II BARCELONA WORKSHOP ON ISSUES IN THE THEORY OF REFERENCE

Special topic: TWO-DIMENTIONALISM

ABSTRACTS

Invited talks:

DAVID J. CHALMERS

University of Arizona, USA

<chalmers@arizona.edu>

"The foundations of two-dimensional semantics"

The central importance of the two-dimensional semantic framework is that it promises to yield notions of meaning and possibility that are closely tied to reason and cognition. But many different versions of the two-dimensional framework have been put forward, and it is not clear how these are related. In this paper, I try to shed light on this matter by distinguishing from first principles different ways of interpreting the framework. The central distinction is between contextual interpretations, which use the framework to model context-dependence, and epistemic interpretations, which use the framework to model epistemic dependence. Contextual interpretations are more common, but I argue that only an epistemic interpretation can yield constitutive connections among reason, meaning, and possibility.
I develop an epistemic version of the two-dimensional framework in some detail, compare it to other versions, and show how it can be used to address a number of important problems in the philosophy of language and mind.

MICHAEL MARTIN

University College London, UK

<michael.martin@ucl.ac.uk>

"Objects of Desire"

Discussions of indexicality and the psychological phenomenon of perspective commonly divorce treatments of this aspect of thought from truth-conditions. Stalnaker's diagonal proposition offers a means of respecting the distinctive features of indexicality within a truth-conditional approach and Higginbotham in recent work has exploited a similar model to explain the nature of tensed thought. In this paper I argue that there are some aspects of the perspectival nature of attitudes towards time which require us to acknowledge that there are subpropositional psychological states. Reflecting on Arthur Prior's famous example of 'Thank Goodness that's over', I argue that we need to recognise a distinction between desires for acts or events and desires for propositions. The former occupy a cycle of motivation in a way that the latter cannot. We can explain the psychological difference here by reference to a difference in the content of desires once we acknowledge that act and event desires in contrast to propositional desires are related to sub propositional objects which do not specify a time.

ROBERT STALNAKER

Massachusetts Institue of Technology, USA

<stal@MIT.EDU>

"Conceptual and Metaphysical Necessity"
Saul Kripke made a persuasive case that there are necessary a posteriori and contingent a priori truths, but philosophers have disagreed about the significance of the phenomena that he drew to our attention. Frank Jackson and David Chalmers have argued that there are no irreducible necessary a posteriori truths, and have used a two-dimensional modal semantic framework to make precise a way of explaining all necessity in terms of conceptual necessity. But I argue that while the two-dimensional framework gives a useful representation of the phenomena, their reductive account does not succeed. I contrast two interpretations of the framework, one modeled on David Kaplan’s semantics for demonstratives and the other - the metasemantic interpretation -in which the second dimension represents the way that the contents of thoughts and expressions depend on the facts. I argue that the first interpretation requires implausible assumptions about the nature of intentionality to explain the facts. The second interpretation, I argue, gives a better account of the phenomena, an account that neither requires nor provides any explanation for a notion of purely conceptual truth that is knowable a priori.

Contributed talks:

PAUL BLOOMFIELD

University of Connecticut, USA

<phsb@uconn.edu>
"Lets Be Realistic About Serious Metaphysics"

The main thesis is that "serious metaphysics" (Jackson's term) ought to be focusing only on possibilities which are centered on or indexed to the actual world and ought to ignore possibilities not fixed by what is actually possible. Thus, conceptual analysis performed upon "primary" or "A" meanings, when used as a means to gain a priori knowledge of reality, leads metaphysics astray. Locke's distinction between real and nominal essence is compared to the primary/A - secondary/C distinction between meanings and a dilemma is presented for the defenders of using logically possible zombies as informing our understanding of actual consciousness. The discussion focuses on the work of Locke, Putnam, Kripke, Chalmers and Jackson.

