Knowledge and Reality : Selected Essays 9780191519376, 9780198238232

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Knowledge and Reality

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Knowledge and Reality Selected Essays

Colin McGinn

CLARENDON PRESS · OXFORD 1999

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi São Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © in this collection Colin McGinn 1999 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 1999 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographcs rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available ISBN 0-19-823823-1

Acknowledgements The original places of publication of the essays reprinted here are as follows. ‘The Concept of Knowledge’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy., ix (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). ‘A Priori and A Posteriori Knowledge’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. (1976). ‘A Note on the Essence of Natural Kinds’, Analysis. (June 1975). ‘On the Necessity of Origin’, Journal of Philosophy., 73 (1976). ‘Modal Reality’, in Reduction, Time and Reality., ed. Richard Healey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). ‘The Structure of Content’, in Thought and Object., ed. Andrew Woodfield (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). ‘Conceptual Causation: Some Elementary Reflections’, Mind. (October 1991). ‘Charity, Interpretation, and Belief ’, Journal of Philosophy., 74 (1977). ‘Radical Interpretation and Epistemology’, in Truth and Interpretation., ed. Ernest Lepore (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986). ‘The Mechanism of Reference’, Synthese., 49 (1981). ‘Truth and Use’, in Reference, Truth and Reality., ed. Mark Platts (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979). ‘An A Priori Argument for Realism’, Journal of Philosophy., 76 (1979). ‘Two Notions of Realism?’, Philosophical Topics., 13 (1982). ‘Realist Semantics and Content-Ascription’, Synthese., 52 (1982). ‘Another Look at Colour’, Journal of Philosophy., 93 (1996). I am grateful to the various publishers of these essays for permission to reprint.

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Contents Introduction. PART I: KNOWLEDGE AND NECESSITY 1. The Concept of Knowledge 2. A Priori and A Posteriori Knowledge 3. A Note on the Essence of Natural Kinds 4. On the Necessity of Origin 5. Modal Reality PART II: THOUGHT AND WORLD 6. The Structure of Content 7. Conceptual Causation: Some Elementary Reflections 8. Charity, Interpretation, and Belief 9. Radical Interpretation and Epistemology 10. The Mechanism of Reference PART III: REALITY AND APPEARANCE 11. Truth and Use 12. An A Priori Argument for Realism 13. Two Notions of Realism? 14. Realist Semantics and Content-Ascription 15. Another Look at Colour 16. The Appearance of Colour Index.

1 7 36 49 57 65 111 152 168 181 197 225 247 267 279 298 314 327

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Introduction I came into philosophy in a somewhat unorthodox fashion. My undergraduate degree was in psychology, taken at Manchester University in 1971. I also completed an MA thesis in psychology on the topic of innate ideas at Manchester. The philosophy I had studied as an undergraduate was mainly existentialism and philosophy of science, though I took to reading Russell extensively. I decided to study philosophy as a postgraduate, so I applied to do the Oxford B.Phil., naively thinking that because it included a hefty amount of course work it must be designed for people like me who had done rather little philosophy as an undergraduate. I was, however, turned down by the Oxford philosophy panel, after having been accepted by Balliol College. After some negotiations I was permitted a year later to enrol in the university (now at Jesus College) to study for the B.Litt., a somewhat despised degree (I later learned) for people who couldn't cut it on the B.Phil. or D.Phil. Michael Ayers was my first philosophy tutor, and under his friendly and expert supervision I was permitted to switch to the B.Phil. after my first term. By this time I was well aware of how much catching up I had to do, but at least I had no high expectations about my performance. I decided to enter for the John Locke Prize as a dry-run for my upcoming B.Phil. examinations, and to my surprise I won the prize. It was chiefly this that secured me my first job at University College London. I was appointed at UCL without in fact having any formal degree in philosophy at all, since I had not yet taken my B.Phil. exams, and had only been officially studying philosophy for about eighteen months. In retrospect, this all seems remarkably lucky, though unnerving: I went from barely scraping onto the B.Phil. from a background in psychology to an appointment at one of the best philosophy departments in the country. I was 24 when I started full-time teaching. I began writing and publishing as soon as I went to UCL, so some of the earlier papers reprinted in this volume were written when I was still only in my mid-twenties. Philosophy was still very fresh to me then and I approached it with a vigour and joy of discovery that is only possible for a few youthful years. I took great pleasure in the construction of arguments, and in coming up with new ways of looking at things. Clarity was very important to me. The kind of metaphilosophical pessimism I now feel about the possibility of solving the

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INTRODUCTION

great problems of philosophy was no part of my mental horizon in those years. I also had a far greater appetite for philosophical discussion then than I do now—possibly because I was still in a highly formative phase of development. In any case, my early papers were written in that spirit of excitement, and often under considerable pressure of work (I had a lot of teaching to do). This was also a period of notable creativity in philosophy, with Davidson, Kripke, Putnam, Dummett, Lewis, and others producing the work that would forge the shape of analytical philosophy in the last decades of the millennium. My early papers are thoroughly enmeshed in these discussions, often being commentaries on the work of these philosophers. I do not regret this: the best way to figure out what you think in philosophy is to engage with the best minds in the field. Criticism of the kind found in these papers is a form of homage, and a way to arrive at a view of one's own. Even finding another philosopher's view quite preposterous, and explaining why, can be an immensely fruitful form of dissent. Philosophy is a subject of extremes, and extreme disagreement is what powers the subject forward. Severe criticism can be the sincerest form of respect. These papers are very largely concerned with the relation between mind and reality. They deal with knowledge, intentionality, and reference, on the one hand, and the nature of what is known or thought about or referred to, on the other. I am concerned here with how the world shapes the mind and in what respects the world might be a product of the mind. Broadly speaking, the topic is the various kinds of dependencies that might hold between mind and reality. Thus ontology and epistemology are pursued in tandem, each discussed with an eye on the other. The most obvious trait of these papers is their consistent commitment to realism—to not making the world depend upon our means of knowing about it (colour is the exception). My view of modality is strongly anti-mentalist, and I adopt robust forms of realism about both the mind and the physical world. The result, naturally, is to introduce sceptical problems about our access to these areas of reality. Here, as elsewhere, I think it is the job of philosophy to expose real problems rather than to be intent on papering over problems with speciously plausible ‘solutions’. Problem-blindness is the worst trait a philosopher can have. I have written postscripts to each of the papers, which I have arranged thematically rather than chronologically. I must ask the reader's indulgence for all the ‘I still think's and ‘I have not seen a reply to's and ‘I was the first to say's: this is surely what most of us think about our work, at least some of the time—that it is unjustly neglected, not properly understood, yet to be refuted. I don't think I have a particularly bad case of this, but in looking back on one's work it is hard to avoid some measure of self-vindication. The papers do still seem to me generally on the right track, so I have often contented myself with spelling out the main thesis and indicating why it matters. I have not attempted to respond to specific criticisms in the literature, since that would require, in

INTRODUCTION

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order to do justice to my critics, far lengthier discussion than would be appropriate in a volume intended as a selection of papers. But I hope that the postscripts may serve the purpose of suggesting what I would say in reply to certain criticisms—often by referring the reader to later work of mine that takes up the issues treated in these papers.

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Part I Knowledge and Necessity

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1 The Concept of Knowledge I. Types of Knowledge Analysts of knowledge have typically confined their attentions to propositional knowledge (knowledge that such-andsuch is the case). Answering the question ‘What is knowledge?’ has thus been assumed to be possible by treating only of a single type of knowledge; the other types of knowledge have accordingly been deemed secondary, and their correct elucidation has been supposed strictly irrelevant to the proper analysis of propositional knowledge. It seems to me that this is a dubious procedure. The concept of knowledge occurs in a variety of different locutions—knowing how, knowing who (which, where, etc.), knowing one thing from another—and it is a condition of adequacy upon an account of knowledge that it display the unity in this family of locutions. For the word ‘know’ is surely not ambiguous; and it is reasonable to expect that there is some discernible common theme upon which the different types of knowledge can be exhibited as variations. And once we take on the responsibility of confronting the whole family of knowledge locutions, it is by no means guaranteed that propositional knowledge will emerge as fundamental: perhaps the core notion will attach most directly to some other locution, so that knowledge-that comes out as a species of some more basic type of knowledge. The methodological situation here is comparable with that in the theory of causation: the word ‘cause’ likewise occurs in a variety of locutions, and it is a desideratum of any analysis of the concept of causation that it somehow unify these different uses.1 To refuse the obligation of seeking this unity, by concentrating exclusively upon one type of causal or knowledge locution, is to run the risk of parochialism in one's analysis of the concepts and hence of drawing a distorted picture of what causation or knowledge essentially involves. In particular, the analysis of a given locution of the families concerned should be sensitive to the conceptual links of that locution with others.

1

We speak causally of events, objects, facts, and properties in a variety of grammatical forms; we apply the word ‘cause’ in both mental and physical contexts; we use the word to indicate an explanatory relation as well as simply to cite the entity. that was the cause (see Donald Davidson, ‘Causal Relations’, in Essays on Actions and Events. (Oxford, 1980) ).

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I think that this methodological constraint already throws suspicion upon certain of the standard and received analyses of knowledge. It is hard to see, for instance, how the justified true belief account of propositional knowledge can be extended or modified to encompass the other types of knowledge (notably knowing how); and the causal theory, to take a more topical proposal, does not appear any better placed in this respect.2 What is wanted, from the present point of view, is some component of our account of knowing-that which can be seen to play a role in our account of the other knowledge locutions. The most obvious and direct way to achieve this unification would be to select one type of knowledge locution as basic and to explain the others in terms of the selected type. This is the approach I shall favour in this paper. Taking my lead from J. L. Austin3 and (more explicitly) A. Goldman,4 I shall suggest that the underlying notion is that of what might be called distinguishing. knowledge, that is, knowing one thing (or sort of thing) from. another. The result is a unified theory of knowledge in which the notion of discrimination. is central and basic. This kind of theory is by no means novel—it is, indeed, a variant of what have come to be called reliability. theories of knowledge—but I think the virtues of the theory have not been sufficiently appreciated and its motivation has not, to my mind, been properly articulated.5 Furthermore, reliability theories in which the notion of discrimination is invoked have also relied upon the use of counterfactual conditionals of certain sorts in providing conditions for knowledge, and I would like to separate the discrimination analysis from its association with counterfactual analyses of knowledge.6 My reason for wishing this separation is that I find the discrimination theory attractive while finding the associated counterfactual analysis in various respects unsatisfactory. I shall proceed by critically examining Robert Nozick's7 recent presentation of a counterfactually formulated reliability theory, arguing that it fails on a number of counts to provide an adequate analysis of (propositional) knowledge.

2

See A. Goldman, ‘A Causal Theory of Knowing’, Journal of Philosophy., 64 (1967). Indeed, as Goldman acknowledges, the causal theory does not even extend to nonempirical knowledge.

3

See his ‘Other Minds’, in Philosophical Papers. (Oxford, 1961). The notions of telling, discriminating, classifying, and recognizing are prominent in Austin's account of knowledge; he even has the idea of a ‘relevant alternative’.

4

See his ‘Discrimination and Perceptual Knowledge’, Journal of Philosophy., 73 (1976).

5

For discussion of reliability theories see John Watling, ‘Inference from the Known to the Unknown’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. (1954–5) ; D. M. Armstrong, Belief, Truth and Knowledge. (Cambridge, 1973) , part iii; R. Grandy, ‘Ramsey, Reliability and Knowledge’, in D. H. Mellor (ed.), Prospects for Pragmatism. (Cambridge, 1980).

6

I thus diverge from Goldman's official development of the discrimination theory in ‘Discrimination and Perceptual Knowledge’, in which counterfactuals are given a central role.

7

See his Philosophical Explanations. (Oxford, 1981), ch. 3. As Nozick remarks (n. 53), Fred Dretske anticipates Nozick's principal theses in ‘Epistemic Operators’, Journal of Philosophy., 67 (1970) and ‘Conclusive Reasons’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy., 49 (1971). I focus in this paper upon Nozick's presentation because it is fuller and sharper than Dretske's.

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The lessons thereby learned will then help us to arrive at a more satisfactory theory, as judged from a variety of standpoints. A good deal of my discussion will retrace themes familiar from the (swollen) literature on this subject, but I hope I can succeed in putting certain issues and problems in a (somewhat) new light.

II. Tracking the Truth According to Nozick, knowledge is (true) belief that ‘tracks the truth’, where the relation of tracking between a believer S. and a proposition p. is defined subjunctively, as follows: (i) If p. weren't true, S. wouldn't believe that p. and (ii) If p. were true, S. would believe that p.. When we add to these two conditions the usual requirements that p. be true and that S. believe that p., we are claimed to have (subject to some minor refinements) necessary and sufficient conditions for S. to know that p.. The basic idea is that knowledge is not merely actually. believing what is true but being disposed. to believe what is true and being indisposed. to believe what is false: knowledge is belief that is counterfactually sensitive to the truth value of the proposition believed.8 This sensitivity thus has two aspects, corresponding to the counterfactuals (i) and (ii), which Nozick refers to as the variation. and adherence. conditions, respectively. Putting these two conditions in terms of the usual possible worlds semantics for counterfactuals, we can say that S. has knowledge that p. iff (i) in all the worlds closest to the actual world in which p. does not hold S. does not believe that p., and (ii) in all those close worlds in which p. does hold S. believes that p.: belief that p. is not preserved in the close not-p. worlds and it is preserved in the close p. worlds.9 Thus tracking is supposed to provide a sense in which S.'s true belief is not merely accidentally. true, since it varies subjunctively with the truth value of the proposition believed. It is natural to see Nozick's tracking theory as a direct descendant of the causal theory; for the causal theory also conceives knowledge as a certain kind

8

Nozick does not, in fact, employ the notion of a disposition to believe the truth in his official analysis; but it is a natural and convenient way to state the kernel of his theory.

9

Tracking is thus a cross-world relation as Nozick defines it; but we might also consider a cross-time tracking relation, defined as follows. A person's belief that p. held at t. temporally tracks the truth of p. just if the person persists. in believing that p. at times later than t. at which p. is true, and the person ceases. to believe that p. at later times at which p. is not true: that is, the belief tracks the truth of p. across time just if the person believes that p. just so long as p. is true. This notion of temporal tracking thus contains temporal analogues of Nozick's subjunctively defined variation and adherence conditions. It is not perhaps too far-fetched to see this notion of temporally tracking the truth as the analogue for whole propositions of the notion of tracking an object. through time, as invoked by Gareth Evans in The Varieties of Reference. (Oxford, 1982), esp. 174 f.

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of linkage between a belief and the fact that makes the belief true, the linkage consisting in a ‘causal connection’ between belief and fact.10 Indeed, adjoining a counterfactual account of causation, in the style of David Lewis,11 to the causal theory of knowledge yields a theory looking very like Nozick's; and once this step has been taken the resulting theory becomes, as the original causal theory was not, hospitable to non-empirical knowledge.12 I emphasize this affinity with the causal theory because I think that Nozick's tracking theory encounters difficulties very like (some of) those that have been acknowledged to beset the causal theory; so (as I shall argue) we need to make a more radical break with the causal theory if we are to capture the true character of the concept of knowledge. We need, in particular, to give up the idea that knowledge consists in a relation between the person's belief and that which makes his belief true. My criticism of the tracking theory falls into three parts: first, I shall contest the necessity and sufficiency of Nozick's conditions; second, I shall press some difficulties regarding knowledge of necessary truths; third, I shall voice some misgivings concerning the primitive use of subjunctive conditionals in Nozick's analysis. There seems to me room for doubt as to whether the variation condition is necessary. for knowledge, though I recognize that intuitions may differ here. The following (rather extravagant) case convinces me at any rate that the condition is too strong. Suppose we are living in a universe in which there also exists a benevolent deity who watches over our sensory input: he has the intention to preserve this input by artificial means in the event of a cataclysm in which the material objects that actually produce it should suddenly go out of existence. Let us suppose that this cataclysm is, in fact, physically possible and that the deity has the power to carry out his intention. Then it seems that we have the truth of this counterfactual: ‘If the objects around me were to go out of existence, I would still believe that I was surrounded by those objects’—since the deity would see to it that my experience sustained this belief were the cataclysm to occur. (We also, of course, have the adherence condition satisfied in this case.) Yet I am reluctant to say that, because of these facts, we do not know. that we are surrounded by material objects: for the truth of the counterfactual does not, intuitively, make our true belief that we are surrounded by material objects merely accidentally. true.13 Suppose that in the whole history of

10

Nozick himself appears to take this view of the tracking theory: see Philosophical Explanations. , pp. 172–3.

11

See his ‘Causation’, Journal of Philosophy., 70 (1973).

12

As we shall see, however, problems do arise for the tracking theory over the modal. status of non-empirical propositions; so it may be that in the end the tracking theory is no better off than the causal theory when it comes to e.g. mathematical knowledge.

13

I appeal to the idea of accidentally true belief frequently in this paper, so I should say something about how I construe this idea. My view is that the idea functions as a sort of adequacy condition on whether a theory of knowledge is correct—a theory of knowledge should have the consequence that when its conditions are met the belief is not accidentally true. I do not think the non-accidentality idea itself. constitutes an adequate theory of knowledge, because all it really does is give expression to our intuition that a given case fails to qualify as knowledge. The condition of non-accidentality is to a proper theory of knowledge as (roughly) Tarski's Convention T is to a proper theory of truth.

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the universe the cataclysm never in fact occurs, though if. it had the deity would have intervened to preserve our beliefs: can we really say that we do not then know, for example, that the earth exists? Or consider a parallel example concerning our knowledge of other minds: the deity intends to keep other people behaving normally in the event, which we can suppose physically possible, that they suddenly cease to have mental states, and in so doing to preserve my beliefs about their mental states. It turns out that this mind-destroying cataclysm never occurs, but if it had I would have persisted in my beliefs about the mental state of others, thanks to the deity's intervention. Again, it does not seem to me wrong to say that in these circumstances I nevertheless know. that other people have various mental states: for it is, intuitively, not merely an accident. that these beliefs of mine are true. If it be thought that the introduction of a deity somehow makes these cases illicit, then the following case might be found more compelling. Suppose S. believes on the usual sorts of grounds that trees exist, but it is also true that if trees were not to exist he would still believe they did because the absence of trees would alter the chemical composition of the atmosphere in such a way as to interact with the chemicals in his brain so as to preserve this belief in him (he gets hallucinations of trees, etc.). In this case Nozick's variation condition fails, but my intuition is that S. still knows that there are trees. These counterfactuals just seem not to be relevant to assessing S.'s claim to knowledge. Explaining why there is knowledge in these cases requires a positive theory of what makes knowledge possible, which I will try to set forth later; for now I am merely testing Nozick's theory against what I take to be our spontaneous verdicts on such cases. The suspicion is already raised, however, that Nozick's conditions succeed in predicting our intuitions, in the cases where they do, because of a more or less fortuitous coincidence between the truth of the tracking counterfactuals and some conceptually distinct property that is covertly doing the real work of distinguishing knowledge from non- knowledge.14 Turning now to sufficiency, I think the inadequacy of Nozick's analysis stands out yet more starkly. Remember that knowledge is claimed to be belief that tracks the truth of the proposition believed., and consider the following case. You visit a hitherto unexplored country in which the inhabitants have the custom of simulating being in pain. You do not know that their pain behaviour

14

I mean that the critical defining property generally. brings with it the truth of the tracking counterfactuals but that it does not necessarily. do so—hence the possibility of knowledge without tracking. What this underlying property is we shall presently see.

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is mere pretence, and so you form the belief of each person you meet that he or she is in pain; imagine you have acquired a great many false beliefs in this way. There is, however, one person in this country who is an exception to the custom of pain pretence: this hapless individual is. in constant pain and shows it (we can suppose that he falsely believes others to be in his unfortunate condition—he has not been told of the pretence by the others). You also believe of this person, call him N., that he is in pain. Now I take it that we would not say that your true belief that N. is in pain counts as knowledge, for it is, intuitively, a mere accident that your belief is true in this instance. But now consider the relevant counterfactuals, in particular ‘if N. were not in pain, you would not believe that N. was in pain’: this counterfactual is true. in the envisaged circumstances, since if N. were not in pain then (unlike the pretenders around him) he would not behave as if he was, and so you would not believe that he was.15 So your belief that N. is in pain does. track the truth of that proposition even though it does not rank as knowledge. It may be thought that this is a somewhat special case in that it involves (at least on most views about our knowledge of other minds) an inference from evidence: so can we produce a counter-example to the sufficiency of tracking that is not thus inferential? Well, if ordinary perceptual knowledge is agreed not to be inferential, then I think we can, as follows. Suppose you are surrounded by straight sticks immersed in water that therefore look bent to you; you, however, take them to be in air, and so you falsely believe of each of them that it is (really) bent. There is, though, one stick that is not. immersed in water and it really is. bent; on the basis of how that exceptional stick looks you believe it to be bent. Again, I take it that you do not know. that that stick is bent, since, in view of the circumstances, your belief is only accidentally true. But Nozick's variation condition is satisfied in this case, since if that. stick were not bent you would not believe it to be, because it. would not, being in air not water, look bent. So here we have a perceptual belief that tracks the truth of the believed proposition but does not rank as knowledge. Here is another case of a somewhat different kind. Suppose there is a chemical C. in your brain that has the property that only if it is present in your brain can you have beliefs involving the concept of C. (surely there are such chemicals in our brains). Now imagine that the neuroscientists are causing you to hallucinate seeing C. in your brain but that you erroneously take your experience to be genuinely perceptual; you therefore believe (truly) that C. is in your brain. We can suppose that the scientists have been causing a lot of hallucinations in you recently, most of which lead you to form false beliefs; so there is a clear sense in which your true belief that C. is in your brain is only

15

This example is expressly designed to parallel Goldman's case of the real barn surrounded by facsimiles of barns and other objects: see his ‘Discrimination and Perceptual Knowledge’, 772. The difference is that in my example it is clear that the tracking counterfactuals hold: this separates out the failure of discrimination from the failure of the counterfactuals in such a way that the former is seen to be what is crucial.

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accidentally true. I think it is patent that this is not a case of knowledge, despite the truth of the tracking counterfactual ‘if C. were not in your brain, you would not believe that C. was in your brain’.16 (We can easily describe the case as one in which the adherence condition is also satisfied: suppose the scientists decide to cause you, by means of brain stimulation, to believe that C. has reached a certain concentration whenever it does in fact reach that concentration, so that if C. were at that concentration you would believe it was. This adherence to the truth would not give you knowledge, especially in the presence of the other false beliefs similarly caused in you by the scientists.) The lesson of the foregoing examples is that if we are to have a reliability theory of knowledge it cannot be a tracking theory: when assessing claims to knowledge we have to reckon with both more and less than the counterfactual dependence of belief upon the truth value of the proposition believed. The second line of objection I want to mention concerns the applicability of the tracking theory to knowledge of necessary truths, such as the truths of mathematics. The causal theory, notoriously, has its troubles with this sort of knowledge, and so too does Nozick's theory, though for a different reason. The problem is simply that the variation condition, which carries the main burden of the theory, cannot be applied to such knowledge on pain of producing unconstruable counterfactuals—e.g. ‘if it were not the case that 7 + 5 = 12, it would not be the case that S. believes that 7 + 5 = 12’. It is not merely the general problem that we have no adequate theoretical account of counterfactuals with impossible antecedents, since it might well be thought a deficiency of current accounts that they provide no truth conditions for apparently true. counterfactuals with impossible antecedents;17 the problem is the specific one that the counterfactuals demanded by the tracking theory appear not to state clear truths. Nozick himself immediately concedes that his variation condition is inapplicable to necessarily true propositions, but he quickly brushes the problem aside, claiming that the adherence condition will suffice on its own. His rationale for simply deleting the variation condition is just that if the believed proposition is a necessity we are not going to be called upon to consider what the person would believe in the circumstance that it is false.18 This raises two doubts: first, the tracking analysis now possesses an undesirable asymmetry as

16

After thinking up this example I came across a very similar example reported by Armstrong, Belief, Truth and Knowledge. , 178, and attributed to Ken Waller: there is a moral to be drawn here about reading the literature first. .

17

It does seem that such counterfactuals exist and that we cannot give their truth conditions in terms of what holds good in close possible. worlds. Suppose a scientist is devising an experiment to test a theory of the nature of a certain substance and reasons ‘if this substance were not of that nature, it would not behave thus-and-so when subjected to such-and-such conditions’: it may be that the scientist's theory is correct and that the substance necessarily. has that nature. It even seems that we could have such contrapossible counterfactuals in respect of mathematical necessary truths, as in ‘if 16 were not divisible by 2, it would not be divisible by 4’.

18

Nozick, Philosophical Explanations. , 186.

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between knowledge of necessary and contingent truths—so the univocity of the concept seems not to be properly represented in the analysis; second, the radical weakening of the theory raises the expectation that there will now be problems of sufficiency. The first doubt might, I suppose, be partially allayed by noting that the adherence condition is common to the analysis of knowledge of necessary and of contingent truths; but the second doubt cannot, I think, be brushed off so unconcernedly. For it was precisely the variation condition that, in respect of contingent truths, made the analysis (allegedly) invulnerable to Gettier-type cases; so we should expect that deleting that condition would leave the analysis wide open to such difficulties. Suppose I perform a computation upon some number n. and decide upon this basis that n. is prime; I then deduce the existential proposition that some number is prime. But suppose the computation was wrongly executed and n. is not prime. Then I have a (justified)19 true belief that fails to qualify as knowledge; but Nozick cannot exclude this case by adding the condition that if it were not the case that some number is prime I would still believe this. Or suppose I fortuitously acquire a true mathematical belief on the basis of generally unreliable testimony—my informant was trying to deceive me but happened to convey the truth: again we have a Gettier case, but it cannot be excluded in the way Nozick excludes exactly parallel cases involving contingent truths. Moreover, it is hard to see how the adherence condition alone could handle these cases, since it is easy to see how I might also be disposed. to have these true beliefs—I might have a tendency to make the kind of computational mistake in question, and I might have implicit faith in my mendacious informant who himself has a tendency to have mistaken mathematical beliefs.20 Nozick considers only a priori necessities in connection with his tracking analysis, but it is clear that the same problems arise for a posteriori necessities too.21 Suppose someone forms the belief that a lectern is made of wood on the basis of a hallucination that happens to be veridical; here we have a classic Gettier case in which the proposition believed is a necessity. Nozick cannot exclude this case in the way he would for a parallel case in which the believed proposition is contingently true, namely by observing that if that lectern were not made of wood the person would still believe it was; so it seems that Nozick is powerless to exclude such cases. And if the adherence condition is insufficient by itself in the contingent case, it is difficult to see how it can suffice for the exactly analogous cases in which the believed proposition is

19

The belief could be justified because I generally get such computations right and have merely made a slip on this occasion. Note that this example is of exactly the form of the classic Gettier case of truly believing someone. owns a Ford on the basis of the false but justified belief that Jones. owns a Ford.

20

Here it is instructive to ask whether the adherence condition would suffice on its own for parallel cases involving contingent propositions.

21

Of the kind discussed by Saul Kripke in Naming and Necessity. (Oxford, 1980).

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15

necessary—and indeed it is readily seen that this condition is insufficient. Nozick has thus introduced an asymmetry into his account of knowledge that prohibits him from treating intuitively analogous cases in the same way: whether a proposition is necessary or contingent should not be relevant to the conditions required for someone to know it—the metaphysical should not intrude in this way upon the epistemological.22 I can summarize the problem necessary truths pose for the tracking analysis in this way: Gettier cases of the familiar sort show that justified true beliefs can be true by accident, and that if they are they fail to count as knowledge; but whether a true belief is thus accidentally true is surely independent of its modal status—it depends, intuitively, upon how the belief was acquired; so we should not try to capture the idea of accidental true belief, and hence the concept of knowledge, in terms of apparatus whose application is. dependent upon modal status. That is, the same kind of thing is going wrong in cases in which (e.g.) a true existential belief is inferred from a false singular belief (in a justified way), whether the former belief is in a necessary or a contingent truth; so we do not want our account. of what is going wrong to treat these cases differently. If this uniformity constraint is accepted, it shows that the failure of the tracking analysis to deal with knowledge of necessary truths reflects, and is symptomatic of, a deeper and more general inadequacy: that counterfactual dependence is not the right way to handle Gettier cases and so does not give the correct analysis of knowledge. In short, accidentally true belief cannot be defined as belief that fails to track the truth.23 The third and last point I want to make against Nozick's analysis is a very general one and I do not expect that it will be found compelling by everybody; nevertheless, the point does seem to me of some methodological importance across a wide range of issues, including the analysis of knowledge. The point is that it is unsatisfactory to employ counterfactuals in a primitive way in one's analysis of a concept. It is a generally accepted thesis that counterfactuals are true in virtue of categorical propositions; they have dependent. truth value.24 We can always legitimately ask what makes. a given counterfactual true and expect to be presented with a suitable categorical fact. Now it seems to me that this general thesis imposes a constraint upon philosophical analyses, to the effect

22

That is to say, it should not be a consequence of the analysis that we mean something different. when we say of S. that S. knows that p. , according as p. is necessary or contingent. For one thing, we may not in ascribing knowledge that p. to S. ourselves know the modal status of p. . An analogous requirement holds for the word ‘true’: we do not want our account of the content. of that word to vary with the modal status of the proposition to which it is ascribed.

23

The argument I am using here could be paralleled in the case of the causal theory: granted that there are Gettier cases for non-empirical knowledge, we cannot use the notion of a causal connection to diagnose the Gettier cases that arise for empirical knowledge—on pain of having no univocal account of accidentality for the two sorts of case.

24

See Michael Dummett, ‘What is a Theory of Meaning? (ii)’, in G. Evans and J. McDowell (eds.), Truth and Meaning. (Oxford, 1976), 89 f.

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that we should be able to say what categorical propositions ground the counterfactuals we employ in the analysis. Thus counterfactual phenomenalism, for example, invites the question what grounds the reductive counterfactuals about sense experiences, and a phenomenalist owes it to us to provide some answer to this question. Indeed, it is frequently the case for such counterfactual analyses that the only categorical statements capable of supplying the requisite grounding are precisely those that are allegedly being analysed (or reduced)—in which case a charge of circularity appears in order. On the other hand, if non-circular categorical grounds can. be produced it seems that the counterfactuals are in principle dispensable in the analysis; they serve merely as an eliminable intermediate or interim step to the real analysis, which is categorical in form.25 In the light of this general constraint (of which I have not, of course, offered a full defence), I think we are entitled to press Nozick on the question what makes his tracking counterfactuals true: what categorical. facts about the believer S. and S.'s relation to the world make. it true that if it weren't the case that p S. would not believe that p. and if it were S. would? Not to be able to answer this question is not to have completed the analysis of knowledge, according to our constraint; whereas answering it would render the counterfactuals strictly redundant. Since Nozick does not consider this kind of opposition to his style of analysis, we cannot say what sorts of categorical facts he might offer; but it seems to me essential to fill this need if we are to claim a fully satisfying analysis of the concept of knowledge. In the next section I shall try to supply an analysis that does meet this constraint.

III. Discriminating the Truth Nozick's theory defines knowing that p. as belief that varies with the truth of p.; only a single proposition is mentioned in the analysis, along with the person's disposition to believe that. proposition. Tracking is thus reliable belief with respect only to the proposition believed; the person's reliability with respect to other propositions does not enter the picture. Let us say, in view of this feature of the analysis, that Nozick's tracking theory is a local. analysis of knowledge—it localizes the conditions for knowledge into a relation between the knower and a unique proposition. Then I think it is easy to see that the counter-examples I gave to Nozick's analysis arise (at least in part) because of the local character

25

David Lewis has proposed counterfactual analyses of causation and of perception that infringe the constraint I am endorsing: see his ‘Causation’ and ‘Veridical Hallucination and Prosthetic Vision’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy., 58 (1980). Part of the motivation for the constraint is the conviction that the modal is somehow supervenient upon the actual: whatever is possible should be made. possible by what is actual. I cannot, however, get into a defence of this supervenience thesis here.

THE CONCEPT OF KNOWLEDGE

17

of that analysis; for what disqualifies the belief that N. is in pain or that that stick is bent from counting as knowledge is that the person is (in a sense to be made more precise) placed in a context in which that person is apt to form (and indeed has formed) many false beliefs in a range of distinct. propositions.26 Thus, while in these cases the person's belief that p. allows us to infer (non-demonstratively) that p. is true, there are other beliefs, which are relevant to whether the person knows that p., which do not provide sound reason for inferring to the truth of what is believed—for the person is un.reliable with respect to q., r., s., etc. Let us accordingly say that a theory that attempts to incorporate this sort of reliability with respect to other propositions into the analysis is a global. theory: a global theory takes knowledge that p. to require, essentially, some condition that speaks of the person's propensity to believe the truth with respect to a range of distinct ‘relevant’ propositions. Then the theory I want to put forward is a global reliability theory based upon the notion of discrimination.27 The guiding idea of the theory is simple: to say that a person S. is globally reliable with respect to a range of propositions is to say that S. can discriminate. truth from falsehood within that range of propositions; global reliability is a capacity to tell the difference. between true propositions and false ones within some given class of propositions. We then say that S. knows that p. just if his (true) belief that p. is acquired by the exercise of a capacity to discriminate truth from falsehood within some relevant class R. of propositions. It is precisely such a discriminative capacity that is lacking in my cases of the pain pretenders and the bent sticks: in the circumstances specified, the person is unreliable with respect to the relevant class of propositions. S. cannot in these circumstances tell a real pain feeler from a simulator or a really bent stick from one that merely looks bent; so S.'s true beliefs that N. is in pain and that that stick is bent do not qualify as knowledge, despite the counterfactual dependence of S.'s belief upon the truth value of those particular. propositions. The lesson of these cases is then that someone's belief may track the truth of p. and yet not result from a general capacity to discriminate the true from the false; and when this capacity is lacking, it is merely accidental that the particular belief is true—hence we do not have a case of knowledge. In other words, we need to consider the truthdiscriminating power of the method. employed by S. in arriving at the belief

26

Although it is somewhat less obvious, the other examples I have are also explicable in this way. The case of the brain chemicals fails to count as knowledge because the hallucinations produced in the subject render him incapable of discriminating the truth in respect of propositions not involving the concept C. . And the counter-examples to the necessity of the tracking conditions work because the requisite powers of discrimination are preserved in these examples.

27

I have not found the distinction between local and global reliability theories made in the literature, though what is in effect global reliability is sometimes invoked. This distinction, plus the rejection of a counterfactual account or reliability, constitute what is (I believe) new in the analysis I am proposing.

18

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that p., and this will have us looking at the truth value of other. beliefs acquired by use of this method. Placed in unfavourable circumstances, S. might employ a method, for example, observing how things look, that is apt in those circumstances to produce false beliefs—and getting it right in a particular case will not then constitute knowledge.28 The difference between the tracking and discrimination theories comes out, not just in the local/global distinction, but also in that the latter theory makes no essential use of counterfactuals. To introduce a counterfactual element into the discrimination analysis, or to try to reduce. that analysis to a set of counterfactual conditions, would be to go beyond what has so far been endorsed—and to go, in my view, in the wrong direction.29 I have spoken only of a global capacity to tell true from false—and nothing in this compels us to go counterfactual. We might, however, choose to take this further step; and if we do there are two places at which counterfactuals might be supposed to come in. We might, first, propose a sort of global tracking theory: we speak of what S. would believe were the associated propositions false, and what S. would believe were they true—we require, that is, that S.'s beliefs track the truth of the propositions in the relevant class and not just the truth of p.. And second, we might introduce counterfactual conditions that, while keeping the truth values of the associated propositions fixed, specify what S. would believe were he. differently situated: we might say, for example, that S. does not know that N. is in pain because if he were to meet a pain pretender he would believe that pretender to be in pain. It seems to me that neither of these supplementations is obligatory and that both raise problems we can avoid by sticking to our non-counterfactual formulation. The first suggestion may be able to handle the sorts of counter-examples to sufficiency that I raised against the local tracking theory, but then Nozick's theory has effectively merged with a global reliability theory and is not an alternative to it.30 However, the global tracking theory, unlike the global discrimination theory, still runs up against my other objections to Nozick—namely, the problem of knowledge of necessary truths, and those general methodological scruples regarding primitive counterfactuals. It is fortunate,

28

My position, then, is that possessing and exercising a discriminative capacity is what explains. tracking when tracking serves as an indicator of knowledge: the capacity grounds the counterfactuals about what would be believed. There are possible circumstances, however, in which the capacity is absent though the counterfactuals are true (hence Nozick's conditions are not suffi-cient) and the capacity is present though the counterfactuals are false (hence his conditions are not necessary).

29

Goldman's formulation of the discrimination theory in terms of counterfactuals renders him unable to make the sharp distinction I make between tracking and discrimination theories. No wonder Nozick cites Goldman's theory as a variant of his own: Philosophical Explanations. , 689.

30

More exactly, for the tracking theory to go global is (a. ) for it to lose its original essential form and (b. ) for it to employ machinery that it does not then need, since the global counterfactuals become redundant once a local analysis is abandoned.

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then, that the discrimination theory can be detached from the tracking conception simply by declining to formulate the theory in counterfactual terms: we can instead speak categorically of the person's propensity to form true beliefs across a range of propositions whose truth values are taken as fixed in the actual world. Once we introduce these other propositions, and S.'s belief propensities with respect to them, we do not need to consider what S. would believe were the truth values of these propositions other than what they actually are. Nozick needs the extra strength given by tracking because his is a local theory, but a global theory gets the necessary strength by bringing in other. beliefs and propositions. The second suggestion for introducing counterfactuals does not face these objections because it does not employ counterfactuals whose antecedents suppose the relevant propositions to have truth values other than their actual truth values: all that is suggested is, in effect, that we explicate the notion of discriminative capacity by speaking of what S. would believe were he situated differently. Thus, the suggestion goes, having a truth-discriminating capacity with respect to a class R. of propositions is being such that, were one presented with propositions from R. as candidate objects of belief, one would believe the truths and refrain from believing the falsehoods. This is a pleasingly simple view of what such a capacity consists in, but I am sceptical about its adequacy. In the first place, it seems to me that this explication gets the logical priority the wrong way around; for I would hold, quite generally, that an ascription of capacity is what grounds the associated counterfactuals—it is not that the capacity ascription is true in virtue of the truth of the counterfactuals. This claim is, I think, just a corollary of the general position about counterfactuals and categoricals that I allied myself with earlier: the counterfactuals about what someone would do in such-and-such circumstances are true because. (inter alia.) the person has a certain capacity—the person does not have the capacity because he satisfies the associated counterfactuals.31 (I do not, of course, claim to have established this view of capacity concepts here; I am merely gesturing at the sort of position that motivates my reluctance to accept the proposed counterfactual explication.) The second thing I would say is that, even waiving the question of logical priority, it is not in fact correct to propose a counterfactual analysis of what it is to possess a discriminative capacity, since the sorts of simple counterfactual exemplified above do not supply either necessary or sufficient conditions for possessing such a capacity. The point here is familiar: someone can have the capacity to φ and yet not φ when appropriately placed, and it is possible

31

I would say the same about traits of character and their associated counterfactuals: what makes it true that if Jones were put in a situation calling for bravery he would act bravely is precisely the fact that Jones has the trait of bravery—it is not the other way about. To hold these views about capacities and traits is part and parcel of being a realist. about them.

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for someone to φ in appropriate conditions and yet not have the capacity to φ.32 This logical gap opens up because the capacity to φ is at best only one component of what makes it true that someone will (or would) φ: so someone could, for example, have the capacity to hit the bull's-eye and yet fail to hit it, and someone could hit it and not have that capacity. Possessing a capacity is a more complex condition that the simple counterfactual explication suggests. Returning to truth-discriminating capacities, it seems to me that possessing such a capacity can likewise be pulled apart, logically, from satisfying counterfactuals about what would be believed under certain circumstances: for a person might satisfy such counterfactuals without genuinely having the capacity. to tell true from false, since the person might, so to speak, receive outside help; and someone could have the capacity yet not satisfy the counterfactuals, perhaps because of some sort of extraneous interference in its normal operation. And the third point I would make is that it is simply unnecessary to explicate the notion of discriminative capacity counterfactually: there is no objection that I can see to taking the notion of capacity as primitive in the analysis. In view of the difficulties attendant upon reducing the notion of capacity to a set of counterfactual conditions, it seems to me advisable to keep counterfactuals out of the analysis altogether.33 It will clarify the conception of knowledge I wish to advocate to contrast it with an attractive and widely held view of perception; the points of contrast concern the global character of knowledge and the role of causation in explicating the two concepts. The concept of perception is plausibly understood as both causal and local: to perceive the fact that p. requires that that fact should play an appropriate causal role in the production of an experience, and whether a particular experience counts as genuinely perceptual depends solely upon how that experience is related to the fact that causes it. That is, what perception requires is a certain kind of causal relation between an experience and a particular state of affairs—we do not need to establish that other. ‘relevant’ experiences are veridical in order to know that a given experience is genuinely perceptual. Knowledge depends upon the status of other relevant beliefs, but perception is possible without such global reliability. I therefore think that it is a mistake to make perception one's model or paradigm of knowledge; the two concepts operate quite differently.34

32

Saul Kripke's discussion of meaning and dispositions to use in Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. (Oxford, 1982) is relevant here. We need to allow for dispositions to make systematic mistakes. in the exercise of a capacity, and all sorts. of things could give someone a disposition to φ—not just the capacity to φ. Put differently, the notion of competence. is not definable dispositionally.

33

I am not saying that counterfactuals are quite irrelevant. in the ascription of capacities; I am just resisting the idea of a reduction. of the former to the latter.

34

It is thus wrong to conceive knowing as a kind of seeing. . This has the consequence that one does not secure knowledge, in some epistemologically problematic domain, by claiming that the facts in question are perceptible; for it is possible to see a state of affairs and yet not know that it obtains (this is indeed the situation in my bent sticks example). I therefore think, contrary to much traditional epistemology, that debates about the ‘directness’ or ‘indirectness’ of our perceptions do not have the relevance to the question whether we know that they have commonly been taken to have. Perceiving that p. is one thing; knowing that p. is quite another.

THE CONCEPT OF KNOWLEDGE

21

A tracking theory may, indeed, be more workable for perception than we have seen it to be for knowledge.35 I just said that knowledge requires more than perception; what I want to say now is that in another respect it requires less. Causation is pretty indisputably a necessary condition for perception, but it seems not to be a necessary condition for knowledge. We give every appearance of having mathematical and other a priori knowledge, but a causal theory is inapplicable to such knowledge; so causation cannot be a necessary condition for the applicability of the notion of knowledge per se.36 But we surely cannot make sense of the idea that mathematical facts or entities might be (literally) perceived.. The discrimination theory, by contrast, carries smoothly over to a priori knowledge, so that theory cannot plausibly be said to be somehow tacitly causal.37 Also, we cannot require even for empirical knowledge that the known fact be the cause of the belief that it obtains, because of the existence of inferential knowledge; for such knowledge the causal requirement must be weakened to mere ‘causal connection’.38 No such weakening would be possible for perception; what is necessary for perception is that the fact or object straightforwardly cause the experience—it is not enough, for example, that fact and experience have a common. cause. But I think that in the case of knowledge the weakening of the causal link can in principle go further, even to the point of obliterating it altogether. The discrimination theory explicitly requires only global reliability, so that nothing in that theory, as so far stated, excludes knowledge of empirical facts in a universe in which there is a pre-established harmony: that is, the theory seems to permit knowledge of facts that are totally causally isolated from one's beliefs.

35

Lewis's analysis of perception, in ‘Veridical Hallucination and Prosthetic Vision’, is in effect a tracking theory.

36

If Platonism in mathematics is epistemologically problematic, as argued by Paul Benacerraf in ‘Mathematical Truth’, Journal of Philosophy., 70 (1973) , it cannot be because the very concept. of knowledge requires a causal connection with the fact known. It must rather be that our means of access. to numbers is inexplicable—that is, we have nothing relating us to numbers as perception relates us to material objects.

37

We thus avoid what was an embarrassment for the causal theory. This still leaves a theoretical role for the notion of causation, though, namely that of distinguishing between a priori and a posteriori knowledge: see my ‘A Priori. and A Posteriori. Knowledge’, (1976; repr. as ch. 2 in this volume), for this sort of causal definition of the distinction.

38

As Goldman did in ‘A Causal Theory of Knowing’, thereby compromising the original conception.

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And I think that reflection upon such a set-up does not contradict the deliverances of the discrimination theory: if one's beliefs correlate with the facts in a sufficiently reliable way, then it seems intuitively that they may rate as knowledge. It is not just that knowledge does not generally. require perception of the fact known; we can even say that it never. (logically) requires perception of the fact known—God could give us the capacity to know without giving us the capacity to perceive. Knowledge is thus not an inherently. causal concept, whereas perception is; and this difference is of a piece with the global character of the former concept and the local character of the latter.39 Why should our concept of knowledge be global and not local after the manner of Nozick's analysis? What is the point. of having a concept of this global kind instead of a local concept ‘knowledge*’ defined as Nozick tries to define ‘knowledge’? The answer (or an. answer) can, I think, be found by looking at the use we make of the information that someone knows that p.—what this information equips us to do. If knowledge is global reliability within a range of propositions, then to be told that someone knows that p. is to be told that this person's beliefs with respect to that range are reliable indicators of the truth; so if we know that S. knows that p. we can infer (with good probability) a number. of truths about the world given information about S.'s other (relevant) beliefs, since the particular knowledge ascription encapsulates, so to speak, a whole range of true beliefs (or at least propensities to form true beliefs). Thus the concept of knowledge has a pragmatic role in our acquisition of a range of true beliefs on the basis of what another believes: if someone is certified as a knower, then you can rely upon that person's beliefs in forming your own beliefs about the world. But the tracking theory does not, because of its locality, confer upon ‘knowledge*’ a pragmatic role of this kind: since only S.'s disposition to adjust beliefs to the truth value of a single. proposition p. is constitutive of S.'s knowing* that p., we can infer from S.'s belief that p only. the truth of p., when given the information that S. knows* that p.. So to be told that someone tracks the truth in respect of p. is, in itself, no help to us if we are interested in relying upon that person's other. beliefs in forming ours—and this no matter how ‘relevant’ those beliefs may be to the belief that p.. If a community had in use only the concept expressed by ‘knowledge*’, they would not be in possession of a concept that was designed to enable them to place reliance upon each other's

39

The asymmetry between perception and knowledge can be brought out as follows. The problem of analysing knowledge is the problem of supplementing the two conditions: S. believes that p. , and it is a fact that p. ; the problem of analysing perception is the problem of supplementing the two conditions: S. has an experience as of its being the case that p. , and it is the case that p. . In the perception case, we need some kind of local connection between experience and fact, and it seems that a causal relation is what is required to make this connection. In the knowledge case, we need to introduce further facts and S. 's beliefs with respect to those facts, so that a local condition will not suffice; in addition no requirement of causal connection between belief and fact seems built into the concept of knowledge. Perception is, but knowledge is not, a kind of linkage. between representational state and fact represented.

THE CONCEPT OF KNOWLEDGE

23

beliefs across of range. of propositions; and given the utility of a concept that is global in the way I have outlined, we might expect them to introduce the concept expressed by ‘knowledge’. Someone who knows can be depended upon on other occasions; someone who merely knows* can be depended upon only in respect of a single belief. Of course, if someone does track a single truth p. we have some. sort of reason to believe that his belief-forming methods are generally. reliable, since this is likely to be the best explanation of why he tracks the truth that p.; but this assumption is strictly external. to the notion of knowledge*—it is not something that can be read into its very analysis. The concept of knowledge as we have it, on the other hand, is ideally suited to serving our interest in learning from other people. I have so far steadfastly refrained from defining. the notion of a truth- discriminating capacity, preferring to leave the notion in a relatively intuitive and unexplicated state. It may be complained that this is objectionable, not because (or just because) it is impermissible to take such notions as primitive, but rather because there is a danger that the analysis as stated is tacitly circular. The objection may take the form of a dilemma: either a truth-discriminating capacity is understood simply as a disposition to have true beliefs within a given range of propositions, or it is something more than this. If it is such a disposition then, arguably, it is insufficient for knowledge; but if we intend to employ a stronger notion, the suspicion is raised that a truth-discriminating capacity is to be defined precisely as a capacity whose exercise produces knowledge.. Is this line of criticism just? I think there is something to the point that the intended notion of a capacity to discriminate the truth is a stronger notion than that of a disposition to form true beliefs, and that the latter notion is not strictly. suffi-cient for knowledge. Consider this case: a certain child cannot do addition problems—lacking the ability to add, if the child were to get an addition problem right it would be by sheer accident. However, a benevolent and numerate deity intervenes in the child's efforts to add up numbers and directly produces true arithmetical beliefs involving addition in the child's mind; moreover, the deity does this in a regular and dependable way—you could reliably infer the answer to addition problems from the child's beliefs. This is a case where we would say the right answer just pops into the child's head, as a result of the deity's interventions, but the child lacks the capacity. to employ the method that in us leads to such true beliefs: in such circumstances I think there is some temptation to deny that the child really knows. what he or she thereby comes to believe. And what is lacked might well be described as a capacity to discriminate true from false arithmetical equations: the child does not have the ability to tell. which is the right answer to the problems that are set. Indeed, we can even say that there is a sense in which the child's beliefs are only accidentally true, since the child has no capacity. that explains why the beliefs are true. Now if this is correct, as I have some inclination to think it is, the notions of discriminating and telling are

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not (at any rate simply) definable in terms of the notion of a disposition to form true beliefs, so that the notion of reliability I am using is stronger than anything that can be delivered by those notions. And it is certainly a question whether the extra strength is got by hearing the words ‘discriminate’ and ‘tell’ in such a way as to presuppose the concept of knowledge: to have the capacity to discriminate truths from falsehoods, or to be able to tell whether arbitrary propositions from a certain range are true or false—these capacities might well be thought to be nothing other than capacities to acquire knowledge.. So there is at least a challenge to me to explain the concepts of discrimination and telling in a way which shows the non-circularity of the account I have proposed.40 My response to this accusation of circularity will, perhaps, be shocking to some—an abnegation of the responsibilities of the analyst of knowledge. For I do not think that the kind of circularity alleged is necessarily a bad thing; indeed, I am inclined to think that it is quite a good. thing. The reason I say this is that I am generally sceptical of attempts to provide analytical reductions. of philosophically central concepts—attempts to define fundamental concepts entirely in terms of concepts that are in no way contaminated with the concept to be defined. I am sceptical for two reasons: (a.) such attempts have seldom, if ever, met with success; and (b.) it would be surprising if they had, since it is implausible to explain the existence of the defined concept (or better, its lexicalization) merely as a convenient shorthand for the conditions that exhaustively define it—a much more plausible explanation, it seems to me, is that the concept is in some way primitive.41 But I do not think it follows that the whole enterprise of conceptual analysis is therefore misguided and should be abandoned; we should rather adopt a less

40

It may help to put this circularity objection in some perspective if I point out that a parallel kind of objection might be made against the condition of justification. For it may be claimed that when we come to explaining what it is for one belief to justify another, we will be forced back to the concept of knowledge: one belief justifies another just if the former belief is of a kind to confer the status of knowledge. upon the latter. And if we were compelled so to define justification, then it may seem that we are not entitled to employ the concept of justification in our analysis of knowledge. Now just suppose for the sake of argument that this point is correct—the concept of justification is tainted with the concept of knowledge—should we then conclude that it is ‘uniformative’ to be told that knowledge requires a justification condition? As I go on to argue in the text, such ‘circularity’ is not. a good reason for rejecting an analysis as trivial and unilluminating.

41

Surely if we were dealing with mere ellipsis, the philosophical analysis of concepts would be a lot easier than it is (think of ‘bachelor’ and ‘unmarried male’). I also think that the ‘paradox of analysis’—that any analysis of a concept must be either trivial or incorrect—is much less of a worry when analysis is construed in the more relaxed way I am recommending: instead of seeing ourselves as excavating the substructure of a concept, we can conceive our enterprise as that of linking the concept with others—finding its conceptual location. . (These remarks are, of course, highly impressionistic: the whole question of how conceptual analysis is to be understood is a deeply perplexing one, and I do not claim to have said anything very helpful on the question here.)

THE CONCEPT OF KNOWLEDGE

25

ambitious and more relaxed attitude to the enterprise of analysing concepts. We should be content with whatever illumination we can obtain by relating the given concept to others with which it has conceptual liaisons; and we can construct an illuminating conceptual map of a domain of concepts without claiming that the illuminating concepts contain no tincture of the concepts to be illuminated. In other words, conceptual analysis need not be construed as foundationalist.; it can be, as one says, ‘holistic’.42 Moreover, a theory of the concept of knowledge might derive its rationale less from a project of conceptual breakdown than from a desire to achieve some sort of conceptual unification of the various types of knowledge; and from this perspective, there is no objection even to employing the word ‘know’ itself in one's theory. Be this last point as it may, the real test of a piece of philosophical analysis is its capacity to throw light upon our employment of the concept to be analysed and to provide some sort of explanation of our intuitions: judged by this test I think that the discrimination theory has much to recommend it, notwithstanding a lingering suspicion of ‘circularity’. The notion of discrimination does tell us what kind of thing is ‘going on’ in an attribution of knowledge, and I think that it is unreasonable to insist that conceptual illumination can be got only. from conceptual reduction.43 In the next section, we shall see that the discrimination account can also help us to understand and assess sceptical arguments.

IV. Scepticism and Closure Dretske,44 Nozick,45 and others have argued that knowledge is not closed under known logical implication: it is possible for someone to know that p., to know that p. implies q., and not to know that q.. This non-closure has been supposed to offer a rebuttal of one form of scepticism, namely the argument that since I do not know I am not a brain in a vat I ipso facto. do not know that (e.g.) there is a table in front of me. I find these arguments against closure convincing and the application to scepticism attractive, but I want to dissociate the non-closure

42

The foundationalist picture of conceptual analysis, according to which we decompose complexes into simples until we reach conceptual bedrock, is I think prompted by the old Russellian doctrine of logical atomism: if you find that doctrine unpalatable, you should be suspicious of the foundationalist picture that goes with it.

43

We can compare this view of what an analysis of knowledge should aim at, or resign itself to, with Kripke's recommendations apropos the theory of reference: see Naming and Necessity. , 93–4. For both reference and knowledge, it can be enough to present the right picture. of the concepts.

44

Dretske, ‘Epistemic Operators’; see also, G. C. Stine, ‘Skepticism, Relevant Alternatives and Deductive Closure’, Philosophical Studies., 29 (1976) .

45

Nozick, Philosophical Explanations. , 204 f.

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thesis from a tracking analysis of knowledge: I prefer, for the reasons set out earlier, to rest non-closure upon the discrimination analysis of knowledge. So I shall in this section indicate how to do this; then I shall make some remarks about the relevance of the discrimination analysis to the question whether I know that I know that there is a table in front of me. The tracking analysis leads to non-closure by way of the following train of reasoning: for S. to know that there is a table in front of him he must be such that he would not believe this proposition if it were not true; and in normal conditions S. satisfies this condition, since the antecedent of the counterfactual takes us only to worlds in which, for example, there is a chair or a dog or some such there instead of a table, but otherwise things are much as they actually are. Similarly, for S. to know that he is not a brain in a vat he must be such that if he were he would not believe he was not; but it seems that S fails. to satisfy this condition, since if he were a brain in a vat he would. still believe that he was leading a normal life, since (by hypothesis) his evidence would remain unchanged under this counterfactual supposition. But now ‘there is a table in front of me’entails. ‘I am not a brain in a vat floating in empty space with no tables within a million miles of me’; so knowledge is not closed under known logical implication, given the assumption that S. knows this entailment to hold. Now those wedded to closure might want to object that this consequence of the tracking analysis is sufficient to show its untenability; so if we want to insist upon non-closure we need a more intuitive argument for it, one which does not rely upon already accepting the tracking analysis. I want to suggest that the natural intuitive argument introduces considerations of discrimination in a way that conforms with my earlier contentions about knowledge. The following seems an intuitively correct principle: one can know. that p. only if one can tell whether p.—I can know that (e.g.) it is raining outside only if I can tell whether it is raining outside. Let us apply this principle to my putative knowledge that there is a table in front of me and that I am not a brain in a vat. Can I tell whether there is a table there? I think that in the ordinary use of the phrase ‘tell whether’, what this requires is that I can distinguish there being a table from there being a chair or a dog or some such.46 So, granted that conditions are normal—there is a table there, my eyes are functioning normally, etc.—I can. tell whether there is a table there. But can I tell whether I am a brain in a vat? Again, assume conditions are normal: I am not a brain in a vat, there is a table there, my eyes are functioning normally, etc. Then what is required for telling whether I am a brain in a vat is that I be able to distinguish. my being a brain in a vat from my not being a brain in a vat. But it seems clear that I lack this ability—I cannot tell whether I am a

46

This claim is made more intuitively compelling by stressing ‘table’ within the contexts ‘tell whether’ and ‘know’: it is an interesting fact that these contexts accept such stress, whereas belief contexts do not (felicitously).

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brain in a vat because I have no means of distinguishing being in that condition from not being in that condition. I claim that this reasoning does no violence to our ordinary intuitive understanding of the key locutions it employs; accordingly, we have a pre-theoretical argument for non-closure. It seems to me, furthermore, that the discrimination account of knowledge is hovering in the background of this intuitive reasoning; for what is critical to the argument is the idea of a capacity to distinguish. one state of affairs from others. To know that there is a table there requires discriminating tables from chairs and dogs and empty corners; to know you are not a brain in a vat requires discriminating this state of affairs from envatment—and a person could have the former discriminative capacity without having the latter. What is crucial to this defence of non-closure is the assumption, or thesis, that possessing the capacity to tell whether there is a table there does not require that one be able to tell whether one is a brain in a vat: that is, the discriminative capacity required for the former piece of knowledge does not need to be powerful enough to rule out the possibility that one is a brain in a vat. And this assumption is tantamount to the idea that different propositions carry with them different requirements as to the discriminative capacities necessary for knowledge of them and that knowledge of logically weaker propositions can require greater discriminative power than knowledge of logically stronger propositions. Put less ponderously, it can be easier to know p. than q. though p. implies q. (and not vice versa) because q. requires more in the way of discrimination than p.. The possibility that I am a brain in a vat is, as one says, not relevant. to telling whether there is a table there.47 Now it seems to me that this point about relevance is a virtual datum about discrimination and knowledge: it is simply what the concept intuitively involves, and I cannot see how one could hope to prove it from independent epistemological principles. When we ask whether someone knows a particular proposition p., we just do tacitly presuppose a range of propositions R. somehow determined by p. whose truth values must be discriminable by the would-be knower. These relevant propositions are in some intuitive sense ‘at the same level’ as the given proposition—they are propositions ‘of the same kind’ as the given one: this is why ‘there is a dog there’ is relevant to knowing ‘there is a table there’ but ‘I am a brain in a vat’ is not.48 I have no precise criterion for this kind of relevance, but I think we do have an intuitive grasp upon how the

47

The discriminative capacities of animals bear out this non-closure thesis: a bee can tell flowers from leaves and birds and concrete, but it would be extremely odd to say that the bee can tell whether it is a brain in a vat—even though there being a flower in front of it implies that it is not a brain in a vat. So the bee knows there is a flower there, but does not know it is not a brain in a vat. (Choose another example if you jib at attributing knowledge to bees.)

48

It seems that propositions partition according to subject matter with respect to what determines the discrimination class. Suppose that someone is reliable about propositions concerning material objects but hopelessly unreliable when it comes to getting other people's mental states right. It does not seem that this unreliability about the latter class of propositions infects the person's knowledge claims regarding the former class. The difference of subject matter insulates the knowledge about material objects from the vagaries of the beliefs concerning other minds. So it is not only. sceptical possibilities that are irrelevant to one's ordinary knowledge claims about the material world.

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requirement operates, and hence some understanding of the rationale for non- closure: non-closure holds because of the different discriminative requirements imposed by propositions and (some of) their logical consequences.49 What non-closure shows is that it is invalid for the sceptic to infer from our not knowing that his sceptical hypothesis, for instance, that we are brains in vats, does not hold the conclusion that we do not know those ordinary things that we commonly take ourselves to know, for example, that there is a table there. Non-closure allows us to accept that the sceptic's initial contention has force without being committed to the alarming conclusion that our ordinary knowledge claims are false. This seems to me some advance against the sceptic, but it leaves an important question open: do we know. that our ordinary knowledge claims are true? We commonly think, not only that we may have knowledge that there is a table there, but also that we know that we do—so that we are in a position to assert. that we know that there is a table there. It therefore seems that if we are to be at all consoled by the antisceptical consequences of non-closure, we need to sustain our conviction that we know that we know. The question, however, is not straightforwardly answered. The discrimination theory tells us the form of what is required for such second-order knowledge: to know that you know you have to be able to discriminate the cases in which you have a (first-order) discriminative capacity from the cases in which you do not. Second-order knowledge thus consists in a capacity to tell whether you have a capacity. Now I think it is clear that first- order knowledge does not entail. second-order knowledge; for one could have a capacity to tell without being able to tell that one has such a capacity—having a capacity does not guarantee knowing one has it. So if we are to secure second- order knowledge it cannot be by claiming that it simply follows. from firstorder knowledge. Indeed, it might begin to seem that there is a yawning gap between knowing and knowing one knows when we recall the concession already made to scepticism; for (it might be thought) if I cannot tell whether I am a brain in a vat how can I hope to be able to tell whether I have the first-order discriminative capacity in which my knowing that there is a table in front of me consists? If I am. a brain in a vat—a possibility I am in no position to exclude—

49

Perhaps the non-closure of knowledge under known logical implication will seem less surprising if we observe that neither perception nor memory is closed under known logical implication. The reason is simply that known logical implication does not preserve what perception and memory require (chiefly the right kind of causal connection): so why should it be so. surprising that another epistemic concept imposes requirements that are similarly not preserved by known logical implication? Note also how perverse it would be to argue that we do not perceive what we think we do because we do not perceive the known logical consequences of what we (claim to) perceive!

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then I do not have the truth-discriminating capacity I think I have; so how can. I tell whether I have this capacity? I think there is force in this reasoning—it explains why we feel that agreeing with the sceptic about being a brain in a vat inhibits us from asserting. that we know that there is a table there—but I want to suggest that there is a possible intermediate position that has thus far been glossed over. Under what circumstances would we in fact allow that someone has learned that the (earlier) lacked a truthdiscriminating capacity? Well, if he became apprised of the fact that he had been given a hallucinogenic drug or that he had been the victim of a brain stimulation experiment: he would, in coming to know such things, come to know that he (earlier) lacked his usual capacity to discriminate the truth, so that any accidentally true beliefs he acquired in this condition did not count as knowledge. But, equally, I can (sometimes) tell that I have not. been subject to such disruptions of my usual discriminations of the truth: that is, in normal circumstances I am reliable in my beliefs about whether my (first-order) beliefs are the result of normal sensory functioning or of drugs, etc. So being under the influence of a drug is not. like the sceptic's vat hypothesis, since I can be credited with the general capacity to distinguish drug-induced beliefs from regular beliefs, whereas I could not distinguish vat- induced beliefs from regular beliefs in the circumstances envisaged by the sceptic.50 If this is so, then there is a foothold, however narrow, for knowing that one knows: I can know that I know that there is a table there because I have the general capacity to distinguish (e.g.) drug experiences from regular experiences. This is an intermediate discriminative capacity because it is not entailed by the capacity to tell whether there is a table there, and it does not entail the capacity to tell whether I am a brain in a vat. And so far as I can see, this intermediate capacity is stably. intermediate: there is no cogent reason to suppose that it must collapse into either of the two extremes—it really does require less. than the capacity needed to tell that the sceptic's radical hypotheses are false and more. than the capacity to tell that ordinary propositions about the external world are true. This seems to me a moderately happy result, since it allows us to persist in asserting that we know such ordinary truths while (regretfully, but honestly) conceding that we do not know we are not brains in vats. My only residual worry is that a clever sceptic might show how my incapacity to tell whether I am a brain in a vat somehow. undermines my

50

Of course I cannot while. under the influence of the drug distinguish which of my beliefs are true and which false—if I could I would not form the false beliefs; rather, I subsequently. distinguish the drug-influenced condition as one in which my truth-discriminating capacities have gone awry. But it does not follow that I do not, at the time of being under the influence of the drug, have the general capacity in question—on the contrary, I do. have the capacity to distinguish drug induced beliefs from regular ones, though I cannot then exercise. this capacity. It is otherwise with the possibility of envatment: as the situation is set up I can never. exercise a capacity to tell real life from envatment.

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claim to be able to tell whether I am now exercising a (first-order) truth- discriminating capacity; but as of this moment, I have not met such a clever sceptic. What I am confident of—and this has been the prime point of the foregoing remarks—is that the discrimination theory provides the right setting for answering the question.

V. Further Remarks I began this paper by stating a condition of adequacy upon any analysis of propositional knowledge—the condition, namely, that the analysis should in some way unify the various types of knowledge. This adequacy condition was prompted by the thought that the word ‘know’ cannot be regarded as ambiguous in its occurrence in the various knowledge-ascribing locutions—there must be some common thread running through the various members of the family of knowledge concepts. I am now in a position to say how I think this unification may be effected: the soughtfor common thread is precisely the notion of discrimination. The unification is obvious enough for knowledge-that and knowing one thing from another (what I earlier called distinguishing knowledge); for the burden of my thesis has been precisely that the former is a special case of the latter—it is knowing the true propositions from the false ones within a certain range. Knowledge-which (who, where, what, etc.) also falls smoothly into place; for it is very plausible to say that (e.g.) knowing who the burglar is (in the context, say, of an identity parade) is a matter of being able to distinguish. that person from other individuals relevant in the context; it is knowing the burglar from. the guiltless bank manager next to the burglar. Or again, for me to know whom you are speaking of in a conversational context is for me to be able to pick out, identify, or discriminate, from among the range of possible referents, the person spoken of. In much the same way a dog's knowing where its bone is buried consists in its being able to distinguish that place from other places where the bone is not buried. Thus, knowing-which essentially involves a discriminative capacity, where the objects of discrimination are (not propositions but) things. that are in some way the target of some kind of cognitive state: it is, as we say, knowing the identity. of some specified item. Knowing-how admittedly falls into place somewhat less smoothly, but I do not think this should be found so very disturbing, since it seems to me intuitively correct to see this type of knowledge as somewhat removed from the types so far considered. That is to say, knowing-how belongs less to the realm of the strictly cognitive than do the other types of knowledge, as is shown by its connections with the motor faculties. However, I think that something can and should be said to explain why the word ‘know’ gets used in the ascription of (paradigmatically at any rate) motor skills. First, the notion of capacity. is common to the application conditions of both knowledge-that and

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knowledge-how—a capacity (roughly) to believe the truth in the former case and a capacity successfully to do something in the latter case.51 Second, it seems not unduly strained to characterize knowing-how capacities as discriminative: if someone knows how to ride a bicycle, for example, that person (or the sensori-cognitive-motor system) has the capacity to select. which movements will lead to bicycle-riding success when sat in the saddle; the person (or the system) can distinguish. which movements will, and which will not, maintain balance and mobility on a bicycle. Or again, if I know how to reach my office I have the capacity to discriminate selectively from among the courses of action available to me which will get me to my office. As we might say, to know how to φ is (at least in part) to know φing movements from. non-φ-movements: knowing how to φ is knowing what you have to do. to φ. It therefore seems to me that the main varieties of knowledge can be adequately accommodated by the discrimination theory; and this conceptual unification should, I think, increase our confidence in the analysis of specifically propositional knowledge as a truth- discriminating capacity. Finally, some remarks about knowledge and belief. If the root notion of knowledge is the notion of a discriminative capacity, then it will not be surprising if knowledge is logically independent of belief. That knowledge does not imply belief seems plain for non.-propositional knowledge, since belief is a propositional attitude, and these other types of knowledge are not ascribed by completing ‘know’ with a that-clause; if they were to involve belief at all, it would have to be indirectly. It seems to me, though, that we are prepared to make literal ascriptions of knowing-how, knowingwhich, and knowing one thing from another to creatures whose status as believers we are (rightly) reluctant to acknowledge: we say without strain of various species of animal that they have such non-propositional knowledge, though an element of the metaphoric attaches to any ascriptions of belief to them.52 The reason for this difference is, I suggest, this: possessing authentic beliefs presupposes the capacity to reason, to weigh evidence, draw inferences, and so on; but the concept of knowledge per se requires only a capacity to discriminate, to respond differentially—and this sort of capacity is possible in the absence of a capacity to reason.

51

A caveat is needed here. I do not in fact believe that knowing how to φ entails. the ability to φ: a person may know how to swim or to get to the office but be unable to do these things because of motor failures (e.g. paralysis). Knowing how to φ is indeed an activity-involving concept—it concerns what one has to do. to φ—but it is a further accomplishment to be able to carry out what one knows how to do. If one has appropriate general motor capacities, then knowing how to φ will typically. confer the ability to φ upon one—but these general capacities may be lacking. This is not to say that knowing-how is a species of propositional knowledge, concerning actions and goals; and I do not think that knowing what to do to φ is to be conceived as a kind of knowing-that either—as I do not think that knowing-which is a species of knowing-that.

52

Thus birds (for example) know how to build nests, know predators from prey, and know which other bird is their mate; but I would be uncomfortable ascribing beliefs to birds.

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Knowledge is thus a subrational. achievement, whereas beliefs are essentially cognitive states that are formed and interact according to the dictates of rationality. In this. respect, knowledge belongs with perception (and also memory), for perception is also possible in the absence of belief and reasoning: many animals that can be said to see, hear, smell, etc., what is going on around them could not literally be credited with beliefs. Such animals can, it is true, be credited with informational states that are, if you like, analogous. to genuine belief; but processing information about the environment is not the same thing as reasoning about it. So both perception and knowledge are, in a clear sense, more primitive than belief; they require less cognitive sophistication than belief. (Knowledge and perception pre-date belief in evolutionary history.) But what of propositional. knowledge: does not it imply belief? The foregoing considerations encourage me to doubt that it does: what is required by knowledge-that is some. sort propositional attitude, but we need an argument to persuade us that this attitude must be belief. Why not require only something like registering and retaining the information that p., where these ‘attitudes’ are conceived as subrational cognitive states?53 When we say that the mouse knows that the cat is behind the door, we do not imply that it believes. that the cat is there; we imply only that the mouse's senses have functioned to register the information that the cat is there. This seems to me an intuitively plausible account of our practice with such ascriptions, and it comports with the analysis of knowledge as a discriminative capacity. If this is correct, then propositional knowledge is also more primitive than belief: it is not, as the tradition has supposed, an especially rarefied form of belief, calling for some higher cognitive faculty than mere belief; rather, it is a condition that even dumb, non-rational animals can aspire to. These reflections lead one also to doubt the rationalistic conception of (propositional) knowledge as inextricably associated with the having of reasons or justification for belief. For if knowledge does not require belief, then it does not require justified. belief. It may be replied that we can separate out the requirement of justification from the belief requirement; we can hold that justification is itself more primitive than belief. My response to this is that if we are really speaking of justification—of the having of reasons.—then we cannot

53

See Jonathan Bennett, Linguistic Behaviour. (Cambridge, 1976), 46 f., for the notion of registration. Bernard Williams, in ‘Deciding to Believe’, in Problems of the Self. (Cambridge, 1973), 144 f., has some remarks about knowledge and belief that are very much in the spirit of the position I am advocating. Note that my reasons for disputing the necessity of a belief condition are not the same as those sometimes given, e.g. by C. Radford in ‘Knowledge—By Examples’, Analysis., 27 (1996–7) , in which the knower is reluctant to claim that he knows or even is (allegedly) prepared to dissent from the known proposition. My position is more radical: it is that you do not need to be a believer at all to be a knower (though you need some cognitive state that is the analogue. of belief). (Perhaps this notion of subdoxastic propositional knowledge is what is wanted to explain the Chomskyan claim that we have unconscious knowledge of the grammatical rules of our language?)

