, AND PARADOXES (IF THEY BE PARADOXES) 1 by A. K. Bierman ‘Tis filausofers & logishons wot bedde down wyth paradoxyes. --Fanebius Perlyng (from Erly Warnyngs) Conversation I: The First Day. Reference becomes Emplacement p. 1 Conversation II: The Following Afternoon: The Emplacement Chart p. 37 Conversation III: The Following Evening: Paradox, be gone p. 88 Summary of Results and coming plot line p. 133 THE FIRST DAY Reference Becomes Emplacement. Names live in eternity, are set there like stars…tiny points in human consciousness. H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), Pausanias THELMA FACTIVA (THELMA): What should we do tonight, Tom? A movie? TOMASSO PARADOSSO (TOM): No. Let's stay here and play Paradox. THELMA: Show me how. TOM: My statement is false. THELMA: A new come on, Tom? So, OKAY, what statement is false? To what are you referring with quote My statement unquote? (Tom and Thelma's spoken quotat- 1 This essay corrects some of Russell’s “On Denoting” and Strawson’s “On Referring”. It does so by replacing “denoting and “referring” with “emplacing”, which is a feature of a conceptual/coherence logic, an ur, basement logical to statement/truth logic This new logic is informally introduced during the discussion about paradoxes, which is a test case for the utility of the new logic. A more extended formal presentation of conceptual logic appears in The Logic of Conceptual Coherence 3.0 that includes a brief symbolic abstract of it. With this essay, I intend to wash away a decent portion of the clotted, academic blood shed by analytic philosophers in the 20th Century, to refresh the survivors of the 20th Century analytic wars, to free young philosophers and other intellectuals from the oppression of accum- ulated orthodoxies, and to suggest that the introduction of a new canon may open new prospects for fledgling philosophic alternatives, fun, games, and joy. Special thanks to Nino Cocchiarella, Roy Mash, and Don Gieschen for reading drafts of this essay and for their advice. 2 ion conventions (quote...unquote) will be replaced with written quotation marks ("..."); other kinds of quotation marks Thelma thinks are useful await you down the line (p. 7f). TOM: I referred to what I just said. THELMA: To "This statement is false"? TOM: Yes, "This statement is false" is self-referential. THELMA: Tom, I'm surprised at you. Referring is something people do. State- ments can't refer any more than they can infer. Statements may imply or entail; but it's incoherent to say they infer or refer. We don’t use statements to designate anything, including itself. We do use their sub- jects to designate objects and their predicates to designate properties they have. TOM: I intended "This statement" to designate "This statement is false". THELMA: You know, don't you, that, in interpreting somebody's singular declar- ative sentence, we substitute for its subject what we believe is the intended designee? TOM: Substitute a referent! That's bizarre. THELMA: It’s neither bizarre nor unfamiliar. We do this all the time. Actually, it’s more accurate to say we emplace rather than substitute objects for subjects. We sub- stitute “2” for “two” or vice versa, but that’s different from emplacing one in the other. Emplacing is how we go from a declarative sentence's grammatical subject to its referent- ial subject. Frege understood this. "The reference of a proper name is the object itself which we designate by its means ...".2 For me, the same goes for any linguistic technique we use to pick out single objects, such as definite descriptions, pronouns, and pointing propped up with a common name, “That pan …”. If you say "That is hot", the sentence's grammatical subject is "that". If you point to a pan, that helps me identify your intended referent of "that". The pan would be the sentence's referential subject, and so, the subject of the statement “That pan is hot”. Do you agree? TOM: That's obvious--I think. THELMA: Your pointing instructs me to emplace the pan in "that". TOM: Emplace? THELMA: If you're to verify or disverify, agree or disagree on the basis of evi- dence, rationally believe or doubt that the pan is hot, you have to get past "that" to the pan. Yes?3 TOM: Sure. THELMA: To get past "that" you have to emplace the pan-piece-of-reality in the sentence’s place where "that" is. [THELMA addresses a predicate's referential property later. She rejects the notion that predicates are functions. She thinks they’re operations that persons, not sentence predicates, carry out. And if properties, such as bloated versus 2 Frege, G., “On Sense and Reference”, Trans. M. Black, Translations from the Philosophical Writing of Gottlob Frege, p. 60, eds. P. Geach and M. Black; Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1952. 