Fictionalism and the informativeness of identity

Philosophical Studies

Volumn 106, Issue 3, 2001, Pages 197-225

  Kroon, Frederick ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND   (New Zealand)

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EID: 52549113954     PISSN: 00318116     EISSN: 15730883     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1013397112078     Document Type: Article

References (35)

1. Wittgenstein here gives his reason for thinking that identity is not a true relation, given the Tractarian view that the meaning of a genuine name is what it names. Wittgenstein's project is sympathetically discussed by Ramsey in Ramsey's unpublished manuscript 'Identity' (located in the University of Pittsburgh's Archives of Scientific Philosophy in the 20th Century).
2. The fiction itself may have any of a range of functions: e.g., predictive, systematising, or broadly aesthetic. One can be a fictionalist about theoretical entities and possible worlds no less than about characters of fiction.
3. For the pretense or make-believe theory of fiction, see especially Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).
4. Both Gareth Evans, in The Varieties of Reference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), ch. 10,
5. and Walton in Mimesis as Make-Believe, ch. 11, use such a theory to give an account of negative existentials.
6. For one prominent 'abstract object' theory that resists the lure of a pure fictionalism, see Ed Zalta, Intensional Logic and the Metaphysics of Intentionality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988).
7. See Susan K. Gillman, Dark Twins: Imposture and Identity in Mark Twain's America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
8. Mark Twain, The Prince and the Pauper: A Tale for Young People of All Ages. First published in 1881 by James R. Osgood and Company, Boston, MA.
9. In oral presentations of this paper, I have tended to rely on another possible story - an "Evening and Morning Star Wars" story told by someone who doesn't know that the Evening Star and the Morning Star are in fact the same celestial body and imagines "them" at war with each other.
10. When formulated in descriptivist terms, as I prefer, this priority is akin to the thesis of the priority of narrow over broad content defended by, among others, David Lewis and Frank Jackson. See Lewis, "David Lewis: Reduction of Mind", in Guttenplan, S. (ed.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 412-431.
11. For arguments in favour of the theory of direct reference, see, for example, Nathan Salmon, Frege's Puzzle (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986),
12. David Kaplan, "Demonstratives" and "Afterthoughts", in Almog, J., Perry, J. and Wettstein, H. (eds.), Themes from Kaplan [New York: Oxford University Press, 1989], pp. 481-563 and pp. 565-614) ,
13. and François Recanati, Direct Reference: From Language to Thought (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993). Like Kaplan and Salmon, but unlike Recanati, I shall assume that the semantic content of a name standardly involves only the referent. The theory of direct reference for proper names, a version of Mill's idea that names are connotationless, gained much of its early impetus from Saul Kripke's attack on descriptivism in Naming and Necessity (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1980; first published as an article in 1972). The latter work also provided the first sketch of a causal theory of reference for names.
14. "Explicitly contradictory" in a loose sense. In "Complex Demonstratives", Philosophical Studies 97 (2000): 229-249, Emma Borg places such a contradiction at the level of the term's character rather than content.
15. In Shakespeare in Love, Shakespeare's lover, Lady Viola, ends up playing the part of Juliet in the Curtain's production of Romeo and Juliet, in defiance of laws restricting acting to male actors. At the end of the play, the Master of the Revels, Master Tilney, enters the theatre. Intent on closing down the Curtain, he bellows out: "that woman is a woman!", indicating Lady Viola. Crisis is averted only after the Queen, who had thus far been an inconspicuous member of the audience, uses her authority to proclaim Master Tilney wrong. Although no one "in the know" is fooled, it seems likely that most of the theatre audience took Lady Viola to be a very convincing male.
16. There may be too many contenders. Or there mightn't be any. Consider "that woman is not a woman; she is just a trick of the light", said after you decide that your friend's belief that he can see a woman-friend is the result of a perceptual illusion. Here the statement is used to assert that there is no demonstrated individual, so any attempt at completion of the form "the individual over there who resembles a woman in such-and-such a respect" will get the truth-condition wrong. (For a discussion of such cases, see Kroon, "Characterizing Non-Existents", Grazer Philosophische Studien 51 (1996): 163-193.)
17. Cf., for example, the Gricean theory found of metaphor in G. Nunberg, The Pragmatics of Reference (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1978).