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licitly make this separation: to have genuine reasons. is precisely to have reasons for belief.. I think this inseparability is again borne out in our descriptions of the cognitive life of (subrational) animals: as we do not readily ascribe beliefs to (certain) animals, so we do not (a fortiori) speak of them as having justifications. Such animals may of course be in receipt of information that provides good grounds for supposing a state of affairs to obtain; but it does not follow that they have reasons. corresponding to this information. It has been usual for analysts of (propositional) knowledge to inquire what needs to be added. to truth, belief, and justification to arrive at knowledge; but it seems to me that there are plausible considerations that recommend subtracting. the second two conditions from the analysis. The independence of the concept of knowledge from that of justified belief also bears upon the way in which scepticism has traditionally been supposed to arise for our claims to knowledge. Sceptics have characteristically argued that we do not know what we think we do because our justification for the beliefs we hold is in some way inadequate: thus, for example, none of our ordinary beliefs concerning the external world is really justified because our evidence is (logically) compatible with some other hypothesis. But we are now in a position to protest that this kind of argument presupposes a mistaken conception of knowledge: for if knowledge requires not justified belief but a discriminative capacity, then it is strictly irrelevant to object to a claim to knowledge on the ground that the underlying beliefs are unjustified; what the sceptic has rather to show is that such a discriminative capacity is actually lacking. This means that it is consistent for us to agree with a sceptic that no belief is ever justified and at the same time maintain that we nevertheless have knowledge. I think this point is best appreciated by considering again cases of subrational animal knowledge. Suppose we say of a mouse that it knows that there is a cat behind the door: is it appropriate to question this knowledge ascription on the ground that the mouse's beliefs are not adequately justified because the reasons it has for its belief are logically compatible with some other hypothesis, as that it is being deceived by an evil demon? Certainly the mouse cannot itself raise such epistemological doubts since (as we are supposing) it is not a reasoning creature capable of weighing evidence and so forth. Where there is. no (possibility of) justification, it makes no sense to ask whether the justification is adequate; so scepticism of this. kind simply gets no purchase upon the knowledge of subrational creatures. It seems odd to ask whether the mouse knows that it is not a brain in a vat precisely because this question presupposes a structure of justification whose credentials are being called into question. But what of those creatures, such as ourselves, who do have justified beliefs: is their. knowledge imperilled by scepticism about justification? Here two positions offer themselves. The first is that such scepticism is misplaced even for this type of knower since our claims to knowledge rest only upon the existence of appropriate truth-discriminating capacities and not upon whether we can

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justify what we believe. The second position is that where knowledge gets associated with justified belief, the question of the adequacy of the justification becomes. relevant to the possession of knowledge—the fate of knowledge becomes intertwined with the fate of justified belief. This latter position is that justification becomes, in effect, one's method of discriminating the truth: rationally weighing evidence is the means. by which one attempts to make one's beliefs sensitive to the truth. It seems to me that this second position has much to be said for it, so that our. knowledge claims do (or can) come to rest upon the adequacy of our reasons for belief, and hence come under threat from justification scepticism, whereas the mouse's knowledge is free of such doubts. This position produces a somewhat ironic result: that when knowledge is made to rest upon full-blooded justifying reasons it comes to be more. vulnerable to sceptical attack than when it is independent of reasons and justification. Thus, if we suppose a child to move from the subrational to the rational while possessing knowledge during both phases, we have to say that justification scepticism gets a purchase only in the rational phase; and so we have the prospect that what was once knowledge ceases to be, because it comes to rest upon an inadequate foundation. The irony is that the enterprise of foundationalism, construed as an answer to scepticism, so far from securing knowledge, renders it more assailable by the sceptic, since where there exists an evidential foundation the question of its shakiness becomes a live issue. One of the penalties of acquiring rationality may be that it becomes harder to know things.54

Postscript to ‘The Concept of Knowledge’ The basic idea of this paper is that a belief counts as knowledge when and only when it is produced by a method that is capable of yielding true beliefs in a range of relevant cases. This is a version of the well-known ‘reliabilist’ account of knowledge; any originality it has lies more in the details than in the general conception. I still think the paper makes sound critical points against Nozickstyle counterfactual analyses of knowledge, and I still think the global discrimination account I defend is on the right lines. The part of the paper that strikes me now as deserving special emphasis concerns the relations between belief, justification, and knowledge. My suggestion was that knowledge, so far from being a refinement of belief—a higher form of it—is more primitive than belief, psychologically speaking. So long as

54

These remarks about knowledge, justification, and scepticism are, I realize, sketchy and allusive; I am just hinting at a line of thought that seems to me worth pursuing.

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some internal representational state exhibits the kind of global truth-tracking I propose it counts as knowledge, even though it may not qualify as a genuine belief-state. There are three areas in which this idea commends itself. First, it is the natural way to handle the cognitive states of animals that lack beliefs proper, perhaps because they lack rationality proper. We apply the word ‘know’ generously across the animal world, while we are stingier with ‘believes’: that is because animals are usually at least informational truth-discriminators, while often not being true believers. Second, as I suggested in note 53, a notion of subdoxastic knowledge seems appropriate for handling Chomksyan claims about knowledge of syntax. It seems implausible to attribute unconscious beliefs. about the intricacies of syntax to normal speakers (those who have not studied linguistics at MIT); yet there is an inclination to say that syntactic rules are nevertheless known (unconsciously) by the speaker. If we think of linguistic competence as a structured capacity to discriminate grammatical from ungrammatical strings on the basis of an internal representation of syntactic rules, then we can allow that the speaker knows. the rules in question—the speaker is globally reliable with respect to truths about grammaticality. Third, the notion of belief is bound up with the notion of rationality, and hence with scepticism about rationality. But if some knowledge is independent of belief and the rational method of belief formation, then sceptical doubts about the rational basis of belief become beside the point. The more mindless a knower's method of truth discrimination is the less open to complaints about insuffi-ciency of rational warrant (what you do not attempt you cannot be criticized for failing to achieve). If a knowledge attribution is not a claim about the rationality of the knower, then the knower's alleged ir.rationality can hardly undermine the attribution. I hate to say it, but in one respect at least dumber can be wiser; better, a shaky foundation is worse than no foundation at all when it comes to knowing things. When an eagle is said to know that there is a mouse on the ground it makes no sense to ask whether its rational faculties are generating an adequate justification for such a belief; rather, the eagle possesses an internal state that is wired to be responsive to the facts of mouse distribution. This is a Wittgensteinian point: what lacks reasons can be more epistemically stable than what relies upon reasons for its epistemic credentials. A comment on the tortuous grammar of some of the sentences in the paper: the original copy-editor, without my permission, zealously recast all occurrences of ‘he’ into gender-neutral grammar, for the usual reasons, thus complicating already complicated syntax. I would have preferred it if he or she had just substituted ‘she’ for ‘he’ throughout (though I can't say I think any such change was really necessary). In any case, the politically correct inelegance of some of the sentences is none of my doing.

2 A Priori and A Posteriori Knowledge

55

The paper falls naturally into two parts. My intention in the first part is to propose an extensionally adequate and conceptually illuminating criterion (necessary and sufficient condition) for distinguishing a priori from a posteriori knowledge. In the second part I try to articulate some interrelations between this epistemic distinction and the (by tradition) collateral concepts of metaphysical modality, viz. necessity and contingency. The parts are connected inasmuch as the criterion proposed in the first is trained upon issues raised in the second.

I Before I give my account of the difference between a priori and a posteriori knowledge., something had better be said about the distinction in its application to statements.. It is important to realize that, because the distinction is epistemic in character, what it originally partitions are propositional attitudes. The properties of apriority and aposteriority hold of a statement, therefore, only according as that statement comes to be known in this way or that. So if we are to classify statements as a priori or a posteriori, as the case may be, it will be because the propositional attitudes consisting in a recognition of their truth meet certain epistemic conditions. The following pair of definitions make this dependence explicit: (1) It is a priori (true) that p. iff ◊ (∃ x.) (x. knows that p. a priori), and (2) It is a posteriori (true) that p. iff □ (∀ x.) (x. knows that p. → x. knows that p. a posteriori). Some comments on these definitions. The reason (1) stipulates that an a priori statement is a statement know able. a priori is that it seems clear that one can know an a priori truth a posteriori. A statement might be an instance of a

55

I was greatly helped in writing this paper by W. D. Hart, Jennifer Hornsby, Marie McGinn, and Christopher Peacocke.

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derivable schema of first-order predicate logic, yet not recognized as such, but known to be true on ordinary empirical grounds; or we might come to know some mathematical truth on the basis of the outpourings of a reliable calculating device, or again because of the testimony of an authoritative mathematician.56 Notice also that the possibility expressed in (1) has to be pretty liberal if it is to yield the intended results. For there might be some number-theoretic conjecture whose proof, though finite, required for its execution more time than a man's life permits, more even than is available to generations of men—it might indeed transcend the capacities of human beings simpliciter.. So the scope of ‘◊’ has to be broader than that of ‘∃ x.’, and the quantifier should range over (possible) beings perhaps transcending our powers of ratiocination—or else there is the chance that not all mathematical truths will be reckoned a priori by (1). Similar remarks go, mutatis mutandis., for (2). The necessitation of the conditional is required, not only to ensure exclusiveness of the partition of statements, but also to capture the idea that a posteriori statements are such as only. to be knowable a posteriori—and not just must be known, if known at all, by us. a posteriori, but by any being capable of knowledge. It seems that if we are exclusively and exhaustively to attribute apriority and aposteriority to statements, such extreme modal conditions are going to have to be countenanced. My plan now is to state the criterion I have to offer, to explain it, and then to show how it handles specimen cases of a priori and a posteriori knowledge. The conditions are as follows: (3) x. knows that p. a posteriori iff

and

(i) x. knows that p. & (ii) (∃ s.) (s. is x.'s ground or reason for believing that p. & (iii) the subject matter of s. causes x. to believe that p.),

(4) x. knows that p. a priori iff (i) x. knows that p. & (ii) (∃ s.) (s. is x.'s ground or reason for believing that p. & (iii) it is not. the case that the subject matter of s. causes x. to believe that p.). First, some elucidatory comments on what (3) and (4) are meant to say, then some remarks by way of motivation for them. (a.) I do not intend (3) and (4) to commit me to the thesis that all knowledge is inferential. In cases where the knowledge that p. is non-inferential, if such there be, the variable ‘s.’ should be instantiated by the statement that p. itself.

56

Cf. S. Kripke, ‘Naming and Necessity’, in D. Davidson and G. Harman (eds.), Semantics of Natural Language. (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1972), 261.

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Then the causation will go immediately from the subject matter of the statement that p. to the corresponding knowledge-ranking belief that p.. When the knowledge is inferential, on the other hand, the causal path will take a detour through a grounding belief in the truth of s., ultimately causing the belief that p. via an inference from the reason-giving belief in s.. (b.) By the ‘subject matter’ of a statement I mean the entities the statement is about—denotations of singular terms, values of variables, and whatever else you think statements are about. (I take the liberty of letting feature-placing sentences possess a subject matter in this sense.) Also my talk of entities causing beliefs is to be understood as elliptical: it is rather the events in which the entities comprising the subject matter participate that are causally responsible, according to some correct causal explanation, for the belief in question. (c.) I assume for the sake of simplicity that x.'s grounds for knowledge are unmixed. It seems appropriate where a person has both a priori and a posteriori grounds to let aposteriority be dominant with respect to apriority; replacing the existential by a universal quantifier in (4) seems to register this adequately enough. But I shall try to ignore this complication from now on. Definitions (3) and (4) naturally prompt two queries: How do they relate to the traditional Kantian characterization of the distinction?57 and: How do they relate to the causal theory of knowledge (CTK)?58 I shall address myself to these queries in turn. Apart from extensional inadequacy in the Kantian criterion (which will emerge), and its reliance on a vague and unanalysed notion of ‘experience’, I prefer a causal condition partially out of a desire to see empiricism naturalized.59 Fundamental to that project, as I conceive it, is a causal theory of perception (CTP):60 for empirical knowledge is, according to classical empiricism, ultimately founded on and traceable to perception of the external world. So, if CTP is conceptually necessary, and all a posteriori knowledge is ultimately and essentially justified perceptually, then the expectation is that a causal component will enter the analysis of what it is for a piece of knowledge to be a posteriori. Naturalized empiricism, now gone conceptual, then says that you cannot know about the external empirical world without causal interaction with it—for there is no perceiving the spatio-temporal world of particulars without causal commerce with it, and there is no knowing about it without

57

Thus Kant, ‘we shall understand by a priori knowledge, not knowledge independent of this or that experience, but knowledge absolutely independent of all experience. Opposed to it is empirical knowledge, which is knowledge possible only a posteriori. , that is, through experience.’ Critique of Pure Reason. , B3.

58

See A. Goldman, ‘A Causal Theory of Knowing’, Journal of Philosophy. (22 June 1967).

59

Cf. Quine, ‘Epistemology Naturalised’, in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. (Columbia University Press, 1969).

60

See H. P. Grice, ‘The Causal Theory of Perception’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society., suppl. vol. 35 (1961). I see no internal evidence that Grice views CTP in this light.

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perceiving it. In part, the causal requirement spells out what is involved in having experiences of, or beliefs about, the world of particulars. My answer to the second query is not unconnected with my answer to the first, because CTP may be regarded as CTK's ancestor and model. Just as Gettier problems61 for perceptual knowledge defined as true justified belief seemed soluble by introducing a causal clause into the analysis of perceptual knowledge, so a comparable tactic has recommended itself more generally. Thus it is required, in order that a man know that p., that his belief that p. be caused by the fact that p., or by some fact ‘suitably related’ to the fact that p.. Now I want to insist that in cases of a priori knowledge such a causal condition is unsatisfied: it won't in general be the case that the subject matter of what you know a priori (or that of some statement ‘suitably related’ to what you know) causes you to know that thing (vide infra.). But then if the concept of knowledge does not always require for its application the satisfaction of such a causal condition, it is hard to see how causality could be constitutively embedded in that concept. It is hard to see, that is, how causality could figure in its analysis.. Since the verb ‘to know’ seems univocal, and since CTK seem inapplicable to a priori knowledge, I think that a causal condition cannot be part of the concept of knowledge. I suggest, alternatively, that causality be expelled from the analysis of knowledge as such, and relocated, where naturalized empiricism indicates, in the account of what it takes for a given piece of knowledge to be a posteriori. If this advice is taken, the Gettier problems will have to be got round in some other way; but I think that CTK failed to fulfil that hope anyhow. The acid test of the criterion, however, is its ability to handle cases—its ability appropriately to tag knowledge as a priori or a posteriori. It is easy to appreciate its operation in respect of a posteriori knowledge, because there one's ground is ultimately perceptual: the scattering of birds causes you, via the belief that birds have scattered, to infer, with the help of a number of other beliefs, that there is a cat in the vicinity; the deaths of individual men (inter alia.) may cause you to form the belief that all men are mortal; and so on. Less trivial perhaps are examples of a posteriori knowledge of a priori truths, for in such cases the failure of an epistemic condition on the subject matter of what is known to yield a criterion for apriority is most apparent; it is rather how we come to have our reasons. that is decisive.62 Thus suppose you come to know that the lines bisecting the interior angles of an equilateral triangle bisect the sides opposite by drawing many lines and noticing that they regularly display that

61

See G. Harman, Thought. (Princeton University Press, 1973), 174 ff. for a discussion of such examples. He does not propose a causal condition to handle these cases.

62

Neither can it be sufficient for apriority that the subject matters of the ground and the known proposition be, in some intuitive sense, disjoint. ; for this condition is met in cases of a posteriori knowledge of a priori truths.

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geometrical property. Then, apparently, it is your causal contact, via perception, with those marks that is responsible (inter alia.) for your inductively forming the belief in question. (The computer and testimony cases are parallel.) The subject matter of your ground comprises particulars which are causally responsible, along with other things, for your coming to know. A priori knowledge is the more challenging of the pair. I shall consider briefly: knowledge of logic, knowledge of mathematics, and knowledge of analytic truths. Logic, it will be agreed, is concerned with deducibility relations among sentences—with the ‘laws of truth’, as Frege says.63 Our knowledge of logic is therefore concerned with such relations. That a set of (interpreted) sentences Γ implies a sentence A., that is, that the corresponding conditional is valid, can be known without any knowledge of the properties of the objects mentioned by Γ and A., since the implication holds no matter how the non-logical constants in those sentences are (re)interpreted. To know that a logically valid sentence is true, therefore, one needs no information about the specific properties of the entities making up the sentence's subject matter, information one might acquire only by a posteriori inspection of those entities; knowledge of logical form is all that is required. Such knowledge, that is, that a sentence is logically true, is either primitive, as with the axioms, or derived, as with the theorems. But a logical proof (including one from the null set of axioms) does not mention entities that cause one's belief that the last line in the proof is valid, for the steps in a proof mention no entities at all. Logic is a purely deductive science, neutral as to topic. Thus a truth-table test for tautology is not the sort of ground whose subject matter, if it has a subject matter at all, is causally efficacious in producing knowledge of what is thereby proven. Even if stating the laws of logic requires semantic ascent,64 so that sentence schemata become the subject matter of logic, such entities cannot be said to cause one's logical knowledge. All this is evident from the fact, and I take it to be a fact, that one does not verify logical laws by perception. So logic is an a priori science by (4) and (1). Mathematics cannot be treated so straightforwardly, because of the multiplicity of views as to what counts as a mathematical justification and what entities mathematics must be construed to speak of;65 so the best I can do (here) is to assert conditionals. If strict logicism were correct, then the apriority of mathematics would fall out of the apriority of logic, as recently established, since the epistemology of mathematics would be that of logic, immensely prolongated. On the other hand, if mathematical discourse enjoys a distinctive subject matter—so that, for example, arithmetical sentences speak of numbers, understood as abstract entities—then mathematical knowledge will come out a priori again. For, if mathematical grounds, for example, instances of mathematical

63

In ‘The Thought’, in Strawson (ed.), Philosophical Logic. (Oxford University Press, 1967).

64

See Quine, Philosophy of Logic. (Prentice-Hall, 1970), 10 ff.

65

See M. Steiner, Mathematical Knowledge. (Cornell University Press, 1975).

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induction, mention entities which are causally inert, as abstract objects surely are, then the subject matter of a mathematical ground will not cause the knowledge had by a mathematician when such a ground is his reason for believing what he knows. If mathematics is reducible to logic and set theory, the same consequence is yielded, since logic is a priori, and sets are abstract objects incapable, like numbers, of causal relations. On any view according to which the subject matter of mathematical discourse, and of mathematical grounds, consists of abstract entities—on any Platonistic view, that is—(4) confers apriority upon mathematics and knowledge thereof.66 It is worth pausing to note that if mathematical knowledge can be acquired by so-called mathematical intuition,67 where this epistemic relation is characterized in terms of quasi-perceptual acquaintance, then the Kantian independence-ofexperience criterion, read literally, judges knowledge this way acquired to be a posteriori; for the kind of acquaintance involved in mathematical intuition is presented as a species of experience. Presumably, the availability of such a route to mathematical knowledge should not make knowledge so acquired a posteriori. The criterion I propose respects this intuition, because it is capable, in virtue of the causal condition, of distinguishing such intellectual perception from the common or garden variety. Maybe one can come to know mathematical truths by ‘perceiving relations between universals’, but universals cannot cause such perception, on account of their abstractness. So, if there is such a route to knowledge, (3) and (4) seem to handle it better, from an extensional point of view, than the traditional characterization. We must not neglect to mention those views according to which mathematical knowledge is a posteriori, as with Mill68 and Quine.69 Even if the ontology of mathematics is Platonistic, one's reasons for accepting a mathematical statement as true may be entirely empirical; for a mathematical statement may be accepted because of its relationship to perceptual reports, that is, observation statements. On such a view, the reason we accept and come to know

66

Since I am not proposing a causal condition as part of the analysis of knowledge, I can turn CTK's troubles over mathematical knowledge to my own advantage in suggesting a differentia. . (I do not pretend that this solves the problem of how. we get to know the properties of abstract objects. If anything, the question how a priori knowledge is possible is yet more acute on my criterion; the problem of reconciling Platonism in mathematics with a plausible epistemology is, I think, a special case of this general question.)

67

See Russell, Problems of Philosophy. (1912) , ch. 10; Gödel, ‘What is Cantor's Continuum Problem?’, in Benacerraf and Putnam (eds.), Philosophy of Mathematics. (Cambridge University Press, 1983), 271; and Steiner, Mathematical Knowledge. , 130 ff. Note that Russell's characterization of a priori knowledge as that which ‘deals exclusively with the relations of universals’ (p. 59), conforms closely to my own, though he defines the concept by reference to a special sort of subject matter rather than in terms of what epistemic consequences fall out of having such a subject matter.

68

J. S. Mill, A System of Logic. , chs. V and VI of book ii.

69

See e.g. Philosophy of Logic. , 98 ff. Of course, the views of Mill and Quine on this matter are not to be identified.

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mathematical statements is that there exists a complex and remote conformability relation between them and the observation statements which alone form the empirical content of any theory: for the utility of mathematics, like that of any other science, consists in its power to predict the course of experience. Clearly, if mathematical knowledge is thus verified and grounded, it is a posteriori; and it is a posteriori by (3) too, since observation statements speak of entities whose causal operation on our senses disposes us to hold them true. In unfathomable holistic ways we come, by inference, to know classical mathematics, with its abstract subject matter: but we are prompted to do so a posteriori. (Again, what is decisive in fixing the epistemic status of a piece of knowledge are the properties of one's reasons. for belief.) I have not tried to adjudicate between these various doctrines on how we come to know mathematics, only to argue that the criterion proposed delivers the right verdicts with respect to the a priori/a posteriori distinction given each doctrine as input. Dummett70 calls ‘compelling’ the following principle: ‘if someone knows the senses of two words, and the two words have the same sense, he must know that they have the same sense’. When a sentence is formed from two synonymous expressions in such a way as to be analytically true, it follows that a person who understands the sentence knows that it is, since reference cannot diverge where sense does not. Thus one's knowledge that oculists are eye-doctors is supervenient upon one's grasp of the senses of the contained general terms; it does not require any investigation of the objects in the extensions of those terms. However, instead of supposing knowledge of synonymies to follow inevitably from knowledge of the senses of each of the synonymous expressions, I would prefer to formulate Dummett's principle like this: that a person apprised of the senses of two synonymous words is thereby in a position to infer a priori that they have the same sense, and hence to infer a priori that the corresponding analytic sentence expresses a truth71—for there seems no clear limit to a person's inability to draw out the consequences of what he knows. But my main purpose is not to question Dummett's formulation of his principle; it is rather to show how from it and my test for apriority the a priori knowability of analytic truths follows. One's sole and sufficient ground for such knowledge seems to be knowledge of synonymies (and related semantic knowledge). Now whether synonymy is construed as an equivalence relation between expressions, or as the identity relation between ‘entified’ senses, knowledge inferred from such a basis comes out a priori by (4), since the subject matter of such a ground does not cause the knowledge in question. To put it Frege's way, the

70

In Frege: Philosophy of Language. (Duckworth, 1973), 95.

71

This interpretation of the principle seems closer to Frege's intentions in ‘On Sense and Reference’, where he speaks of identity statements whose truth ‘cannot always be established a priori. ’, p. 56 of Geach and Black (eds.), Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege. (Basil Blackwell, 1966).

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mode of presentation associated with an expression as its sense is not the sort of thing to enter into causal relations. Lastly, what should we say of knowledge of one's own mental states? Here the Kantian criterion seems to run into trouble. For such knowledge—for example, that one intends to do such-and-such, that one has a certain belief, that one is in pain—does not seem either acquired or justified by experience or observation, still less by perception. Accordingly, it will get tagged a priori by the traditional test. But it is desirable, both intuitively and on account of its contingency, that it be rated a posteriori. And so it is by (3), since, as I should maintain on independent grounds, propositional attitudes directed on to one's own mental states are caused by those very states (this is not to say they are inferred from them). That is, one's knowledge that one is in mental state ψ is caused by the subject matter of the knowledge-ranking belief, viz. state ψ. If this is right, (3) and (4) are more adequate extensionally than the traditional characterization, the reason being that they are more adequate in.tensionally.

II I turn now to the difficult but important question how apriority and aposteriority, on the one hand, and necessity and contingency, on the other, are connected—and here I am yet more diffident than hitherto. We are to enquire whether, and if so why, the following conditionals are valid or necessary: (5) □ p. → it is a priori that p., and (6) It is a priori that p. →□ p.. Or, contraposing, whether a truth's being a posteriori implies its contingency, and whether its contingency implies its aposteriority, respectively. How do the epistemic and metaphysical distinctions connect up, conceptually speaking? As to (5) I am persuaded, with Kripke,72 that it is invalid: some of its substitution-instances are false. Standard cases of de re. necessity—necessity of identity, of constitution, of kind, of origin, etc.—seem counter-examples to it; none of these necessities could be known a priori. What I am anxious to insist, however, is that we must beware of an ambiguity in attributing a posteriori necessity to statements. The ambiguity invites confusion between two quite distinct theses: one true, the other false. To claim we have a posteriori knowledge of essence might be to claim either. that there are necessary truths whose truth. we know a posteriori (there being no other way), or. that there are

72

‘Naming and Necessity’, passim. .

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necessary truths whose necessity. we know a posteriori.73 The latter thesis, but not the former, collides with a famous dictum of Kant's: ‘Experience teaches us that a thing is so and so, but not that it cannot be otherwise.’74 The ambiguity can be removed by attending to matters of scope: the true statement ‘we can know a posteriori of a necessary truth that it is true’ is different from and does not imply the (I think) false statement ‘we can know a posteriori of a necessary truth that it is a necessary. truth’. The intended reading is got by bringing the attribution of necessity (or contingency for that matter) out from under the scope of the epistemic operator. How, if not by perception, do we come by our knowledge of modality? The phenomenology of acquiring modal knowledge seems to be something like this: we assess a statement's modal status by constructing or surveying possible worlds; if the result is that the statement is true at all worlds it is presumed necessary, if at some only then contingent. The exercise consists in taking thought, perhaps primarily imaginative thought, about how things might have been. The upshot of such ratiocination is an ascription of this or that modality to the statement in question; and it seems that a person could not come to have such knowledge unless he (or someone he heard it from) had conducted this kind of Gedankenexperiment.. (Perception tells us what is the case; reason what could be.) If this is roughly how we acquire and justify our modal knowledge, it seems a priori by (4) and by the Kantian criterion. For one's knowledge of possible worlds, of how things might be, is not derived from perception of, or causal contact with, those possibilia.. The possibilities to which imagination relates us do not cause the beliefs thus formed; for only what is actual can cause anything. So modal knowledge as such. is a priori, though we may have a posteriori knowledge of necessary truths. The converse implication, (6), seems in contrast, and as Kripke acknowledges,75 to carry a lot of intuitive weight. But what account might we give of the intuition? Here is one way of articulating, if not quite proving the soundness of, the thought behind (6). Suppose it knowable a priori that p.. Now since the knowledge that p. is grounded upon reasons one has independently of observation of (causal contact with) the world, one's evidential state is not contingent upon the vicissitudes of the world. And if one's evidential state does not thus depend upon the ways of the actual world, then one could be, in Kripke's phrase,76 in qualitatively the same epistemic situation in any world: a priori evidence is constant across worlds, because available without observation of the specific properties of each world. Now if, as seems plausible, a priori grounds,

73

The following remarks from Kripke seem to me to encourage the confusion: ‘Whether science can discover empirically that certain properties are necessary. of cows, or of tigers, is another question, which I answer affirmatively’ (pp. 322–3), and ‘whatever necessity it [“gold is a yellow metal”] has is established by scientific investigation’ (p. 353), loc. cit.

74

Critique of Pure Reason. , B3.

75

At p. 347, loc. cit.

76

Loc. cit. 308.

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unlike a posteriori grounds, entail. what they ground—that is, provide conclusive. reasons for belief—then one could not be in possession of the very same evidence in a counterfactual situation and yet the statement thus evidentially supported be false. Putting these two thoughts together—independence of evidential state and epistemic necessity of a priori evidence—we derive the conclusion that what is known a priori is true in all worlds, which is to say it is necessary. Contraposition of (6) enables us to conclude also that what is contingent can only be known a posteriori. (Notice that a posteriori evidence exhibits neither of the properties I have attributed to a priori evidence.) I anticipate at least two lines of objection to this argument. The first, which at least shows its non-triviality, is that there seem to be cases of epistemically contingent a priori knowledge, that is, cases in which a person seems entitled to claim to know some proposition a priori though his justification does not necessarily preclude its falsehood. I have in mind probabilistic or quasi- inductive mathematical arguments which fall short of proof, for example, Euler's solution to Bernoulli's problem of the sum of the reciprocals of the squares.77 I do not know how to answer this objection. The second objection, to which I think I do have an answer, is that there are actual counter-examples to (6), given by Kripke.78 These instantiate the general pattern of coming to know a truth on the basis of reference-fixing stipulative definitions. Thus it is claimed that one can know a priori that a certain rod is one metre long even though it is only contingently of that length. How might we, in hopes of preserving (6), try to dispose of such counter-examples? I don't doubt that the rod is accidentally a metre long, nor that a person can be said to know (relationally) of the rod that it satisfies that condition, nor even that there is a clear sense in which we have ‘automatic’ or ‘prior’ knowledge of the rod's length. But I think that attention to what grounds the knowledge in question brings its apriority into serious doubt. Compare the case of naming a ship. As a result of instantiating certain general conventions about how the reference of a ship's name is determined, a ship comes to be (say) the QE2.. So those present at the christening come to know the contingent fact that the ship struck at t. by a certain champagne bottle is the QE2.. But they only know this because they are antecedently apprised of the general conventions governing the naming of ships and because they have observed that these conventions have been instantiated in (among other acts) a certain speech act. And these things they know a posteriori. Since aposteriority transmits itself through inference, their inferred knowledge is a posteriori too—even though they enjoyed ‘automatic’ and ‘prior’ access to the ship's identity. I think the case is similar with the metre rod. One comes to know it is a metre long on the basis of knowledge concerning the general convention of

77

For details see Steiner, Mathematical Knowledge. , 162 ff.

78

Loc. cit. 274 ff.

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stipulative definition and observation of (or testimony about) the event of utterance (etc.) instantiating the convention, these requiring causal commerce with empirical particulars. So I am inclined to say that the sort of knowledge Kripke has cottoned on to is not genuinely a priori. The example of the metre rod seemed to count against (6) only because it traded on an unacceptable conception of the a priori. (6) recommends itself on a quite different front too. One feature of a priori knowledge claimed by tradition, and sustained by reflection, is that in knowing a truth a priori one comes—as it were in the very act—to recognize its necessity. I prefer to view the consequent modal knowledge as acquired by inference, on these lines. Suppose a man knows a priori that p.. Given that he knows his knowledge to be a priori, and given knowledge of (6), he can infer that □ p.: so if a man knows that p. a priori, then he knows that □ p. a priori. (No such inference is valid when a necessary truth is known a posteriori.)79 There is clearly much more to be said on these topics, but I hope I have succeeded in scratching the surface of a subject that deserves to be reopened.

Postscript to ‘A Priori and A Posteriori Knowledge’ In Naming and Necessity. Kripke did much to clarify modal concepts, but he said relatively little about how best to understand the notions of a priori and a posteriori knowledge, despite their centrality to his principal contentions. I had been interested in the notion of a priori knowledge since working on innate ideas for my MA thesis in psychology, particularly as a result of studying Leibniz. So this paper was a natural result of those two influences. It was initially much longer, but I abbreviated it to conform to the stringent length requirements of the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society., perhaps to the point of excessive pithiness. This may be partly why it was a bit neglected at the time, though it has attracted a steady trickle of interest since its publication in 1976. At any rate, I was somewhat disappointed that it figured so little in the later literature on the a priori that sprung up largely in response to Kripke's contributions. My aim was to provide a crisper statement of the distinction than the traditional Kantian formulation in terms of independence from experience, and to bring out precisely why it is that a priori knowledge is the problematic member of the pair. My account is quite compatible with an experientialist

79

It is interesting to note that given (6), the principle that modal knowledge is a priori, and a few other standard modal principles, it is possible to derive the distinctive axioms of S4 and S5. This result is reported in W. D. Hart and Colin McGinn, ‘Knowledge and Necessity’, Journal of Philosophical Logic., 5 (1976), 205–8.

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formulation, since the causal relation I invoke typically passes through a sensory channel; but I do not think this is the essence of the notion. The most direct way to see this, not emphasized in the paper, is to consider what we would say of a creature that acquired its cognitive states without benefit of sensory experience. If the creature's beliefs were directly causally produced by objects in the external world, but with no experience occurring in its stream of consciousness, then I think we would still say that it possesses a posteriori knowledge, and that this knowledge differs crucially from (say) its mathematical knowledge. (This would be an extreme case of blindsight, in which brain damaged patients acquire knowledge about the world without having a visual experience of what is around them.) What is essential to the distinction is not the occurrence of an experiential link in the causal chain that produces knowledge but the presence or absence of an appropriate such chain. Many other accounts of a priori knowledge assume that introspective knowledge is a priori, thus classifying it along with logical and mathematical knowledge. This has always seemed to me an unfortunate result, since it blurs the line between reason-based knowledge and knowledge that depends upon empirical facts—as that I am in pain at a certain time or am thinking about Paris. Surely some notion of abstractness. is pivotal in drawing the right distinction (which is why Russell, for example, defined a priori knowledge as concerned solely with relations between universals in The Problems of Philosophy.). Certainly, it sounds quite wrong to describe introspective knowledge as ‘purely intellectual’, on a par with knowledge of logic and mathematics and philosophy itself. Of course, the issue is somewhat terminological, and the traditional bifurcation is bound to ignore further distinctions, but I would argue that the great divide in human knowledge puts introspective knowledge in a category apart from knowledge of logic and mathematics. And my causal criterion enables us to acknowledge this intuitive allocation. It also enables us to respond to Kripke's claim that there can be a priori knowledge of contingent truths: for this, I argue, only seems plausible if one is assuming, wrongly, that introspective knowledge of one's linguistic intentions is genuinely a priori. Of course, if we believe, like Kant, that introspective knowledge is based upon ‘inner sense’, this being modelled upon ‘outer sense’, then introspective knowledge comes out a posteriori without further ado. I am suggesting that we can get this desirable result without reliance on that dubious picture of self-knowledge. I recently returned to the topic of the a priori in Problems in Philosophy., chapter 8, in which I suggest that the problematic nature of a priori knowledge is best understood as an example of the kind of natural mystery I investigate in that book. Our capacity for a priori knowledge is an aspect of the mind that we are not conceptually equipped to comprehend. No wonder, then, that it has always seemed to be both especially elevated and deeply puzzling. Empiricism is based on the perfectly sound thought that we have no idea how a priori knowledge works, or is even so much as possible; but it mistakenly infers from

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this that there is no such thing as (substantive) a priori knowledge. (Compare this with a similar reflex eliminativism about consciousness, based on the thought that we cannot provide a theory of it.) I still think the topic of the a priori needs much more untendentious attention from philosophers; uncritical empiricist assumptions need to be jettisoned.

3 A Note on the Essence of Natural Kinds I wish to take up an issue arising out of J. L. Mackie's piece ‘Locke's Anticipation of Kripke’ (Analysis., 34/6). It concerns the question which properties (if any) of a natural kind—more especially a substance, such as gold—are to be reckoned essential. to the kind; that is, which properties actually instantiated by a kind are such that that. kind could not have lacked them, or, in another idiom, which properties a given kind instantiates in all worlds in which it exists. After remarking Locke's observation that we are prone to (try to) annex substance terms, for example, ‘gold’, to the real. essence of the substance in question, rather than as epistemological modesty requires to its nominal. essence, Mackie writes: It is a consequence of our using the world ‘gold’ with this intention that if we contemplate the counterfactual possibility that something with this same internal constitution [i.e. real essence] was not (through some change in other things or in the laws of nature) shining yellow in colour, malleable, fusible, soluble in aqua regia., and so on, we would express this by saying that gold might not be yellow, might not be malleable, etc., whereas if we contemplate the counterfactual possibility that something with a different internal constitution had all these features, we would say not that gold might have a different internal constitution, but only that something else might look and behave like gold. Saul Kripke has argued just this, that if gold does in fact have atomic number 79, it is not possible that gold. should have a different atomic number, though it is possible that gold should lack the features by which we now recognize it, and that some other substance should have them (pp. 178–9). Now turning to Kripke, we read: In particular, then, present scientific theory is such that it is part of the nature of gold as we have it to be an element with atomic number 79. (We may also in the same way, then, investigate further how colour and metallic properties follow from what we have found the substance gold to be: to the extent that such properties follow from the atomic structure of gold, they are necessary properties of it. [my italics], even though they unquestionably are not part of the meaning. of ‘gold’ and were not known with a priori certainty.) (Pp. 320–1, ‘Naming and Necessity’, in D. Davidson and G. Harman (eds.), Semantics of Natural Language. (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1972).)

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It seems plain enough from this passage that Kripke is asserting the negation of a thesis defended by Mackie and attributed by him to Kripke. For Mackie says (and says that Kripke says) that, on the one hand, the atomic structure, as indicated in the atomic number, of (e.g.) gold is to be reckoned to that substance's essence and, on the other, that the various dispositional (and other) properties of gold are merely contingent; while Kripke claims that the latter properties, provided that they ‘follow from’ the atomic structure, are to be reckoned essential too. I want to ask who is right and why. Before tackling the issue directly, though, I pause to consider two prior matters, which may serve to clear the air for the main issue. First, a comment on Mackie's account of the provenance of those ‘necessities of constitution’ he seems willing to acknowledge. His suggestion, in a nutshell, is that their provenance is to be located in a certain utility attaching to the ‘linguistic policy’ noted in connection with Locke, that is, the policy of annexing substance-terms to the property or properties comprising the real essence of the substance and prescinding from those comprising its nominal essence. That Mackie regards the adoption of such a policy as up for decision is borne out by his remark that we could. have chosen to fix the reference of ‘gold’ via its nominal essence, as Locke recommended. Then, according to Mackie's account, the properties of gold which are now supposed accidental to it—malleability, fusibility, etc.—would be counted essential. Furthermore, the property in which that substance's real essence consists—sc. having atomic number 79—would on this alternative policy be counted contingent. So the modal properties of a substance are consequent upon our selection, prompted by considerations of utility, of a subset of the substance's properties, which thereafter fix necessary and sufficient conditions for something's being that substance. Since we could have selected a different subset, the possibilities concerning the substance could have been different; in particular, we could have counted the colour, etc., of gold essential and the atomic number inessential. (Reducing a putative necessity to an agreed contingency, namely our linguistic policies, is bound to entail that there is after all no necessity about the necessity.) Actually Mackie's account seems to have a still less palatable consequence. For suppose we decided, for whatever reason, to annex ‘gold’ to such properties of gold as that of being a stuff endowed by human beings with symbolic significance, or being a medium of exchange, or being what the Queen's crown is made of: then it would follow, from Mackie's principles, that these properties would be reckoned to gold's essence, while its other properties, whether pertaining to real or nominal essence, would come out contingent. That is, it would be supposed necessary and sufficient for a substance to be gold that these properties were satisfied by it. But now, since rubber could have been the stuff instantiating these. properties, it seems to follow that gold could have been rubber, and contrariwise. Or at least that we would say, and say correctly,

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that gold might be (or might have been) what we now call rubber; in other words, on the alternative policy, we could truly say, of. gold and rubber, that the one might have been the other, since the other might have instantiated the properties to which we originally annexed the name of the one. I infer that the prospects are not good for founding the modal properties of natural kinds on (alleged) features of our ‘linguistic policies’. The boot is surely on the other foot. It may seem surprising (and this is the second matter) that Kripke should make the parenthetical remark quoted above. For, it may be protested, hasn't he spent painstaking pages showing that the identifying marks by which we initially fix the reference of a natural kind term, for example, ‘gold’, are neither necessary nor sufficient for something to be of that kind: that is, that it is possible. for something to be gold despite its lacking those marks? On closer inspection, however, the apparent tension is easily resolved. For the possibilities here. envisaged by Kripke, and deployed to advance a certain thesis about the sense of terms like ‘gold’, are to be interpreted epistemically., in Kripke's sense. Hence his talk of optical illusions and other sources of error. Indeed, Kripke observes that, in this. sense of ‘possibly’, gold might have turned out (or might turn out) not to have atomic number 79. But in the passage cited above the possibilities under discussion are metaphysical., again in Kripke's sense. So the diagnosis of Mackie's misinterpretation, as of the apparent tension, is that epistemic modalities are being taken as metaphysical; once separated out, there is no inconsistency. What could have turned out to be the case compatibly with the reference of ‘gold’ staying fixed as that stuff. and what could have been, given what is, are just different questions. And the quoted passage speaks to the latter, while the epistemic possibilities discussed bear on the former. (In fact, this is made very clear at p. 319 of ‘Naming and Necessity’, and I hesitate to labour the point.) Now to the main issue. I begin by sharpening up the model of natural kinds, in particular, substances, that Kripke and Mackie (and before them Locke) are working with. The leading idea of the model is that properties of a kind come in two grades, one more fundamental than the other. Let's call properties of the more fundamental grade primary. nomic properties, and let's call properties of the less fundamental grade secondary. nomic properties. Then the point of the model is this: that the primary properties—e.g. having a certain atomic number—are ‘responsible for’ and ‘underlie’ the secondary properties—e.g. solubility, conductivity, etc. As it were, the secondary traits of a substance are nomically derivative from, because they have their basis in, the primary traits. Explanation of a substance's behaviour as manifested in its secondary properties, consists in discovering its internal nature.; and its nature—what the stuff fundamentally is.—is constituted by its primary properties. We know what the nature of a substance is when we have identified its primary properties and seen

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how they account for the more readily discernible secondary properties.80 Now, in terms of this model, we can state the issue more amenably: Are the secondary properties of a substance to be reckoned to its essence along with the primary properties, or are they not? Is the relation between properties of these levels contingent or non-contingent? If the relation is non-contingent—or rigid, as I prefer to say—then Kripke is right; if it is contingent—or non-rigid—then Mackie is right.81 I think we can adduce considerations favouring Kripke's answer to the question thus stated. Mackie might insist that a condition sufficient for the relation's being non.-rigid is satisfied. (See his ‘De. what Re. is De Re. Modality?’, J. Phil.. 71/16: 552). For, on his view, the relation between the atomic structural properties of gold and its superficial properties is causal.; and, since causal relations are contingent, so is the relation between the two sets of properties. It is contingent because the identity of the items causally related at a time doesn't turn on their being so related at that time. Now I am inclined to agree that if. the relation were causal in this way—i.e. a relation holding between distinct items—then it would have to be non-rigid. But I deny that the relation we are concerned with is causal in this way, for I deny that primary and secondary properties are distinct in the required way. I think we can arrive at a correct view of the relation by combining two thoughts, both of which enjoy a certain currency. The first is, as Kripke notes, that scientific inquiry proceeds by reductive identification.—of water to H2O, of heat to molecular motion, and so on. The second is that this procedure takes a specific form: it consists in finding a basis in the infrastructure of a substance for the superficial properties characteristic of the substance. Bringing these two thoughts together, we reach the thesis that investigation of the nature of a substance involves identifying. the secondary properties with the primary ones. More especially, the dispositional properties of a substance are explained by identifying them with underlying ‘scientifically fundamental’ properties, where these latter may be characterized dispositionally or non-dispositionally, depending on predilections not here in question. So for gold to have the property of being soluble in aqua regia just is. for it to have some atomic structural property. Basic among these properties will be, as physics has discovered, the atomic number of gold. Uncovering the primary properties of gold is finding out what it is. for gold to have the secondary properties it nomically has.

80

Cf. David Wiggins's concept of ‘scientifically fundamental properties’, which occurs in ‘Essentialism, Continuity, and Identity’, in Synthese. , 28/3–4 (Nov. 1974). Note that the distinction of grades here sketched is not to be identified with the classical distinction between primary and secondary qualities, at least on some construals of that distinction. It has more in common with the Aristotelian distinction between properties (in the old, narrow, sense, translating ‘idia. ’) and essence.

81

I picked up the term ‘rigid relation’ from M. K. Davies; it is intended to recall Kripke's concept of a rigid designator, according to which the relation between a name and its bearer is a rigid relation—if it holds in the actual world, it holds in all worlds.

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And this is obviously a relation more intimate than causality, as ordinarily construed. Now if this view of the relation is correct, we are a short step from the rigidity we set out to establish. For, as Kripke and others have made clear, true identities are necessary: accordingly, property identities, though discovered a posteriori, are necessary. If secondary properties are to be identified. with primary properties, then they will be necessarily coextensive—that is, they must be related rigidly. Whence it follows that if gold couldn't have lacked its atomic properties, it couldn't have lacked its dispositional properties either. For to lack the one would just be. to lack the other. That, I suggest, is the reason Kripke's laconic remark is true. The nomic equivalence. of primary and secondary properties precludes any peeling off of dispositional properties; for to peel off the dispositional properties would be to peel off the atomic characteristics too. (Note that this thesis isn't committed to a reduction of the sense. of predicates ascribing secondary properties to that of predicates ascribing primary ones; we have to do with different ‘modes of presentation’ of the same property.) There is a further consequence of this view. It is that the symmetry of identity ensures that rigidity cuts both ways. If the atomic constitution cannot come apart from the superficial traits, then neither can the superficial traits come apart from the internal constitution. This consequence may seem to contradict Kripke's remarks about real gold and fool's gold. For isn't this precisely a case in which two substances agree in superficial properties, yet diverge with respect to molecular constitution? Well, gold and iron pyrites agree in some. secondary properties, and to that degree they share some primary properties. But Kripke nowhere claims that they agree in all. non-molecular properties; and of course they do not. The situation rather seems to be this: if substances S1 and S2 agree in secondary properties φ1,. . . φn, then there are primary properties φ1,. . . φn in which they also, and necessarily, agree on account of property identity. So, if S1 and S2 coincide on all. secondary properties, then they coincide on all primary ones. In particular they would perforce agree in atomic structure. Otherwise put, if the properties of S1 and S2 coincide, as physically described (i.e. in a certain vocabulary), then they coincide under all other descriptions. For example, if the properties of S1 and S2 fall under the same chemical descriptions, they would fall under the same physical descriptions. We are dealing with identical states of a substance, variously characterized. My claim is that if. this view is right, and it seems to me that it is, then Kripke's position on the modality of secondary properties is correct and Mackie's incorrect. Nor is the position unintuitive. Indeed it enables us to undercut what may have seemed embarrassing questions. On the Mackie view, which seems common, at least among sympathetic readers of Kripke, the following has to be swallowed. Consider a possible world containing a substance with all the

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secondary properties of gold yet lacking its atomic constitution, and suppose also that this world contains a substance having that constitution yet lacking all of gold's secondary properties, suppose indeed that it instantiates all of the secondary properties of rubber: then it is the second substance not the first that is gold. On the view I defend, however, such implausibilities are avoided, since on that view the world just described is impossible. It isn't. possible for something to instantiate the molecular properties of gold and instantiate the dispositional properties of rubber, and vice versa. For to instantiate the molecular properties of gold is. to instantiate its dispositional properties. The situation is perhaps clearer in respect of ‘natural phenomena’ such as heat and light. We may simply reject the possibility that heat (= molecular motion) or light (= stream of photons) should exist in a world yet not heat or illuminate things, respectively; indeed that they should, for example, have the secondary properties of water or oxygen and behave as they. do. On the non-rigid view of the relation between basic nature and observable properties, however, such possibilities must, it seems, be countenanced; and the identity of the substances in question is to be fixed simply by the underlying properties, so that, for instance, light could have had the dispositional properties of water. According to the view I defend, on the other hand, we are free to regard gold, heat, light, and water, in all possible worlds, just as we always did—that is, as endowed precisely with those properties that intuition supposed definitive of the kind. (This is not to deny that the scientifically fundamental properties enjoy a certain primacy among properties of a kind. It is. to deny that this status amounts to unique essentiality.) Someone may object at this point and say ‘But now isn't it going to follow that all. of gold's properties are essential to it, and isn't this false?’ I don't believe my principles do have this profligate consequence, however. For first, not all of gold's properties are nomic. properties of it, for example, being a medium of exchange, or being deposited in Fort Knox: that is, it is not a consequence of the laws governing gold that it have these properties. And second, such nomic properties of gold (or more clearly heat and light) as that it produces certain phenomenologically identified sensations in human beings don't come out essential either (granted certain assumptions about the modal properties of human beings) for there is no question of identifying. such sensations with the primary properties of gold (or heat and light). The kind and the sensation really are distinct existences, and so are contingently related. Rigidity sets in just when the properties in question are identifiable, that is, when the predicates ascribing them represent identical states of the substance. A final word about Locke. A not untypical passage from the Essay. is this: I doubt not but if we could discover the figure, size, texture, and motion of the minute constituent parts of any two bodies, we should know without trial several of their operations one upon another; as we do now the properties of a square or triangle. (my italics; book iv, iii. 24).

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Perilous though it is to read current preoccupations into past philosophers, I conjecture that, if anything, Locke would have concurred with the rigid view of the relation between real essence and ‘powers’, as manifested in the substance's relational properties. (Note also his remark that ‘malleableness depends on, and is inseparable from., the real essence of gold’, quoted by Mackie at p. 177.) ‘Scientifical’ knowledge, were it available to us, would be, though a posteriori, of necessary truths. That, in modern dress, is the claim I have tried to ground.

Postscript to ‘A Note on the Essence of Natural Kinds’ This was my first published paper (aside from an article entitled ‘Mach and Husserl’ that I wrote as an undergraduate in psychology and published, at the request of the editor, Wolfe Mays, then a teacher of mine, in the British Journal for Phenomenology., 3/2, May 1972). It was prompted, like much of my early work, by Kripke's Naming and Necessity., which at the time was frequently misunderstood, even reviled in some (backward) quarters. Indeed, defending Kripke's essentialism, as I did, was deemed in some circles a sure sign of intellectual ‘unsoundness’. Looking back, it is hard to see what all the fuss was about, and this paper now strikes me as a model of sobriety. As to the interpretative issue between Mackie and me, it is clear enough that my reading of Kripke is the correct one; in fact, soon after the paper was published I ran into Kripke and he remarked simply ‘You are right’ about the exegetical question. The same mistake is still sometimes made, as when people suppose Kripke's thesis to be that the only. essential property of water is that it is H2O. Twin Earth cases were not yet in circulation at the time, but I have heard many people criticize such thought experiments on the ground that nothing could have all the superficial properties of water without being water; that is, H2O. But the point is that speakers could attribute. all the same superfi-cial properties to XYZ as to H2O, perhaps because of perceptual illusions, and yet be referring to something other than water. That is, water could have a non- water epistemic. counterpart; it is not integral to Twin Earth cases that it be metaphysically. possible that XYZ could have all the superficial properties of water and not be water (though no doubt it is really possible that it should have some. characteristically watery properties). And the idea of such a strong dissociation of deep and surface properties is surely highly suspect, since superficial properties are necessarily rooted in the kind of theoretical constitution science discovers for substances such as water. Perhaps I was too strict in suggesting that superficial properties are always identical. to some underlying scientific property. It might be better to allow for looser relations of determination between levels, by invoking something like supervenience: if two substances agree in their microproperties, then they

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necessarily agree also in their macroproperties; and if they agree in all their macroproperties, including law-governed causal interactions, then they must agree also in their microproperties. This captures the idea of the macro- properties ‘flowing from’ the microproperties. There must be a grounding. relation between macro and micro, and this is apt to generate necessitations. That had better be so, on pain of having a substance made wholly of the same components as gold but having all the gross properties of rubber. Whether we should call such an impossible substance ‘gold’ or ‘rubber’ is indeed a moot question, but it is not one that the Kripkean picture is committed to taking seriously.

4 On the Necessity of Origin

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Saul Kripke has advanced a number of essentialist theses whose acceptance seems recommended by intuition.83 One such thesis is that the origin of a thing constitutes a de re. necessity. Compelling as the deliverances of intuition are, however, they fall short of supplying any sort of explanation of the necessities in question. We are left wondering why. it is that, for example, a person couldn't have had a different origin. In ‘De. what Re. is De Re. Modality?’84 J. L. Mackie has a try at filling the explanatory vacuum—that is, he offers us an account of why we are inclined to believe that origin is essential but subsequent history is accidental. I am going, first, to argue that Mackie's proposed explanation is inadequate, and, second, to suggest a different account of the necessity of origin.

I. De The Wrong Re There are two preliminary points I would note about Mackie's procedure. The first is that he conceives the task as that of explaining away, in the style of Hume on causation, the beliefs about de re. modality which he agrees we have. He inquires not about why these beliefs are true—for, by his lights, their truth is strictly illusory—but rather why we are disposed to think. they are true. It is not surprising, then, to read that ‘these de re. modalities are, in a very broad sense, de dicto. after all’ (p. 560)—‘de intellectu.’ might be more apt. Since Mackie's explanation is, unashamedly, an essay in the aetiology of confusion (as was Hume's account of our intuitive concept of causality), it is not always easy to tell whether we are invited to suppose his principles true or simply psychologically correct. I shall take it that the explanatory principles are intended as plausible in themselves; then argue that they are not, and that, even if they

82

I am grateful to W. D. Hart, C. A. B. Peacocke, and J. Hornsby for helpful discussions on the topic of this paper.

83

See ‘Naming and Necessity’, in D. Davidson and G. Harman (eds.), Semantics of Natural Language. (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1972), 253–355 .

84

Journal of Philosophy., 71/16 (19 Sept. 1974), 551–61 . Parenthetical page references to Mackie are to this paper.

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were, they would fail to explain the modal intuitions we have. In particular, they stand in want of a supplementary principle, to be discerned in A. N. Prior85 and Michael Dummett,86 which is itself unacceptable. The second point has to do with the nature of counterfactual supposition. Mackie gestures concurrence with Kripke in holding that we may transpose actual individuals into counterfactual situations, by dint of rigid designation, and that consequently there is no prior requirement of fixing up identities (or some other equivalence relation) between individuals counterfactually posited and individuals as they actually are, on the basis of qualitative criteria. I think Mackie goes wrong through (inter alia.) not taking the Kripkean view of possible worlds fully to heart. Mackie's explanation comes in two stages. The first stage purports to tell how. we ‘handle possibility and identity together’, the second why. we handle them that way. The main thrust of the first stage is this: although we are able intelligibly to contemplate a forward. divergence from actual history, the idea of a backward. divergence is not the sort of counterfactual situation in which identity can be preserved. Otherwise put, we cannot make sense of a possible convergence. with actuality. For suppose ‘we contemplate a possible person who is conceived at t.0, not at t.1 [the time of Nixon's actual origin] whose career from t.0 to t.2 is different from that of the actual Nixon but whose actions and experiences from t.2 to t.3 are exactly like those of the actual Nixon’; then ‘even if we do contemplate the conceivable if not causally possible t.0–t.2–t.3 career, we cannot claim that the possible person whose career it is would be Nixon’, for ‘he never becomes Nixon and so never was Nixon’ (pp. 554–5). Ergo, we are to conclude, origin is essential and subsequent history accidental. It seems to me that Mackie here just assumes. that we cannot pick out the actual Nixon and suppose that he. enjoyed a different career prior to a certain time, for he (Mackie) begins by postulating some possible. person whose continuity with Nixon is taken as problematic. Thus he simply begs the question against its being Nixon. But it seems perfectly possible to suppose that Nixon got to be President by different means. To reply that Nixon could have converged on the Presidency in a different way but not from a different origin seems merely to reinvite the original question, viz. why origin should be singled out as essential and life-history counted contingent. The claimed asymmetry of forward and backward departures from actuality seems either spurious or a petitio.. A second objection is that, even if Mackie were right about the asymmetry,

85

See ‘Identifiable Individuals’, esp. 70 f., in Papers on Time and Tense. (New York: Oxford, 1968) . Parenthetical page references to Prior are to this article.

86

In Frege: Philosophy of Language. (London: Duckworth; New York: Harper, 1973), 130 f . Parenthetical page references to Dummett are to this book.

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it couldn't non-question-beggingly distinguish origin as necessary. For, since convergence is impossible at any time in Nixon's career, the properties he has before a given time come out essential; on the other hand, the possibility of divergence at any time makes all properties come out accidental. It looks as if we need some extra principle capable of conferring special status on the time of origin, so that convergences and divergences can be evaluated for their modal implications with respect to that time. Though Mackie does not, so far as I can see, offer any such principle, Prior and Dummett do. Thus Dummett asserts that ‘we cannot push back the moment in respect of which a property is to be characterized as presently accidental behind the point at which the object came into existence: that is why, in the case of a human being, his parentage and even the moment of his conception seem absolutely necessary to his identity’ (p. 131). That is, before his coming to exist, Nixon was not a subject for the possibility that he should come to exist differently; there is no earlier situation containing Nixon with respect to which actuality might have turned out otherwise than it did. Now, aside from other criticisms one could make of this principle, the following seems decisive against it: it entails that everything. true of Nixon at the moment of his creation is necessarily true of him. Not just exact time and place of birth, but also that he started to be in a room containing a vase of geraniums, indeed (if existence be a property) that he is a necessary existent. In fact, the principle appears capable of yielding the result that all true sentences are necessarily true, since to each ascription of a property to Nixon at birth we can conjoin a true sentence, for example, a sentence about his later career. The suggested supplementary principle seems to lead rapidly from the frying pan to the fire. Its troubles should also alert us into suspicion of any view that lets the necessity of origin attach to the circumstances. of origin. The second stage of Mackie's account seeks to explain the alleged asymmetry in terms of (i) the fixity of the past and (ii) the causal underdetermination of the future. The idea, if I understand rightly, is that, because we regard the past as unalterable, we do not allow that things could have come about differently; that is, we do not allow that a given past condition of the world could have had different causal antecedents. Again, it seems to me hard to see how (i) and (ii) confer special modal status on origin without either circularity or unspecified supplementation. Agreed, we don't have to say that all past properties are essential, since before they were acquired it was causally possible that some other condition be brought about; but what is to stop us saying that before the time of origin. it was causally possible that the individual have a different origin? Only, it seems, invocation of some principle in which the existence of the individual figures crucially; for example, x. is essentially φ at t. if there is no earlier time at which x. exists and such that it was causally possible at that earlier time that x. not be φ at t.. Either Mackie calls upon such a principle, and then faces its modally extravagant consequences, or his explanation fails to afford any rule of discrimination between the property or properties comprising

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origin and the properties that comprise contingent history. If such principles, and the reasoning based on them, lay at back of our beliefs about de re. modality we should be confused indeed.

II. An Alternative Account As remarked, Mackie's explanation is confessedly reductive. The account I shall propose is not. My procedure will be to bring the necessity of origin under certain general principles governing a class of de re. modalities. That is, I shall try to isolate and articulate a feature common to all cases of a certain class, and claim that the necessity of an individual's origin is a special case exhibiting this feature. So I shall be taking at least one de re. modal principle as primitive. My explanation will then take the form: this is essential because that is. This does not, of course, embroil me in circularity; indeed, it is hard to see how such an explanation could be non-reductive without. calling upon some de re. modal principle as explanans. Part of our trouble so far has been haziness over what the origin of an individual is supposed to consist in. It seems usual to view it as the exact circumstances of birth or creation—time, place, and so on. As hinted earlier, I am dubious of this interpretation of the thesis. In fact, Kripke is inclined to formulate it as the claim that one essentially has the parents. one actually has. If so, then you could presumably have started to exist at a different time or in a different place had your parents operated at a different time or in a different place. Spatio- temporal constraints of this kind (if such there be) will, I conjecture, be supervenient upon more fundamental constraints. As a step toward identifying the more fundamental constraints, note that, because of recherché cases of sperm and ovum transplants, your parents must be picked out as those responsible for producing, in the standard way, the sperm and ovum from which you actually came. Now I think it helpful to distinguish three relations between entities of different kinds in which the origin of a person may be said to consist: first, the relation between the fertilized egg—the zygote.—and the person it is destined to become; second, the relation between the egg and sperm—the gametes.—and the zygote (and hence person) they fuse to produce; third, the relation between the gametes and the parents of the resulting person. Our task, then, is to give some account of the rigidity. of these relations: that is, to explain why it is that when entities stand in these relations they necessarily do, why it is that in any world in which they exist these entities are related as they are in the actual world. To explain how come you must have developed from your actual zygote I need two assumptions: (i) you are identical with that zygote, (ii) transtemporal identity is necessary. I think that (ii) scarcely requires comment, so long as one

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accepts that identity is a rigid relation and that there are genuine identities across time—both of which I shall here take as read. But (i) is less straightforward. How can a grown man be identical. with a tiny fertilized egg? The claim that he is might be resisted on these lines: a person cannot be the same as a zygote because a zygote is not a person and person. is an ultimate sortal concept; that is, a concept that a continuant individual must satisfy throughout its existence if it satisfies it at all. I don't know whether a zygote is a person, but it doesn't matter: for if it is not, then the proper conclusion is that person. is a phase-sortal, in David Wiggins's sense.87 The demand for an ultimate sortal covering the putative individual for the duration of its existence can be met either by appropriating or by inventing one: for example, human being.. Nor is the claim that we have to do with a single persisting entity here out of the ordinary when one reflects on the drastic metamorphoses endured by seeds as they grow into trees and caterpillars as they become butterflies. More positively: adults are commonly identical with children, and children with infants, infants with foetuses, and foetuses with zygotes. Any attempt to break the obvious biological continuity here would surely be arbitrary. So much for explaining why you couldn't come from a different zygote. What now of gametes and zygotes (and hence persons)? We cannot, it seems, avail ourselves of the necessity of identity again, for gametes are two and persons are one. But neither can we stop short at the zygote, since it seems essential that you come from the gametes you actually come from, as the following train of thought makes plain. Suppose, with a view to reductio., that I come from Nixon's actual gametes; that is, consider a world in which this occurs. Now, what is surely compossible with the first supposition, add my actual gametes to the aforementioned world and suppose they develop into an adult. Which of these individuals has the stronger title to be me? My intuitions seem decisively to favour the latter individual. And the same verdict seems delivered if the counterfactual gametes are genetically similar to mine. The reason for preferring the actual gametes of a person as a criterion of identity is, I surmise, a matter of a certain sort of spatio-temporal continuity.. My suggestion, in pursuance of that hint, is that we extend biological continuity beyond the zygote, and then maintain that origin is essential because continuity is. Just as you must have come from the zygote you came from because you are diachronically and developmentally continuous with it, so you must have come from the gametes you came from because you are similarly continuous with them. I shall call this relation d-continuity.. The intuitive content of the idea of d-continuity is given by the concept of one thing or things coming from. another thing or things. And it is the task of developmental biology to investigate the laws and mechanisms underlying this intuitive idea. A definitive feature of this relation, as I understand it, is that it does not require the

87

See Identity and Spatio-Temporal Continuity. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), 7, 29 .

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persistence of the things that do the becoming. It is therefore unlike the relation of composition or constitution, or the relation between a thing and its parts. There can be d-continuity between entities without the relation of being made out of. holding between them. This seems to be a peculiarity of biological entities. It contrasts with the relation between a table and the piece of wood it ‘came from’. While we may hope to explain the necessity of origin attaching to the table and the wood it came from in terms of the table's being essentially made. from that piece of wood, no such account seems available in respect of biological entities. This should surprise no one who expects de re. modalities to depend upon the nature of the res. in question.88 It will help to get the flavour of the d-continuity relation if I give some further examples of it. Since the relation seems integral to each of the de re. necessities intuition recognizes in these examples, it seems appropriate to claim that it explains them. The union of human gametes is a special case of biological fusion. The generalization then suggests itself that all fusion relations give rise to a necessity of origin; this very entity couldn't have resulted from the fusion of entities distinct from the actual ones. Thinking of fusion we naturally turn to fission, and here again it seems that the entities that result from a given entity by fission couldn't have come into existence by the fission of a distinct entity, or indeed in any other way. When an amoeba splits, itself ceasing to exist in the process, the resulting amoebas are such that they couldn't have come from any other amoeba. The phenomenon of clones presents another example; the plants that grow out of cuttings from the original plant couldn't have had their origin in a distinct plant. Or again, it seems that a branch of a given tree must be a branch of that. tree and of no other. Now my thesis is that what these various cases have in common—and they do seem to form a natural family—is the relation I am calling d-continuity; and it is this that confers rigidity on the relations involved, thus accounting for the necessity of origin. In each case we have a kind of spatio-temporal continuity different from, yet sharing many of the characteristics of, the sort of transtemporal identity exhibited by biological things: an organized, law-governed, causally unified process of development. And in each case the individuation of the entity, or entities, concerned turns on its, or their, d-continuity relations with other entities. I have yet to deal with the third relation I distinguished—that between a parent and the gamete he or she is responsible for producing. Here again, it seems to me, we naturally use the concept of one thing biologically ‘developing

88

In Metaphysics and Essence. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975) , Michael Slote is apt to speak indifferently of a man's essentially coming from a particular sperm and egg and his essentially deriving from the particular matter. composing that sperm and egg (e.g. 31). But it is a general truth about biological entities that they are not essentially composed of their actual matter: in some sense of ‘matter' my gametes could. have been made of different matter—e.g. if my parents had been composed of different matter owing to different material intake. The matter thesis and the gametes thesis are therefore not to be conflated.

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from' another by virtue of biological laws; and again it seems essential to the identity of a given gamete that it spring from the animal it actually sprang from. Putting the three relations together then, we reach the conclusion that an individual necessarily has his actual parents, the reason being that he is d-continuous with them. It isn't hard to see that the d-continuity principle applied to human beings predicts the necessity of their ancestry. Allowing the relation to possess the transitivity property, so that it is plausibly rated an equivalence relation, a less obvious consequence ensues, namely that a person's position in a field of kinship relations is an essential property of him: your siblings are necessarily your siblings, your nephew is necessarily your nephew, and so on. (Blood relations run deep.) This seems to me intuitively correct, and it is predicted by the d-continuity principle. (Of course, if dcontinuity is to hold between (say) cousins, we cannot gloss it straightforwardly in terms of ‘coming from’; but we can say that entities thus related come from something from which they both come, and so preserve the intuitive gloss.) Finally, some remarks about species. Species have origins. A species is a biological entity, or at least creatures belonging to a species are biological entities. So we might expect some sort of necessity of origin in respect of species. And indeed I think that being of a certain species does consist in having a certain origin essentially. Dummett claims that for an organism to be of a given kind is for it to have a certain descent, so that species are individuated according to their evolutionary origin: ‘even if creatures exactly like men arose from Dragon's teeth, they would not be men, because not children of Adam’ (p. 144). As hitherto, it isn't my primary aim to justify this essentialist thesis; my aim is rather to explain such intuitions as I presume we have. The explanation I propose is that to be of a certain species is to be d-continuous with a stock of creatures from which the species actually evolved: to be of the kind Homo sapiens. is to be d-continuous by descent with a stock of pre-hominid primates (or with Adam and Eve, depending on your views). The case is different for non-biological kinds, such as gold and water. To be of such a kind is not to have a certain historical origin, but to be constituted in a particular way. In this respect, the difference in modal properties we noted earlier as between biological and non-biological particulars is paralleled at the level of kinds. If the thesis that species have their origins essentially is correct, it seems to follow that the earth wouldn't have been populated by the species it is populated by if the relations of evolutionary descent had been different from what they actually were. For the evolution of a species consists of a chain of d-continuity relations each link of which is metaphysically necessary.89

89

Incidentally, the rigidity of d-continuity relations, if correct, gives the lie to a famous principle of Hume's, viz. that there cannot be necessary connections between distinct existences.

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Postscript to ‘On the Necessity of Origin’ I wrote this paper a few weeks before the previous one, but it was not published until the following year. It too seeks to elucidate and defend Kripkean essentialism. Kripke had boldly stated the necessity of origin without doing very much to articulate and investigate the thesis; I thought it needed to be explained in some way, especially since so many people were sceptical of it (often for confused reasons). Quite a number of people mistakenly took the claim to be that the time. of a person's origin is an essential property of that person. For me, to accept that some property is essential is only the beginning; one needed to classify the different cases and, if possible, exhibit dependencies between them. Thus, I distinguished necessities of constitution, such as this table being necessarily made of this piece of wood, from necessities of origin, which concern the modalities of aetiology (Kripke had lumped these together). I was concerned, that is, to analyse the necessity of origin and to uncover its deeper source: d-continuity was the theoretical notion I employed to do that. This notion enabled me to generalize the necessity of origin to animal species—it turns out that birds had. to come from dinosaurs, granted that they actually did. It also enabled me to point out that these necessities stretch far back in time: I could not have existed unless a certain remote ape once existed—the very ape whose descendants led up to me. Indeed, none of the animals currently on the planet could have existed unless certain specific protozoa had oozed through the primeval slime. Or, if you prefer, God had to make Adam (that specific man) if He was eventually to produce you (despite God's omnipotence even He could not make a possible world in which you exist but Adam never did). Moreover, each of our siblings necessarily come from the same remote ancestors that we do—and our cousins, etc. We are all one big modal family, locked to each other across all possible worlds. Once it is determined that a certain possible world contains me, an enormous series of other individuals are constrained to exist in that world—from my father and mother to the primitive evolutionary progenitors of the entire ancestral line. I still find this a striking result. And it clearly pulls necessity very far from what might plausibly be contained in the meanings of our referring terms (it is obviously not part of the sense. of ‘Colin McGinn’ that it be true that Colin McGinn necessarily evolved from a certain hairy ape some millions of years ago). The origin of the necessity of origin is not analytic entailment, no matter how elastically this notion is construed. Some necessity is radically de re..

