Michael Bench-Capon
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Empty Names Michael George Trevor Bench-Capon Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds School of Philosophy, Religion and the History of Science September 2013 0 The candidate confirms that the work submitted is his own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. © 2013 The University of Leeds and Michael George Trevor Bench- Capon The right of Michael George Trevor Bench-Capon to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents act 1988. 1 Acknowledgements A lot of people have helped me, philosophically or otherwise, while I was writing and this. I would like to thank these people: The other philosophy postgraduates at Leeds from 2009 to 2013, especially Thomas Brouwer, Wouter Kalf, and Paul Ramshaw. The staff in the philosophy department at Leeds during that time, especially my supervisor, Andrew McGonigal. My examiners, Robbie Williams and Cian Dorr, for their input at the viva. My parents, my brothers, and my grandparents. My girlfriend, Aliya Vasylenko. 2 Abstract Empty names are names which do not refer to anything. Apparently empty names are used in many different ways, and an analysis which looks good for one kind of use can look bad for another. I aim to get a wide enough angle on the issues that the solutions I propose won’t run into that problem. Chapter one is about names which are empty because they were introduced in the context of mistakes and lies. I see how we can assign truth values to utterances containing such names. I also look at how genuinely empty names could be meaningful at all, and examine how they could fit into a Davidsonian theory of meaning. Chapter two is about mental states corresponding to the names dealt with in chapter one. I try to give an account of how beliefs could be subject to rational norms without appealing to their propositional contents. I do this by showing that puzzles about co-referring names can motivate such an account independently, and that the empty name beliefs can fit into this framework easily. Chapter three is about attitude ascriptions and propositions. I consider different ways of responding to the problem of having propositions but no objects for the propositions to be about. I defend an account involving gappy Fregean propositions, and give a semantics for attitude ascriptions which incorporates them. Chapter four is about the names that occur in fiction. I argue that we should take these to be polysemous between a use referring to an artistic creation and a use primarily suited to pretence. For the first use, I survey proposals for ontologies of fictional characters, and suggest one of my own. To make sense of the second use, I use a two- 3 dimensional semantics, which also helps with the problem of negative existentials. 4 Contents Chapter Zero: Introduction 9 Chapter One: Names without Referents 13 1.0 Introduction 13 1.1 Meaningful names without semantic contributions 17 o 1.11 Braun’s problems 17 o 1.12 Braun’s solutions 18 o 1.13 Other routes to pessimistic truth values 25 1.2 Everett’s objection 30 o 1.21 A Millian solution 30 o 1.22 A metalinguistic solution 32 o 1.23 A Fregean solution 35 1.3 Empty names and truth theories 39 o 1.31 Davidsonian theories of meaning 39 o 1.32 The Davidsonian problem of empty names 43 o 1.33 Semantic competence and semantic ignorance 44 o 1.34 More tentative semantic axioms 49 1.4 Conclusion 53 Chapter Two: Beliefs without Objects 56 2.0 Introduction 56 2.1 Frege’s Puzzle 58 o 2.11 Descriptivism 61 o 2.12 Anaphora and drefs 63 o 2.13 Paderewski 67 2.2 A psychological solution to Frege’s puzzle 79 o 2.21 The language of thought hypothesis 79 o 2.22 Dispensing with psychological sententialism 81 5 o 2.23 Problems with co-ordination 89 . 2.231 Anti-luminosity 90 . 