The Pre-Kripkean Puzzles are Back

Yes, but does Nature have no say at all here?! Yes.

It is just that she makes herself heard in a different way.

Wittgenstein (MS 137).

Modality was already puzzling before Kripke - there’s a tendency for the potted history of the thing to make it seem like just before Kripke, philosophers by and large thought they had a good understanding of modality. But there were deep problems and puzzles all along, and I think many were alive to them.

There is a funny thing about the effect of Kripke’s work which I have been starting to grasp lately. It seems like it jolted people out of certain dogmas, but that the problems with those dogmas were actually already there. The idea of the necessary a posteriori sort of stunned those ways of thinking. But once the dust settles and we learn to factor out the blatantly empirical aspect from subjunctive modality - two main ways have been worked out, more on which in a moment - the issue comes back, and those ways of thinking and the problems with them are just all still there.

(When I was working on my account of subjunctive necessity de dicto, I thought of most pre-Kripkan discussions of modality as irrelevant and boring. Now that I have worked that account out, they are seeming more relevant.)

What are the two ways of factoring out the aposterioricity of subjunctive modality? There is the two-dimensional way: construct “worlds” using the sort of language that doesn’t lead to necessary a posteriori propositions, and then make the truth-value of subjunctive modal claims involving the sort of language that does lead to them depend on which one of the worlds is actual.

This is currently the most prominent and best-known approach. However, it involves heady idealizations, many perplexing details, and various questionable assumptions. I think the difficulty of the two-dimensional approach has kept us in a kind of post-Kripkean limbo for a surprisingly long time now. Except perhaps in a few minds, it has not yet become very clear how the old pre-Kripkean problems are still lying in wait for us. I have hopes that the second way of factoring out will move things forward more powerfully (while I simultaneously hope for a clearer understanding of two-dimensionalism).

What is the second way? It is to observe that the subjunctively necessary propositions are those which are members of the deductive closure of the propositions which are both true and C, where C is some a priori tractable property. (On my account of C-hood, the closure version of the analysis is equivalent to the somewhat easier to understand claim that a proposition is necessary iff it is, or is implied by, a proposition which is both C and true. On Sider’s account of C-hood this equivalence fails.)

My account of subjunctive necessity explains condition C as inherent counterfactual invariance, which in turn is defined using the notion of a genuine counterfactual scenario description. And it is with these notions that the old-style puzzles come back up. Sider’s account has it that C-hood is just a conventional matter - something like an arbitrary, disjunctive list of kinds of propositions. (Here we get a revival of the old disagreements between conventionalists and those who were happy to explain modality semantically, but suspicious of conventionalism.)

What are these returning puzzles all about? They are about whether, and in what way, meaning and concepts are arbitrary. And about whether, and in what way, the world speaks through meaning and concepts. Hence the quote at the beginning, and the quote at the end of this companion post.

Raisins at Dawn #2

Topics this time include: false thoughts, psychological impossibility, metaphilosophy, losing the use of a concept as it gets problematized or worked on, interdefinability as a sign of non-basicness, intuitionism, and the Russell-Copleston debate.

On Conceptually Progressive Propositions

The following remarks were written around 2010 - early 2011, when I was training myself in Wittgenstein's later methods.

1. In some cases where we wonder at the (metaphysical, conceptual) possibility of something, imaginability, conceivability in full detail seems to be close to what is at issue - i.e., whether the thing can be 'worked out'. In other cases however, it is quite different. In other cases, the question is closer to: ought we conceive of this? (This is connected with what I want to call railed vs. unrailed sponteneous concept formation in Wittgenstein's philosophy of math, knowing how to go on vs. discovering how.)

2. An example: suppose someone says that when a cat weaves around someone's legs, they are asserting ownership of this person. (I was actually told this as a child.) We might now consider whether this is so, get puzzled, and then consider whether it is even possible for part of a normal cat's normal behaviour to turn out to amount to an assertion of ownership. Here, it is quite unnatural to think that any kind of conceivability or imaginability (however detailed) is at issue. We have seen the behaviour a hundred times. We can imagine it perfectly well. What, now, does it mean to imagine it being an assertion of ownership? (Furthermore, actually being such an assertion - by which I mean that it does not count to merely imagine that one is dealing with some extraordinary cat who can think and communicate with conventional signals, or indeed anything out of the ordinary.)

3. The assertion that the cat is asserting ownership, and countless others like it, have a special character - it is granted in advance, so to speak, that the cat is not asserting ownership by the usual criteria. Conceptually progressive propositions, but also linguistically progressive propositions. (The former are perhaps well seen as a proper subset of the latter.)

4. One feels like saying: here, a decision is needed (although this is misleading in that no conscious decision is needed, no freedom to decide either way need be felt, etc.).

5. Within such cases, one might distinguish those which as it were call for full-blown (literal?) acceptance, while others are not concerned with that, being, rather, quasi-metaphorical, quasi-analogies. But - and hopefully this is seems trite - there is no clear line between literal truth and analogy, figure, simile, metaphor. However, with the latter, one of the characteristic things is that a decision isn't really needed in the full sense. However, one may still reject or embrace ('work with') the idea, criticize it, modify it, etc.

6. (Simile as a minimal literalization of metaphor - in effect, the literal truth one gets to when one accepts a metaphor as a metaphor. Which isn't to say that all similes are such literalizations, but rather: given an acceptable metaphor, one can get a literally true simile.)

7. An interesting feature of the cat case is that, in a sense, the verification and falsification conditions are already in place. It is already clear that, if one accepts this kind of proposition at all, one will count 'the cat asserted ownership' true when the cat weaved around the person's legs, false otherwise. Obviously it will be a more subtle than that, for many reasons - vagueness about whether weaving took place, the possibility of the cat being in some pathological state which just happens to involve weaving, etc. - but still, the point remains that the working criteria are not the focus of the problem. Reflection on this leads to the comparison of the cat proposition (in its progressive use) with a proposal of the adoption of a norm of expression.

