11/13/2012
Week 12 Notes
Main Topics:
- Object-dependent thought and strong de re beliefs.
In the fifties, then, Quine distinguishes the attribution of merely notional belief from the attribution of genuinely relational belief.
In the sixties, Kaplan shows how various sorts of relational belief can be understood in terms of notional belief, by adding to the thin denotational model of aboutness restrictions to privileged classes of expressions available for use in specifying the content of the underlying notional belief.
Sosa then showed how radically the appropriate restrictions must vary with circumstances of belief attribution, and the interests of the attributors.
In the seventies Burge, Perry, Lewis, and Kaplan himself, among others, focus attention on the kind of beliefs that are de re or relational in the epistemically strong sense that results from insisting that the believer be in a position to pick out the object of belief by the use of demonstratives, or more generally, indexical expressions.
Since that time much effort has been invested in the notion that sdirectly referentials expressions, paradigmatically indexical ones, make possible a fundamental sort of cognitive contact with the objects of thought, a kind of relational belief that is not conceptually mediated--in which objects are directly present to the mind, rather than being presented by the use of concepts. [MIE p. 551]
- From causal-historical theories of names (vs. descriptive ones) to anaphoric theories.
The lessons one should and should not learn from Kripke’s arguments in NN pertain to proper names, not to reference in general. Descriptivism presupposes a nondescriptive connection between predicates (the ones that articulate descriptions) and properties.
‘A Puzzle about Belief’.
(Weak version: Pierre contradicts himself. Strong: ascriber does.)
Tactile Fregeanism: anaphoric chains as “what one grasps” and determiners of reference (in that sense, peforming both the functions of Fregean sense that Putnam and others led us to distinguish), but without epistemic transparency (a visual notion).
Cf. Laura Davis’s question, and Jacquet Kehm’s
- ‘I’
From ‘A’ to ‘I’, in stages.
Demonstratives are not indexicals.
Indirect reflexives: interpersonal anaphora put into intrasentential anaphora in ascriptions, but nonetheless carrying information about its antecedent. (Cf. ‘he’, but now, ‘herself’).
Anaphorically indirect quasi-indexicals (cf. anaphorically indirect definite descriptions).
(But not quasi-names—since they are already anaphors indicating lexically cotypical antecedents.)
What have been considered so far are de dicto ascriptions of strong de re beliefs. The use of quasi-indexicals also permits a straightforward analysis of de re ascriptions of beliefs that are strongly de re in the sense of being essentially indexical or demonstrative.
S believes ofstrong t that (it),
is an ascription expressing the perspectivally hybrid deontic attitude that consists of the attribution that would be expressed by the de dicto ascription
S believes that (that<this>),
and the undertaking of the substitutional commitment that would be expressed by the identity
that<this> = t.
This understanding just adapts the reading of weak de re ascriptions by combining it with a restriction on the terms the ascriber takes it the believer could use to express the belief.
Such an account combines:
1) The denotational reduction of weak de re to de dicto ascription;
2) Kaplan's and Sosa's idea that stronger sorts of rapport with objects correspond to a "frankly inegalitarian attitude toward different ways of specifying objects";
3) Perry's point that there are essentially indexical or demonstrative beliefs, and Burge's suggestion that it is just these that are strongly de re;
4) Davidson's and McDowell's paratactic account of de dicto ascriptions in terms of relations between the reporting tokening, in the ascriber's mouth, and the (possible) reported tokening, in the mouth of another, which is or expresses what is ascribed.
The final theoretical ingredient, which serves to combine all the rest, is then
5) An anaphorically rendered notion of quasi-indexicals, whose expressive role in ascriptions is modelled on Casta¤eda's quasi-indicators and indirect reflexives.
With these expressive resources it is possible even for an interlocutor who cannot have that 'I' thought and that demonstrative thought to ascribe exactly the beliefs that Michele would express using the first-person pronoun "I am threatened by a bear,"and that Danielle would express using a demonstrative "This is an interesting painting." What is required is only that the reporting tokening occurring in the ascription determine in a systematic fashion what token is being reported—either the utterance being ascribed, or the tokening that would express the state being ascribed. [MIE p. 566]
Cf. M.H. Abrams on beads and string (empiricists line up the beads and push the string through).
- Communication, sshared contents, navigating between perspectives, and anaphora (to secure a common topic).
- Objectivity Proofs.
Dewey, Sellars, Dummett as assertibility-theorists.
All share a common difficulty, if assertibility is thought of as articulating the kind of content we think of as articulated by truth-conditions. (Dewey wants a replacement, not an analysis.):
Co-assertible things can have what are intuitively very different meanings.
The resources of a two-sorted account of normative status over a single-sorted account (which all of Dewey, Sellars, and Dummett offer):
Can make these distinctions of meaning.