7.3.1 Problems For The Singular And General Belief Distinction
The first big problem I want to consider concerns the demarcation between singular and general thoughts1. What is it that makes it the case that when I have a belief about
the tallest spy the object of my belief is a congeries of properties, while when I have certain other beliefs, the object is an object? The idea of acquaintance is tempting but ultimately, I think, too unfirm a foundation to ground semantics on.
While there is something prima facie attractive about this view, as we already saw in 6.5.3, it has problems. It seems that the notion of epistemic intimacy which it’s con- cerned with is inherently vague. For example, consider the following two cases (similar in theme to one in Jeshion, 2010b): in the first, you catch a fleeting glimpse of a bear in the woods, before he runs off. In the second, you see fresh bear footprints heading towards a forest you know bounded by walls. It’s arguable that in the latter case you stand in a more epistemically intimate relation to the bear than in the former. Here’s another particularly neat illustration of this issue from Mark Sainsbury:
Consider the following example of the way in which knowledge by ’by de- scription’ might modulate into knowledge ’by acquaintance’. You notice that the cheese in your larder is disappearing overnight. You hypothesise that this is caused by a mouse. You imagine this mouse in some detail, which you reinforce by experiment: you leave sand near the cheese and confirm that it is a mouse by its tracks; by similar methods, you discover
1Recall I already argued, based on my Stage Semantics, that perception is insufficient for reference.
Here, in the spirit of not putting all one’s eggs in a single basket, I present alternative routes to that conclusion.
where it lives when not raiding your larder. Your behaviour becomes a lit- tle obsessive: you dignify your mouse by the name ’Freddie’; you speculate, correctly in fact, that Freddie is the head of a large family of mice, and that he does not eat all the chesse he steals but takes some back as paternal in- vestment in a recent brood; you get a camera and in the morning you replay scenes of Freddie’s activities the previous evening. Then one evening you actually see Freddie eating your cheese (Sainsbury, 2005, p21)
Sainsbury asks at what point in this story do we come to be acquainted with the mouse, and surely he’s right to say that there doesn’t seem to be a sharp cut off point. Moreover, it seems that we should want to say that before one gets to the final stage where one actually sees Freddie, one has enough information to count as acquainted with him. But in such a circumstance, one has not perceived him (nor remembered perceiving him, nor heard about him, nor been him).
What cases like this seem to show is that actual perception isn’t necessary for sin- gular thought (for an interesting discussion of why we might think perception is not necessary in this case, which ties the notion of acquaintance to a speaker’s interests, see the Jeshion paper cited above). Not only that, I think one can find, somewhat sur- prisingly, cases in which perception isn’tsufficientfor reference. In particular, consider cases of masses which are rapidly losing parts. Imagine one is faced with a melting pile of snow, and one thinks to oneself: it’s white and it’s melting. I take it there’s some pressure to say that, as far as the subject terms go, these two beliefs should have the same content, that is to say (the mental analogues of) the two ’it’s should refer to the same. But if these two beliefs are object involving, they will not do so, on the following plausible assumption:
Mereological Essentialism For Masses. If x is a mass of K, then, for every y such that y is a mass of K, y is a part of x if and only if it always was and always will be the case that, if x exists, then y is a part of x (Zimmerman, 1995, p79)
Because the snow has melted and lost parts between the two beliefs, if the beliefs are singular, they are about two different masses2. But then they don’t have the same con- tent, which was our intuitive desiderata. So the thing to say, I think, is that these beliefs are actually descriptive beliefs, ones which could be expressed by ’the snow is white’ and ’the snow is melting’. This secures that the two beliefs have the same content (even though they will denote–in the Russellian sense of being uniquely satisfied by–different masses). If this is so, then to the extent that the two beliefs are clearly perceptual, we have a counterexample to the claim that perception is sufficient for knowledge (I dis- cuss such cases at more length in McKeever, n.d.(a)). So it seems that perception is either sufficient nor necessary for the having of singular thought. But to the extent that it’s always been thought that perception furnished the clearest means by which one could come to have singular thoughts, this serves to undermine the distinction.
Not only that, but there are arguably cases in which clearly general beliefs enjoy the epistemic closeness typical of singular beliefs. Thus consider the following case:
2One might try to deny this by taking the second thought ’it’ to be anaphoric on the first. If that were
so, in a scenario in which the snow first dazzles (at t1) because it’s illuminated by the sun, and then ceases to (at t2), two consecutive thoughts to the effect that ’it’s dazzling’ and ’it’s not dazzling’ wouldn’t come out true,which seems like the wrong result. Similar things apply in the case where we have only one thought at t2, to the effect that it was dazzling. If the pronoun is functioning to pick out the snow at t2, then the sentence reports something false, as the mass around at t2 has just come in to being, and so there’s no past time such that it dazzles then.