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This paper is given over to a difficult and controversial topic: how we should conceive the truth conditions of modal statements. Three interests motivate my concern with the nature of modal truth. One interest is semantical: what is the correct treatment of modal locutions in a meaning-theory for natural language? More specifically, what semantic role should a Tarskian theory of absolute truth assign to modal expressions? A second interest is metaphysical: what are the presuppositions and consequences of belief in objective necessity? Here I wish to include strict (or metaphysical) necessity and causal (or nomic) necessity, that is, the alethic as opposed to the epistemic or the deontic modalities. I am interested, in particular, in uncovering the source of the uneasiness which a non-reductive view of such modalities provokes in philosophers of broadly empiricist persuasion. (The focus will be on so-called de re. modality, but I think the underlying issue extends to de dicto. modality.) This second interest cannot fail to be intimately connected with the first, since how we choose to represent the truth conditions of modal sentences in a systematic semantical theory must reflect our considered conception of the nature of modal reality. That is, if we are to assert. modal sentences, as is our common practice, then we thereby commit ourselves, metaphysically, to whatever our semantical theory attributes to such sentences as comprising their truth conditions. Conversely, our prior conception as to the constitution of modal reality should find its way into the semantics we propose, since modal sentences are the vehicle of expression for that conception. There is no divorcing semantics and metaphysics; we are obliged to take seriously whatever the favoured semantic theory pins on our serious modal assertions. In other words, instrumentalism about semantics implies instrumentalism with respect to the objectlanguage. Insistence on this point has a significance beyond semantics for modal expressions, since an influential conception of the proper form of a meaning-theory for a whole language (model theory on possible worlds) is premissed on a certain view of the semantic role of modal locutions: if that view

90

I am grateful for comments on the ideas developed in this paper to members of the UCLA philosophy department and to participants in the Thyssen group meeting in 1979: Anita Avramides, Hartry Field, Bas van Fraassen, Bill Hart, Christopher Peacocke, and Warren Quinn were particularly helpful.

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proved philosophically suspect, then we might well have to abandon the derived conception of semantical theory. The third interest I have in modal truth relates to the question of realism. On the one hand, I am interested in whether a uniform notion of realism can be formulated, applicable to all areas in which philosophical disputes have naturally been characterized in such terms; and modality is an area in which a significant modification of a certain standard formulation (that due to Michael Dummett)91 is needed if it is to have the required generality. On the other hand, there is an independently interesting issue about modal realism: how it is most naturally formulated, whether it is true, what view it requires of the relation between knowledge and reality. Coming at modality in this way will, I hope, illuminate the metaphysical questions surrounding essentialism and objective modality. The three interests converge on my opening question: how should we explicate that in virtue of which a modal statement is true? My discussion has two main parts. The first part is addressed to what I shall call objectual. interpretations of modal expressions: this is to be the thesis that the truth conditions of modal sentences introduce an ontology of possible worlds. It is often supposed that this just is. realism about modality. I shall argue that, so formulated, modal realism is false; for there are. no possible worlds in objective reality. The second part investigates non-objectual. interpretations of modal expressions: this is to be the thesis that modal reality is not entitative in character, and the semantic role of modal expressions is accordingly not referential. Modal realism can still, however, be naturally formulated under a nonobjectual interpretation, whereupon its threat to empiricist epistemology becomes manifest. So the first part of the paper deals with the location of modality in ontology.—what objects there are; while the second part locates modality in modes.—the manner in which objects have properties.92 My guiding strategy will be to contrast modality with two other categories often thought illuminatingly analogous to it, viz. space and time. Use of these as a foil will help us get some perspective on the nature of modal reality.

I According to possible worlds semantics for natural language modal expressions, the truth conditions of modal sentences involve commitment to a domain of objects (the worlds) over which modal expressions are taken to quantify. Formally, such ontological commitment can occur in two ways: either the vernacular modal sentences, containing (syntactic) modal connectives, are initially translated into a first-order language in which the connectives are

91

Truth and Other Enigmas. (London: Duckworth, 1978) .

92

This terminology is taken from Kit Fine's ‘Postscript’ to A. N. Prior and K. Fine, Worlds, Times and Selves. (London: Duckworth, 1977), 177 .

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replaced by suitable restricted quantifiers and associated variables, so that a first-order metalanguage can specify the truth conditions of the regimented object-language homophonically; or else the modal connectives are left primitive in the object-language and the possible worlds quantifiers occur only in the metalanguage, in which case the truth conditions are given nonhomophonically. Such treatments have been proposed for the unary modal connectives and for the binary counterfactual conditional (see Kripke; Lewis).93 Under both sorts of formal treatment the sentences embedded within the scope of the modal connective are construed as predicates. of the objects quantified over according to the stipulated truth conditions; so to make a modal claim is to make a (non-modal) predication on a domain of specifically modal objects. Thus the truth conditions of □ A. are given by ∀ w.(A.′w.) and ◊ A. by ∃ w.(A.′w.).94 The modality expressed in the original sentence thus gets absorbed into a special range of values for a distinctive style of variable. Taken as part of a meaning-theory for a particular natural language, the suggested picture is then this: with respect to a class of expressions not overtly referential in form we are to discern an ontology of possible worlds, thus enlarging the domain of objects apparently spoken of, to which, in making modal assertions, the speakers attribute properties. This is, then, a semantical proposal in which we are invited to acknowledge the existence of entities whose inclusion in the ontology of our language did not immediately meet the eye: we become aware of the objects of modal discourse only when we set about contriving a theory that makes systematic sense of it. In order to evaluate the ontological imputations of semantical proposals, we need some idea of the kinds of constraint to which such imputations are answerable: we need some regulative canons of ontological commitment. Discussion of possible worlds founders in the absence of agreed upon standards of ontological assessment. To get a handle on the issue I shall therefore recognize a number of conditions of acceptability which such ontological proposals may reasonably be required to meet. These conditions are not tendentious in the sense that their very formulation prohibits an ontology of possible worlds; rather, it will turn out. that possible worlds have trouble meeting the conditions. (i) Formal.. By this I mean to cover a battery of requirements which ensure that the theory is semantically workable. Thus it is standardly required that a given semantical proposal allow a finitely axiomatized theory, that it do justice to the manifest structure of sentences, that it exhibit the language as learnable, that it account for structurally valid inferences, that it satisfy some material adequacy condition such as Convention T, that it mesh with a

93

S. Kripke, ‘Semantical Considerations on Modal Logic’, Acta Philosophica Fennica., 16 (1963), 83–94; D. Lewis, Counterfactuals. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973) .

94

The primed sentence letter A. ′ represents a possible worlds predicate corresponding to the sentence A. ; the notation is Fine's (Prior and Fine, Worlds, Times and Selves. , 119).

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model theory yielding a definition of validity, and so on. Meeting some such conditions as these is clearly necessary if the theory is to have any attraction at all. (ii) Linguistic.. This is a label for the following constraint: if a semantic theorist imputes a certain kind of ontology to a range of sentences not superficially committed to such an ontology, then he is under a prima-facie obligation either to point to other expressions in the language explicitly so committed or to explain why it is that the ontology in question never surfaces. The motive behind this condition is to regulate and control departures from surface syntax. For it would seem implausible to discern reference to entities of a given kind in a speaker's language if he was never. found invoking those entities explicitly. This condition is not perhaps absolutely binding, but failure to conform to it constitutes a strong presumption against the semantical proposal in question. On the other hand, if the condition is adequately met the theorist can adduce independent evidence for the correctness of his imputation; and certainly such corroboration can be used to justify a preference between formally equivalent semantic theories. (iii) Metaphysical.. The proposed ontology must not be intrinsically suspect; it must not comprise entities which are demonstrably metaphysically dubious. In particular, alleged values of variables should qualify as genuine individuals, on some acceptable explication of that indispensable notion. For to discern reference to entities of dubious metaphysical status would be to convict ourselves of error by our own lights. This might be formulated as a principle of self.-charity: if sentences seem metaphysically innocent on their surface, then it is a count against a semantical theory of those sentences that it makes them metaphysically outrageous. A good example of a theory failing this condition is the Meinongian account of the semantic role of empty definite descriptions once favoured by Russell: it would be preferable to change our semantics rather than our metaphysics in this case, for we do not want to find ourselves speaking of entities which do not exist.. I know of no conclusive argument that our language could. not be thus aberrant, but I would prefer a theory that made my sincere and settled assertions true by my own standards. (iv) Epistemological.. The linguistic condition required that the expressions in question be related to other expressions of a certain syntactic type; the metaphysical condition required that the expressions relate acceptably to genuine extralinguistic individuals; the epistemological condition imposers requirements on the relation between expressions and a speaker's use. of them. That is, the attributed truth conditions should be pragmatically defensible, in the classical sense. More exactly, the introduced objects must play a suitable part in the learning and verification of the sentences concerned. The imputed ontology must dovetail with how the pragmatic phenomena observably are, and should not be alien to the phenomenology of understanding and using the sentences in question. In other words, what makes our sentences true should properly relate to our knowledge of their truth.

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The foregoing conditions have been stated rather schematically. To see how they operate let us consider a semantical proposal that seems to pass the tests pretty well, and with which the objectual modal semantics unfavourably compares: this is Donald Davidson's (1967)95 treatment of adverbially modified sentences. The basic idea of the proposal is that we see such sentences as containing implicit quantification over events.; the adverbs are then taken as predicates of such events. Formally, the proposal is very like the possible worlds paraphrase of modal sentences. We cleave to first-order regimentations by extending the domain of reference to include a range of objects not superficially spoken of; and just as predicates in modal sentences receive an extra argument place to accommodate the reference to worlds, so predicates in adverbial sentences acquire an extra place for the event variable. In both cases, then, a new style of bound variable is introduced and equipped with a new domain of objects to serve as values thereof. Now it is not my mission to defend Davidson's treatment of adverbs on all fronts, but I think it has some claim to meeting our four conditions. Here is a sketch of how it passes the tests. Since I do not intend to confront possible worlds semantics on the score of formal adequacy, I shall not dwell on the formal merits (or demerits) of Davidson's theory of adverbs. Let it suffice to note that it seems to stand up quite well in respect of this condition. Davidson himself acknowledges the linguistic condition and argues, plausibly enough, that natural language is replete with referential constructions relating to events: quantifier phrases, definite descriptions, proper names, sortal predicates, pronouns, etc. And associated with these we have an elaborate apparatus of individuation: identity sentences, resources for counting, and so forth (Davidson 1969).96 So imputing an ontology of events to sentences not obviously so committed can be corroborated by pointing to related areas of the language in which the ontology of events is explicitly and systematically invoked. Granted this we might explain the absence from the surface syntax of adverbial sentences of reference to events as the result of deletion transformations; whereas if corresponding referential constructions occurred nowhere in the language such an explanation would presumably not be available. Metaphysically, events seem to qualify as authentic individuals: they enter into causal relations; they can be given a clear identity condition; and most important, they admit of inequivalent descriptive identification, and so may be properly designated without being fully described, thus showing their independence from language.97 Events seem as reputable as material objects as values of individual variables and subjects of

95

D. Davidson, ‘The Logical Form of Action Sentences’, in N. Rescher (ed.), The Logic of Decision and Action. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1967), 81–95 .

96

D. Davidson, ‘The Individuation of Events’, in N. Rescher (ed.), Essays in Honor of Carl G. Hempel. (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1969) .

97

The idea that genuine individuals must be specifiable by inequivalent conditions is implicit in Davidson, ‘The Individuation of Events’, 218.

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predication: they are the kind of entity for which we can make sense of the idea of multiple property exemplification. We can also make sense of the distinction between particular and universal in application to events. Neither do they threaten trouble epistemologically. They figure straightforwardly in the explanation of how a speaker verifies sentences purportedly about events; indeed they are plausibly cited as causes. of the perceptual beliefs which constitute (direct) verification of such sentences. They are thus directly implicated in the use of adverbial sentences, and are not such as to render knowledge of such sentences problematic. In other words, the suggested truth conditions for adverbial sentences afford a satisfactory link between truth and knowledge. So I think that Davidson's ontological imputation stands up well under our four conditions; indeed it departs little from the ontological paradigm set by material objects. We must now consider how possible worlds compare with events in the above respects. I shall begin with David Lewis's account (Counterfactuals., ch. 4), because it is the most forthright, clear, and honest defence of possible worlds from a philosophical point of view that I know of. It should be remarked that, as Lewis notes, not much in the way of actual argument. has ever been brought against the theory; and without such argument intuitive conviction must pale beside theoretical power. Arthur Prior vilified it as ‘a tall story’, but was reduced, in rejecting it, to relying upon “ ‘the choice of the soul”, or, if you like, prejudice’ (Prior and Fine, Worlds, Times and Selves., 92–9).98 I want to give the prejudice argumentative colour. Lewis's view is that the quantified world variables which replace modal connectives range over a set of elements, homogeneous in themselves, one of which is distinguished as the actual world. Each such element exists.; the actual world differs from the rest merely in its being the one we inhabit. The actual world is thus just one member of a more inclusive totality of objects not intrinsically different in kind. The word ‘actually’ is an indexical expression which, when uttered by inhabitants of other worlds, picks out the world in which it is uttered; actuality is thus a context-bound property. As Lewis99 remarks, he intends this picture of modal reality to parallel a less controversial conception of the ontology of time: the present is just one element of a more inclusive totality of times each of which can be said (tenselessly) to exist.100 The present is distinguished from other times simply in being the time at which we are—‘presently’ is indexical. He might equally have compared his view of worlds with an even less controversial conception of space: the place at

98

Prior took the same view of time: quantification over times is not to be interpreted literally either. As will emerge, I think there are strong reasons for an asymmetrical attitude towards ontologies of worlds and times.

99

D. Lewis, ‘Anselm and Actuality’, Nous., 4 (1970), 175–88 .

100

The accompanying metaphysics of actuality is criticized in R. M. Adams, ‘Theories of Actuality’, Nous., 8 (1974), 211–31 .

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which I am is but one element of a larger totality of places, all of which (univocally) exist; but of course they do not all exist here., since ‘here’ is indexical. So Lewis wishes us to conceive of truth conditions for modal sentences strictly on the model of objectual truth conditions for temporal and spatial sentences: quantifiers over times and places function just as quantifiers over worlds. Keeping the comparison in mind enables us to take Lewis (as we must) absolutely literally. Possible worlds semantics has undoubtedly enjoyed considerable formal success, largely because it allows techniques developed in classical extensional logic to be carried over to modal languages; and without its formal fecundity an ontology of possible worlds would (I suppose) hardly seem attractive. But formal success is not enough to establish its correctness; we need to be independently convinced that the introduced theoretical entities are acceptable, as Lewis himself recognizes. So, first, do possible worlds meet the linguistic condition? Before I argue that they compare unfavourably with times and places in this respect, let me consider Lewis's own positive argument purporting to uncover direct evidence in natural language of (implicit) acceptance of his ontology of possible worlds. He writes: I believe that there are possible worlds other than the one we happen to inhabit. If an argument is wanted, it is this. It is uncontroversially true that things might be otherwise than they are. I believe, and so do you, that things could have been different in countless ways. But what does this mean? Ordinary language permits the paraphrase: there are many ways things could have been besides the way they actually are. On the face of it, this sentence is an existential quantification. It says that there exist many entities of a certain description, to wit ‘ways things could have been’. I believe that things could have been different in countless ways; I believe permissible paraphrases of what I believe; taking the paraphrase at its face value, I therefore believe in the existence of entities that might be called ‘ways things could have been’. I prefer to call them ‘possible worlds’ (Counterfactuals., 84). This argument proceeds by first finding an uncontentious modal sentence, observing that it contains a position open to existential quantification, and then construing the associated variable as ranging over possible worlds as Lewis characterizes them. Since Lewis is right that ordinary language allows such quantification, any fault in the argument must come at the last step. In effect, Lewis is inviting us to regiment ‘there are ways things could have been besides the way they actually are’ by means of a first-order quantifier somewhat as follows: ‘(∃ x.) (x. is a possible world & x.≠ the actual world)’. However, this method of paraphrase seems to me neither obligatory nor natural. Consider the nonmodal sentence ‘there are ways John is which annoy Jane’. This sentence would most naturally be taken to involve second.-order quantification into predicate position: for a way that something is is surely a property of it. Similarly for ‘there is a way things are’, where ‘things’ is some sort of device of plural reference; or alternatively ‘there is a way the world is’. Now suppose we insert

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a modal operator into such second-order sentences, as in ‘there are ways John could have been besides the way he actually is’. This is naturally represented in the formula: ‘(∃ F.) (◊ F. (John) & ∼actually F. (John))’. This sentence says, not that there are worlds. in which John (or some counterpart)101 has different properties, but rather that there are properties. that John might have had. Similarly, we can render Lewis's sentence thus: ‘(∃ F.) (◊ F. (things) & ∼actually F. (things))’. This says simply that there are properties that things could have possessed. In sum, what Lewis encouraged us to do with individual variables over worlds we can do (and do naturally) using second-order quantification combined with modal operators. It would be ineffective to protest against this alternative method of paraphrase on the ground that it employs primitive modal operators: for Lewis was trying to give an ordinary language argument forcing. us to construe the sentences in question in his preferred way. So I deny that Lewis has drawn attention to a form of words that superficially requires, or even plausibly invites, the kind of truth conditions he wishes to propose. Certainly he has not produced linguistic evidence for his ontology comparable in richness to that available to the theorist of events. Here we may observe a contrast between modality and space and time. For it is not difficult to discover a matrix of ontological locutions in which spatial and temporal expressions are embedded. Thus, in respect of space, we find locative indexicals, demonstratives, place names, functors forming complex singular terms for places, and quantification over places, standard and nonstandard. And such ordinary language reference goes systematic in the advanced physical sciences. (Indeed, places have some claim to be ontologically more basic than material objects in our language.) In the case of time, the language seems similarly entitative: associated with the tense modifiers we have a systematic nomenclature for times (the system of dating), as well as temporal demonstratives, functors, quantifiers, etc. Accordingly, a semantics for spatial and temporal expressions employing quantification over places and times can be corroborated, like the ontology of events, by observing the manifest presence of such ontological commitment in the object-language. But in respect of the possible worlds ontology modal language seems pointedly impoverished: no proper names for worlds, no functors, demonstratives, and no clear cases of quantification (standard or non-standard) over the alleged worlds. Nor do we find ready talk of identity and number in application to possible worlds. Yet surely if there are such entities and we daily quantify over them, our language

101

Although Lewis substitutes a counterpart relation for the identity relation as between objects in distinct possible worlds (see especially Lewis, ‘Counterpart Theory and Quantified Modal Logic’, Journal of Philosophy., 65 (1968), 113–26) , this idiosyncrasy seems logically independent of his position on the ontological status of possible worlds. However, it is very natural, once one has interpreted de re. modal claims as introducing an ontology of counterparts, to take modal predications on the actual world as similarly introducing numerically distinct counterpart worlds. I find the latter move just as implausible as the former, but I will not argue against Lewis on this ground.

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might reasonably be expected to extend to overt recognition of them; at the very least, there is a mystery here for Lewis to dispel. The availability of ontological locutions for space and time seems predicated on their dimensionality. The three spatial dimensions permit a co-ordinate system, crude or sophisticated, with respect to which places may be identified; spatial functors trade upon this. Similarly, our system of dating exploits the linear ordering of time. That is to say, for places and times we have the idea of an ordered domain of elements, where the kind of ordering is reflected in our means of reference to those elements. In the case of worlds such an ordering idea seems arbitrary at best; so it is hard to see how a system of reference, comparable to that applicable to space and time, could be successfully and usefully introduced. The more inclusive totality of which Lewis speaks does not present itself as an arrangement of objects along some natural dimension (or dimensions) allowing for identification according to position along that dimension (those dimensions) relatively to other elements.102 So not only is there in fact. no clear referential apparatus for possible worlds; it is hard to see how there could. be, at least after the fashion of space and time. And this starts a suspicion that the ontology of worlds is alien to the conceptual resources of the ordinary speaker; it is not an ontology for which we can be said to harbour an antecedent predilection. In fact, the modal connectives seem, in the present respect, closer semantically to the truth-functional connectives. If what I have just said is right, we do not pre-theoretically recognize possible worlds as genuine individuals; but is there direct reason to withhold this appellation from them? If there is, then possible worlds are ineligible as values of individual variables and subjects of predication; so the first-order regimentation of modal sentences would inaccurately represent the modal facts. Now it is not easy to define. the notion of an individual, vital as that notion is, but the following two conditions seem necessary to individuality: something is a genuine individual only if (a.) it admits of proper identification short of exhaustive characterization, and (b.) its properties partition (non-trivially) into the essential and the accidental. Condition (a.) captures the idea that an individual is an extra-linguistic entity whose properties exceed those we happen to fix upon in referring to it: and this is essential if we are to apply the picture of first identifying an individual as a potential subject of predication, and then informatively characterizing it by coupling the identifying singular term with a predicative expression. Condition (b.) tells us that an individual is something that has certain properties essentially, but is also such that it can exist through variation in respect of other of its properties. Both conditions ensure that an individual is something distinct from the descriptions true of it. (Meinongian objects seem to fail these conditions.)

102

Lewis himself notes the contrast between worlds and times in respect of ordering in Counterfactuals. , 105.

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Now I think we have enough of a grip on the notion of an individual to appreciate that possible worlds are unqualified for that status; whereas places and times on the other hand adequately meet the conditions. Kit Fine (Prior and Fine, Worlds, Times and Selves., 158) remarks of times that they enjoy scarcely any essential properties but these: that they are times, that they exist, and that they are ordered in a certain way—the rest is accidental. It follows that it would not be feasible to identify a time with the conditions which obtain at that time, that is, with what is true at it. A parallel observation applies to places: only their existence and their positional properties seem essential to them—what goes on at a place is not constitutive of its identify. Moreover, times and places may be picked out in inequivalent ways, and uniquely identified without complete description. So times and places may be made to figure as genuine subjects of informative predication. But with worlds none of this is so. For as Fine (158) goes on to note (though not to make the present point) what transpires in a world is. essential to its identify; the identity of a world is fixed by its ‘content’. This implies that worlds do not permit a (non-trivial) partition of their properties into essential and accidental; so one loses one's grip on the idea that a particular world is distinct from the set of properties which characterize it. Furthermore, it seems clear that a world has not been uniquely. specified until all of its properties have been listed; it is not determinate of which world one is speaking until its whole content has been specified. It is difficult to see, therefore, how we can apply the idea of first picking out a world and then predicating some property of it. (Another way of putting the point is that we cannot easily make sense of informative identity statements about worlds, since it seems that they can be presented to us in just one way.) We can perhaps conceive of the actual. world as an individual, but that is precisely because we think that it. could have been different. Indeed, it seems more natural to construe what are called possible worlds as ontologically of the nature of states or properties; but if so, modality belongs rather with predicate position: it is not properly associated with values of individual variables. (Space and time seem quite otherwise.) So formulas containing alleged world variables should be viewed with suspicion: we do not understand their import just because we can write them down—we must satisfy ourselves that they can really mean what they purport to. It seems to me that the indicated problematic status of possible worlds as individuals renders unsurprising the observed reluctance of our language to treat them so. (I shall return to this question in another connection.) The fourth condition we imposed on ontological imputations was epistemological. And here I think that the Lewisian truth conditions encounter serious trouble: for they yield a conspicuously incorrect epistemology of modality. Before I give my reasons for saying this, let me distinguish the objection I want to urge from a different epistemological worry one sometimes hears voiced. The worry is this: possible worlds are entities causally insulated from each

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other, in particular from how things are in the actual world; but then how can we come to know about them, since knowledge about a range of objects requires causal interaction with those objects? In other words: we have some modal knowledge, but this could not have been acquired by inspection of possible worlds, owing to their causal insulation; so possible worlds are not implicated in the epistemology of modality; therefore the truth conditions of modal sentences do not concern possible worlds. The general point here is that we cannot get into epistemic contact with entities so remote from the sphere of actuality in which we are condemned to toil. Now I would be the first to agree that there is a genuine perplexity behind this worry, but I doubt its dialectical power against a proponent of possible worlds. There are two points. First, as I shall notice below, modality gives rise to such epistemological problems even when non-objectually construed; so the underlying difficulty is not escaped by abolishing the worlds. Second, there are plausible semantical theories of other types of sentence which present exactly analogous perplexities—the most notable being mathematical sentences. If the truth conditions of mathematical sentences involve abstract entities, themselves causally inert, then a parallel epistemological problem arises.103 But since the alleged problem is not distinctively. presented by possible worlds semantics, a defender of those entities can produce some motivation for resisting the conception of knowledge that the objection rests upon. At least, it could be maintained that we have to do with a genuine antinomy here between our metaphysics and our epistemology, and not a knockdown objection to that metaphysics. So if we are to dispatch possible worlds on the score of epistemology, we need considerations of a more specific and less question-begging sort. Let us grant, then, as a concession to Lewis, that we possess some cognitive faculty which enables us to know what is true in other possible worlds; a faculty of the same species as that proposed by some (e.g. Gödel) in respect of mathematical entities and structures.104 To fix ideas, we might think of the faculty as a kind of mental vision, analogous perhaps to the ordinary vision whereby we learn of the actual world. Now, as I said, Lewis takes modal sentences to contain quantification over a homogeneous domain of objects, the worlds. So the question for Lewis is how the postulated modal faculty relates to the entities comprising the truth conditions of modal sentences so as to yield modal knowledge. According to Lewis (Counterfactuals., 90), the cardinality of the set of possible worlds is equal to or greater than the cardinality of the set of subsets of real numbers: so the quantification is over a non-denumerably infinite set of objects, the same in kind, remember, as the

103

See P. Benacerraf, ‘Mathematical Truth’, Journal of Philosophy., 70 (1973), 661–79 , for a clear statement of the issue.

104

For a discussion of the Gödelian faculty of mathematical intuition, see M. Steiner, Mathematical Knowledge. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 130 ff .

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actual world. Now let us enquire how sentences with such quantificational truth conditions are verified. Our basic model of the verification of such sentences is, as Dummett says,105 the ‘direct method’ of applying to each element of the domain some test which determines whether or not it satisfies the condition in question. (If the condition embeds further quantifiers, as would a possible worlds paraphrase for iterated modalities, this may involve more than a single such total check.) It seems plain, however, that we could. not verify modal sentences by the direct method, since the modal faculty would presumably require a non-zero time to test whether a given world satisfies the condition appended to the possible worlds quantifier. (Just think how long it takes to verify a necessary empirical truth in the actual world!) So our knowledge of the truth of a sentence of the form □ A. could not be acquired by directing the modal faculty sequentially and exhaustively to the infinite domain of possible worlds. If that were the only available method of verification, then modal claims would (or should) be the object of extreme scepticism, since our evidence for modal statements would perforce fall far short of covering that in virtue of which they are true. My point here is not, of course, that no sentence can be credited with such radically undecidable truth conditions: it is rather that, since modal sentences manifestly do not thus transcend our powers of verification, an account of their epistemology on the present lines cannot be correct. Modality contrasts strikingly with space and time in this respect: contingent sentences about all places and all times typically do. present severe problems of decidability. So the quantificational truth conditions of such sentences well match the extent of our spatial and temporal knowledge: we find just the degree of undecidability by direct method that the suggested truth conditions predict. The possible worlds theorist must, therefore, if he is to account for our modal knowledge, suggest some indirect. means by the exercise of which our modal knowledge might be acquired and justified, where this means suffices to yield knowledge of what holds true in the infinity of possible worlds. I do not know of any actual suggestions to this end, but those that I have devised seem to me not to work. What is needed is some method having two components: a principle for selecting some subset of worlds which the modal faculty can be reasonably supposed to survey; and a rule of inference which licenses us to move from direct knowledge of the properties of that subset to justified conviction concerning the containing totality. A straightforward suggestion, then, is the method of ordinary enumerative induction: we proceed by surveying mentally some finite number of selected worlds with a view to determining whether the sentence in question is true at those worlds; and if it is, we infer that the remaining unsurveyed worlds follow suit. Thus it is that we may come to know that some statement is necessarily true. Such a method certainly seems

105

M. Dummett, Frege: Philosophy of Language. (London: Duckworth, 1973), 236–9, 634–6 .

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phenomenologically inaccurate; but it is also inadequate, as a matter of principle, to account for our modal knowledge. For surely the subset of worlds we can reasonably be supposed to check in the time it takes to arrive at a justified modal belief will fall far short of exhausting the set of worlds in which the sentence is required to be true. If this were the procedure, then our grounds for modal claims would be highly non-conclusive: we would have no right to the confi-dence we commonly repose in such claims, and scepticism would be indicated. (Recall that many necessary truths have been supposed paradigms of certainty.) So this suggestion misrepresents the epistemology of modal truth. Again, it is instructive to contrast modality with space and time: applying such an inductive method to a large totality of places and times leaves us, and rightly so, in a condition of extreme dubiety. Our degree of conviction about modal truth might now prompt the idea that our method of establishing it might resemble that of inductive proof in mathematics; for here we attain a comparable confidence about comparable domains. Such a method would require a basis premiss, perhaps establishing truth in the actual world, conjoined with an induction step, exhibiting the truth of a sentence at the k. + 1 world as dependent upon the truth of that sentence at the k.th world, thus demonstrating the truth of the sentence at all worlds. This method at least seems to be the right kind. of justification procedure to explain our confident modal knowledge, but it does not appear feasible in the present case: for the worlds are not well ordered under any satisfactory ordering relation, as the natural numbers are ordered under the successor relation, and I can see no plausible way in which the induction step might be proved. In default of a detailed and specific proposal of this sort, I therefore conclude that this method will not bring the totality of worlds within the reach of our circumscribed epistemic capacities. Seeing that inductive methods are unworkable, someone might suggest a falsificationist procedure for the discovery of modal truth. Thus we do better to direct the modal faculty upon the subset of worlds most likely to falsify the given statement: if the statement passes this test, then our rule of inference licenses us to accept the modal sentence as true. The analogy with space and time is that we go to the place or time at which the universal sentence will most likely be falsified, there make the requisite observations, and judge accordingly. It is not altogether clear how we might set about locating such a potentially falsifying world, but anyway the suggestion has the same defect as the inductivist proposal: our modal beliefs should be relegated to the extremely tentative, as tentative as we are often told our scientific beliefs should be; but I think it is obvious that no such insecurity is right. The general difficulty is that the gap between the inspectable subset of worlds and the total set does not seem bridgeable by some principle of inference which justifies our actual modal beliefs. It therefore seems to me that either the epistemology of modality cannot conform to the possible worlds truth conditions and so those truth conditions

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must be rejected, or it should be said (heroically) that our modal convictions are unjustified and should hereafter become victims of scepticism. Since I have argued against possible worlds on other grounds, and since I think there is an alternative view of modal truth, I advise that we retain our modal beliefs and extrude the worlds. It is natural now to suggest, if one is impressed by the preceding difficulties, that the epistemological condition be met by trying to divorce truth conditions and verification conditions. The trouble arose because we took the verifying modal faculty to operate by apprehending the objects whose properties determine modal sentences as true or false. The solution, it may be suggested, is to dissociate the modal faculty from those objects, and let the grounds of modal knowledge consist in something other than (direct) knowledge of the worlds. The suggestion is the analogue of a certain proposed solution to the problem of mathematical knowledge: since mathematical entities construed Platonistically seem unknowable on a causal theory of knowledge, we must ground such knowledge, not on any direct apprehension of their properties and relations, but on some empirical basis. Thus it is suggested that we know mathematical truth by perception of proofs, these understood as stretches of notation; or again, that the application of mathematics in empirical science provides a route to mathematical knowledge, since we verify our empirical theories holistically.106 My general complaint about such suggestions is that, in severing the connection between what renders the sentences in question true and the means by which we come to know their truth, we make a mystery of how it is that our having just those grounds can constitute a proper justification for knowledge of truths of just that sort. In other words, it is hard to see how a person can justifiably believe a sentence if his justification is unrelated to what it is offered as a justification for.: for what makes it the case that he justifiably believes a sentence with those. truth conditions?107 Certainly, as a matter of general principle about knowledge we take it that some such connectedness condition has to be met. But in case this general point fails to carry conviction, let me examine a specific and tempting proposal along these lines for the case of modal knowledge. It is very plausible that, at least for the strict modalities, knowledge of the modality of a given sentence is arrived at a priori. This is pretty evident for sentences whose truth (as distinct from their necessity) is known a priori, but it

106

For such a view of mathematical knowledge see W. D. Hart, ‘Access and Inference’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society., suppl. vol. (1979), 153–65 : Hart's position derives from W. V. Quine's suggestions in ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, From a Logical Point of View. (New York: Harper & Row, 1961), 20–46 .

107

This kind of point is urged by Benacerraf, ‘Mathematical Truth’, 672–3, against epistemology for (Platonistic) mathematics based upon the empirical accessibility of proofs; I am urging the point more generally.

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also seems to hold for necessary a posteriori sentences; for example, statements of natural kind, composition, identity, and origin. Thus it may be said that we do not gain knowledge of the corresponding modalized sentences by quasiempirical inspection of the possible worlds in virtue of which the sentences are true: rather we come to know them by some sort of grasp of concepts. More precisely, we come to know that a certain empirical statement is necessary by inference from a pair of premisses: the first is the non-modal empirical truth which we know by ordinary a posteriori procedures; the second is a conditional, affirming that if the concept in question applies to a sequence of objects then it does so necessarily, where this conditional is known a priori by reflection on the concept in question. Modus ponens. delivers the modal conclusion.108 Now the suggestion is to be that this account of such modal knowledge nowhere cites singular premisses about possible worlds, that is, instances of the universal quantifier to which the modal connective is equivalent: instead it speaks of concepts and our grasp of them—so the modal faculty relates not to worlds but to concepts. Now it is not that I think this account of modal knowledge is wrong—though it is often mischaracterized—but I do not see that it helps the possible worlds theorist. Note to begin with that this entirely rescinds the analogy with space and time, so far as the epistemology of the statements is concerned. Secondly, the second premiss is itself modal, so knowledge of it is knowledge about all worlds: we must then say that it. is known without adverting to how it stands in those worlds. But if so my general difficulty becomes acute: for how could ‘grasp of concepts’ warrant belief about the infinite set of worlds? The concepts onto which the modal faculty is directed presumably exist in the actual world; so it is hard to see how such grasp could inform one of how things are in all the possible worlds. That is to say, the source of modal knowledge is being located in a region of reality which is both quite distinct from, and inexplicably related to, the region whose condition the modal knowledge is knowledge of. It is therefore quite mysterious how we can justifiably pass from the alleged grounds to that for which they are grounds. I suppose that someone strongly attached to possible worlds could choose to live with this mystery: but it seems to me to be a powerful prima-facie objection to the possible worlds truth conditions. One would prefer, other things being equal, to have a theory of modal truth conditions which did not have this unattractive consequence; such a theory is proposed in the second part of the paper. I have argued that Lewis-style truth conditions for modal sentences fail a number of well-motivated conditions on the acceptability of ontological imputations. In doing so I have had to spell out views and contrive possible defences to the objections I have raised. This runs the risk of incurring accusations

108

This is the account of our knowledge of a posteriori necessities naturally suggested by Kripke's discussion of essentialism in ‘Naming and Necessity’, in D. Davidson and G. Harman (eds.), Semantics of Natural Language. (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1972), 253–355 .

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of ignoratio elenchi., or of encouraging retreat to positions seemingly less vulnerable. My own suspicion is that Lewis's metaphysics is the only way to make clear and honest sense of an ontology of possible worlds, but I am aware that this will not meet with instant agreement. So I should consider some alternative views of possible worlds which have been supposed to avoid the excesses of Lewis but which preserve the intuitive content of the objectual view. I shall therefore discuss the conceptions of possible worlds suggested by Robert Stalnaker and by Saul Kripke.109 Stalnaker's theory is developed in reaction to Lewis's. Stalnaker wants a conception of possible worlds which recognizes their literal existence as irreducible entities, and which serves in the interpretation of modal locutions and in the analysis of intensional concepts such as that of the proposition. He wants, that is, to preserve the idea of possible worlds as values of individual variables. But he rejects Lewis's picture of a set of worlds not differing in intrinsic nature from the actual world. (We might put it by saying that he rejects the analogy with space and time.) Stalnaker agrees with Lewis that worlds are ‘ways things might have been’, but denies that these entities are of the same sort as the actual world. In fact, he seems to hold that possible worlds are to be conceived as states of. the world. So the world variables are taken to range over such possible states. Now I have already argued that the form of words invoked by Lewis (and now by Stalnaker) should not be interpreted as containing a first-order quantifier over possible entities, but should instead be seen as a second-order quantifier over non-modal properties which are predicated in some modality of ordinary actual objects. But let us for the moment go along with the alternative regimentation: then we can ask whether the attendant ontology of states. is acceptable. I have three sorts of objection. First, this proposal does not seem to escape two of our earlier complaints: we are still short of convincing linguistic corroboration of the introduced ontology; and the epistemological problems seem to recur in precisely analogous form, since the verification of modal sentences will now involve surveying the infinity of possible states. or employ some clearly inadequate indirect method. Second, the metaphysical objection from what it takes to be an individual is avoided only by undermining the title of Stalnaker's worlds to feature as values of individual variables. If his possible worlds are of the nature of states or properties, then they belong with expressions whose semantic role is that of predication; but to concede that is to give up the quantificational paraphrase. There is a related query: it is customary to view truth in the actual world (truth simpliciter.) as following by universal instantiation from truth in all worlds (necessary truth); but this seems possible on Stalnaker's view only if we distinguish the actual world from the world. If

109

Stalnaker, ‘Possible Worlds’, Nous., 10 (1976), 65–75; Kripke, ‘Naming and Necessity’, 264 ff .

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possible worlds are states and the world is an individual, then the actual world must itself be a state of the world if it and the other worlds are to comprise a homogeneous domain over which universal instantiation can be interpreted as valid. But surely part of the appeal of Stalnaker's picture was that the actual world is distinguished from merely possible worlds just by being the world.—‘I and all my surroundings’, in Lewis's phrase. Thirdly, Stalnaker advertises possible worlds, as he construes them, as entities capable of giving a non-circular explanation of propositions. If worlds are taken in Lewis's way, one can appreciate the motive: a proposition becomes a set of concrete (though non-actual) individuals. But on Stalnaker's explication the appearance of explanation seems to lapse: propositions become, in effect, sets of properties. But properties are universals, the kind of entity of which propositions are said to be composed, so the circle of explanation begins to look small indeed. In fact, given a nominalist view of universals, Stalnaker's conception of possible worlds seems to collapse into a sets of sentences view. It would be odd if Stalnaker's ‘moderate realism’ about possible worlds were to depend upon rejection of such nominalism. I therefore think that the Stalnaker view is more eliminative or reductive than he intended it to be. The view, indeed, often seems to amount to little more than the anodyne suggestion, acceptable to those who refuse the objectual truth conditions, that the world might have been different; which is just to say that the world is an individual with modal properties. That is harmless enough, but in no way warrants quantification over an infinite domain of possible worlds. It seems to me no better than inferring from the fact that a person might have had a different life history that there are infinitely many possible persons corresponding to the actual one who are. enjoying those alternative life histories, either as individuals or as states. It is less easy to find a halfway house between primitive modal connectives and Lewis's ‘extreme realism’ than one might suppose. At any rate, Stalnaker's suggestions fail to justify the objectual truth conditions he aimed to defend. Kripke is popularly supposed (a.) to have scouted a Lewisian conception of possible worlds, (b.) to have offered a picture of the ontological status of possible worlds which is metaphysically acceptable, and (c.) to have supplied, by way of (b.), a satisfactory objectual interpretation of the truth conditions of modal sentences. In other words, Kripke is taken to have given a metaphysically innocent account of the domain of objects over which possible worlds variables range, where the truth value of a modal sentence turns upon conditions of those objects. I think this popular view of Kripke's views is mistaken. However, the conflicting pressures at work in Kripke's discussion make it difficult to extract a coherent doctrine: he can be found consistent, but only by modifying the popular (and somewhat natural) view. Indeed, his ultimate position, it seems to me, is not calculated to promote the cause of possible worlds semantics.

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On the one hand, he is anxious to deny that possible worlds are correctly conceived as ‘other dimensions of a more inclusive universe’ (‘Naming and Necessity’, 345): this amounts, fairly clearly, to a rejection of the standard parallel with space and time, since the here and now clearly are. elements of larger totalities. He prefers, instead, to speak of possible worlds as postulated. entities, not as objects of intellectual discovery. at all (267).110 Possible worlds are claimed to be, in Lewis's phrase, ‘creatures of the imagination’. This conception is directly opposed to Lewis's ‘realist’ position, since possible worlds are not taken by Kripke to exist independently of our imaginative stipulations. It strongly suggests an analogy with the intuitionists' conception of the ontological status of numbers, viz. that they are ‘mental constructions’. If so, Kripke's characterization of possible worlds implies that quantified world variables range over a domain of constructed. objects: and on that intuitive interpretation of modal sentences we would expect the standard consequences of such anti-realist views—namely, intuitionistic-type logic and time-relative truth.111 In fact, the Kripkean picture of possible worlds can be seen as a reduction of the truth conditions of possible worlds sentences to their assertibility conditions, since exercises of imagination constitute (for Kripke) our route to knowledge of possible worlds. These observations have the following consequence: if. the truth conditions of modal sentences consist in facts about possible worlds, then on Kripke's conception of the latter, modal truth should be taken anti-realistically. That is indeed a consequence that many would happily embrace: but not Kripke. For, on the other hand, Kripke clearly wishes to maintain a strongly objectivist view of modal truth: his essentialism commits him to it, and he often speaks, realistically, of our ‘seeing’ whether some statement is necessary or contingent (e.g. ‘Naming and Necessity’, 267). That we are at liberty to stipulate. modal truth would be anathema to him; rather, we must discover what is necessary by philosophical reflection (‘intuition’) and scientific inquiry. The tension is obvious: how can possible worlds comprise the truth conditions of modal sentences if the former are anti-realistically conceived while the latter are interpreted in a realist way? It seems to me that consistency requires that Kripke deny the correctness of such truth conditions: that is to say, modal sentences should not be given a possible worlds semantics, assuming that the job of semantics is to specify the conditions of strict and literal truth. What is interesting is that Kripke does come close to concluding as much. After lamenting the abuses to which the notion of possible world has been put, he says: ‘It is better still, to avoid confusion, not to say “In some possible world Humphrey would have won [wins]” but rather, simply, “Humphrey might have won’ ” (‘Naming and

110

Rescher elaborates what he takes to be a similar view: N. Rescher, A Theory of Possibility. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975) .

111

Rescher remarks upon this seeming consequence (ibid.: 97).

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Necessity’, 345). This very strongly suggests that, if we are limning the true and ultimate structure of modal reality, we do better to leave the modal connectives primitive: paraphrasing them with possible worlds quantifiers misrepresents how things modally are. Prior took a similar view: if we are to talk of possible worlds at all we should construe such talk as strictly derivative from talk in which modal expressions are semantically non-objectual, for the primitive modal connectives better convey ‘the structure of the facts’.112 So it seems that if Kripke is to bring his modal semantics into line with his metaphysics he needs to favour a position like Prior's, in which case a semantics must be provided which really conforms to the advice Kripke offers in the remark quoted above. In short, Kripke is not in fact a modal objectualist: the truth conditions of modal sentences are determined prior to, and independently of, the imaginative construction of possible worlds. What, then, is the status of possible worlds for Kripke, both in his informal remarks and in his formal model theory for modal logic? I think the only answer can be that we are to take such talk merely as evocative metaphor: its significance is purely heuristic, in the sense that it can aid our thought about matters modal. But it does not reflect the sober metaphysical truth. This means that all such talk must be ultimately eliminable when employed in serious contexts, on pain of talking fiction.113 So possible worlds model theory cannot be understood as providing a genuine interpretation. of serious modal discourse; what it gives is just an algebraic formal model. That is what I meant when I said that Kripke's view of possible worlds undermines the ambitions of possible worlds semantics.. Perhaps possible worlds, understood as imaginative mental constructions, have a place in an account of how we verify. modal sentences, but they cannot, so understood, supply a foundation for a realist conception of modal truth.. It seems to me, therefore, that Kripke's view of the ontological status of possible worlds is basically right, but that the view disqualifies them from featuring in modal truth conditions; so I need not rehearse my earlier objections to possible worlds in application to Kripke's conception.

112

The phrase is Prior's (Prior and Fine, Worlds, Times and Selves. , 54). (I should perhaps make it clear that my informal talk of facts. in this paper is not intended to imply any commitment to an irreducible ontology of such entities.)

113

One notable context in which Kripke permits himself to quantify over possible worlds is in his characterization of rigid designation—a. is a rigid designator of x. iff a. designates x. in every possible world in which x. exists. However, such quantification seems easily eliminable in favour of modal operators, thus: a. is a rigid designator of x. in L. iff a. designates x. in L. & ∼◊∃ y. (y. ≠ x. & a. designates y. in L. ). (This definition can be employed for rigidity with respect to modal operators weaker than, or at least different from, metaphysical modalities: thus we have nomically. rigid designators, e.g. ‘the gravitational constant’, ‘the speed of light’, etc.) On the other hand, terms naturally described as temporally rigid or even spatially rigid may, I think without metaphysical impropriety, be defined by quantification over times and places. There seems nothing objectionable about defining these different kinds of rigidity in formally different ways.

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I have now reviewed what I take to be the principal candidates for a philosophical explication of the ideas on which objectual modal semantics is based, and found them wanting. What are the consequences for realism about modality? We can say at once that if modal realism depended upon construing the subject matter of modal sentences in terms of possible worlds, then indeed modal realism would be unacceptable. However, I think an alternative formulation of modal realism is available which does not encounter the difficulties of the objectual formulation; I turn to this in the second part of the paper. But a second point has emerged: possible worlds semantics is not sufficient. for modal realism either, since quantifiers over them might be interpreted in the manner of the intuitionists. Just as the intuitionists employ (non-substitutional) quantifiers over numbers but construe them constructively—numbers are the products of creative mental acts—so an adherent of possible worlds semantics might propose a constructivist interpretation of his quantificational metalanguage and assume the underlying logic to be intuitionistic.114 The values of world variables would then comprise something like imaginative acts or their contents, in which case the truth of a modal statement would consist in the obtaining of the conditions in which we recognize. such a truth. We must, accordingly, think again about the truth conditions of modal sentences and about what it is to hold a realist view of modal truth.

II The quantificational treatment of modal expressions naturally corresponds to the idea that the metaphysical category of modality is that of object.. I said that the opposing view conceived modality as consisting precisely in modes.: but what is a mode? The intuitive content of this notion is that of a way. of possessing properties. I should like to put this as follows: modalities are to be conceived as higher order conditions on properties—they are properties of properties. Thus we can say that an object has a property dispositionally, or that a property is an essential property of objects which instantiate it, or that the properties expressed in a law of nature are related by nomic necessity, or that an analytic sentence has the property of truth necessarily. So understood, modal qualifications can be compared with other locutions naturally construed as conditions on properties. Quantification itself, as Frege characterized it, functions as a higher order property (second-level concept). (But this analogy. between modes and quantification should not be construed as actual subsumption—modality is

114

Given the constructivist conception of possible worlds I have attributed to Kripke, and given his ‘possible worlds semantics’ for modal languages, one might think it natural for Kripke to integrate his semantics for modality with his semantical interpretation of intuitionistic logic, as developed in his ‘Semantical Analysis of Intuitionist Logic 1’, in J. N. Crossley and M. Dummett (eds.), Formal Systems and Recursive Functions. (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1965), 92–130 . How this would work out I leave to others more competent than I to judge: but clearly it would imply an anti-realist view of modal truth, if taken as an account of literal truth conditions.

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not a kind. of quantification.) Value qualifications seem to behave analogously too: we say that it is good to have a certain property or bad that a pair of properties be combined. (So a comparison with deontic expressions can be made independently of possible worlds truth conditions for the two sorts of locution.) Or again, modality might be compared with the properties of objectivity and subjectivity: these notions are best seen as properties of properties—they categorize first-order properties of individuals.115 It seems to me that this conception of the metaphysical character of modality captures the intuitive idea of a mode of property instantiation; and it is quite removed from an objectual view of the import of modal expressions. Moreover, it well consorts with the syncategorematic character of modal expressions: they qualify other predicates, while not themselves capable of ordinary first-order predication (save by ellipsis). I am concerned, then, with the question of realism with respect to facts of this higher order structure (if I may so speak). But before I address the matter directly, some remarks are in order on semantics proper. I take it that one constraint upon semantic proposals is that, in a sense it is difficult to make precise and hygenic, they should do justice to our prior substantive conception of the sector of reality with which the sentences at issue are designed to deal. So we need a semantics for modal expressions which conforms to the picture of modal facts just sketched. I am myself somewhat doubtful that such a semantics is presently available, but I think there are formally workable proposals which are at least in the right spirit. I shall mention three kinds of theory; this will at least show that the alternative to possible worlds semantics need not be a refusal to theorize, as Lewis (Counterfactuals., 85) insinuates.116 Each proposal can be said to assign a distinctive semantic role (contribution to truth conditions) to modal expressions, though they treat them as primitive in the sense that their semantic content is not in any way analysed..117 (i) One style of truth theory regards modal expressions as genuine operators on open and closed sentences by employing an intensional metalanguage in which modal operators modify sentences containing semantic machinery. Formally the method parallels the usual Tarskian clause for negation, and in a clear sense yields homophonic truth conditions (e.g. Baldwin, Peacocke, Gupta, Davies).118 (ii) There are recommendations to see modal expressions as more properly

115

Here I have in mind Thomas Nagel's discussions of subjective and objective: see ‘What is it like to be a Bat?’, and ‘Subjective and Objective’, in Mortal Questions. (Cambridge: University Press, 1979) . It is a notable fact that all four sorts of higher order property have been objects of suspicion or of reduction: perhaps there is some general antirealist tendency to doubt the reality of facts of this apparent structure.

116

Would he count the standard Tarskian clauses for the truth-functional connectives or for the classical quantifiers as instances of theoretical abstinence?

117

I am assuming the Davidsonian distinction between attributions of logical form and conceptual analyses of structurally primitive semantic elements: see e.g. D. Davidson, ‘Truth and Meaning’, Synthese., 17 (1967), 304–23 .

118

T. Baldwin, ‘Quantification, Modality and Indirect Speech’, in S. Blackburn (ed.), Meaning, Reference and Necessity. (Cambridge: University Press, 1975), 56–108; C. Peacocke, ‘Necessity and Truth Theories’, Journal of Philosophical Logic., 7 (1978), 473–500 ; A. Gupta, ‘Modal Logic and Truth’, Journal of Philosophical Logic., 7 (1978), 441–72; M. Davies, ‘Weak Necessity and Truth Theories’, Journal of Philosophical Logic., 7 (1978), 415–39 .

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attaching to predicates. (or predicate abstracts): this gives natural expression to the idea of a modal property, and may avoid some alleged problems about permitting bound variables in the scope of modal operators. This approach recognizes a category of predicate modifiers and enriches the usual truth-theoretic resources to handle these.119 (iii) One might extend Davidson's para-tactic theory of propositional attitude expressions to modality.120 This approach keeps the theory extensional, and again sidesteps issues about opacity. It would need to accommodate quantification into modal contexts, of course, but any solution for the case of propositional attitudes would presumably go over to modality. On such a treatment, modal expressions would be metalinguistic. A related metalinguistic view, due to Quine,121 treats modal expressions as multigrade predicates, satisfied by objects and predicates. None of these theories requires quantification over specifically modal objects; and each seems at least consistent with the metaphysical picture I favour. Since the matter is controversial, and since my present concerns do not call for a firm decision, I shall not try to defend a particular theory here; but for the sake of definiteness the reader may select theory (i) as the semantic background to what follows. Realism with respect to a given class of sentences has been characterized as the thesis that the truth conditions of those sentences transcend the recognitional capacities possessed by their users.122 Let me distinguish three kinds of recognition transcendence. First, the class of sentences in question might be such as to permit us evidence bearing upon the truth value of any sentence of the class—so that we can always put ourselves in a position justifi-ably to assert or deny any given sentence—but the evidence may always fail to be conclusive: that is, the class admits of complete but non-conclusive verification. Second, we cannot guarantee complete verifiability—some sentences of the class may altogether elude evidentially warranted assertion—though some.

119

A theory of this type is developed in C. Peacocke, ‘An Appendix to David Wiggins' “Note’ ”, in G. Evans and J. McDowell (eds.), Truth and Meaning. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 313–24 .

120

D. Davidson, ‘On Saying That’, in D. Davidson and J. Hintikka (eds.), Words and Objections. (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1969), 158–74 . I would like to extend the paratactic theory to the relational case by letting the quantifier in the first sentence actually bind. the variable free in the second. This suggestion is encouraged by cases of pronominal crossreference like ‘There is a big fish in the river. Go and catch it!’, which are also not plausibly construed as truth-functional compounds of open and closed sentences. But I cannot elaborate on the suggestion now.

121

W. V. Quine, ‘Intensions Revisited’, in Peter French et al.. (eds.), Perspectives in the Philosophy of Language. (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1979), 268–74 .

122

This is Dummett's general formulation of realism (Truth and Other Enigmas. ). He takes this to result from insistence on bivalence for undecidable sentences: however, it should be noted that recognition transcendence could obtain in cases which admit of complete though non-conclusive decidability.

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sentences do permit recognition of their truth or falsity. Third, the sentences are always. unverifiable—even nonconclusively—by means of our actual recognitional faculties. Each of these possibilities may be described as cases in which the realist view of truth conditions introduces a gap between the world and our knowledge of it. The anti-realist characteristically protests at the introduction of such a gap: for, on a realist view, the relation between knowledge and reality becomes problematic. So we can say that a realist suggests a conception of reality to which our epistemic faculties may be in some way inadequate, whereas an anti-realist conceives the world as essentially. accessible to our epistemic faculties. Now what I want to notice about this formulation of the dispute between realist and anti-realist is that it presupposes a prior inventory of recognitional capacities: a sector of reality can be judged recognition-transcendent, in any of the ways distinguished, only relative to antecedent assumptions about what faculties we have. And it is a notable fact that one realist strategy is to try to close the epistemic gap by claiming the existence of a faculty which crosses it. Dialectically the position is as follows: the realist formulates his conception of what the truth conditions of the given sentences consist in; the anti-realist protests that on that conception the truth conditions would objectionably transcend our faculties; the realist replies by disputing the assumptions about our faculties which underlie the antirealist's protest, thus (as he hopes) restoring their accessibility. The debate is then apt to devolve upon the acceptability of the alleged faculty. Examples showing this pattern are readily produced. Thus it has been claimed that the truth conditions of sentences about the past or about other minds are not, on a realist view, recognition-transcendent, because we can be credited with a perceptual capacity which (at least on some occasions) yields direct knowledge of the facts in question: so we do not have to picture our faculties vainly attempting, by means of some dubious process of inference, to traverse the gap at which the anti-realist jibs.123 Somewhat so, a realist about ethical or mathematical sentences will find himself appealing to special cognitive faculties to account for our ethical or mathematical knowledge. Thus a mathematical Platonist needs some account of how we come by mathematical knowledge, given his conception of mathematical reality: and here a faculty of mathematical ‘intuition’ has sometimes been introduced, its operations characterized in quasi-perceptual terms (Gödel).124 And an ethical realist, locating values in the objective world, has to invoke a distinctive faculty of ethical

123

This is John McDowell's view of the past and other minds (‘On “The Reality of the Past’ ”, in C. Hookway and P. Pettit (eds.), Action and Interpretation. (Cambridge: University Press, 1978), 127–44) .

124

K. Gödel, ‘What is Cantor's Continuum Problem?’, in P. Benacerraf and H. Putnam (eds.), Philosophy of Mathematics: Selected Readings. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1964), 258–73 .

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apprehension directed upon such values.125 In each of these cases we can say that the realist has introduced problematic cognitive faculties in order to link the facts as he construes them to our knowledge of those facts. Actually, it is useful to distinguish two kinds of case. In one kind the form of the anti-realist complaint is that the realist truth conditions invite scepticism: this is because knowledge of those conditions appears mediated by a problematic inference—so with (e.g.) the past and other minds.126 In the other kind the complaint is in a way more fundamental: the trouble here is that the anti-realist cannot comprehend how the introduced faculty is supposed to operate at all. That is, it is not that we have a clear idea of the mechanism of operation of the faculty but worry that it cannot reach far enough; rather, it is obscure what it would be. for the alleged faculty to yield cognitive states consisting in a knowledge of the realist's truth conditions—so with (e.g.) abstract objects and ethical values. (As I shall later suggest, this difference turns upon the role of causation. in the operation of the faculty.) So we have two ways in which the relation between knowledge and reality may be problematic on a realist conception: but they fall under a common rubric in that for both realism seems to require problematic epistemic faculties. The formulation just arrived at differs in an important respect from Dummett's standard formulation. Dummett has the realist claiming recognition-transcendence in conjunction with bivalence. But, as we have seen, positions naturally classified as realist do not quite fit this description: for in some cases a realist precisely denies. recognitiontranscendence; he does not admit that his picture of truth conditions makes them unknowable. What he does is to secure this knowability by invoking problematic faculties. It therefore seems to me that, if we are to have a suitably general and uniform formulation of the realist/anti-realist dispute, we need to amend Dummett's official formulation in the way I have suggested. The relevance of the foregoing remarks to the topic of modality is this: the shape realism takes with respect to modal sentences does not easily fit the mould Dummett casts; but it fits the broader formulation got by modifying Dummett's criterion in the suggested way. Its failure to conform to Dummett's characterization is shown in two (related) points. First, there is no class of sentences we can naturally identify as constituting evidence. for modal claims and with respect to which the anti-realist proposes a reduction. That is, in Dummett's terminology,127 the disputed. class and the reductive. class are not

125

Thus ethical intuitionism. J. L. Mackie objects to precisely this feature of moral realism (Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 28 ff.).

126

Realism of this sort is discussed in my ‘An A Priori. Argument for Realism’ (1979); repr. as ch. 12 in this volume.

127

M. Dummett, ‘The Reality of the Past’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society., 69 (1968), 239–58 .

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plausibly taken as standing in a relation of evidential support.128 Second, realism about modality has not been accompanied by specifically sceptical. worries: it has not been supposed that a realist is committed to viewing modal reality as stretching out beyond the evidence we can acquire about it. Rather, the focus of worry has been of the second kind I distinguished: the problem of what manner of faculty is capable of any. sort of apprehension of modal facts. So we can expect modal realism to result in problematic faculties, not in scepticism. Anti-realism about modality will thus react to the problematic character of the needed faculty by denying that the truth conditions of modal sentences are as the realist claims: they will be said to consist instead in something (relatively) unproblematic. In other words, the antirealist will propose a reduction of modal statements to others which do not present (or do not present the same) epistemological difficulties. What class of sentences will this reductive class be? The obvious answer is that it will consist of statements about what is actually. the case. Thus anti-realism about modality is the doctrine known as actualism.. For, as we shall see, actual facts are precisely those with respect to which modal facts are epistemically problematic. This is, of course, the traditional way in which the issue of modal realism has been set up. I arrived at this statement of the issue in a roundabout way because I wanted to show its bearing on the general formulation of realism, and to suggest how it naturally results from a prior general formulation derived from Dummett. Modal realism is correspondingly to be the thesis that modal facts are not. reducible to actual facts. A brief review of the traditional anti-realist positions concerning modality confirms their tacit actualism as well as their conformity to the epistemological criterion of modal anti-realism just suggested. Let us first distinguish two kinds of modal anti-realism, both of which have actualist presuppositions. By ‘impersonal actualism’ I mean views which try to reduce modal statements to statements about objective non-psychological conditions: thus causal necessity might be reduced to actual regularities in the world; logical necessity might be claimed to be reducible to statements about the actual world of a very high degree of generality; or dispositional statements to be reduced to categorical statements about the ‘basis’ of the disposition.129 On the other hand, we have what might be called ‘personal actualism’ (for want of a better

128

So it is not quite correct to characterize anti-realism as the thesis that truth always reduces to conditions of warranted assertion (evidence).

129

That impersonal actualism is a form of modal anti-realism shows that truth in virtue of external. facts is not sufficient for realism. Putnam formulates realism in this inadequate way (H. Putnam, ‘What is Mathematical Truth?’, in Mathematics, Matter and Method. , Philosophical Papers. , vol. i (Cambridge: University Press, 1975), 60–78, at p. 70): anti-realism is not always idealist. Nor is such externality a necessary condition of realism, or else realism about one's own mental states would be impossible; indeed the anti-realist view here—namely behaviourism—consists precisely in reducing the subjective mental to what is objective and external.

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label): this type of view suggests reducing modal statements to facts about the one who uses those statements; such a reduction is aptly described as psychologistic. Different versions of this general doctrine pick upon different sorts of properties of persons as constituting that to which a modal truth fundamentally reduces: thus the notions of stipulation or convention or intention or decision or imagination or mental disposition (Hume) are brought reductively to bear. On the former type of actualism, modality objectively resides in the impersonal world, but it does not transcend what actually obtains; on the latter, modality resides in us, either voluntarily or willy-nilly. In the case of the personal type of actualist reduction we are often presented with an interim reduction; that is, a reduction of seemingly objective modal facts to psychological abilities or propensities. But since these psychological notions are themselves modally specified, the actualist owes us a further reduction of those. if he is to complete his programme. The thesis of the modal realist is thus precisely that no such reductions are feasible: the modal is something ‘over and above’ what is merely actual. This distinction between personal and impersonal anti-realist reductions has analogies in two other areas I have mentioned—namely, ethics and mathematics—which I will not take time to spell out, except to remark upon the very close analogy between Humean accounts of necessity and of value: both are conceived as objects of feeling, not of knowledge, arising from the de facto. constitution of our minds.130 These two anti-realist tendencies with respect to modality render modal knowledge (relatively) unproblematic, because they suggest familiar faculties by which modal truth, so reduced, may be known. The impersonal reduction brings modality within the scope of perception. and extensions thereof; the personal reduction effectively assimilates modal knowledge to knowledge of one's own mental states, so that we know modal truths by something like introspection.. By contrast, the realist view seems to place modality beyond the reach of such sublunary capacities, since modal facts cannot be identified with facts to which those faculties apply (I return to this below). It is worth emphasis that the issue of realism about modality is not on the present conception an ontological. issue; it is not, that is to say, an issue about what objects. the world contains. Put in the formal mode, the issue relates, not to expressions whose semantic function it is to introduce entities into a sentence's truth conditions, but to expressions whose semantic role approximates rather to that of an operator.. And the formulation of realism reflects this, since it speaks of the epistemological status of whole sentences and of what their truth consists in; indeed the notion of recognition-transcendence is best seen as applicable to sentences, not to singular terms. The question of realism concerns what kinds

130

Hume is thus a non-cognitivist about both modality and value. See his Treatise. , book I, part iii, section xiv, on the idea of causal necessity; and book III, part i, sections i and ii, on the origin of ideas of value.

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of statement. we need in a complete and ultimate description of reality. (Compare the first sentence of Wittgenstein's Tractatus..) This point is significant for us in two ways. First, we see that arguments for the indispensability of a given kind of locution in our ultimate account of the world need not be taken as showing the inescapability of acknowledging entities of a certain kind: so the ontological commitments of a theory do not exhaust its commitments as to the ultimate facts it requires, that is, the statements it has to take as true.131 Second, construing the realism issue as ontological in character often unfairly prejudices the outcome against the realist view: for one is rightly reluctant to admit (e.g.) ethical or modal entities. into one's ontology. If realism with respect to ethics or modality is taken as asserting that the world contains entitative moral values or possible objects, then it comes to seem totally unattractive; but there is no obligation to take it that way—it is fundamentally a thesis about the irreducibility of certain statements to others. And so no argument alleging the nonexistence of such entities can be relevant to the question whether realism about such statements is correct. I suspect that a good part of resistance to modal realism in particular arises from tacitly assuming an ontological interpretation of the issue.132 I shall now sketch out three positions on the relation between the modal and the actual, endorse one of them, and finally indicate the epistemological consequences of the endorsed position. Since this position deserves to be called realist, the rest of the paper investigates the form and commitments of a plausible modal realism. (i) Modal anti-realism is a thesis of reductive or eliminative actualism. That is, it claims that we do not need to recognize modalities in our fundamental account of what the world is really. like: either we can offer adequate reductions of the import of modal statements, or we can simply refuse to indulge in such talk ab initio.. But why should it be thought that modalities deserve our attention to begin with: what are the purposes for which we employ modal expressions, and are they legitimate? In other words, what is the (prima-facie) utility of modal locutions? There seem to be three main areas in which it is natural to invoke modal notions: we invoke them in expression of our intuitions about the identity conditions of objects, as in philosophical discussions of essentialism; we invoke them in empirical scientific theories, in the notion of a law of nature and in

131

One is reminded here of Russell's defence of ‘negative facts’ (B. Russell, ‘The Philosophy of Logical Atomism’, in R. C. Marsh (ed.), Logic and Knowledge. (London: Allen & Unwin, 1956), 175–282, at pp. 211 ff .): his claim was that negative statements are needed in a full description of the world—and clearly this claim is not ontological in form, since it relates to the negation operator. .

132

This seems to lie behind the hostility to modal realism evinced in F. Mondadori and A. Morton, ‘Modal Realism: The Poisoned Pawn’, Philosophical Review., 85 (1976), 3–20 (especially the second section). And I have heard similar objections to ethical realism.

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ascriptions of dispositional properties; and we commonly appeal to necessity in characterizing the notion of logical implication. Since I myself take each of these areas seriously, I have a good deal of use for modal expressions. An actualist must therefore either refuse to set foot into these areas, or offer some actualist surrogate for the distinctions initially drawn in modal terms. The point is familiar from Quine: one cannot consistently help oneself to a kind of locution, ontological or otherwise, whose purport one officially repudiates: it must either be eschewed or reduced. An anti-actualist will thus make two claims: that modal locutions are indispensable in certain kinds of discourse themselves indispensable, and that they cannot successfully be replaced by any other sort of locution. The issue about modality is in close parallel with Platonism in mathematics: we need mathematical expressions in scientific theories, and no programme of reinterpreting mathematical statements seems workable.133 You may not like the resulting metaphysics, but it needs to be demonstrated. that it is avoidable; so the onus is clearly on the actualist, or the anti-Platonist. To implement the actualist programme would therefore be to show that nothing of significance is lost if we purge our thought of all modal notions. This claim has always seemed to me totally implausible, since it seems to obliterate important distinctions between statements that we customarily and naturally draw in modal terms: between statements ascribing properties without which objects would not be what they are and those which ascribe properties that are merely accidental; between statements of law entailing counterfactuals and mere contingently universal generalizations lacking such entailments; and between inferences which are valid (necessarily truth-preserving) and those which are not. Of course, actualists have had things to say about these alleged distinctions, typically attempting to formulate them in non-modal terms. I cannot consider these various proposals here, but I think it is fair to report that the distinctions in question have proved remarkably difficult to reformulate in actualist terms, though this has often been disguised by covert circularities in the reductions offered.134 If such reductions do indeed systematically fail, then I think we are committed to some sort of modal realism, given that we need to use modal locutions in contexts of serious assertion: we simply have no choice

133

In fact, there may be a connection here as well as a parallel: for some philosophers, e.g. Putnam (‘What is Mathematical Truth?’) have suggested a modal interpretation of mathematics. There does, indeed, appear to be some trade-off between modality and abstract entities: logical consequence may be defined either model-theoretically, by quantifying over sets, or by use of modal operators; and the notion of possible world itself has been explicated in Platonistic terms—as in Quine's construction of possible worlds in terms of mathematical structures of real numbers (W. V. Quine, ‘Propositional Objects’, Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 139–60, at pp. 148 ff .).

134

Criticism of actualist theories of causal necessity can be found in W. Kneale, Probability and Induction. (Oxford: University Press, 1949) , sections 13–20; C. Peacocke, ‘Causal Modalities and Realism’, in M. Platts (ed.), Reference, Truth and Reality. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), 41–68 ; B. Stroud, Hume. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), ch. 10 .

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but to recognize a realm of irreducible modal facts. Indeed the failure of actualist reductions may be viewed as one more item on the list of defeats suffered by reductionist philosphers.135 Nor is such failure altogether surprising: for if modal concepts really were just equivalent. to concepts expressible in purely non-modal vocabulary, it would be a puzzle exactly why it was that we did not speak in that reductive actualist vocabulary to begin with. At any rate, we would need some explanation of why it is that modal expressions were introduced at all, if not to convey truths not expressible otherwise. (I offer this as a salutary thought, not as a conclusive argument.) (ii) The denial of actualism, I have said, implies some form of modal realism, on the assumption that we regard modal sentences as true or false. Realism is the thesis that the truth conditions of the given class of statements transcend the truth conditions of statements of some relatively unproblematic (potentially) reductive class. But what is the exact character of this transcendence in the case of modality? A very natural answer to this question is that it consists in a relation of independence. between modal truths and actual truths. Thus realism about the external world or about mental states plausibly consists in the thesis that the truth of such statements is not determined by the truth of experiential and behavioural statements, respectively.136 It is a question whether such independence permits arbitrary conjunctions of material object and experiential statements, and of mental and behavioural statements, so that there are no mutual constraints whatever linking the concepts in question; but certainly a realist will insist upon a measure of independence in these cases which clearly precludes any possibility of reduction. This kind of independence thesis has the straightforward consequence that truths of the given class are not supervenient. upon truths of the (potential) reductive class. So now, encouraged by this pair of examples, the anti-actualist might hold, similarly, that modal truths are independent of actual truths; in particular, the former do not supervene on the latter. Now supervenience is not an entirely perspicuous relation, but its minimal content will deliver with respect to modality the negative claim that two objects could be indiscernible with respect to non-modal predications yet differ with respect to what is modally true of them. Is this non-supervenience claim plausible? Hilary Putnam makes some interesting remarks in this connection:137 he says, in effect, that reductive actualism is no more acceptable than phenomenalism about material objects, either for nomological modality or for strict logical modality. He expresses his ‘modal-realist intuitions’ by denying that ‘what is true in possible worlds is totally determined by what is true in the actual world plus our conventions’. Thus he

135

Cf. a remark of Davidson's (D. Davidson, ‘Mental Events’, in L. Foster and J. Swanson (eds.), Experience and Theory. (London: Duckworth, 1970), 79–101, at p. 91 ).

136

See my ‘An A Priori Argument for Realism’ (1979; repr. as ch. 12 in this volume) for more on this sort of realism.

137

‘There is at least one a priori. truth’, Erkenntnis. , 13 (1978), 153–70, at pp. 164–5.