8. Whenever something like that is said (i.e. 'a norm of expression'), it looks as though something important is being skirted over too easily. This is connected with the fact that this is no merely conventional, arbitrary norm of expression. It is highly charged with significance, with meaning. Also: to say it is a norm of expression might suggest that it is not a norm of thought. That thought goes on underneath, and this norm relates to how the thought gets 'put into words'. But the cat case is obviously not like that.

9. To think of a badly treated mechanical device as suffering, feeling sympathy for it - this is a perfectly possible form of thought which, as a matter of fact, ordinary adults do not engage in. (Here my saying 'as a matter of fact' may give a wrong impression, namely that I think it would be 'just as good' to do that, or that we can't say anything against such a viewpoint, etc. But not at all. I'm not getting into that.) 

10. The cat case, and the case of the suffering vacuum cleaner, are interesting partly because they make trouble for a certain oversimplification of the working of language which is, in certain circumstances, natural for us.

11. The oversimplification is something like this: in cases where the working criteria are not an issue, but where judgement one way or the other sets a kind of precedent (for the remainder of a conversation or train of thought (internal monologue), at least), it may look like the issue is 'merely verbal', 'merely pragmatic', or something of the sort. But this is liable to be extremely misleading; it focuses on the comparison of such a case to that of, say, the adoption of a perfectly arbitrary label, to the exclusion of other comparisons. The consequences are very different here from those which follow an arbitrary labelling decision. (Associations.)

12. It is instructive to reflect that sometimes we accept provisionally a conceptual precedent for the purposes of a conversation (or even a private train of thought), but have misgivings about it. We feels, as it were, that quite possibly we can get on OK with it for now, that to start critiquing here might be impractical at this point (e.g. in an involved conversation where we will have to go to bed soon, or get off the phone or something), but that, were the stakes to be raised, so to speak, we would have to try to sort it out.

13. Consider a conversation of this sort. The limitations one characteristically feels in such discussions. (Consider especially the case where your conversation partner doesn't see any difficulty.) Thoughts have potential problems other than falsity! Truths, expressed in a certain way, can be almost false. One almost wants to talk here of a 'higher' kind of truth and falsity, of verification and falsification. (I think Hegel actually does something of this sort at the beginning of his Logic.)

14. 'They believe a machine suffers!' - this could be thought to be an inadequate, misleading statement in a similar way to 'Cantor showed that there are numbers larger than the number of natural numbers' - except in the first case, the thing is rejected as absurd, in the second case, accepted as mind-bogglingly wonderful. (There are, of course, reasons for these different treatments.) In both cases, an extended conception is being regarded from the point of view of a narrower one.

15. ((There is a false note here, interestingly. I feel like saying: no, those who believe that the machine suffers do not have an extended concept, it is we who have a restricted one. We've got more structure, so to speak. We could have a concept similar to but distinct from our concept of suffering, which we apply to machines. Thus we have a sort of distinction where they have none. Or, we could apply something like that more minimal concept across the board, and then add something for the case of "real suffering".))

16. The proposition that a machine suffers could actually be embedded, quite deeply, into a highly sophisticated conceptual framework. The point being: it is not a proposition which can only survive in very primitive or childish systems. One could talk of panprotopsychism (Chalmers), a continuum of organizational complexity, and with it a continuum of suffering. So complex human computers in disorder, on such a view, perhaps suffer about as much as an insect. How far can it be taken? To vacuum cleaners? Hot water bottles? Not the latter. (The human teleology (purpose) of the object, if such there be, would naturally not play any part in its placement on the continuum.)

17. How do we know that rocks aren't incredibly sad? If this is metaphysically impossible, how do we know that? This is another case where imagination seems quite irrelevent. There's nothing to picture except the rock - or one might imagine being sad. Both procedures are clearly idle!

18. I believe that any reason given to think that rocks aren't sad is going to be bunk. What is disturbing here is the strong inclination toward finding such reasons nonetheless. It suggests deep infelicities in our thinking.

A Plea for Conceptual Schemes

Introduction 

In 1974, Donalad Davidson published a now famous paper entitled 'On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme', in which he attacked that idea and exhorted the reader to give it up. One reason Davidson set upon this idea was his evident hunch that it lay behind the pernicious, nebulous doctrine of the relativity of truth. Another, perhaps more fundamental, reason, was his desire to see the world and our understanding of it in terms of a metaphysics of sentences and objects, without employing things like concepts and propositions.

I think the idea of a conceptual scheme a highly serviceable one, and that Davidson's attack is confused. I believe that the idea of a conceptual scheme has a good deal of unrealized potential in the philosophy of modality and many other areas. My object here is simply to vouchsafe the idea from Davidson's attack. 

 

The Problem of Comparison and Neutrality

Early in his paper, Davidson makes this remark, which goes to the essence of his attack:  

[T]here is no chance that someone can take up a vantage point for comparing conceptual schemes by temporarily shedding his own.
(Davidson 1979/1984, p. 185. Page references are to the 1984 version.)

This is true, but misleading. True, because we cannot do anything by temporarily shedding our conceptual scheme - the immediate reason being is that there is no such thing as 'temporarily shedding our conceptual schemes' in the required sense (i.e. while retaining some kind of rationality or sentience). Misleading, because it seems to carry the implication that scheme-shedding would be the way we ought to proceed with a comparison, if only this were possible.

Against this, I want to insist that the only conceivable way we could compare two conceptual schemes is from within our own. We have a conception of the world (surely!). Part of that conception is the idea that there are conceptions - of the world, in the world. We are self-conscious. We think about our thinking and that of others, and when we do this we employ our conception of our own conceptions, and our conception of others' conceptions.

Of course, if we compare our conceptual scheme with another, our ideas of these two schemes will not be on a par epistemologically. This difference cannot be factored out. However, we should try to be as objective as we can, and this means trying to improve our conception of our conceptions, and those of others, and the relations between them.