Penguins. I’m an experienced penguinologist, who has just taken into my care 10 penguins. They are dotted around my penguin sanctuary, and I’ve been going round meeting them. I meet nine, thereby coming to be able to have singular thoughts about them. The only area I haven’t yet visited is the penguin sauna. I form the belief: the penguin I haven’t met yet must be in the penguin sauna.
This seems like a paradigm instance of general belief. But in a certain respect my cogni- tive position with regard to the penguin I haven’t met is similar to the one with regard to those I have met. In particular, note that I have the capacity to recognise, when presented with it, the last penguin: it’s the penguin who doesn’t look like one of the penguins I’ve already met. But one of Recanati’s ideas is that this capacity to recog- nise is a mark of acquaintance. So it seems like this should count as an acquaintance thought. Of course, Recanati will reply that in this case, there fails to be an ER relation between the speaker and the object, but I think we should just take this as a case which shows that ER relations aren’t needed.
Arguably, then, not only is perception neither necessary nor sufficient for acquain- tance, but it also seems that arriving at a definite description belief, in certain particular circumstances, is sufficient for an acquaintance thought. I conclude that the notion of acquaintance, despite being prima facie attractive, should play no crucial role in seman- tic theorising, and in particular is insufficient to support a contrast between singular and general belief.
7.3.2 Problems For The Theory Of Pronouns
Not only that, the theory of pronouns made use of is questionable. It’s long been famil- iar that certain uses of pronouns can’t be accounted for in the standard Tarskian way. Here’s a typical example (Neale, 1990):
(174) The president is a democrat. He used to be a republican
On the more plausible reading of the second sentence, it is equivalent to ’the president used to be a republican’. That is to say, it seems as if the pronoun must be function- ing descriptively, expressing the same content as ’the president’. We can’t derive the reading we’re after if we assume that pronouns simply stand for an object.
What hasn’t been realised is that we get a similar phenomenon, on certain plau- sible assumptions, with indexicals. In particular, the assumption we need is the one, important to Kaplan, that there is a semantically important notion of indexical validity: of sentences which are true at every context (which is to say relative to every context express a proposition true with regard to the world and time of the context). This is typ- ified by the following canonical (but flawed: see Predelli, 1998 and the huge literature it spawned) example:
(175) I am here now Compared with:
(176) Matt is in Oslo 11/04/16 In Kaplan’s famous words:
Intuitively,[175] is deeply, and, in some sense, which we will shortly make precise, universally, true. One need only understand the meaning of [175] to know that it cannot be uttered falsely. No such guarantee applies to [176]. A Logic of Indexicals which does not reflect this intuitive difference between [175] and [176] has bypassed something essential to the logic of indexicals(Kaplan, 1977, p509)
My claim is that we get apriori truths involving anaphoric pronouns, and such truths cannot be accounted for within a standard semantics for pronouns. Consider:
(177) Yesterday is in the past and it’s never to return
This is true relative to every context: relative to every context, the day before the day of the context will indeed be in the past, and will indeed be never to return. But think about what the character of the pronoun must be. The natural thought is that the char- acter of such pronouns serves to pick out the linguistic antecedent of the expression. There are several ways to cash this out. It could be that this is effected by means of the variable assignment. We can assume that antecedence is marked in the syntax by co-indexing, as so:
(178) Yesterday1is in the past and it1’s never to return
We could then suggest that the effect an utterance of a referring expression rihas on the
variable assignment is to put the object referred to in the ith place of the assignment. We would then have a character like:
• It1=λc.λw. the object assigned by the variable assignment of c to 1.
Alternatively, another thought is that such referential anaphora goes by salience. ’It’ refers to the day in question because it has been rendered salient by just being men- tioned. We would then have:
• It1=λc.λw. the salient mentioned object in c.
However, a little reflection reveals that neither of these will yield the correct result. Consider a context c* in which the following has just been uttered:
(179) Tomorrow1is going to be great.
Then relative to that c*, on either possible character for ’it1’ mentioned above, ’it1’ will
stand for the day after the day of c*. So the sentence will be true relative to c* iff the day before the day of the context is in the past, and the day after the day of c* is never to return. So the second sentence–assuming the falsity of eternal recurrence–is false relative to the context, and thus so is the conjunction, and so the sentence is not indexically valid. But the sentenceisindexically valid, so something is wrong with our purported characters for ’it1’.