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writes (164): ‘does the totality of facts about what events actually take place determine the truth value of all statements of the form “it is possible that p.”? To me, at least, it seems that the answer is “no”, and if the answer is “no”, then both Quinean accounts of logical necessity and Humean accounts of causality have to be wrong.’ Putnam is, then, what might be called an independence realist about modality. We are not told how strong the failure of dependence is—whether what is modally true of an object is completely. unconstrained by what is actually true of it—but we have enough to see that, for Putnam, modal truth may vary (presumably. within some limits) while actual truth stays fixed. This is certainly a statement of modal realism: but it does not seem to me that the independence thesis is plausible. Let us consider some cases. Suppose we have two samples of a given substance and suppose we have it that one sample has a certain dispositional property which generates certain counterfactuals about how it will behave in various possible circumstances; suppose also that the two samples have precisely the same microstructure as specified in non-modal physical vocabulary. Then I think we must say that the second sample has the same dispositional property and thus the same counterfactual properties as the first. But on Putnam's view the second substance might altogether lack that disposition, possessing instead some quite different disposition: but this seems to make nonsense of the idea that by investigating the actual micro-structure of substances we can determine how they behave in counterfactual circumstances. (In fact, this is just the familiar point that dispositions have a ‘categorical basis’.) Or again, consider two sectors of the universe in which the same sequences of (type) events occur: that is, we have the same (type of) constant conjunction. Now if background conditions are (actually) the same and the events do not actually differ even down to their fundamental microstructural properties, then I cannot see how it might be that one sequence instantiates a law while the other does not: for surely if sequences of events differ in respect of lawlikeness that is due to some actual. feature of the events concerned (or perhaps surrounding conditions). So it seems to me that nomological modality does in this sense supervene on what is actually the case. Putnam may have been misled by his choice of example: he asks whether it is possible that there be two worlds indiscernible with respect to the occurrence of actual events in them but differing as to the fission of a small particle in a certain counterfactual experiment. So the question he is putting is whether two particles could be the same in all actual respects yet differ in their counterfactual properties. He makes no mention, in advocating an affirmative answer, of fundamental physical indeterminism, but perhaps this was at the back of his mind. Certainly, if quantum theory is to be believed, particles can behave differently though they be actually indiscernible; but we should note two points about this. The first is that it is extremely dubious that the truth value of the counterfactuals in question is determinate:

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for it does not seem that there is in this case a fact of the matter as to how the particle would. behave were it subjected to certain energies; so we do not yet have a case in which the modal properties are both determinate and independent of actual properties. In fact, the indeterminacy of truth value of the counterfactuals here seems to trace precisely to the unavailability of any actual fact as a ground for the alleged modal difference. The second point to note is that such physical indeterminism cannot be supposed to account for all. the cases in which Putnam would deny supervenience. For consider phenomena with respect to which such elementary indeterminism is irrelevant, or suppose that the world had been thoroughly deterministic: in these cases we would still want to make modal distinctions (perhaps based upon variations in initial conditions), but ex hypothesi. these would not depend upon physical indeterminism. What of the non-supervenience claim for strict or metaphysical modality? Consider first synthetic necessities, such as the necessity of origin, kind, composition, and identity. Presumably the claim will take the form of envisaging two objects just alike in these respects—they instantiate the same non-modal properties and relations—yet for one object these properties and relations are essential while for the other they are not. So, for example, two human beings could both instantiate the relations that constitute having a certain origin—they developed in a certain way from gametes and so forth—yet one has his actual origin essentially while the other has his contingently; and similarly for the other synthetic necessities. To anyone who takes such essentialist claims seriously this must seem quite implausible: it is impossible that two objects be alike in their actual properties but differ in the modalities with which they instantiate those properties. Analytic necessities too seem supervenient upon actual facts. Two sentences could not agree in the actual meanings they have yet differ with respect to their necessity; nor could two sentences of the same logical form whose logical constants have the same meaning differ with respect to the modality of their truth value. So it seems to me that Putnam's independence formulation of modal realism is incorrect. I suspect he was induced to embrace it by rejection of actualism, which he rightly perceived to be anti-realist, and by the example of other areas in which independence is. the proper expression of the realist view. However, I think there is a third intermediate view which avoids both actualist reduction and radical modal independence; to this view I now turn. (iii) The position we have reached is this: we have two sets of concepts of which we wish to hold both that one set is irreducible to the other and that applications of concepts of the former set are not independent of applications of concepts of the latter set. Here we should be reminded of a parallel position with respect to the mental and the physical: it is arguable (indeed it seems to me correct) that we wish to draw genuine distinctions using mental vocabulary which cannot be reduced to distinctions drawn in purely physical terms, but

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that it is nevertheless not true that mental distinctions can apply independently of physical differences (Davidson, McGinn).138 The view on the relation between mental and physical concepts which captures this position is the thesis of supervenience without reduction: mental concepts differ in kind from physical, but there is no mental difference without a physical difference. Conscious sensations, as characterized by Thomas Nagel, are perhaps the most vivid illustration of properties which seem to meet these two conditions: since they are essentially subjective—and so differ categorially from objective physical states—there is no apparent prospect of successful reduction.139 But still it seems that there is a sense in which the sensations a creature has are determined by its physical states. And this supervenience thesis seems to warrant the claim that, in some weak sense, any mental attribution is, in Dummett's phrase, ‘true in virtue of ’ a physical fact, while not being reducible thereto.140 A second case is that of ethical and descriptive concepts: it has been held that the ethical, while not reducible to the descriptive, none the less supervenes on it. Now it is not that such supervenience relations are completely unmysterious; but it does seem that a variety of considerations within the areas to which they have been applied strongly suggest that such supervenience is the only reasonable position. I think that the modal and the actual constitute one more such case: there is some sense in which modal statements are true in virtue of non-modal or categorical statements, but this dependence is not so strong as to permit genuine reduction—on the contrary, modal statements mark out a real and irreducible range of facts. What is difficult, here as elsewhere, is to give an illuminating explication of the supervenience relation: to specify exactly how. the statements in the domain of the relation determine the truth of statements in its range. Unfortunately, I have no very interesting suggestions to make along these lines: but, as Nagel says in another connection, one can know that something is true without yet knowing how it can be.141 I am able to say, however, why it is that the supervenience claim is perfectly compatible with a realist view of modal truths as I have formulated realism. The reason is apparent from the following general principle: it is not. true that if a class X. of

138

Davidson, ‘Mental Events’; C. McGinn, ‘Philosophical Materialism’, Synthese., 44 (1980), 173–206 .

139

See esp. Nagel, ‘What is it like to be a Bat?’.

140

Dummett also holds that counterfactual conditionals are true in virtue of categorical statements. It is unclear, however, whether he wishes this claim to carry reductionist commitments (M. Dummett, ‘What is a Theory of Meaning? (ii)’, in G. Evans and J. McDowell (eds.), Truth and Meaning. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 67–139 ).

141

He says this of physicalism in ‘What is it like to be a Bat?’, 176. If his suggestion in ‘Panpsychism’ is intended to explain how the physical can determine the mental, then that. sort of suggestion will not go over to account for the supervenience of the modal and the actual (‘panmodalism’) for obvious reasons: and so it will just be a brute fact that objects have modal properties in virtue of their actual properties (Mortal Questions. (Cambridge: University Press, 1979)).

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statements supervenes on a class Y. of statements and a faculty F. is proper to the acquisition of knowledge of statements of Y., then F. is eo ipso. proper to the acquisition of knowledge of statements of X.. That is to say, the faculty F.′ proper to X. may be epistemologically problematic relative to Y. and F.. Since different cognitive faculties may be needed in order to know the supervening truths from those adequate to the determining truths, it is possible to be a realist about the supervening truths: it is possible because our formulation of the transcendence definitive of realism was in terms of problematic cognitive faculties. Sensations and physical states well illustrate the above principle: according to Nagel, the capacity to know physical truths is possessible irrespective of one's own range of sensation types, but the capacity to know truths involving concepts for sensations is more narrowly constrained: one needs, to possess that capacity, to enjoy sensations similar to those the statement in question concerns.142 We could put this by saying that the name of the faculty needed to know a certain range of subjective truths is ‘empathy’: one may lack this faculty in respect of a class of subjective statements and yet be capable of coming to know the truth of statements which, as a matter of metaphysical fact, determine the truth value of the statements accessible only via the lacked faculty. If the determining truths constitute a potential anti-realist reductive class, then the need for an additional faculty shows that a realist interpretation of the supervening truths is being assumed: and this is precisely the situation with respect to the modal and the actual. (Some have supposed the same for ethics.) So the modal supervenes on the actual, but (as we shall see more fully) the modal is epistemologically problematic relative to the actual; we have then the defining characteristic of realism. Supervenience allows room for this transcendence because it is a rather weak relation between sets of statements: in particular, it does not imply that the supervening truths are knowable. via the determining truths. Nor does it alone give an answer to the question of what the truth of the supervening statements consists in.. It merely acknowledges a certain sort of non-contingent dependence. I think, therefore, that modal realism can be adequately formulated in terms of supervenience and does not require an independence formulation: for the definitive feature of realism is common to both sorts of formulation, namely transcendence from the recognitionally unproblematic. Moreover, this formulation of modal realism seems to me to give a more plausible account of the relation between modal and actual than the previous two. We have, then, what we sought: a non-objectual formulation of an acceptable modal realism.

142

Nagel does indeed remark that his view of mental states is strongly realist (‘What is it like to be a Bat?’, 171) since it implies the possibility of facts we can never, because of our very nature, comprehend. Clearly, this sort of realism involves facts which transcend our unproblematic recognitional faculties, and so fits my characterization of the realist position.

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I now wish to isolate and articulate what it is about modal realism (antiactualism) that many philosophers, notably empiricists, find unpalatable. To do this is just to spell out the way in which modal statements are epistemologically problematic relative to actual statements. For I think that it is the epistemology of modality which is the source of the discomfort induced by modal realism. Dummett says at one place (Truth and Other Enigmas., 169): ‘We know what it is to set about finding out if something is. true; but what account can we give of the process of discovering that it must. be true?’143 I am concerned in what follows to uncover the perplexity this question evokes. It is to be noted at once that anti-realist views of necessity have the effect of relieving the perplexity, as I remarked earlier: for modal truth conditions share the truth conditions of statements not supposed similarly problematic, since they do not transcend the realm of the actual. The thought I want to develop is that only what is actual is empirical., and that what is (to use a term of Richard Braithwaite's) ‘transempirical’144 is unknowable by means of the epistemic capacities we can intelligibly be supposed to possess. I shall concentrate on the case of causal or nomological modality. A given linguistic construction may be called empirical if sentences in which it occurs can be (canonically) established as true by experience. Now the most obvious way in which the truth of a sentence can be empirically established is by observation.—we can simply observe the sentence to be true. This method appears to require that we be able to observe that feature of the world which corresponds to the construction in question. Now what Hume (and his followers) famously insisted was that it is (necessarily?) false that we observe any feature of the world corresponding to expressions of causal necessity.145 So if the content of a statement of law were stronger than the affirmation of an actual (though exceptionless and extensive) regularity, we could make no observation which would warrant the assertion of a statement with such a

143

Here is perhaps an appropriate place to observe that the issue raised by this question applies equally to de re. and de dicto. modalities: for both we seem compelled to acknowledge a faculty which recognizes modal properties, either of objects or of statements. It is therefore unclear how any reduction of all modalities to de dicto. modalities removes the fundamental difficulty for empiricism—unless something further is said to actualize the de dicto. modalities. Hume was particularly vulnerable on this point: for his critique of causal necessity can be recapitulated in respect of necessary relations among ideas, about which he has little positive to say. Strictly, he should adopt a noncognitivist theory of the basis of our idea of necessity in the de dicto. case too: subsequent empiricists have been similarly weak on this point.

144

Scientific Explanation. (Cambridge: University Press, 1953), 318 .

145

Thus A. J. Ayer writes, ‘There is no such thing as seeing that A must. be attended by B. , and this not just because we lack the requisite power of vision but because there is nothing of this sort to be seen’ (Probability and Evidence. (London: Macmillan, 1972 ), 4). And J. L. Mackie asks, with respect to Kneale's account of nomic necessity, ‘What, in the operation of such a mechanism, however delicate and ingenious, could we see except the succession of phases?’ (The Cement of the Universe. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 217 .) The defect of both formulations, inherited from Hume, is the use of the verb ‘to see. ’: below I try to formulate the Humean worry in less naive terms.

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content. For we can observe only what is actual, and a statement of causal necessity purports to go beyond the actual; the causal necessity constructions are therefore transempirical in the sense that they fail to yield observably true sentences. All this seems to me correct, but as a reason against objective modalities it is totally unsatisfactory; for the criterion of empirical significance it assumes—direct observability—is much too strong. More exactly, it indiscriminately brands various constructions as non-empirical which are not plausibly so taken, and it thus obliterates an intuitive epistemological difference we should like to capture between modality and these other cases.146 Three sorts of expression may be cited: spatial, temporal, and theoretical. It does not seem true that places and times are empirically inaccessible in the sense specified, yet they are hardly observable. entities. (This can be seen by asking how a causal theory of perception might be applied to such entities.) If modality were no worse off epistemologically than space and time (even on an absolutist theory of them), then I think a reasonable empiricist would have no cause for complaint about modal realism: we need to find something more distinctively transempirical about modality. The postulation of causally operative unobservables in physical science also generates sentences which are not strictly observably true: but again, it is not the case that the truth value of such sentences is empirically unascertainable. This is because the theoretical postulation of unobservables has observable empirical consequences. which permit the theory to be tested by experience. So the question a Humean about modality has to answer is how modal realism differs from realism about theoretical entities or about space and time on the score of empirical significance. That is, what version of empiricism is liberal enough to count these other cases empirically significant but restrictive enough to give a sense in which modality is objectionably transempirical? To answer this question would be to show what is epistemologically problematic about modal realism. Unless this can be done Humeans are vulnerable to the charge of resting upon a naive and oversimple conception of the conditions of empirical knowledge.147 The charge will be put in this way: knowledge arrived at by inference to the best explanation of empirical phenomena is itself

146

Two writers who underestimate the distinctively non-empirical character of modality are F. P. Ramsey and Richard Boyd. Ramsey, in his last papers, says that ‘realism’ (his term) about causal modalities and about theoretical entities is equally unplausible in view of the observation-transcendence they both imply: Foundations of Mathematics and Other Essays. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1931), 253, 261 . Boyd, on the other hand, being already a realist about theoretical entities, remarks that, since the considerations in the two areas are so similar, we should take on modal realism as well. (R. Boyd, ‘Approximate Truth and Natural Necessity’, Journal of Philosophy., 73 (1976), 633–5 ). But, as I shall suggest, it seems to me crucially important that there is a sense in which modality and theoretical unobservables differ in point of their empirical status.

147

Putnam (‘What is Mathematical Truth?’, 69) registers this kind of complaint, and Bas van Fraassen urged the point in discussion.

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genuinely empirical knowledge; and it appears that modal notions are. bound up in our empirical theories of the world—counterfactuals, dispositions, lawlike necessity, and so on. In short, we can empirically know nomically modal truths by inference to the best explanation of observable empirical facts. Now I think that there is something crucially wrong with this suggestion, but it is not altogether obvious how the intuitive epistemological difference between modal constructions and the others mentioned is to be formulated. I shall try to bring out the difference by borrowing some ideas suggested by Hartry Field's treatment of mathematics.148 Field claims (and claims to prove) that mathematical theories are conservative. in the following sense: if you take a nominalistic theory N. and add to it a mathematical theory M. (as when applying some pure mathematical theory to a range of physical phenomena), then the resulting theory N.∪ M. is a conservative extension of the theory N.—that is, there are no nominalistic consequences of N.∪ M. which were not already consequences of N.. Field further suggests how the axioms of a scientific theory might be nominalized, so that the empirical assertions of the theory do not themselves contain mathematical vocabulary. Granted both of these claims about the role of mathematics in scientific theories, Field uses them to undermine Quinean indispensability arguments for Platonism, and so paves the way for a fictionalist account of mathematical sentences. But I want to appropriate these points about mathematics to show a different thing. Suppose one is a Platonistic realist about mathematics, and suppose that one agrees that the application of mathematics to a nominalized theory has the stated conservativeness property. Then the empirical consequences of a physical theory, these being nominalistic, will follow even without the use of mathematics in the theory, since the theoretical axioms are nominalistically formulable and mathematics is conservative. But if so, it is implausible to hold that the theory N.∪ M. is known by way of the empirical consequences of that theory, since these are equally consequences of N.. That is, under a Platonist view, N.∪ M. is a factually stronger theory than N.—it asserts more truths—yet the two theories are empirically equivalent: how then could we claim that the mathematical component of the theory is known by inference to the best explanation of the empirical consequences of the theory? For the empirical evidence is, by conservativeness, compatible with a much weaker theory: mathematics does not increase empirical content. I think this shows that a certain strategy for combining mathematical realism with empiricist epistemology—to the effect that since mathematical sentences occur in empirical theories they are known, like the nominalistic portions of such theories, by inference to the best explanation—is inadequate, because of the essentially non-empirical role that mathematics plays. In this respect of conservativeness mathematical entities and theoretical entities stand in striking

148

Science without Numbers: A Defence of Nominalism. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980 ).

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contrast: for sentences about theoretical entities are not. nominalistically conservative—they issue in genuinely new empirically testable consequences. The lesson for us in this contrast is this: though there is a clear sense in which numbers and theoretical entities are unobservable, they yet differ radically in point of empirical significance. And this difference suggests that there is no prospect of putting Platonistic mathematics on an empirical footing; our knowledge of mathematical truths (given that there are any) is. therefore a threat to thoroughgoing empiricist epistemology, despite their occurrence in (incontestably) empirical theories.149 We can now state a usable criterion of the transempirical: a given type of construction gives rise to transempirical truths if (a.) it is interpreted realistically and (b.) its introduction into an empirical theory yields a conservative extension of that theory (or equivalently, its removal from an empirical theory leaves its empirical consequences intact). Mathematics is transempirical by this criterion, whereas statements about theoretical entities are not. The question now is whether modality is transempirical in this sense. Let T. be a theory free of modal expressions: its generalizations apply only to all actual objects of the kind treated by the theory, past, present, and future; and suppose we know T. to be true, presumably by observation and induction. (We can think of T. as got by taking a scientific theory containing modal expressions, implicitly or explicitly, and removing its modal content.) T. will have certain empirical consequences which are used to verify it. Now add to T. some causally modal constructions V.—a nomic necessity operator, a dispositional suffix, a counterfactual conditional (possibly embedded in a modal logic appropriate to the modal notions introduced)—and suppose that the resulting theory T.∪ V. is realistically true. Then the modalized theory T.∪ V. is, for a modal realist, a factually stronger theory than the non-modal T.: it reports, not just what actually happens, but what happens in all causally possible conditions. But clearly T.∪ V. is a conservative extension of T.: in particular, T.∪ V. has no empirical consequences not shared by T.. So modality, like mathematics, is empirically conservative. The reason is obvious: empirical consequences are reported by sentences which can be observed to be true, but what is non-actual cannot be observed to be true. To put it (heuristically) in terms of possible worlds: the modalized theory says what goes on in nomologically possible worlds, but empirical consequences obtain only in the actual world. So, by the conservativeness of modality, removing the modal component from an empirical theory does not decrease empirical content. In fact, this is just the point which has seemed to empiricists to lend such support to a constant conjunction conception of laws; viz. that the extra assertoric content alleged by the necessitarian about laws must transcend what we can empirically verify.

149

I take this consideration to undermine the account of mathematical knowledge proposed by the authors cited in n. 16, thus reinstating the epistemologically problematic status of mathematical truths, as Platonistically interpreted.

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It follows, I think, that we could not plausibly be said to come to know a theory with such modal content by purely empirical means: for the empirical consequences of the theory are compatible with a weaker theory in which modalities do not figure.150 So in this crucial respect, captured by the idea of conservativeness, modality and mathematics are alike in not being properly empirical, and different from other sentences whose subject matter is admittedly not itself observable; for example, theoretical sentences.151 And this suggests a restriction upon the propriety of epistemological theories of a given type of statement which are based on the idea of inference to the best explanation: namely, that the statements in question should not be empirically conservative. If this is correct, the liberalized empiricist can insist upon the non-empirical nature of modality while not simultaneously and unwantedly excluding statements whose epistemological credentials he finds (or should find) acceptable. But now if modality is thus non-empirical and if modal realism is. (as I have claimed) true, then this insistence immediately refutes empiricism, be it ever so attenuated: for that combination of views is tantamount to the thesis that there are facts, about which we can apparently know, that are not epistemically accessible to us through faculties acceptable to a consistent empiricist.152 And of course this is essentially just the predicament that Hume perceived, only he chose to reject objective necessities. How then does. one know causally necessary truths? Or better: how does one know of. a scientific generalization that it is a nomological necessity? Since it

150

Here we must guard against a mistaken reaction to this claim. It may be said: ‘knowledge of modalities is bound up with our inferential knowledge that certain generalizations are explanatory. , since explanation is only by laws whose necessity sustains counterfactuals: so knowledge of modality does result from inference to the best explanation. of the empirical consequences of a theory’. However, this objection tacitly concedes the point I am after: for now we will need to appeal to knowledge of the lawlike status of generalizations in the premisses. figuring in the inference—whereas the attraction of the original proposal was to give modal knowledge a purely empirical (actualist) basis. (This point will become clearer when I give a more positive account of our knowledge of modality.)

151

I do not want to suggest that mathematics and modality figure in empirical theories in exactly. analogous ways; indeed, I think there is an important point of disanalogy to be noticed. Field (Science without Numbers. ) argues, plausibly, that the role of mathematical statements in scientific explanations is extrinsic. to the phenomena being explained: and this is an important part of his case for adopting a fictionalist attitude towards mathematical sentences. However, it seems that modality is not thus extrinsic to explanations: for one does not have a genuine explanation unless modalities are implicated—so it would not be feasible to combine a realist account of scientifically explanatory sentences with fictionalism about their modal status.

152

The need for non-empirical cognitive faculties was, of course, insisted upon by the Rationalists. Thus Leibniz, e.g. in the ‘Introduction’, to New Essays on the Human Understanding. , remarks that our knowledge of ‘necessary truths, such as we find in pure mathematics, and particularly in arithmetic and geometry, must have principles whose proof does not depend upon instances, nor consequently on the testimony of the senses’, since the necessity of a generalization cannot be established merely by observing its actual instances. And Descartes, in the second Meditation. , tells us that the dispositional properties (which are implicitly modal) of (a piece of) wax can be known only by reason, not by perception or imagination.

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does not seem right to invoke recognition of a relation of confirmation between empirical data and generalizations alone, it appears that we need to introduce a faculty directed upon intrinsic. features of the content of a lawlike generalization. I tentatively suggest that knowledge that a given generalization is a law is a result of the operation of recognitional faculties of two fundamentally different sorts: there is first the faculty that tells us, from the intrinsic properties of the generalization, whether or not it is law like.; and there is second the faculty that allows us to confirm the generalization by empirically recognizing instances of it. Indeed, the verification of causal necessities seems to follow the pattern set by the structure of our knowledge of a posteriori metaphysical necessities, outlined earlier. Knowledge that a generalization is lawlike is knowledge that if true it is a law (i.e. necessarily true), and in the case of metaphysical necessities we likewise have a conditional premiss with a modal consequent. This is then conjoined with a purely empirical non-modal premiss, affirming the truth of the antecedent. The modal claim—nomological or metaphysical—then follows by detachment. In the case of metaphysical necessities we know the conditional premiss by appreciating that possession of the property in question is constitutive of an object's identity; in the case of laws we judge a generalization lawlike if (roughly) the predicates in it stand in some explanatory and projectible relation to each other; and both pieces of knowledge are possessed in advance of knowing whether the objects in question in fact (actually) instantiate the properties ascribed in the non-modal premiss.153 So nomological and metaphysical modality seem, upon examination, to have a (somewhat) uniform epistemology. This reflection prompts the following general thesis: there is a clear and important sense in which all. specifically modal knowledge is a priori. It is not surprising, if that thesis is true, that modality, like mathematics, is empirically conservative: anything true a priori is bound to be. The above thesis puts modal realism in a new light. For it suggests that the problematic character of modal knowledge, as implied by my formulation of realism in terms of cognitive faculties, traces to its a priori status. A faculty yielding a priori knowledge has always seemed to philosophers difficult to comprehend. Knowledge of the actual empirical world is arrived at a posteriori and is pro tanto. unproblematic; but if the transcendence of the modal over the actual calls for an a priori faculty, we see at once in what the problematic character of modal knowledge consists. It is just the old problem of how a priori knowledge is possible. If so, the problem of modal knowledge reduces to a more general problem. I do not, alas, have a satisfactory solution to the general problem, but I think I can at least formulate it sharply enough to see the nature of the underlying issue.

153

I am aware that this account of our knowledge of nomic necessity is sketchy and obscure—also that there are important differences between the epistemic status of the two sorts of modal conditional. It does, however, seem to me desirable to find something uniform in the epistemology of all types of modality.

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It is plausible and illuminating to define the distinction between a priori and a posteriori truth along the following lines: an a posteriori truth is one that must be known by way of causal interaction with the subject matter of some justifying statement; and an a priori truth is one that can be known without causal interaction with the subject matter of some justifying statement.154 Now if modal statements are indeed known a priori we can say (simplifying a bit) that the cognitive states which constitute knowledge of modal statements are not caused. by the modal facts in virtue of which the known statement is true. This immediately gives the consequence that modality is not perceptible: we cannot perceive modality (have an ‘impression’ of necessity) because modal knowledge is a priori, and a priori knowledge is not by definition based on the kind of causal process involved in exercises of the faculty of perception. But note that the definition of the a priori does not tell us how a priori knowledge is. acquired: the characterization is entirely negative. Of course names of appropriate a priori faculties are not far to seek: ‘reason’, ‘intuition’, and the like. But these do not afford any real hint as to the mechanism. or mode of operation of the faculties denoted. The point can be put generally and intuitively as follows: our conception of knowledge—that is, of the relation between knowledge and reality—construes the state of knowing as somehow the effect. of that which is known. Thus perceptual knowledge is our basic model of how knowledge comes about (the causal theory of knowledge is built upon this model): and we conceive of other kinds of knowledge—in memory or by induction—as approximating more or less closely to this model. But with a priori knowledge the model seems to break down altogether. Either we try to conceive of a noncausal mode of influence upon the knowing mind, which seems incoherent; or we decide to give up the idea that knowledge somehow results from what is known, which leaves us perplexed about what such knowledge consists in and in want of an alternative conception. Empiricists are notoriously hard put to account for knowledge that seems inescapably a priori, and the naturalistic

154

See my ‘A Priori and A Posteriori Knowledge’ (1976); repr. as ch. 2 in this volume. The proposed definition improves on the traditional characterization in terms of ‘independence from experience’ in a number of respects. (i) It is unclear what notion of experience is being employed in the traditional characterization: it cannot allude to the phenomenological kinds enjoyed by human beings, since we would wish to apply the a priori/a posteriori distinction to creatures whose experiences were phenomenologically dissimilar—and a more general definition will, I think, resort to causal notions; (ii) the traditional characterization wrongly pronounces introspective knowledge a priori, since we do not have experiences of our experiences, while the causal definition seems capable of handling this type of a posteriori knowledge; (iii) the distinction, or an analogue of it, seems applicable to informational states in whose production experience can play no part, e.g. a recording device that acquires information about the environment by means of ‘sensors’, and also generates informational states, such as the state of having ‘proved’ a mathematical theorem, on the basis of a mathematical programme. But I cannot elaborate on these points now. (It is interesting to note that Russell held ethical knowledge to be a priori, analogously to our knowledge of necessity: Problems of Philosophy. (Oxford: University Press, 1973), 42 ff .)

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conception of knowledge in terms of causality seems equally impotent to account for it.155 The epistemological problem with modality is, then, that we cannot represent modal facts as causally explaining our knowledge of them. And the trouble with this is that we seem to have no other going theory of knowledge. We thus reach the uncomfortable position of agreeing that there is a priori knowledge but not understanding how such knowledge comes about. And this, it seems to me, is the form that the problematic epistemology of modal realism takes. (No such difficulty afflicts the realist about space and time.) My own view is that we are here confronted by a genuine and intractable conflict between what our metaphysics demands and what our epistemology can allow.156 If modal realism is to be finally accepted, it must find some way of alleviating the conflict to

155

We now have enough before us to make some brief remarks on Peacocke's discussion of the empirical status of causal modalities (‘Causal Modalities and Realism’). Peacocke suggests that his anti-actualism does not make causal modalities non-empirical because (a. ) we employ modal notions in constructing empirical theories, and (b. ) we can give an empirically checkable manifestation condition for possession of beliefs involving causal modalities (p. 64). We should note two points about these claims. The first is that suggestion (a. ), as it stands, seems to render mathematics similarly empirical: but we have seen for this case, as well as for modality, that there is a very significant difference between the epistemic status of these statements and that of e.g. statements about theoretical entities. The second is that there seems no obvious reason why the availability of an empirical manifestation condition should show the notion manifested to be itself. empirical, i.e. such that truths involving it can be known by purely empirical means: again, think of mathematics. Peacocke also compares the causal necessity operator with the universal quantifier, and finds no good reason to regard them, as philosophers traditionally have, as importantly different in respect of empirical status (p. 59). Here we should distinguish three claims: that universal quantification over infinite domains is problematic in much the way that causal modalities have been supposed to be; that universal quantification over (humanly) unsurveyable domains is similarly problematic; and that universal quantification itself, irrespective of the surveyability of the domain, is epistemically comparable to modality. About these three claims I would say the following. The first claim is true, but because of special problems about infinity, not because of the sense of the universal quantifier itself. The second claim ignores the fact that quantitative extensions of ordinary empirical faculties would be enough to make such unsurveyable domains empirically accessible, but the move from the actual to the possible requires a qualitatively different epistemology, since modal facts are empirically conservative. The third claim is reminiscent of the thesis, maintained by Ramsey and Russell, that general facts are irreducible to sets of particular facts because you always need to add some quantified condition to any set of singular statements if you are to capture the import of an entirely general truth. The issues here are fairly subtle, but I think we can point to two important disanalogies between this irreducibility thesis and modal realism. First, the assertibility conditions of universally quantified statements seem statable by means of purely singular statements; whereas, as we have seen, causally modal truths cannot be known on the basis of purely actualist premisses. Second, and related, one can check, for directly inspectable domains, by perfectly empirical means that all. of the objects in question have been covered in the set of verifying singular statements, but one cannot thus empirically. check whether a universal generalization holds in all possible. circumstances. So I think that Peacocke underestimates the epistemological problems raised by modal realism. (I am, however, in considerable agreement with much else in his paper.)

156

This tension between the metaphysics of modality and the requirements of an intelligible epistemology is, of course, precisely analogous in form to that described by Benacerraf, ‘Mathematical Truth’, in respect of mathematics.

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which it gives rise. My aim has been to articulate in what the difficulty ultimately consists.

Postscript to ‘Modal Reality’ I begin this paper with a contrast between ‘objectual’ and ‘non-objectual’ conceptions of modality: the former captures the force of necessity locutions by envisaging an expanded ontology of possible worlds; the latter insists that modality be understood in terms of a primitive notion of mode of property instantiation. In a certain sense, the objectual approach is eliminativist about modality, since it interprets the proposition that an object has a property in the mode of necessity as the proposition that in each world the object has the property in the neutral mode of mere instantiation. That is, we make do with the non-modalized notion of property instantiation and simply apply it to every world in which the object exists; the modality disappears into the ontology, so to speak. Having a property necessarily is construed as having it actually from the point of view of each world. Necessity is conceived as the sum of all these world-relative actualities; more accurately, it is the sum of a range of non-modal predications applied to each possible world. Despite the heavy ontology, therefore, possible world semantics is at root a kind of reductionism about modal notions—a translation of modes of instantiation into plain old non-modal instantiation distributed across a set of specially designed entities. We might almost say that it is anti-realist about modal notions—at least from the perspective of someone who thinks of modality in terms of different grades of property instantiation. It is saying: there are no modes. of instantiation, just extra entities that instantiate properties in the modally neutral mode. My aim in ‘Modal Reality’ was to bring a broader philosophical perspective to the issue of possible worlds. At the time the discussion was somewhat narrow and formalistic, and the underlying philosophical issues not sufficiently articulated (or so it seemed to me). David Lewis had done a great deal to spell out the nature of an ontology of possible worlds, not shrinking from the implications of his ‘modal realism’; so I took it as my task to evaluate his position as sympathetically as possible. I still find my criticisms cogent, though now I would put more stress on the implicit reductionism of the approach (I am currently working on a book about philosophical logic that will address the topic of modality, among others). Of course, as Lewis often observes, it is rare that a philosophical position is decisively refuted, but I think my paper succeeds in casting considerable doubt on the Lewisian picture. The idea that our talk of necessity refers to a big bunch of concrete particulars laid out in logical space is not a credible articulation of our modal locutions. (For a powerful criticism of Lewis that turns upon the concreteness of worlds as Lewis conceives them, see

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Tim Maudlin, ‘On the Impossibility of David Lewis' Modal Realism’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy., 74/4 (December 1996). The point that Maudlin makes is that if worlds are concrete particulars then they must be capable of differing solo numero., but this leads to absurd results.) It is more plausible to think of modal locutions as connoting precisely what they appear to, namely modes in which objects have properties. On this view, they are primitive: instantiation can be in the mode of necessity or possibility, and there is no analysis of this in terms of non-modal instantiation (which is not to say that we can have no theory of modality). In this respect, ‘necessarily’ is quite different from ‘eternally’: for an object to have a property eternally is for the object to have the property at every time, so that eternality comes out as temporally distributed instantiation; but for an object to have a property necessarily is for the object to have the property in the (primitive) mode of necessity, not for it to have the property across some set of supposed possible worlds. Modal locutions modify the copula, grammatically speaking; they are not disguised quantifiers that leave the copula untouched. My discussion of the epistemology of necessity complements the position I adopted in ‘A Priori and A Posteriori Knowledge’: knowledge of modality is a priori and hence subject to all the puzzles attaching to such knowledge. That is why empiricism and its naturalized descendants have always been suspicious of modality: for if modalities are real and known, then empiricism is false. As Hume long ago observed, necessity is not something the senses can represent. Even if you could travel to every possible world and exhaustively observe its contents you could never catch sight of a necessity. So either there is no necessity or it is not an object of perception. Hence the difficulty with empiricism.

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Part II Thought and World

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6 The Structure of Content

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I When we report what an agent believes we specify the content. of his belief (and so for the other propositional attitudes). When we say what a sentence means we similarly specify the content of the sentence. The linguistic form of such content specifications consists in the occurrence of a ‘that’-clause within the scope of ‘believes’ or ‘means’, the whole being attached as complex predicate to a singular term designating the subject of the belief or the sentence whose meaning is thus specified. The ‘that’-clause embeds a (declarative) sentence capable of standing alone, the meaning of which contributes in some systematic way to the meaning of the whole content ascription. A natural view of such constructions is that ‘believes’ and ‘means’ serve to express two-place relations—between an agent or sentence and a ‘content’, whatever a content may turn out to be. These two types of content specification are clearly going to be intimately related, and so it is reasonable to hope that reflection upon each in the light of the other will generate reciprocal illumination. In what follows my project is to investigate what both types of content involve; I want to know, that is, what makes such content ascriptions true. This project will take in a large number of issues, not all (or perhaps any) of which can be fully treated here; my aim is to sketch the general outlines of a position and allude to some consequences for certain doctrines and problems. I shall start by considering some suggestions of Fodor about propositional attitudes; then I move on to meaning.

II According to Fodor, beliefs (and I shall take these as exemplary) involve relations to internal representations: to believe that p. is to be in a certain

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My debts in this paper will be evident from the notes, and the sources mentioned in the text, but I must acknowledge a special indebtedness to the ideas of Hartry Field; Anita Avramides, Jim Hopkins, and Christopher Peacocke made helpful comments, as did auditors of talks I gave at the Universities of Birmingham and Cambridge. I should say that I intend this paper as an interim study, rather than a terminally definitive piece. (Those readers who sense a tension between the claims made here and some suggestions made in other papers of mine are not wrong.)

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relation to some internal state s. which represents the objects and properties in the world that the belief is about.158 Fodor thinks that the system of such representations is actually a language, so that believing is structurally like (indirect) saying: the agent stands in a relation, accepting or uttering, to a token sentence, inner or outer, which gets interpreted by being assigned certain semantic properties and relations. I will not myself assume this linguistic view of the medium of mental representation, but I want to agree with Fodor that beliefs involve (must involve) relations to internal representations of some. sort. Now, granting that conception of belief, the following question arises: in virtue of what do beliefs play a role in the agent's psychology? And it seems, Fodor contends, that there can be only one answer to this question: beliefs play a role in the agent's psychology just in virtue of intrinsic properties of the implicated internal representations—the semantic relations. between representations and things in the world must be irrelevant to the psychological role of beliefs. More precisely, the causal role of a belief must depend upon, and only upon, those properties of representations that can be characterized without adverting to matters lying outside the agent's head. Since, as Fodor claims, cognitive psychology is concerned exactly with the causal–functional role of representations, it takes mental processes and procedures to operate exclusively upon the intrinsic aspects of belief, and so must ignore the referential properties of representations. In other words, cognitive psychology is committed to what Putnam called methodological solipsism.159 This methodological constraint thus implies that the theoretical taxonomy of mental states demanded by cognitive psychology will be determined solely by such solipsistic features of representations; mental states will be the same or different according as their causal role is the same or different. Now typically semantic distinctions between mental representations are mirrored in intrinsic differences between them: what the corresponding beliefs are about is normally, as we might say, encoded. within the internal representations—or equivalently, the solipsistic properties of representations determine. their semantic characterizations. When there is such encoding the taxonomy of states required by a psychology of the causal role of propositional attitudes matches the taxonomy we get by allowing what the attitude is about to contribute toward its individuation. But as Fodor observes, drawing upon recent discussions of reference and belief, such matching is not invariably the case. He mentions two sorts of example. First there are cases in which beliefs are formed

158

See J. A. Fodor, The Language of Thought. (New York: Crowell and Hassocks: Harvester, 1975), ‘Propositional Attitudes’, Monist., 61 (1978) , ‘Methodological Solipsism Considered as a Research Strategy in Cognitive Psychology’, Behavioural and Brain Sciences., 3 (1980) ; and H. Field, ‘Mental Representation’, Erkenntnis., 13 (1978) .

159

H. Putnam, ‘The Meaning of “Meaning’ ”, in K. Gunderson (ed.), Language, Mind and Knowledge. (Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science., vol. vii) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1975) : repr. in Putnam, Mind, Language and Reality., Philosophical Papers., vol. ii (Cambridge: University Press, 1975) .

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about different things in ‘qualitatively indistinguishable’ circumstances—what have come to be called Twin Earth cases.160 Here it has been argued that the beliefs cannot be the same, if beliefs are individuated by the meaning of the sentence that specifies their content, since the content of a belief is (in part) fixed by what the embedded content sentence says the belief is about—and in Twin Earth cases the beliefs are about different things and so may differ even in truth value. So we seem to have cases in which the states of the head that function as internal representations do not suffice to fix the full content of the belief, because in these cases the semantic relations are not. intrinsically encoded. We need to appeal to causality or context or some such to determine what the belief is semantically about, and hence what its truth conditions are. The second kind of case is that of indexicals.161 It is a commonplace (though an important one) that indexical beliefs may be ascribed by content sentences with the same linguistic meaning (character, in Kaplan's terminology) but differing in referential truth conditions. For example, two people may self-ascribe some property using the word ‘I’ and the ascriptions differ in truth value, even though the internal states of the people are themselves indistinguishable; so plainly such internal states do not on their own determine the truth conditions of the expressed beliefs. (Here we can say that reference is determined by the occurrence of a representation in. a context, not by way of a representation of. the context. On the relation between concept, context and referent, see also Burge.)162 In both kinds of case it appears that the intrinsic properties of the representations fail to determine the semantic content of the beliefs in which the representations figure. It follows that the causal role taxonomy delivered by methodological solipsism does not match the taxonomy suggested by ordinary content ascriptions, for which the identity of a belief is (partly) a matter of its truth conditions. In short, the truth conditions of a belief are not always or necessarily encoded in its causal role. But this should come as no great surprise, in view of the structure of belief, since it was already clear that it is the representations themselves. and not their referential properties that play a causal role in the agent's psychology: even where reference is. intrinsically encoded it is not the relation. to the referent that is causally relevant but the way in which

160

So dubbed by Putnam, ‘The Meaning of “Meaning’ ”. A similar idea lies behind Saul Kripke's talk of epistemic counterparts in ‘Naming and Necessity’, in D. Davidson and G. Harman (eds.), Semantics of Natural Language. (Boston: Reidel, 1972) . See also, for an interesting extension of the Twin Earth idea to the social environment, T. Burge, ‘Individualism and the Mental’, in P. A. French, T. E. Uehling, and H. K. Wettstein (eds.), Midwest Studies in Philosophy., iv: Studies in Metaphysics. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979) .

161

Cf. D. Kaplan, ‘Demonstratives’, in J. Almog, J. Perry, and H. Wettstein (eds.), Themes from Kaplan. (Oxford: University Press, 1989) ; J. Perry, ‘Frege on Demonstratives’, Philosophical Review., 86 (1977), and ‘The Problem of the Essential Indexical’, Nous., 13 (1979) ; D. Lewis, ‘Attitudes De Dicto. and De Se.’, Philosophical Review., 87 (1979) .

162

T. Burge, ‘Belief De Re’, Journal of Philosophy., 74 (1977), and ‘Sinning Against Frege’, Philosophical Review., 88 (1979) .

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the referent is represented internally. It is not what. is encoded that matters to causal role, but what it is coded into.. So even if there were a one–one mapping between representations and referents the basic point would remain: semantic properties are irrelevant to a psychology of causal role; at best they figure by proxy. On the other hand, it seems undeniable that beliefs do have (something like) semantic properties—for they have referential truth conditions—and these properties do exert a pull in the individuation of beliefs by content. It thus appears to follow that ordinary content ascriptions, made as part of commonsense psychology, are not methodologically solipsist. What Fodor suggests is that we need two. kinds of psychology to deal with propositional attitudes: a psychology of internal representations, which is methodologically solipsist; and a psychology of the representation relation, studying the extrinsic relations between representations and the environment.163 Ordinary content ascriptions conflate these two aspects of belief. I think we should conclude from these observations that our intuitive conception of belief-content combines two separable components, answering to two distinct interests we have in ascriptions of belief. One component consists in a mode of representation of things in the world; the other concerns itself with properly semantic relations between such representations and the things represented. I want to suggest that the former component is constitutive of the causal–explanatory role of belief, while the latter is bound up in our taking beliefs as bearers of truth. We view beliefs both. as states of the head explanatory of behaviour, and as items possessed of referential truth conditions (cf. Perry, ‘The Problem of the Essential Indexical’). (My talk of ‘referential’ here is loose. I qualify it later.) These components and the concerns they reflect are distinct and independent—total content supervenes on both taken together. We get different and potentially conflicting standards of individuation—and hence different conceptions of what a belief essentially is—according as we concentrate on one or other component of content. The tendency of discussions of belief is, I think, to allow one component to eclipse the other, thus producing needless conundrums and a distorted picture of the nature of belief. We can best see our way through problems about belief if we recognize that beliefcontent is inherently a hybrid of conceptually disparate elements, both. of which inform our conception of belief and its individuation. On this dual component view we will be prepared to expect—precisely what we find—that beliefs may have the same truth conditions and different explanatory role, and the same explanatory role accompanied by different truth conditions. Words in content

163

Actually, Fodor, ‘Methodological Solipsism', doubts whether the latter type of psychology is feasible. His reason seems to be that we would need to have a more or less complete scientific theory of the non-psychological world if we were to characterize referents in ways which are (a. ) nomological and (b. ) uniquely identifying. This reason appears weak to me; the problem is that it proves too much. For the same considerations would rule out a science of photographs, or of ecology. (Not that I want to say that we could have a genuine science. of propositional attitudes.)

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clauses—singular terms or predicates—may thus be said to make a dual contribution164 to the truth conditions of the whole content ascription: they indicate the character of the representations the agent employs in his thought about the world, and. they specify which objects and properties are relevant to the truth conditions of the belief itself. Neither contribution suffices to determine the other, and both are needed to fix total content. Starting from Fodor's idea that belief involves internal representations, I was led to advocate a dual component conception of the structure of belief-content. Now I want to try to reach the same conclusion on the basis of the very nature of representation: representations, I want to argue, necessarily have two aspects and these two aspects must be mutually independent. Let us first ask what is the point or function of representations. The answer, I take it, is that representations are made to mediate between the agent and his environment in such a way as to permit or produce appropriate action guided by information about the world. That is, a mental representation is a state whose function and raison d'être. is to control behaviour in the light of evidence; a representation, we can say, is precisely that which discharges this role. Thus a perceptual experience, for example, can be said to represent the environment, and the point of its so doing is to enable the perceiver to act appropriately in respect of the perceptually represented environment. So any theory. of mental representation should, I think, address itself to the role of representations in the organization of behaviour. On the other hand, representations must also have properties beyond. those constitutive of their intra-individual causal role, because they at least purport to relate to extra-individual entities and states of affairs—they have a ‘referential’ aspect. To claim that semantic properties are invariably encoded in intrinsic properties is then to hold that the intra-individual role of a representation determines its extrinsic relations; or in other words, that reference is somehow supervenient upon dispositions to behaviour. However, I think this supervenience claim conflicts with two important, perhaps definitive, properties of representations. One is that representations can perform their function even when they incompletely. or improperly. represent the object or state of affairs in question. This is because a creature can, so to speak, rely on its spatio-temporal context to resolve ambiguities of reference, and thus ensure that the behaviour caused by the representation is appropriate to the object represented. Thus a perceptual experience can direct a creature's action to the right object in its environment despite the fact that there is some other object in the world which fits the experience equally well—Twin-Earth cases well illustrate this point. But second, and more important, it seems to me to be part of the concept of representation that if r. represents x. as F. it is (epistemically) possible that x. not be F.—that is, representations are necessarily fallible.. How an object is

164

B. Loar, ‘Reference and Propositional Attitudes’, Philosophical Review., 80 (1972) ; S. Schiffer, ‘Naming and Knowing’, in P. French et al.. (eds.), Midwest Studies in Philosophy., ii (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977) .

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represented should therefore be seen as inherently vulnerable to failures of verisimilitude; it cannot be that some state of a creature should qualify as a representation and yet be logically guaranteed to represent reality correctly (unless, of course, the reality represented is of a special sort). It is therefore a condition of adequacy upon a theory of mental representation that it render representations fallible. But now it seems that you can fallibly represent an object as F. only if what. is represented is fixed independently of its being F.. For suppose the fixing were not thus independent. Then error in the representation would entail that the representation was not really of. the object in question—it would be a representation of some other object that did fit it or of no determinate object at all if the representation were improper. In order for us intelligibly to judge that r mis.represents x. as F. we have to assume that r.'s being a representation of x. is independent of its characterization of x. as F.. This rather abstract point can be appreciated from the nature of perceiving and naming. A visual experience will represent the object of perception in a certain way—the object will be seen as. such and such. To regard the experience as genuinely a representation one has to admit the possibility that the object is not in fact as it is seen to be—the experience fallibly represents the object. Such fallibility presupposes that the erroneous experience is still of. that which it erroneously represents. And of course we do suppose that an experience can be a perception of an object which it in fact misrepresents. This is possible because the perception relation is fixed independently of the mode of perceptual representation; it is fixed by a certain kind of causal relation. In other words, the intra-individual role of the experience does not determine its extrinsic relation to the perceived object, precisely because of its representational fallibility. With respect to proper names we can also distinguish two aspects: there is the role of the name in thought and action, and there is the relation of reference between the name and its bearer. Does the former determine the latter? Inasmuch as a name is (or is associated with) a mental representation I do not think it could; for we want to make sense of the idea that the user of the name might misrepresent its bearer to himself. I think we can view Kripke's case against description theories of naming in this way (though he himself does not present his counter-examples in these terms in ‘Naming and Necessity’). The descriptions a speaker associates with a name constitute his representation of its bearer; but these, Kripke argues, may fail to fit the bearer; so the naming relation cannot be set up. by such representing descriptions. There could only be such cases of erroneous descriptive beliefs if the naming relation were fixed independently of the representing descriptions. If I am right that representations are essentially fallible, the existence of such cases can be predicted just from the idea that names involve representations: for we may misrepresent that of which we speak. The fundamental mistake of description theories is, then, that they make linguistic representation by names necessarily infallible; for a name will simply not, on that theory, have an object as bearer if the associated descriptive beliefs are not true

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of it, being perhaps true of some other object or of no unique object. So names must have a component of their content which attaches to them independently of how. the name represents the denoted object; the two aspects of the name are thus independent. Looked at in this way there was nothing adventitious about the availability of the examples exploited by Kripke against the description theorist. I therefore think that the incompleteness and fallibility characteristic of representations give the lie to the thesis that the action-guiding intra- individual role of a representation can determine its referential aspect. But then if representations do of necessity have these two aspects independently, their content will eo ipso. comprise two separable components—what. is represented and how. it is represented. These, of course, are just the components we earlier isolated upon consideration of Fodor's conception of belief, which also seemed forced upon us by Twin-Earth examples and indexicals, and which are specified by way of the special dual contribution made by words in belief-contexts. Representations being what they are, content has the structure it has. Fodor suggested that the two components of belief be the objects of two different kinds of psychology; both together would tell us all there is to know about belief. But common-sense psychology—in particular, the rationalization of action by citing desires and beliefs—does not itself break belief-content down into the two components; its explanatory predicates appear to invoke properties that straddle Fodor's two kinds of psychology. It can easily seem that there is a problem about this: it can seem that either it is, after all, wrong to restrict the explanatory role of beliefs to their internal component; or that ordinary belief–desire psychology cannot be a causally explanatory theory, since it violates methodological solipsism in respect of the properties it employs in rationalizations. That is, there seems to be a tension between the causal–explanatory pretensions of common-sense rationalization and the conditions on what sort of psychological property can. be causally explanatory.165 However, I think there is no real inconsistency here. To see this, consider factive propositional attitudes; for example, knowing, remembering, perceiving. We do commonly employ these in explanatory contexts, yet it would be agreed that they are hybrid states requiring the world as well as the agent's head to be a certain way. What we should say of this is clear: only the internal component of the condition reported is doing explanatory work—the rest is, from an explanatory point of view, idle. Since I similarly hold that beliefs have hybrid content I can take a similar line: the explanatory force of the content ascription attaches only to the contribution the words in the content clause make in their capacity as specifiers of internal representations; their referential properties play no explanatory role. Indeed, one might see factives and propositional attitudes in general as instantiating a common feature: both require the embedded sentence to have certain extensional. properties—that the sentence be true or that the

165

Cf. S. Stich, ‘Autonomous Psychology and the Belief-Desire Thesis’, Monist., 61 (1978) .

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terms and predicates occurring therein should succeed in referring. So we can say that the truth conditions of content ascriptions are indeed not solipsistically specifiable, but only part. of the truth conditions is relevant to the explanatory role of the belief. This does, of course, have the consequence that not every aspect of rationalization can be assimilated to causal explanation, since a component of content is irrelevant to causal role.166 Common-sense psychology is not methodologically solipsist in the properties it invokes, but we need not conclude that it violates methodological solipsism with respect to its explanatory dimension. There is however the question, once this has been granted, as to whether the genuinely explanatory states are themselves beliefs of some sort; that is, whether we can ascribe those purely explanatory states by way of a content specification. To claim that the explanatory states are beliefs would be to claim that underlying any non-solipsistic ascription of belief there is a purely solipsistic belief. I see no good reason to accept this, either with respect to singular terms or predicates in content clauses. It amounts to the idea that there can be purely ‘qualitative’ belief-contents; I doubt that we have any such beliefs and I do not know what their ascription would look like.167 If this is right, it is as misleading to say that beliefs and desires causally explain action as to say that factive attitudes do. It is just that we ascribe such non-propositional causally explanatory states by. ascribing genuine propositional attitudes. The thesis that content has both explanatory and truth-related components throws some light on the difference between transparent and opaque ascriptions of belief. When a term occurs transparently outside the belief-context it specifies only the truth-related aspect of content: this is shown in the fact we are thereby enabled to evaluate the belief for truth, but we cannot use the transparent ascription to explain the agent's actions, for this requires us to know how the agent represents the objects of his belief. When a term occurs opaquely within the belief-context it gives us two sorts of information: the truth conditions of the belief, and the representations that causally explain the agent's actions. If it is asked why we do not have belief-sentences which ascribe only. representations, I think the answer is that beliefs are essentially bearers of truth conditions; so we need some way of getting from the truth of a belief ascription to the truth conditions of what is believed—we need a route to reference—and representations on their own do not supply such a route.

166

This clearly bears upon the conception of rationalization advocated by e.g. D. Davidson, ‘Actions, Reasons and Causes’, Journal of Philosophy., 60 (1963) . Indeed, it now appears that the causal factors implicated in acting on reasons are distinct from the truth-evaluable propositions that determine the logical relations between propositional attitudes. So even if the whole of content could. be shown to have explanatory relevance (which I have denied), we would still have to qualify the claim that rationalization is causal. explanation. I would say that not all of rendering an action ‘intelligible’ by ascription of reasons can be assimilated to specifying the conditions that causally explain it—though a component can.

167

Cf. S. Kripke, ‘A Puzzle about Belief’, in A. Margalit (ed.), Meaning and Use. (Boston: Reidel, 1979), 262 .

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My thesis, to summarize, is that our concept of belief combines two separate elements, serving separate concerns: we view beliefs as causally explanatory states of the head whose semantic properties are, from that point of view, as may be; and we view beliefs as relations to propositions that can be assigned referential truth conditions, and so point outward to the world. This bifurcation of content can be seen as stemming from the point that beliefs involve internal representations, and these inherently present a dual aspect. This thesis will be confirmed and clarified by an examination of the structure of sentence. content, to which I now turn.

III As I remarked at the outset, the logical form of ascriptions of meaning to sentences seems very like that of ascriptions of content to beliefs: but is there any closer tie than that? If we can show the two types of content to be linked in some way, then considerations about meaning will tell us something about belief-content and vice versa. I will mention three sorts of link that might be suggested. First, we have those theories of belief-sentences which make belief a relation to the sentence embedded in the content clause—as with quotational and paratactic theories.168 What a person believes, on such theories, is just the content-specifying sentence (token or type); so belief-content turns out to be the same as sentence content. Second, there is the language of thought hypothesis: according to it, belief is a relation to an internal. sentence, which need not be a sentence either of the ascriber's (public) language or that of the believer. To give a semantic theory of the content of the internal language would therefore be to give a theory of belief-content (Field, ‘Mental Representation’). But third, there is a less theoretically committed way of forging a connection: since the meaning of the embedded sentence serves precisely to specify the content of the ascribed belief, it seems right to identify contents with meanings. That is, belief is a relation to a sentence meaning, though not necessarily a sentence the believer understands. So when a person expresses a belief by uttering a sentence, we can say that he believes precisely what his utterance means. This identification is, of course, close to Frege's view of oblique contexts: what a person believes is the thought (sense) expressed by the obliquely occurring sentence.169 Let us put this by saying that that which is grasped by someone who knows the meaning of a sentence is the same as that which is believed by someone whose belief is specified by using that sentence. Given this

168

D. Davidson, ‘On Saying That’, Synthese., 19 (1968) ; J. McDowell, ‘Quotation and Saying That’, in Mark Platts (ed.), Reference, Truth and Reality. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980) .

169

G. Frege, ‘On Sense and Reference’ (1892), in Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege., ed. P. Geach and M. Black (Oxford: Blackwell, 1952) .

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identification, conclusions reached in one area will be directly transferable to the other; and I think we shall see that the issues that arise in respect of meaning confirm this identification. I said that we treat belief-content in two ways: as explanatory and as truthe valuable. Let us analogously ask what the notion of sentence meaning is designed to do for us—why do we have the notion? When we know to what purposes we put the notion of meaning we shall be better able to see how meaning should be theorized. In other words, we are to think of meaning as a theoretically introduced concept and then ask what is the nature of the theory in which it figures. One very influential and appealing answer is that the concept of meaning is tied to the explanation of the use. of language—what we do. with sentences. A closely related answer is that the notion of meaning has its theoretical role in a characterization of the cognitive states which constitute the apprehension. of meaning. Consequently any adequate account of use or understanding would be. a complete theory of meaning; put differently, any set of concepts introduced to explicate the nature of meaning must be adequate to explain use. The positive aspect of the use conception of meaning is that a theory of meaning must at least. explain use; the negative aspect is that the theory must at most. explain use. So the question becomes: what feature of sentences determines their use?—meaning will then consist in that use- determining feature. Three writers in whom this point of view is more or less explicit are Dummett, Putnam, and Harman.170 Each of these writers, in their different ways, takes the use conception to rule out the introduction of certain concepts in a theory of meaning and to invite the employment of others. Thus Dummett disputes the employment of the (classical) notion of truth in the characterization of sentence content and favours notions of verification and falsification; Putnam extrudes reference and truth from the theory of understanding and use and invokes notions of acceptance and subjective probability in their stead; and Harman rejects a truth conditions theory of meaning, proposing a functionalist theory. Each of these proposals carries a certain conception of what the state of semantic understanding consists in: that state will be defined by the dispositions to verbal (and other) behaviour it induces. What determines use is a state of the head—‘knowing meaning’—and this state gets characterized in terms of the behavioural manifestations in which it is displayed. I hope it is not too tendentious to say that, according to the use conception of meaning, as exemplified in these writers, meaning is a matter of the causal role of the state of semantic understanding.

170

See M. Dummett, ‘What is a Theory of Meaning? (ii)’, in G. Evans and J. McDowell (eds.), Truth and Meaning. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976) , and Truth and Other Enigmas. (London: Duckworth, 1978) ; H. Putnam, Meaning and the Moral Sciences. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978) , notably in ‘Reference and Understanding’; G. Harman, Thought. (Princeton: University Press, 1973) , and ‘Meaning and Semantics’, in M. Munitz and P. Unger (eds.), Semantics and Philosophy. (New York: NYU Press, 1974) .

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It should be clear enough that such a conception implies or assumes methodological solipsism in the theory of meaning, since what explains use is precisely a state of the head. That is why reference. seems to drop out of theories of meaning shaped by the use conception.171 We should be reminded here of an analogous result concerning beliefcontent: when beliefs are viewed exclusively in their capacity as explanatory states the truth conditions component of content has no place. Think of it this way: understanding is a relation to a content, as is belief; but if we insist on viewing these attitudes as exhausted by their explanatory role it will seem that the referential component of content is idle—there will be theoretical room only for the internal representations. Meaning, on the use conception, comes to be a matter of what I shall call cognitive role.—and this is an entirely intra-individual property. Again, the in principle irrelevance of semantic relations to explanatory role is obscured by the fact that, very often, cognitive role determines reference. But, as we saw with belief, what is in the head does not always or necessarily determine reference;172 and even when it does it is the cognitive representation itself and not what is coded into it that is strictly constitutive of explanatory role. Once we give up the idea that reference is determined by what is in the head—by cognitive role—it becomes clear that a theory of meaning conforming to the use conception will find no legitimate place for referential truth conditions. But I do not think we can rest content with a pure cognitive role theory, discarding reference and truth entirely. For any adequate theory of language should address itself to relations between words and the world, since such relations are clearly (to say the least) a very important feature of language: we cannot just choose to ignore semantic relations in our theory of the workings of language. Furthermore, there seems good reason to suppose that reference and meaning are not independent properties of expressions: the meaning of a sentence surely determines its truth conditions, and one who did not know the truth conditions of a sentence would not fully grasp its meaning. The difficulty is that it does not seem possible to motivate reference on the use conception. So how could we warrant its introduction into a theory of meaning? In my discussion of belief I said that reference comes in by way of truth; and this does motivate it in a conditional way, since truth requires reference. But this does not answer a more radical question, pressed by Hartry Field:173 what is the basis, if any, of our customary ascription of truth. conditions to beliefs and sentences? The question is pressing because the most obvious place to seek the motivation for speaking of semantic correspondence is in the explanatory utility of belief

171

This consequence is most explicitly acknowledged by Putnam in ‘Reference and Understanding’.

172

As Putnam (‘The Meaning of “Meaning’ ” ) pointed out, it follows that meaning is not in the head, on the assumption that meaning determines reference.

173

‘Tarski's Theory of Truth’, Journal of Philosophy., 69 (1972) , sect. V, and ‘Mental Representation’, sect. V.

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and meaning—but closer scrutiny has shown that place to be already adequately filled by representations or cognitive role. I shall now critically review some suggested answers to this question; to answer it would be to disclose the point of the non-explanatory component of content. (i) Let us first put aside a misguided answer to our question. Frege, having argued that words have sense (cognitive value) as well as reference, asks why it is that we do not confine ourselves to the sense and let the reference go (Frege, ‘On Sense and Reference’, in Translations., 63). His reply, in effect, is that we need reference because we are interested in how the world is—we seek knowledge of the world. It is important to see that this cannot be taken as an answer to our. question. It can seem to be because of an ambiguity in the question ‘why should we be interested in reference?’ We must distinguish between: why we should be concerned with the referents. of our words (or better: with respect to our words, why we should be concerned with their referents), and why we should be interested in the reference relation. between words and things. Frege is answering the first question, but this does not suffice to answer the second. To suppose it did answer our question would be as wrong as trying to refute a redundancy theory of truth by insisting that the concept of truth is indispensable because we want to know the truth. about the world. To motivate a concern with the world is not to motivate a concern with the relation. between the world and language. (This is not to deny that an interest in the world might somehow underlie our ascriptions of reference—only that the present suggestion does not on its own begin to answer our question about semantic correspondence.) (ii) We can also deal briefly with what Dummett sometimes suggests is the role of reference in an account of meaning.174 Dummett takes the mode of presentation. (cognitive value) associated with a term to coincide with its mode of designation. (mechanism of reference): that is, he holds that the manner of association between word and object is fully mentally represented. He can then claim that the reference relation enters the characterization of meaning as use because, to put it my way, that relation is encoded as an intrinsic property of the speaker which serves to determine his linguistic and other behaviour. From this perspective Dummett can insist that a causal theory of reference, for which the reference relation is not mentally represented, has the undesirable consequence that reference becomes ‘idle in the theory of meaning’.175 In other words, only something like a description theory of reference—which locates the mechanism of reference within the head—can justify the semantic relevance of reference; but granted that theory, reference does. play a role in a use-centred theory of meaning, it being precisely that which sense (cognitive value) determines. This

174

M. Dummett, Frege: Philosophy of Language. (London: Duckworth, 1973), esp. ch. 5.

175

Ibid. 147. We might say that, for Dummett, the reference relation has semantic relevance only if it is dispensable in favour of non-relational conditions of the speaker, i.e. is not really a relation. between word and object.

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way of introducing semantic correspondence cannot satisfy us for two reasons, both of which have come up before. First, it is not true that what is in the head in the way of mental representations suffices to determine reference—we need to appeal to causal or contextual factors. Second, Dummett's suggestion motivates reference only derivatively or by proxy: it says that the two-place nonsolipsistic reference relation enters into the theory of meaning by being coded into a one-place solipsistic condition of the speaker's head. But, by that very fact, the reference relation proper falls away as redundant; it does nothing not already done by what it is coded into (empty terms bear out this point). In this respect, I think Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences.) has a clearer appreciation than Dummett of the consequences for reference of the use conception: its commitment to methodological solipsism precludes recognition of semantic correspondence. (iii) Putnam begins by connecting understanding with use, sees that reference is otiose in a theory of use, and concludes that the learning and mastery of a language—one's knowledge of meaning—do not involve referential concepts: you can know the meaning of a sentence without so much as having the concept of truth. The ability to employ language no more presupposes a grasp of referential concepts than the ability to turn on lights presupposes a grasp of the concept of electricity. The concept of truth, for Putnam, enters at an altogether different level: it should be construed as a theoretical term in an explanatory theory of the success. of linguistic behaviour, as the concept of electricity is invoked to explain the success of flipping light switches (Meaning and the Moral Sciences., 99). Elsewhere (‘The Meaning of “Meaning’ ” ) Putnam proposes to decompose meaning into ‘stereotype’ plus extension: combining this with his account of understanding and truth, we could say that, for Putnam, it is the stereotype that explains use and is that in which knowledge. of meaning consists; while the role of the extensional component of meaning is to account for why the use behaviour prompted by the stereotype is generally successful. Putnam's story here is not totally free of obscurity, but it seems clear enough to invite the following objections. First, it is not obvious to me that we require. truth and reference to explain the fact (if it is one) that behaviour directed by mastery of language tends to fulfilment of our goals. Instead of accounting for such success by saying that our utterances and beliefs are reliably true. (where the theory of reliability will invoke relations at least coextensive with referential relations), why not tie success to evidence.? Our actions tend to fulfil our goals because they are (typically) informed by good evidence; that is, our utterances tend to be assertible.. And if our having reliable evidence can explain success, it looks as if we have still not found a feature of language whose explication requires us to go beyond narrow psychology. Nor is it at all clear that an intuitionist or formalist about mathematics cannot explain the utility of mathematics. But a more fundamental and frontal objection is that Putnam's story unacceptably dissociates one's knowledge of meaning from one's being able to take assertoric

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utterances as (primarily) reports on the condition of the world. That is, an audience interprets an assertion, not just as the expression of the internal stereotype the speaker associates with his words, but as standing in a certain sort of relation to the world; and it seems that you could acquire knowledge of the world by this means only if you (at some level) took the sentence uttered to have referential truth conditions; that is, to be such that the world is a certain way if and only if the sentence is true.. Surely it is absurd to suppose that someone could achieve full mastery of the practice of speaking a language, using it in communication, and not, in some way, take words as possessed of reference—such a one could not appreciate the point and purport of an assertion. (I come back to reference and communication later.) (iv) A quite different suggestion is that we need reference and truth because the only way in which the cognitive role of words and sentences can be specified. is by citing their reference or truth conditions—we can show. the cognitive role of a word only by saying. what its reference is.176 We should distinguish this thesis from the claim that we cannot specify meaning. except by stating reference: that claim seems to me true, simply because reference is. an ingredient in meaning, but it does not follow that it is the cognitive role of the word that is thereby specified. The confusion here is abetted by uncritical use of the notion of sense, construed as that which constitutes cognitive value and. that which determines reference, that is, as roughly equivalent to the intuitive undifferentiated notion of meaning. But we have seen that these two jobs are not and could not be discharged by the same property of an expression. So to say that the specification of meaning requires the use of ‘refers’ does not yet address the question at issue, since that question just is how the non-cognitive component of meaning is to be introduced. Once we are clear that it is the cognitive role that has to be referentially specifiable, I think the suggestion loses whatever plausibility it may have had. Note to begin with that it is of course not sufficient. for the specification of the cognitive role of an expression that we state its reference; it could not be, since ‘refers’ produces a transparent context (it is a genuine relation). So we would need some further condition to select such ways of stating reference as would fix cognitive role—that is, which used expressions have the same. cognitive role as the mentioned expressions. This clearly calls for some prior criterion of sameness of cognitive role. But still it may be said that this prior criterion cannot be directly exploited to specify cognitive role; it can serve only as a constraint on reference assignments. However, this seems to me very implausible, for mental representations and the things they represent are evidently distinct existences; so how could it be that the former are not identifiable independently of the latter? Consider empty names: it seems to me undeniable that they can have a cognitive role (which is

176

I cannot cite a published source for this thesis, but it is prominent in the (recent) oral tradition.

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not. to say that they have what we would ordinarily regard as meaning); but their cognitive role would be ineffable if the present suggestion were right. But we need not rely on these general reasons for supposing that non-referential specifications of cognitive role must exist, because we do have ways of alluding to cognitive role—whether or not these are ultimately theoretically adequate—which do not employ the concept of reference. Thus the cognitive role of a name might be given by a description—proper or improper, correct or erroneous—either by quoting the description or by availing ourselves of the traditional (though logically rather obscure) device of italicizing the description in order to designate a concept. Or we might, following a suggestion of Dummett's (Frege.: Philosophy of Language., 227), specify cognitive role by saying what ability. its possession confers on the speaker; or again a functional definition of the dispositions induced by associating a given cognitive role with an expression might be given. It is also conceivable that an adequate account of cognitive role can only be expected from scientific cognitive psychology, in terms perhaps of some kind of subconscious system of representation; so that our usual ways of indicating cognitive role relate to this underlying system in somewhat the way in which our common-sense terms for physical dispositions relate to a properly scientific account of the basis of the disposition. I will return to what a theory of cognitive role might look like later; for now I want to conclude that, since it is not necessary. (and not sufficient) to use reference to specify cognitive role we are still wanting an answer to our question. It would indeed be extremely puzzling if reference did come in this way, since cognitive role is a matter of use and reference is irrelevant to use. (v) Field177 offers an answer to our question which seems to me close to the truth. He wishes to find a serious point in our ascribing semantic properties to sentences and beliefs, given that such properties play no part in a psychology of internal representations. He suggests that we employ semantic concepts because we take people's utterances and beliefs as generally reliable indicators of the world, that this vastly increases our ability to acquire knowledge about the world, and that an articulate theory of how we acquire knowledge in this way will make essential use of the notions of truth and reference. It is important to note that this suggestion locates the point of semantic concepts quite outside of psychological explanation: semantic concepts direct our concern to the world, not to the speaker's behaviour. Note also that the suggestion tacitly connects reference with meaning—with the information conveyed in an assertion—since what state of affairs a sentence represents is plainly part of its meaning: so, unlike Putnam's suggestion, this does make grasp of semantic concepts constitutive of linguistic competence. Thus in Twin Earth cases, for example, we assign distinct references to expressions because the sentences uttered convey information about different things, and we want to know about those things.

177

‘Tarski's Theory of Truth’ and ‘Mental Representation'.

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(No doubt this practice is founded on a largely implicit theory of learning and reliability; to make that theory explicit would be to say what governs our assignments of reference). However, as stated, Field's suggestion has some untoward consequences. The suggestion has two parts: (a.) we want knowledge of the world (for obvious reasons), and (b.) we take it that people's utterances and beliefs are reliable ways of getting such knowledge. But it seems that neither of these considerations could be constitutive of why we assign reference as we do, since they are in a certain sense merely contingent. Suppose that with respect to certain subject matters my knowledge is complete (or I suppose it to be); then I shall not, according to Field's suggestion, have any motive for assigning reference to those of your utterances and beliefs which relate to those subject matters—omniscience has no need of reference. Or suppose that your utterances are un.reliable (or I take them to be); then again I shall lack any motive for assigning reference to your words. But surely we want to say that a hearer in these relations to a speaker's words would. still think it proper to assign reference to them; so Field's suggestion seems not to be quite right. The basic trouble is that he makes the raison d'être. of reference and truth too dependent upon conditions of the hearer., instead of locating their point in the characterization of the activity of the speaker.. We need to associate reference with the very nature of communication. (vi) Let us then modify Field's suggestion in the way indicated. What seemed right in his suggestion was the idea that reference and truth are needed in an account of how it is that utterances can transmit knowledge about the world. I accordingly propose that we locate reference in the point of communication—in the intention with which assertions (and other kinds of speech act) are made. A hearer understands a speech act as an assertion just if he interprets it as performed with a certain point or intention—viz. to convey information about the world. On this view, omniscience and unreliability will not destroy the motive for assigning reference, since we will still need semantic concepts to explain why it is that the speaker chose those. words to convey knowledge (or belief) about a certain state of affairs to an audience. Of course the hearer will often acquire knowledge of the world by witnessing assertions, but his doing so is not the root reason for assigning semantic properties to the speaker's words (indeed it is plausible to see our acquiring knowledge in this way as resting upon a prior interpretation of the utterance as performed with an intention whose possession requires a tacit grasp of semantic notions). To fulfil the intention to communicate knowledge (or belief) about the world in language the speaker must exploit signs standing in representational relations to things in the world. In fact, I think that finding a place for reference forces us to take a world-directed view of communication; for if, as some philosophers have held178 (or at least said), the point of communication is to convey the solipsistic

178

I suppose the locus classicus. of the view is book III of Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975) .