EMMA BORG

University of Reading, England

<e.g.n.borg@reading.ac.uk>

"Demonstrative content and character in semantics and epistemology"

This paper explores how to incorporate the kind of two-aspect theory of meaning for demonstratives familiar from Kaplan within the kind of truth-conditional semantic theory familiar from Davidson. The options for accommodating the elements of the theory of direct reference range from pre- (or meta-) semantics, semantics itself, through to post-semantics (or pragmatics); Kaplan himself endorses the middle road. I argue that this position is clearly correct for character (following arguments concerning complex demonstratives) and thus explore how to accommodate it within a truth-conditional semantic theory. The status of content is, however, claimed to be less clearly semantic: specifically, I argue that, were we to embrace any epistemically-laden (e.g. acquaintance-based) approach to content, it would properly belong to the post-semantic realm. The argument here turns on the nature of deferred demonstratives – expressions which demand referential semantic analysis but flout any suitable epistemic condition. Instead, then, we need to recognise a far thinner notion of content (as Kaplan himself clearly did), one which recognises that the contents of our thoughts may be sensitive to the syntactic forms we use to express them. Only if singular content is understood in this thin way, do we have something which can be treated as properly semantic.

RICHARD BREHENY

RCEAL, University of Cambridge, UK

<reb35@cam.ac.uk>
"Anaphoric pronouns and context sets"

This paper concerns itself with non-dynamic approaches to discourses like in (1), focussing on the anaphoric dependence between the pronoun and the indefinite.

(1) a. Last night I met a member of the Cabinet. He was pro‑Europe.

b. I predicted that a woman will be nominated for president. Also, I predict she will win.

The question it poses is whether, in analysing such discourses, Stalnaker's descriptive framework employing sets of possibilities for context and content offers any distinct advantages over frameworks in which the content of utterances and what is presupposed can be represented by other means. It could be suggested that Stalnaker's framework would have the edge if a semantic analysis of pronouns according to which they are treated as variables terms of direct reference could be sustained. After considering the pragmatics of such discourses in somewhat more detail than in Stalnaker (1998), it will be argued that a treatment of pronouns as definite (as in E‑type approaches) would in fact be required. As other frameworks can deal with such discourses using an E‑type approach, the conclusion will be that Stalnaker's framework does not offer any advantage.

ALEX BYRNE & JAMES PRYOR

MIT, USA, <abyrne@MIT.EDU>

Harvard, USA, <jpryor@fas.harvard.edu>

"Bad Intensions"

According to two-dimensionalists like David Chalmers, words like "water" and "Bob Dylan" have two sorts of intensions, a "primary" or "epistemic" intension and a "secondary" or "metaphysical" intension. The "epistemic" intension of a word does the most theoretical work, and can be thought of as a set of properties that all competent speakers associate with the word, that fixes the word's reference, and that accounts for the word's cognitive significance. However, it is prima facie unlikely that words have such epistemic intensions. We rehearse Kripke's familiar arguments from ignorance and error, which seem to show that competent speakers need not associate any informative and uniquely identifying properties with their words. We then examine and criticize some of Chalmers' responses to these arguments.

MAITE EZCURDIA

Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas, UNAM, México

<maite@filosoficas.unam.mx>
"Occurrrences Revisited"

In this paper, I deal with the issue of the sort of entities that constitute the primary bearers of reference and truth-conditions where indexicals and indexical-sentences are concerned. I side with Kaplan, against utterance accounts, in thinking that they are combinations of syntactical expressions and contexts, or what he has called “occurrences”. The view I defend differs from other occurrence theories in two crucial respects: it incorporates the completers of demonstratives as one of the parameters against which they obtain a referent, and the resulting linguistic meaning of a demonstrative cannot be represented as a unary function from contexts to truth-conditional contribution. By introducing the completers of demonstratives into the context, the view defended is empirically adequate in ways in which other occurrence theories are not.

Of the three arguments presented by occurrence-theorists against utterance views, namely, those dealing with the lack of expressions problem, the logic problem and the non-uttering problem, I argue that the responses that an occurrence theory should give of them are not always the standard ones. On the non-uttering problem, I argue that there is no situation in which “I am not uttering anything” is true, and that occurrence-theorists are committed to saying this given the way in which contexts are construed from speech situations. On the lack of expressions problem, I take the standard line from occurrence-theorists, but the line I take on the logic problem is neither standard nor simple. I argue that although we may not have any pressing need from the tasks of logic itself to account for inferences of the form p therefore p, where p is an indexical sentence, reasonings of a similar form do occur in natural language. I defend this claim by developing the idea of semantic possibility, and argue that a semantic theory of indexicals that allows for accounts of why such forms of reasoning are valid are preferable over others like utterance-style theories which, as a matter of principle, cannot. In this way, I seek to respond to the dilemma set forth by García-Carpintero to occurrence theories, viz. to either give an empirically adequate account of demonstratives or be faced with the logic problem. The view here defended is empirically adequate in the way required by the dilemma and although it may respond to the logic problem as stated by Kaplan, I argue that the challenge to theories of indexicals does not come from tasks set forth by logic but by semantics.

