Modal Constraints

To get back to reference: the argument here is not that descriptivism is true or that the causal theory is false. What I am saying is that so-called philosophical 'expertise' reflects acquaintance with a sophisticated sort of linguistic proposal that can be justified in terms of its utility in carrying out certain kinds of endeavors. As such, philosophical expertise cannot be used to defend descriptive theses about 'ordinary language,' for the intuitions of philosophers are about disciplinary norms. Thus appeals to 'philosophical expertise' really only carry weight in the context of the normative proposal on offer. I chose to focus on

kinds (and 'naturalness') first because it illustrates the point vividly. But the same applies to proper names. Just as ‘naturalness’ asks us to assign ‘natural’ semantic values to terms and predicates, modal constraints ask us to consider modal truths when attempting to

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understand the semantics of proper names. However, it seems clear that we can use names in ways that fundamentally violate any purported modal restrictions: semantic facts and modal facts come apart.

Suppose I say: “Imagine Nixon, that man, had an identical twin.” But distinctness, like identity, is necessary in S5 modal logic.261 Monozygotic twinning, that is, spontaneous division of the zygote into two embryos, is a random, contingent event. If Nixon1 and his twin, Nixon2, are necessarily distinct as modal logic requires, then neither are identical to the sole Nixon in the possible world where the contingent event of twinning did not occur even if all three originated from the same zygote. For if the twins Nixon1 and Nixon2 are necessarily distinct from each other, neither can be identified with non-twin actual Nixon. (Imagine the reverse scenario: could the Olsen twins not have been twins? Well, the twinning event might not have occurred, and then only one child was born. In that world, which of our actual ‘twins’ corresponds to the possible single child? Choosing either seems arbitrary, and both violates distinctness: if a=c and b=c, by transitivity, a=b. ‘Neither’ is the only viable option.)

If 'Nixon,' in our language, is just a rigid designator, there is no possible world where that

man had an identical twin. But it plainly makes sense to utter a sentence like “Imagine Nixon had an identical twin.” It is quite natural to think thoughts for which there is no corresponding possible world, strictly ('rigidly') speaking, and this tells us that the semantical framework is not adequate to the perversities of natural language. We switch between description and rigidity fluidly—it does not seem to be an important cognitive boundary. That suggests to me that the semantics on offer, even if it could emulate

aspects of natural language, probably won't make for empirically adequate psycholinguistics. Whatever meaning is, it is insensitive to the modal-ontological facts. Stipulated psychic continuity also appears to violate modal restrictions: there are no possible worlds where the emperor Kuzco, a man, gets turned into a llama and remains

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Proof by contradiction: suppose (a≠b) at some world w and (a=b) at w’ (so that there exists one possible world where a and b are not distinct.) But if (a=b) at w’ is true, it is necessary; and if it is necessary, it holds at all accessible worlds. w is accessible from w’; therefore, (a=b) & (a≠b) holds at w.

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essentially the same person. Yet small children follow such stories, and concomitant referential attributions to Kuzco the man and Kuzco the llama, with no difficulty. What matters is not the metaphysics of modality, but the uses of the name and the conceptual resources we can bring to bear. This is particularly clear with place names. Chomsky writes that

London is not a place. Rather, it is at a place, though it is not the things at that place, which could be radically changed or moved, leaving London intact. London could be destroyed and rebuilt, perhaps after millennia, still being Lonodn; Carthage could be rebuilt today, just as Tom Jones, though perfectly concrete, could be reincarnated as an insect or turned by a witch into a frog … but Tom Jones all along—concepts available to young children without instruction or relevant experience. The abstract character of London is crucial to its individuation. If London is reduced to dust, it–that is, London—can be rebuilt elsewhere and be the same city, London.262

We need to separate out two ‘could’ questions: the linguistic from the modal. On the former reading, all the usages above are perfectly natural for a speaker, even if, on the latter ‘modal’ reading none of these ‘coulds’ represent legitimate possibilities. It could be objected to a story that, technically, Tom Jones cannot be turned into a frog, for Tom Jones is essentially a human being; though this would be to misunderstand the practice of story-telling and it would constitute a mistake to ‘reform’ language to exclude such usages. Likewise, one might endeavor to discover the modally correct ontology of cities, and in doing so discover that London could not be destroyed and rebuilt and be the ‘same’ London; this has no bearing on whether or not we wish to say that London was destroyed and rebuilt (any more than the botanically correct definition of berry should convince me to refer to pumpkins as berries, but not strawberries).