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contents of the speaker's mind, then the notion of reference would not be required in characterizing the activity of communicating. But if this is. the right way to introduce reference, it follows that communication is aimed rather at the world. (It should be noted that my suggestion is not that the reference relation itself explains a speaker's acts of communication; I am saying rather that the thought. of it is presupposed in reflective mastery of the practice, or in characterizing its function where the practice seems quite unreflective.) This suggestion may well appear rather obvious once it is formulated, but in fact it creates a prima-facie problem. Field's suggested motivation applied equally to utterances and beliefs, indeed fundamentally to beliefs; my amendment is stated in terms of the point of utterances, and so does not seem applicable to beliefs at all, since belief-states are not actions performed with a point. It may then look as if my suggestion has not really uncovered the theoretical root of reference. However, I think I can turn this apparent lacuna to my advantage; for I doubt that beliefs do have genuine referential properties in the manner of sentences—a belief 's being about. something is not the same as a sentence's referring. to something. (If the aboutness of beliefs were not thus literally referential, then that would cast some doubt on the view that the representations implicated in belief are, properly speaking, sentences of a language, since that view implies a quite literal sense in which beliefs involve reference.) That aboutness is not the same as reference is suggested by the following considerations. First, we are reluctant to apply strict semantic concepts to beliefs in the ordinary course of things; we naturally speak of the aboutness of beliefs as quasi.-semantical, thus signalling a derivative or analogical usage. Second, part of our reluctance to attribute beliefs to non-linguistic creatures stems from doubts about assigning a specific and discriminated object to the belief, that is, about giving it determinate truth conditions; we tend to let the explanatory aspect of belief dominate in such cases, and feel unsure about judgements of truth value.179 Inasmuch as we wish to attribute beliefs in the case of non-linguals, their aboutness seems closer to the ofness of perceptual experiences—which no one would directly assimilate to a genuinely semantic relation. It seems to me that the aboutness of beliefs is situated midway between the ofness of perceptual representations and the reference proper of words; so we should not want. it to be straightforwardly true that beliefs refer. This intermediate status of belief representation is perhaps not surprising in view of the location of beliefs in the causal network of psychological processes: beliefs are (typically) states caused by perceptions and subsequently expressed in speech; so their causal role with respect to input and output seems to reflect (perhaps to underlie) the conceptual status of their representational properties. The aboutness of belief stands between the more primitive (perceptual) and the

179

Cf. S. Stich, ‘Do Animals Have Beliefs?’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy., 57 (1979) .

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more sophisticated (linguistic) ways of representing the world, and it reflects a bit of both. Suspended between perception and reference beliefs can be pulled now in one direction, now in the other: when language is absent (socalled) beliefs approximate to perceptual states; when language is present it is apt to dominate and make us conceive of beliefs as essentially linguistic in character. But now we still have the question of why we ascribe even non-referential aboutness to beliefs. Part of the answer is that we think of beliefs as essentially communicable, so that some of the referential quality of words rubs off on them. In so far as we do not conceive of belief linguistically I think the answer will coincide with the correct answer to this question: why do we say that perceptual experiences are of. things in the world? I suspect that we do so because of the phenomenon of learning.: perception is a process whereby a creature acquires information about its environment, and learning in the most basic case consists in the reception (or registration) of sensory stimuli caused by the perceived object. Perception is of objects because it is the means by which creatures learn about things around them; we account for such learning by postulating relations of perception—where the resulting cognitive states guide behaviour in respect of objects in the environment.180 No doubt this account of the theoretical role of the notion of perception is crude and sketchy, but I think it does something to explain why we say beliefs are about things and what such aboutness consists in. The representational properties of beliefs are a sort of combination of properly semantic reference and perceptual ofness. I started this section by asking after the theoretical role of meaning. I agreed with those writers who tie meaning to use, and introduced the idea of cognitive role as what determines use. But I did not agree that meaning is exhausted by use, since this leaves out reference. I then motivated reference in a different way, as the means by which language conveys the condition of the world. It emerges, then, that the notion of meaning, like that of belief-content, is structurally duplex: it comprises two distinct components, each component introduced to serve a different purpose and each to be theorized in conceptually different ways. In the next section I shall try to articulate further what a complete theory of meaning, shaped by the preceding reflections, would be like.

IV In the case of belief we said that the two components of content are specified by way of a dual contribution made by expressions in the belief-context—they

180

This connects with Jonathan Bennett's claim that a necessary condition of belief-ascription is educability (Linguistic Behaviour. (Cambridge: University Press, 1976), 84 f.) : if I am right, educability is required for aboutness.

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attribute a representation and they relate that representation to things in the world. We can, similarly, construe words in the ‘means that’ context as making a dual contribution of the same sort—they specify the cognitive role of the mentioned expressions and they specify their referential properties. For perspicuity we can separate out the two contributions by taking the meaning ascription as equivalent to a conjunction: for s. to mean that p. is for s. to be true iff q., for some ‘q.’ having the same truth conditions as ‘p.’, and. for s. to have some cognitive role φ such that ‘p.’ also has cognitive role φ. (Notice that no position in this conjunction is non-extensional; the intensionality of ‘means that’ results from compounding the two contributions.) Now to have a complete theory of meaning would be to have adequate theories corresponding to each conjunct of this schema; the ordinary style of meaning ascription could then be seen as combining or straddling these two theories (neither of which would directly employ the concept of meaning), in much the way that we saw the ordinary notion of belief-content to straddle the two sorts of psychological theory envisaged by Fodor. But it seems that nothing of critical importance would be lost, and some philosophical clarity gained, if we were to replace, in our theory of meaning, the ordinary undifferentiated notion of content by the separate and distinct components exhibited by the conjunctive paraphrase. An analogy here might be this: in ordinary talk we employ the concept of a reason, but the ascription of a reason really consists of a conjunctive ascription of a belief and a desire in combination. The concepts of belief and desire are quite distinct, and a particular belief–desire pair combining to form a reason can be detached and combined with other desires and beliefs to form different reasons—so clearly there is no mutual determination as between the beliefs and desires that jointly constitute reasons. In roughly this way I think that reference and cognitive role go to make up the intuitive idea of meaning: they too are conceptually disparate and mutually independent, permitting variation of pairings. Let me now mention three general consequences of this picture of meaning, before delineating the precise shape of each sub-theory. The first is simply that the dual component conception appears to conflict with an assumption (or thesis) of Dummett's about the proper form of a theory of meaning, namely that it will employ a single central concept in terms of which all of the traits of meaning will be explained.181 It may seem slightly odd that Dummett should hold this view, since he also insists upon a firm distinction between sense and reference; but there is no inconsistency for Dummett here, because he also holds both that sense determines reference and that sense is to be characterized in terms of referential concepts. We have seen, however, that this view of sense is fundamentally wrong, if sense is understood as cognitive role or mental representation. Once the intra-individual role of

181

See e.g. Dummett, Frege: Philosophy of Language., 360 f., and ‘What is a Theory of Meaning? (ii)’, 75 f.

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expressions and their reference fall thus apart any unity in the notion of meaning dissolves, and we find ourselves accounting for each component by means of distinct sets of theoretical terms (as below). Nor does this duality seem objectionable when the two dimensions of meaning are properly distinguished: not all of meaning is truth conditions and not all of meaning is use, but what is not either of these is not of the same sort. as what is. So a verification conditions theory and a (classical) truth-conditions theory need not be seen as rivals, if each restricts itself to its proper domain—cognitive role or reference, respectively. The second general point to make is that the notion of semantic structure now falls into two. A key aim of a meaningtheory for a particular language is to explain and exhibit how the meaning of a sentence depends upon the meaning of its parts and their manner of combination.182 If meaning has two components, then this project of exhibiting the structure of meaning will divide into two sub-projects: we shall want to know how the truth conditions of a sentence depend upon the reference of its parts, and we shall want to know how the cognitive role of a sentence is determined from the cognitive role of its parts. (Frege can be interpreted as providing a sketch, for his notions of sense and reference, of how these theories of semantic structure might proceed.) Presumably the syntax required by each theory will coincide, but it is possible that the mechanisms of structural determination will be different in respect of the two components and thus call for different kinds of formal theory. The third consequence relates to what might be called the topography of the total theory of meaning. Dummett is prone to picture a theory of sense (cognitive value) as surrounding, like a shell, the theory of reference—reference is depicted as derivative from sense.183 Put in my terms, this is tantamount to the idea that the component of meaning that subsists in the head determines and warrants the assignments made in the theory that deals with the extra-cranial component. Since Dummett's topography presupposes a wrong conception of how the components are related, it should I think be rejected as engendering an illusory sense of unity in the concept of meaning. A theory of cognitive role no more surrounds a theory of reference than a theory of desire surrounds a theory of belief in the ascription of reasons to an agent. (A question arises about the location of a theory of force. on my view. I am inclined to hold that it properly attaches to the theory of reference not to the theory of cognitive role, since what. is asserted (say) is that some state of affairs obtains in the world, and the speaker's representations are strictly immaterial to this—they are more expressed

182

This was Davidson's official aim in ‘Truth and Meaning’, Synthese., 17 (1967) . In that paper, however, Davidson is (rightly, I think) cautious about the claims of a recursive specification of truth conditions to be a complete theory of (intuitive) meaning; so strictly, all he can claim is that a Tarskian truth theory shows how one component. of the meaning of a sentence is structurally determined, viz. the referential component.

183

See especially ‘What is a Theory of Meaning? (ii)’, 74.

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than asserted.184 If this view of force is right, then Dummett is also wrong about the location of force with respect to the other two theories—again because he takes sense to determine reference. But I will not now digress to substantiate this position one force.) Putnam (to whose conception of meaning I am generally sympathetic) would not of course subscribe to Dummett's topography, but the gloss he puts on his own articulation of meaning as stereotype plus extension suggests a less radical position than seems to me indicated: he speaks of meaning as a vector. of these two components, as if stereotype and extension somehow mingled in a unitary property.185 But I think that meaning is no more a vector of reference and cognitive role than is a vector of 1 and 2. It seems to me, then, least misleading to conceive a combined theory of meaning as simply the ordered pair of the two sub-theories, rather as a reason is aptly represented as an ordered pair of a belief and a desire. We shall then, in accordance with the recommended topography, construe each sub-theory as making distinct and independent assignments of reference and cognitive role to expressions, one theory allowing us to read off how the world is if the uttered sentence is true, the other supplying the materials for the (causal) explanation and prediction of a speaker's behaviour, specifically his use of sentences. A gnomic slogan capturing this conception of meaning might be this: the aim of each sub-theory is to specify the whole of part of meaning, not part of the whole of meaning. I have so far characterized the two sub-theories in a schematic way; we need to know more about their precise form. The theory of reference will naturally take the form of a Tarskian theory of truth, possibly supplemented by some kind of account of the reference relation. This theory tells you, on the basis of the recursive structure of sentences, how the world is if the sentence in question is true—that is, it gives truth. conditions, neither more nor less. In other words, a truth-theory is a specification of the facts. stated by sentences of the object-language, in the intuitive sense of that recalcitrant notion. Given that this is. the object of a theory of reference, what constraints should we impose on the truth-theory to ensure that it fulfils its appointed aim? It is notorious that material equivalence in a T-sentence is sufficient for its truth; but clearly this does not yield us the intuitive notion of fact. On the other hand, it would be wrong to require that the right-hand side feature a sentence fully synonymous. with the sentence mentioned on the left, since plainly ‘Hesperus is a planet’ and ‘Phosphorus is a planet’ have precisely the same conditions of truth despite their non-synonymy. I suggest that an acceptable intermediate constraint is afforded by the condition of ‘extensional isomorphism’: the sentence

184

Cf. a remark in S. Schiffer, ‘The Basis of Reference’, Erkenntnis. , 13 (1978), 176. This paper gives some cogent reasons for interpolating modes of presentation between subject and object, but I do not agree that these determine (and so make redundant) mention of the object in giving the content of a belief or sentence.

185

Putnam, Mind, Language and Reality. , 269.

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mentioned and the sentence used in the theorems of the truth-theory should be composed of semantic primitives bearing the same extension in the same logical structure.186 This condition is not without its complications, but I think it does approximate justice to the idea of the fact stated by a sentence; in particular, it is insensitive to differences of meaning between expressions traceable to cognitive role alone—how a sentence represents a fact should be kept distinct from the fact thus represented. The constraint can be put another way: if two sentences are intersubstitutable in all non-psychological contexts—truth- functional, modal, explanatory, etc.—then the one sentence can be used to give the truth conditions of the other. The thought behind this condition is that only psychological contexts are sensitive to the mental representations associated with the expressions in their scope (are representation-functional, as we might say) over and above extensional properties of expressions.187 If these constraints do indeed serve to circumscribe the intuitive idea of fact, then they seem to me to offer a more hygienic explication of the fact idea than we have been taught to expect.188 What should be emphasized is that these constraints on the truth- theory do not. entitle us to replace the truth predicate and biconditional with ‘means that’ and preserve truth: but my whole point is that it is misguided to hanker after doing that, since a theory of truth conditions cannot, by its very nature, deliver all there is to meaning—nor is this any deficiency in it construed as a theory of the whole of part of meaning.189 If we want to capture the other part of meaning, we must move to a theory built upon qualitatively different principles—a theory of intra-individual cognitive role. About this last matter it must be said that we have much less in the way of clear ideas and rigorously developed theory; perhaps, indeed, cognitive role is inherently insusceptible to the kind of formal theory exemplified by classical truth definitions. But I think that we have enough to appreciate what kind of thing cognitive role might be, and what a systematic semantic theory of it might look like. Our initial characterization of representations was in terms of their function in guiding behaviour in the light of evidence about the environment; so cognitive role will naturally be theorized in evidential terms. Field, in a paper190 to which I am much indebted, has built upon this initial (Quinean)

186

This is, of course, the extensional analogue of Carnap's relation of intensional isomorphism: see R. Carnap, Meaning and Necessity. , 2nd edn. (Chicago: University Press, 1956), sect. 14.

187

I thus commit myself (gladly) to a divided account of the truth conditions of (alethic) modal contexts and psychological contexts. The division is predictable from the ‘Shakespearean’ character of the former in contrast to the latter: i.e. co-denoting names (but not definite descriptions) are intersubstitutable, salva veritate. in modal but not psychological contexts.

188

e.g. by D. Davidson, ‘True to the Facts’, Journal of Philosophy., 65 (1969) . In saying this I do not. intend to resurrect the idea that facts are a peculiar kind of entity. quasidesignated by whole sentences; I wish only to point out the semantic transparency of ascriptions of truth conditions and note its significance.

189

My point here can be put this way: it is a mistake to think that if the notions of truth and reference cannot be made to deliver all. of meaning, the proper response is to start again. with some other set of semantic notions.

190

H. Field, ‘Logic, Meaning and Conceptual Role’, Journal of Philosophy., 74 (1977) .

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thought a theory of cognitive role based upon the concept of subjective probability. Without recapitulating the details of Field's probabilistic semantics, his idea is that the cognitive role of a sentence determines and is determined by the speaker's subjective conditional probability-function on that sentence; that is, his propensity to assign probability values to the given sentence conditionally upon other sentences. Exploiting this idea Field shows how to construct a formal semantics for propositional and quantificational languages, yielding soundness and completeness proofs. He also provides what is in effect a recursive definition of the subjective probability of sentences, showing how the probability of complex sentences depends upon the probability of their subsentences and subformulas. Sameness of cognitive role is defined as equipollence with respect to the speaker's conditional probability-function. According to Field, the cognitive role of an expression, as thus defined, depends upon something like associated descriptions (most clearly in the case of names), which may be improper or erroneous. The intuitive motivation for this is that what probability I assign to a sentence containing (say) ‘Hesperus’ conditionally upon the possession of certain evidence depends upon my conception. of Hesperus—what I take to be true of it. Put in more Quinean terms, whether I assent to a sentence containing ‘Hesperus’ in response to impinging sensory stimuli depends upon the conception induced in me of the denoted object in the course of my acquisition of the name, that is, upon what states of my head are associated with the name. Now, given this probabilistic account of cognitive role, we can ask how it fits in with our earlier observations about the independence of reference and internal representations: specifically, do the semantic assignments made in the probabilistic interpretation fix the assignments made in the truth-theoretic interpretation? We should predict not, since Field's associated descriptions can fail to determine reference in both of the ways discussed earlier; and indeed I think it does turn out that there is a clear sense in which a person's conditional probability-function on his sentences fails to fix their truth conditions in the ways we have come to expect. First, as is most evident from the simplified Quinean theory, the conditional probability- function I assign to sentences containing ‘water’ will be the same as that assigned by my Twin Earth counterpart to his sentences containing ‘water’, since we assent to such sentences in the same stimulus conditions (they are stimulus synonymous though referentially non-synonymous). Similarly, indexicals used in evidentially indistinguishable situations will determine the same conditional probability-function, though the context may yield distinct truth-conditions. With respect to erroneous cognitive representations the failure of determination consists on a propensity to take sentences as evidence for the given sentence which do not in fact constitute evidence for the truth of the given sentence, that is, which do not really raise the probability that its truth conditions obtain. Thus suppose I associate ‘the φ’ with a name ‘a.’, where a. is not in truth the φ; then given a sentence ‘the φ is F.’ I will be prepared to assent to (accord high subjective probability to) ‘a. is F.’: but of course it is not the case

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that the probability of ‘a. is F.’ is increased by the truth of ‘the φ is F.’. In other words, erroneous descriptions can cause my conditional probability-function to rate a sentence probably true in conditions that do not in fact afford evidence that the sentence is. true. So here is a second way in which the truth-conditions semantics is independent of the probabilistic semantics. We thus have the desirable result that Field's theory of cognitive role has the consequence that the cognitive role of a sentence does not determine its truth conditions. Nor is that at all accidental, since the two theories are constructed around quite different central concepts, the epistemic concept of subjective probability and the non-epistemic concept of truth. Relating all this to our conjunctive formulation of the dual contribution made by words in the ‘means that’ context, we can say in summary that the first conjunct is treated by a Tarskian truth-theory meeting the extensional isomorphism condition, while the second conjunct can be filled out by means of a subjective probability or evidential interpretation in the style of Field. Thus we have two central semantic concepts which supplement rather than rival one another; we have two theories of semantic structure, though based on the same syntax; and topographically the two theories exist alongside. one another, not in any relation of inclusion. Furthermore, the cognitive role theory takes its place as part of a theory of behaviour, allied to decision theory; while the theory of reference does the job of recovering that aspect of communicative content which relates to conditions in the world. The former theory solipsistically characterizes the intra-individual role of representations; the latter non-solipsistically articulates the relations between words and the world, ignoring how grasp of those words affects behaviour in virtue of their representational aspect. Insisting upon the separateness of the two theories is not inconsistent with allowing that they might be combined or amalgamated to yield correct substituends in ‘s. means that p.’. To derive such meaning ascriptions we would first apply the truth-theory to s. and then substitute expressions on the right-hand side in accordance with the equivalences of cognitive role set up by the probabilistic semantics. Having thus taken account of both components we can. replace ‘is true iff ’ by ‘means that’. For example, the truth-theory might contain the theorem ‘Hesperus is a planet’ is true iff Phosphorus is a planet this being a perfectly correct truth-condition; we then replace ‘Phosphorus’ by ‘Hesperus’ in the metalanguage on the basis of what the theory of cognitive role says about ‘Hesperus’; we can then move to the direct meaning ascription. Two points should be noted about this method of amalgamation. First, we have got the effect of direct meaning specification without explicit use of the concept of meaning. Second, the extra conditions imposed by the theory of cognitive role do not make the truth-theory redundant in the enterprise of achieving full meaning ascriptions: this is because cognitive role does not determine reference

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and meaning does (think of giving the meaning of ‘water is wet’ in English and in Twin Earth English). So there is a recipe for putting meaning together again; but what is the theoretical motive for doing so? Viewing the amalgamated theory as the object of the exercise encourages, it seems to me, an illusion of unity in the concept of meaning. Compare the two theories with a theory (if there could be such a thing) of what Dummett calls tone..191 The tone of an expression is certainly a constituent of its conventional meaning, so that if two sentences differ in tone they do not substitute into ‘s. means that p.’. Tone is a separate and sui generis. component of meaning, consisting perhaps in the affective connotations of an expression; it neither determines nor is determined by the other two components. A theory of tone would be a supplementary part of the total theory of linguistic significance, safely neglectable in developing the other two theories. To present a unitary theory, built around a single central concept, somehow combining all three elements, would obscure the true structure of meaning—suggesting as it would that each element could be theorized in the same terms. I think our attitude toward the relation between reference and cognitive role should be the same as our attitude toward the relation between tone and those other components of meaning. It would not actually be wrong. to amalgamate the theories, but this should not blind us to their fundamental distinctness. I myself can see little theoretical point, and some danger, in presenting all of meaning within a single theoretical setting.192 The claim that meaning extends beyond states of the head is sometimes resisted on the ground that it implies that there are aspects of meaning which are not understood or grasped by someone with semantic competence in respect of the expressions concerned. That is, a non-solipsistic conception of meaning denies that meaning is essentially an object of semantic knowledge..193 And it is felt that meaning could not be anything other than that which a person apprehends when he acquires mastery in a language; a non-solipsistic view implies that the meaning of a man's words is opaque to him. (This is why it is supposed that reference could not be an ingredient. of meaning.) This line of objection to our account can be reacted to in two ways. One way is just to concede that the psychological state of understanding a sentence does not fix its meaning—but then insist that this is unparadoxical once the two components of meaning are clearly distinguished. What would. be paradoxical would be the idea that meaning is a unitary affair and yet only partially cognitive in character; but a difference in the epistemological properties of cognitive role and

191

See Dummett, Frege: Philosophy of Language. , ch. i. I recommend reflection on tone as a prophylaxis for those inclined to hold, as a dogma, that meaning must. be a unitary matter.

192

I am thus opposing, as potentially misleading, the Davidsonian conception of the form of a complete theory of meaning, most clearly exemplified in McDowell, ‘On the Sense and Reference of a Proper Name’, Mind. , 86 (1977)—more on this later in the present paper.

193

See Dummett, Frege: Philosophy of Language., 92 , and ‘The Social Character of Meaning’, in Dummett, Truth and Other Enigmas. .

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reference is in fact predictable from their essential nature. However, I prefer a rather different reaction. Understanding is itself a propositional attitude and as such can be expected to have content in the hybrid way in which propositional attitudes generally do: not all of understanding—sc. what. is understood—is in the head. But then we can. say that all of meaning is understood, since an extrinsic characterization of the state of understanding will encompass the extrinsic component of meaning. On this view of semantic knowledge you understand an expression just if (a.) you associate the right representation with it, and (b.) the resulting states of your head are appropriately related, causally or contextually, to the referent of the expression. So people on Earth and Twin Earth understand ‘water’ differently after all. Understanding is comparable to perception in this respect. People on Earth and Twin Earth do not differ in the intrinsic aspects of their perceptual experiences, but their perceptual states are distinguished by being of. different things. Understanding, we might say, is a de re. propositional attitude. It is this that establishes a bridge of sorts between the theory of cognitive role and the theory of reference: understanding a sentence is a psychological state on which the assignments of the two theories converge—but each in their different ways.

V In this section I shall briefly indicate the bearing of the view of content so far advocated upon some influential approaches to meaning; for the most part it will be fairly obvious what the bearing is. (i) Pure truth-conditions theories.. It follows directly from what has been said so far that any theory which attempts to explain meaning in terms of truth conditions alone cannot be adequate; such a theory is constitutionally partial, because it omits internal representations. Thus possible worlds semantics (based upon alethic. modality anyhow) will never add up to meaning, since it can register only one side of meaning.194 This is because modal contexts are insensitive to the cognitive role of the expressions that occur in them. The lacuna shows up when possible worlds semantics tries to deal with psychological contexts and questions of cognitive value: its inability to account for these is not some peripheral defect, but results from the very nature of the theory—it has no place for the cognitive role of expressions. With Davidsonian theories the matter is less straightforward. Davidson proposes Tarski's Convention T condition of material adequacy upon definitions of truth as the proper object of a

194

David Lewis wrestles (unsuccessfully) with this problem in ‘General Semantics’, in D. Davidson and G. Harman (eds.), Semantics of Natural Language. (Boston: Reidel, 1972), 182 f. The notion of proposition generated by this approach to meaning—as equivalent to a set of possible worlds—clearly unsuits propositions so defined to serve as the internal representations needed to account for the causal–explanatory aspect of belief.

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meaning-theory: the right-hand side must translate. the sentence mentioned on the left.195 There are many problems with this simple condition when we apply it to truth-theoretic semantics for natural language (e.g. indexical sentences), but the point on which I want to insist is that the requirement is too strong as a condition on definitions of truth., at least if translation is taken in its full sense, since it is no defect in a statement of truth conditions that the expressions used differ merely in cognitive role (sense) from the expressions mentioned. It is indeed a defect in a theory of truth taken as a full theory of meaning, but what that shows is that we need to import a different set of considerations if we are to reach full meaning. The needed additional element is often introduced by imposing certain ‘constraints’ upon the core truth-theory in order to ensure the serviceability of the theorems in content ascriptions.196 This way of looking at meaning is apt to mislead, however. First it should be clearly acknowledged that meaning cannot be reconstructed from truth alone, and the question then faced as to whether the needed extra element makes the truth-theory redundant. Second, we are given no theory. of the needed extra element; the only theory in the offing is a theory of truth conditions and this is agreed not to exhaust meaning. The proper verdict, I think, is that the Davidsonian perspective, while not being actually incorrect—for it is, after all, tacitly a dual component conception—is apt to deceive us about the theoretical resources we need in a fully adequate theory of meaning.197 Certainly it cannot be glossed as claiming that meaning can be captured in terms of truth conditions. One might almost say that the kind of bipartite theory suggested in the last section is the form the Davidsonian proposal would (or should) take if it were clearer about its own assumptions. (ii) Pure use theories.. In recommending a use conception of content Dummett makes play with a revealing analogy. He compares the meaning of a word with the powers of a chess piece: meaning is exhausted in dispositions to use words, as the identity of a chess piece is exhausted by its role in the activity of playing chess (see ‘The Philosophical Significance of Gödel's Theorem’, p. 188, in Dummett, Truth and Other Enigmas.). Acceptance of this analogy can make the use conception seem incontrovertible, for we can indeed find no sense in the suggestion that the identity of a chess piece might transcend the powers it has on a chess board. Surely the game of chess could not be learned and the significance of a move appreciated if such transcendence obtained. However, the analogy is both tendentious and importantly misleading, for the simple reason that chess pieces, unlike words, do not have referential properties. Our

195

See esp. D. Davidson, ‘In Defense of Convention T’, in H. Leblanc (ed.), Truth, Syntax and Modality. (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1973) .

196

D. Davidson, ‘Radical Interpretation’, Dialectica., 27 (1973) ; various papers in G. Evans and J. McDowell (eds.), Truth and Meaning. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976) .

197

There is a danger, too, of a certain kind of circularity in appealing to constraints from propositional attitudes with content: for what we wanted was a radical theory of what content comprises. (Cf. my remarks on Gricean theories in Section V(iv) of the present paper.)

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conception of meaning is such that we regard Twin Earth cases as possible, but we cannot coherently envisage Twin Earth cases for chess pieces—their identity is. supervenient upon the powers they possess. A word is more like a photograph than a chess piece in this respect: for there can be intrinsically indistinguishable photographs of different things. If we inserted such indiscernible photographs in some device whose output was sensitive only to intrinsic properties of them, then there would be no telling, on the basis of output, of which thing each was a photograph. This shift of analogy helps to dispel a related fear concerning the observability of meaning. Dummett argues that if meaning is to be communicable, it must be intersubjectively accessible; but if meaning transcended use, in the way the identity of a chess piece might (absurdly) be said to transcend its powers, then meaning would be something covert, occult and unobservable (see e.g. ibid. 190). To deny that meaning is exhaustively manifest in use would be to make it into an ulterior trait of a speaker's mind, incapable of public exhibition. However, if the component of meaning that transcends use is reference, then the use-independent aspect of meaning would lie, not in the hidden recesses of the speaker's mind, but in public facts about how he is embedded in the world. Analogously, the intrinsic indiscernibility of two photographs need not make their representational properties undetectable: we can look to their causal ancestry to determine which objects are in fact photographically represented. Similarly, on a causal or contextual theory of reference, we could appeal to extrinsic facts about the speaker to recover the use-transcendent component of meaning. To deny that meaning supervenes on behavioural dispositions does not then have the dire consequences Dummett fears. If the use conception is as flawed as I have claimed, then there is another sort of consequence for Dummett. This is that Dummett's case against a realist truth-conditions semantics, and in favour of anti-realism, is seriously undermined, since its crucial premiss is precisely that meaning cannot transcend that which is manifest in a speaker's behavioural dispositions. It is significant here that Dummett's complaint against the causal theory of reference almost exactly parallels his objection to realist truth-conditions: that is, the notion of content delivered by both positions renders content incapable of behavioural manifestation.198 Both views yield unacceptable accounts of understanding, because what is understood ceases to show up in dispositions to use. Consider a mental representation of a recognitiontranscendent state of affairs; by hypothesis, what is thus represented will not be fully manifest in propensities to respond appropriately to evidence—the speaker's conditional probability-function will not exhaust the full semantic content of the sentences on which it is defined. So

198

On realist truth-conditions and use see ‘The Philosophical Basis of Intuitionistic Logic’ in Dummett, Truth and Other Enigmas. , and see also Dummett, ‘What is a Theory of Meaning? (ii)’. On the causal theory of reference and use see Dummett, Frege: Philosophy of Language. , 146 f. These two questions seem to me to be intimately connected.

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realist truth-conditions will not be explanatory of use. But from my perspective this is as it should be, since the use conception can. only govern part of meaning. Let me put it more strongly. To insist that meaning is use is to commit oneself to methodological solipsism in semantics. Now if the content of a sentence can consist in nothing other than what is explanatory of use, then it seems that methodological solipsism in semantics will lead to metaphysical solipsism. For the facts that explain use are just states of the head—ultimately, dispositions to respond to sensory evidence. So the content of a sentence will in the end consist simply in the internal representations themselves, not in the states of affairs represented—hence metaphysical solipsism. What this whole line of reasoning ignores is that sentences have referential properties independently of their role in the determination of behaviour. And without the basic assumption that meaning is use, it is hard to see how Dummett's argument against realism could be reconstructed. The general moral I would draw from this is that, in assigning content to sentences and propositional attitudes, we perforce rely upon our own theory of the world in which we take the subject of assignment to be situated; for part of assigning content is assigning reference and we cannot hope to recover the reference of a speaker's words just from truths about his behaviour. There is, in other words, no neutral. way to ascribe content—no way that is independent of the theorist's own view of the world. (This point is relevant to the question of alternative conceptual schemes: briefly, we have no choice but to impose our own conceptual scheme on others—we cannot bracket our own view of the world and try to discern what the other thinks by putting ourselves into his head.)199 Dummett and Quine have much in common; and Quine too has taken to stating his behaviourist conception of language as the doctrine that meaning is use.200 More exactly, the meaning of a sentence is identified with the set of sensory triggerings which prompt the speaker's assent. Quine's view must then be that the notion of reference has no role in a theory of meaning strictly so- called; reference will not even be determined. by meaning as he construes it, since distinct referents can cause the same sensory triggerings.201 This leaves Quine with the question of what theoretical purpose the relation of reference can serve in his philosophy of language, in view of its redundancy in the explanation of

199

This puts me in agreement with the conclusion of Davidson, ‘On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association., 47 (1974) , but I reach that conclusion by a diametrically opposed route.

200

Especially in his ‘Use and its Place in Meaning’, in A. Margalit (ed.), Meaning and Use. (Boston: Reidel, 1979) . It is also worth noting, apropos of my earlier interpretation of Dummett's use conception, that he (Dummett) expresses ‘strong agreement’ with Quine's insistence on reducing knowledge of meaning to dispositions to behaviour: see Dummett, ‘The Appeal to Use and the Theory of Meaning’, in Margalit (ed.), Meaning and Use. (1979), 134 .

201

See W. V. O. Quine, Word and Object. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960), 31 , where in effect this is acknowledged. There may, indeed, be some irony in this for Quine: meaning may be a more infirm notion than reference in point of clarity, but it appears to have a surer theoretical role in Quine's philosophy of language than does reference—it being what accounts for behaviour.

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behaviour. I do not know that Quine has ever seriously put this question to himself, nor what his answer would be. But it is at least clear that, on his view of meaning, reference is not any part of it. (iii) Translational semantics.. The conception of semantic theory put forward by J. J. Katz and his associates202 is sometimes berated for failing to address itself to semantic relations between words and the world, this being the task of ‘real semantics’.203 I wish only to point out that this criticism is in a certain way misguided. For it is reasonable to construe translational semantics as some sort of attempt to give a theory of the cognitive role component of meaning, and a theory of that component should. not be a theory of referential truth-conditions. Indeed, proponents of translational semantics would be equally justified in berating truth-conditions semantics for not doing the only thing that any semantics ought to do, namely characterize the internal cognitive role that words and sentences have. It is not that I think Katz's theory is a good. theory of cognitive role; it is just that it is plausibly seen as engaged upon a perfectly legitimate enterprise, which is not to be criticized for not being the same as another (equally legitimate) enterprise. So the dispute between the two approaches seems to me to be based on a misunderstanding: there is no genuine conflict between them, because each is addressed to a different component of meaning; and neither can pretend to comprehensiveness. (iv) Gricean theories.. By a Gricean theory I mean any theory which attempts to reduce conventional sentence meaning to the propositional attitudes of speakers.204 A Gricean reduction will offer as an account of what it is for a sentence s. to mean that p. some collocation of attitudes at least one of which has the content that p.. This immediately invites the suspicion that Gricean theories could not possibly be theories of what content consists in, since they presuppose the same content in their analysans as occurs in the analysandum; the Gricean cannot then be construed as in the same business as he who characterizes content in terms of cognitive role and truth conditions. The theory might be offered, instead, as an account of the conditions under which public sounds and marks have the particular content they have—viz. when and only when they are produced with certain propositional attitudes. That interpretation of the Gricean programme—as telling what associates a content with a bit of language non-semantically identified—seems to require that propositional attitudes themselves not consist in relations to sentences (internal or external) antecedently associated with semantic content, on pain of circularity.205 To

202

e.g. J. Katz and J. Fodor, ‘The Structure of Semantic Theory’, Language., 39 (1963) .

203

Thus David Lewis, ‘General Semantics’, 169. (I do not, however, dispute the point that knowledge of a translation manual is insufficient for knowledge of meaning.)

204

Cf. S. Schiffer, Meaning. (Oxford: University Press, 1973) ; Bennett, Linguistic Behaviour. .

205

Field raises this difficulty for the Gricean in ‘Mental Representation’, 52–3, but I think underestimates its potential force: he takes it that circularity is avoided if (but only if) the semantics of the internal language can be developed independently of the semantics of the public spoken language. But even if that were possible (which he doubts), the fundamental aim of the Gricean project would be frustrated, the aim being to demonstrate that semantics can be (analytically) reduced to psychology—to the contrary, psychology would rest upon semantics.

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avoid the circularity the Gricean would have to claim that the representations involved in propositional attitudes are not properly linguistic, so that no sentence/meaning associations are presupposed. I cannot resolve the issue now: what I have wanted to point out is that the Gricean reductionist must confront the question of what it is for a propositional attitude to have content.206 A second issue concerns the conception of communication suggested by Gricean theories. At a superficial glance it might look as if the point of communication, for a Gricean as for Locke, is to convey to the audience the state of mind of the speaker as opposed to the condition of the world, since the speaker is said to intend the audience to believe that he (the speaker) has certain propositional attitudes. But in fact this implies the mind-centred view of communication only if the attitudes in question are themselves taken solipsistically. If, on the other hand, we view their content as implicating reference to things in the world, then it is not so clear that the Gricean has no room for the world-directed purport of acts of communication. We might say that the condition of the world gets conveyed by. conveying the speaker's world- directed attitudes. What is perhaps more just is to accuse the Gricean of mislocating the emphasis. in his implied picture of communication; he should acknowledge that the primary intention of a communicator is to let the audience know that the world is thus and so, the communicator's attitudes being an essentially secondary matter. My own view is that the content of an act of communication must be seen as comprising two elements, corresponding to the meaning of the sentence uttered: there is the information conveyed about the world, but there is also information about how the speaker represents the world, where this latter enables the audience to take what is communicated as usable in the explanation of the speaker's behaviour. The speaker's primary intention is indeed to discourse on the world, but he cannot do this except by revealing his own conception of it. Any adequate account of communication must make a place for both of these aspects. (v) Kripke on names.. I would agree with Kripke (‘Naming and Necessity’ and ‘A Puzzle about Belief ’) that identity statements containing names are both necessary and a posteriori. But, given his own assumptions about the meaning of names, it is not easy to see how a statement can. combine this modal status with that epistemic status. A natural account of the modal status of such an identity statement, favoured by Kripke, is that the names function simply to designate their bearers, so that the proposition expressed is aptly represented as an ordered triple consisting of the bearer(s) of the names and the identity relation. But this account of what is expressed by an identity statement leaves

206

This question is especially pressing for those who wish to explain linguistic truth and reference in terms of propositional attitudes: e.g. Christopher Peacocke, ‘Truth Definitions and Actual Languages’, in G. Evans and J. McDowell (eds.), Truth and Meaning. (1976) .

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it problematic how the statement can have cognitive value, since the same representation of propositional content applies to statements of the form ‘a.= a.’. In short, Kripke's conception of the proposition expressed by an identity statement gets the modal status right but runs into trouble over the epistemic status. Suppose now that we start with the question of epistemic status and propose a classical Fregean account of the cognitively significant proposition (thought) expressed: the names are taken as semantically equivalent to a pair of proper definite descriptions, those the speaker or hearer associates with the names. Then the proposition thereby expressed seems to offer a plausible account of the epistemic status of the statement but (on reasonable assumptions about the sorts of descriptions speakers associate with names) encounters difficulties regarding its modal status, since the definite descriptions will (typically) not be rigid designators. The upshot appears to be this: neither the Kripke proposition nor the Frege proposition can do both. jobs, yet both jobs need to be done. It can thus seem that an identity statement could not be both necessary and a posteriori. Kripke toys with the idea that the epistemic status might be explained by invoking descriptions only as reference- fixing not as meaning-giving, where such descriptions do not really contribute toward the proposition expressed. But I find this unsatisfactory for two reasons: (a.) such reference-fixing descriptions are not—on Kripke's own showing—guaranteed to be available to the speaker, and (b.) I think names like ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’do. differ in their meaning and not just in how their reference was fixed. It seems to me that Kripke's troubles here stem from his taking fixing the reference to be in a certain sense weaker than giving the meaning: he takes it that what fixes the reference of a name need not enter into its meaning, but that what does enter into meaning cannot but contribute to the determination of reference. This assumption has the consequence that if you try to account for epistemic status by reckoning descriptions into the meaning of names (perhaps idiolect by idiolect), then you will inevitably get the truth conditions and hence the modal status of the identity statement wrong, since what constitutes meaning must also determine reference. The key to the problem is to give up that assumption; and this is exactly what the dual component theory does. We can then assign the epistemic status to the cognitive role component and the modal status to the referential component—and neither component determines the other. We could say that the identity statement expresses (independently) both. the Frege proposition and the Kripke proposition; the problem arose because it was assumed that the statement has a unitary meaning.207 Kripke makes the mirror image mistake to Dummett on this matter. Dummett is rightly anxious to account for the epistemic aspect of meaning, but is then driven to deny that

207

Indeed the very idea of proposition comes to seem to embody a mistake from the present perspective: for there is no one. thing that is both the bearer of truth value and that which determines the cognitive import of a sentence, i.e. its psychologically explanatory aspect.

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the bearer of the name enters truth conditions and so must resort to ad hoc stipulations regarding scope and related devices.208 Kripke, on the other hand, wishes to account for modal status by letting the referents themselves occur in the proposition expressed, but is then hard put to handle questions of cognitive value. The common presupposition is that the role of descriptions in determining epistemic status must carry over to the determination of reference and truth conditions. My suggestion is that, in rejecting this double role for descriptions, the dual component view of meaning can render a Fregean theory of informativeness consistent. with a Kripkean conception of truth conditions. Actually to accept the Fregean theory of cognitive value would, of course, involve repudiating the strict Millian view of the semantic content of names endorsed by Kripke; but I can see no advantage in retaining that view once it is clear that its rejection does not have the Fregean consequences for truth conditions that Kripke fears. The dual component view can also help us see what is going on in Kripke's puzzle about belief. The puzzle arises because we seem compelled to ascribe contradictory beliefs to someone in cases in which he expresses his beliefs using names acquired in different circumstances: in my terms, names with different cognitive role can invite the same ascription of belief-content. This is in fact a rather general phenomenon: it can also arise for demonstratives, as when a person assents to and dissents from ‘that is F.’ at different times because he fails to realize that the same object is being demonstrated. I would offer the following diagnosis (which is not to say solution). First, because the singular terms in these cases have different cognitive roles for the believer it is easy to understand the state of mind in which such contradictory beliefs occur: the states of the head corresponding to the ascribed beliefs are not in fact the same. What would be very alarming and mysterious would be an ascription of contradictory beliefs in which the names on the basis of which the ascription is made are cognitively equivalent. This difference in the states thus ascribed comes out in their explanatory role, for the utterance of the sentences containing the terms will warrant quite different expectations about how the person will behave. So we can say, second, that in these cases the truth-conditions aspect of content dominates over the explanatory aspect: since the truth conditions of the uttered sentences are precisely the same, we tend to ignore the cognitive difference between the names. Our usual principles of belief-attribution can, I agree, commit us to attributing formally contradictory beliefs, but this is not an inconsistency in internal representations—it obtains rather between the extrinsic truth-conditions. There is a sense in which the puzzle can arise precisely because belief-content has the two components we have distinguished.

208

See Dummett, Frege: Philosophy of Language. , ch. 5, appendix. Christopher Peacocke seems to me to make the Kripkean mistake (‘Proper Names, Reference and Rigid Designation’, in S. Blackburn (ed.), Meaning, Reference and Necessity. (Cambridge: University Press, 1975) .

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VI I have now motivated a dual component theory of content, sketched in the outlines of such a theory, and indicated its consequences for some standard views of meaning. It remains to take up a number of further issues for which the theory has implications. These are: (a.) the ascription (or existence) conditions of content, (b.) the nature of radical interpretation, and (c.) the epistemology of content. (a.) Under what conditions can we say of someone that he has a certain belief or of a sentence that it has a certain meaning? The dual component theory predicts that there are two sorts of condition, both of which are necessary and neither of which is sufficient: a belief-content may fail to be ascribable either. because the person is wanting in adequate representations or. because the world does not contain such objects and properties as would confer truth conditions on the belief; and similarly for the psychological state of knowing meaning. So it might be thought a test of the rightness of the view I am advocating whether we do indeed refuse to assign a content in cases in which either the cognitive role or the reference is lacking. We have then two sorts of case to consider: those in which a person's assent to a sentence is not backed up by an association of adequate representations but reference is present, and those in which assent is accompanied by representations but the sentence lacks referential truth- conditions. On the view that words in content clauses make a dual contribution it should not be possible to ascribe content in the usual way in either sort of case. Cases of the first type are of two sorts: those in which no representation is correlated with some word(s) in the assented-to sentence, and those in which some correlated representation is wildly in error. The former type of situation can be generated by (broadly speaking) the division of linguistic labour: a person merely mouths a sentence to which others in his speech community attach adequate cognitive representations (stereotype)—an extreme case would be passing on a coded message undeciphered by the person transmitting it. Here the words can have reference—even in the mouth of the person in question—but no belief expressed by the sentence is ascribable to the person; his conception of the sentence's subject matter is too impoverished. This lack of associated representations makes itself felt when we try to use the assent to explain the person's behaviour by way of a belief-ascription: his psychological state will not match that of someone whose behaviour can be explained in terms of the belief in question. The latter sort of case arises when a person severely misunderstands the sentence to which he assents. Clearly someone who thinks that ‘bachelor’ applies to married females cannot be ascribed a belief whose content is specified by using that word. I am inclined to be liberal about how much error it takes to obstruct a content ascription, but there are limits beyond which no belief can be ascribed. In these cases the person's assent is again

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psychologically idle—he will lack the usual dispositions in respect of evidence and action. I think the absence of explanatory potential is the reason we are unprepared to ascribe beliefs in these cases, though the sentence itself is possessed of truth conditions. But now are adequate representations sufficient. for a content ascription? Someone (like Frege) who thinks that cognitive role determines reference will suppose so, since the referential component will be recoverable from the representations; but since I deny such determination it looks as if I have. to say that empty reference blocks content ascription. For an ascription of belief involves, as we said, a claim about the (quasi-)semantic relations between the subject's representations and things in the world; if that claim is false it follows that the subject has no belief with that content (compare factives). So if a sentence does not have referential truth-conditions it cannot be used to ascribe a belief-content. We thus have the consequence that the non- explanatory aspect of belief is also necessary for the existence of content. Taking both sorts of case together we get the predicted result.209 That content existence depends upon both components helps explain and reconcile what have seemed like contrary intuitions. Some have claimed (rightly) that since content is determined by the extra-cranial world, beliefs will not be available unless the world is a certain way; it follows that beliefs have no purely intrinsic characterization (McDowell, ‘On the Sense and Reference of a Proper Name’, sect. 8). Others have felt that this flies in the face of an obvious truth: from the point of view of the explanatory role of a belief, a person's dispositions to behaviour are invariant with respect to how the world is—so beliefs must. be in the head (Stich, ‘Autonomous Psychology and the Belief- Desire Thesis’). The disagreement results from each side concentrating on one aspect of belief to the neglect of the other. I think it is correct to insist that the relation between subject and object is necessarily mediated by representations whose existence is world-indifferent—for an object cannot be its own cognitive role—but it is wrong to infer that beliefcontent can be solipsistically ascribed. If God could look into (the intra-cranial part of) our minds he would indeed not see there what we are thinking of: but that is not because he would see nothing.—he would see our internal representations—but because what is there does not suffice to determine the objects of our thought.210 In other words, beliefs do have

209

Here is perhaps the place to insert a remark about functionalist views of propositional attitudes; as e.g. in Schiffer, ‘The Basis of Reference’. The intuitive idea of functionalism is that a mental state is individuated by its causal role in the agent's psychology. On my view of content, a component of it eludes capture in these terms—for people can have attitudes possessed of different contents and yet be functionally isomorphic. A possible response to this, suggested by Field, ‘Mental Representation’, is to try for a functionalist account of the reference relations constitutive of that component of content that goes beyond individualistic functional properties. However, I think this reponse rescinds the intuitive motivation for functionalism: we would have to think of the whole world, not just the individual, as a functional system. Cf. McGinn, ‘Philosophical Materialism’, Synthese., 44 (1980), sect. V (iii) .

210

McDowell appears to hold that nothing of the mind is discernible within the skull (a Sartrean view). But admitting that the truth conditions of a belief introduce extra-cranial conditions does not require us to accept the extreme view that the mind is not in the head. Indeed that view cannot, I think, properly explain how propositional attitudes are mental causes of behaviour. My position is that some. of the mind is located in the head. (This way of putting it is due to McDowell.)

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an intrinsic component—they must have if they are to be causally explanatory—but that component cannot be identified with the belief of which it is a component, since content also requires reference. The existence conditions of content are like those of an ordered pair: the pair does not exist unless both elements do, but it does not follow that the elements can be identified.. (b.) What is the empirical status of a theory of meaning for a particular language? Since I have divided the total theory into two sub-theories, the question of radical interpretation now comes in two parts, corresponding to the assignment of truth conditions and the assignment of cognitive role. It is obviously an interesting question then whether the two sub-theories are independently testable. Before I address this question let me make some remarks about its significance. It seems to me that the question of empirical status is secondary to the question what form. a theory of meaning ought to take: given a certain conception of meaning, the proper view of radical interpretation should fall out as a consequence—we should not let the verification conditions of a theory of meaning dictate its internal conceptual structure. To do so would be to embrace a positivism that is no more reputable in the theory of meaning than elsewhere.211 What is more significant for theorizing meaning is the question of the point. of the notion of meaning—or of the components that make it up—for this question will better lead us to the concepts in terms of which meaning is to be theorized. If it should turn out, then, that the two sub-theories could not be independently tested, we ought not to conclude that our theoretical conception of meaning is somehow defective—that it alleges a theoretical difference where there is no empirical distinction—rather, we should doubt the significance of radical interpretation in the theory of meaning. (We would not feel tempted to revise our customary articulation of reasons into desires and beliefs just because the attribution of these attitudes turns out to be empirically interdependent.) However, that said, it does seem reasonable to expect that the already noted differences between reference and cognitive role will be reflected in diverse modes of empirical verification. Let me first indicate, by way of a foil, how (idealized) radical interpretation would proceed under two other dual component theories—Frege's (as seen through Dummett's lens) and Putnam's (in ‘Reference and Understanding’).212 On Frege's view of sense and reference, the two theories would be fundamentally interdependent in their conditions of confirmation. For once we have arrived at a theory of sense—construed as that in which cognitive significance consists and as what explains our judgements—we will already have settled upon a scheme of reference for the language, since

211

The prime target of this remark is Quine, but I think Davidson falls into this way of thinking sometimes: see especially Davidson, ‘Reality without Reference’, Dialectica., 31 (1977) .

212

In Meaning and the Moral Sciences. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978) .

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sense determines reference. For the same reason it is necessary. in order to arrive at a reference assignment, that the interpreter already have a theory of sense; there will be no independent way of getting at reference. By contrast, Putnam's theory of total meaning would render the two theories fundamentally independent in point of empirical confirmation. For the theory of use and understanding can be tested without any thought of what accounts for the success of language behaviour, and vice versa—just as describing the competence involved in turning on lights is independent of a theory of electricity. It seems to me that Frege's view makes the empirical status of the two theories too interdependent, while Putnam's picture suggests an unrealistically radical separation. I can indicate my own view of the matter by considering perception. Here we can envisage a pair of assignments to a perceiver made over time: first, an assignment of experience characterized in ‘as of ’ terms; second, a relational assignment of objects perceived, this done in the transparent style. It is clear enough that knowledge of one assignment would not yield. knowledge of the other: but could we come to have knowledge of the one without any knowledge of the other? In practice, no doubt, we rely upon information about the actual properties of surrounding objects to conjecture how someone else is perceptually representing those objects—what he perceives them as—and we also take reports of perceptual experiences to be (typically) good indicators of the actual condition of external objects of perception. But is it possible in principle. to verify such perceptual assignments independently? It seems to me that it ought to be. We could test our assignment of experiences on the basis of how, in combination with other mental states, they would (causally) influence behaviour (we might in this way assign a course of experience to a man we know to be constantly hallucinating). On the other hand, we could judge whether an object is (transparently) seen on the basis of (to put it crudely) how the perceiver is spatio-temporally embedded in the world and in what causal transactions he is involved. In something like this way we can envisage separately testing a theory of reference and a theory of cognitive role. In respect of the latter, we will, in the manner of Quine, observe how our subject responds to sensory stimuli, thus establishing his conditional probability-function—and all this within narrow psychology. This procedure will not yet have issued in the verification of any assignment of reference, for the reasons already given. How then is the reference theory to be tested? Suppose we have a theory of reliability. for speakers, that is, a theory of the conditions under which speakers learn (acquire true beliefs).213 Conjoining this reliability theory with a candidate

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Such a theory is alluded to in Putnam, Meaning and the Moral Sciences. , and Field, ‘Mental Representation’. A reliability theory plays essentially the role sometimes allotted to the principle of charity, e.g. by Davidson, ‘Radical Interpretation’. That principle would also provide a rule for assigning referents—viz. maximize true assertions and beliefs—that will not immediately yield information about the speaker's representations. However, I think the principle is unacceptable: see McGinn, ‘Charity, Interpretation, and Belief’ (1977); repr. as ch. 8 in this volume.

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assignment of truth conditions the empirical content of the conjunctive theory will be this: the theory is empirically warranted if the world turns out to be as the theory of reliability and truth conditions jointly predicts. Let the conjunctive theory say that a sentence s. is true iff p. and that the belief expressed by an utterance of s. was reliably acquired; then if it is in fact the case that p. the theory's assignment of truth conditions is (to some degree) confirmed—otherwise it is disconfirmed.214 Whether a reference theory is totally empirically independent of a cognitive role theory clearly depends upon whether we could have a theory of reliability that made no assumptions about cognitive role. It is difficult to resolve this question without a better idea of the precise character of a theory of reliability, but it does at least seem evident that some. reliability considerations can be ascertained without inquiry into a person's inner psychology—we can tell, for example, whether external circumstances are conducive to unimpeded observation. (The same conclusion appears indicated by so-called causal theories of reference.) With respect to propositional attitudes, verifying the two components of their content can be expected to combine the methods appropriate to perception and to meaning, in view of the location of belief vis-à-vis those other two sorts of property. However, I do not want to be dogmatic about this: it may. be impossible properly to know the referents of a man's words without knowing how he represents those referents, and vice versa—so that (as with joint attributions of beliefs and desires) we need, at some stage, a method of simultaneous determination. But at present I can see no very convincing argument for this and some reason to doubt it; certainly the two sub-theories can be supposed, in large measure, to have their empirical consequences in isolation. (c.) Dummett says: ‘It is an undeniable feature of the notion of meaning—obscure as that notion is—that meaning is transparent. in the sense that, if someone attaches a meaning to each of two words, he must know whether those meanings are the same’ (Truth and Other Enigmas., 131). It will be evident from what has been said up to now that I am committed to denying what Dummett takes to be undeniable. But why should anyone hold that meaning is thus diaphanous? (I prefer this term, as ‘transparent’ already has a technical usage.) On the face of it the claim seems questionable in view of its apparent conflict with a second undeniable feature of meaning, namely that meaning determines reference; for no one could hold that reference. is diaphanous. Meaning appears constitutionally diaphanous because of the familiar assumption that what is in the head determines reference; that is, the reference relation is internally represented. But once we reject, as we have, the assumption that cognitive value is the mechanism of reference, the second undeniable feature of meaning immediately controverts the first: words can have the same cognitive

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That is, the interpreter tests for whether he could acquire knowledge of the world. by means of the candidate theory of referential truth-conditions; note that this method has the merit of conforming with the point. of communicative speech acts.

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role yet differ in reference and hence in meaning.215 Since reference is not supervenient on cognitive role, an identity statement can be potentially informative even though the terms in it are cognitively equivalent. (Difference of cognitive role is not then necessary for informativeness, though it does seem sufficient.) Denying that total meaning is diaphanous does not, of course, imply that there is no. dimension of meaning which has that epistemological property; and indeed it seems very plausible that cognitive role is. diaphanous—for it resides in the head and can therefore become accessible to introspection. Since it is not the case that all of meaning is diaphanous it is not a consequence of incorporating reference into meaning that one who understands an identity statement must know its truth value—understanding relates to reference in an extrinsic way. The semantic content of a sentence is analogous in this respect to the representative content of a perceptual experience: for what is perceived includes the external object of perception, and so is not something wholly accessible to introspection. Acknowledging the duplex structure of content in general thus prepares us to reject the diaphanity thesis. We can now detect some deep connections between a number of mutually supporting doctrines about meaning. Methodological solipsism in semantics, meanings as introspectible, the use conception of meaning, description theories of the reference relation—all of these reflect an underlying individualism.: content must be supervenient upon properties of the individual (inner or behavioural) taken in isolation from his environment (cf. Burge, ‘Individualism and the Mental’). Thus if meanings were in the head, we could expect them to be both diaphanous and exhaustively manifested in use; description theories are then offered to preserve these doctrines from the threat posed by the semantic relevance of reference and truth. As soon as we take a different view of the mechanism of reference these behaviourist and introspectionist conceptions of content come to seem mistaken. I suspect that attachment to these doctrines arises out of a tacitly Cartesian approach to content: what we say and believe must be accessible from a first-person point of view. The alternative position here advocated tends to approach the matter from a third-person viewpoint: the individual is seen as situated in the world in such a way that the semantic content of his actions and psychological states results jointly from his intrinsic properties and his relations to the world. Content is conferred as much by the world as by us; the epistemology of meaning reflects this fact.

215

I hold this not only for the inter-speaker case and the cross-temporal intra-speaker case, but also for the individual speaker at a given time. Surprisingly, Field ‘Logic, Meaning and Conceptual Role’ stops short at this last case: he says (on p. 396) that the reference of an individual's words at a given time should be determined by the states of the individual's head at that time, and he proposes a constraint to ensure this. However, it seems clear to me that the usual ways of constructing counter-examples to this determination thesis for the other cases—with respect to names, natural kind predicates, and indexicals—are equally available in the single-time intra- speaker case; I leave the exercise of constructing such examples to the reader.

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Postscript to ‘The Structure of Content’ The 1970s saw a great outburst of interest in propositional attitudes. This interest signalled a switch of emphasis in analytic philosophy away from philosophy of language and towards philosophy of mind. Philosophers discovered that they were really interested in mind after all, language being but one expression of mind. No doubt this was partly due to the demise of behaviourism—we no longer had to pretend that speech was the only legitimate topic of concern. In any case, this paper was part of that surge of interest. It is a synoptic paper, integrating issues in semantics, indexicality, action explanation, intentionality, realism. I think it is still the most widely cited paper I have published, perhaps because it crystallized the convergence of these topics (it also has a catchy title). It was a paper waiting to be written. The paper occasioned a good deal of what can only be described as hostility—at least in England. I remember a normally mild-mannered and very distinguished philosopher actually shouting at me on a station platform about the paper. I shall not speculate on the reasons for this reaction, but it certainly seemed to me disproportionate and more often than not rather uncomprehending. In fact, the basic ideas of the paper are quite commonsensical, however inimical to entrenched philosophical positions they were. That beliefs both cause behaviour and have referential content is not exactly news, and there are plenty of reasons for supposing that these two aspects of belief call upon different mechanisms and require different concepts for their articulation. So I am unrepentant about the general claims of the paper, though some of the formulations could use a little refinement. As I remarked in the first footnote, I conceived the paper as a preliminary study, knowing that it required a more systematic treatment. That treatment can be found in my 1989 book Mental Content., to which I direct interested readers. Here I shall mention just two areas in which the position in ‘The Structure of Content’ was modified in the later work. First, the problem of justifying ascriptions of reference to mental states is taken more seriously in Mental Content.. There I invoke, somewhat tentatively to be sure, teleological accounts of intentionality, suggesting that reference can be introduced within the project of assigning relational functions to mental states. Such an approach was virtually unheard of at the time I wrote ‘The Structure of Content’, but it offers some promise of dealing with what has come to seem an increasingly troubling question. On this view, content is a vector of internal causal properties and extrinsically characterized function. Second, I had not, at the time of ‘The Structure of Content’, formulated the distinction between strong and weak externalism, which is a cornerstone of Mental Content.. This distinction allows us to recognize a class of contents that are not subject to Twin-Earth cases but which are nevertheless individuated by reference to extrinsic entities—as with the simple contents of visual experience.

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This notion of weakly external content is the acceptable face of what some choose to call narrow content—except that it is not narrow in the sense usually intended (purely intrinsic to the subject's body). Accordingly, Mental Content. makes a threefold division within (at least some) contents: wide or strongly external content, weakly external content, and purely internal aspects of a contentful state. This more complex picture replaces the simple dual component theory, though it does not involve going back on the main theses of the earlier paper. In particular, there is still an aspect of content—its extrinsicness—that does not contribute to the causal powers of the mental state with that content.

7 Conceptual Causation: Some Elementary Reections 216

I Once there were no thinking beings and hence no concepts.217 In those thoughtless days all the events in the world happened through non-conceptual causation. Then concepts found a home in the head region of certain organisms; thereafter concepts began to exert control over the course of nature. The proportion of effects due to conceptual causation and effects due to causation of other kinds gradually grew. When concepts of a scientific sort found their way into human thoughts conceptual causation really came into its own, technology being the most spectacular upshot. Many of these effects were good, but others have been less so. Conceptual causation has now reached the point at which it has the power to put an end to the human race and ruin the planet—a far cry from those early days when it could only get an organism a decent meal. Part of the causal power of concepts has always been auto-destructive, what with suicide and so on; but now concepts have the causal heft to annihilate themselves completely. There were prophets, indeed, who sagely predicted this life- cycle for concepts—‘lo, there will come concepts containing the seeds of their own extinction’. One day concepts would beget effects that obliterate the very causes of those effects (and there are not many kinds of cause you can say that of). In any case, conceptual causation is a force to be reckoned with: we would do well to understand how it works. My concern in this paper is not, however, with the ecological and eschatological repercussions of causation by concepts: it is with the analysis of such causation (of course). What is the structure of a conceptual cause? Out of what elements are such causes made up? How do they bring about their effects? I shall begin by enunciating three laws or principles of conceptual causation, focusing in on the third. The fate of the Earth, as mooted above, will turn out to have a lot to do with events on Twin Earth, since these events are the key to

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I am grateful to Brian McLaughlin and especially Jerry Fodor for conversations on this topic.

217

I shall be using ‘concept’ in the psychological, not the abstract, sense, so that concepts exist only when minds do.

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understanding conceptual causation as it occurs around here.218 (And they say analytic philosophy has no practical relevance!) I want to make conceptual causation safe from an analytical point of view; taming it in other ways will have to be left, as they say, for another occasion, or another life.

II Here follows the first law of conceptual causation: (L1) Conceptual causation is geared to effects of a behavioural kind. That is, concepts have physical and other effects beyond the subject's body primarily or canonically by first having effects on the subject's actions: this is their preferred route onto the wider world. In other words, concepts work through the subject's will; the volitional system is written into their teleology. Concepts are not apt to leapfrog over the subject's motor apparatus and make their presence felt ‘directly’. If you think of concepts as equipped with causal hooks, then these hooks are designed to get purchase on the external world by first linking themselves to the efferent pathways underlying intentional action. The neural correlates of concepts thus differ from other kinds of causally active brain state, those which are expressly designed to bring about non-intentional bodily events—such as heart beat, blood flow, digestion. However, it is not quite accurate to say that conceptual causation can only. operate through a behavioural intermediary: for some thoughts cause the adrenalin to flow, while others produce erections—and these are unwilled. But these are exceptional causal channels: as things are, concepts are generally causally oriented towards the voluntary musculature. And without these central cases it is hard to see how an organism could be a locus of conceptual causation at all. This fact about the causal pathways open to concepts has often been misconstrued as favouring, or even requiring, the truth of behaviourism—the thesis (in effect) that thoughts reduce to their typical causal intermediary, viz. behaviour. But really we are dealing here with a law governing the causal structure in which concepts are embedded, not with a collapse of mental causes into their nomically designated route of impact on the organism's environment. A conceptual cause goes out to the world via behaviour, but it cannot be reduced to its behavioural interface, however essential that interface may be. Now for the second law: (L2) The unit of conceptual causation is the conceptual complex. That is, a given concept exercises its causal powers in combination with a number of other concepts: conceptual causation operates plurally. Specifically,

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The externalist background to this paper is laid out in McGinn, Mental Content. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989) , esp. ch. 2. My thinking on this topic goes back to McGinn, ‘The Structure of Content’, in A. Woodfield (ed.), Thought and Object. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982).

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a given concept needs to join with enough other concepts to yield something with propositional structure; conceptual causation cannot be sub-propositional. This law appears to have the status of a necessary truth; even merely ‘entertaining’ a concept, which may cause certain associations in the subject, amounts to a kind of suppositional predication.219 At any rate, concepts standardly work in groups, and it is hard to make sense of a conceiving being whose concepts never joined causal hands. In conjunction with (L1), then, we can say that concepts make their impact on behaviour co-operatively: they form a team before conspiring to get the subject's body moving. At a minimum, the team will need two members—subject and predicate. (Even feature-placing thoughts like ‘It's raining here’ will need indexicals for places and times.) Conceptual causation is indeed made up of cognitive atoms, but the atoms are causally impotent until they unite to give a cognitive molecule. This law is the conceptual analogue of the familiar principle that words can issue in a speech act only in the context of a sentence. The point about the combinatory principle for concepts is that it is written into their causal structure, as well as being a condition on their constituting a thought. In sum: thoughts need a plurality of concepts; thoughts are the smallest unit of cognitive causation; therefore concepts are smaller than the smallest unit of cognitive causation, and hence require the help of other concepts if they are to make their presence felt. Accordingly, causal laws citing concepts will have to be framed at the molecular level, not further down: the unit of nomologicality is also the conceptual complex. Put differently, the laws of psychology concern beliefs and desires, not their constituent elements (save derivatively). It is as if psychology deals in chemical laws which are not derivable from the underlying physics, since there are no laws governing the causal powers of conceptual atoms qua atoms. In a sense, the ontology of psychology cuts one level deeper than the laws of psychology. This combinatory law might be misconstrued as implying a form of holism about concept identity—the thesis that each concept contains within it a trace or echo of all the other concepts with which it may combine in causal transactions. No such individuative holism is implied, however; again, we are dealing with a point about the causal structure within which concepts work, not a point about what constitutes a concept as the particular concept it is. Indeed, the holistic thesis in question would tend to cut against the law of co-operative causation, since the other players on the team would already lurk within the identity of each member, making those other players strictly redundant, causally speaking. The co-operative law can only remain robust if individuative holism is rejected, since you do not need to combine with what you already

219

More needs to be said about what it is to ‘entertain a concept’, but I won't pause over this now. One of the relevant issues is whether this cognitive act is not really a kind of mental mention of a concept rather than a use of one; in which case, though a single concept might be so mentioned, the mentioning of it would call for the use of a number of other concepts. The cooperative law is a law about concept use, not concept mention.

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contain. It is the very falsity of holism that generates the necessity for concepts to work in groups. And the third law is: (L3) Conceptual causation involves intentional directedness. That is, a conceptual cause is an event or state that has, or purports to have, intentional relations to items in the world: because concepts are representational devices, agents of reference, bearers of content. When a concept engages the motor system semantical relations somehow enter the chain of cause and effect. The concept horse., for example, represents the property of being a horse (or the kind horse), and its extension is precisely the class of actual horses. So when a conceptual cause operates these worldly entities are apparently somehow implicated or in the offing, somehow part of the causal picture; indeed, the causative concepts are identified by alluding to such entities. Horses are somehow caught up in causal transactions involving the concept horse.. So, at least, (L3) seems to imply. And it's not just horses: it's everything else we manage to think about. Concepts radiate outward from the subject in every direction, even while they turn their causal attentions to the internal mechanisms that initiate bodily movements. But now how precisely are. these external entities caught up? There the horses trot, corralled into the extension of the concept horse.: we don't suddenly leave them behind when we italicize the word ‘horse’—the word that, after all, refers directly to horses. Yet they seem too extrinsic to be part of the thinker's causal machinery (they lack the necessary horse-power). The question then is how to understand this meshing or meeting of causation and reference. What does ‘involve’mean. in (L3)? This is the question, familiar enough I hope, that I shall be addressing in what follows. And my thesis, broadly stated, is going to be that what we have here is a general feature of causality being filtered through a special feature of intentionality; so that there is nothing inherently problematic or puzzling about the causal story. We just need to make careful use of a certain neglected distinction.220

III This is how causality goes about its work: at various places and times different objects instantiate different properties, and as a result other objects come to

220

I intend my treatment of this subject to complement J. Fodor, ‘A Modal Argument for Narrow Content’, Journal of Philosophy., 98/1 (1991), 5–26. My aim, in effect, is to derive Fodor's position on causal powers and content from a more general conception of causation. I shall not here repeat the points he makes in that paper, which seem to me thoroughly convincing (and sort of obvious): I am going to assume the basic correctness of his way of counting causal powers—especially the use of the ‘cross-context test’. Readers are advised to study Fodor's paper before this one, if only to get certain misconceptions out of the way.

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instantiate other properties at other places and times (‘other’ here is not meant to signify invariable distinctness). An object x. is F. at p. and t., and this brings it about that an object y. is G. at p.′ and t.′. (If you believe in possible worlds you can add ‘at w.’, but I'll leave this out.) Let us say that the property F. is a causal power and that the triple consisting of x., p., and t. specifies the parameters of that power, as then exercised. Thus the power is, as it were, bound to those parameters with respect to the causal nexus in question: the property has the particular effect it does only because it occurs in the context determined by these parameters. For example, suppose my knife is sharp in New York on Hallowe'en 1990; and let's say that its being sharp in these circumstances brings it about that my bread is cut in that place at that time. Here sharpness is the power and the knife, New York, and Hallowe'en are the parameters: causation takes us from this power to a certain state of affairs, relative to certain parameter values. The sharpness power could be lifted from these parameters and placed in another context, where it would be set to bring about the same sort of effect in that other context. And, conversely, these same parameters could have hosted another power, say bluntness, whose effects would be quite different. Intuitively, the predicates ‘sharp’ and ‘blunt’ tell you what kind of effect to expect, while the terms ‘my knife’, ‘New York’, and ‘Hallowe'en’ tell you in what context to expect this effect—its coordinates, as it were. Thus it is that we can readily extract a nomic generalization from the initial singular causal statement by universally generalizing on the terms for the parameters, while keeping the power predicate constant: for any x., p., t., if x. is sharp at p. and t., then some y. will be cut at p.′ and t.′ (other things equal). But note—and this is important: we cannot extract a nomic generalization by keeping the parameters constant and generalizing on the power predicate. For what kind of effect could we expect from this putative law? For any. property P., if my knife has P. in New York on Hallowe'en 1990, then . . . then what? Then nothing. Then at best: something will have some property in the vicinity of New York probably not far in the future relative to Hallowe'en 1990. The point here is simply that in the original singular causal statement the parameter terms occurred as merely apparent constants with respect to the underlying law, while the power predicate occurred as a genuine nomological constant. Formally, this comes out as an asymmetry in the nomic results of quantifying away the vernacular constants: turning these constant terms to variables produces something lawlike in the one case and non-lawlike in the other case. We can thus use this asymmetry as an intuitive test of whether some (seeming) constant in a causal statement denotes a parameter or a power—can it be quantified away salva. nomologicality? This test will tell us what sort of contribution to the full causal story the terms of a singular causal statement are making—whether they report the source of the action or merely in what context the source is operating.