ROBIN JESHION

University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA

<jeshion@rcf-fs.usc.edu>

"Descriptive Descriptive Names"
Descriptive names are names whose reference is fixed exclusively with the use of a definite description. Acquaintance plays no role. Analysis of descriptive names is typically subordinated to and constrained by the analyses of the semantics and psycho-semantics of ordinary names. This basic attitude is rooted in two widely shared views about descriptive names. One is that descriptive names are extremely rare in natural language. The other is that we are always free to introduce a descriptive name just by stipulating "Let 'N' refer to the F". Gareth Evans relied upon these two points in developing his influential analyses of descriptive names as abbreviations for rigidified descriptions. In this essay, I criticize his theory, and, more importantly, attempt to show that the basic attitude about descriptive names is misguided. Descriptive names should not automatically be taken as having a lesser status in theorizing than ordinary, ostensive names, for they are not particularly rare and cannot be "artificially" created. I use this criticism as a springboard for presenting an alternative semantics and psycho-semantics of descriptive names, one which forces us to alter our understanding of de re thought.

TOMIS KAPITAN
Northern Illinois University, USA
<kapitan@niu.edu>
"Indexical Execution"

According to a standard account of indexicals, the meaning of an indexical type can be displayed by a rule indicating how the designations of its tokens are fixed in terms of facts about their utterances. So viewed, the context-sensitivity of indexicals is partly a matter of token-reflexivity or utterance-reflexivity. But while such reflexivity is essential to interpreting indexical tokens, it is not a factor in a speaker's identificatory use of indexicals. Tokens cannot be interpreted unless they are first produced, and obviously, the speaker who produces them does not depend upon utterance parameters in order to identify their referents. Thus, the standard account cannot explain a speaker's execution of indexical reference. Instead, we must acknowledge a fundamental duality of meaning for every indexical type, executive and interpretative, each of which operates on contextual elements to roduce the individuating modes needed for identification. But whereas contexts of utterance are suitable for interpretation, executive identification depends upon psychological contexts constituted by speakers' perspectives. The notion of perspective is explained, and an analysis of individuating executive mechanisms is given that preserves the threefold distinction between meaning, mode, and referent, and the functional representation of indexical meaning.

PHILIPP KELLER

Université de Genève, Switzerland

<philipp.keller@lettres.unige.ch>

"n-Dimensionalism"
Whether or not you can conceive that p depends on your epistemic situation. Your epistemic situation depends on the world you are in. This much is uncontroversial. More important is that a complete description of your epistemic situation also includes what you know or even what you are in a position to know about the world you are in. Not all of this knowledge can be stripped off while determining truth or falsity of this-wordly statements in counterfactual circumstances. This undermines a distinction between considering a possible world as counterfactual and considering a possible world as actual in terms of what you keep fixed (only the language or your concepts or empirical knowledge as well) and the associated distinction between primary and secondary intensions. To "retain the concept of the real actual world'', I will argue, we have to make assumptions about how the real world is like. These assumptions trivialize what we can find out about what is a priori in this way. Conditionalizing on these assumptions paves the way to a more general outlook on the a priori: n-dimensionalism.

GÖTZ-A. KLAGES & ARMIN TATZEL

Univ. Hamburg , Germany. <gak@mediascape.de>

Université de Genève , Switzerland. <armin.tatzel@lettres.unige.ch>

"The World According to Pierre"

What we call the egocentric view of belief attribution is the idea that, roughly, the success of such attributions is dependent on certain conditions of fit between the ways the attributer and the subject of the attribution conceptualise the things and properties the attributed belief is about. One of the traits which make the egocentric view attractive is that it provides an explanation of the troubles we face when we try to attribute beliefs to people who conceptualise the relevant things or properties in a way which differs largely from our own. Kripke's Pierre is an example of this kind.