Davidson, on the other hand, apparently has some idea to the effect that, as long as we are 'stuck' in our own conceptual schemes, comparison will be impossible or at the very least greatly hampered. Indeed, some notion of being stuck seems to lie at the root of this part of the confusion.


'The Dualism of Scheme and Content'

According to Davidson

[the] dualism of scheme and content, of organizing system and something waiting to be organized, cannot be made intelligible and defensible. It is itself a dogma of empiricism, the third dogma. (p. 189.)

Now, I do not want to argue with the claim that no dualism between scheme and content could be made good sense of. Rather, the point is that no notion of a dualism is called for to support the idea of a conceptual scheme.

In our ordinary ideas of 'scheme and content', I should think, it is understood that the scheme itself is potentially part of the content, and parts of this potential content - such as concepts - inhere in the scheme.

Simply put: There is no dualism of scheme and content. A distinction is not a dualism.

The idea of a dualism of scheme and content is bound up with a fundamental misunderstanding of the 'content' part of that idea, arising from a certain picture we possess of the situation, and an attitude toward this picture which most of us, in certain circumstances, are strongly inclined to take. (Cf. the notion of the thing-in-itself.) While this phenomenon is of fundamental importance in parts of philosophy, I maintain that it is not an essential part of our practical understanding of the idea of a conceptual scheme. On the contrary, and as the existence of Davidson's paper shows, it can be an obstacle.


The Problem of 'Uninterpreted Reality'

Davidson wants us to give up 'dependence on the concept of an uninterpreted reality, something outside all schemes and science'. The great unclarity here is: what do the phrases 'uninterpreted reality' and 'something outside all schemes and science' mean in this context?

As suggested in the previous section, the 'content' or 'world' term of the conceptual representation relation need not be thought of as some amorphous fundament, some uninterpreted thing-in-itself. We live in the world - in reality - and we interpret it. Reality, since we are real and interpret it, just is interpreted; there is no reality which, as a whole, is completely uninterpreted.

What about parts of reality? The particular objects, events and processes which intelligent beings talk and think about are parts of interpreted reality - parts of reality which get interpreted. Thus my desk is part of interpreted reality, as are Denmark, Donald Davidson, Beethoven's Ninth, Saturn and many other things besides.

It is quite commonly believed, in our culture, that other parts of reality are uninterpreted; if some small pebble somewhere has never been apprehended or encountered in any way by an intelligence, then this individual is, in some sense, part of uninterpreted reality. Quite obviously, this is not the sort of thing Davidson means by 'uninterpreted reality'.

We might instead take the phrase 'uninterpreted reality' to mean 'reality considered separately from any interpretational or conceptual apparatus'. Then surely this can include chairs, tables, and the rest of it. ('Considered separately from interpretational or conceptual apparatus' obviously doesn't mean 'considered without recourse to any interpretational or conceptual apparatus'.) So this doesn't seem to be what Davidson means, either.

Regarding the phrase 'something outside all schemes and science': isn't the desk I am working at now outside all schemes and science? Surely my desk is not inside a conceptual scheme, or inside science (whatever that means).
 

The following passage from Rorty, who enthusiastically embraced Davidson's critique of the idea of conceptual schemes, gives us more to work with:

The notion of 'the world' as used in a phrase like 'different conceptual schemes carve up the world differently' must be the notion of something completely unspecified and unspecifiable - the thing in itself, in fact. A soon as we start thinking of 'the world' as atoms and the void, or sense data and awareness of them, or 'stimuli' of a certain sort brought to bear upon organs of a certain sort, we have changed the name of the game. For we are now well within some particular theory about how the world is.

(Rorty 1982, p. 14.)

I deny the first assertion. The notion works like this: we use our conceptual schemes and understand there to be chairs, tables, numbers, quarks, experiences, concepts and schemes thereof. Then we form an idea of different schemes carving up the world differently. Here, our idea of the world is still our idea of the world, i.e. an idea of something which contains chairs, tables, numbers, quarks, experiences, concepts and schemes (among who knows what else).

In a strange way, Davidson and Rorty seem to make the very mistake they appear to be warning against. In saying queer things about 'uninterpreted reality', they try to identify a thing we can't say anything about. Or: they try to give the content of a notion they want to criticize, but in so doing they only embroil themselves in the confusion which bothers them. It is this confusion, I believe, which leads Davidson and Rorty to loudly and violently reject the idea of a conceptual scheme. They reached for the saw; I suggest we consider a scalpel.

Tristan Haze

References

Davidson, D. 1974. 'On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme', Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, Vol. 47, pp. 5-20.

The above reprinted 1984 in Donald Davidson (ed.), Inquiries Into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rorty, R. 1982. 'The World Well Lost', Consequences of Pragmatism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Essence, Belief and Epistemic Modality (Part 2 of Sketch)

This is part 2 of a Sketch of a Way of Thinking about Modality. In this part we shall consider:

- Essences and the de re/de dicto distinction,
- The indefiniteness of necessity,
- Intentional contexts ("propositional attitudes"), and
- Epistemic modality.

The first topic is really the main one. What I say about the remaining topics will be very scant - a rough indication of how these issues are to be approached according to the way of thinking being sketched out here, rather than an attempt to really deal with them. (I hope to really deal with them in my book.) They fit quite naturally here, since intentional contexts come into the more substantial discussion of the first topic. If nothing else, the brief discussion here should prevent readers from thinking that I have given no consideration to such issues, or that my account of modality is straightforwardly unable to deal with them.