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We might compare the way powers and parameters lock together to produce effects with the way functions take arguments to yield values. As we know from Frege, we can extract from a singular term like ‘2 + 3’ a (two-place) functional expression ‘+’ and a pair of argument expressions ‘2’ and ‘3’. These can then be independently varied and recombined with other expressions: ‘2 + 3’, ‘7 + 5’, etc. And there are arithmetical laws got by generalizing on the numerals while keeping the functional expression constant; but no such laws got by doing the converse. Intuitively, a function is something that can plug itself into different entities as arguments and yield a characteristic value: it is something abstractable, general, predictive. The particular arguments of the function are just the things it latches onto in one instance of something more universal. Somewhat so, a causal power is a kind of function from a sequence of parameters as arguments to a kind of effect, where the corresponding law tells you how to compute the particular effect from the power and its associated parameters. Thus we identify powers across contexts on the basis of their nomic role, and hence achieve the generality we demand of a law. Being sharp at p., t., say, is the same. causal power property as being sharp at p.′, t.′, while being blunt at p.*, t.* constitutes a different causal power from these. So the identity of the power is not tied to one particular context of instantiation, and had better not be if we are to achieve nomic generality. The total set of causal circumstances is so tied, but that includes the specific parameters as well as the general power. Indeed, we can say that for any particular causal transaction there must exist a power involved in that transaction that is abstractable and identifiable across contexts (this is a variant of Hume's principle of causal generality). Causes are not irreducibly singular—as functions are not: there is always a hint of the universal in them. In contrast, we would never say that parameters per se work like this. We would never say: being sharp in New York on Hallowe'en is the same causal power as being blunt in New York on Hallowe'en. For we recognize the quite different causal roles played by parameters and powers. Powers drive nature's motor; parameters are just points on nature's map. Both, to be sure, may be described loosely as ‘causal factors’, since both need to be mentioned in causal explanations, but that should not disguise the fundamental metaphysical distinction between them. In particular, it should not disguise their very different relations to causal laws.221

221

A side question to consider is whether we draw the parameter/power distinction on a priori or empirical grounds. For example, how do we judge that spatio-temporal context is parameter- like relative to the instantiation of physical properties? Could it have turned out that the time of an event, say, was a causal power of it, on a par with its being an event satisfying a particular physical property? It seems to me that such judgements carry a large a priori component, but I won't investigate the question further here.

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IV How do these (rather elementary) considerations bear on the question of conceptual causation? How does this kind of causation fit the general framework of powers embedded within parameters? Let's start with pain and work up to indexicality and out to Twin Earth. Suppose I am in pain in the dentist's chair in New York on Hallowe'en; and suppose this causes me to strike the dentist (accidentally!) then and there. Well, it is easy enough to see how to carve up this causal nexus into its power components and parameter components, using the intuitive test mentioned earlier: try to quantify the respective constants away and see if you get anything useful and lawlike out of it. The pain emerges as the power, while the rest is just so much context. This case differs from the case of the sharp knife only in that the pained person bears a mental causal power not a physical one. Accordingly, ‘pain’ is a nomological constant with respect to the laws of psychology, while the other terms give way to variables over persons, places, and times.222 But what about mental states that are individuated by their representational content—how do these resolve into their causal components? What is the structure of a conceptual cause? What role, in particular, do the terms play that stand in the content-clause? Which are the nomic constants here and which the variables? Where do the powers stop and the parameters begin? Suppose I believe that my hair is on fire now, and as a result of this belief I put my head under the tap a few seconds later. All this happens in a certain specific context, of course, involving various particular entities: me, now, my hair, etc. In another context, it might be you who believes his hair is on fire and who wisely puts his head under a tap. Here are two distinct contexts in which something is shared—two sets of parameter values instantiating a similar power. It is pretty easy to see here how the facts break down, causally speaking: we have just the same old basic pattern being repeated. But notice a peculiarity of the case: the specification of the context is intermingled with that of the property instantiated in it. When we say what is believed we willy-nilly let slip the context in which it is believed. In citing the power we can't help but usher in the parameters. But this does not mean that the distinction collapses or is inapplicable here. It is simply that we specify parameters from both outside and inside the scope of a verb of propositional attitude. Generally, then, we may say that indexical terms in content-clauses specify causal parameters, even as they help identify the causal power exercised. More exactly: the (context-independent) linguistic meaning of an indexical expression specifies (part of) the causal power conferred by instantiating the psychological property in question, while the reference of the expression in that context determines one of the parameters

222

I speak of psychological laws. in this paper, but I do not mean to beg any questions thereby. If you don't think there are any psychological laws, then substitute ‘explanatory psychological principles’ where appropriate.

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with respect to which the power operates.223 What has happened is that intentionality has absorbed some of the causal parameters into the content of the belief, thus making it momentarily tempting to rate them to the power conferred by that content: but really it is just the same causal division all over again. Form the sequence consisting of the reference of each indexical occurring in a given content: this sequence functions as the coordinates with respect to which the mental power operates. So it is the same power that operates when a subject believes, with respect to a distinct sequence of coordinates, a proposition specifiable using the same (or a suitably related) form of words. But, of course, it is not. the same power we started with when I believe (say) that my hair is wet. now—which is why I don't bother to stick my head under the tap. A quick application by the reader of the quantifying-away test will verify this obvious asymmetry. Now let's go to Twin Earth. In fact, let's go to lots of Twin Earths, so that we have more parameters to play with. Imagine then a whole series of Twin Earths varying in the substance hailed as ‘water’: H2O here, XYZ on Twin Earth 1, ABC on Twin Earth 2 . . . @#* on Twin Earth 1000. Throughout this constellation of planets our molecular twins complain about the level of pollution in the liquid they call ‘water’ (conceptual causation is behind this pollution, of course): they regularly utter the words ‘this water is undrinkable’. Then we can say, orthodoxly, that different concepts are expressed by ‘water’ on these different planets, according to the chemical kind that prompts speakers' despairing uses of ‘water’. Different (‘wide’) concepts are possessed but remarkably similar behaviour occurs: the same wailing and gnashing of teeth, the same insistence on Perrier (or Reirrep), the same rest-room rituals, and so on. Yet these varying concepts are the (sole) causes of this similar behaviour. How should we understand the nature or structure of this plurality of causal nexi? It is clear what I shall say: these distinct concepts confer the very same causal power on the people inhabiting each planet, but the environmental context supplies distinct parameters in the shape of distinct liquids.224 When a

223

I mean this as an expression of the kind of theory of indexicals associated with Kaplan and Perry (D. Kaplan, ‘Demonstratives', in J. Almog, J. Perry, and H. Wettstein (eds.), Themes from Kaplan. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988; J. Perry, The Problem of the Essential Indexical’, Nous., 13 (1979), 3–21). My view of indexical mental causation is the natural (istic) counterpart to Kaplanian character/content semantics. A ‘singular proposition’, which fixes truth conditions, is thus a sequence of causal coordinates in propositional attitude psychology.

224

See Fodor, ‘A Modal Argument for Narrow Content’, on why causal powers should be individuated ‘narrowly’, despite the fact that (of course!) they have object-involving effects. A pleasant consequence of this way of slicing things up concerns first-person access to broadly individuated mental states. Just as such states cause behaviour describable in environment-relative terms, so they cause second-order beliefs that are specifiable by reference to the environment—e.g. the belief that I believe there is some water. in my glass. Does this differentiate between the causal powers, with respect to introspection, of my ‘water’-beliefs and my twin's? There is a dilemma for those wishing to preserve first-person infallibility by insisting that our (first-order) beliefs do thus differ. Either we say the first-order beliefs are causally the same by the cross context test, since they would cause the same introspective beliefs if transposed; or, more plausibly, we say that they would always generate introspective beliefs that track their specific content, in which case the link between cause and effect would be conceptual. (in Fodor's sense), and thus not a causal power in good standing. In other words, if Fodor's treatment of the causation of behaviour is correct (which I think it is), then the same apparatus will yield a parallel position for the causation of introspective beliefs. This point about causal powers is, I think, what underlies the intuition that I could not discriminate. between my ‘water’-beliefs and my twin's.

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particular content is specified we are told both what kind of power to expect to see exercised and also what context the exercise will occur in—that is, the nomic psychological kind and the planetary coordinate to which it is in that instance joined. Not surprisingly, then, in extracting the nomic truth from a singular instance we can quantify the particular liquid or planet away, while we hang on to the power that recurs across each environment: no matter which of these planets a person is on, if she has a belief expressible by her as ‘this water is undrinkable’, then (other things equal) she will refrain from drinking the liquid at hand. (Notice that we can only formulate the generalization in question by mentioning ‘water’ not using it: if we try to use it a particular parameter will rise up and insert itself into our putative law). In other words, the aspect of content that lies ‘outside the head’, stemming from the environment, functions as a variable parameter with respect to which we can universally generalize without losing nomic thrust; not so, of course, the aspect that resides headward and recurs monotonously throughout the planetary series.225 A single one of these concepts, say water., is, causally speaking, an amalgam or resultant of a fixed power and a variable parameter—a causal function, as it were, that has melded with one of its many possible arguments. Travel to Twin Earth and you see that some disentangling is going to be necessary if the causal story is to be reported adequately. When Putnam invented Twin Earth what he in effect did was detect a causal parameter in psychological explanation that had not hitherto been recognized. What a ‘water’-belief is about turns out to be as parameter-like as who has it when and where. Mental representation can thus be seen as just a further source of parameters in psychological causation and explanation; content- clauses record these parameters. It is as if ‘sharp’ as we use it on Earth meant ‘Earth-sharp’, so that the causal traits of sharp things on Twin Earth need to be described in other terms. The essential point is that a molecular duplicate of my knife on Twin Earth has the same causal powers as my knife does on Earth, despite the different contexts in which those powers get triggered; and a molecular duplicate of me on Twin Earth has the same causal powers as me on Earth, despite our contextual variation—in particular, our mental causal powers are identical.

225

Strictly speaking, local supervenience on brain states is not entailed by the parameter/power analysis—even extreme Cartesian dualists could agree with me about the causal decomposition of thoughts. But for a number of familiar reasons the brain seems the best candidate as the bearer of mental causal powers.

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The causal powers of my water-representing mental states might be compared to the causal powers possessed by a pair of mirror images of H2O and XYZ on Earth and Twin Earth: these are indeed images of different things—they have distinct ‘reflection-contents’—but the images themselves will be indiscernible from a causal-power point of view. And if we want to capture the nomic regularities that exist to be captured, then in each of these cases—knives, images, beliefs—we have to separate our powers from our parameters, our constants from our variables. The insistence on a local supervenience thesis for mental causal powers results from the commendable desire to do justice to the underlying causal patterns: it's the natural way to carve off the parameters for later conversion into nomological variables.226 I am saying that the aspect of the concept water. that is contributed by water itself is parameter-like with respect to the effects of that concept and hence with respect to psychological causal laws (or quasi-laws). References to water (that. liquid) in psychological content-clauses are in principle dispensable in favour of variables over such substances as are consistent with the causal powers characteristic of our concept water.. But this is not to say that reference to water is parameter-like with respect to every. kind of law; it plainly is not. When it comes to chemical laws, obviously, the word ‘water’ functions to specify a power, as when we say that salt dissolves in water. Being. water is certainly a causal power of certain substances—while representing. water (that liquid in particular) is not a causal power of certain persons. There are, we may be sure, different laws of chemistry relating to what is called ‘water’ on each of Twin Earths mentioned above, despite the monotony of the laws of psychology from planet to planet. So items that feature as parameters in psychology can be (and typically are) powers in other sciences; the distinction is relative, not absolute. Chemical natural kinds are not, nor do they determine, natural kinds in causal psychology.. Intentionality can thus appropriate a causal power property from a special science and convert it into a mere parameter in psychological science. Reference to water gets nomologically demoted, so to speak, as it is transferred from chemistry to psychology. What exerts causal control over the course of inanimate nature becomes distinctly marginal when it finds its way into the content of mental states. Individuation by kind K. is not the same as nomic parity with K.: the causal powers of K. itself do not map onto the causal powers

226

Not every definable relation between a power property and some entity or other counts as a genuine parameter relation: there are real and pseudo parameters. Fodor's Hparticle relation, between an electron and a coin in his pocket, is a pretty clear case of a pseudo parameter: his coin does not (inter alia. ) feature as a value of a variable in the physical laws governing electrons. I would place broad content reference in the genuine parameter category, thus distinguishing it from the H-particle kind of case. (Further work: what is the right criterion for making this kind of distinction?) I think Fodor's tendency to compare broad content with the H-particle kind of irrelevant extrinsic relation is therefore rather misleading. Indeed, I would say that he needs something like the real/pseudo distinction in order to preserve (broad) folk psychology in the face of his own demonstration that only ‘narrow content’ has causal power.

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of the mental states K. helps individuate. If I can put it somewhat hyperbolically: the laws of psychology are set apart from the laws of chemistry precisely because what is a causal power for chemistry is only causal parameter for psychology.227 Less obviously, the position I have taken does not by itself entail that reference to water is variable-like with respect to all kinds of psychological law or explanatory principle. What I have claimed is that environmental individuation is variable-like with respect to causal. psychological laws. Thus there is room for the idea that psychological explanation treats ‘water’ as a genuine constant in its non-causal aspect, if it has one. Suppose, plausibly, that teleological taxonomy cuts states finer than purely causal-power taxonomy; and suppose that content distinctions are grounded in teleological taxonomy. For example, my brain states have functions defined relative to H2O while my twin's brain states have XYZrelative functions; and this difference underlies our distinct intentional contents.228 Then, assuming that psychological laws (or principles) must respect teleological facts about the subject, terms for water will earn a constant-like status in psychological explanations—despite the fact that the underlying and implementing causal laws treat such terms as nomic variables. That is, granted that psychology is interested in classifications other than the strictly causal, it might well invoke explanatory principles that do not quantify specific worldly reference away. In that case, psychology would be concerned with more than just the causal powers of mental states, and would be quite happy to agree that, from a purely causal point of view, ‘wide content’ is parameter-ish. Whether you quantify away in your psychology depends on what you are trying to do there: my claim here is just that if what you are after are the causal regularities you should consign water to the range of a bound variable.

V It follows from the parameter thesis about referential content that there is a kind of hidden relativity built into folk psychology. Our ascriptions of (a certain range of) mental causal powers are keyed to a given set of parameter values (our ‘environment’), but the same range of powers could be ascribed by other folk psychologists against a background of distinct parameter values, thus yielding

227

This position is intermediate between two more extreme positions. Some hold that every broad content difference corresponds to a causal power difference; others hold that broad content is no part of psychological explanation at all—it's like Fodor's H-particle property. I say that it is as much (and no more) a part of psychological explanation as my knife is a part of an explanation of the effects of its sharpness. The right distinction is between constant power and variable parameter, not between explanatory relevance and explanatory irrelevance tout court. —though I suppose my position is spiritually closer to the latter position.

228

See McGinn, Mental Content. , ch. 2, on teleology, Twin Earth, and causal explanation.

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disjoint content specifications. The same set of basic laws would thus be invoked, though the predicates used to invoke those laws would carry different environmental commitments. De-relativizing the folk-psychological law formulations would require generalizing over wide contents to extract a common mental feature—what is commonly called ‘narrow content’.229 This would call for some revision in the way we speak, at least when enunciating canonical formulations of the laws with which we tacitly operate. Whereas the predicate ‘sharp’, say, is syntactically isolated from its associated parameter specifications, so that the relevant causal power stands out plainly in singular causal statements, the predicate ‘water’, as it occurs in a content-clause, seems to conflate or fuse parameter and power, so disguising the relativization of the ascription to one environment rather than another. How surprising is this? Why don't our content-clauses explicitly announce the causal structure they imply? Is it an objection to my analysis that they don't? It is less surprising than one might at first suppose. There is much implicit relativity in ordinary language, especially when other potential parameters are rare or absent. Secondary quality predicates are the most interesting example of this phenomenon, but it is already plain enough with such words as ‘poisonous’ and ‘upwards’. Imagining a Twin Earth kind of case for colours, in which objects invert their perceived colours by dint of different perceptual reactions, can make us recognize a relativity in our colour ascriptions that is not apparent in ordinary speech.230 Indeed, the relativity of colour ascriptions to a selected group of perceivers is a kind of converse to the relativity of ascriptions of contentful states to a selected set of environmental entities. Both sorts of ascription are more complex than they seem if you go by surface syntax alone; some analysis of the linguistic appearances is needed if the truth conditions are to be brought clearly to light. Furthermore, of course, the pervasiveness of indexicality in natural languages, both outside and inside belief contexts, already carries substantial context-dependence. The case of natural kind concepts like water. is just another instance in which the relativity is so entrenched as to be almost invisible. Folk psychology relies on context to expedite its

229

This is a phrase I don't much like, which is why I tend to scare-quote it: the reason is that it suggests that there is something propositional left when broad content has been subtracted, or at least something semantically evaluable. I prefer to speak of a ‘narrow aspect’ to content, where this aspect is simply defined as what you get when you quantify away, i.e. what is in common across Twin Earths. I think also that talk of narrow and wide content is often a confused way of drawing the distinction between what I call weak and strong externalism: see McGinn, Mental Content. , ch. 1. Perhaps I should note, for those who follow the weak/strong distinction, that in the case of weakly external content there is a one–one mapping between power and parameter, since you can't get Twin Earth cases for this kind of content—which is not to say that the present kind of causal analysis is inapplicable to those cases.

230

I discuss this in McGinn, The Subjective View. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983). The comparative logical structure of colour ascriptions and content ascriptions is worth dwelling on for a few moments. Broad contents and secondary qualities are both relational in a way that it takes a bit of philosophy to appreciate.

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business, but it sees little point in being pedantically explicit about this context- relativity; after all, we folks have only this. environment to contend with! Folk psychology might assume a different and more revealing shape if we regularly had Twin-Earthians to describe also: for we would then be confronted by empirical phenomena for which we need suitably capacious explanatory generalizations. Compare folk mechanics. One of the laws of motion contained therein says roughly this: bodies fall to earth more quickly the longer they fall. In this law we find overt reference to planet Earth, so if we want to state what the identical laws of motion are on Twin Earth we will not be able simply to repeat ourselves. We need to generalize: for any planet x., bodies fall more quickly to x. the longer they fall. Thus the term ‘Earth’ emerges as a spurious constant in the underlying law; it must be quantified away. Earth and Twin Earth are simply instances of something more general, with respect to which they occur as mere parameters. As it is with the laws of motion, so it is with the laws of psychology. The relativity of folk mechanics, in its vernacular references to the Earth, is both intelligible and expungible—and harmless if not misconstrued. Folk psychology should be similarly viewed—with tolerance but not with reverence. Suppose I assert that Jane made a beeline for the nearest open space because she thought the Earth was about to erupt. Here a reference is made to the Earth (in an oblique context) in giving a psychological explanation, but this reference is quickly seen to be incidental—a mere parameter—once we take a look at the beliefs and behaviour of Jane's double on Twin Earth: she too makes just such a beeline when she thinks that Twin Earth is about to erupt. Again, this specific reference can and should be quantified away when it comes to stating the overarching generality at work: if someone thinks her planet is about to erupt, then beeline behaviour ensues. And this move to higher generality was anticipated by the concepts of folk psychology themselves: it is our ordinary grasp of the concept water., along with the Twin Earth thought experiment, that enables us to appreciate the way its causal properties break down into separable elements. Folk psychology was ready for Twin Earth long before it was ever discovered. So the parameter/ power analysis of conceptual causation is not some adventitious scientism: it is simply a spelling out of what our ordinary concepts imply. It is the logical upshot of juxtaposing our ordinary notion of content with our ordinary notion of causation.

VI Now that we can tell our parameters from our powers, and can see how concepts combine both, we can better understand (L3). Conceptual causation involves intentionality in this sense—that the mental power comes harnessed to

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a worldly parameter. The intentional relation ties or targets the power to the particular environment within which the causal relation happens to occur. The two causal factors involved must on no account be confused or conflated: it would be as wrong to pamper the parameter as to fight the power. Concepts have causal powers all right, but not in virtue of their objective correlates—not in virtue of their contextually determined reference. From the fact that all causal powers operate from a sequence of coordinates it does not follow that the coordinates themselves are further causal powers. Intentionality, from a purely causal point of view, is just an extraordinarily fertile source of parameter values; it is not a magical means of converting extrinsic entities into causal machinery. Your head is the source of all power, but it is embedded in an entire universe of causal context—all that your thoughts encompass. Beliefs are to their objects what knife blades are to the things they cut. So your concept horse. can cause your body to move—even in a horsey direction—without having horses on the brain. This interpretation of (L3) bears upon the way (L1) and (L2) should be understood. We now see, with respect to (L1), that concepts engage with behaviour through causal channels that do not incorporate the objective correlate of the concept; so the motor system does not need a way of responding to what the concept is distally about—which would be too much to ask of any motor system. Thus you can engineer the motor systems of Earthians and Twin Earthians in exactly the same way; you don't need efferent pathways that resonate to one ‘water’-concept rather than another. Behaviour follows the dictates of the inner power, letting the external parameter fall where it may (which is not to say that the behaviour lacks a parameter-relative description).231 Indeed, there seems no other feasible way to get externally individuated concepts to hook up intelligibly with behaviour except by distinguishing out an inner power. As to (L2), we also see that the co-operative propensities of concepts, in the causation of mental and physical events, are a matter of the interlocking of their powers, with the referential parameters just along for the ride. Of course, when the powers put their heads together the parameters will also form their own correlative team; but they do so only to provide the powers with a suitable setting—not to contribute extra powers of their own. When my concept water. gets together with my concept polluted., causing me to refrain from drinking some water, the fact that it is water that my thought is about is not strictly part

231

The obvious fact that behaviour admits of relational description in terms of environmental entities has, we know, been triumphantly seized upon by opponents of the kind of causal thesis defended here: these opponents think it shows that there must be a difference between the causal powers of my beliefs and my twin's—after all, I reach for a drink of water (H2 O) and he reaches for retaw (XYZ)! Fodor, ‘A Modal Argument for Narrow Content’, definitively puts this ‘argument’ out of its misery, it seems to me (if it has not already expired of natural causes). You might as well say that my knife and its molecular double have different causal powers because they each cut numerically different loaves of bread—or do it at different times and places!

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of the causal story of the combinatory operation—as can be seen by considering the like orchestrations going on in my Twin Earth double when his concept retaw. is brought into combination with his concept polluted.. Same grouping of powers, but different parameters with respect to which the powers jointly operate.

VII Is there a moral in any of the previous analysis so far as the politics of conceptual causation are concerned? Perhaps this: it doesn't matter what you think about, so long as you think about it in the right spirit.

Postscript to ‘Conceptual Causation: Some Elementary Reections’ This paper continues the theme of ‘The Structure of Content’ and introduces some conceptual apparatus that had not occurred to me at the time I wrote Mental Content.. Distinguishing parameters from powers in causal explanation allows us to assign objects of reference a role in explanation without having to rate them as causal powers in the strict sense. The standard argument for dismissing wide content from psychological explanation is that such content cannot play a role in fixing the causal powers of a mental state. My point is that this is a non sequitur once it is recognized that explanations need parameters as well as powers; we need to assign to objects of reference the secondary role of constituting the ‘context’ of the causal nexus. Such information is useful, since it fills in the ‘initial conditions’ with respect to which a causal power is exerted, that is, a law is instantiated. We know the law, but we also get to know with respect to which entities it was instantiated. Does this provide a role for the notion of reference in psychological explanation? Does it justify using a notion of semantic correspondence in characterizing mental states? No, since it merely provides a place for the objects. of reference in psychological explanation; it does not assign any role to the notion of a mental state's referring. to that object. How could it, given that my knife does not refer. to the bread it has the power to cut? We clearly cannot analyse ‘refers’ by means of ‘is a parameter of ’ because the latter applies far more widely than the former. So this account does not compete with other ostensibly justifying theories of the nature of the reference relation (e.g. teleological accounts). We have found a place for extrinsic content in psychological explanation, but that is not to say that we thereby have a rationale for speaking of reference in application to mental states. Nor do we have any kind of theory of

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the reference relation. Still, if the position of this paper is right, one large problem about psychological explanation has an answer—and a somewhat deflationary answer at that: the context that supplies a semantic interpretation for our mental states plays the explanatory role of determining the causal parameters against the background of which our mental states exert their causal powers. The key here is to see that causation itself already contains an analogue of the notion of context. The contextual parameters of a causal transaction are not intrinsic to the property that does the primary causing, just as the reference of a mental state is not intrinsic to its causal potential.

8 Charity, Interpretation, and Belief It is generally agreed that a principle of charity should play some part in regulating the project of radical interpretation. But it is a question what status such a principle enjoys. Donald Davidson has urged that charity with respect to the beliefs and sayings of others is a sine qua non of successful translation; more, that unless we see to it that veracity preponderates in a creature's attitudes and utterances we cannot construe its behaviour as that of a rational agent or psychological subject. Thus he says: Since charity is not an option, but a condition of having a workable theory [of radical interpretation], it is meaningless to suggest that we might fall into massive error by endorsing it. Until we have successfully established a systematic correlation of sentences held true with sentences held true, there are no mistakes to make. Charity is forced on us;—whether we like it or not, if we want to understand others, we must count them right in most matters.232 And there are many other passages in the same vein.233 The claim, then, is that charity as a methodological precept is to be insisted on because we know in advance, by a transcendental argument of some sort, that most of what others say and believe is going to be true (according of course to our own view of the truth). We know a priori that there is no possibility. of widespread and deep- going disagreement between interpreter and interpreted. It is this strong modal thesis that I am here concerned to undermine. I shall review arguments that have been, or might be, given to support the thesis, concluding that none is probative. That. the thesis is unproved is, however, less important than why. it is that Davidson's central argument does not prove it; and my chief interest will be to advocate a conception of mental states, particularly propositional attitudes, which argues the incorrectness of Davidson's premisses and, indirectly, of his conclusion. As by-products, I shall indicate (a.) how that conception bears upon some doctrines of Hilary Putnam, and (b.) what impact rejection of Davidson's position on charity has on his method of radical interpretation.

232

‘On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association., 47 (1973–4): 5–20, at p. 19.

233

e.g. Davidson, ‘Thought and Talk’, in S. Guttenplan (ed.), Mind and Language. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 21.

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We can begin by dismissing the following line of reasoning (though the confusion in it is manifest, the point that emerges will be useful later). ‘The object of interpretation is the explanation of actions, linguistic and non- linguistic. Rationally to explain an action requires that it be so described as to seem reasonable. An action will seem reasonable only if it issues from desires and beliefs that are themselves reasonable. For these attitudes to seem reasonable they must accord with what you, the interpreter, take to be reasonable. Thus it is that rationalizing explanation requires charity, i.e. the ascription of attitudes the interpreter himself has.’234 The argument equivocates on ‘reasonable’. To describe an action as done for a certain reason is indeed to acknowledge that were. you to have that reason (desire and belief) you would. find yourself rationally disposed to act as its agent did; it is not to acknowledge that you actually. have such a reason. You appreciate the reasonableness of an action by putting yourself into its agent's shoes, not by forcing him into yours. So, since rationalization calls for empathy not charity, there is no argument from the character of it to Davidson's thesis. A second argument is discernible in Davidson's writings. It starts from the reflection, not here in dispute, that there is no separating the enterprises of, on the one hand, semantically interpreting a man's language, and, on the other, reaching a satisfactory determination of his propositional attitudes.235 Davidson proposes to breach the impasse created by the interdependent contributions of belief and meaning to speech behaviour by taking as antecedently detectable the attitude of holding a sentence true in publicly recognizable conditions. He says: Since knowledge of beliefs comes only with the ability to interpret words, the only possibility at the start is to assume general agreement on beliefs. We get a first approximation to a finished theory by assigning to sentences of a speaker conditions of truth that actually obtain (in our opinion) just when the speaker holds these sentences true (‘On the Very Idea . . . ’, 18–19). Here the claim seems to be that, in order to distil off meaning from belief, a procedure of interpretation, at least in its initial attributions of belief, will inevitably attribute true. beliefs to a speaker observed to hold. a sentence true. Now, aside from the fact that this does not get us to the desired conclusion, since it applies only to the early stages of interpretation and does not, as stated, preclude preponderant error, it simply begs the question at issue. For we may equally provide a basis for deriving the meanings of sentences held true by un.charitably imputing false. beliefs to our speaker. We simply suppose, with or

234

I do not say that Davidson argues like this. (But cf. ‘In our need to make him make sense, we will try for a theory that finds him consistent, a believer of truths, and a lover of the good (all by our own lights, it goes without saying)’; ‘Mental Events’, in L. Foster and J. Swanson (eds.), Experience and Theory. (London: Duckworth, 1970), 97.) In fact, I have come across this reasoning explicitly only in conversation.

235

See e.g. Davidson, ‘Belief and the Basis of Meaning’, Synthese., 27/3–4 (July–Aug. 1974), 309–24.

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without good reason, that he has made a mistake and is expressing a false belief with a correspondingly false sentence. Falsity holds belief just as constant as truth, and affords an equally systematic rule for correlating sentences of our language with sentences of theirs in such a way (it is hoped) that the former will serve to give the meanings of the latter. I am not saying that this is a good rule, in practice or theory; only that the point about the belief-meaning conspiracy does not itself. enforce the charitable assumption. We need some independent. reason for preferring a priori to find the other right instead of wrong. And Davidson does offer a further reason; a reason, moreover, that would, were it cogent, serve to underpin the arguments I have thus far peremptorily rejected. He has often asserted, by way of justification of his radicalinterpretation procedure and as an independently compelling thesis, that it is only against a background of true belief that the imputation of error is so much as intelligible. But he has not been altogether explicit as to why he thinks this. The following passage from a recent paper makes his position (relatively) clear, and represents I suspect his main motive for urging the necessity of charity all along: We can . . . take it as given that most. beliefs are correct. The reason for this is that a belief is identified by its location in a pattern of beliefs; it is this pattern that determines the subject-matter of the belief, what the belief is about. Before some object in, or aspect of, the world can become part of the subject-matter of a belief (true or false) there must be endless true beliefs about the subject-matter. False beliefs tend to undermine the identification of the subject-matter; to undermine, therefore, the validity of a description of the belief as being about that subject. And so, in turn, false beliefs undermine the claim that a connected belief is false. To take an example, how clear are we that the ancients—some ancients—believed that the earth was flat? This. earth? Well, this earth of ours is part of the solar system, a system partly identified by the fact that it is a gaggle of large, cool, solid bodies circling around a very large, hot star. If someone believes none. of this about the earth, is it certain that it is the earth that he is thinking about? (‘Thought and Talk’, 20–1.) The question is clearly intended rhetorically. And the doctrine that prompts it is evidently this: that we cannot sensibly assign an object in the world to a man's belief as its subject matter unless he is (or is taken to be) equipped with a collateral constellation of other true. beliefs concerning that object. That is: an object x. can be the subject of a belief B.0 only if there is some set of beliefs S.={B.1,. . . B.n.} such that x. satisfies the ‘predicative components’ of the majority of {B.1,. . . B.n.}, for some fairly large (‘endless’) n.. (Davidson seems also to commit himself to the converse of this principle, which asserts sufficiency, but I shall be chiefly occupied with his thesis construed as a necessary condition.) Before scrutinizing the principle we do well to formulate an analogous condition concerning semantic reference, as follows: an object x. can be the referent of a term t. in a sentence s.0 uttered by a speaker U. only if there is some set T. ={s.1,. . . s.n.} of sentences containing t. such that U. is disposed to affirm T.

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and x. satisfies the ‘predicative components’ of the majority of {s.1,. . . s.n.}, for some fairly large (‘endless’) n.. Our question is whether these principles concerning the objects of propositional attitudes and the denotations of singular terms are acceptable, and, if they are not, why they are not: for upon their truth hinges Davidson's case for according to charity the status of a constitutive condition of intelligibility. Denying the principles would not require one also to reject the holism alluded to by Davidson. And there is indeed considerable plausibility in the idea that the content of a belief (etc.) is determined by its relations, logical and causal, with other attitudes; so that the primary bearers of object-directedness are not beliefs singly considered but batches of interrelated beliefs. It may even be admitted that there is no possessing one belief about an object without possessing further beliefs about it, and without clear limit. But it does not follow. from this holistic conception of belief content that any of the beliefs (etc.) thus interrelated are true.. In the same way holism with respect to meaning, such as Quine espouses, does not require that the totality of sentences in which a given sentence is embedded and from whose overall semantic content its meaning is derived, be mainly true. Such holism does not itself supply a motive for charity, though without it Davidson's transcendental argument would be frustrated. To see what is wrong with Davidson's principle, consider the following example. It is said of the ancients—some of them—that they believed the stars to be apertures in a vast dome through which light from a conflagration behind penetrated. Such beliefs are radically yet recognizably false, and it seems undeniable that it was of the stars. that they believed these falsehoods. Similarly, it seems evident that it was of. the Earth that Davidson's ancients entertained their egregious misconceptions. The acceptability of these attributions is owed, clearly, to what Quine aptly calls their relational. form.236 And what explains that acceptability is simply that, in assigning such attitudes to a person, there is no presumption that the concepts (predicates) the reporter calls upon to pick out the entity the reported belief is said to concern be themselves—those concepts—credited to the believer. The reporter employs his. concepts to identify some object he takes the believer to be cognitively related to. That these concepts are not assumed to be possessed by the believer is indicated by keeping the vocabulary one uses to express the concepts outside the scope of the belief operator. We are thus able intelligibly to impute preponderantly false beliefs to the ancients in relation to the Earth and the stars without the implication that they believed these things of those entities as. they are conceptualized by us.. It follows that a person may be intentionally related to an object (in the Brentano sense) without being able to conceive it aright. If it is true that

236

See his ‘Quantifiers and Propositional Attitudes’, Journal of Philosophy., 53/5 (1 Mar. 1956), 177–87, repr. in L. Linsky (ed.), Reference and Modality. (New York: Oxford, 1971) .

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relational attributions, with all their transparency, allow the reporter to distinguish his own conceptual commitments from those of his subject, then possessing concepts appropriate to some object, or kind of object, can be pulled apart from the having of beliefs (etc.) about. the object, or kind of object. It may still be maintained (with what plausibility I shall not inquire) that possession of a concept requires a certain minimum of true beliefs about members of its extension, so that there cannot be shared concepts without a measure of shared beliefs; but this falls short of what Davidson wants, because now we see that disagreement concerning an object is possible unmediated by common concepts with respect to that object. Nor is the point confined to a minority of beliefs, since in general if a notional attribution is true so is a corresponding relational. These remarks suggest that Davidson's purported necessary condition on the subject matter of a belief is not binding. But the important question remains: why does it fail, and what alternative can be offered? Think of perception. Perception is paradigmatically a type of relational mental state which does not require for its holding between a percipient and an object that the percipient have true beliefs of the object he is perceiving. The perceptual relation is prior to, and affords a foundation for, beliefs of objects; it cannot be undermined by arrant falsity in the beliefs thus based. (This helps make intelligible the predicament of the ancients.) Nor is it the case that which object a man is perceiving is fixed by finding that object which satisfies a (possibly weighted) majority of the predicates he would be disposed to apply to the object. What all this suggests is that relational attitudes of mind are autonomous. with respect to truth. This is hardly surprising, given the point just made about perception, since relational beliefs about the external world are typically, perhaps necessarily, based upon perceptual contact with its denizens (often mediated, no doubt, by memory). If perception can bring an object into our ken independently of our believing truths concerning it, then perception-based beliefs about objects seem to be possible compatibly with dominant error. These (as I take it) platitudes are echoed in a parallel issue over naming. And the motivation for Davidson's principle has much in common with certain assumptions that (in part) prompt a description theory of names: viz. that denotation is fixed by a certain sort of semantic fit between an object and the predicates a speaker associates with a name and supposes true. of its bearer. And what Kripke-type counter-examples to that theory show, though they do not themselves explain it, is precisely that reference is autonomous with respect to truth (which isn't yet to say it is conceptually prior to truth).237 It is a consequence of this autonomy that a scheme of reference for a given (natural)

237

See Kripke's ‘Naming and Necessity’, in D. Davidson and G. Harman (eds.), Semantics of Natural Language. (Boston: Reidel, 1972) .

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language cannot be adequately characterized as that total assignment of objects to singular terms which induces a certain distribution of truth values upon those sentences of the language to which its speakers are disposed to assent: for example, the assignment that maximizes. truth. If charity recommended such an assignment as determining a scheme of reference, as it does, it would very probably deliver an incorrect scheme. The same lesson goes for objectinvolving propositional attitudes: any procedure for assigning objects to a man's total set of beliefs whose sole or governing constraint is stated in terms of truth cannot be relied upon to yield a correct specification of their subject matter. Nor, a fortiori, could such a method be expected to illuminate what is constitutive of the relation of denotation, or what it is for a mental state to involve an object as its subject matter. Consider now the following pair of theses about object-involving mental states: (i) if a mental state is correctly described in respect of its intentional content by reference to an object as comprising its subject matter, then the identity and existence conditions of that state are dependent upon and fixed by those of that object; (ii) it is a necessary. (but not sufficient) condition of an object's being referred to in correctly specifying the intentional content of a relational mental state that it—that object—figure suitably in the causal. genesis of that state. I shall not here defend these theses fully, since others have;238 but I shall offer an articulation of their force and try to show their connection. Suppose you are undergoing a perceptual experience as of seeing an F.. And suppose that the content of your experience—what you are perceiving—is correctly specified by mentioning an object a.. Let a. be uniquely F.. Now suppose yourself in a world in which again you have an experience as of perceiving an F.; but now your perceptual state is correctly specified by reference to an object b., where a.≠ b. though b. is uniquely F. in that. world. Then plainly you are in different perceptual states in these two worlds, since perceiving a. is not the same state as perceiving b.—no matter how it may seem. to you. Again, suppose you are in a world in which a. does not exist; then you cannot be in that world in the very same mental state as you instantiate in this world when you perceive a.. Let us say, then, that the perceptual state of seeing a. is rigid. with respect to a.; a perceptual state cannot be that. state unless its content is

238

On the first, see John McDowell, ‘On the Sense and Reference of a Proper Name’, Mind., 86/ 342 (Apr. 1977), 159–85 , esp. sect. 8. On the second, Gareth Evans, ‘The Causal Theory of Names’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society., suppl. vol. 47 (1973), 197–200 , and Richard Grandy, ‘Reference, Meaning and Belief’Journal of Philosophy., 70/ 14, (16 Aug. 1973), 439–52 . I do not, in this paper, help myself to a full-fledged causal theory. of belief, i.e. a set of necessary and. sufficient conditions stated in causal terms for the intentional relation to hold. To do that one would need some restrictions on the type. of causal chain connecting a mental state with an object. Since I do not require such an analysis for my purposes here, I shall not undertake to supply one—though it seems clear that the type of causal chain one wants to isolate will be a matter of its being suitable for the acquisition of information about the object in question. Perception is the obvious model here.

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specified by mentioning that object. It does not seem that a theory of this relation in terms of an object's fitting or satisfying the qualitative features of the state can account for this rigidity. Similarly with belief. If you believe of a. that it is G., where a. is and you believe that it is uniquely F., then the belief of b. that it is G., in a world in which b. is and you believe it is uniquely F., is just not the same belief: for its content, and therefore it, essentially involves the object it actually involves, viz. a.. But according to the satisfactional theory of intentionality, there should be no distinction between these belief states, since by that theory their content is given in terms of the purely general. predicates the person would volunteer as singling out the object of his belief. In fact the defect is exactly parallel to the incapacity of the description theory to secure the rigidity of a name in respect of its bearer in terms of a set of descriptions possessed by the speaker and satisfied by the name's bearer. Such a theory is not equipped to explain why it is that the identity and existence conditions of the contents of mental states and of the senses of names are determined by the particular objects whose mention serves to specify those contents or senses. That the perceptual relation cannot hold between a man and an object unless that object figures suitably in some causal process resulting in a certain mental state suffered by the man is now generally accepted.239 It is very plausible that a comparable necessary condition obtains for belief: a man's relational belief cannot be reported as really about. an object referred to by the reporter unless the belief was, in part, caused by the object. Indeed, as remarked, this requirement may be seen as a consequence of the fact that such beliefs are acquired through the faculty of perception. At any rate, there is a clear distinction between beliefs about an object acquired by causal (perceptual) interaction with it, and beliefs acquired (as we might say) by inference, as when one conjectures there to be an object uniquely answering to certain purely general. conditions.240 In the latter type of case, the content of the belief seems not to be essentially tied to the identity of the object actually meeting those general conditions, so here the satisfactional theory is plausible enough. But in the former case, where the content of the mental state is individuated by its causal source in the state's intentional object, it is the identity of that object which fixes the identity conditions of the state. It is as if the ‘onus of match’ between state and object is reversed in the two types of case. The two theses are connected, for the causal condition helps explain the point about individuation. Suppose a belief B. has intentional object a.. Then, by rigidity of B. with respect to a., it is necessary that B. is about a.. We also have it that, if B. is genuinely about a., then a. must be suitably involved in the causation

239

The locus classicus. is H. P. Grice, ‘The Causal Theory of Perception’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society., suppl. vol. 35 (1961), 121–68 .

240

Recall David Kaplan's case of ‘the shortest spy’ and associated discussion in ‘Quantifying In’, repr. in Linsky (ed.), Reference and Modality. .

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of B.; there must be some appropriate causal chain leading from a. to B. such as to make B. about a.. So B. is necessarily caused (inter alia.) by a.. Now we can say that the fact that B. is necessarily about a. is explained by. the fact that B. is necessarily caused. by a.. On the satisfactional theory, that rigid relation between B. and a. cannot be explained, since the predicative components of the beliefs associated, à la Davidson, with B. could have been satisfied by some object distinct from a., in which circumstance B. would have been about that other object—and that contradicts rigidity. Further, on that theory B. could exist in a world in which a. didn't exist, just as a definite description can have a sense in a world in which it contingently fails to be satisfied. But again, as there cannot be such a thing as the state of perceiving a. in a world in which a. doesn't exist, so there cannot be such a thing as a relational belief, whose content is given by mentioning a., in a world in which a. isn't. (If Quine had never existed, I would not have been able to have a belief about him.) These truths about relational mental states seem, however, to be explained by the thesis, itself independently plausible, that such states necessarily include their intentional object in their causal history.241 The upshot of these remarks, incomplete as they are, is that the conception of the intentional relation implicit in the passage from Davidson is mistaken at root. It is because we observe that people causally interact with objects in their environment in such ways as enable them to have thoughts concerning those objects, paradigmatically in perception, that we are prepared to assign those objects to their beliefs as comprising their subject matter, notwithstanding the amount of bad theory they may bring to bear upon the objects. So Davidson's reasoning was valid—charity would. be a condition of the possibility of intelligible ascriptions of propositional attitudes if. the holistic-satisfactional theory of intentionality were true—but, the premiss being false, the conclusion

241

It is instructive to recall Russell's distinction between two sorts of ‘knowledge of things’: there is knowledge of things by description, which is mediated by knowledge of truths, and knowledge of things by acquaintance, which requires no such mediation. Russell says, ‘Knowledge of things, when it is of the kind we call knowledge by acquaintance., is essentially simpler than any knowledge of truths, and logically independent of knowledge of truths . . . Knowledge of things by description, on the contrary, always involves . . . some knowledge of truths as its source and ground.’ Ch. 5 of Problems of Philosophy. (1912). This is not to say that Russell characterized the acquaintance relation satisfactorily. Because he required that it could hold between a person and an object only if the object's existence was indubitable for the person, and because he did not really inquire what constitutes. the relation, he made its range at once too wide and too narrow: too wide because he included abstract universals, and too narrow because the indubitability condition is seldom met by the ordinary particulars with which we suppose ourselves acquainted, e.g. in perception. We do better to construe acquaintance as a certain type of causal relation, and knowledge of things by description as a ‘semantic’ relation.On the constitutive character of the intentional relation, compare a writer from a somewhat different tradition: ‘The for-itself [consciousness] is outside itself in the in-itself [external reality] since it causes itself to be defined by what it is not; the first bond between the in-itself and the for- itself is therefore a bond of being.’ J.-P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness., tr. Hazel E. Barnes (London: Methuen, 1957), 177.

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need not be accepted. The principle of charity still lacks a transcendental justification. Digressing now from charity, I wish to show the bearing of our reflections on the individuation of mental states upon some recent claims of Putnam.242 He contends that the mental state that constitutes one's understanding a term—mass term, natural-kind sortal, or singular term—does not uniquely fix its extension. Since, as he thinks, it is implausible that meaning could fail to determine extension, he concludes that mental state—individual or social—does not determine meaning: ‘the meaning of one's words is not in one's head’. The reason offered in support of the initial contention was that two speakers, or two linguistic communities, could use (phonetically identical) terms whose extensions in their respective languages were disjoint and yet be in the same mental states with respect to the terms and their extensions. Thus we are to imagine one language in which ‘water’ has H2O as extension and another in which the extension is a distinct chemical substance XYZ; however, speakers of the respective languages are scientifically unsophisticated and cannot tell these phenomenologically indistinguishable substances apart. I agree with Putnam that the extensions of ‘water’ are distinct in the two languages, and I agree too that users of the term might be thus unable to distinguish the two substances and suppose them identical. But I do not think it follows that their mental states with respect to these disjoint extensions are the same. For, on the conception of the identity conditions of mental states advocated above, a correct specification of the mental states of the two groups of speakers in respect of H2O and XYZ would mention those very substances; and their. distinctness guarantees the distinctness of the mental states directed toward them. This is very clear for perception: since they perceive different substances, their perceptual states are different, even though they. may not be aware of this. Analogously for belief: in specifying their relational beliefs we must, if we are to report adequately, refer these beliefs to the substances causal interaction with which makes them of. the substances they are. We should not let this elementary observation be obscured by the fact that they suppose their mental states to be identical; that would be like agreeing with a man who thinks of identical twins that they are one and the same when he says that he saw the same person twice.243 To insist upon identifying such qualitatively. indistinguishable states would be simply not to take intentional directedness seriously and literally. Nor would it help the doctrine to describe the states purely phenomenologically, using no terms that actually refer to the objects the beliefs are about, and then claim that those. descriptions do not, in their neutrality, suffice to fix the relevant term's extension. For that would be open to the charge of just refusing to individuate the states correctly

242

See ‘Meaning and Reference’, Journal of Philosophy., 70/19 (8 Nov. 1973), 699–711 .

243

This point shows what is wrong with certain doctrines of ‘privileged access’. Since we are often less well placed to individuate our own mental states than another is, it can hardly be maintained that we enjoy authoritative access to our own mental descriptions.

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at all. It is no good to claim that one kind of fact does not determine another kind on the ground that one does not have to describe the former facts as they are. Again, that would be tantamount to rejecting the very idea of a genuinely constitutive intentional relation between mental states and external objects. So the reason mental state uniquely fixes extension is precisely that it is fixed by. extension.244 In fact this point tallies with others of Putnam's doctrines. For he holds that the terms in question are covertly indexical, and indexical terms are the paradigms of those expressions grasp of whose sense requires a de re. attitude on the part of the grasper: one does not know the contribution made to truth conditions of a token of ‘that man’ unless one knows that it is of that man. that a remark is being made. It is doubly ironic that Putnam should also champion a version of the causal theory of reference, since use of a term, and grasp of its meaning, will be causally connected, in a way that makes for a reference relation, with the object or substance referred to. Putnam has only to apply his views on the contribution of the world to meaning, to the nature and individuation of mental states to reject his claims about the relation, or lack of it, between mind and meaning. That rejection would be well motivated, for resisting Putnam's arguments permits the retention of two otherwise attractive theses: (i) that the theory of meaning is a theory of knowledge. of meaning, that meaning is an essentially cognitive notion, that there can be no more to the semantics of a language than is comprised in competence with it;245 and (ii) that semantic facts are supervenient. upon psychological, or sociological, facts: there cannot be two speakers (communities) alike in all psychological (sociological) respects yet differing in some semantic respect.246 Both theses are preserved on the advocated view of mental states, since (i) mention of an object is required both to give the meaning of a referential term and to specify knowledge of that meaning, and (ii) the reference of a term could hardly fail to supervene upon a mental state in respect of that term which was essentially identified by adverting to the object referred to.

244

Actually Putnam's thesis seems to have undergone a significant reformulation, to judge from his ‘The Meaning of “Meaning’ ”, in Mind, Language and Reality., Philosophical Papers., vol. ii (New York: Cambridge, 1975) . For he now restricts the claim that psychological state does not determine extension, to psychological states in what he calls the ‘narrow sense’ (see p. 221). The intention seems to be to limit psychological descriptions to the purely phenomenological. The restriction is surely question-begging, but let us grant it to him. Then it must be said that he seriously misrepresents his opposition to traditionalists. For now their mistake was, not to hold that meanings. are in the head (mind), but that mental states. are—i.e. that it is possible adequately to identify a mental state without mentioning extra-mental entities. They should rather have conceived mental states in the ‘wide sense’ conceded by Putnam to be legitimate (220).

245

For an extended defence of that viewpoint see Michael Dummett's Frege: Philosophy of Language. (London: Duckworth, 1973), passim., but esp. p. 92 . (The view of semantic knowledge I presuppose would not, however, be congenial to Dummett.)

246

Cf. Davidson on the supervenience of the mental on the physical, ‘Mental Events’, 88.

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In fact Putnam's speakers afford a good illustration of the general position here advanced. An interpreter, apprised of chemical theory, would assign to the sentences and beliefs of Putnam's two groups of speakers distinct substances, according to their observed causal interaction, via. perception, with those substances. And he would not be tempted to identify the extensions of ‘water’ in the two languages just because they were indiscernible with respect to the predicates the speakers were disposed to apply to their actually distinct substances. Nor would he assign XYZ to ‘water’ in the community surrounded by H2O on the ground that, by some coincidence, the inchoate chemical theory developed by the latter for that liquid all around them happened to fit XYZ better. In settling the subject matter of their sayings and beliefs, observed epistemic contact is the overriding criterion. I conclude with some brief remarks on the implications for a method of radical interpretation of the position we have reached on charity. (Strictly, I have no right to these remarks, since I have not shown that no. justification can. be given for the status Davidson wishes to bestow upon the principle of charity; only that, if I am right, he has not established its constitutive status. But it is of interest to see what might be the consequences for a theory of radical interpretation of allowing it to be conceivable that a community of speakers be wrong about most things.) The central idea of Davidson's proposal is that we extract a rich concept of translation from information about truth by pairing sentences of the native language with sentences of ours on the basis of shared truth values in such a way (to cut a long story short) that something close to interpretation is yielded.247 The step in the procedure I wish to question is the anterior move from holding true to truth. It is because Davidson thinks, as a result of his views on charity, that holding true could never fail to be good evidence for truth, at least on the whole, that he takes it as providing a generally reliable test of the truth of theorems of some candidate truth-theory. But if it is possible. that speakers be mainly in the wrong, then reliance on their holding a sentence true as evidence for its truth will simply lead to mostly false. (i.e. materially false) Tsentences, since it will direct us to pair a true sentence of ours with what is, despite their assent to it, a false sentence of theirs. So Davidson's method would be undercut at base if speakers could have preponderantly false beliefs in a conceivable case. And this suggests that holding true cannot play the role in a radical interpretation procedure that Davidson has tried to cut out for it. What might be put in its place? We noted earlier that rationalization involves the attribution of attitudes that make certain kinds of behaviour reasonable for the agent, and therefore apt to be followed. The attribution can be tested, at least up to indeterminacy, by seeing whether the agent behaves as one would

247

See his ‘Radical Interpretation’, Dialectica., 27 (1973), 314–28 .

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who possessed those attitudes; and of course the verification of such a conjectured set of attitudes will inevitably be holistic. This exercise is reminiscent of the so-called hypothetico-deductive method in science: crudely, think of a theory that would explain the observed facts if it were true, then test it by deducing its further consequences and seeing whether they hold.248 I suggest that interpretation may proceed in just that way: conjecture a theory of meaning and propositional attitudes guided by whatever hunches and expectations one has, then test for whether the subject behaves as one would of whom that theory were true.249 It will be complained that this sketch, even if filled out, could scarcely amount to a method., that is, a set of prescriptions that issue with the minimum of imaginative ingenuity in the selection of a correct theory (modulo., as always, indeterminacy). The complaint is correct; the hypothetico- deductive ‘method’ is not a method in that sense of the word. But the lack of such a procedure for extracting theory from evidence does not impede science; and indeed, it is to be assumed that radical interpretation has often been successfully undertaken without benefit of Davidson's method. It may well be, as Davidson's writings suggest, that there can be no method without charity: but there can be interpretation without either.250 .

Postscript to ‘Charity, Interpretation, and Belief’ The object of this paper is to argue that relational belief attributions do not require a principle of charity in Davidson's sense. But this leaves open the question of notional attributions, that is, the ascription of conceptual contents. As I say in the next paper, this is too much of an omission: we need to argue also that Davidson is wrong to suppose that notional ascriptions require preponderantly true belief. We need to argue, for example, that someone can have the concept red. and not have mainly true beliefs about red things; specifically, that having the concept red. does not consist in having true beliefs about red things. That issue is taken up in the following paper. With this qualification, I still

248

See, for the elements, Carl G. Hempel, Philosophy of Natural Science. (Prentice-Hall, 1966) , chs. 2 and 3. In drawing this parallel I intend no commitment to a deductivenomological construal of human action explanation; that is a separate question.

249

This general rubric seems close to the conceptions of radical interpretation favoured by McDowell, ‘On the Sense and Reference of a Proper Name’, and David Lewis, ‘Radical Interpretation’, Synthese., 27/3–4 (July–Aug. 1974), 331–44 .

250

I should emphasize that in this paper I have not: (i) claimed to refute every conceivable argument that might be offered in support of Davidson's thesis, though I know of none that seems to me convincing; (ii) considered all versions of the principle of charity that have been proposed, though the others I know of (e.g. David Lewis's in ‘Radical Interpretation’, 336) do not seem incompatible with the attribution of preponderant error; (iii) discussed charity as to finding others consistent and rational, which seems to me highly compelling, though quite compatible with the negation of the Davidsonian claim I have discussed.

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think my uncharitable earlier self was substantially in the right (and I don't think I'm applying a principle of charity to that distant self). It is not a condition of representing the world that one's representations be mainly correct, since what you think is not fixed by whether what you think is true. Intentionality is prior to veridicality. Thoughts only get to be true by having a specific content, so it cannot be that their having that content is determined by their being true. Thoughts cannot aspire to truth in advance. of having content—for what then would it be. that was true? This paper was one of the earliest and most extreme statements of externalism about the mind, and it has some of the fervent crudity of early statements. I believe it was the first place in print in which Putnam's claims about the externality of linguistic meaning were extended to apply to the contents of propositional attitudes, yielding the conclusion that mental states are not ‘in the head’. Not that this was a very surprising or creative suggestion on my part; it is the obvious way to go once one starts to think about belief content in the light of Twin Earth cases. This was also, I believe, the first place in which the implications of externalism for self-knowledge were identified: see note 12. The obvious question, once the mind has been pushed outwards beyond the merely qualitative, is whether we still enjoy authoritative access to our own thoughts (my fullest discussion of this is in Mental Content.). Both of these themes were taken up by other writers, no doubt independently, and I devoted many more pages to them in subsequent years.

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How do we set about establishing what beliefs a person has? How does a person form his beliefs? These two questions cannot be quite independent of each other. For a method of discovering someone's beliefs can be expected to incorporate some conception of the processes that lead to belief-formation; the method will in some way reflect or recapitulate how beliefs are acquired. Beliefs are discovered by tracing the route by which they were acquired. Thus it is that radical interpretation meshes with epistemology. Recognition of this connection has long been explicit in Quine: in translating the native's language we proceed from information about the very sensory stimulations which cause the subject to believe what he does.252 Thus in Quine's method our evidence for what the subject believes is the subject's evidence for believing what he does. The connection has not, however, been prominent in Davidson's writings on radical interpretation; not, that is, until ‘A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge’.253 In that paper Davidson links his account of how we attribute beliefs and meanings to another with a theory of justification and belief-formation. In particular, he spells out the epistemological implications of his use of the principle of charity in interpretation. My purpose in the present paper is to criticize Davidson's account of radical interpretation, specifically his adherence to charity, from an epistemological standpoint; and to erect on its ruins an account of interpretation which gets the epistemology right. Needless to say, I am indebted to Davidson for the foundations.

I To specify a method of radical interpretation is to specify an ordered sequence of inferential steps which take us from evidence available in advance of

251

This paper is based upon three talks I gave at Rutgers University in the Spring of 1984. I am very grateful for the invitation to give the talks, for the comments I received on them, and for the hospitality shown to me during my stay—especially by Peter Klein, Ernie LePore, and Brian McLaughlin.

252

See Quine's Word and Object. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960), ch. 2.

253

In Dieter Henrich (ed.), Kant oder Hegel. (Klett-Cotta, 1983), 423–38 . See also Davidson's ‘Empirical Content’, Grazer Philosophische Studien., ed. Rudolf Haller, 16/17 (1982), 471–89.

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interpretation to a total set of psychological and semantic ascriptions to the subject of interpretation. The steps are not, of course, deductive; the aim is to articulate principles which, in conjunction with the evidence, make it reasonable. to interpret the subject in a certain way. Davidson's fundamental idea is to use evidence about the external causes of assent simultaneously to ascribe beliefs and meanings to the subject: the truth conditions of the subject's beliefs and sentences are given by the external states of affairs that prompt him to hold sentences true. For example, suppose the subject assents to (holds-true) a sentence S. as a causal result of a rabbit running by: Davidson's method tells us to attribute to the subject the belief that a rabbit is running by. This method is charitable in an obvious way: we take the subject to believe precisely what we observe to be objectively the case about his surroundings. Charity may be tempered in the later stages of interpretation, as Davidson often remarks, but to begin with and generally it must be adhered to if interpretation is to be possible. Thus he says: Since charity is not an option, but a condition of having a workable theory, it is meaningless to suggest that we might fall into massive error by endorsing it. Until we have successfully established a systematic correlation of sentences held true with sentences held true, there are no mistakes to make. Charity is forced on us;—whether we like it or not, if we want to understand others, we must count them right in most matters.254 Nor is charity merely an unavoidable assumption of the process of interpretation; it is of the very nature of belief to be veridical. We do not know what it would be. to interpret and communicate with a person whose beliefs were not mainly true. So the charitable method rests upon a thesis about the conditions of interpretability which in turn is justified by a thesis about the essence of belief. Or rather: since the charitable method is the only possible. method, it is idle to speculate that it might on occasion yield incorrect results; for nothing could ever show. that charity was misguided. It is a conceptual truth about belief that beliefs can be ascribed only if they are, in the main, true. In ‘Charity, Interpretation and Belief ’255 I made a criticism of Davidson's defence of charity which questioned his account of what determines the objects of belief. Davidson had claimed that for two people to have beliefs about the same object it is necessary that they agree (in the main) about the properties of that object: if you and I are both to have beliefs about (say) the Earth or the stars then we must have the same conception. of these entities. Thus if I am to ascribe to you a false. belief about the Earth or the stars, I must, as a presupposition of this, also ascribe to you a whole range of true. beliefs about them.256 We can

254

‘On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’, repr. in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 197.

255

Journal of Philosophy. (1977); repr. as ch. 8 in this volume.

256

See, in particular, Davidson's ‘Thought and Talk’, repr. in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. , 168.

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disagree about something only if we agree about what. it is that we disagree about. My earlier objection to this claim about the conditions of genuine disagreement was that the claim is false of relational. beliefs. For it seems that I can say of you that you believe of. the Earth that it is stationary without attributing to you any particular conception of the Earth, let alone the conception I myself entertain: you can believe something of. the Earth without knowing that it is the Earth. that you have a belief about. And isn't it just straightforwardly true that the ancients had wildly erroneous ideas about the nature of celestial objects? The reason for this feature of relational beliefs, I conjectured, is their tie with perception: seeing an object can suffice for a relational attribution, and seeing something does not require the perceiver to have preponderantly true beliefs about what he is seeing. So it seems that people can disagree about. some object without necessarily agreeing (in other respects) about it. Now I still think this objection is right as far as it goes, but it no longer seems to me to go far enough. For it leaves the following retort open to Davidson: charity may not be required for the ascription of relational beliefs, but it is required for the ascription of notional. beliefs, that is, it is required for the ascription of shared concepts.. Thus if I am to ascribe to you the concept Earth. or star. (or any other concept) I must presume that you agree with me about (most of) the properties of the things falling under these concepts. And since every relational ascription implies the existence of a true notional ascription, charity will be required as globally as Davidson suggests: it will be required whenever the interpreter ascribes a concept to his subject. More formally, for any concept C., if the interpreter is to ascribe C. to his subject, he must assume that most of his subject's beliefs of the form . . . C. . . . are true. I want to argue in what follows that this thesis too is mistaken: concept-attribution is not essentially charitable in this way.

II The line of objection I want to pursue may be put (baldly and unsympathetically) as follows: if Davidson were right about the inherently charitable nature of interpretation, then we could dismiss certain kinds of traditional scepticism; but it is absurd to suppose that scepticism could be dismissed in this oblique and roundabout way. For, if it is a condition of having beliefs about (say) the external world or other minds that these beliefs be mainly true; and if it is a condition of having an interpretable language that most of what the speaker says is true: then we know, just by knowing that we believe and speak, that most of what we think and say is true—and so the sceptical claim that we might be globally mistaken about the external world or other minds can be dismissed as inconceivable. There is then no need to provide any demonstration that our

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particular modes of belief formation in these areas are in fact reliable; we can reject the suggestion that they are not, simply by considering the nature of radical interpretation. But this seems, to put it mildly, a surprising result, one that should persuade us to question the premisses: for how could. scepticism be dismissed in this way? How could. epistemologists have been so wrong about what is necessary to defeat the sceptic? These rhetorical questions do not, of course, constitute an argument; they merely record the sense that something is going wrong in Davidson's adherence to charity. They do not indicate exactly what it is that is going wrong. And they cannot be regarded as disturbing to Davidson for the simple reason that he explicitly. draws the conclusion from his account of interpretation that scepticism of this kind has been thereby refuted.257 So we need, if we are to press the objection, to examine his reasoning. Davidson sets up the sceptical problem as follows. He first claims that justification is always a matter of the coherence of beliefs: nothing can count as a reason for belief except another belief. This means that there is no such thing as confronting a belief with ‘reality’ or with some non-doxastic representative of reality (sense-data, stimulations, etc.).258 But then the question arises of whether a coherent set of beliefs is a true. set: how can we move from coherence to correspondence? Well, not by seeking further justification—that. just enlarges the set of coherent beliefs. Rather, ‘the answer must be to find a reason. for supposing most of our beliefs are true that is not a form of evidence.’.259 And here is where the methodology of interpretation comes in, specifically the principle of charity: when we look at how beliefs must be ascribed we see that we could not assign a consistent set of beliefs to a person without assigning a largely true set of beliefs to him. And if this goes for another whom we interpret, then it also goes for us. as potential subjects. of interpretation. Thus Davidson concludes: ‘What stands in the way of global scepticism of the senses is, in my view, the fact that we must, in the plainest and methodologically most basic cases, take the object of a belief to be the cause of that belief. And what we, as interpreters, must take them to be is what they in fact are.’260 Belief is essentially (largely) veridical because we assign content to beliefs on the basis of the facts in the world that prompt belief. So to answer the sceptic we. need do nothing save ensure coherence; it can be left to the nature of belief itself, as seen through interpretation, to guarantee that our beliefs are mainly true. Clearly the crucial question about Davidson's argument is whether he is right to suppose that belief content can be read off the world in the way he

257

In fact, I had the idea of using the anti-sceptical consequences of the principle of charity as a reductio. before I learned that Davidson regarded this as a virtue. of his account of interpretation.

258

Thus Davidson says: ‘No such confrontation makes sense, for of course we can't get outside our skins to find out what is causing the internal happening of which we are aware’ (‘A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge’, 429). I am, in fact, very suspicious of this whole way of thinking, with its suggestion that we are somehow not directly aware, through perception, of what lies outside us in the external world; but I won't pause to criticize Davidson on this point.

259

Ibid. 431.

260

Ibid. 436.

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suggests. Let us first note a contrast with Quine, concerning the role Quine assigns to sensory stimulations in his account. It is these stimulations which, for Quine, determine content and provide the primary evidence for interpretation. Such stimulations function as what Davidson calls ‘epistemic intermediaries' between the subject and the world, between beliefs and facts. Now Davidson points out, quite correctly, that Quine's conception of interpretation leaves open the possibility of global error and thus leads to scepticism, since the stimulations could conceivably stay constant while the facts are varied: we would then ascribe the same beliefs to our subject though the world failed to match those beliefs. Imagine hooking a person up to a stimulation machine that caused the same irritations of nerve-endings as are commonly caused by tables and mountains and rabbits; this person would, on Quine's conception, believe and mean what we believe the mean—and he would accordingly be very wrong in his beliefs. By contrast, Davidson cuts out the content-determining epistemic intermediary and lets the external facts provide the evidence for interpretation; so if the facts are varied, then so too is the interpretation. Thus Davidson sees a link between his view of justification and his view of the data of interpretation. It seems to me that Quine is basically in the right in this dispute, but I want to propose a revision in his conception of the nature of the intermediaries. Let us consider, not peripheral sensory stimulations, but conscious perceptual experiences: having a visual experience as of a brown rabbit-like creature and the like.261 Now I take it as uncontroversial that experiences are not always veridical; there are such things as illusions and hallucinations. When a person's experience is non-veridical in these ways it is rational (other things equal) for him to form a belief in accordance with the content of his experience. We have here, in the possibility of non-veridical experience, a potent source of false belief, of a kind made familiar to us by generations of sceptics about our knowledge of the external world. Whether this source of error can lead to the possibility of global. mistake depends upon whether it is necessarily local: so could most. of our experiences be non-veridical? Sceptics have argued that this could be so; it might be, for example, that a super-scientist is causing us to have systematic hallucinations by stimulating our brains appropriately with implanted electrodes. If this is a coherent possibility, as it certainly seems. to be, then global error in our beliefs is. possible, and an interpreter of our beliefs must acknowledge such global error. So, clearly, Davidson must dispute the coherence of this kind of case if he is to preserve his anti-sceptical argument and his general account of interpretation.

261

A main reason for this modification is that I do not think that stimulations of a person's nerve-endings can function as the sensory evidence upon which his beliefs are based, on account of their inaccessibility to the person's belief-system; whereas experiences are ideally suited to this role. I discuss this point in my review of Quine's Theories and Things. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981) which appeared in the Journal of Philosophy. , 80 (1983).

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It is not difficult to predict Davidson's reply to this objection.262 He would say that we could. not, given the basic methodology of interpretation, interpret someone in such a way as to make most of his perceptual experiences nonveridical. For the content of an experience, as of a belief, is determined by its causes, and in the alleged counterexample to general veridicality, content and cause systematically don't match. In the case of the stimulation machine, or the (different) case of the brain in a vat, the causes of belief are electrode stimulations or scientists' actions or afferent nerve impulses, not tables and mountains and rabbits; and so we must interpret accordingly—that is, let the content of the subject's beliefs be determined by those non-standard causes. We are misled, Davidson would say, by what we can allow once we have got interpretation going, viz. exceptional mismatches of cause and content; but when we look at the matter more radically we see that the policy of matching cause and content must be adhered to in the main. So when the sceptic tells his story of globally non-veridical experience he forgets that he is arranging for types of causes of experience and belief which will recommend different ascriptions of content by the interpreter; he is thus, in effect, spinning an incoherent story. The question then is whether this hard-line response to the sceptical possibility is defensible. Before I argue that it is not, let me make a remark about supervenience. On this development of Davidson's view, there is a rather extreme failure of the supervenience of the mental on the cerebral, because my brain and the brain on the stimulation machine or in the vat could be physically indiscernible and yet we would, on the Davidsonian view, experience and believe totally different things. I believe that there is a brown rabbit running by and I have a visual experience as of a brown rabbit-like creature running by; they believe (say) that an electrode is sending n. volts into their occipital lobe and they have an experience with just this content. But there is no difference in what is going on in our brains. Content is thus right out of the head. This is not a result calculated to please neuro-physiologists, who believe that they are investigating (say) the physical basis of shape and colour perception; but it is not inconsistent with the letter of Davidson's own position on the supervenience of the mental on the physical, since the physical extends beyond the confines of the brain.263 Still, it is, I think, a result that ought to give us pause: can the intrinsic physical constitution of the brain be quite. so irrelevant to what a person experiences and believes? I want to focus my misgivings about the hard-line reply by considering the rationalization of action in relation to these non-standard assignments of content.

262

Davidson does not, so far as I know, make this reply in print, but it seems to be suggested by what he has written, and he is reported to have made the reply (or something like it) in discussion.

263

See his ‘Mental Events’, repr. in Essays on Actions and Events. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 214 . There is no hint here, however, that the supervenience base needs to extend beyond the head (nor that it need not).

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Suppose your brain and that of the person on the stimulation machine are sending out impulses causing your respective legs to move in a running motion (your brains, remember, are physically identical). Suppose also that you (but not he) are seeing a tiger running at you with ferocious intent and you believe that this is what you are seeing; you also desire to keep your life. Then we can say that you are intentionally moving your legs in this way because you believe there's a dangerous animal around and you want to escape from it (or some such). But what can we say of your cerebral twin? We cannot say of him what we said of you because he does not have. experiences and beliefs and desires with these contents. Nor can we rationalize his action by saying that he believes he is being stimulated by an electrode, etc.—for that. belief would not rationalize his intentionally moving his legs (unless it was, per impossibile., connected with beliefs about tigers, etc.). It doesn't help matters to redescribe the action as intentional qua the sending out of efferent nerve impulses; for, again, how is that. action rationalized by the experiences, desires, and beliefs we have, following Davidson's policy, attributed to him? The problem here is a general one: we just don't get a coherent, rational, sensible psychology by following Davidson's policy; but we do if we allow the intrinsic properties of the brain a larger role in determining content—in particular, if we attribute the same experiences. to you and your cerebral twin. So what we have given here is in effect an argument for the mentalistic version of an essentially Quinean position on interpretation. Does the argument I just gave commit me to the idea that content is in the head, contrary to much recent thought? Yes and No. Yes, in that I am suggesting that the (phenomenological) content of experience is fixed by the intrinsic condition of the brain. No, in that this does not commit me to the quite general thesis that the content of propositional attitudes (and sentences) is so fixed; for it may be that there are types of belief-content which are not fixed by the content of experience. The position I wish to occupy is the following: experiential content is a proper subset of beliefcontent, and beliefs whose content goes beyond the experiential are not in the head. Thus, in particular, beliefs about concrete individuals and natural kinds are not in the head: they are determined by causal relations to the environment, in the way sketched by causal theorists of belief-content. But beliefs which involve concepts that also characterize the content of experience—observational concepts, if you like—can. be possessed independently of such extrinsic relations. Thus suppose someone (you or an envatted brain) has an experience as of a round, red object, as a result of some event in his brain; this person may, on the basis of this experience, then form beliefs involving the concepts round. and red.—even though he may never have had causal contact with (specifically perceived) round or red objects.. On the other hand, a person cannot have beliefs involving the concepts water. or tiger. without the appropriate causal contact with water and tigers. The reason for the difference, I suggest, is that experience can ground

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concept possession if it can represent the property denoted by the concept in question but it cannot do so if the property is not capable. of being represented in experience (i.e. if it is not a property relating to the appearance. of things). So I am advocating a mixed position on concept possession and the location of content: concepts partition into two sets, and one set is in the head while the other is not, depending upon their capacity for entering into the content of experience.264 Is this mixed position plausible? Admittedly it seems ad hoc at first; but consider the alternatives. There are three that I can see, none of them attractive. First, we might try denying that the envatted brain can experience what a normal person can, so that there is simply no basis. for concept possession independently of causal contact with the environment in this case. This alternative cuts experience off from the brain too radically, as I argued above. Second, we might try maintaining that, though the envatted brain does have experiences as of (say) a round, red object, this does not enable it to form the corresponding concepts (have beliefs with such a content)—causal contact with round, red objects is needed for that. While not easily refuted, this alternative seems deeply implausible: surely if it can seem. to me that I am seeing something red and round (have an experience qualitatively indistinguishable from the experience I have when I actually see. a round, red object) then it is possible for me to think. that is indeed what I am seeing. Who needs causal contact if the property is directly represented in experience? Third, we might try abandoning the idea that any. concepts require causal contact for their possession, thus embracing a unitary theory which puts all. concepts in the head. But this would be to unlearn all that we have learned in recent years about reference and contentdetermination—and we cannot unlearn what is true. What we need to do, I suggest, is to accept the lessons of Twin Earth and related considerations but not overgeneralize them: some. concepts just don't work like that, viz. those that characterize the appearances of things (you can't get a Twin-Earth case for ‘red’ or ‘round’). Moreover, my mixed position does not seem intrinsically unmotivated, just a desperate attempt to avoid unpalatable alternatives: for there is a genuine division of observational and non-observational concepts, and their different relation to experience sets up the expectation that they may require different sorts of basis for their possession.265 But let me not pursue this topic further now; I am supposed to be discussing Davidson's views on radical interpretation.