Egocentric views of belief attribution might be formulated in different theoretical frameworks. In the talk we compare two possible egocentric theories: one formulated in terms of structured propositions and one formulated in the framework of Stalnaker's two-dimensional theory of communication. Using the Pierre case as an example we discuss the explanations the two egocentric theories provide for the troubles which arise if we try to attribute beliefs to Pierre. We argue that Stalnaker's theory provides the most natural framework for the egocentric view.

MICHAELIS MICHAEL

The University of New South Wales, Australia

<m.michael@unsw.edu.au>

"The Problems of Double Indexing accounts of The A priori"
Some have sought to domesticate the notion of the a priori by finding a model of it in the more readily accepted space of alethic modality, a model which crucially uses double indexing. In these attempts it is usual to identify the set of a priori interpreted sentences with the set of sentences with a necessary diagonal. These attempts have yielded at best partial accounts. What is common to these accounts is a failure to build in the epistemic aspect of the a priori. But the a priori is essentially epistemic. The distinction between the a priori and the a posteriori does not partition the set of truths of an interpreted language, even relative to a speaker and a context. Rather that distinction partitions the set of knowable truths. If there are truths which are unknowable then those truths are neither a priori nor a posteriori knowable. Yet if there are mathematical truths of this sort they will have necessary diagonals and yet not be a priori because they are unknowable.

MARTINE NIDA-RUEMELIN

University of Fribourg , Switzerland

<martine.nida@-ruemelin@unifr.ch>

"Phenomenal Concepts"
After a brief introduction of the distinction between phenomenal and non-phenomenal belief with respect to qualia proposed in earlier papers (see e.g. my "On Belief about experiences. (...)" Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 1997) I use the two-dimensional framework to account for the difference in content between phenomenal and non-phenomenal belief in a way based on ideas of David Chalmers (see David Chalmers, "Content and Epistemology of Phenomenal Belief", accessible in the internet). Phenomenal belief with respect to the quale blue (that can be had only by people acquainted with that quale) involves what Chalmers calls the purely phenomenal concept of blue. The two-dimensional function that characterizes the purely phenomenal concept of blue associates this specific quale independently of the world taken as actual and independently of the world taken as counterfactual (the concept is thus what one might call a superrigid designator). By contrast, the two-dimensional function corresponding to the relational concept of blue involved in nonphenomenal belief about the quale blue (which can be had by someone who is not acquainted with that quale) is either dependent on the world taken as actual or non-rigid. The description of the subjective content of phenomenal and non-phenomenal belief content proposed (content according to primary intensions) may be used to give a precise account of the intuitive idea that the fact expressed by "A has an experience of blue" can be grasped only by someone who is acquainted with blue: The subjective content of the phenomenal belief that A has an experience of blue (but not of the corresponding non-phenomenal belief) can be represented by the set of possible worlds that also represents the content (according to secondary intensions) of the sentence "A has an experience of blue".

JÉROME PELLETIER

Université de Bretagne Occidentale , France
"Two-dimensionalism, Simulation and Fiction"

<jerome.pelletier@univ-brest.fr>

In this paper, I study ‘unofficial uses of the first person pronoun’ such as in (1) ‘If I were you, I would stay away from me’. I distinguish between the ‘official content’ and the ‘unofficial content’ of (1). Contrary to the official content of (1) which is located at the level of words, its unofficial content is a property of utterances of (1) and it violates in the consequent of the conditional the rule that ‘I’ refers to the speaker. Since the aim of conditionals of the ‘If I were you’ kind is usually to give practical advises, I then try to give an analysis of the kind of imaginative project involved in advising. It appears that advising supposes an imaginative projection into the other’s situation without commiting the adviser as to what he or she will do when such a situation arises. On that basis, I compare the merits and limits of two analysis of (1), that is an anaphoric proposal and a pretense theoretic proposal. I try to show that the only adequate explanation of conditional statements prefaced with an ‘If I were you’ sentence should lead us to make a minor improvement in 2-Dimensionalist theory of the reference of pure indexicals in order to take into account the possibility of context-shift through pretense .

