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"This"? : a Puzzle About Demonstrative Belief

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University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014 1-1-1985 What's the meaning of "this"? : a puzzle about demonstrative belief. David F. Austin University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_1 Recommended Citation Austin, David F., "What's the meaning of "this"? : a puzzle about demonstrative belief." (1985). Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014. 2143. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_1/2143 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014 by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. WHAT'S THE MEANING OF "THIS' 7: A PUZZLE ABOUT DEMONSTRATIVE BELIEF A Dissertation Presented By DAVID F. AUSTIN Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY September 1985 Philosophy David F. Austin © All Rights Reserved 11 WHAT'S THE MEANING OF "THIS"?: A PUZZLE ABOUT DEMONSTRATIVE BELIEF A Dissertation Presented By David F. Austin Approved as to style and content by: f JUG'LL La i // ( l C IA / Edmund L. Gettier, III, Chairperson of Committee Emmon Bach, Member // Michael Jubien, Department Head Philosophy Acknowledge ments Work on this essay began in January, 1978, (when a version of Chapter IV was written) and continued, discontinuously, until August, 1984, when it reached very nearly its present form. During those six and a half years, I have learned from many people about the topics treated here, and it is a pleasure to acknowledge their help. I proceed from the specific to the general. Chapters I and II benefitted from the detailed comments provided by Randy Carter and David Auerbach. Their comments helped me to make those chapters clearer. Discussions with Wayne Backman and with Harold Levin enabled me to make several sections of Chapter III coherent. Written comments from Joseph Mendola helped to reassure me that the arguments of that chapter were worth extended treatment. Stephen Schiffer was a helpful correspondent. Another version of Chapter IV was published in the Notre Dame journal of Formal Logic, under the title, "Plantinga's Theory of Proper Names". An earlier version of that paper was presented to the Herbert Heidelberger Task Force on Propositional Attitudes, and the members then present (Herbert Heidelberger, William Lycan and Lynne Rudder Baker) were very encouraging. So was Alvin Plantinga, in correspondence. Several discussions with Diana Ackerman were helpful to me in coming to appreciate her views. IV The main arguments of Chapter V were discussed at a meeting of the Triangle Conference on Content, a biweekly discussion group on philosphy of mind and language held at the National Humanities Center during the academic year '83 - 84. (The group's other members were: Wayne Back man, Lynne Rudder Baker, Alan Berger, Michael Ferejohn, Robert Hambourger, Igal Kvart, Harold Levin, William Lycan, Jonathan Molino and David Sanford.) That discussion prompted me to add "Believing Too Much by Believing More ' to the chapter. Further discussion with Wayne Back man and Robert Hambourger resulted in additional clarification of the arguments. Robert Stalnaker and David Lewis were generously helpful correspondents (but Stalnaker still owes me a letter). A letter from David Lewis was also important to Chapter VI and the Postscript. I wrote the second draft of this essay during my first summer here at North Carolina State University. My department head, Robert Bryan, has seen to it that I and my colleagues have a good academic home, and I thank him for building it and maintaining it in such good repair. Bill Lycan and Lynne Baker have been friends and valued philo- sophical companions since 1980. I hope that they have lost track of the number of times that they have heard me describe the Two Tubes case and its minor variants. I assure them that the number is at most denumerable, and thank them for their patience. Two members of my dissertation committee (in addition to its director) have been good and powerful influences on my approach to philosophy. Robert Sleigh helped impress upon me the fact that you can't v really see the forest unless you've made a detailed examination of the roots, bark, trunk and leaves on all of its constituent trees. The overall structure of this essay was adopted because I had the benefit of Gareth Matthews practical wisdom and philosophical insight. It is hard to think of him without also thinking of wisdom. Fred Feldman has had a major influence on my approach to teaching philosophy and hence to philosophy itself. The effect has been wholly salutary, and the undergraduates who have taken classes with me on the topics of this essay (and who have good-naturedly spent some time looking through tubes) have him to thank for much of the clarity and simplicity