Three Interpretations of Modal Claims about Individuals

As a preliminary, it should be noted that epistemic modal claims are not counted in this taxonomy. Consider, to begin with, sentences of the form 'a is necessarily F'. I distinguish the following three interpretations of such statements:

(1) The contextual interpretation. The locus classicus for this interpretation is Lewis in On the Plurality of Worlds, who expresses it better than I can:

I suggest that those philosophers who preach that origins are essential are absolutely right - in the context of their own preaching. They make themselves right: their preaching constitutes a context in which de re modality is governed by a way of representing (as I think, by a counterpart relation) that requires match of origins. But if I ask how things would be if Saul Kripke had come from no sperm and egg but had been brought by a stork, that makes equally good sense. I create a context that makes my question make sense, and to do so it has to be a context that makes origins not be essential.' (p. 252)

There is one ruffle here: Lewis (who is notorious for playing fast and loose with ordinary modal language) talks of 'how things would be if Saul Kripke had...', rather than how things would have been. This might suggest a kind of epistemic reading, concerning what it would be like if it turned out that Saul Kripke actually had such-and-such an origin. But the range of possibilities in this sense - the things which could turn out to be true of an individual, for all we know (or all we know a priori) - is something quite different from what we are discussing here. In two-dimensional semantics, this corresponds roughly to the difference between A- and C-intensions.

(2) The "unrestricted" interpretation. In contrast to the above, we are now beginning to enter the realm of what could more legitimately be called 'essence'¹, and are looking at proper metaphysical (or subjunctive) modality. On this interpretation, something like the following holds: 'a is necessarily F' is true iff 'a is F' is satisfied by all configurations of the host system of these propositions, and the concepts involved are adequate to their objects with respect to 'a is F'. (This form of account is introduced more generally in part 1.)

Thus, in this case, we might say that the necessity, as opposed to contingent truth, of 'a is F' stems from the nature of the individual concept of a, rather than any contextual restrictions placed on our representations. Why, then, are there scare-quotes around 'unrestricted'? This is because the present way of looking at things may over-dramatize the difference between the contextual restrictions of Lewis's account, and the constitution of concepts in the relevant fine-grained sense. We might think of the nature of these concepts as being at least partly determined by more-or-less invariant restrictions of some more general apparatus. This more general apparatus can be used to understand epistemic modality (and epistemic space).

On this interpretation, to say that a is necessarily F is to say something like: according to the way I think of a - and this way is adequate - it could not have failed to be F. (This isn't meant to be a proper analysis.) But we will probably want to recognize the possibility of slightly different concepts in other systems which have a as their object, and are adequate. Thus while we might think of John in such a way that we may say, intending the present "unrestricted" interpretation, that he is necessarily F, we might recognize that other people might legitimately think of John in such a way that they may say that he is contingently F. (This could be called 'adequacy pluralism about concepts'.)

(3) The generalized "unrestricted" interpretation. Clearly, we will want an interpretation of modal claims about individuals which does not tie their truth to one particular conceptualization (namely, that embodied in the host system of the modal claim). This interpretation gives us that. On this interpretation, something like the following holds: 'a is necessarily F' is true iff all configurations of all systems containing an adequate concept of a represent a as being F. (Another, less natural interpretation would be to substitute 'at least one system' for 'all systems'. This interpretation would be natural for 'a is possibly F'.)

A Simplification

I have simplified the above by concentrating on subject terms and ignoring different construals of the role of the predicate. One might distinguish interpretations analogous to (2) and (3) above, i.e. an evaluation involving a particular F-concept in a system, versus one involving all systems with some concept of the property F. An analogous simplification will be made below in the discussion of ascriptions of intentional content. 

The Indefiniteness of Necessity

The account of necessity given here, based on the notion of all configurations of a conceptual system, may give the impression that I think a sharp boundary can be drawn between necessary and contingent truths. It is important to realize that this is not the case. (I probably should have emphasized this already in part 1.)

One way of responding to this would be to try to modify our picture of modality - instead of picturing a conceptual system as being like a mechanical apparatus which can be put into a definite set of configurations, one might imagine a device with an indefinite set of configurations; one might, for example, imagine growing resistance as one manipulates the apparatus into further out configurations (i.e. further from what we think is actually the case).

This sort of response has its place, but we needn't respond like that. We can also hold on to our simpler, more definite picture, but with due regard to the indefiniteness of its application.

Either way, it is important to note that there are clear cases. Some propositions are clearly necessary, and some are clearly contingent, and the distinction between them is of fundamental importance.

The following analogies from Wittgenstein are very helpful in connection with this theme:

The use of the words 'proposition', 'language', etc. has the haziness of the normal use of concept-words in our language. To think this makes them unusable, or ill-adapted to their purpose, would be like wanting to say 'the warmth this stove gives is no use, because you can't feel where it begins and where it ends'.

from Philosophical Grammar, Part 1. p. 120.

It is essential to logic to draw boundaries, but no such boundaries are drawn in the language we speak. But this doesn’t mean that logic represents language incorrectly, or that it represents an ideal language. Its task is to portray a colourful, blurred reality as a pen-and-ink drawing.

from The Big Typescript, p. 144.

The De Re/De Dicto Distinction(s)

This is widely acknowledged to be a confusing topic. The pair of terms 'de re' and 'de dicto' appear to get employed in philosophy to mark several important distinctions (or sorts of distinction). Complete clarification of this will have to wait for another time, but for now I want to characterize two basic sorts of distinction for which these terms can be used:

(1) De re: Generalization (universal or existential) over dicta involving a particular object vs. De dicto: specification of a particular dictum. (Dicta here are contents, propositions - something like that.) The distinction above between the "unrestricted" and generalized "unrestricted" interpretations of modal claims about individuals is an instance of this. It echoes, at least in part, Quine's distinction between believes-notional and believes relational.

In intentional contexts (for example, belief-reports), the distinction appears in the following way. The name 'Hesperus' in a belief report like:

(A) Ralph believes that Hesperus is F.

can be read as doing two things at once. (1) specifying the object of Ralph's belief, and (2) specifying the concept (or mode of presentation) via which he has it. On such a reading, (1) could be expanded to:

(B) Ralph believes, of Hesperus, via his Hesperus-concept, that it is F.

(A similar thing could be done for the 'F'.) Some belief reports, on the other hand - purely de re belief-reports - may be read as only specifying the object. (A) read this way could be expanded to:

(C) Ralph believes, of Hesperus, via some concept(s), that it is F.