Indeed, the distinctions and entailments drawn in modal logic appear to place no real semantic constraints on speakers whatsoever, however useful these may be in metaphysical analysis. Yet as I argued above, Kripke argues as if he is engaged in a descriptive project:

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I came to realize ... that the natural intuition that the names of ordinary language are rigid designators can be in fact be upheld ... it was a short step to realize that similar remarks applied to terms for natural kinds.263

It is clear that, for Kripke and those working in his wake that they conceived of their project not as a proposal, but as a description of existing norms in 'language'. They speak, again and again, of 'ordinary,' 'actual,' and 'natural' language. But actual language is manifestly not beholden to the logical restrictions imagined by philosophers. Therefore, again I conclude that the expert intuitions of philosopher reflect theoretical commitments that bias their responses: because philosophers carefully consider the modal profiles of entities when determining what is semantically acceptable to say about them (viz., 3.3.3 on the problem of ‘unwanted necessity’) they generate intuitions that are too restrictive. The anthropological evidence is clear that, without specific training and education into scientific norms, restrictions of naturalness and modality as conceived by contemporary philosophers are largely absent or modified by different epistemic norms:

If the everyday world is your cognitive home, it is not natural to detach abstractions and logic and the hypothetical from their concrete referents. It is not that pre-scientific people did not use abstractions: the concept of hunting as distinct from fishing is an abstraction. They would use syllogistic logic all of the time: Basset hounds are good for hunting; that is a Basset hound; that dog would be good at hunting. They would of course use the hypothetical: if I had two dogs rather than only one, I could catch more rabbits. But the reference is always to the concrete relationships that dominate the everyday world. Today we have no difficulty freeing logic from concrete referents and reasoning about purely hypothetical situations.264

It is not just that the classification norms were different, but the entailment relations within the language reflected practices incompatible with those proposed by philosophers. Consider the following exchange recorded by Soviet anthropologist Alexander Luria with Siberian peasants in the 1930s:

Q: All bears are white where there is always snow; in Novaya Zemlya there is always snow; what color are the bears there?

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Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (1980), p. 5.

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A: I have seen only black bears and I do not talk of what I have not seen. Q: But what do my words imply?

A: If a person has not been there he cannot say anything on the basis of words. If a man was 60 or 80 and had seen a white bear there and told me about it, he could be believed.265

Note the emphasis on testimonial evidence over abstract reasoning. Only direct experience can tell us about concrete facts, not logic; we could trust someone else's direct experience, perhaps. The logic of the words is irrelevant, and it would require the assumption of different conventions to draw out the conclusion desired. Which is not to say that the truth of modus ponens is conventional. What I am saying is that language

does not need to acknowledge modus ponens for it to be a language. Thus the claim that predicates of ordinary language have crisp valuations that carve reality at the joints and obey classical logic, and that names follow modal restrictions, either makes pre-scientific peoples ignorant of much of their own language, or—as I am urging—is simply a proposed norm for the use of language in certain contexts.266 The norms appears seductive because they facilitate certain kinds of reasoning. What they are not is descriptive of the possibilities within natural language.

I do not mean to advance deep theses about the nature of semantics. In responding to the expertise defense in the context of the philosophy of language my goal was to provide evidence that the intuitions of philosophers could well be theoretically biased. Training in formal logic, for instance, might lead philosophers to assume that referential practices ‘should’ be modally coherent, and develop theories that reflect this constraint. For example, in the Nixon case I presented above, there corresponds no possible world where Nixon, rigidly designated, has an identical twin: a world where there are twin Nixons is a

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Ibid, 25. There are more like these. These people are not unintelligent. They just haven't adopted the norms we take for granted.

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Let us recall how extreme the philosophical claims sometimes are. As I discussed in 3.2.2, Williamson, argues that the question “Was Mars always either dry or not dry?” has a determinate answer in virtue of logical form, because natural language is such that it obeys these restrictions (The Philosophy of Philosophy). This simply appears to be a false assumption about natural language. One could always propose a convention such that the sentence is determinate.

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world where our Nixon does not exist; we are thinking ‘descriptively,’ as it were: a world much like our own, with twin-Nixon ‘counterparts’ picked out via description. This can be figured out a priori, so it’s not a question of a metaphysically impossible yet epistemically possible world; rather, I can simply think of Nixon descriptively should the imagined situation require it, just as I can refer to Kuzco as a llama. But if this is so, then it raises the possibility of open-ended answers to cases such as the Gödel-Schmidt: it is not that some names ‘turn out to be descriptive’ (4.4) but that reference is contextualized to occasions of use, a possibility that had been excluded from intuitive consideration due to background assumptions in philosophy of language. More specifically it seems that for philosophers de re modal properties of referents trump other considerations: since any given individual might not have some associated descriptive property, these properties cannot secure reference. The question is whether this assumption is true of ordinary referential practices, or represents a normative constraint for rational reconstruction.