Not only that, it seems quite clear that there’s an independently motivated fix avail- able. We noted above that sometimes pronouns inherit thecontentof descriptions on which they are anaphoric. Our case suggests sometimes they inherit thecharacter of indexicals on which they are anaphoric. Not only this, but when we combine it with the Elbournian idea that pronouns are syntactically covert descriptions, then we have the option to say that in both these cases, we should think of anaphoric pronouns as just copies of their antecedent which gets spelled out as explicitly as pronouns for some reason. That is, we would have:
(180) The president is a democrat. He [president] used to be a republican (181) Yesterday is over and it [yesterday] is not coming back
If this is so, we have a good reason to doubt that pronouns function as the standard theory has it, and to the extent that the standard theory is an important part of the position concerning de re belief we’re considering, we have good reason to doubt that theory (for more on indexical cases like the one above, see McKeever, n.d.(b)) .
Let me make a couple of comments before going on. Firstly, the copy theory I just bruited is of limited application. It would clearly get the wrong result in the following case, for example:
(182) Every father loves his child
This does not report that every father loves every father’s child. So the copy theory has its limits. But it nevertheless shows us that at least as concerns constructions like: (183) Quine met Elizabeth but embarassed himself because he didn’t know she was
Elizabeth
The account given above can’t be right, and we need an explanation for how it is that this sentence doesn’t seem to claim that Quine doesn’t know that Elizabeth is Elizabeth. Moreover, my criticism is, and is intended to be, limited. We can note that we get de re readings in the absence of pronouns. Thus imagine that Quine is at a party with the Queen, except he doesn’t know she is the queen, and so doesn’t bow in front of her. The following then has a true reading:
(184) Quine embarrased himself because he didn’t know the queenwasthe queen To make sense of this, we should say that the first occurrence of ’the queen’ is function- ing just to pick out the person at the party. That is, we get de re readings not involving pronouns, so my criticism of the standard account of pronouns doesn’t extend to them. Let me just say a word more about this. One might think that such a casedoes in fact involve pronominal elements, albeit at the level of logical form. In particular, a not implausible thing to say is that the stress onwasforces the first occurrence of ’the queen’ to scope over the whole sentence, and leave behind a trace. That is, we’d have:
• The queen λ1. Quine embarassed himself because he didn’t know t1 was the queen
So this would be a case of scope after all. However, this is no good: it’s a familiar point that scoping can’t account for all de re/ de dicto ambiguities. Here’s about as clear a case as one gets (adapted from (Bäuerle, 1983)) :
(185) George believes that a woman from Liverpool loves every member of Manch- ester United
And consider the following scenario: we’re in Liverpool. George sees a bunch of fa- mous, rich looking people on a bus. He assumes they are celebrities or something, and knowing how people like celebrities, he comes to believe there’s somebody who loves them all, although he doesn’t know who. Now as it so happens, the men on the bus are the Man United football team.
The sentence seems like an accurate report of George’s belief. But no permuting of scope will give us the reading we are after. The salient facts are that because George
doesn’t have some particular woman in mind, ’a woman from Liverpool’ must scope under ’believes’. Moreover, because there’s some one women who loves them all, ’a woman from Liverpool’ must scope above ’every member of Manchester United’. But because George doesn’t know the people he sees are Manchester United players, ’every member of Manchester United’ must scope above ’believes’. But these, a little thought reveals, are inconsistent requirements.
The standard response to this has been to assume that attitude verbs and other modal expressions are in fact quantifiers which can bind covert world variables (for a textbook presentation, see (Von Fintel and Heim, 2002), chapter eight). If we then say that the variable associated with the indefinite gets bound by, and thus covaries with, the universal quantifier over doxastically accessible worlds supplied by ’believes’, while the world variable associated with the universal quantifier is free and gets the world of the context as its value, then we’ll get the right result. And if that is so, then our queen cases could receive the same treatment. We could claim that in the good reading of 236, the world variable associated with the first occurrence of ’the queen’ is free and thus gets its value from the actual world.
If this were the case, however, ’the queen’ would be functioning just like an e-type expression: notably, it would be rigid, picking out the actual queen relative to all dox- astically accessible worlds, and it wouldn’t give rise to the scope interactions which are one of the defining features of quantified noun phrases. So the more sophisticated and empirically adequate theory more or less relies on e-type expressions too. While I don’t have any particular criticisms of it, the positive theory I’ll present will, I think, have a certain advantage in terms of theoretical unity, as it will give more or less the same treatment to both speech and belief reports, which I claim is desirable.