264

This mixed position is consistent with the conception of content-determination suggested in my ‘Realist Semantics and Content-Ascription’, Synthese., 52 (1982) and applied to the envatted brain; but the position is not to be found explicitly in that paper.

265

We might see the classical empiricists as wishing to construct natural kind concepts (meanings) out of concepts derivable from the content of experience because of a commitment to a unitary theory of concept possession. Indeed, this may be part of what prompts ‘description theories’ of such concepts (meanings).

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The upshot of this consideration of the sources of possible error in belief may be summarily stated as follows: we can make sense of the possibility of global error by reflecting on the character of perceptual experience. Whether or not experiences can function as epistemic as well as causal intermediaries is not here to the point: if we imagine someone's experience to be globally nonveridical, as I have argued we can, then we have imagined a case in which globally false belief is possible, indeed inevitable. But then belief is not essentially veridical and scepticism has not been refuted. It remains to enquire how radical interpretation should proceed in the light of all this: what method can mesh properly with the facts about belief-formation? If interpretation cannot depend upon charity, what can it depend on?

III We need to describe a method of radical interpretation which leaves open the possibilities of error upon which the sceptic trades. As we have seen, such a method will accord an important role to the ascription of experience. to the subject, a type of ascription usually neglected in discussions of radical interpretation.266 The method I have in mind is, like Quine's, a two-stage method, in contrast to Davidson's one-stage method: that is to say, the causal link from the environment to the subject's belief-system will pass through an epistemic intermediary—stimulations for Quine, experiences for me. I will assume, with both Quine and Davidson, that we have access to information about assent or holding-true, and that we know what physical forces are impinging on the subject's body and from what distal sources. The ultimate aim is to assemble sufficient evidence for an ascription of propositional attitudes and semantic properties in explanation of the subject's behaviour. The overall plan of the two-stage method I envisage is as follows: first, settle on an assignment of perceptual experiences to the subject, on the basis of the observable physical facts about his environment and his relation to it; second, go from what has been established at the first stage to an ascription of beliefs and meanings. The question then is by what principles these two moves can be justified. Remember that the inferential moves are not intended to be deductive; the aim is only to assemble evidence which makes a certain interpretation reasonable—we do not want our method to aspire to an apodicticity that our actual interpretations of each other do not possess. What is important is that each stage should be in principle completable in advance of the next: in particular, we do not want our assignment of experiences to depend essentially upon a prior knowledge of what the subject believes and means. If we could not achieve this interpretative ordering we could not claim that assignments of experience can function as

266

David Lewis, for one, makes no mention of the ascription of perceptual experience to the subject in his ‘Radical Interpretation’, Synthese., 23 (1974).

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evidence for ascriptions of belief and meaning; and it would then become questionable whether we really had described something deserving to be called a method.. So let us consider each of the two stages I have identified in turn.

Stage One. The general method at this stage is easily described: having identified the subject's sense-organs and their receptive condition, we then make a suitable ascription of experience. Thus if, for example, the subject's eyes are open and a running rabbit is in his line of vision, then we suppose that he has an experience as of a running rabbit. This stage needs to exploit some criteria for perceptual illusion and to make ascriptions of experience accordingly. I am here assuming that the identification of the subject's sense-organs is a matter of physical inspection, not requiring detailed psychological knowledge of the subject. This assumption is, of course, legitimate in the usual human case, but it is a question what should be said of a more radical case of radical interpretation—the case in which the subject is an alien life-form with a quite different anatomy and physiology from the human. What if its eyes are physically quite unlike the eyes with which we are familiar? what if its sense-modalities are disjoint from those of the interpreter? these possibilities introduce a new element of difficulty into the problem, which I do not propose to explore here; in common with other writers on ‘radical’ interpretation I shall assume that we are dealing with subjects with a sufficient degree of similarity to the interpreter. But it is worth making this assumption explicit and indicating the scope and limits of the account I am proposing. (It may. indeed be that without the assumption of such a shared ‘form of life’ between interpreter and interpreted interpretation is not possible.)267 Am I entitled to suppose that, once the sense-organs have been identified, it is legitimate to make an ascription of experience to the subject? It seems to me that I am, at least prima facie: the disposition of a person's sense-organs is prima-facie good evidence for how he is perceiving the world, even though an initial ascription may be corrected in the light of further knowledge of the subject's psychology. Furthermore, I am not alone in supposing this: both Quine and Davidson make the same assumption, though less explicitly. There is much talk in Quine of the ‘conspicuous presence’ (p. 29) of rabbits, of ‘glimpses’ (p. 37) of rabbits, of the native assenting to ‘gavagai’ in ‘plain sight’ (p. 39) of a rabbit, of being prompted by ‘the sight of a face’ (p. 42), of a child hearing the word ‘Mama’ while ‘sensing the mother in the periphery of his visual field’ (p. 81).268 In fact it is clear that it is precisely because of the presence

267

This appears to be a thesis of Wittgenstein's about the conditions of communication: see sections 241–2 of Philosophical Investigations. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958). It is doubtful, however, that his notion of a ‘form of life’ exactly coincides with that alluded to in the text: he would certainly want to include more under this heading than the kinds of biological facts I am speaking of.

268

These quotations are all from Word and Object. , ch. 2. No doubt Quine does not intend. the quoted phrases to be taken mentalistically, but it is revealing how natural and unavoidable it is to invoke such perceptual locutions in describing what is going on in radical interpretation.

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of suitable perceptual experiences that the native assents at all: he assents to ‘gavagai’ when a rabbit goes by because he sees. a rabbit. And we similarly find Davidson suggesting that a particular ascription of belief be made to the subject on the strength of the fact that his ‘vision is good and his line of sight favourable’:269 again, this serves as evidence for belief precisely because Davidson is assuming that the subject sees. a certain state of affairs; without this assumption the suggested belief ascription would be unjustified. So it seems to me that ascriptions of experience are possible, tacitly assumed by other writers on interpretation, and anyhow inescapable in the ascription of belief. What would be objectionable would be a dependence upon knowledge of belief and meaning in the ascription of experience, for then such ascriptions could not function as a basis. for the interpreter's knowledge of the subject's propositional attitudes and language. However, it seems to me that I am in the clear on this point: for the perceptual system is (as we might say) autonomous. with respect to the belief system.270 That is to say, what a person perceives is in general independent of what he believes: you need not believe what you see or see what you believe. This means that even a total assignment of experiences to a person does not entail. that he has any particular set of beliefs. We can thus often know what someone sees without knowing what he believes. In this respect I think my account is better off than Davidson's: for ascriptions of holding-true are. ascriptions of (one kind of) belief—the belief that a sentence is true—and so they link up with ascriptions of other beliefs in a way that threatens their prior availability. But experiences are not beliefs and so they belong to a separate department of the subject's psychology. It therefore seems to me reasonable to suppose that Stage One can be undertaken in advance of Stage Two, and that Stage One can itself be got off the ground on the basis of evidence that does not just assume that we know how our subject experiences the world. We can solve for experience on the basis of the physical facts without assuming that we have already solved for belief and meaning.

Stage Two. Our problem now is to see how to get from knowledge of experience to knowledge of belief, and thence to knowledge of meaning. This step is, I think, more problematic than it initially appears—more problematic, indeed, than stage one. There is one small difficulty and two large ones. The small difficulty is that we need a test for the attitude of belief that is more general than that of assent to a sentence. The reason we need this is that we (I)

269

‘On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’, 196. Davidson is here suggesting that we can use facts about perception to correct attributions of belief invited by the subject's words. Oddly enough, he goes on to say, inconsistently as it seems, that ‘knowledge of beliefs comes only. with the ability to interpret words’ (my italics).

270

Here I am adopting the kind of view of the relation between belief and perception put forward by Jerry Fodor in The Modularity of Mind. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983). I am suggesting that the modularity shows up in radical interpretation.

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want to make room for the interpretation of creatures without language; and also a realistic reconstruction of our interpretation of creatures with. language needs to reckon with more than just sentential assent as evidence of belief. So we cannot say simply that our test for whether the subject believes there's a rabbit running by is that he assents to a certain sentence just when he has an experience as of a rabbit running by. But let us, in order not to multiply our difficulties, take it that we have devised such a non-linguistic test, so that we have a criterion for when an experience gives rise to a belief. Then we still have two larger difficulties. The first is familiar, though it presents itself in a slightly new form under our present way of conceiving the matter: this is the problem of indeterminacy (construed here epistemologically not metaphysically). Even if we know that the subject has formed a belief as a result of seeing a rabbit and that this belief gets its content from the content of the experience, we do not yet know what the content. of the belief is and hence what the meaning of the held-true sentence is: does he believe and mean that a rabbit has run by or an undetached rabbit-part or a rabbit stage etc.? The point is that an experience as of a rabbit is also. an experience as of an undetached rabbit-part etc. Perceptual experiences represent a great many features of the world simultaneously, whereas beliefs and sentences select out their content from this multiplicity. In other words, experiences underdetermine the content of the belief expressed in much the same way that Quine's stimulations do; they thus leave open too many choices of belief and meaning. This problem, like the first smaller one, is not, however, peculiar to my own account, though its form is, and I have nothing to add to the very extensive literature which addresses itself to the indeterminacy problem; so I shall not pursue the issue further, being content to have raised the question. The second large problem is. (I think) peculiar to the account I am proposing; it arises from the fact, remarked earlier, that a person is not constrained to believe what he sees (hears, etc.). It is this that prevents us directly inferring from someone's experience what it is that he believes: for he might distrust his senses. What if he believes that he is the victim of a hallucination experiment? Matters are pretty straightforward when the subject can be assumed to form his beliefs in accordance with his experience (waiving our first two difficulties): we can then ascribe to him the belief that the world is as it seems to him, thus using the content of his experience to determine the content of his belief. But this will not work when the subject's beliefs are not formed in this simple way. What then should we say of this possibility? The problem, clearly, is that our usual and best mode of access to a person's beliefs has been abrogated in the case under consideration. Can we somehow make up for this lack? We could if we had interpreted his language, of course, but that is part of what we are supposed to be establishing. We might alternatively try relying upon behavioural data. So far we have (like Quine and

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Davidson) been trying to figure out a person's beliefs from knowledge of their causes.; perhaps we could get somewhere by turning to their effects.. The trouble with this suggestion is that, unlike perceptual input, behaviour is not itself contentful and so threatens to be inadequate as evidence for belief content: it underdetermines ascriptions of belief and meaning too severely. This idea also appears to give up on the ambition of supplying a method. of interpretation: all it says is that we should so ascribe beliefs and meanings as to make best sense of the subject's behaviour; it does not prescribe a series of steps which will achieve this goal. The attraction of going from perception to belief was precisely that it offered a method of interpretation which proceeds from a firm foundation; we do not get the mirror image of this firmness by moving to the behavioural effects of belief. I think that reflection upon the case of the subject who distrusts his senses encourages the following response: it is a condition of interpretability. that the subject by and large believes what he perceives. That is, if a person systematically and globally refuses to let his beliefs be shaped by his experience, then he just cannot be interpreted. It is only the illicit assumption that we know his language that makes us think that we can ascertain such a person's beliefs; when this assumption is abandoned it becomes virtually impossible to see how we could have any confidence in our ascriptions of belief to such a person. (This is not to say such a person is impossible.; it is just that he is not interpretable..) We just have no decent way of finding out what he believes and hence what his words mean. If this is right, then it is not a defect in my account that it does not work for someone who does not form his beliefs on the basis of his experience in the usual way; for such a believer just is. not interpretable. There would be a defect only if someone who is interpretable were not interpretable by following my method. We can, pace. Davidson, interpret someone with preponderantly false beliefs, because we can have reason to attribute globally non-veridical experiences; but I think it is doubtful that we could ever interpret someone whose beliefs were radically cut off from his experience. Fortunately there are few such eccentric souls around asking to be interpreted, possibly because distrusting one's senses in this radical way is a sure way to perish (even madmen trust their senses some. of the time). My method will work well enough for ordinary people who rely on their senses; it is only sceptics who are uninterpretable.271

271

I have said nothing in this paper about the attribution of desires, but my position on this is similar to my position on belief. In ‘Mental Events’, Davidson says of the subject of interpretation: ‘In our need to make him make sense, we will try for a theory that finds him consistent, a believer of truths, and a lover of the good (all by our own lights, it goes without saying)’ (p. 222). Finding him ‘a lover of the good’ is finding that he shares our values and desires; and so we know that our. values and desires will agree with those of any interpreter, including the omniscient one. But then we know that what we value is what we ought. to value, and hence that moral scepticism (or scepticism about what is prudent) can be ruled out. Again, this result makes me suspicious of the method, so I should like to propose a different method. The method I would propose would again be two-stage: first, discover what gives the subject pleasure and pain; second, take it that by and large he values what gives him pleasure and disvalues what gives him pain. On this method, there is no reason why he should necessarily turn out to value and desire what we the interpreters value and desire. Clearly this sketch of a method is rough and unqualified, but it may serve to give some idea of how one might forsake charity in the attribution of desires.

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Despite these difficulties, which seem to me to be inherent in the problem rather than artefacts of the particular method I have recommended, I think that the two-stage procedure I have sketched is a plausible reconstruction or idealization of the way we set about interpreting others. The underlying idea of the method is extremely simple and I think highly intuitive: if you want to find out what a complete stranger believes you first notice how the world appears to him—how he experiences it—and then you take it that he believes by and large what he has perceived. In principle, the world could appear to him otherwise than it is, and then your ascriptions of belief will, in finding him rational, credit him with error—but you would believe the same if you had had his misleading perceptual evidence.272 The intermediate stage of experience does not, in the normal run of things, command our attention—assuming that his experience is veridical, we move straight to an ascription of (true) belief—but it is present none the less and will enter explicitly when it does not represent the world correctly. It is neglect of the role of experience in belief-formation that leads Davidson to advocate his charitable method; when experience is given its due epistemologically and interpretatively, charity goes by the board as a universally applicable precept. Scepticism is not therefore ruled out by the very nature of interpretation; rather, interpretation must respect the premisses on which scepticism rests. There is thus no way of avoiding the hard work of showing (or showing that we need not show) that our particular methods of forming beliefs are reliable—that what we habitually take. as good evidence for belief is. good evidence for belief. Scepticism must be defeated in some other way than through consideration of the nature of radical interpretation.

Postscript to ‘Radical Interpretation and Epistemology’ If someone has the same set of perceptual experiences as you, but these experiences are not caused by the external world in the normal way yours are, then that person will end up having much the same beliefs as you, even though

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Thus I am. supposing that charity about rationality. is a requirement of interpretation, i.e. I am endorsing a ‘principle of humanity’. And I would also agree with Davidson about the limits to the amount of plain inconsistency. we can intelligibly impute to people. Note, however, that these kinds of ‘charity’ do not sustain the conclusions Davidson wishes to derive from the nature of interpretation: they do not undermine scepticism, and they (therefore) do not deliver the sorts of metaphysical results that Davidson hopes for (see ‘The Method of Truth in Metaphysics’, repr. in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. ).

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these beliefs will be largely false. To interpret such a person correctly, therefore, it will be necessary to flout the principle of charity: even though their beliefs are intelligibly formed, indeed entirely rational, the misleading course of their experience will lead them into large-scale error. To find a person rational in such a case will then be to find them believing falsely, since the reasons for belief afforded by experience evidentially support mainly false beliefs. These are the truistic considerations that prompt this paper. The central point of the paper is that experience is crucial to the formation of empirical beliefs and that it must be reckoned with in any account of radical interpretation. The course of a person's experience is logically independent of the nature of the person's environment—hence the sceptical possibility of a brain in a vat having all the same experiences as you. Davidson's position on charity entails that this is not the logical possibility it has always been taken to be, so that scepticism can be ruled out from the start. I argue against this, claiming that the state of a person's brain has far more to do with the content of his experience than Davidson allows. The issue connects with the correct form of an externalist theory of content, and this paper foreshadows the views put forward more systematically in Mental Content.. The question of the determinants of perceptual content comes to the fore here. I have nothing to add to what I have already written on this subject, but I would like to make a few remarks about the intersection between the topic of radical interpretation and the problem of other minds. First, we should not expect that a method of interpretation should be invulnerable to scepticism about other minds; so it would be misguided to object that the kinds of criteria I (or others) propose for mental attributions fall short of providing conclusive reasons for the attributions suggested. The aim is to reconstruct our ordinary grounds for ascribing mental states to others, not to answer sceptical doubts about whether those grounds are really adequate. Second, matters turn murky when we ask about solving the interpretation problem for creatures highly dissimilar to us—here the problem of other minds does intrude into the question of radical interpretation. If the subject has none of our senses, has a body not even recognizable as that of a minded creature, has beliefs about subjects we know nothing about—then there is no reason to think that we can interpret him at all. His mind will be as opaque to us as sceptics have claimed in more humdrum cases. In my view, to solve the problem of other minds for this creature requires solving the mind–body problem, this enabling us to exploit necessitation relations between the physical makeup of the creature and the character of its mental life—reading the mind off the brain, to put it simply. Since I think we cannot solve the mind–body problem, I believe that the problem of other minds will always be a real problem: we have to rely on indirect and contingent marks of mentality, instead of being able to focus upon what constitutes. the basis of mental states. In a sense, a method of interpretation is just a second-class substitute for what a solution to the mind–body

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problem would deliver—a definitive answer to the problem of other minds. Such concerns, however, are remote from the themes of the present paper; I mention them in order to locate the philosophical issues in relation to each other and to bring out a connection with other work of mine.

10 The Mechanism of Reference

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I Reference is what relates words to the world of objects of whose condition the truth of sentences hinges. It is natural to wonder what sorts of relations underlie the reference relation—to wonder, that is, what constitutes the mechanism. of reference. This question comes naturally because reference has the appearance of a supervenient phenomenon: semantic facts, one feels, hold in virtue of facts of some other kind. To ask for a specification of the underlying facts is not (necessarily) to commit oneself to a reductionist view of reference; it may be that our best account of the reference relation, though substantial and illuminating, fails to reach the standards of genuine reduction—it takes the form of a ‘picture’ rather than a ‘theory’.274 An account of reference, of the shape I envisage, would consist in a set of rules—the rules of reference—which determine a function from expressions to the items which are their referents. The rules would speak of relations, not themselves directly characterized in terms of the notion of reference, recognition and deployment of which is comprised in mastery of a language: a speaker has mastered the rules of reference for a language if and only if he appreciates (perhaps inchoately) what relations go to determine the referent of an arbitrary singular term. Specifying the rules of reference is thus part of an account of the principles in which a speaker's ability to interpret words as possessed of specific referents consists, and hence of his ability to come to know the truth conditions of sentences. Articulating the rules of reference is thus analogous to devising a theory of the structure of sentences: such a theory should likewise be construed as a representation of a speaker's ability to understand sentences by way of the meaning of their constituent parts. Recent discussion of the mechanism of reference has tended to focus on the case of proper names, as if these were the basic referential devices. This focus

273

I am grateful for comments on an earlier draft to Anita Avramides, W. D. Hart, David Kaplan, and Christopher Peacocke.

274

Cf. Saul Kripke, ‘Naming and Necessity’, in D. Davidson and G. Harman (eds.), Semantics of Natural Language. (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1972), 300 .

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reflects the assumption that the mode of operation of names provides the model for an account of how language fundamentally makes contact with reality. I think this presupposition is the reverse of the truth: names are really a derivative mode of reference, with somewhat eccentric properties. I shall accordingly begin by discussing what seem to me the primary referential devices, viz. indexicals, and proceed to names upon that basis. This strategy should undermine the appeal of two kinds of theory of reference inspired initially by the case of names, and point in the direction of what I think is the correct theory. In fact, I believe that the true mechanism of reference will stand forth once we look afresh at the functioning of indexicals. But I must warn that what seems to me the natural theory requires serious revisions in received ideas on how language hooks up to the world. The two theories of reference with which I want to part company are the description theory and the causal theory. The broad tendency of the description theory is to picture the mechanism of reference as operating by some kind of matching or fitting between the referent and a batch of descriptive conditions in the mind of the speaker; an object qualifies as referent if it fits the mental template or blueprint the speaker brings to the referring expression in question. The rule of reference associated with this kind of theory is this: to find the referent of a term t. on an occasion of utterance discover the speaker's inner blueprint (the set of general descriptions he would volunteer) and then determine which object in the world fits it best. The causal theory on the other hand pictures the reference relation as holding in virtue of genetic facts: what makes the utterance of t. have a certain object as referent is the manner in which the utterance came about (its aetiology). More precisely, the referent is to be the object whose properties causally explain, via a chain of causally connected stages, certain properties of the speech act in which the term is uttered. (It is usual to require that the causal chain contain a stage at which an epistemic state of the speaker is produced.) The associated rule of reference is just to find the object that plays the right kind of causal-genetic role in respect of the utterance of t.; so mastery of the notion of reference will involve a grasp of various causal principles.275 Three lines of objection to the description theory can seem to lead us toward a causal theory. First, the theory seems incomplete as a full account of reference

275

For advocacy of causal theories and criticism of description theories see: Kripke, ‘Naming and Necessity’, Keith Donnellan, ‘Proper Names and Identifying Description’, in Semantics of Natural Language. ; Gareth Evans, ‘The Causal Theory of Names’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society., suppl. vol. 47. (1973) ; Dennis W. Stampe, ‘Toward a Causal Theory of Linguistic Representation’, in P. A. French et al.. (eds.) Midwest Studies in Philosophy., ii (University of Minnesota Press, 1977) ; Michael Devitt, ‘Singular Terms’, Journal of Philosophy., 71 (Apr. 1974) ; David Kaplan, ‘Quantifying In’, in D. Davidson and J. Hintikka (eds.), Words and Objections. (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1969) . It goes without saying that these authors differ among themselves about the precise form of a causal theory of reference.

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because it explains term. reference by means of predicate. reference: an adequately general theory should tell us how the predicates embedded in the associated descriptions pick out the properties they do (clearly there is a regress to be avoided here).276 Second, as has been pointed out particularly in the case of names, there can be proper reference even where the descriptive conditions fail to determine a unique referent, that is, where the speaker's blueprint is not individuating. Third, the description theory does not make adequate room for the fallibility of the speaker's beliefs: intuition can assign a referent to a term which dramatically fails to fit the speaker's blueprint, even where some other object does perfectly fit it.277 A causal theory of reference can be encouraged by comparing the relation of reference to the relation of perception.278 Suppose it claimed that you perceive an object x. in virtue of perceiving properties P.1,. . . P.n. which x. in fact instantiates uniquely. Three objections would instantly be lodged to such a theory. First, the theory presupposes the notion of perceiving the properties. of an object in saying what it is to perceive an object and so has no general account of the perception relation; more strongly, the theory involves a circularity. Second, the theory seems to disallow what is evidently possible (because actual), namely that someone should in fact perceive x. even though there exists some y. which equally fits the perceiver's experience. Third, the theory has difficulty explaining how objects can be misperceived, since the theory has it that what an object is perceived as. determines which object is perceived. It is easily seen, therefore, that the mechanism of perception is no sort of matching or fitting; it is, rather, a causal-genetic matter. And not only does a causal account deliver a better theory of the perception relation, it also explains why perception has the features which refute a ‘description’ theory of the relation. Under the influence of this comparison it is extremely tempting to propose an analogous causal theory of reference: a term refers to an object just in case there is a non-deviant causal chain linking features of the use of the term with explanatory facts about the object.279 Our mastery of the notion of reference, then, will comprise causal principles in much the way that our mastery of the notion of perception does. (Indeed, according to some causal accounts of reference the causal chain that constitutes perception is a proper initial segment of the causal chain that constitutes reference.) In what follows I shall argue against any such theory and suggest an alternative view.

276

Hartry Field recognizes the need for such a theory of predicate reference in ‘Mental Representation’, Erkenntnis., 13 (1978) 22 f .

277

These last two points are pressed especially by Kripke, ‘Naming and Necessity’.

278

Evans does this in ‘The Causal Theory of Names’, sect. I.

279

Of course, specifying which causal chains are ‘appropriate’ is a major issue for causal theorists. It is worth noting that the treatment of deviance offered by Christopher Peacocke in Holistic Explanation: Action, Space, Interpretation. (Oxford University Press, 1979) , ch. II, does not seem naturally applicable to the case of reference.

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II Let us consider the indexicals: ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘now’, ‘the past’, ‘here’, ‘far away’, ‘that man’, ‘the rabbit over there’, etc. The use of such expressions results, I take it, in reference—some item is identified as that upon whose condition the truth value of the utterance turns. It should be plain straight off that a classical description theory of indexical reference is hopelessly misguided; for it is obvious that a speaker can use these expressions to refer no matter how underspecifiying and erroneous his associated body of general descriptive knowledge may be.280 This is simply because the set of properties the speaker supposes his referent to instantiate manifestly plays no role in fixing what it is he refers to. Rather, the rule of reference for an indexical adverts to the context. of the speaker, not to the descriptive material he happens to have in his mind: the reference is determined by. the context, independently of any representation the speaker may have of. the context. It would clearly be only too easy to produce counter-examples to a description theory of the reference of (e.g.) ‘that man’ as uttered on a particular occasion. Nor is a causal-genetic theory immediately suggested: not all indexicals refer to items unproblematically endowed with causal powers, and it is far from evident that the operative notion of context should be explicated in causal terms. In both these ways indexical reference departs from perception: we cannot be said actually to perceive. all the items to which we can make indexical reference, and the idea of a context. of utterance does not go over naturally to perception. Perhaps the most promising candidate for subsumption under a causal theory is demonstrative reference to material objects in the speaker's immediate environment, for in that case perception is present in its least diluted form. Thus it has sometimes been suggested (or more commonly assumed) that the rule of reference for demonstratives invokes perception in the most straightforward way: you refer with a token of ‘that man’ to the man you are perceiving when you utter that token expression.281 Two points should be noted straight away. The first is that this rule fails to determine a function from (token) demonstratives to referents, for the obvious reason that the speaker might be perceiving more than one man. The usual response to this captious-seeming objection is to introduce a condition of salience.: the referent is to be the saliently perceived man.282 This amendment, however, either fails to yield an adequate criterion or is tacitly circular. If the notion of salience is interpreted phenomenologically, perhaps in terms of

280

Cf. John Perry, ‘Frege on Demonstratives’, Philosophical Review., 86 (Oct. 1977) , and Tyler Burge ‘Sinning Against Frege’, Philosophical Review., 88 (July 1979) .

281

This seems to be Russell's suggestion in ch. 7 of An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth. (Allen & Unwin, 1940); he also gives a causal chain account of such perceptual prompting. Devitt makes a similar proposal in ‘Singular Terms’, sect. 7.

282

Russell thus refines his perceptual theory in Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits. (Allen & Unwin, 1948), 107.

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how much of the speaker's attention is taken up, it does not supply a necessary condition, since it is clearly possible to refer demonstratively to something which is not at the centre of one's attention. Moreover, what is there to prevent the case of two men equally saliently perceived only one of which is the speaker's referent? On the other hand, if we construe salience in such a way as to make the criterion work by stipulation we have a blatant circularity. It therefore seems to me that no account in purely perceptual terms will work to cover all cases of demonstrative reference. What this suggests is that if perception is to play any role in the mechanism of demonstrative reference it will have to be supplemented by machinery of a different kind; at best it will feature as a component of a fuller account. But, secondly, allowing perception to feature as a necessary condition, would not, I think, show it to be, strictly speaking, part of the mechanism. of reference, that is, part of what a competent speaker has to master in order to operate with the concept of demonstrative reference. A condition can be necessary for a given concept to apply to an object, just in the sense that the concept cannot apply unless the condition holds, without it being true that the condition is (partly) constitutive. of the concept. It might be a necessary condition of an object's being a combustion engine that it be made of metal; but grasping the mechanism by which a combustion engine works does not involve this fact. Or again, it is plausible that explaining actions by way of desires and beliefs requires that the explaining facts have physical realizations in the agent's brain; but mastering the principles of such explanation does not seem to involve this necessary condition. Similarly, perception might be a necessary condition of demonstrative reference and yet not be constitutive of how it works; indeed, since the relation of perception cannot be made to yield a sufficient. condition for reference one would suspect as much. However, the most direct way to discredit a theory is to show that it does not even specify a necessary condition; this I shall now try to establish by presenting a number of counter-examples to any causal-genetic theory of demonstrative reference. (a.) Consider a factory inspector certifying cars as roadworthy as they come off an assembly line. His job is to say, as successive cars pass by, ‘that car is certified as roadworthy’. Normally, he looks at each car and utters his incantation while gesturing in the appropriate direction; but on this occasion he absentmindedly looks away as a new car arrives before him, while uttering his usual sentence accompanied by his usual gesture. It seems clear that his utterance of ‘that car’ stood in the relation of reference to the car in front of him, causally unconnected as (by hypothesis) they were; this is shown (inter alia.) in the fact that the inspector could be accused of saying something false if the car turns out not to be roadworthy. (b.) Consider a man in the following Gricean situation: he is positioned in front of a clock the effects of which on his senses are blocked in some way but in whom there occurs a sense impression as of there being a clock in just that

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position;283 and suppose the man knows this to be his situation. I think that if he points in the direction of the clock and says ‘that clock is not seen by me’ he speaks truly, and he does so only because he refers demonstratively to the clock in front of him. (c.) Consider a man looking through a transparent medium that alters the path of light in such a way that the real position of objects seen through it is three feet to the right of their apparent position; and suppose the man knows the medium to have this property. He wishes to refer to a penny which he does not perceive but which he knows (we can suppose on general grounds) to be in a certain place, just the place in fact at which a penny he does perceive appears illusorily to be. To fulfil his intention he points to just the place where the second penny appears to be, but is not, and says ‘that penny will appear to be three feet to the left of where it really is’. Again, I think this man can succeed in referring demonstratively to the unseen penny despite the perceptually salient presence of the other penny (this is not to say that he could not also, if he wished, refer demonstratively to the seen penny). (d.) Consider the subject of the psychology experiment described by Donnellan: the subject is seated before two squares, one above the other, and has been equipped with inverting spectacles, so that the square that appears to be on top to him is really on the bottom and vice versa;284 again we can suppose he knows this to be the situation. He is asked to refer to the top square and duly points to the place where the top square really is but the bottom square is perceived to be, saying ‘that square is on top’. I think he speaks truly; he refers to the top square by pointing to the place at which he perceives the bottom square. In each of these cases reference and perception come adrift in various ways. In judging that reference falls where I claim it does we are taking the demonstratives to function deictically., that is, by some kind of pointing gesture in the direction of a place; and indeed it is precisely the performance of an ancillary gesture that inclines us to agree that reference takes place in these cases. Not for nothing do linguists speak of such pointing gestures as ‘paralinguistic’: in establishing reference the gesture functions as part of the language.285 Taking the role of the gesture thus seriously, we might suggest the following rule of reference as operating in examples (a.)–(d.): the referent of a

283

H. P. Grice, ‘The Causal Theory of Perception’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society., suppl. vol. 35 (1961).

284

Donnellan ‘Proper Names and Identifying Descriptions’.

285

See John Lyons, ‘Deixis as a Source of Reference’, in E. L. Keenan (ed.), Formal Semantics of Natural Language. (Cambridge University Press, 1975) . Wittgenstein continually stresses the role of pointing in the use of demonstratives, e.g. at §§ 8, 9 of Philosophical Investigations. (Basil Blackwell, 1953); and in the Brown Book. (Basil Blackwell, 1958), 109, even speaks of the gesture as part. of a symbol. C. S. Peirce is yet more explicit: ‘The pointing arm is an essential part of the symbol without which the latter would convey no information’, Collected Papers., ed. C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss (Harvard University Press, 1932), sect. 293, vol. ii.

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token of ‘that F.’ is to be the first F. to intersect the line projected from the pointing finger, that is, the F. at the place indicated—one might almost say geometrically—by the accompanying gesture. Now if that were the correct reference rule for demonstratives, then the role of perception would begin to take or a different and less significant aspect. Perception, it is true, is a generally good guide. to deictic reference, because objects are apt to be in the places they seem to be and because we typically know the disposition of objects around us by way of perception; but as soon as these generally applicable conditions break down, as in (a.)–(d.), it becomes clear that what makes for reference is some other mechanism—perception starts to look incidental. What does the work, as captured in the operative rule of reference, is a mechanism based upon spatio-temporal. relations between the speaker's actions and the things around him: the referent is the object spatio-temporally related to the speaker in the way specified by the aforementioned rule about pointing. In short, the proper notion of context for demonstratives is a spatio-temporal notion, not a perceptual or causal-genetic notion. For the sake of a label I shall call the theory that invokes spatio-temporal relations the contextual. theory of demonstrative reference.286 I anticipate the objection that the rule for demonstratives I have given does not realistically describe our actual practice in the use of demonstratives; we conform to nothing so precise and inflexible. I agree with this observation, but I do not think it compromises the applicability of the rule: the rule has the status of an idealization. of actual linguistic practice. This claim may be backed up with two remarks. One is that when we are in doubt about a speaker's demonstrative reference because of an ambiguous gesture lazily executed we tend to resort to a precise rule of the kind specified; we get the speaker to point out exactly. which apple he wanted. If someone is pressed in this way to make his reference clear (determinate) and points with resolute and taut finger two inches to the side of his intended referent, then he can be accused of misusing the conventions of language. The other way to make the idealization claim plausible is to consider a language which is stipulated. to obey the precise and rigid rule. In the first place, this is clearly a language in which demonstrative reference occurs, so the rule must capture some critical element in our notion of demonstrative reference. In the second place, it seems to me that given the exigencies and vagaries of linguistic life such a language would end up, by a series of natural deformations, looking very much like our own; so the rule

286

The author who comes closest to this conception of indexical reference is A. W. Burks in his excellent ‘Icon, Index and Symbol’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research., 9 (1948–9), esp. p. 686 . He does not, however, explicitly contrast his basically spatio-temporal theory with a causal theory such as Russell's. Peirce is unclear on this question: sometimes he speaks of the ‘existential relation’ or ‘dynamical connection’ involved in indexical reference as causal, sometimes as spatial. This probably traces to his incorrect assimilation of natural indicators, such as barometers, to linguistic indexicality.

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seems to represent a standard or paradigm from which our actual practice can be seen as an intelligible deviation. The important point is that the deviations and perturbations preserve the essential feature of relying upon spatio-temporal context in their rules of reference determination.287 What of the other indexicals? They too, it seems, invite spatio-temporal reference rules; what rule depends upon the linguistic meaning of the indexical in question. Thus a token of ‘now’ refers to the same time as the time of occurrence of that token, ‘tomorrow’ to the day after the day of the utterance; ‘here’ refers to the place at which the speaker is located, and similarly for the other spatial indexicals.288 The case of ‘I’ is somewhat special: here the relation between speaker and referent is that of identity.. We can view this as a limit case if we adopt two theses about persons, both of which seem to me independently true; that persons are necessarily embodied beings existing in space and time, and that identity for such beings is a matter of spatio-temporal coincidence. Then we can say that the rule: to find the referent of a token of ‘I’ take the object identical with the speaker of that token—that rule amounts to taking the object spatio-temporally coincident with the speaker. (Those who find this ad hoc should ask themselves whether they can make sense of disembodied beings using a public language containing ‘I’.) If this kind of rule is correct for our indexicals in general, then the hearer's ability to work out the speaker's reference consists in integrating his knowledge of the linguistic meaning of the indexical with his knowledge of the spatio-temporal location of the speaker with respect to other items—material objects, times, places, and persons. Given the reference rules carried by linguistic meaning and the spatio-temporal context, it is determined what the referent is—causal relations need not be considered. Let me make clear what I am and am not claiming. I am. claiming that spatio-temporal rules of reference are perfectly coherent and so could govern a possible language; I am also claiming that in fact natural languages (at least over a large fragment) incorporate such rules. But I am not. claiming either of the following: that any. intuitively indexical expression—one whose reference varies systematically from occasion to occasion, its linguistic meaning remaining

287

In fact, I would say that the pointing gesture as such is, in a certain sense, inessential to the use of demonstratives; it seems necessary for communication only because there is typically more than one F. in the immediate environment. If this never happened, then the pointing gesture would not be needed, since there would be no risk of ambiguity. But it would be a mistake to infer from this that a spatio-temporal theory of demonstratives is compromised: for the location of the speaker's body is what serves as the paralinguistic determinant of such reference when no other or finer spatio-temporal directions are required by the hearer.

288

It would be a confusion to object here that I am selectively relying on spatial and temporal indexicals to establish a spatio-temporal theory of indexical reference. For it does not trivially follow from the fact that an expression has places or times as referent that the rules for determining the referent associated with the expression are spatiotemporal rules. (This is not to say that the applicability of such rules does not in some. way derive from the character of the world to which the expressions refer: see below.)

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constant—must. obey spatio-temporal reference rules; or that it would be wrong to discern genuinely demonstrative reference in a language which obeyed a different kind of rule. That is, I have not said that there is any conceptual connection between indexicality as such and spatio-temporal rules; it seems to me an interesting question whether, for example, one might not introduce a type of expression which functioned indexically and yet conformed to some kind of causal rule. It also seems to me a real question whether a language could contain expressions of the form ‘that F. ’, having the same linguistic meaning as our own demonstratives, yet obeying a perceptual rule of reference.289 Admitting such possibilities raises an important and neglected question about the status of theories of reference: if there could. be a language whose mechanism of reference differed from that of our own, what would that show about the notion of reference? One immediate consequence is that an account of reference will not parallel what we have a right to expect of philosophical accounts of (say) perception and knowledge; for in those cases we expect constitutive conditions applicable to any conceivable case of perceiving and knowing; that is, we look for a general account of the concept.. But if we allow that reference could occur by radically different sorts of mechanism our theory will be parochial: for we can conceive of referential devices that are stipulated. to be governed by descriptive or causal theories, for example. If this is granted, then the question should not be ‘what, quite generally, are the necessary and sufficient conditions of reference?’—for there are no such conditions—but rather ‘what constrains the choice of mechanism of reference by which a language will be ruled: in particular, why is our language built according to spatio-temporal rules and not some other kind of rule?’ The way to investigate this latter question is to ask in what ways a language stipulated to obey other rules would differ in point of communicative efficiency (or in other respects) from our own. I shall not pursue this question further here, except to make two telescopic remarks. The first is that the noted feature of the concept of reference appears to stem from the essentially conventional. character of reference: which rules of reference there are in a language is a matter of convention guided by considerations of convenience and point. That is why we can simply stipulate that a certain relation between words and the world shall count as reference, as fixing the items on which the truth of a sentence turns; we cannot, in the same way, stipulate that some other kind. of relation shall constitute perception. Reference is, in this sense, and artefact; perception is not.290 The second

289

Wittgenstein mentions an imaginary language in which names are stipulated to be usable only in the presence of their bearer; he says they would still be names: Philosophical Investigations. , § 44.

290

I suspect that part of the feeling that the reference relation is somehow ‘occult’ comes from assuming it to be natural and then finding that it looks and behaves as if it were not. This assumption may also explain a residual sense that there is a further question about the nature of reference over and above specifying the conventional reference rules that govern expressions. The proper picture, however, is that we decide. what natural relations shall underlie reference; reference is not a further natural relation superadded to those underlying relations. (The obscurity of this footnote is due to the obscurity of the worries it attempts to dissipate.)

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brief remark is that the spatio-temporal rules do seem well suited to the purposes of communication, because of their ready accessibility; facts about the causal ancestry of utterances or about the speaker's descriptive beliefs are relatively difficult for the hearer to come to know. The spatio-temporal framework is the pervasive and common background against which we construe what transpires in the world; it is therefore unsurprising that the rules of reference we adopt in a shared spatio-temporal world should themselves be spatio-temporal rules.291 A language designed to apply to a non-spatio-temporal world might well obey a different kind of reference rule, as, for example, that a given term shall always be taken to refer to the most salient item in the speaker's phenomenal field.292 But, however this may be, it does seem that an account of reference will not have the theoretical status it is commonly assumed to have. There is a further clarification to be entered. My topic so far has been the semantical. relation of reference, holding between utterances and things, that is, the notion that is tied to the semantical notion of truth. I have said nothing of the psychological. states of understanding an utterance or knowing what a term refers to—nor have I spoken of the conditions of de re. belief. I suspect that some will be reluctant to accept my conclusions about reference because they construe them as a contribution to an account of those psychological states; and it seems to them very implausible that the intentionality of such states might admit of a spatio-temporal theory—they will wish to cling to causal theory of intentionality. My view is that we should separate the conditions for achieving semantical reference from the conditions for possessing singular thoughts: I want, that is, to allow that a person may make singular reference to an object while not having a genuinely singular thought about it. Indeed, that is precisely what I should say of examples (a.)–(d.): the speaker has no de re. attitude in respect of the object he designates.293 I would even agree that there is a sense in which the speaker does not completely grasp the proposition he expresses; though the factory inspector said. that that car is roadworthy he did not know. that he said precisely that. For such demonstrative attitudes require, I would agree, some kind of causal contact. What I dispute is that the conditions of

291

I intend here to recall P. F. Strawson's discussion of demonstrative reference in Individuals. (Methuen, 1959), esp. ch. I. However, he tends to emphasize the importance of indexical terms for. places and times, rather than explicitly offering a spatio-temporal theory of the mechanism. of reference. Nevertheless, I think his discussion can be seen as complementing my own suggestions.

292

Cf. Strawson's discussion of the No-space world, Individuals. , ch. 2: the rules of reference for an indexical language with such a subject matter would not (indeed could. not) be spatio. -temporal—but this would be a ‘language’ very different from our own.

293

This is not to say that he has no. attitudes toward his referent, or that the referent fails to have any. mode of presentation to the speaker: he will, on the contrary, have many beliefs, of a general nature, about the referent.

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singular thought should dictate the conditions of singular reference. It has become customary to assume that an account of the reference relation should be answerable to considerations about knowledge of that relation; but it is no more obvious to me that the notion of reference should be characterized under this constraint than that the notion of (say) perception should. Whether a speaker refers to a particular object and whether he knows that he does are distinct questions, and it appears demonstrable by example that reference to an object can occur without de re. knowledge of that object.294 The presupposition that the theory of reference must recapitulate that of thought seems to have its source in the idea that the purpose of speech is the expression or externalization of thought; a demonstrative utterance needs to be backed by a demonstrative thought or else it is null and void. Our intuitions about demonstrative reference do not, I have claimed, support this idea, but I also think it is wrong as a matter of principle. The purpose of speech is communication—to get the hearer. to have thoughts. And clearly a demonstrative utterance could serve the end of bringing a demonstrative thought to the mind of the hearer, by directing his attention toward some object, without the speaker. having the thought the hearer acquires. The primary job of the rules of reference is to afford a means of making thoughts available to the hearer, and the spatio-temporal rules can achieve this without requiring such thoughts of the speaker.295 This is not, of course, to say that the purpose of demonstrative communication is invariable fulfilled—there may be no thought corresponding to the proposition expressed on the part of the speaker or. the hearer; but the connection between speech and thought I have acknowledged seems enough to ward off the charge that I have totally severed thought and speech. What does seem to follow from my view of the connection between thought and speech is that there is a clear sense in which reference is established antecedently to thought, since the hearer has to recognize the reference of the speaker's words before. he can have the thought the speaker wishes to instil. Perception is indeed

294

A clear example of the kind of position I am against is provided by Jaegwon Kim's ‘Perception and Reference without Causality’, Journal of Philosophy., 74 (Oct. 1977) . Kim claims that you cannot refer or point to a thing and not have the sort of direct cognitive contact with it that gives knowledge of what that referent is; as I have argued, this seems just false. He also recommends, in an effort to unify perception and reference, that perception be analysed in terms of the perceiver's ability to refer to the object he perceives: this suggestion appears immediately refuted by the observation that non-linguistic creatures can perceive.

295

It is interesting to contrast Russell and Peirce here. Russell favours an acquaintance theory of demonstrative reference because he takes it that the function of demonstratives is to express the speaker's demonstrative thoughts—he never mentions their communicative role. Peirce, on the other hand, takes the function of the demonstrative to be that of calling the hearer. 's attention to something in his immediate environment. Thus Peirce's theory alludes essentially to publicly accessible facts about the speaker—his bodily orientation, etc. Basically, I think Russell is interested in the nature of demonstrative thought. whereas Peirce is clear that his topic is speech. . Wittgenstein is closer to Peirce in this respect; ostensive definitions are performed for the benefit of the hearer.

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required in order fully to understand. a demonstrative utterance, but it is incidental to the utterance having the referential truth conditions it has. That semantical reference differs fundamentally from psychological intentionality might be predicted from the fact that speech is a rule-governed form of intentional action whereas thinking (like perceiving) is not. Consider, as an analogy, the economic relation of buying.: what is the mechanism whereby an agent buys an object? At first sight one might be tempted to suggest a causal-genetic theory, perhaps because of a supposed connection between buying an object and having de re. knowledge of it. But brief reflection shows that the suggestion is wrong: you can certainly buy objects you have never perceived nor had any other causal contact with (you might buy the shortest spy). Perception is, indeed, generally what guides. us in performing acts of buying, but it is not a conceptually necessary condition of it and is clearly no part of the mechanism of that economic relation. An account of the buying relation would involve a characterization of the conventions of money and exchange which govern economic actions; and, as with reference, what underlying relations constitute the mechanism of buying will, in virtue of the conventional nature of the action, admit of variation from economic system to economic system. Somewhat similarly, I think that reference is basically a matter of a kind of action performed in accordance with conventional rules to fulfil a specific end; it is best conceived as a relation to objects speakers get into by acting in a certain context, not a state they come to be in as a result of the impingement of energy (as perception is). In this respect speaking differs from thinking; thinking is not a kind of action governed by conventional rules.296 So it would be wrong to analyse thought in terms of speech, and also wrong to expect a full account of speech from considerations about thought: thinking and speaking are different kinds. of capacity. Not all reference by means of demonstratives is intended deictically; demonstratives sometimes function anaphorically. The idea of an ‘anaphoric chain’ is useful here: an anaphoric chain is a sequence of singular terms, occurring in speech or writing, which is initiated by a term referring non-anaphorically, and is such that the reference of later terms in the sequence depends upon that of earlier terms, ultimately upon the reference of the initiating term.297 We can now ask: what is the nature of the links which hold an anaphoric chain together—what are the rules for finding the referent of an anaphoric singular term? Clearly part of the answer will advert to syntactical considerations; but equally clearly we need some sort of rule to select which

296

The case of ‘I’ illustrates this point. Learning the use of the first-person pronoun clearly requires mastering conventions; but coming to have self-conscious thoughts cannot plausibly be said to require understanding of the word ‘I’. So indexical thoughts seem quite different in nature from indexical language.

297

See C. Chastain, ‘Reference and Context’, in K. Gunderson (ed.), Language, Mind and Knowledge. (University of Minnesota Press, 1975) for an exposition of this important notion.

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prior utterance is the one with respect to which the syntactic rules are to be applied. And here some will be tempted to suggest a causal-genetic theory: the rule for anaphora is to find the utterance that prompted. the utterance containing the term to be evaluated. This seems a natural enough suggestion when we think about the course of a conversation between two people: one may refer to an object deictically and the other, hearing his interlocutor's utterance, intend to use a demonstrative anaphorically with respect to the term he hears uttered; as with deictic demonstratives perception seems. to play a critical role. But, as with the deictic case, I think a causal theory of the anaphoric links mistakes the incidental for the essential. The essential rule for anaphora is contextual: go to the immediately preceding. utterance (this is especially clear for a written text, where the notion of precedence becomes spatial). Again, this is only an approximation to something for more complex; I intend it as an idealization. And again, different sorts of anaphoric rule might be stipulated to operate in logically possible languages. But it seems to me that the basic structure and mechanism of the anaphoric chain, as we find such chains, is spatio-temporal. To undermine the causal theory completely I would need, as before, a counter-example to the claim that causal prompting is even a necessary. condition for anaphora; such a counter-example will, perforce, have to be pretty recherché, since we do generally perceive the utterances to which our own are anaphorically chained. However, here is a possible case: suppose I believe on general grounds at t. that you will say at t. + 1 ‘that man is drunk’ at a party, and suppose I know that at t. + 1 my hearing will be blocked. Nevertheless I plan to say at t. + 2 ‘He will soon be thrown out’, intending my pronoun to be anaphorically linked to your demonstrative. It seems to me that I could succeed in this plan, even though my own utterance was not causally linked to the utterance to which it is referentially chained (certainly the other people at the party will take my pronoun to be so chained). The reason I could succeed is that the rule is to select the immediately preceding utterance; what leads us wrong theoretically is just that, as with deictic reference to objects around one, the speaker typically does perceive the items to which he is thus spatio-temporally related. Nor is it surprising that anaphoric reference should obey the same principles as deictic reference if, as some linguists argue, anaphora is a special case of deixis.298

III There is a striking structural similarity between the functioning of names in a natural language and familiar kinds of anaphoric chain. Just as elements of an anaphoric chain rely ultimately for their reference upon an initiating element

298

See John Lyons, Semantics., 2 (Cambridge University Press, 1977) , sect. 15.3 for a discussion of this; Lyons invokes a notion of ‘textual location’ in the explanation of anaphora.

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whose reference is independently set up, so proper names get transmitted from speaker to speaker in such a way that later uses are referentially dependent upon earlier uses—and ultimately upon some term which is not so dependent. In both cases we have an initial singular term to which other terms, or uses of terms, are linked according to certain kinds of contextual principle. (A lot of reference takes place parasitically.) Viewed in this light, the causal-historical account of name reference can be conceived as a kind of extended anaphora, and so may be expected to operate by the same general sorts of principle.299 There are two points, therefore, at which we need to inquire into the referential functioning of names: the point at which they are linked to objects. in the world, and the point at which distinct uses. of a given name are linked to one another. And clearly it would be prima facie consistent to hold a causal theory of one sort of link and a non-causal theory of the other sort.300 As already indicated, I am doubtful that it is right to hold a causal theory of the mechanism of anaphoric linkage: what is essential to the transmission of names is just that the speaker intend his use of the name to co-refer with uses in the preceding or contiguous linguistic context; it is not essential that his use be causally prompted. by earlier uses.301 But I am more interested in how a name is originally tied to its bearer: does there need to be a causal connection between the object and the name in order that the name be a name of the object? Let me first remark that there is a certain tension between the motivation commonly offered in favour of a causal conception of the name–bearer relation and the fact that name reference can occur parasitically. We are sometimes directed to consider the role of perception in bestowing names, as if perception were a constitutive condition of name reference: names are viewed as the characteristic means of linguistic expression for singular beliefs, and such beliefs seem to require perceptual contact. But if naming were thus tied to perception it should not have the other property it has, namely that name reference can be passed from speaker to speaker. For one can be in a relation of naming to an object in virtue of one's social connection with another speaker,

299

Indeed, if we see the causal-historical account of names as a special case of the social character of language, we might come to view the phenomenon of the division of linguistic labour, remarked by H. Putnam in ‘The Meaning of “Meaning’ ”, in Mind, Language and Reality. (Cambridge University Press, 1975) , as continuous with what has traditionally been regarded as anaphora: the whole of language could be viewed as ‘surrounding text’.

300

Kripke, in ‘Naming and Necessity’, does not seem entirely clear about where he intends his ‘causal’ picture to apply. Sometimes he speaks of the causal chain as reaching back to the referent; but then he also allows that names can be introduced, and passed on, when the referent features only in absentia. : see p. 301.

301

It seems to me that Kripke's formulation of the mechanism of inter-speaker linkage for names conflates two rather different ideas: one idea is that what is essential is that one speaker should intend to use the name with the same reference as another speaker uses that name; the other idea is that names are passed. from speaker to speaker. It seems to me that the former idea is the crucial one, but that is only the latter that manifestly introduces causal notions into the mechanism of linkage: see p. 302, ‘Naming and Necessity’.

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but one cannot in this parasitic way get into the relation of perceiving: each man has to do that for himself. To perceive an object you have to be causally connected in a certain way to it.; it is not enough that you be causally linked to someone else's. perceptual experience which is so connected to the object. This is one more piece of evidence that reference is just not the same kind. of relation as perception. (Thoughts provide an interesting intermediate case. It does not seem so obviously. wrong to suppose that singular thoughts can be transferred from person to person, for example by one person reporting his perceptual beliefs to another; but then neither does it seem clearly right. to allow that thoughts can be had thus parasitically. I would like to explain such hesitation as we have about this question by locating thoughts midway between perception and speech: thoughts are typically caused by episodes of perception and they typically cause episodes of speech; we thus tend to conceive of thoughts now on the model of perception, and now on the model of utterance. In so far as thoughts approximate to perceptual states we take them to be nontransferable; in so far as they approximate to utterances we feel disposed to grant them transferable content.)302 The account of name reference I would propose follows from two principles about names which seem to me true: (i) Naming is an essentially derivative or secondary mode of reference. (ii) You can introduce a name for any object you can otherwise refer to. By (i) I mean to assert that a name cannot be an initial element in a chain of linked referential devices; a name can be introduced into a language only via some other kind of singular term. I say this because a name is simply a tag or label for something already identified. You cannot give an object a name just by reciting the name in the presence of the object; it won't stick. The reference of the name has to be fixed by way of some term that picks the referent out nonderivatively. This is why the reference of a name always needs to be explained; we have at some point to be able to say which. thing the name stands for.303 (I think it is this sense that a name must always be in some way definable that is one of the deeper sources of description theories of names.) Names climb into language on the back of other, primary, modes of reference. Once this point is appreciated it begins to look misguided to start. one's inquiry into how language relates to the world by considering names, as if they furnished the most direct and immediate mode of word–world connection; on the contrary, an account of name reference should fall out of an account of the primary modes of reference,

302

I discuss the intermediate status of thoughts further in ‘The Structure of Content’ (1981: repr. as ch. 6 in this volume); the present paper is meant to complement that one.

303

Cf. Wittgenstein: ‘it is precisely characteristic of a name that it is defined by means of the demonstrative expression “That is N. ” (or “That is called ‘N. ’”)’. Philosophical Investigations. , § 38. And: “ ‘I” is not the name of a person, nor “here” of a place, and “this” is not a name. But they are connected with names. Names are explained by means of them’: ibid. § 410.

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plus the principles of (quasi-) anaphoric linkage between names and their referential carriers. And the primary referential devices are, pretty plainly, indexicals and definite descriptions. In practice the latter will typically embed indexicals and further names, but there is no reason why a purely general description should not serve to introduce a name. When a name is introduced it is linked to one of these primary devices and thus acquires a referent. To explain how a name relates to its bearer, therefore, we need only take over a prior account of the primary referential devices. This does not yet entail. a non-causal theory of name reference, however, because we have not, by (i) alone, excluded the possibility that only a proper subset of primary referrers—those accompanied by causal contact—should be capable of introducing authentic names. That consequence is secured by principle (ii): the thought behind it is that a name is just a non-descriptive label you can stick on anything to which you have a prior means of referring.304 (If this seems to demythologize names, then so much the better.) I should emphasize that I do not wish to deny that how a name is introduced can affect its meaning, that is, the conditions for understanding. the name in question. I am making the semantical point that manner of introduction does not affect the status of a name as a semantically simple expression making a characteristic contribution to truth conditions. In fact it seems to me clear that whether a name is introduced indexically or descriptively does bear upon the conditions for understanding it, at least at its inception. But I would insist that we have a full account of the mechanism of name reference once we have explained reference for indexicals and descriptions, and spelt out the principles of inter-linguistic linkage; and, as we have seen, these do not require a causal-genetic theory. Again, this is not yet to say anything about what sorts of thoughts are expressed by using names. When a name is linked to a demonstrative whose referent has not been perceptually present to the user of the name it seems to me implausible to hold that the user has a thought attributable by employing that name—for the name is semantically anchored to a device that does not itself sustain the attribution of a singular (demonstrative) thought: the introduction of the name does not make available any singular thoughts not antecedently possessed. I would also allow that the introducer of the name does not properly or completely understand. the name so introduced; for he does not properly or completely understand the demonstrative which introduces it. On the other hand, names introduced by demonstratives with. perceptual presentation of the referent do serve to express singular thoughts and are properly

304

It is sometimes felt that this would license the introduction of names for future existents (e.g. by way of ‘the first child to be born in the 21st century’), and that it is dubious that determinate reference can be so conferred upon a name. I think that such intuitions derive, not from any defectiveness in the manner of introduction of such names, but from doubts about the determinateness and reality of future individuals—in which case it cannot be said that we do. have a prior means of referring. Compare this with the case of descriptively introduced names for past. individuals.

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and completely understood. Similarly for descriptively introduced names: since the description can itself be understood without perceptual contact with what satisfies it, so can the name it introduces; and the name can be used to express the same thoughts as the antecedent description, viz. general ones. But despite these differences all qualify as names on which reference has been conferred. A theory of singular reference for a natural language will, then, be a twotiered theory. At the lower tier we have the primary modes of reference, chiefly indexicals, but also general definite descriptions, to be accounted for in the ways already outlined. Built upon that tier we have the names: their rules of reference recapitulate those for the basic referential devices plus the principles of linkage. The work of hooking language to the world is carried out wholly at the first tier. Accordingly, the project of assigning reference to a speaker's words should respect the two-tiered structure into which his referential devices fit, and reflect the mechanisms that operate at each tier to determine what is referred to. I have suggested that, the mechanisms of reference being what they are, we should look, not to the causal or to the fitting relations a speaker has with objects in his environment, but to the spatio-temporal relations he enjoys—combining these with the linguistic meaning of the term will yield the speaker's semantic referent. If a term belongs to the secondary tier, then we proceed by ascertaining the links with other expressions used by the speaker or by those in his linguistic community.305

IV An account of the nature of reference may be expected to have implications for certain issues in which the notion of reference importantly figures; the account may also be evaluated in the light of those issues. In this final section I shall accordingly make some brief remarks about a number of issues to which the contextual theory is relevant; in this way the plausibility of the theory may be tested. (i) Abstract referents.. Causal inertness is generally supposed to constitute a criterion for being an abstract entity. According to a causal theory of reference,

305

Note that I have not claimed, in the style of Tyler Burge's ‘Reference and Proper Names’, Journal of Philosophy., 70 (Aug. 1973) , that proper names are. indexical; I have claimed only that indexicals characteristically fix the reference of names. It might be thought that my conclusions about name reference could be quickly reached by combining Burge's theory of names with my non-causal theory of demonstratives. That would be a non sequitur, however, because it is a necessary condition of the truth of ‘That N. is F. ’ where ‘N’. is a name, that the object demonstrated should be called. ‘N. ’, i.e. that it be so baptized; and for all that has been said such bestowing of names might be claimed to require causal contact. In other words, Burge's theory could be combined with a non-causal theory of demonstratives. , yet secure a causal theory of names. by insisting upon a causal condition for the satisfaction of the name predicate. . (In effect, I have denied any such causal condition for introducing name predicates.)

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therefore, reference to the abstract is impossible.306 I think this is a virtue. of the causal theory: it is indeed problematic how our use of numerals (say) could relate to mathematical entities subsisting in the abstract Platonic heaven. The question for me, then, is whether the contextual theory preserves this virtue. We should distinguish two sorts of case: the abstract entities that are said to exist outside space and time, and the ones that exist within space and time. Platonists take numbers to belong to the first group, and geometrical figures in physical space seem to belong to the second.307 Now the causal theory seems not to distinguish between these two kinds of abstract entity in point of their referentially problematic status, since neither appears susceptible to a causal-genetic theory. This seems to me undesirable: for the unlocated entities seem metaphysically and referentially far more problematic than the located ones. The spatio-temporal theory predicts as much: we can. demonstratively refer to the triangle subtending three corners of a room by means of a sweeping or tracing gesture accompanying an utterance of ‘that triangle’, because the spatio-temporal rules of reference are easily extended to such cases; but for entities alleged to exist outside space and time no such reference is possible. So the contextual theory preserves the virtue of rendering Platonic entities referentially problematic, while improving on the causal theory in respect of causally inert entities that take up spacetime. (ii) Self-reference.. A thoroughgoing causal theory encounters a problem in cases of self-reference, as in ‘this sentence is false’ or ‘the first two words of this inscription have eight letters’; the problem is that these seem to require selfcausation.308 More precisely, utterances or inscriptions containing singular terms referring to the utterance or inscription of which they are constituents seem to compel a causal theorist to claim that there can be causal paths leading from an object or event to objects or events comprising proper parts (in the mereological sense) of those objects or events. But, as we know, an effect must be a (mereologically) distinct existence from its cause; so part of an event cannot be an effect of the event of which it is a part. A spatio-temporal theory has no such problem, for there is no conceptual difficulty in there being spatio-temporal relations between entities and their proper parts; this is just the relation of spatial or temporal containment.. So in cases of self-reference the rule is to take the utterance or inscription in which the referring term is temporally or spatially contained—it is not, and cannot be, to take the entity which causally produces the occurrence of the term in question.

306

Cf. P. Benacerraf, ‘Mathematical Truth’, Journal of Philosophy., 70 (Nov. 1973) .

307

Some would dispute that such geometrical entities are really abstract: Hartry Field takes such entities to be nominalistically acceptable, in Science Without Numbers. (Basil Blackwell, 1980) . However, with respect to the present issue the propriety of ‘abstract’ here is largely a verbal question; what matters is just causal inertness (no energy is emitted by such geometrical figures).

308

This puzzle was pointed out by W. D. Hart, in ‘Causation and Self-Reference’, Proceedings of the Keele Conference on Logic and Language., ed. J. Dancy (1979) .

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(iii) Referential and attributive.. Whatever one might think of the theoretical status of the distinction Donnellan drew between two uses or functions of definite descriptions—whether, that is, it is a semantic or a pragmatic distinction—it seems undeniable that he hit upon a genuine and significant difference in the way definite descriptions may occur in speech.309 Basically, the difference comes down to two ways in which a speaker may intend his description to be taken: either as picking out whatever. happens to fit the description, or as a device for identifying a particular. individual about which the speaker wishes to say something. Preliminary reflection on the kinds of case Donnellan presents can suggest an interpretation of the intuitive distinction favourable to a causal-genetic theory of reference. For it seems very natural to suggest that in the referential case the speaker has a specific individual in mind, typically presented to him (and his hearer) perceptually, and he intends to make a remark about this. individual; whereas in the attributive case the speaker has no specific individual in mind, and so does not call upon his own perceptual state (or that of his hearer) in the interpretation of his description. More brutally, the referential use exploits causal connections with the referent, while the attributive use does not. It may thus be thought a count in favour of a causal theory that it can draw the distinction in this neat way.310 I want to argue that Donnellan's distinction can apply in cases for which no such explanation is feasible, and that the contextual theory can make the distinction in such cases as well as in those in which there is causal contact. At one point Donnellan characterizes the two different ways of using ‘the man drinking Martini’ by saying that in the referential case the speaker intends to refer to ‘that man over there’, whereas in the attributive case the speaker intends to talk merely about some unique Martini-drinking man.311 The speaker's intentions in these two cases might be distinguished as follows: in the former case the speaker means his description to function as a demonstrative. expression, thus propounding a singular proposition about the demonstrated individual; in the latter case he means his description to be equivalent to a quantified. expression, and thus to propound a purely general proposition which the actual referent just happens to satisfy. We might disambiguate the speaker's utterance by ascertaining which type of expression he would substitute for his original definite description—demonstrative or quantified. Now, given that explication of the distinction, we should expect the referential use to have the properties of the associated demonstrative; and we have already seen that demonstratives do not essentially function in a causal-genetic way. Thus the

309

Donnellan, ‘Reference and Definite Descriptions’, Philosophical Review., 60 (July 1966) . Kripke contests the semantic significance of the distinction in ‘Speaker's Reference and Semantic Reference’, in Midwest Studies in Philosophy. , ii. Donnellan defends its semantic significance in ‘Speaker References, Descriptions and Anaphora’, in Syntax and Semantics., 9, ed. P. Cole (Academic Press, 1978) .

310

Devitt claims this in ‘Singular Terms’, sect. 5.

311

‘Reference and Definite Descriptions’, 290.

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speaker might gesture in the direction of someone with whom he has no causal-perceptual contact and say ‘the man drinking Martini is not to be trusted’ (perhaps on the basis of general beliefs about parties and Martini drinkers) intending the description to be equivalent to a suitable demonstrative term, and so using it referentially. This use would be quite different from that of a speaker who intended to get across to the hearer that someone. drinking Martini at the party is not to be trusted; in this case, but not in the other, the description could not be replaced with another and the speaker's intention be preserved. This diagnosis of the distinction is confirmed, and a point of Donnellan's explained, by noting a special feature of demonstrative reference. In demonstrative reference there are two elements that go together to determine the referent—the expression uttered and the paralinguistic gesture that accompanies it. Because the two elements are independent of each other it is possible for there to be a clash between them, as when you point to a chauffeur and say ‘that diplomat looks shifty’. In such a case one is half-inclined to allow that genuine reference has occurred, since the gestural element came off satisfactorily. But with purely general quantified conditions, where no gesture is implicated, the expressions themselves must do all the referential work; and so if nothing fits the description we have no inclination to allow that reference has occurred. Donnellan claimed that in a referential use in which the description fails to be satisfied by the intended referent we do not suppose that nothing has been said of. that object, as we do when an attributive use fails to be satisfied. This intuitive difference may now be explained by claiming that the referential use is equivalent to a sortally qualified demonstrative, and demonstratives operate by means of two elements one. of which is doing its job successfully; crudely, you can afford to misdescribe something if you are pointing right at it. What is essential to the referential use, then, is a reliance on the (spatio-temporal) context. This way of looking at the referential use also suggests that the distinction is more semantic than some have alleged; for the performance of a pointing gesture in a spatio-temporal context qualifies as a convention of language, and it is the operation of this which is definitive of the distinction.312 (iv) Language of thought.. According to the language of thought hypothesis, the internal representations involved in thinking are linguistic items: to have a thought is to be in a certain relation to an internal sentence endowed with referential truth conditions.313 So, for example, if I think that that pen is black, it is in virtue of the occurrence in my head of an indexical sentence token which has the same semantic content as the sentence ascribing that thought to me. Now one way of assessing the language of thought hypothesis is to ask whether

312

That is, in order for the hearer to determine what the speaker meant in using a definite description he will appeal to the presence or absence of a paralinguistic gesture, and this is to invoke essentially semantic (i.e. part of the linguistic rules) information to resolve the question.

313

See J. Fodor, The Language of Thought. (New York: Crowell, 1975) , and Field, ‘Mental Representation’.

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the conditions under which thinking of objects takes place match the conditions under which speaking of objects takes place; that is, to ask whether the intentionality of thoughts in a mind parallels the reference of terms in a language. I have already remarked that is seems implausible to suppose that learning to think involves acquiring and deploying mastery of a set of conventional rules, as learning to speak does; but now I want to make a different point, though one that has been anticipated. If I am right about the mechanism of reference, then it ought to be possible, on the language of thought hypothesis, to have demonstrative thoughts under the same conditions as secure demonstrative reference: all that is required is that the internal demonstrative sentence be contextually related in the right way to the object in question. But that means that I could think that that pen is black without having perceived or had any other causal contact with that pen; and this is very implausible. As urged earlier, the mechanisms of de re. thought and of semantical reference are very different. (The irrelevance of the gesture in having a determinate demonstrative thought may already have suggested as much.)314 Two responses might be made to this observation. One is to claim that the mechanism of reference in the inner language differs from that of the public language; the inner language obeys causal rules of reference. This response certainly seems ad hoc but is not easily refutable, especially in view of my earlier concession that there could. be a (public) language which operated by causal principles. The second response, which I favour, is to conclude that the content of demonstrative thoughts cannot be explained in terms of inner sentences; the representations involved in such thoughts are not strictly sentences. at all. This conclusion is encouraged by the intermediate status of thoughts vis-àvis perception and speech, remarked earlier: the reason we insist upon a causal condition of de re. thought is that we recognize the affinity of thought with perception—and perception is indisputably causal. In other words, demonstrative thoughts involve perceptual representations, and these are certainly not linguistic. (This also explains our willingness to ascribe demonstrative thoughts to speechless creatures.) I think, therefore, that the conception of reference I have defended ought to cast doubt upon the idea that thought can be explained as the internal recitation of sentences. (v) Reference and truth.. In what way should an account of the reference of singular terms connect with the truth conditions of sentences? It has seemed to some that there is a dilemma here: either we explicate reference in such a way that the semantic role of singular terms comes apart from their distinctive function in the formation of sentences, or we make reference totally dependent upon sentential role.315 Neither option seems to me attractive: the nonlinguistic

314

Wittgenstein, e.g. at Philosophical Investigations. , §§ 669–73, contrasts attending and pointing: attending cannot be construed as a kind of inner demonstrative pointing.

315

Davidson confronts us with this dilemma in ‘Reality Without Reference’, Dialectica., 31 (1977) .

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explication would seem to permit mastery of the reference relation by someone who failed to appreciate that the sounds and marks constituting one of the relata are words of a language making a characteristic contribution to the truth conditions of sentences; but the attempt to explicate reference wholly in terms of truth makes reference into a mere abstraction. from sentences, and then it is hard to see how we could properly explain. the truth conditions of sentences by way of the reference of their parts. These two unsatisfactory approaches to reference seem exemplified by the causal theory and the description theory, at least in their most ambitious versions. The causal theory treats reference as not essentially a linguistic matter; it is assimilated to other sorts of relation, notably perception—and so the bearing of reference upon the truth of sentences is not registered in the theory itself. On the other hand, a theory of reference couched in terms of the pattern of truth values of utterances (sentences held true) fails altogether to get outside the circle of semantic notions, and makes reference into a logical construction from truth the significance of which is entirely instrumental.316 What is wanted, to avoid the dilemma, is some account of reference which invokes relations not definable in terms of truth but is such as to incorporate a constitutive connection between reference and sentential role. The account of reference I have presented seems to me to combine these two features: the underlying relations invoked, sc. spatio-temporal relations, are certainly not definable in terms of truth—this the contextual theory has in common with the causal theory—but these relations are essentially coupled with the conventional linguistic meaning of the indexical. In order to work out a speaker's reference one needs to bring to bear two sorts of information: information about his spatio-temporal context and information about the linguistic meaning of the expression in question. The joint operation of these two factors allows us to view reference as autonomous with respect to truth but at the same time to reveal the referring term as a word with a specific meaning and sentential role. Demonstratives provide a clear case: demonstrative reference is partly effected by means of a spatio-temporal gesture, but there is no appreciating the significance of such a gesture independently of mastery of a language and hence of the concept of truth.317 The contextual theory does not therefore carry us right outside of the sphere of the linguistic, but it does not collapse reference into a mere projection from sentences either. (Parallel remarks can be made about the rules of reference for

316

This is roughly Davidson's position. See also J. Wallace, ‘Only in The Context of a Sentence do Words have any Meaning’, in Midwest Studies in Philosophy. , ii. I think it is possible to acknowledge the constitutive connection between singular reference and sentential role while denying the instrumentalist thesis that the whole content of the notion of reference is exhausted by the contribution of singular terms to truth conditions. An analogy: the concept of intention is constitutively linked to behaviour, but one cannot define. the notion of intention behaviouristically. The mistake is to pass from the admission that a concept is dispositional to the claim that the concept can be wholly analysed in terms of the manifestations of the disposition.