FRANCOIS RECANATI

Institut Jean-Nicod (CNRS/EHESS), France.
<recanati@ehess.fr>
"Indexical concepts"

Following Strawson, Perry and others, we can think of concepts as mental files in which we store information concerning the reference of the concept. Indexical concepts (e.g. demonstrative concepts such as "that man") can be construed as special files whose very existence is contingent upon the existence of certain contextual relations to entities in the environment. The reference of an indexical concept is the entity which stands in the appropriate contextual relation to the thinker in whose thought the concept occurs. The nature of the contextual relation which the reference must satisfy determines the type of the concept.

In this paper the notion of an indexical concept will be extended so as to encompass a vast class of fairly ordinary concepts. It will be argued that natural-kind concepts such as the concept of water, and recognitional concepts more generally, are indexical concepts based on a certain type of relation to the reference of the concept.

Like demonstrative concepts, recognitional concepts presuppose some form of acquaintance with the reference, hence the extension of the notion of indexical concept which I have just suggested may seem natural. But what about cases in which the subject is not acquainted with the reference but has merely second-hand knowledge of it? I will argue that, in such cases, the subject possesses a deferential concept, and that deferential concepts themselves are indexical. While the indexical concepts talked about so far serve as repository for information gained in perception through various relations of acquaintance with the reference, deferential concepts serve as repository for information gained in communication through linguistic relations to the reference.

CARA SPENCER

Howard University, USA

<cspencer@howard.edu>

"Cognitive Significance and the Diagonal Proposition: A Two-Dimensional Approach to Discourse-Internal Identity"
If occurrences e and e' of proper names, demonstratives or indexicals are used in a discourse, and understanding the discourse requires participants in it to believe that e and e' are intended to refer to the same thing, then I will say that there is a discourse-internal identity between these occurrences of e and e'. For instance, suppose A and B are talking. A says, "What can I get you?" and B replies "I'll have a beer." Plausibly, fully understanding this conversation requires listeners to believe that A's "you" and B's "I" co-refer, hence there is a discourse-internal identity between these occurrences of "you" and "I". Discourse-internal identities are typically grasped, and believed to be grasped, by all attentive participants in a conversation, yet propositions about discourse internal identities are rarely the explicit contents of any utterances in the conversation. This speaks in favor of characterizing them as presuppositions of the conversation. What I propose here is an application of the framework offered in Robert Stalnaker's "Assertion" (1976) that treats propositions about discourse internal identities as part of the evolving context set of presuppositions. I also propose a two-dimensionalist extension of the basic solution to deal with the sorts of discourses in which utterances are best understood as conveying the diagonal proposition of a two-dimensional propositional concept.

JASON STANLEY

University of Michigan, USA

<jasoncs@umich.edu>

"Modality and What is Said"
If, relative to a context, what a sentence says is possible, then what it says could be true. Following natural philosophical usage, it would thus seem clear that in assessing an occurrence of a sentence for possibility or necessity, one is assessing what is said by that occurrence. In this paper, I argue that natural philosophical usage misleads here. In assessing an occurrence of a sentence for possibility or necessity, one is not assessing the modal status of the proposition expressed by that occurrence of the sentence.

KAI-YEE WONG

The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

<b388758@mailserv.cuhk.edu.hk>

"Two-Dimensionalism, Context and Reference"

Recently Frank Jackson (From Metaphysics to Ethics, OUP 1998), David Chalmers (The Conscious Mind, OUP 1996), and Kai-Yee Wong (“Sentence Relativity and The Necessary A Posteriori”, Philosophical Studies, 1996) have claimed that two-dimensionalism offers a nice explanation of the possibility of Kripkean a posteriori necessary truths, such as ‘Water is H₂O’ and ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus’. This paper argues that this claim is sound only if augmented by a relative construal of the a priori. Section one of the paper outlines the basic two-dimensional ideas underlying the kind of explanation offered by Jackson, Chalmers and Wong. Section two presents the ‘two-propositions objection’ against the two-dimensional explanation. It is argued that such an explanation tends to invoke two different propositions for each case of a posteriori necessity, one for the attribution of a posteriority and the other for necessity. This leads to the suggestion that the two-dimensional account is incomplete without the relativisation of the a priori. Finally remarks are made on the intuitive appeal of the relative construal.