(Cases such as 'John believes that Santa Claus exists' suggest that there are also readings where the name just functions to indicate an individual concept or intension involved in the propositional attitude, i.e. does not specify any real extension.)

Substitution of co-referring terms salva veritate (i.e. without change in truth-value) will fail in modal and intentional contexts which are de dicto in this sense.

(2) De re: Involvement of a dictum featuring a rigid (or rigidified) designator vs. De dicto: Involvement of a dictum featuring a non-rigid, unrigidified designator. This distinction most clearly makes its appearance with definite descriptions.

To illustrate: as a result of these two distinctions together, a sentence like 'The winner could have been shot' - once we rule out salient epistemic readings and Lewis-style contextually restricted readings - still has three readings left:

De dicto in both senses (1) and (2): true iff the non-rigid dictum 'The winner was shot' is satisfied by at least one configuration of the host system. (In this configuration (so to speak), the winner might be someone else.)

De dicto in sense (1) and de re in sense (2): using 'The winner' to indicate an individual concept - the concept of the actual winner, that very person - i.e. as a rigidified description, and true iff that dictum is satisfied by at least one configuration of its host system.

De re in sense (1) and therefore neither de re nor de dicto in sense (2): using 'The winner' purely to indicate a particular object, and then making a claim about all dicta which are rigidly about that object and which fulfil certain conditions (in this case: saying that the object was shot, or saying that the object was shot using some particular concept of being shot). It is only on this sort of reading, I submit, that substitution of co-referring terms salva veritate will be valid.

Clarifying and separating these distinctions helps to clarify Quine's skepticism about de re modality, and Kripke's famous arguments against Quine's attitude, as well as making it clearer why this debate is so confusing. Below is a lengthy quote of an important passage of Naming and Necessity. The above discussion can help us disambiguate the ensuing talk of particulars having modal properties independently of how they are described: this may be indicating de re-ness of the second kind (involvement of an individual concept rather than a non-rigid, unrigidified designator), or the first (generalizing over concepts of a particular object, rather than fixing on a particular concept).

Some philosophers have distinguished between essentialism, the belief in modality de re, and a mere advocacy of necessity, the belief in modality de dicto. Now, some people say: Let's give you the concept of necessity. A much worse thing, something creating great additional problems, is whether we can say of any particular that it has necessary or contingent properties, even make the distinction between necessary and contingent properties. Look, it's only a statement or a state of affairs that can be either necessary or contingent! Whether a particular necessarily or contingently has a certain property depends on the way it's described. This is perhaps closely related to the view that the way we refer to particular things is by a description. What is Quine's famous example? If we consider the number 9, does it have the property of necessary oddness? Has that number got to be odd in all possible worlds? Certainly it's true in all possible worlds, let's say, it couldn't have been otherwise, that nine is odd. Of course, 9 could also be equally well picked out as the number of planets. It is not necessary, not true in all possible worlds, that the number of planets is odd. For example if there had been eight planets, the number of planets would not have been odd. And so it's thought: Was it necessary or contingent that Nixon won the election? (It might seem contingent, unless one has some view of some inexorable processes....) But this is a contingent property of Nixon only relative to our referring to him as 'Nixon' (assuming 'Nixon' doesn't mean 'the man who won the election at such and such a time'). But if we designate Nixon as 'the man who won the election in 1968', then it will be a necessary truth, of course, that the man who won the election in 1968, won the election in 1968. Similarly, whether an object has the same property in all possible worlds depends not just on the object itself, but on how it is described. So it's argued.

It is even suggested in the literature, that though a notion of necessity may have some sort of intuition behind it (we do think some things could have been otherwise; other things we don't think could have been otherwise), this notion [of a distinction between necessary and contingent properties] is just a doctrine made up by some bad philosopher, who (I guess) didn't realize that there are several ways of referring to the same thing. I don't know if some philosophers have not realized this; but at any rate it is very far from being true that this idea [that a property can meaningfully be held to be essential or accidental to an object independently of its description] is a notion which has no intuitive content, which means nothing to the ordinary man. Suppose that someone said, pointing to Nixon, 'That's the guy who might have lost'. Someone else says 'Oh no, if you describe him as "Nixon", then he might have lost; but, of course, describing him as the winner, then it is not true that he might have lost'. Now which one is being the philosopher, here, the unintuitive man? It seems to me obviously to be the second. The second man has a philosophical theory. The first man would say, and with great conviction 'Well, of course, the winner of the election might have been someone else. The actual winner, had the course of the campaigner been different, might have been the loser, and someone else the winner; or there might have been no election at all. So such terms as "the winner" and "the loser" don't designate the same objects in all possible worlds. On the other hand, the term "Nixon" is just a name of this man. When you ask whether it is necessary or contingent that Nixon won the election, you are asking the intuitive question whether in some counterfactual situation, this man would in fact have lost the election. (Kripke, Naming and Necessity, first lecture.)

Epistemic Modality and Ascriptions of Intentional Content

For the purposes of understanding metaphysical or subjunctive modality, I have been talking about conceptual systems in a fine-grained sense such that changing one's mind about an empirical identity statement involving individual concepts, for example, constitutes a change in the system itself. Since we believe that Hesperus is Phosphorus, there is no configuration of our fine-grained system which satisfies 'Hesperus is not Phosphorus'. And yet we can truly say things like 'It could turn out that Hesperus is not Phosphorus after all', and even (despite worries of Kripke's) 'It could have turned out that Hesperus was not Phosphorus'.

