Hesperus and phosphorus: Sense, pretense, and reference

Philosophical Review

Volumn 107, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 1-46

  Crimmins, Mark ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 52649138102     PISSN: 00318108     EISSN: 15581470     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2998314     Document Type: Article

References (56)

1. The Philosophy of Logical Atomism (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1985), 115.
2. Speaking of thetruth condition of an utterance is in general dangerous, since one needs to decide to hold fixed certain features of the utterance in order to ask what ,nore is needed if it is to be a true utterance. To see this, notice that what's wrong with the following view is not falsity: every utterance has the same truth condition: that the utterance be a true one. It is only when certain aspects of the utterance are held fixed (perhaps including its syntax and some "lexical" features of the constituent expressions, contextual facts and speaker intentions), that a more specific truth condition can be isolated. But for the moment let's go with the flow.
3. Mimesis as Make-Believe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), and "Metaphor and Prop Oriented Make-Believe," European Journal of Philosophy 1 (1993): 39-56.
4. Wahon's distinction between directly and indirectly generated (or primary and implied), fictionally true propositions seems to cross-cut this one. See Mim.esis as Make-Believe, 140-44.
5. Why mention these metalinguistic propositions rather than, say, 'the proposition that Ann is as clever as Holmes and more modest than Watson'? Since 'Holmes' and 'Watson' do not really refer to anything, I do not assume that there is any such proposition. Indeed I think that there is no such proposition, and so that there is no such proposition that can be even fictionally true. In explaining what is fictionally so, I want to identif' propositions that are fictionally true, and so of course I restrict myself to all the propositions that there are.
6. It is compatible with this account that there is a "fictionally operator" governing the statement, but I don't see any point in postulating hidden syntax in this sort of case. I prefer to see this statement as employing a trope, akin to metaphor, characterized by a distinctive path connecting utterances to their truth conditions. It perhaps is preferable to view this case not as involving a pretend (and also serious) assertion, but as involving two pretend (and also serious) predications-namely, of 'is as clever as Holmes' and of 'is more modest than Watson'. We then would inquire after the (fictional and serious) conditions of applicabilit analogously to how we have sought truth conditions. There is no reason to restrict this sort of analysis to entire speech acts, nor even to utterances of whole sentences.
7. See my Talk About Beliefs, chapter 4. The need for complexity in a perspicuous notation is an important motivation for semantic pretense.
8. The reader may feel, too, that this sentence would naturally be used in making a notionally loaded claim. I agree, and what I hope to make clear is just how this sentence can do that. But the first step is to notice how the intuition about what the sentence can be used to clirn conflicts with an intuition about how it is semantically structured. I will show how to reconcile these intuitions.
9. See W. V. O. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge: MIT, 1960), esp. 219;
10. Daniel Dennett, "Beyond Belief," in The Intentional Stance (Cambridge: MIT, 1987);
11. Francois Recanati, "Domains of Discourse," Linguistics and Philosophy 19 (1996): 445-75;
12. Walter Edelberg, "Intentional Identity and the Attitudes," Linguistics and Philosophy 15 (1992): 561-96
13. and "A Perspectivalist Semantics for the Attitudes," Notis 29 (1995): 316-42;
14. Robert Gordon, "Folk Psychology as Simulation," Mind and Language 1 (1986): 158-71;
15. Alan Leslie, "Some Implications of Pretense for Mechanisms Underlying the Child's Theory of Mind," in Developing Theories of Mind, ed. J. Astington, P. Harris, and D. Olson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 19-46.
16. See also Fred Landman, Towards a Theory of Information (Dordrecht: Foris, 1986).
17. See for instance Nathan Salmon, Frege's Puzzle (Cambridge: MIT, 1986),
18. and Scott Soames, "Direct Reference, Propositional Attitudes and Semantic Content," Philosophical Topics 15 (1987): 44-87.
19. On Saying That," in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).
20. See my "Notional Specificity" Mind and Language 10 (1995): 464-77.
21. There recently has been a flurry of interest in apparent failures of substitution in other than the "classic" propositional attitude contexts. See for instance Anne Bezuidenhout, "Pragmatics and Singular Reference," Mind and Language II (1996): 133-59;
22. Jennifer Saul, "Substitution and Simple Sentences," Analysis 57 (1997): 102-8;
23. Graeme Forbes, "How Much Substitutivity?" Analysis 57 (1997): 109-13.
24. Such cases are enormously common. See John Searle, "Literal Meaning," in Expression and Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
25. Given our thin conception of mode of presentation, remember, there is no distinction between specifing a single mode of presentation and specif5ing a type or class of modes of presentation. Considerations like those supporting the notional loadedness of the Gingrich case seem to me to support taking most ordinary reports to be notionally loaded as regards not only particulars (like Gingrich) but also universals (like being a communist), but I ignore this in the present discussion.
26. For an abnormal case in which this is not so, see my "I Falsely Believe that P," Analysis 52 (1992): 191
27. For useful recent work on these questions, see Jennifer Saul, "The Pragmatics of Attitude Ascription," forthcoming. See also my TalJ About Beliefs (Cambridge: MIT, 1992), especially chapter 5, and "Notional Specificity."
28. This is connected to certain suggestions Evans makes in his discussion of existence statements in Varieties of Reference (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). Relevant also is one way in which, according to Walton, metaphors can be essentia4 see "Metaphor and Prop Oriented Make-Believe."
29. A conception of content built around this assumption is familiar from Kripke's Naming and Necessity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981). The theoretical centrality of such a notion of content (but not its semantic reality) is questioned by Michael Dummett in appendix 3 of The Interpretation of Frege's Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), and by Evans in "Reference and Contingency," in Collected Papers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