18. A related idea is the notion of "protagonist projection". In "Some Telling Examples: A Reply to Tsohatzidis", Journal of Pragmatics 28 (1997): 625-628, Richard Holton uses this notion to characterize various natural locutions of the form 'R&S', where R entails not-S (e.g., "He gave her a ring studded with diamonds, but they turned out to be glass").
19. Here I am assuming that plural descriptions are used to refer to appropriate set-theoretic entities, but nothing in what I say strictly requires any particular semantic theory of plural descriptions. For a discussion, see R. Schwarzschild, Pluralities (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996).
20. Linguists writing on plurals have paid scarce attention to this phenomenon. Partee (quoted in Schwarzschild, p. 10) notices that predicates like 'are one person' are defined for pluralities, but doesn't remark on the oddness of the resulting locutions.
21. As with fiction-based plural identities, the phenomenon is certainly not restricted to names. It also encompasses (rigidified) descriptions, simple and complex demonstratives, and indexicals. Consider a sentence like "you and he are the same," uttered in light of the conviction that two photographic likenesses, A and B, are likenesses of the same person (i.e., you). There is an intuitive sense in which the occurrence of 'he' here designates an alien person (else, why not say 'you' twice?).
22. So does Mark Crimmins, in "Hesperus and Phosphorus: Sense, Pretense, and Reference", Philosophical Review 107 (1998): 1-47. Later in this section I briefly contrast my approach with that of Crimmins. Crimmins doesn't talk about fiction-based plural identities, and so doesn't avail himself of the argument, given in the present paper, that the naturalness of the pretense approach in their case is a strong argument for a pretense approach to the problem of ordinary plural identities.
23. As we will see, this condition rules out Crimmins's solution. It also rules out adopting something like Castañeda's guise ontology as a solution to our problem. Castañeda's view can be interpreted as the suggestion that identity in ordinary plural identity statements is best construed as con-substantiation, with the terms in such identities understood as designators of distinct guises.
24. See Mimesis as Make-Believe and "Hesperus and Phosphorus: Sense, Pretense, and Reference".
25. "Hesperus and Phosphorus: Sense, Pretense, and Reference", p. 36.
26. This is Crimmins' reformulation of Walton's view in "Hesperus and Phosphorus: Sense, Pretense, and Reference", pp. 32ff. (Note that the notion of "mode" is non-Fregean; it has nothing to do with the idea of reference determination.)
27. For a response to Walton's view that echoes some of the moves made in the present paper, see Kroon, "'Disavowal through Commitment' Theories of Negative Existentials", in Empty Names, Fiction and the Puzzles of Existence (CSLI Publications, 2000), pp. 95-116.
28. Walton responds to some of these arguments in "Existence as Metaphor?" (same volume), pp. 69-94.
29. See, for instance, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism.
30. Michael Devitt describes this and others problems for the theory of direct reference in "Against Direct Reference", Midwest Studies in Philosophy 14 (1989): 206-240. Devitt's own answer to the problem of informativeness invokes the difference in causal networks underlying tokenings of names (pp. 227-228). But while this difference might explain why a statement of the form 'N = M' won't be a truism, it says nothing about what the statement's non-truistic informational content might be. And if that is all we are trying to explain, certain ways of understanding the New Theory of Reference seem to do just as well without invoking causal networks
31. (see T. Yagisawa's "A Semantic Solution to Frege's Puzzle", in Tomberlin, J. (ed.), Philosophical Perspectives, vol. 7 [California: Ridgeview, 1993]).
32. If I am right, no appeal to the more circumscribed grammatical forms available in a logically perfect language should be allowed to hide this fundamental psychological fact. Doing so may mean that we will look in the wrong places for a solution to the problem of informativeness.
33. For a pragmatic account that solves the informativeness problem along broadly similar lines, although without taking the detour through the plural identity problem, see Peter Carruthers, Tractarian Semantics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).
34. See, for example, John Perry, "Cognitive Significance and New Theories of Reference", Nous 22 (1988): 1-18. Perry's own account of the informativeness of identity statements for the case of names claims that the information pragmatically imparted by an utterance of such a statement is that the truth-condition of the statement is satisfied.
35. I am grateful to the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh for its support during the fall semester of 1997, and to the many colleagues who provided useful comments and criticisms (in particular, David Braddon-Mitchell, Mitch Green, David Hills, Lloyd Humberstone, Robert Meyers, and Ken Walton).