This is connected with the idea of 'two spaces of possible worlds' in other approaches. (Cf. Chalmers' 'The Nature of Epistemic Space'.) When we say that it could be that Hesperus isn't Phosphorus, we are not considering a configuration of our existing system in the sense we have been talking about, but are rather considering a change in our system. But in another sense, of course, making this change would constitute a reconfiguration of some "wider" system - the system relevant to epistemic modality. Making various abstractions and idealizations, we can imagine a space of possible ways things could be for all we know a priori - epistemic space. Moving from that to the space of ways things could have been involves getting rid of epistemic possibilities which are not metaphysically possible (the lesson of the necessary a posteriori), but also adding epistemic impossibilities which are metaphysically possible (the lesson of the contingent a priori), i.e. things which couldn't be the case, but could have been, such as this room being bigger than it is. (This latter thing will occupy us in part 3.)

So, we can configure our systems in the wide sense to represent ways things might be, and the way we think things are. But, speaking roughly, such a configuration of the wide system yields a system in the fine-grained sense, of ways things could have been. Sometimes, when we change our beliefs, this can be understood as simply moving to another configuration in the fine-grained system (and thus not directly changing any of our metaphysical modal judgements), whereas other times this must be regarded as involving change of the fine-grained system itself (e.g. going from believing that Hesperus is not Phosphorus to believing that it is).

(Note that I am not saying that the ways things really could be all have corresponding configurations in some system of ours, nor that the ways things really could have been all have corresponding configurations in our fine-grained system - not only may we be wrong, there will be possibilities we haven't dreamt of. Clearly much more needs saying here about these notions of 'the ways'. Some speculations can be found here.)

The Metaphysical Possibility of Metaphysically Impossible Thoughts

Hesperus could be distinct from Phosphorus after all, if we're radically deceived, but given that it is Phosphorus, it could not have been distinct from Phosphorus. So 'Hesperus is not Phosphorus' is not satisfied by any configurations of our fine-grained system. And yet 'John believes that Hesperus is not Phosphorus' is metaphysically possible, is satisfied by configurations of our fine-grained system.

This may be quite puzzling given a certain way of visualizing the fine-grained system and its relation to the wider epistemic system which gives rise to it. For a while it seemed like a real problem to me, and I called it 'the containment problem'. The bothersome thing is the way in which epistemic modal space seems to be contained in metaphysical modal space via our machinery for ascribing intentional states and propositional attitudes - our machinery for representing the thoughts and representations of others - despite epistemic modal space outrunning the metaphysical in the well-known Kripkean way.

It is very tempting to try to "fix" this "problem" by going metalinguistic. I.e. saying something like: 'When we say that John believes that Hesperus is not Phosphorus, we aren't really simulating, constructing, or dealing directly with a thought that Hesperus is not Phosphorus. Rather, we are simply employing our concepts of Hesperus, the Hesperus-concept and the Phosphorus-concept, and forming an idea of a proposition in another system which has the relevant properties.' That may be a good view of what we do sometimes (especially with very foreign thoughts), but it seems wrong - gratuitous, even - to suppose that this is always how we do it. After all, we naturally and frequently envisage epistemic possibilities which fall outside our current fine-grained system. We step outside it all the time. So, when we think something like 'John believes that Hesperus is not Phosphorus', we can think of this as employing - in tandem - our fine-grained system together with a configuration of our wider system which falls outside it, but which is "pointed to": to give ourselves the thing John believes, we step outside our fine-grained system and construct the thought directly, so to speak - and all of this in a sense just constitutes a configuration of our fine-grained system, but of a special kind.

Compare Russell's treatment in the Logical Atomism lectures of 'propositions with more than one verb', and his remark about Wittgenstein's 'discovery' that propositions like 'A believes that p' are 'a new beast for our zoo' (p. 226, Logic and Knowledge).

A Desultory Postscript about Water

Contrary to plan, I haven't included a proper section on 'Water is H20' and related examples (or apparent examples) of the necessary a posteriori. I don't have much to say about such examples for now, except that it is very difficult to avoid dogmatism when treating them; specifically, in the move from the fact that water is H20 - something we've all learned - to a particular interpretation and logical explication of 'Water is H20'.

One might regard this sentence as expressing a 'theoretical identity' as in Kripke. Scott Soames critically examines this way of going in detail in his book Beyond Rigidity. Alternatively, one might regard the 'is' here as being "the 'is' of constitution", and this in turn might be construed as a (non-symmetric) relation. Or one might simply interpret 'is H20' as a predicate. On the 'water' side, one may construe this as being tied to a concept of water in the Kripke-Putnam way (i.e. such that 'Water is H20' is necessary), or it may be construed functionally or phenomenologically, such that 'Water is H20' is contingent.

All these contents seem to exist, so to speak, and all seem like natural ways of interpreting 'Water is H20'. So we must be wary not to fall into holding views which might implicitly suggest otherwise; we can and should develop simplified, systematic, abstract views of logic and language, but we hinder and discredit this very development if we neglect the underlying variety of language use. Among other things, this may give the false appearance that the whole logico-philosophical enterprise depends on there not being this variety.

(Part 1, recently edited, is here.) 

(See this paper for a newer presentation of the basic ideas of part 1.)

1. For present purposes, I pass over Kit Fine's contention that not all necessary properties are essential in an intuitive sense (roughly because they are not all intrinsic to the thing in question). The classic example of a necessary property which is arguably not an essential property is Socrates' membership in his singleton set {Socrates}. There may be something important which distinguishes the essential properties from the merely necessary ones, but they will still be necessary properties, and hence will be amenable to my view.

Wild Thoughts on Modality, Propositions and Concepts

Here. (Readers who like Sprachlogik for its clear-headedness are duly warned that this title is no joke.)

Sketch of a Way of Thinking about Modality - Part 1

[This is old and my thinking on the subject has changed quite a bit (for the better I'm pretty sure). It may be of historical interest, or interesting if you're interested in how my ideas have developed. See my more recent 'Necessity as an Attribute of Propositions' - 22/10/15]

[UPDATE: This sketch, except for parts of part 2, will soon be made mostly redundant by a paper I am working on. I expect to make a draft of this paper available in early November. A link will appear here. - TH 13/10/2011]

[UPDATE 2: The paper mentioned above is here.]