2.232 Slow switching 92 o 2.24 A more formal framework for co-ordination 95 2.3 Conclusion 101 Chapter Three: Contents without Constituents 103 3.0 Introduction 103 3.1 Desiderata for a solution 107 o 3.11 The role of propositions 107 o 3.12 Truth intuitions about attitude ascriptions 108 o 3.13 Intentional transitives 109 o 3.14 A plausible ontology 111 3.2 Reifying the constituents 112 o 3.21 Meingongianism 112 o 3.22 Abstract artefcacts 114 3.3 Rejecting the contents 117 o 3.31 Error theory 117 o 3.32 Pretence and paraphrase 119 3.4 Gappy propositions 122 o 3.41 Russellian gappy propositions 122 o 3.42 Fregean gappy propositions 128 3.5 Conclusion 138 Appendix: Sential Semantics for Attitude Ascriptions 141 Chapter Four: Fictional Names 147 4.0 Introduction 147 4.1 Fictional ontologies 151 o 4.11 Van Inwagen’s argument 151 6 o 4.111 ‘If there are fictional characters then they exist’ 151 o 4.112 ‘There are fictional characters’ 152 o 4.113 Yagisawa’s objections 156 o 4.12 Categorizing fictional ontologies 169 o 4.121 Dependent abstracta 170 o 4.122 Platonic abstracta 172 o 4.123 Non-existent concreta 177 4.2 Problems for fictional ontologies 181 o 4.21 Creations or discoveries? 181 o 4.22 Kripke and unicorns 189 o 4.221 Kripke’s argument 192 o 4.222 Descriptivist responses 195 o 4.223 Dummett 197 o 4.224 Reimer 202 o 4.225 Yagisawa 203 o 4.226 Epistemicism and indeterminacy 206 o 4.227 Summary 212 o 4.23 Double lives 213 o 4.231 Caulfield’s fame and other problems 213 o 4.232 Kripke’s story about Sherlock Holmes 215 o 4.233 Interdependent fictional characters 218 o 4.234 The modesty paradox 221 o 4.235 Abstract and concrete natives and immigrants 227 4.3 A sketch of a fictional ontology 230 o 4.31 Introduction 230 o 4.32 Informal presentation of the theory 231 o 4.33 Formal presentation of the theory 236 o 4.34 How the theory solves the problems 238 o 4.341 Creations or discoveries? 239 o 4.342 Kripke and unicorns 240 o 4.343 Double lives 240 7 o 4.3431 Caulfield’s fame 241 o 4.3432 Kripke’s story about Sherlock Holmes 241 o 4.3433 Interdependent fictional characters 242 o 4.3434 Paradoxes 243 o 4.35 Limitations of the theory 245 4.4 Pretence 245 o 4.41 Leaving your sports car in the garage 245 o 4.42 Anchored and unanchored pretence 248 o 4.43 Lewis on truth in fiction 251 o 4.431 Semi-rigid designation 252 o 4.432 Fictional names and attitude ascriptions 255 o 4.433 Note on ‘according to’ 259 4.5 Conclusion 262 Chapter Five: Concluding Remarks 265 5.1 What we have learned about empty names 265 5.2 What we have learned about other things 266 5.3 What we have not learned about empty names 267 Bibliography 269 8 Chapter 0 – Introduction Once upon a time, at least according to philosophical folklore, most people were descriptivists about names. This means they thought that names, like ‘Aristotle’, had the same meanings as definite descriptions, like ‘the pupil of Plato and teacher of Alexander’. Bertrand Russell [1905] gave a famous analysis of definite descriptions which still makes sense even if nothing fits the description, and thus we could be forgiven for thinking that we had solved any problems associated with names which don’t refer to anything, or empty names as we'll call them. Apparently empty names are words like ‘Apollo’ (for a god some Greeks thought existed), ‘Vulcan’ (for a planet some astronomers thought existed), and ‘Santa’ (for a jolly fellow some children think exists). The problem of empty names came back, so the story goes, when people like Ruth Barcan Marcus, Saul Kripke and David Kaplan started challenging the descriptivist consensus. They presented arguments that at least some of the time names behave very differently from definite descriptions. One view which gained some popularity was Millianism, named after John Stuart Mill, which says that the meaning of a name just is its referent. This immediately presents a problem for empty names, because it seems that a name without a referent won’t have a meaning. Even if we stop short of Millianism, we might still want to say that a name’s meaning is more intimately connected to its referent than a definite description’s meaning is to the thing (if any) fitting the description, and this makes empty names a problem. One response is to fall back on descriptivism. I don’t want to do that, and will mostly only consider it as either a last resort or way of treating special cases. Another response is Meinongianism, which in its extreme form says there are no empty names, and all apparently empty names refer to non-existent objects. I don’t want to do that either, but I will 9 leave the view on the table and give it a fair ride. The principal aim of this thesis is to see if we can make sense of the different ways we use apparently empty names without falling back on descriptivism.