30. Given any two true sentences p and q. whatever their truth conditions and modal contents, we can construct (using the 'Actually' operator of philosophical logic) a sentence whose truth condition is necessarily equivalent to that of p and yet whose modal content is necessarily equivalent to that of q, namely, 'Actually p, and if actually q then q'. And for any two false sentences p and q, the same feature is possessed by 'Actually p, or if not actually q then q'.
31. This needs to be unpacked carefully if names are individuated in the ordinary way, such that different things can have the same name. We must understand the use of the name in the ascription as borrowing from one of one's personal traditions of univocally using the name to refer (one has different 'Aristotle' traditions for what one at least suspects might be different Aristotles). The mode of presentation in question must concern not just any bearer of the name, but what the name in fact names within that tradition. The source of this constraint will become clear later in the present section.
32. I should note the possibility of considering both premises to be framed from within the pretense. We can interpret (25) as meaning 'Hesperus is really a planet' (in analogy to 'Hesperus (really) exists'. As will be clearer after our discussion of existence and identity, this might give (25) the truth condition that the Hesperus-mode denotes a planet. If (25) is given this interpretation, there can be an entailment in modal content even if the modal content expressed by (24) has nothing essential to do with Venus.
33. If 'the Hesperus-mode' owes its nature to the contours of this pretense, then it seems to follow that it is necessary that thoughts involving it concern Venus.
34. Certain examples suggest that this principle of generation is defeasible: 'Had Hesperus not been Phosphorus, I would have believed that Hesperus was not Phosphorus'. Related examples are considered by Michael Dummett in Frege: Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), 113;
35. Landman in Towards a Theory of Infonnation, and Bezuidenhout in "Pragmatics and Singular Reference."
36. Schiffer, "Naming and Knowing," in Midwest Studies in Philosophy 2, ed. P. French, T. Uehling, and H. Wettstein (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977);
37. Crimmins and Perry, "The Prince and the Phone Booth," Journal of Philosophy 86 (1989): 685-711;
38. Crimmins, Talk About Belief;
39. Richard, Propositional Attitudes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990);
40. Recanati, Direct Reference (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993).
41. Mimeis as Make-Believe, 426. He also considers the possibility that one seriously asserts that it is fictionally true that one speaks truly in making the statement.
42. However, as noted earlier, such constraints may be defeasible, offering resources to explain such sentences as 'Had Santa existed, I would have gotten more toys' and 'Had Hesperus not been Phosphorus ⋯'.
43. We might allow that there are other ways for it to become fictionally true that this relation holds, to allow, for instance, for the fictional truth of 'Zeus is Jupiter'.
44. This too is only approximately true, depending on how the contours of the pretended promiscuous "identity" relation are to be spelled out. In particular, we might well allow 'Santa is Santa' and 'Zeus is Jupiter' to be counted true-in the pretense, "identity" extends to "things that don't exist."
45. Steve Yablo first called such examples to my attention.
46. In a reenactment of Waterloo, one might believe that it is in fact Napoleon's sword in one's hand, and yet the fictional truth of this claim would not depend on its truth.
47. "Intentional Identity" and "The Perils of Pauline," in Logic Matters (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972).
48. In thinking about intentional identity I have profited from Edelberg's "A New Puzzle about Intentional Identity" Journal of Philosophical Logic 15 (1986): 1-25,
49. "Intentional Identity and the Attitudes," and "A Perspectivalist Semantics for the Attitudes," as well as Michael McKinsey's "Mental Anaphora," Synthese 66 (1986): 159-75.
50. This need not entail, as we would put it colloquially, that Nob assumes that the witch exists; it does plausibly entail that he does not assume that she does not exist. This seems right: we can unproblematically append to (38) 'but is unsure whether she even exists'.
51. Intentional Identity" 151 (sentence labels altered).
52. As Geach notes, the example is not completely compelling. A better case (McKinsey's) is: Nob wishes that he caught the fish that got away (where the speaker doubts there really is such a fish).
53. "A New Puzzle about Intentional Identity."
54. I continue to find persuasive the argument in Talk About Beliefs (193-94) for the claim that modes of presentation of modes of presentation are ascribed in embedded reports. The hierarchy has no end, but this is not a problem: thought is nowhere bare.
55. A possible reason for discomfort with this response is that it seems to predict that (56) would be an apt surrogate for (54), when really it is at best awkward: (56) ? When Fred came in, Doris doubted that he was the same person as Fred. In contrast, (57) does seem an apt surrogate: (57) When someone who in fact was Fred came in, Doris doubted that he was the same person as Fred. This is prima facie evidence that the response is not on the right track, since if (56) did involve the predicted sort of pretense, as (57) clearly does, surely it would be no more awkward than (57). On the other hand, perhaps (56) is not really so very awkward, and perhaps the awkwardness it has can be explained consistently with taking it to be semantically equivalent to (54). For instance, it might be that the crucial difference between (54) and (56) is a garden-path phenomenon- that it owes to a cognitive effect of the increased "parsing distance" between 'he' and 'Fred'. The hearer discovers that she must, so to speak, pretend-apart Fred only when she encounters the second occurrence of 'Fred'. In (56), perhaps, this realization is more surprising, since it comes only after the hearer has been lulled into being unprepared for it. So it seems that this response can be defended.
56. See John Perry, "The Problem of the Essential Indexical," in The Problem of the Essential Indexical (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).