[UPDATE 3, March 2013: What appears below has been left so far behind that I'm almost embarrassed about it. For my latest on these topics, see An Account of Subjunctive Necessity.]

This is the first installment of a two-part series of posts where I aim to sketch some ideas about modality which will feature in a book I am working on, Necessity and Conceptual Systems. The material is still very much under development, and I apologize for the obscurities which the reader will inevitably find in it. Comments and criticisms are very welcome.

In this first part, I will introduce the approach, and indicate how it handles the necessary a posteriori, using 'Hesperus is Phosphorus' as a case-study. In part 2 I will discuss the notion of de re modality, of essence, and natural-kind examples such as 'Water is H20', as well as some more general issues which arise on my approach (especially to do with epistemic modality and ascriptions of intentional content).

In the Golden Age of analytic philosophy, necessarily true propositions were widely taken to be those which are satisfied by (or 'come out true' on) all configurations of some conceptual or linguistic system. Possibility was understood in terms of satisfaction by at least one configuration. Our conceptual system, our means of understanding the world, is here thought of as something like a model, or a machine, which has moving parts, and which can be put into various positions or configurations. Each configuration can be thought of as corresponding to, or satisfying, or even being, a set of propositions. (I have taken many liberties in the formulation of this description.)

Conceptual or linguistic systems of the kind in question were thought to be describable with "semantical rules" for a language, and necessary propositions were thus commonly taken to be a priori and true "in virtue of the meaning" of the terms involved (cf. Carnap's Meaning and Necessity, Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic). This yields a notion of necessity reminiscent of the notion of truth-functional tautologousness. (Earlier, in the Tractatus - which was a major inspiration to both Ayer and Carnap - this relationship is much closer than mere reminiscence.)

This sort of view was attacked by Quine in at least two ways (cf. his 'Truth by Convention', 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism'). Quine's undifferentiated picture of language had a sobering or worrying effect, but it did not stop people carrying on with some version of the view in question. This is connected with the fact that it amounted to a kind of quietism or abstinence with respect to the relevant sorts of notions (semantic, modal), rather than a sustained attempt to attain positive insight about them.

The really decisive blow to the Golden Age view of modality came from Kripke. His fundamental contribution was to persuasively argue that the a priori does not coincide with the (metaphysically) necessary, and relatedly, that epistemic modality ("what could be the case") is to be distinguished from metaphysical modality ("what could have been the case" in a certain unrestricted sense). This contribution was closely bound up with Kripke's ideas concerning naming and reference, more on which in a moment. The recognition of the necessary a posteriori in particular, and the associated idea that conceivability doesn't entail possibility, has led to a reaction against views of modality of the Golden Age sort.

(About 'metaphysical modality': one sometimes hears it said of a philosopher that they countenance metaphysical modality, as though this indicates that the person holds some sort of doctrine, which may be quite esoteric. But 'metaphysical modality' is just a label for me - synonymous with 'subjunctive modality' - for a notion "detected" in the logic of language. That said, someone who felt this notion was, e.g., a trivial artifact of the way we happen to talk, rather than a deep artifact of the way we think, would probably not want to use this label.)

My approach to modality retains the view that necessity - metaphysical necessity - can be fruitfully understood in terms of invariance through all configurations of a conceptual system. But it also takes Kripke's separation of the a priori and the metaphysically necessary fully to heart. This latter point is one respect in which my approach differs from that of the two-dimensional semanticists. Another key contrast is that the possible worlds framework is not fundamental to my view.

Broadly speaking, I handle the necessary a posteriori by doing two things. Firstly, I work with a much more fine-grained notion of 'conceptual system' than did the logical empiricists. (The sense of 'fine-grained' here should become clearer in a moment.) Secondly, I embrace a certain kind of semantic externalism - roughly, the view that sense doesn't determine reference (other ways to put this which for me are roughly equivalent: intension doesn't determine extension, concept doesn't determine object).

I will illustrate how this works with respect to a classic example of the necessary a posteriori: 'Hesperus is Phosphorus'.¹

I follow Kripke in holding that proper names do not have reference-determining senses (which hangs together with semantic externalism via Putnam's idea of Twin Earth), and also that proper names do not have a semantics which can be given in the form of general conceptual content such as definite descriptions, or clusters thereof (irrespective of whether this content can be said to determine reference).

I do not, however, accept the (to my mind very strange and confused) idea that proper names are 'mere tags' (Ruth Barcan Marcus's phrase), that all there is to the meaning of a name is its referent, etc. This idea is sometimes associated with Mill's claim that names have no 'connotation', only 'denotation', and also with the phrase 'direct reference'.²

We have individual concepts - concepts of individuals, of particular objects - and we often associate these with proper names. This sheds light on Kripke's rigid designation thesis (the thesis that a referring proper name designates the same object in all possible worlds at which that object exists). If names are associated with individual concepts - concepts of particular objects - then it is immediate that they will designate the same object in all possible worlds where that object exists; designating another object is out of the question, since we are holding fixed the associated individual concept. We may thus distinguish rigid designators such as ordinary proper names, which designate rigidly because they are directly associated with individual concepts, from other rigid designators such as definite descriptions in mathematics.

Once we recognize individual concepts in this way, we can say that when someone accepts that Hesperus is Phosphorus (having previously taken them to be distinct), there is a change in their conceptual system - in the relevant fine-grained sense. Of course, in a more coarse-grained (and more ordinary) sense, we can say that they have before and after the same conceptual system. The fine-grained change consists in the unification of two individual concepts. The original concepts, we might say, are not blended irrevocably but remain as aspect-concepts united under a common master. From now on, it should be kept in mind that conceptual systems will usually be individuated here in this fine-grained sense.