3 "The theorems of arithmetic are never about symbols, but about the things they represent". Frege, G., "The Whole Number", Mind, p. 482, Vol. LXXIX, No. 316 (Oct. 1970) 3 long, aren’t emplaced in predicates as objects’ features, she wonders why anyone bothers looking at Falstaff’s face to see if it’s really bloated or at a nail to see if it’s truly long? She distinguishes objects from properties, but she also knows both need to be emplaced to verify and falsify statements’ truth value. She explains why later.] TOM: Emplace? THELMA: You are persistent! If I claimed that a pan is hot, you'd check out the designated pan and its temperature to verify my statement. It would be incoherent to em- place a wig in “pan”. That leads to the absurdity of checking its temperature to verify that the pan is hot. It’s coherent to emplace a wig in “wig” and a pan in “pan” but inco- herent to emplace a wig in “pan” and a pan in “wig”. TOM: Incoherent? THELMA: Conceptually absurd. Our tribe differentiates words’ referents. Not just anything can be a word’s referent. Why do you think we use different words for dif- ferent kinds of objects and differing properties? Only Plump Jack could get away with “It’s all one”, and he only when in his cups. TOM: Who’s Plump Jack? THELMA: Falstaff’s predecessor. Don’t you think I’d be a bit daft if I used “wig” to refer to a pan, and vice versa? Or speaking in tongues, or code? TOM: There must be more to incoherence than that. THELMA: There's lots more and all good, but that's all you need to know now. Haven’t you noted how popular “coherent” and “incoherent” are, especially the latter, in the Anglo-American philosophic lexicon. “Incoherent” is like a blurry curse you can pin on an indefinite target. My cardinal philosophical task is to make coherence a service- able concept, as basic as truth is, to distinguish the two, and initiate a logic for conceptual coherence value inferences distinct from a logic serving statements’ truth value infer- ences. That’s not done in a one-liner, Tom. For starters, it takes the whole of this essay, its Appendix, and the latter’s appendix. And work on the coherence value of evaluations. Allora. Let's call whatever we emplace in a declarative sentence's singular gram- matical subject a "statement subject", which is short for "an interpreted sentence's refer- ential subject". It's a short way to help us keep sentences' grammatical and referential subjects distinct. I use the phrase "statement subject", because the concepts of reference, statement, and truth value are bound together. When I utter a sentence, intending to make a statement with it, I must intend, or an auditor must believe I intend, that it's terms coherently refer to something I or an auditor believes contributes to its truth or falsity. So, the indicated pan would be the statement subject of "That is hot". TOM: If I say "Thelma is daft", and you're the intended referent of "Thelma", are you really saying you are really the statement subject of "Thelma is daft"? THELMA: Yes, I am saying so, and I am. Really, and really. The referential con- tent of a sentence can't be the sentence's referring words themselves. If they were, you'd never get beyond the sentence. 4 TOM: I've always thought the contents of statements had to be platonic-like thoughts, if you favored Frege. Or psychic events or states, if you were a conceptual naturalist. THELMA: Don't confuse a referent with such metaphysical or psychological tools to explain the referential process. If you want a hands-on explanation, I’m offering what I call emplacing objects and properties in sentences subject and predicate tokens in a ser- ial order from subject to predicate, what’s needed for verification. I’ll explain that later. TOM: The confusion between a referential process and a referent never sullied my mind. THELMA: I hope not. Hot pans and I, Thelma, are neither Fregean concepts nor functions, nor are we mental events, but we are referential contents. If referents weren’t the ‘contents’ of our statements, we couldn't reach beyond sentences to objects and prop- erties in the world, which, after all, is what the truth value of statements finally depends on. The truth value of the statement “Tom doubts” depends on whether or not you doubt. Emplaced referents are the pay-off contents of statements; only they make them true or false. Notice I didn’t say truth value depends on ‘states of affairs’. The story’s more complicated, but it’s better to let its elaborations flow out of our conversation.