in my lectures to those classes. There are four philosophers who deserve special thanks here: Earl Conee, Mark Richard, Herbert Heidelberger, and Edmund Gettier. Earl Conee shared an office with me while I was writing the first draft of this essay. Then, before and after, we have spent hundreds of hours in discussion of the topics of this essay. Earl foments good philosophy, and raises the level of any philosophical discussion in which he participates. Talking with him has certainly made each and every chapter here better than it would otherwise have been. I have had the privilege of discussing triadic theories of belief with one of their most able and creative proponents, Mark Richard. We have not talked often since we left our graduate school - being over three thousand miles apart most of the time tends to interrupt the flow of conversation - but our discussions have been extremely important to me in gaining an understanding of the virtues and defects of contemporary theories of belief. vi Herbert Heidelberger's death deprived me of a good friend and much valued teacher, and it deprived philosophy of an extremely able practitioner. A significant portion of the content of this essay formed in seminars and discussions with him. He persuaded me to take seriously the view criticized in Chapter V. Had Herb lived, he might well have given us satisfactory solutions to many puzzles about belief, the Two Tubes Puzzle included. I miss him, and I dedicate this essay to his memory. The greatest debt of these four is to my friend, advisor and dissertation director, Edmund Gettier. He is, first of all, one of the sharpest and most penetrating philosophers I have ever known; there are very few as good at criticism. (Unbeknownst to most, he is also a creative philosopher, but his critical faculties usually get the better of him.) Although sharp (and a very effective puncturer of pomposity and pretension), he is never unkind; he is instead deeply generous, and his sharpness, penetration, generosity and true wit make him the best of teachers. More than anyone else, he taught me how philosophy ought to be done: clarity may not be enough, but without deep conceptual clarity, one will know neither where one stands, nor where one does not stand. (As Mies van der Rohe said, God is in the details' .) Whatever good there is in this essay is here largely because of what he taught me. As do all such projects, this one has exacted a considerable toll from the author's family. Despite the birth of our daughter, and the rigors of her own graduate career, my wife, Candice Ward, has been more supportive than than she should I had any right to hope she would be, and more tolerant have been. Our daughter, Alexandra Lee Austin-Ward, (a.k.a., Lexie ) vii helped me to gain and keep a healthier perspective on many important things, work included. Without the love of wife and daughter, I might have finished this essay, but, in the end, it would have meant too much and too little. ABSTRACT What's the Meaning of "This"?: A Puzzle about Demonstrative Belief September, 1985 David F. Austin, B.A., University of Rochester M.A., Ph.D., University of Massachusetts Directed by: Professor Edmund L. Gettier, III In recent literature in the philosophy of mind and language, one finds a variety of examples that raise serious problems for the traditional analysis of belief as a two- term relation between a believer and a proposition. My main purpose in this essay is to provide a critical test case for any theory of the propositional attitudes, and to demonstrate that this case really does present an unsolved puzzle. Chapter I defines the traditional, propositional analysis of belief, and then introduces a distinction, motivated by the intui- tions that underlie Kripke's arguments for direct reference, between purely qualitative and individual propositions. Beliefs typically expressed using proper names, indexicals or demonstratives appear to relate the believer to individual propositions with the entity that may be referred to as subject constituent. Chapter II presents the critical test case (the Two Tubes case). In this and Chapters III - VI it is used to show that the latter sorts of beliefs are not analyzable as dyadically relating the believer to individual (or purely qualitative) propositions. The case constitutes a genuine counterexample to IX the traditional analysis only if (a) it is possible for a believer to believe an individual proposition with a contingent thing other than herself as a constituent; and (b) the believer in the case is in optimum conditions for believing an individual proposition. In Chapters III, IV and VI, I criticize views prompted by rejection of (a) (Schiffer, Russell, Plantinga, Ackerman, Chisholm, Lewis), and in Chapter V, I criticize Stalnaker's view, which rejects (b).
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