In the former conceptual system (call this 'the Babylonian system'), where the Hesperus-concept is separated from the Phosphorus-concept, the distinctness of Hesperus and Phosphorus is invariant through all configurations of the system; if one positively believes that Hesperus and Phosphorus are distinct, one will say that, although it might conceivably turn out that Hesperus is Phosphorus after all, given that it isn't, Hesperus could not have been Phosphorus. (And one will of course be wrong.) In the latter conceptual system (call this 'our system'), where the Hesperus- and Phosphorus-concepts are unified, the identity of Hesperus and Phosphorus is invariant through all configurations of the system; when one knows that Hesperus is Phosphorus, one will say that, although it might conceivably turn out that Hesperus is distinct from Phosphorus after all, given that it isn't, Hesperus could not have been other than Phosphorus.

Now, with our fine-grained understanding of conceptual systems in place, I maintain that we can still say that all (metaphysically) necessarily true propositions are satisfied by all configurations of their host conceptual systems. We can even say that a truth is metaphysically necessary iff it is satisfied by all configurations of its host system. We just can't say that all propositions which are satisfied by all configuration of their host systems are necessary truths. So far, then, we can say what distinguishes necessary from contingent truths, but we can't say what distinguishes necessary truths from other proposition which are satisfied by all configurations of their host systems - we might call these 'false propositions of necessary character'. What can we say that will do this?

I think we can say something like: a proposition P is necessarily true iff it is satisfied by all configurations of its host system and the concepts involved in P are jointly adequate to their objects with respect to P.

First I want to say that I am not concerned to provide a reductive analysis of modal concepts. Relatedly, I am happy for the relevant modal notions and my ternary relation of 'adequacy' to be explanatory of each other; I do not suppose it is a one-way street, where my notion does all the explaining, nor do I take my notion to be more "fundamental" in any metaphysical sense. I am interested in showing (and making) connections.

I will make a start at explicating the above proposal by indicating how it applies to the 'Hesperus is Phosphorus' case. In the Babylonian system, the Hesperus-concept and the Phosphorus-concept are not unified (are taken to represent distinct objects), but they both have the same object, the same extension, and so together (jointly) they are inadequate to their objects with respect to 'Hesperus is not Phosphorus'. So their proposition 'Hesperus is not Phosphorus' fulfills the first condition given above, before the 'and' - it is satisfied by all configurations of their system - but it does not fulfill the second. Our Hesperus- and Phosphorus-concepts, which also have the same extension, are in contrast united, as aspect-concepts, under a common master concept (the concept of Venus). Hence they are adequate to their objects - or object - with respect to our proposition 'Hesperus is Phosphorus'.

Why do I not simply say that a proposition is necessarily true iff it is satisfied by all configurations of its host system and its concepts are jointly adequate to their objects? Why do I add 'with respect to that proposition'? I will explain this with an example. Assume for the sake of argument that Hesperus (Venus) is necessarily not intelligent - i.e. that Hesperus could not have been intelligent. Now, suppose someone believes that Hesperus is intelligent, and necessarily so - loosely speaking, that it is part of their concept of Hesperus that it is intelligent. In that case, their concept of Hesperus would not be adequate to its object with respect to 'Hesperus is intelligent'. But they may know, for all that, that Hesperus is Phosphorus, and so their concepts of Hesperus and Phosphorus might be jointly adequate to their object with respect to 'Hesperus is Phosphorus'.

Conversely, someone may know that Hesperus is necessarily not intelligent, while mistakenly believing that Hesperus is not Phosphorus, thus having an adequate conceptual situation with respect to propositions about the intelligence of Hesperus, but not with respect to propositions about the identity of Hesperus and Phosphorus.

Speaking broadly, necessity is, on this understanding, not simply a matter of a proposition having a certain status in a conceptual system. It is, as well as that, a matter of the system being adequate to its objects with respect to that proposition. The adequacy of some set of concepts to their objects obviously depends on the identity (and nature) of those objects - and this is not in general determined by the system. (This is how semantic externalism fits in.) Hence you cannot, in general, tell simply by looking at a proposition in a system whether or not it is necessarily true - there are a posteriori necessities.


The compatibility of externalism with rigid designation
(Postscript added 14 August, 2011.)

It may look as though there is a tension between my externalist claim that the extension of an individual concept is not in general determined by the concept itself, and the claim that names rigidly designate: if names are tied to individual concepts, and individual concepts do not in general determine their extension, it looks like a given individual concept can have different extensions in different environments. This is so (at least, when we individuate concepts internally) but there is no real tension here: the rigidity applies to names in use - names tied to token individual concepts embedded in an environment. Individual concepts are not like general concepts: the whole point of them is to apply to one particular object. And so the contrast between names and definite descriptions remains: when we consider counterfactual scenarios and hold the meaning of our terms fixed, our names which are tied to individual concepts always refer to 'the same object'.

This is all perfectly compatible with the fact that the same concept, in a different environment, might be connected up to a different object. The extension of our individual concepts may in some cases even change over time: if an object we know is replaced with a substitute, and we don't notice, after a while it will become true to say that our individual concept has changed its extension. But we don't let the extension change "across possible worlds" when representing counterfactual scenarios using a particular individual concept in a particular environment.

Part 2.

Individual concepts are under-discussed in contemporary philosophy. For further online reading on what they can do, see:

- My post at Philosophy, et cetera, 'An advertisement for individual concepts'

- A recent article by linguist Barbara Abbott, 'Support for Individual Concepts'.

- John McCarthy's article, 'First Order Theories of Individual Concepts and Propositions'. (Warning: arguably contains some use-mention confusion.)

Interestingly, neither of these authors are (primarily) philosophers.

1 I pass over one well-known issue here, to do with the fact that Hesperus/Phosphorus might not have existed. There is a discussion of this on Greg Frost-Arnold's blog. If one is really worried about this, consider instead the example 'If Hesperus exists, then Hesperus is Phosphorus'.

2 It should be noted, however, that Mill's claim is appropriate if 'connotation' is interpreted to mean 'reference-determining sense' or 'general conceptual content', and likewise that the phrase 'direct reference' is appropriate if 'direct' is interpreted to mean 'not via general conceptual content' or 'not via reference-determining sense'.