317

Cf. the opening sections of Philosophical Investigations. , esp. § 6.

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proper names.) We are thus able to steer between the horns of the dilemma with which we were presented. (vi) Reducibility of reference.. Some philosophers have felt attracted to the causal theory of reference, not so much on account of its proven ability to handle the linguistic phenomena, but from more metaphysical motives: it seems to offer hope of naturalizing reference—or of bringing semantic relations within the scope of a physicalist view of the world.318 I share such motives to this extent, that it would be unsatisfactory simply to take reference as primitive and inexplicable: one has a duty to seek the underlying non-semantic relations upon which reference depends. The account I have proposed answers to these motives; it suggests spatio-temporal relations as what realize reference. These are clearly part of the ‘natural order’ and constitute ‘real connections’ between entities (though we should divest the notion of ‘connection’ of any hint of interaction., this being a causal notion). Indeed, my account is consistent with a physicalist view of the reference relation: spatio-temporal relations are the stuff of physics.319 (Of course, a thoroughly physicalist account would also have to address itself to the linguistic meaning of indexicals; but it is the relational aspect of the mechanism of reference that has seemed most in need of physical account, and this seems taken care of by the contextual theory.) It should be observed that the underlying relations I have discerned, upon which the relation of reference is conventionally superimposed, belong to the nominal. essence of the concept of reference; they do not constitute an empirically discovered real. essence for reference. That reference (in our language) involves spatiotemporal relations does not have the epistemic status of (say) ‘water is H2O’; since the spatio-temporal rules of reference are comprised in a speaker's mastery. of the notion of reference, they approximate rather to such a priori philosophical claims as that knowledge is true justified belief. This is not surprising if the rules of reference have the status of conventional stipulations.320 I have not wished to claim that reference is strictly reducible. to some other kind of relation; I have merely identified the kind. of relation by which reference is realized. A strict reduction would require a biconditional, linking semantic and non-semantic concepts, which respected certain conditions of formal and material adequacy into which we need not enter here.321 The status of my account can be brought out by recalling Hartry Field's criticism of Tarski.322 Field objects that Tarski purported to give a definition. of semantic concepts such as reference meeting physicalist standards and offered (in effect) merely a

318

See Field, ‘Tarski's Theory of Truth’, Journal of Philosophy., 69 (July 1972) .

319

At one point, ibid. 364, Field seems to suggest that only. a causal theory of reference could vindicate both physicalism and the reality of the reference relation—perhaps because he wants an account of reference to be totally non-linguistic (no appeal to conventional linguistic rules, etc.).

320

Cf. my ‘Philosophical Materialism’, Synthese., 44 (June 1980) , esp. sect. v, where I defend a physicalism about reference commensurate with the account of reference developed here.

321

See Field's ‘Conventionalism and Instrumentalism in Semantics’, Nous., 9 (1975) , esp. sect. ii, and ‘Tarski's Theory of Truth’.

322

‘Tarski's Theory of Truth’.

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list. of the ordered pairs of term and referent that make up the extension of ‘refers’.323 This, Field rightly insists, is a pseudo-reduction, as is shown by its inextensibility to new cases. What is needed, for a genuine reduction, is a specification of the non-semantic relations in virtue of which the reference relation holds. My own account seems to fall halfway between what Tarski offered and what Field requires. On the one hand, the contextual theory takes the form of a list: we list the various kinds of indexical and other singular terms in the language and for each of them specify the reference rule that governs its functioning. The list seems irremediably open-ended, since new referential devices could be introduced into the language; and no higher order condition constraining which. spatio-temporal relations can underlie reference has been suggested—in contrast, say, to what a functionalist conception of reference aspires to.324 When we add that other types. of relation could. underlie reference in other languages it becomes clear that the contextual account is incurably unsystematic and heterogeneous. On the other hand, the list does not share the triviality of Tarski's list, since the specified conditions of reference do contain relational concepts and the conditions generalize to new token. expressions; something is certainly being said about the kind of relation upon which reference depends. So it seems to me that my account does not measure up to the standards of genuine reduction, and yet it is not trivial in the way Field proscribes. This, in my view, is as it should be: reference is not reducible or eliminable, but it is not entirely inexplicable either—what I have offered is, as one says, a ‘picture’. In fact, given my general conception of the nature of a theory of reference, it is surely misguided to seek an empirical reduction of reference, in view of the conventional character of the relation; for we could always falsify any ostensibly reductive biconditional by simply stipulating. a new rule of reference—as we cannot with non-conventional relations such as perception. Reference is of the nature of an artefact; its irreducibility might be said to derive from its dependence upon the ways of human creativity.

Postscript to ‘The Mechanism of Reference’ The importance of indexicality to our general understanding of language began to be appreciated during the 1970s, largely as a result of work done by David

323

More accurately, Tarski inductively defined truth by way (inter alia. ) of a prior inductive definition of primitive denotation taking the form of a finite conjunction of disquotational axioms dealing with one primitive expression at a time.

324

Thus, in ‘Conventionalism and Instrumentalism in Semantics’, 289, Field in effect suggests that the first-order physical properties that realize reference be non-trivially grouped together by means of a functional theory of reference: a physical relation will realize reference if and only if it has the functional role that reference has. For various reasons I doubt the availability and significance of functionalist definitions: some of these reasons are set out in my ‘Functionalism and Phenomenalism: a Critical Note’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy., 58 (Mar 1980) .

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Kaplan. The emphasis in the theory of reference accordingly shifted from proper names to indexicals (it has yet to shift to a still more central area: predicate reference to properties). My paper in effect charts the fate of the causal theory of reference once the focus shifts from names to indexicals—where it comes to seem not the right approach at all. The idea of linguistic reference as a conventional activity governed by rules that prescribe spatio-temporal conditions of correct use is far more apt than the idea of an occasion of indexical reference as the end-point of a causal chain initiated by some worldly object. The rule for ‘here’, for example, consists in requiring this word to be used for the place broadly co-spatial with the speaker (or his body); it is not that a token of this word is elicited by the causal action of that place on the speaker's vocal apparatus. We often are in causal contact with our objects of reference, but the reference relation itself is not constituted by such contact; and sometimes there is no possibility of causal interaction, as with uses of ‘now’ (the present time hardly causes a token of ‘now’ to pop out of my mouth). As I remark in the paper, there seems no incoherence in the idea that Occasionalism is true of the relation between our linguistic acts and the world around us and yet we succeed in making indexical and demonstrative reference to those objects. If we were to discover that we have always been causally cut off from our environment, with God ensuring the right match between the world and our talk about it, we would not then conclude that no indexical and demonstrative reference had ever been effected. When I point at my cat and say ‘that cat is furry’ my reference depends upon the cat's existence and proximity to me (roughly speaking); whether the cat is causally operating on my vocal apparatus is incidental—and God might have chosen to ban all causal contact between cats and humans. Thus you can refer to what you might not be able to enter into causal relations with. This paper marks a departure from the received causal theory of linguistic reference I tended to assume in earlier papers. There I had a tendency to suppose that any non-descriptive contextually based theory of reference would have to be a causal theory; I had not yet thought of exploiting spatio-temporal relations between speaker and referent. The theory I suggest in this paper is thus a significant move away from classic causal theories of reference, as well as descriptive theories. It is quite a radical move, too, and one that is not much contemplated even today. I suspect that philosophers have become so wedded to the descriptive/causal dichotomy that the reorientation I propose in this paper is not readily digested. I would say that the arguments of this paper are to the causal theory of reference what earlier criticisms of the description theory were to that theory—signs of fundamental problems with the theory in question. There are clear counter-examples to the causal theory of reference, and the general ‘picture’ of reference it offers seems quite inadequate to phenomena pictured. Perhaps reprinting the paper here will encourage philosophers of language to engage with the position I defend.

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Part III Reality and Appearance

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11 Truth and Use

325

According to Michael Dummett, a truth-conditions theory of sense for a class of sentences is equivalent to realism in respect of their subject matter.326 Realism is the thesis that truth (falsity) is an epistemically unconstrained property of a sentence; there is nothing in the concept of truth (falsity) to exclude the possibility that a sentence be unknowably true (false). This property of truth reflects the realist conviction, embodied in our customary linguistic practices, that the world, or a given sector of it, is determinately constituted, quite independently of any limitations on our capacity to come to know truths concerning it. Since, for the realist, truth value may thus transcend our power to determine truth value, as the world may transcend our power to discover its constitution, the principle of bivalence is regarded as generally assertible, whether or not we are equipped to determine, even in principle, what. truth value a sentence has. If it could be shown that there is some intrinsic difficulty in such a radically non-epistemic notion of truth, then realism, as a piece of common-sense metaphysics, would be undermined: the world, or some sector of it, could no longer be conceived in a realist way, as independent of our knowledge-acquiring capacities, but must rather be seen as somehow constituted or constrained by our cognitive activities, after the pattern, perhaps, of the intuitionists' conception of mathematical reality.327 Now Dummett claims to have an argument showing that there is indeed an intrinsic

325

The first draft of this paper was written in the spring of 1976; since then I have had the benefit of reading other people's work on the subject and the comments of several friends.

326

Writings of Dummett relevant to this topic include: ‘Truth’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. , 59 (1958–9); ‘The Reality of the Past’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. , 69 (1968–9); Frege: Philosophy of Language. (London: Duckworth, 1973); ‘What is a Theory of Meaning?’, in S. Guttenplan (ed.), Mind and Language. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975) ; ‘The Philosophical Basis of Intuitionistic Logic’, in Logic Colloquium 1973., ed. H. E. Rose and J. C. Shepherdson (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1975) ; ‘What is a Theory of Meaning? (ii)’, in G. Evans and J. H. McDowell (eds.), Truth and Meaning. (Oxford University Press, 1976) ; Elements of Intuitionism. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977). See also Crispin Wright's ‘Truth Conditions and Criteria’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society., suppl. vol. 50 (1976) .

327

Cf. the final pages of Dummett, ‘Truth’.

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difficulty in the idea of conditions for truth being possibly knowledge- transcendent.328 The argument issues from an alleged failure of such a notion of truth conditions to meet certain requirements, compulsory on any putative central semantic concept, deriving from the general theory of meaning. If Dummett's argument were sound, we should be compelled to repudiate realism with respect to any class of sentences, or sector of reality, for which those general requirements on the notion of truth, construed as the central concept of a theory of meaning, could not be met. My main purpose in this paper is to avert such wholesale metaphysical revision by contending, against Dummett, that the requirements in question can be satisfied, though not in quite the way he envisages. Imagine that we have a materially adequate formal theory of truth, in the style of Tarski, for a given natural language L; that is, a finitely axiomatized theory entailing an infinity of theorems of the familiar disquotational form ‘s. is true iff p.’. If that theory is to serve as a theory of meaning for L, and if speakers are acknowledged to know what sentences of L mean, then there must be a sense in which the theory states, or serves to state, what speakers of L know in knowing what sentences of L mean. Since the theorems of the theory purport to state, or to be usable to state, what sentences of L mean, we must say that they state what speakers of L, qua speakers, know. In short, a semantic theory is a description of linguistic knowledge, or it is nothing. Now the complex state of implicit propositional knowledge thus described must relate suitably to the capacity, possessed by any speaker of L, to employ. the language, to engage in those linguistic activities that comprise operating with a language. That is, it must be possible, if the theory is to be acceptable, to connect the propositional knowledge ascribed by the theory to what it is that a speaker is empowered to do. with language by dint of knowing what the theory (better, its theorems) states. We must, in other words, be able, as theorists, to relate the ascribed semantic knowledge to some specific practical capacity, or capacities, to use. the language. This demand that the connection between knowledge of truth conditions and linguistic use be articulated is warrantable in two ways. The demand can be justified by the general requirement that ascription of a propositional attitude, in this case an item of knowledge, to someone must be accompanied by some account of the difference possession of that state makes to the person's behavioural dispositions: we need to be told something about what would count as a manifestation of the disposition such a propositional attitude produces or consists in; and it is a reasonable expectation that specifically semantic knowledge will manifest itself in the use to which a speaker puts his language. But there is also a special, and more important, reason for insisting that the connection

328

See esp. Dummett, ‘What is a Theory of Meaning? (ii)’, ‘The Philosophical Basis of Intuitionistic Logic’, Elements of Intuitionism. , chs. 1 and 7, ‘The Reality of the Past’; also Wright's ‘Truth Conditions and Criteria’.

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be made out. In addition to the obvious fact that mastery of a language is essentially a practical capacity, it must be observed that language is precisely an instrument of communication.. Plainly, if language is to fulfil its communicative function, sense must be a publicly accessible commodity. But then semantic knowledge must, of necessity, be manifestable in, and recoverable from, observable features of linguistic use (I here telescope a familiar line of argument). If, therefore, the semantic knowledge attributed by a theory of meaning to a speaker were not such as to be relatable adequately to linguistic use, then that theory would be, ipso facto., unacceptable; it could not possibly serve as a theoretical representation of linguistic understanding. What Dummett claims is that a theory of meaning framed in terms of a realistic notion of truth precisely fails to forge the required connection. It is clear that we cannot, in general, equate knowledge of truth conditions with a capacity simply to state. those conditions. If the speaker used the same sentence to do this the account would be patently circular; and if he moved to a different part of the language to state a non-homophonic verbal equivalent, then the question would arise in what his knowledge of the truth conditions of that. sentence consists, with the attendant threat of a circle or a regress. Dummett now suggests that knowledge of truth conditions be identified, or correlated, with a certain sort of recognitional. capacity, viz. a capacity to recognize, or come to know, the truth value of sentences. Understanding a sentence thus consists in an ability to determine its truth value in some canonical way, and acquiring mastery of a language consists in acquiring such capacities with respect to its sentences. In fact, such a capacity is both executive and recognitional: it consists in a disposition, when prompted, to undertake a procedure which, in a finite time, terminates in a recognition, signalled by some overt gesture, that the sentence's truth condition is fulfilled or not fulfilled, as the case may be. It is because (actual) possession of such an effective decision procedure for truth value is a practical capacity that it provides the needed link between knowledge of sense and use. Trouble sets in, according to Dummett, when we inquire with what generality this account can be applied. For, if truth is a possibly recognition-transcendent property of a sentence, what can the realist offer about knowing the truth conditions of sentences whose truth value we are not. equipped to determine? Obviously, in the case of undecidable sentences, alleged grasp of transcendent truth-conditions cannot be associated with possession of an effective method for deciding truth value. We are thus left, for such sentences, with no account of how knowledge of their truth conditions may be manifested: lacking that, Dummett concludes, a realist theory cannot represent sense as determining, and determined by, use. But if truth and use fall thus apart the sense of a sentence cannot consist in its having truth conditions subject to bivalence. It follows that the semantic content of a sentence cannot represent conditions as they might obtain in some recognition- transcendent reality; and so realism is false. A theory of meaning cannot

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therefore be built around a transcendent central concept, because that involves violation of the requirement that meaning be manifestable in use. We must, accordingly, assign only such conditions to sentences as determining their sense as are comprehensible by our actual recognitional capacities—e.g. verification conditions—and face the antirealist consequences. The foregoing is, as I understand it, the essence of Dummett's argument against realism. Before mounting a case against it I shall make two observations, leading to a restatement of the argument. The first is that the argument as we have it seems implicitly to assume that recognitional capacities are constant across a given linguistic community. But it is evident that speakers of what appears a common language may, and certainly could, differ, more or less extremely, in their powers of truth-value recognition. Thus, for example, sentences concerning certain regions of space and time might be decidable for one speaker and undecidable for another, depending upon how well equipped they were to inspect the region in question. Two reactions to such a situation seem possible. On the one hand, we could elect to restrict the theory of meaning to subgroups of speakers (possibly onemembered) equivalent in their power to determine truth value, so that a realistic theory, committed to the assertion of bivalence, for the class of sentences in question would be applicable to the (sub-) language of some groups in the community and inapplicable to that of other groups. This seems an unattractive suggestion, for at least three reasons. First, it denies an evident publicity in the semantics of the language. Second, the act of assertion would have no uniform significance in the community, an assertion being interpretable as a claim to truth or to justification, according as the asserted sentence was or was not decidable by the speaker. Third, the variation across speakers in respect of their entitlement to assert bivalence for a class of sentences would seem to deprive Dummett of any chance to derive general metaphysical conclusions from the form taken by a proper theory of meaning. On the other hand, one might prefer to assimilate the case to the phenomenon, remarked by Putnam, of the division of linguistic labour.329 As speakers of a common language may diverge in their capacity to apply natural kind terms correctly, so we may envisage speakers differing in their ability to determine the truth value of other types of sentence. On such a view, it is not the individual speaker to whom we should look for a manifestation of his semantic knowledge; rather, we should require, for sense to be manifest, only that there should exist, within the community, some. speaker whose powers of recognition match the truth conditions of the sentences in question. A truth-conditions theory of sense for a language would, then, connect with use only for the community as a whole, the individual speaker relying upon the recognitional capacities of his co-speakers, and no variability of

329

See H. Putnam, ‘The Meaning of “Meaning’ ”, in Mind, Language and Reality, Philosophical Papers., vol. ii (Cambridge University Press, 1975).

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semantic properties need be acknowledged. However, though this appears the better line to take, it is less than fully satisfactory, since it involves crediting speakers with conceptions of states of affairs of a kind not available to them during the course of their linguistic training and not such as to be manifestable in their. actual linguistic practice; and this seems already to concede something to the realist. The second observation concerns what it is for a sentence's truth conditions to be recognition-transcendent. It is not, I think, necessary for transcendence of truth conditions that a sentence's truth value be undecidable; so an anti-realist critique might be in order for a class of sentences whose truth value could be effectively settled. The reason is that it seems possible for a class of sentences to admit only of indirect. verification, that is, via the (direct) verification of other sentences, not in the given class, and inference. For such a class, a speaker's knowledge of truth conditions does not correlate directly with some specific recognitional capacity. A direct method of determining truth value, as Dummett explains this notion, reflects the semantically significant syntactic structure of the sentence whose truth value is to be determined; and he requires, of the realist, not only that some decision procedure be available to the speaker, but further that the ascribed semantic knowledge be mappable on to a capacity to conduct a direct. decision procedure.330 Thus a direct verification of a quantified sentence would involve checking each element in the domain quantified over to determine whether it satisfies the appended predicate; an indirect method might be an induction, mathematical or empirical. It is open, then, that a class of sentences should be decidable indirectly but not directly; and for such a class a truth-conditions theory would, as before, traffic in conceptions that fail to correlate adequately with a manifesting recognitional capacity. Thus, suppose one's memory of a certain past interval of space-time were infallible and complete (or the gaps could be filled by inference): then any past-tense sentence concerning that interval would be decidable, but indirectly so. Or consider some fragment of number theory all of whose universally quantified sentences were decidable by mathematical induction, but none of them by direct inspection owing to the infinity of the domain. Or again, suppose there were a type of sentient creature whose mental states and events were invariably accompanied by some distinctive behavioural manifestation; although we could reliably determine the truth value of any mental attribution to that creature, the state of affairs in virtue of which such a sentence was true would, according to a realist view of other minds, be itself inaccessible to our powers of recognition.331 In each of these cases, it appears that the realist is unable to supply an

330

See Dummett, Frege: Philosophy of Language. , 236–9, 515, 634–6.

331

It might be maintained, plausibly, that ‘natural’ extensions of language fragments which exhibit transcendence without undecidability will introduce the latter property. Admitting this would not, however, spoil my point, so long as the speaker's competence is confined to the unextended decidable fragment.

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appropriate recognitional capacity and so, by Dummett's argument, cannot relate semantic knowledge to linguistic use. Let me now offer, by way of preparation for what is to come, the following gloss on Dummett's position. Think of the total theory of language mastery as a tripartite structure. It comprises (i) a theory of sense., (ii) a theory of force., and (iii) a theory of understanding.. The theory of sense consists of a recursive specification of truth conditions for the sentences of the object-language; it represents what it is a speaker knows in knowing the meaning of sentences. The theory of force embeds the propositions of the theory of sense in attributions, made upon the basis of linguistic behaviour, of specific contents to whole utterances; it identifies the kind of speech act being performed and, taking the theory of sense as input, assigns a propositional content to it. The theory of understanding has, in effect, the task of certifying the legitimacy of the theory of sense as input to the theory of force; it tells what knowledge of the theorems of the theory of sense consists in, that is, how that knowledge is manifested. This last component of the total theory is required, according to Dummett, because it is not enough that a theory of language mastery merely record what. a speaker knows—e.g. that ‘snow is white’ is true iff snow is white—there is the further obligation, reaching beyond mere description, to supply an explanation. of what possessing this knowledge consists in; or else, it is claimed, no adequate mesh with use is achieved. We might try to meet this obligation by associating with each theorem of the theory of sense some specific ‘sensori-motor routine’ (recognitional capacity).332 Such a sensori-motor routine could be represented as a finite sequence of instructions of the form ‘find an object satisfying such and such conditions, determine whether it is thus and so . . . ’. Each instruction (sub-routine) correlates with a semantic atom contained in the sentence, and the result of following each instruction, until the constituents of the sentence are exhausted, is a decision as to the truth or falsity of the sentence in question. We can think of such a complete routine for a whole sentence as constituting its direct method of verification.333 And now, in these terms, Dummett's objection to the realist may be stated as the observation that, in the case of undecidable sentences, there is, in a speaker's repertoire of routines, none that corresponds: so grasp of truth conditions does not always correlate with a practical capacity of such a sort. Examples in natural languages would be: quantification over infinite or unsurveyable domains, past-tense sentences, counterfactual conditionals, psychological sentences, reference to remote regions of space and time, and perhaps others. In each of these cases we appear to have to do with linguistic constructions whose sense, as the realist would claim, takes us (in

332

My use of this notion is not, of course, intended to suggest that the capacity in question is in some way non-conceptual, only that it typically involves perceptual processes and action.

333

Cf. J. Hintikka's game-theoretic interpretation of the procedures of seeking and finding that he associates with quantifiers; see ‘Language-Games for Quantifiers’ in Logic, Language-Games, and Information. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973).

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thought anyway) to sectors of reality inaccessible to our powers of observation and recognition: knowing the truth conditions of sentences of these kinds does not confer upon speakers a practical grasp of a canonically direct route to establishing their truth value. But then, Dummett insists, the realist cannot discharge his obligation to the theory of understanding. And this may incline us to opt for a verificationist theory of meaning, according to which knowledge of sentence sense just consists in a practical grasp of which states of information would warrant assertion of the sentence.334 At any rate, the negative point is that, lacking suitable sensori-motor routines for undecidable sentences, knowledge of truth conditions finds no acceptable counterpart in the speaker's dispositions to use the language. My strategy now is to describe a model case to which Dummett's argument should apply, if it applies at all. I consider and reject three ways a would-be realist might try to meet the argument in the model case, and then suggest and develop a fourth response to the anti-realist challenge. Suppose a community of speakers C using a language L. Members of C are like human beings in their observational powers, save that they are incapable of local motion; they remain fixed at a place, rooted like trees. Their habitat is the north side of a certain mountain, to which they enjoy sensory access; they are able, for example, visually to survey the north side by orienting their head. The south side of the mountain is, however, hidden from them and inaccessible to their sensory capacities. We can suppose there to be sheep that move freely from one side of the mountain to the other, and in whose doings members of C are especially interested. L has the following resources: proper names for sheep, predicates of sheep, the usual truth-functional connectives, quantifiers whose domain is the set of (local) sheep, and two sentence operators, N and S, with the senses respectively of ‘On the north side of the mountain it is the case that’ and ‘On the south side it is the case that’. Sentences of L are either quantified or of the form ‘NA’ or ‘SA’. According to these specifications of the recognitional powers of C and of the resources of L, L contains (with respect to C) an undecidable fragment: that comprising the quantified sentences and those of the ‘SA’ form. These sentence types are undecidable for C because, given the actual capacities of members of C, it is perfectly possible that they should be systematically unable to determine the truth value of these sentences, since they cannot transport themselves to the south side of the mountain. We can allow that they occasionally have access to indirect evidence for the truth of sentences belonging to the undecidable fragment; but it can happen that they

334

Dummett is apt to write as if his censure of the realist notion of truth would count against Davidson's conception of a systematic semantics (see ‘What is a Theory of Meaning? (ii)’, 67). This seems to be mistaken. So far as I can see, nothing in Davidson's programme is inconsistent with adoption of a verificationist-type construal of the truth theory, either in the weak form described by J. McDowell in ‘Truth Conditions, Bivalence and Verificationism’, in Truth and Meaning. , or more full-bloodedly as in Wright's ‘Truth Conditions and Criteria’, sect. vi.

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have available neither verifying nor falsifying information concerning these sentences. (Their predicament with respect to the south side may be compared with ours with respect to the past.) As I glossed it a bit back, they associate no sensori-motor routine with the undecidable sentences corresponding to their semantic structure. Suppose nevertheless that, like us, they are disposed, realistically, to assert bivalence across the board; that is, they take the appropriate notion of truth for their sentences to transcend the epistemic limitations imposed upon them by their truncated recognitional capacities. Now, given all this, we have here, it seems to me, a used language to which Dummett's argument should apply. Since the concept of truth they purport to employ is, for them, recognition-transcendent, the theory of understanding, in terms of ability to determine truth value, that we are called upon to offer by way of certification of a truth-conditions theory of sense for the model language L, will simply give out when we direct it towards the undecidable sentences of L. Because there is nothing in the recognitional capacities of the speakers of L to translate into actual use the conceptions of states of affairs that a truth-conditions theory credits to them, we cannot say in what their knowledge of these transcendent truth-conditions consists, how it is manifested in use. We have no account of what it is about their use of language that confers upon their sentences the kind of sense a truth-conditions theory purports to record. In consequence, their commitment to bivalence is misplaced, and an anti-realist conception of the hidden side of the mountain indicated, at least so far as their conceptual scheme is concerned. In assessing the cogency of the anti-realist's case for this conclusion it is useful to break the argument into two parts, one part concentrating on acquisition, the other on manifestation.335 The acquisition argument may be crudely stated as follows: speakers of a public language have, in the course of their training in the use of sentences, been exposed only to states of affairs that they are capable of recognizing (trivially)—in the present case only to conditions as they obtain on the north side of the mountain; and they cannot extract from this training conceptions of conditions that transcend those to which they have been exposed, notably in learning when an assertive utterance is justified—in the present case conditions as they might obtain on the south side. Accordingly, a realist theory of what knowledge of L consists in would leave it quite unexplained—would indeed make it quite mysterious—how it is that speakers have come to bestow upon their sentences truth conditions that relate to states of

335

In ‘The Reality of the Past’ Dummett offers us an acquisition argument; in ‘What is a Theory of Meaning? (ii)’ the argument is presented more or less exclusively in terms of manifestation. McDowell tends to expound Dummett in an acquisition way—see ‘Truth Conditions, Bivalence and Verificationism’, in Truth and Meaning. , and ‘On “The Reality of the Past’ ”, in C. Hookway and P. Petit (eds.), Action and Interpretation. (Cambridge University Press, 1978). Wright, for his part, is more purely manifestational. As will emerge, it seems to me essential to separate the two arguments.

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affairs that could have played no part in their acquisition of the language, on account of their inaccessibility. Only what obtains recognizably can play a part in endowing sentences with communicable meaning, or in apprising a learner of meanings already endowed. The manifestation argument, on the other hand, is to the effect that recognitiontranscendent conditions are not of a sort with respect to which speakers can display. their knowledge of truth conditions. The two arguments coalesce in the thought that there can be no more to the semantics of a language than is determined by recognizable conditions in the world—where the relevant notion of recognition attaches directly to the actual capacities of the speakers in question. Both arguments make it seem that a truth-conditions theory for our model language L fails to make out the required connection between meaning and use. Three ways of resisting this line of argument suggest themselves. (i) One might try to warrant the attribution of knowledge of transcendent truth-conditions by exploiting a certain truth-value link: that between the truth-value of a sentence ‘SA’ when uttered on the north side of the mountain and the truth value of the same sentence as it might be uttered on the south side. (Compare the link between a present utterance of a past-tense sentence and a past utterance of a corresponding present-tense sentence.)336 The suggestion, then, is that speakers succeed in extending bivalence to the undecidable sentences by reasoning as follows: ‘We have linguistic dispositions that sustain the assertion of bivalence for sentences about the north side; well, the truth conditions of sentences about the south side are just like that, except that they obtain inaccessibly.’ The supposed truth-value link ensures bivalence for the undecidable sentences, and the desired conception of truth conditions is obtained by a sort of projection. But it is plain that this begs, rather than answers, the anti-realist's question: for no southern state of affairs has ever impinged upon the speakers' consciousness while learning their language, and the thought of the alleged link does not equip them to manifest, in acts of recognition, the conceptions it is the design of the above reasoning to induce. The point is simply that the link does not take them, at will, to any state of affairs they are able to recognize directly. If they did have the capacity to transport themselves to the south side, then grasp of the truth-value link would enable them to manifest knowledge of the truth conditions of arbitrary sentences as uttered on the north side: but, of course, this is precisely the capacity they lack. So, as in other areas, appeal to truth-value links cannot remove the underlying difficulty. (ii) A second attempt, extending an idea of McDowell's,337 to warrant the attribution of realist truth-conditions to sentences of L might be labelled ‘the

336

Truth-value link realism is discussed by Dummett in ‘The Reality of the Past’ and by McDowell in ‘On “The Reality of the Past’ ”.

337

To be found in his ‘On “The Reality of the Past”’.

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partial accessibility claim’. The original suggestion, made for the past and for other minds, was that, although the truth conditions of these sentences are not always. accessible to direct apprehension, they sometimes. are: we are, on occasion, non-inferentially aware that the truth condition of one of the problematic sentences obtains, and this suffices to instil in us a general conception, extensible to other sentences of the given class whose truth conditions transcend awareness, of the sort of condition that is at issue. Thus we are said sometimes to perceive that another is in pain, and to be vouchsafed direct acquaintance with (certain tracts of) the past via memory. Now, however plausible such a view may be for the past and for the mental states of others, it cannot help the realist in the present case: for there is surely no plausibility in the suggestion that speakers of L sometimes enjoy direct non-inferential apprehension of the fulfilment of truth conditions for sentences that purport to relate to the hidden side of the mountain; these conditions always. transcend the recognitional faculties of members of C. So there seems no warranting a truth-conditions theory for L that way. And this suggests, what one may have already suspected for other kinds of sentence for which a realist interpretation has been challenged, that the partial accessibility claim could not be a complete answer to Dummett, and so cannot go to the heart of his argument. (iii) A third, and initially tempting, thought would be that the problematic conception is acquirable on the basis of analogy. That is to say, speakers of L could come by the desired conception by imaginatively extending the capacities they actually have, or by conceiving of beings with respect to whose capacities conditions on the south side would not be inaccessible; they need only, it seems, hit upon the idea of mobility. The objection to this suggestion, made by Dummett,338 is not so much, pace. the acquisition argument in its crude form, that they could not envisage any such extension of capacities, but rather that, even once acquired, we cannot say how the conceptions thus attained manifest themselves in the actual use to which the speakers are able to put their sentences: for the acquired conception does not, ex hypothesi., translate into a practical capacity manifestable in acts of truth-value recognition. We cannot justify describing our own language mastery in a certain way by imagining speakers, crucially different from ourselves, for whom that description would. be correct: we must describe our use of language as it actually is. What each of these attempts to answer Dummett assumes, one way or another, is that there can be no conception of a state of affairs that isn't a recognitional conception; and indeed Dummett is inclined to assert that the only model we have of what knowledge of truth conditions consists in (aside from a purely verbal ability) is provided by our grasp of the sense of an observation sentence.339 This assumption immediately puts the realist in a weak

338

See Dummett, ‘What is a Theory of Meaning? (ii)’, 100–1.

339

See Frege: Philosophy of Language. , 465; cf. W. V. Quine's (unsuccessful) attempt to explain knowledge of truth conditions in terms of dispositions to assent and dissent in ‘Mind and Verbal Dispositions’ in Mind and Language. .

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position, just because undecidable sentences are precisely such that their sense cannot be explained in terms of what it would be for the speaker to observe. that they are true. If determination of their truth value, where possible at all, is an essentially inferential procedure, the realist, accepting the presupposition of Dummett's argument, finds himself forced to acknowledge that he cannot explain knowledge of truth conditions in the only way available. This is especially clear in the acquisition argument: we are invited to agree that no conception can enter into understanding a language that is not induced directly by sensorily presented conditions; any going beyond the observational must be either impossible or arbitrary. (Like Hume, we wonder how there could be more to our ‘ideas’ than can be extracted from our ‘impressions’.) This, I think, is precisely why we are ready to be convinced that, given that training in the use of language consists in learning to make assertions in circumstances that justify assertion (i.e. recognizable circumstances), the content of sentences could not transcend that to which we have been thus exposed. Put that way, the argument is suspiciously redolent of a certain reductionist dogma bequeathed to us by classical empiricism: the dogma, to put it shortly, that our conceptual scheme cannot transcend our experience.340 But it is now, I take it, a commonplace that such reductionism need not be accepted; indeed that, if we are to have an adequate explanation of what is observed, it cannot be accepted. Thus, though my model speakers experience only the north side of their mountain, we may ask what is to stop. them, as creatures given to speculation and to the search for a coherent picture of the world they inhabit, from arriving at the idea of the south side of the mountain, and from conceiving of it as a determinately constituted stretch of reality. More strongly, it is hard to see how they could avoid. arriving at that idea. For a conception of that (for them) inaccessible reach of reality seems forced upon them if they are to have any reasonable explanation of the things they do observe: sheep disappearing and reappearing, etc. Their predicament seems much like ours when doing theoretical science, notwithstanding the undecidability. And in answer to the question how this process occurs—how in fact we do arrive at conceptions that transcend the observable—it seems that we can take a leaf out of Quine's book: that is a task for the (possibly speculative) cognitive psychology that goes with naturalized epistemology to discharge; it is not a chapter in the philosophical theory of meaning as such.341 So I suggest that it is only an empiricist dogma, with few attractions

340

That is, Quine's second dogma—see ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ in his From a Logical Point of View. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953). This doctrine characterizes the position of McDowell's ‘strong verificationist’—see ‘Truth Conditions, Bivalence and Verificationism’. Dummett's position differs from his, it appears, only by countenancing a more liberal standard of what is recognizable.

341

See W. V. Quine's ‘Epistemology Naturalized’, in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969) . It is arguable, indeed, that the intrusion of such considerations into the theory of meaning would be a form of psychologism. But then perhaps verificationist theories in general attract that epithet, because of the relativity to speakers' recognitional capacities they inevitably introduce.

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in other contexts, that makes us disposed to deny the possibility of acquiring conceptions of reality that transcend our recognitional capacities. This response to the acquisition version of the anti-realist argument may be found reasonable, so far as it goes; but it cannot, on its own, be the whole answer, for it does not speak to the original manifestation version of the argument. And here it may seem that the anti-realist has it all his own way. I have just recorded my conviction that we can acquire recognition-transcendent conceptions; but I have signally failed to explain how such conceptions show up in actual linguistic use. In fact, given the conditions the realist has been thus far required to meet, it appears that there is no hope of making good on that crucial obligation, since the acquired conception—in the present case of the hidden side of the mountain—does not correlate with any ability to undertake a decision procedure guaranteed to culminate in a judgement of truth value. What that suggests is that, though the mountain-dwellers could acquire a conception, encouraging assertion of bivalence, of a sector of reality that transcends their recognitional powers, this conception could not be that in which their grasp of the sense of the relevant sentences consists; for, by Dummett's argument, nothing can qualify as knowledge of meaning unless it relates directly to some linguistic disposition of the speaker—a disposition, we have been agreeing, to engage in a truth-value deciding procedure—and the conception in question precisely does not relate to any such disposition. So are we not back exactly where we started? I think it must be evident by now that something is going wrong with the anti-realist's argument. For how can we allow that speakers can come by a conception of reality of which they cannot speak? The content of a sentence, Dummett says in one place,342 is a representation of some facet of reality; but it begins to seem that this representative content cannot. express the conceptual scheme evidently available to our model speakers. Since it is not plausible to separate acquiring a language from acquiring a conception of reality, it seems that we must choose between two alternatives: either it is, after all, a mistake, an illusion, to suppose ourselves (or others) capable of conceiving a recognitiontranscendent reality; or there must be some way of manifesting such a conception in use otherwise than by the exercise of a capacity to conduct a verification procedure. I shall argue for the second alternative. Suppose we ask what is the proper object of acquiring mastery of a language, what the point of knowing the meaning of sentences is. Then I think we must reply that the point is communication, the business of interpreting the speech of others and having one's own interpreted: that is the end-state at which learning a language aims. We can gain perspective on this capacity by making explicit what a radical interpreter would need to know if he were to become equipped to interpret the speech of a given linguistic community. And we have

342

M. Dummett, ‘The Justification of Deduction’, British Academy Lecture. (1973), 24.

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been taught that what he would need to know is a deductive theory licensing the description of antecedently uninterpreted vocalizations as performances of specific kinds of speech act possessed of specific propositional contents.343 But there is no possessing this capacity in isolation from other knowledge about a speaker; it forms an indissoluble part of a more general theory of the actions of the person, a theory that constitutively relates meanings, propositional attitudes, and intentional behaviour. If someone knows such a general theory for a language, he has the capacity to use the language; and someone shows himself to possess such a capacity by successfully engaging in communication with speakers of the language. These platitudes prompt the simple thought that one's knowledge of meaning is manifestable in one's capacity to interpret—with all that that involves—the speech behaviour of others. A central component of this ability is correctly ascribing beliefs to the speaker, where these will figure—in combination with suitable desires—in explanations of his behaviour. These beliefs may, or may not, be of realist persuasion. (This is, of course, very different from Dummett's picture of use, where the emphasis is placed upon the solitary individual's capacity to determine truth value.) Applying this sketch of a description of linguistic use, we get the following: the mountain- dwellers can manifest their knowledge of transcendent truth-conditions, acquired in the way gestured at earlier, by interpreting the assertions of fellow speakers as expressions of the very realist beliefs we have seen no good reason to deny to them (where their assent to bivalence will be of obvious relevance to such an interpretation). It seems that this way of locating knowledge of truth conditions within the total activity of speech interpretation serves, unambitiously but satisfactorily, to relate conceptions of transcendent states of affairs to a practical linguistic capacity, to actual use. Identifying sentence use, not with a propensity effectively to determine truth value, but with the activity of speech interpretation (and production), seems to carry with it a denial that an essential component in the capacity to use and understand a name is an ability to recognize some given object as the bearer of the name. For, on the face of it, one could possess the capacity to interpret sentences containing a certain proper name—i.e. one could know what speech act was being performed in the sentence's utterance—yet lack any recognitional capacity in respect of the object so denoted;344 and this raises a number of questions about realism and reference. It is apparent that there are certain

343

See D. Davidson's ‘Radical Interpretation’, Dialectica. , 27 (1973), J. McDowell's ‘Truth Conditions, Bivalence and Verificationism’ and his ‘On the Sense and Reference of a Proper Name’, Mind. (Apr. 1977) . The perspective I here wish to endorse construes the theory of meaning as an empirically testable, though possibly underdetermined, explanatory theoretical representation of a speaker's linguistic behaviour, as it interlocks with his psychological properties and dispositions to action.

344

This is not to deny that in order to be able to use a name in ascriptions of propositional content one needs some sort of de re. attitude in respect of its bearer: but it appears evident that such an attitude may be present in the absence of any corresponding recognitional capacity.

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connections between the view one takes of the sense of names and one's position on how the sense of sentences is manifested in use. Dummett urges us to adopt, as a model for the sense of both categories of expression, the idea of a mode of recognition: for names grasping the sense consists in a capacity to judge the truth value of so-called recognition statements of the form ‘that is a.’ accompanied by an ostensive gesture;345 for sentences it is possessing a capacity to recognize the fulfilment or otherwise of the sentence's truth conditions. For both semantic concepts—reference and truth—we can formulate realist interpretations, in terms of their allowing of recognitiontranscendent application conditions: a sentence may be true though we cannot know it, and a name refer to an object with which we cannot be directly confronted (a past existent, say, or a remote, inferentially postulated, galaxy). And for reference, as for truth, we can construct an anti-realist argument: we have no right to assume a determinate reference for a name whose sense is not such as to present a traversable route to recognizing its bearer, for in such a case there will be no manifesting a grasp of the sense of the name.346 Reference cannot transcend recognition of reference, as truth cannot transcend recognition of truth. My present question, however, concerns the interdependence of these views of sense. It appears that one might consistently hold that the sense of a name was required to be effective in this way—thus agreeing that the use of a name consists in the exercise of a recognitional capacity—while denying the parallel view of sentence sense, perhaps because of a principled reluctance to assimilate sentences to the prototype of names.347 But the converse implication seems more compelling, since determining the truth value of a sentence containing a name of a concrete object will require, in the canonical case, some sort of ostensive identification of its bearer (the direct method of verifying the sentence). Now given (a.) that it is such an ability that manifests grasp of a sentence's sense, and (b.) that a theory of sense is required to specify what explicit. knowledge would suffice (and be necessary), when conjoined with certain general principles, for mastery of a sentence's use, it seems to follow, agreeably for Dummett, that some sort of description theory of the sense of names is wanted, since a description is precisely what makes explicit the ‘criterion of identification’ involved in recognizing the bearer of a name as

345

See Frege: Philosophy of Language. , 232 f.

346

This issue obtrudes itself at p. 231 of Frege: Philosophy of Language. ; but Dummett does not explicitly remark upon the possibility of an anti-realist conception of reference parallel to that he advocates for truth.

347

Despite his overt rejection of Frege's assimilation Dummett is to be found passing somewhat too readily from the recognitional conception of the sense of a name to the same view of sentence sense. See e.g. Frege: Philosophy of Language. , 589. (I do not here mean to deny that our grasp of transcendent truth-conditions might somehow involve knowledge of ideal procedures of truth-value determination; my point is rather that, even admitting that such procedures belong to the strict sense of a sentence, the knowledge a speaker has of them could show up in use otherwise than in his carrying them out.)

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such.348 But now we can, I think, reverse the argument: for if we have good reason to reject a description theory of names, as I take it we have,349 we can infer that the (conjunctive) thesis that entails it is false. Since premiss (a.) is hard to gainsay, (b.) must be the culprit. If this view of the matter is accepted, we can claim an independent ground for rejecting Dummett's picture of sentence use. In fact, it seems to me that the best view of the sense of names conforms exactly with the picture of sentence use I advocate.350 It may now be protested that, though apparently answering to the letter of Dummett's argument, the position I have been advancing does not go to its heart. For what I have claimed, in effect, is that the proper locus of manifestation is to be sought in the theory of force—the theory that embeds knowledge of sense in the general theory of interpretation; I have not attempted to ground the theory of sense in some sort of explanation of what it is to know the truth condition of a sentence. I must acknowledge, therefore, that my remarks have so far left the space reserved for the theory of understanding, as Dummett construes it, quite blank. But we are entitled to question whether the demand for an ‘explanation’ is really legitimate. Once we separate the request for a link with use from a demand that we explain what knowledge of truth conditions ‘consists in’, it begins to seem far less obvious that Dummett's alleged lacuna is one we are obliged to fill. Indeed, it is hard to interpret this latter demand as anything other than an insistence, evidently not mandatory, that we supply some sort of reduction. of semantic concepts to others—for example, those we should employ in specifying a sensori-motor capacity.351 But there seems no

348

If we characterize such a recognitional capacity merely as a disposition to apply the name in ostensive judgements upon being causally prompted by certain properties of its bearer, rather than as consisting in some sort of implicit propositional knowledge, then, even still, the explicit propositional knowledge that would suffice to possess the capacity will involve a description, its predicates recording the causally relevant properties. In any case, there seems no avoiding a rich conception of sense if (a. ) and (b. ) are granted.

349

See e.g. S. Kripke, ‘Naming and Necessity’, in D. Davidson and G. Harman (eds.), Semantics of Natural Language. (Boston: Reidel, 1972) ; K. Donnellan, ‘Proper Names and Identifying Descriptions’, ibid., and C. Peacocke, ‘Proper Names, Reference, and Rigid Designation’ in S. Blackburn (ed.), Meaning, Reference and Necessity. (Cambridge University Press, 1975) .

350

The kind of view adumbrated by McDowell in ‘On the Sense and Reference of a Proper Name’. I think, however, that McDowell neglects the motivation for a description theory deriving from the conception of the sense-manifesting use of a sentence as consisting in a determination of its truth value; it is not (or not merely) motivated by some gratuitous psychologistic picture of what guides the activity of speech. What has to be noted is that, if my argument is right, McDowell too is committed to rejecting that view of sentence use.

351

McDowell too diagnoses an underlying reductionism, but construes it as behaviourist in spirit (see ‘On the Sense and Reference of a Proper Name’, 181). To the empiricist reductionism I claim to discern he seems less unsympathetic (see the final section of ‘Truth Conditions, Bivalence and Verificationism’). In fact the two types of reductionism are connected, since if all meaning is empirical meaning a speaker's semantic knowledge will correlate with dispositions to assent and dissent behaviour under appropriate stimulation. I think, however, that in the present context the latter type of reductionism is the more basic, and does not in itself entail. the former type. And there is also, I should say, a more general reductionist strain in Dummett's thinking.

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instability in a position that declines the invitation to tender such a reduction, while accepting as legitimate the request to relate semantic knowledge to linguistic use. The cardinal principle of Dummett's conception of language mastery is that it consists solely in, and so cannot go beyond, sensitivity to evidence. This suggests a parallel with Quine that is worth brief exploration. Quine speaks of our total ‘theory’ as transcending the collated history of our sense experiences: the content of our general conception of the world, notably of theoretical science, is underdetermined by observation.352 And he sees that genuine underdetermination is possible only under a realist interpretation of scientific (and common-sense) discourse. What these propositions together imply is that grasp of the content of such an experience-transcendent theory cannot be simply equated with or reduced to a complex of (molecular) dispositions to judge of the truth value of sentences (dispositions to assent and dissent) upon being confronted by recognizable evidential conditions. Nevertheless, for Quine, we are able to acquire the corresponding realist conceptions. Whether undecidability is brought in the wake of such underdetermination is a delicate question: but it does seem that, at least relative to a time, it may be that there are, formulable within our language, sentences of science, for example referring to subatomic particles, whose truth value is not guaranteed to be determinable by us at will, and certainly not by direct verification. So, for such sentences too, Dummett would be committed to an anti-realist position.353 The point I wish to make is that Quine and Dummett react somewhat differently to the observation that realist truth-conditions cannot be exhaustively manifested in dispositions to respond to evidential promptings. For both men, the realist must seem to be building more into language than could. be present in it, since dispositions to recognize truth value exhaust the objective facts a theory of meaning is required to record. But Quine, taking realism to be obligatory, infers a potential multiplicity of theories from the assumption of underdetermination; the ensuing indeterminacy thesis is itself a form of anti-realism about meaning.354 Dummett, on the other hand, finds it incredible that meaning should thus outrun linguistic dispositions, and so prefers to relinquish the realism that gives rise to that hiatus, thereby restoring the exhaustive manifestability of sense. The difference could be put by saying that, apropos of the conditional ‘If realism, then

352

See esp. Quine, ‘Epistemology Naturalized’, where the word ‘transcend’ is used at p. 83.

353

It must be said that Dummett seldom, if ever, in his published writings on this topic addresses himself to the question of scientific realism.

354

See W. V. Quine, ‘On the Reasons for Indeterminacy of Translation’, Journal of Philosophy., 67 (1970) . One can see the indeterminacy thesis as Quine's attempt to resolve the deep tension in his views between, on the one hand, a realistic face-value interpretation of scientific and common-sense discourse and, on the other, his doctrine that there can be no more to meaning than is recoverable from dispositions to assent and dissent under sensory stimulation. What would take up the resulting slack is adherence to some form of ‘mentalistic semantics’ which repudiates the doctrine of empirical meaning: essentially, that is my position.

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meaning transcends use’, Quine detaches while Dummett contraposes. Both reactions are motivated by the underlying assumption that the capacity to use a language must be represented, fundamentally, as the possession of a complex of dispositions to verify or falsify sentences. Now, without here taking a stand on the issue of indeterminacy, I can restate my position as follows: I agree with Quine at least in this, that the content of our sentences (or those of my model linguistic community) just does transcend dispositions to determine truth value by responding appropriately to suitable evidence; and I agree too that how this comes to pass is a fit subject for naturalized epistemology to investigate. This does not entail the kind of subjectivity of sense that Frege was concerned to rebut, for there seems nothing to prevent different speakers sharing the same recognition-transcendent beliefs and meanings. Nor need we give up the virtual truism that mastery of a language is a dispositional capacity: we can characterize it as essentially a set of interrelated (and molecular) dispositions to interpret the speech of others, and to produce speech of one's own, according to a correct theory of sense and force for the language. Knowing a language is possessing an information-processing capacity: but there is no ‘explanation’ of the operations of that capacity such as Dummett appears to be seeking. A theory of sense aims to describe the core of this capacity, and it needs no support from a theory of understanding that purports to spell out, in a reductionist style, what implicit knowledge of that theory consists in. Indeed, the case of knowledge of a semantic theory seems comparable, in this respect, to knowledge of (say) a theory of chemicals: why should. we expect an answer to the philosophically loaded reductionist question of what knowledge of such a theory of chemicals would ‘consist in’? I hope it is clear that nothing I have said so far commits me to a blanket endorsement of realism; my argument has been essentially permissive. To recapitulate: Dummett presents an argument schema whose instances concern certain kinds of sentence to be found in natural languages; I contended that a model case to which the argument should apply can be argued to escape Dummett's anti-realist critique—we can see, for that model case, how a realist could defend his claim to give an intelligible account of language mastery. If Dummett's argument can be resisted for this model case, then the argument schema of which that case would be an instance cannot be accepted as generally valid. So if an anti-realist case is to be pressed in more familiar areas, it cannot be pressed upon the basis of that general argument. This leaves it open that an anti-realist case might be mounted, with consequences for the theory of meaning, in those other areas. It will be instructive in appraising Dummett's own position to glance at a number of areas for which such a case could be made plausible. For I suspect that Dummett's conclusion can seem compelling for a class of sentences, or sector of reality, not because of his official argument, but because, contrary to his own perspective, specific subject matters may present features that render a realist interpretation in some way problematic,

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independently of considerations drawn from the general theory of meaning, but with consequences for our understanding of the sense of the sentences in question. An obvious case is that of statements concerning infinite totalities. Notoriously, the intuitionists insist upon conceiving infinite collections as merely potential, as given to us via the notion of an essentially incompletable process; a Platonist conception of the infinite as a completed actual totality misrepresents, according to them, the very nature of the infinite, by illicitly assimilating its character to that of finite collections.355 Such a view is maintained for mathematical structures, but one can see how it might be extended to space and time. Now, if that were the correct way to construe the infinite, there would be clear point in adopting a constructivist interpretation of the truth conditions of sentences concerning infinite totalities; and such a decision would be independent of considerations of undecidability as such, but would derive directly from a certain conception of the infinite itself. In consequence, some sort of anti-realist view, involving non-assertion of bivalence for such sentences, might be taken, on the ground that, in advance of constructing appropriate segments of the totality in question, there is no definite reality to speak of. From Dummett's official perspective, however, where undecidability as such is the operative consideration, the properties of infinity and unsurveyability (which can hold of a finite domain) are essentially on a par in their capacity to encourage anti-realist contentions: for both properties block effective manifestation, in recognitional activities, of knowledge of realist truthconditions. But it seems to me that one might motivate a differential attitude, with respect to the realist/ anti-realist dispute, between collections exhibiting these two verification- frustrating properties, on the basis of considerations relating to the intrinsic character of the subject matter in question, independently of facts about our capacity to come to know truths about that subject matter. A second example of a candidate for a non-generalizable anti-realism is that of statements about abstract objects, particularly numbers. Dummett writes as if the dispute between Platonist and intuitionist (or, more generally, nonPlatonist) could only non-metaphorically consist in a disagreement concerning the relation between meaning and use, as he sets out the form of this disagreement.356 But there are well-known difficulties in the Platonist's conception of the truth conditions of number-theoretic sentences that are quite special—I mean such problems as how, given plausible assumptions about the causal inertness of abstract objects and causal requirements for knowledge and belief, we can ever come to know. truths about these

355

See, for a discussion of the intuitionistic conception of the infinite, Dummett's Elements of Intuitionism. , 55 f.

356

This is pretty plainly asserted in Dummett, ‘The Philosophical Basis of Intuitionistic Logic’.

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objects.357 It is true, of course, that Dummett's anti-realism is primarily directed at the objectivity of truths and not at the existence of objects; but one can readily appreciate how a Platonist picture of mathematical objects should be presupposed to a proof-transcendent view of mathematical truth. So rejection of a Platonist ontology might well lead one to a constructivist interpretation of the sense of number-theoretic sentences, perhaps accompanied by local abandonment of classical logic. Not only would such a line of argument fail to generalize to other areas—for example, the physical universe, other minds; it actually runs directly counter to the direction of argument claimed by Dummett to be the only feasible route to anti-realism: for it takes us from. a critical thesis about the specific character of the subject matter of mathematics as realistically (i.e. Platonistically) construed to. adoption of a non-realist conception of sense. Other areas in which arguments of this structure can be envisaged are modal and fictional discourse. Anyone who doubts the existence of hard modal facts corresponding to true modal sentences, preferring instead to construe their truth conditions as involving some sort of mental construction, will be disposed to take an anti-realist attitude towards the meaning of modal discourse; the more so if the semantics of modal operators is done in terms of quantification over possible worlds. And the reason may, again, derive from supposed epistemological difficulties attending modality. In the case of fictional discourse we take it that fictional entities are defined, roughly speaking, according to the author's intentions, to what he tells us of his creations; we do not suppose that the author brings an entity into existence whose constitution renders determinate the truth value of every statement we can make about such an entity. The nature of the subject matter of fictional discourse therefore precludes assertion of bivalence, and invites a nonrealist interpretation. In each of these areas we can formulate an intelligible anti-realist position, which does not go through a manifestation argument, and so cannot be made to generalize to all areas in which undecidability obtains. Tensed discourse provides a case in which, not only can we give substance to manifestation-independent arguments, but Dummett's own mode of argument seems to yield bizarre consequences.358 A natural, and traditional, way to formulate anti-realism with respect to time would be the following. The past exists only in its traces on the present; so where there are no traces there are no past facts; hence bivalence is unassertible for statements about the past. The future

357

Cf. P. Benacerraf, ‘Mathematical Truth’, Journal of Philosophy., 70 (1973) . The case of mathematics in fact exemplifies a general anti-realist argument, applicable (e.g.) to some forms of ethical realism, to the effect that the realist's ontology can play no part in explaining. how knowledge of the area in question is acquired.

358

See ‘The Reality of the Past’. I detect no sign that Dummett anticipates the consequences I allege.

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has less claim to full-blooded reality, since it leaves no traces, and is in some sense open. The present, however, is fully determinate; it is the foil against which the unreality of the past and future are contrasted. (I do not say that these claims are ultimately defensible, or even properly intelligible; only that they underlie anti-realist thought about time.) Now what is remarkable is that Dummett's anti-realism seems to reverse this intuitive order, rather than coincide with it. For, on his view, realism with respect to a certain subject matter is acceptable in proportion as the corresponding sentences admit of an effective decision procedure for truth value. But consider sentences concerning some finite initial segment of the future starting now: if such a sentence contains no other problematic construction, we can, it seems, generally guarantee that we shall be able so to position ourselves as to determine the truth value of the sentence when the appropriate time comes; and this decidability will, according to Dummett, warrant assertion of bivalence, and hence realism. The past, on the other hand, is less well placed: lacking presently available evidence, through memory or traces, statements about the past are apt to remain undecidable, and so present, according to Dummett's argument, prime candidates for anti-realist interpretation. The present, however, occupies a curious position: for it may be that the assertion of a present-tense sentence cannot be effectively verified because the condition that, according to the realist, makes it true no longer obtains at the time of verification; and whether it did, at the time of assertion, obtain becomes a matter subject to the problems of decidability afflicting the past tense. So the verification of many presenttense sentences is at best indirect and at worst unavailable. But surely, we want to insist, this is, as it were, a merely incidental fact about time and verification; it is irrelevant to the question whether, at the time a present-tense sentence is uttered, the assertion made thereby was determinately either true or false. The inaccessibility, in this sense, of present states of the world does not seem a good ground for denying their reality. I think that if Dummett's position has these consequences for tensed statements it is reduced to something approaching absurdity. Dummett places the theory of meaning—the theory of what it is to have mastery of a language—in a position prior to metaphysics. We are to come at traditional metaphysical questions concerning realism and anti-realism by asking what notion of truth can give an adequate account of linguistic use; metaphysical disputes about whether a given class of sentences admits of a realist interpretation turn into a general question as to the relation between meaning and use. It is chiefly for this reason, I think, that Dummett views the philosophy of language as the foundation of philosophy.359 I have argued that the general considerations about meaning and use that he broaches cannot themselves compel abandonment of realism; disputes of this kind must,

359

See ch. 19 of Frege: Philosophy of Language. . No doubt Dummett has other reasons for holding this view.

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accordingly, be settled in other ways. If that is the right way of looking at the matter, we shall have reason to doubt the doctrine that the philosophy of language is the basis and medium of philosophical disputes at large, at least as Dummett intends that doctrine.

Postscript to ‘Truth and Use’ This was my first shot at a reply to Michael Dummett's arguments against realism; the next three papers continue the campaign. The series of papers concedes less and less to Dummett as it progresses—in particular, the assumption that meaning must have a behavioural ‘manifestation’ comes under greater suspicion in the later papers. ‘Truth and Use’ is maximally concessive while resisting the conclusions Dummett arrives at. The paper has often been misunderstood as offering to prove the truth of realism. It attempts no such thing: it argues that Dummett's arguments against realism are answerable, so that the truth of realism remains an option.. My counter-argument comes in two basic steps: (a.) that it is an empiricist dogma to suppose that we cannot acquire conceptions that transcend our experience (‘recognitional capacities’), and (b.) that we can connect experience-transcendent conceptions with linguistic use by making the (deflationary) observation that such conceptions are fit subjects for communicative speech acts. So long as people can share such conceptions there is no bar to their communicating thoughts involving them. I also make the point, with the help of my rooted mountain-dwellers, that measuring reality by the yardstick of ‘recognitional capacities’ commits one to a bizarre relativism about the objective world, since such capacities vary from knower to knower. We are all placed in a world that is sublimely indifferent to how much of it we can experience; it is not that there are as many worlds as there are types of cognizing mind, each of them springing into being as the varying cognitive wheels turn. Such a view of reality in general is quite absurd; the only question is to identify exactly where the argument that purports to lead to it goes wrong. While I found Dummett's arguments challenging, not least because of the obscurity of their presentation, I was never for a moment inclined to think that they could be sound—and I found plenty of reasons in the several years I worked on the topic to find fault with them. In particular, as the following papers argue, the fault lies largely in the account of content determination that Dummett presupposes: he is too much of an internalist and behaviourist and reductionist about content. Basically, he is supposing that the content of thought is fixed by the stimuli that elicit judgements of assent, where these stimuli fall short of coinciding with the states of affairs they betoken. But this is no more acceptable than a behaviourist account of pain: pain is not reducible to behavioural expressions of pain and the stimuli that trigger them.

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Behaviourism is a remarkably resilient doctrine, despite its manifest failings; and it is apt to lurk in places where it might be least expected. But it is hardly surprising that where verificationism is being defended behaviourism should not be far behind. The question to ask about Dummett's argument is: how well does it fare once all traces of behaviourism have been deleted from its premisses (compare Quine's arguments for indeterminacy, which are far more explicitly behaviourist)? The idea that meaning should be recoverable from (non-semantic) descriptions of speech behaviour is really naked behaviourist dogma.

12 An a Priori Argument for Realism

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Except in the vulgar sense, one is not a realist tout court.: one is a realist with respect to some or other type of subject matter—or better, with respect to particular classes of statements. Nor, similarly, is it feasible to be an unqualified antirealist. Nevertheless, specific realist and anti-realist theses are apt to exhibit certain interdependencies. For example: realism about scientifically posited theoretical entities is likely to go with realism about macroscopic material bodies; realism about values will naturally encompass both ethical and aesthetic values; realism about numbers may encourage a general acceptance of abstract objects; anti-realism about the semantical and the mental may go hand in hand; and so on. That is to say, particular philosophical arguments for or against realism with respect to specific areas may call for parallel conclusions in neighbouring areas. Such interdependencies as those cited are, however, of a relatively local and unsurprising kind. The really interesting question to raise is how extensive such interdependencies might be; for it may turn out that philosophical investigation of apparently disparate areas will disclose interdependencies on a more global scale, and an appreciation of the lines of connection that define the scope and limits (if there be such) of global realism and anti-realism may help in the resolution of the dispute in particular areas. Thus we might inquire whether some preferred formulation of scientific realism requires mathematical realism or precludes it, whether insistence on the irreducibility of ethical or aesthetic thought presupposes the reality of values, whether our ordinary understanding of the world of spatio-temporally distributed bodies requires realism about causal modalities,361 and so forth. These are not, however, the questions I am going to discuss in this paper; I mention them and the global question they instantiate in order to locate in a wider perspective the question I want to address. That question is this: Can we

360

This paper was prompted by an aside of Michael Dummett's in ‘The Reality of the Past’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. , 69 (1968–9): 239–58, 250, and bears the mark of his discussions of realism throughout. I have also been influenced by unpublished work of Marie McGinn and Christopher Peacocke, and by conversations with Anita Avramides, W. D. Hart, and Arnold Zuboff.

361

As argued by Peacocke in ‘Causal Modalities and Realism’, in Mark Platts (ed.), Reference, Truth and Reality. (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979) .

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discover interdependencies between realist and anti-realist conceptions of, on the one hand, the external world of material bodies and, on the other, the internal world of mental states and events—to put the matter tendentiously—such that we find ourselves compelled to adopt certain realist or anti-realist positions with respect to these two areas? I am going to argue that we can indeed expose such interconnections and that they force us to recognize that realism about both kinds of statement is the only viable position. The general structure and strategy of the argument is as follows. In respect of our two classes of statements—which I shall for the sake of brevity hereafter designate as M- and P-statements, respectively—there are four possible combinations of view: (i) anti-realism about both M- and P-statements, (ii) anti-realism about M-statements combined with realism about P-statements, (ii) realism about M- statements combined with anti-realism about P-statements, (iv) realism about both M- and P-statements. I aim to show that (iv) is true by eliminating (i)–(iii) by appeal to global considerations designed to uncover the inconsistency of those positions. Since (i)–(iv) exhaust the alternatives and all save (iv) are inconsistent, we must acknowledge that (iv) is the only available position. The argument is thus indirect, like a proof by reductio., in that we set out to establish joint realism by supposing its negation, this giving three possibilities, each of which is claimed to embody a sort of inconsistency. No direct argument for realism in either area is essayed (though I think we shall see that the eventual upshot has a strong intuitive appeal): rather, certain interconnections are claimed and systematically exploited. The result is (intended as) an a priori argument for realism about M- and P-statements.

I To proceed we need a preliminary formulation—to be refined later—of the general import of realist and anti-realist doctrines. Following Dummett, I shall take it that realism and anti-realism are best understood as contrary theses about the relation, with respect to various subject matters, between truth and the recognition of truth.362 That is, what distinguishes a realist from an anti-realist attitude toward the interpretation of a given class of statements is a difference in one's conception of how that in virtue of which the statements are true or false relates to the means or route by which we come to know. their truth value. In yet other words, what defines realism in contradistinction to anti-realism is a disagreement as to the relation between truth conditions and assertibility or verification conditions. The heart of a realist view of a given class of statements is that their truth conditions in a certain sense transcend.—and so

362

See, for example, Dummett, ‘What Is a Theory of Meaning? (ii)’, in G. Evans and J. H. McDowell (eds.), Truth and Meaning. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976) .

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cannot be reduced to—their assertibility conditions. The anti-realist view, correspondingly, is that the subject matter of the given class does not. thus transcend the grounds upon which the statements are asserted. Notice that, under that general formulation, realism and anti-realism, which are, strictly speaking, metaphysical or semantic theses, are already characterized in epistemological terms: for the content of realism is precisely that there obtain, or could obtain, recognition.-transcendent facts, whereas that of anti-realism is that there could not. As will emerge, this epistemological formulation will play a crucial role in the argument I shall present. What I want now to register is that the statement of realism in terms of recognition-transcendence has the important consequence that a realist interpretation of a class of sentences inevitably introduces the possibility of a sceptical challenge concerning our knowledge of the propositions thereby expressed, whereas an anti-realist interpretation evades that challenge. Indeed, I think that a prima-facie vulnerability to such a challenge should be regarded as a condition of adequacy which any formulation of realism is required to meet; and anti-realisms should correspondingly be seen manifestly to foreclose the threat of scepticism. In respect of M- and P- statements, this general formulation may be specialized as follows: realism about M-statements is the thesis that the truth conditions of these statements transcend the experiential. grounds on which they are asserted, whereas anti-realism about M-statements denies this; and realism about P-statements is the thesis that the truth conditions of these statements transcend the behavioural. grounds on which they are asserted, whereas anti-realism about P- statements denies this.363 The realist theses thus imply some sort of recognition- transcendence with respect to the truth of the statements in question, and it is precisely because of this epistemic gap between evidence and truth that the traditional sceptical problems as to the existence and nature of the external world and of other minds arise. Let us now, equipped with these rough preliminaries, turn to a criticism of the first of the combined positions I identified, namely joint anti-realism.

II The anti-realist doctrines I wish to consider may be labelled—I take it with some historical precedent—phenomenalism. and behaviourism.. I shall understand the form of these doctrines to be defined by the thesis that M- and P-statements have the truth value they do have in virtue of. the truth or falsity of statements

363

In saying that M-statements are asserted upon experiential grounds and that P-statements are asserted upon behavioural grounds I do not deny that material objects (or indeed others' mental states) may be directly perceived. Direct perception is compatible with the beliefs. thus formed being inferential in some sense: the significant point is that we shall be equally prone to forming M- and P-beliefs in non-veridical cases as we are in veridical cases.

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drawn from certain other classes, not trivially different from the given ones: M- and P-statements are thus said to be subject to a reductive thesis. A reductive thesis is to this effect: a sentence s. of a given class K. is reducible to (true in virtue of) some sentence s.′ of a class R. if and only if necessarily s. is true (false) just in case s.′ is true (false): it is a logically necessary and sufficient condition for a sentence of K. to be true (false) that some sentence (or set of sentences) or R. be true (false).364 Instantiating for M- and P-statements, the reductive anti-realist theses under consideration claim that these statements are true in virtue of statements about experiences (E-statements) on statements about behaviour (B-statements). We may gloss the reductive thesis definitive of phenomenalism as the claim that any language, such as our own, which contains both M- and P-statements exhibits a hierarchical ordering with respect to the relation of reducibility phenomenalism defines over its member statements. The basal statements of the hierarchy are the E-statements, a subclass of P-statements, and the distribution of truth values over these determines the truth value of any M-statement in the language (if it has one): the truth values of the M-statements cannot vary if the assignment of truth values to the E-statements stays fixed. Similarly, behaviourism has it that the basal statements are uniformly M- statements, where any P-statement of the language is rendered true or false by some B-statement, these comprising a subclass of the M-statements; again, the truth values of the B-statements once determined, the truth values of the P- statements are thereby fixed. What distinguishes phenomenalism from behaviourism is thus a selection of distinct kinds of statement as reductively basic, that is, a characteristic ordering of statements according to a particular reductive thesis. (The orderings preferred by the two doctrines often correlate with some relation of epistemological priority, but we need not go into this aspect of the doctrines now.) For both antirealisms, then, the important point is that the truth of a statement of the given class consists in nothing other than the truth of some statement of the reducing class. Before indicating why it is that these positions are not jointly occupiable, it will be useful to distinguish three ways in which the reducibility relation defined over the relevant classes of statements may be understood. First, we might say that for any statement s. of the given class (M- or P-statements) there is some statement s.′ of the reducing class (E- or B-statements) such that s. reduces to s.′ and s. is determinately either true or false; this reduction may or may not be translational, but it does (or would) preserve the law of bivalence for statements of the given class. Second, we may say that whenever a statement of the given class has a determinate truth value this is conferred upon it by some statement of the reducing class, but there is no presumption or guarantee that

364

A reductive relation between sentences may, for certain reductionist theses, hold a posteriori. Since anti-realism is a thesis about meaning, however, the reductions it advocates are better viewed as semantical and therefore knowable a priori; hence my use of the traditional phrase ‘logically. necessary and sufficient’.

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the former statements will be subject to bivalence: it may be that neither s. nor its negation is made true by some reducing statement s.′.365 Third, it may be alleged that a reduction with this latter property obtains but that the proper response to it is that the sentences that suffer thus from truth-value gaps should be regarded as expressing no proposition, as strictly meaningless, so that bivalence is in effect respected. Which of these three positions one adopts will obviously depend upon the precise character of the anti-realism in question; but a main consideration here is what logical type of statement is assigned to the putative reducing class. Classically, phenomenalism and behaviourism have wished to include counterfactual subjunctive conditionals among their reduction statements, principally because of translational ambitions; for statements reporting the occurrence of actual. sense experiences scarcely suffice to confer upon every M-statement a determinate truth value, and similarly for actual behaviour and P-statements. There are a number of (by now) well-worn objections to such reductions which seem to me very powerful, but which need not be evaluated in detail at the level of generality set by this paper. For the record: it is hard to see how either the phenomenalist or the behaviourist reductions can succeed without tacit circularity, since the consequent of the subjunctive will not hold unless its antecedent introduces conditions of the very sort claimed to be reducible—material-object conditions or mental conditions, as the case may be;366 and, connectedly, one's strong conviction is that the proffered subjunctives are not barely. true, in Dummett's sense,367 but rather are true precisely in virtue of (in part) the categorical M- and P-statements they are designed to reduce.368 Impressed by such objections, one might prefer to confine the reducing class to suitable categoricals recording the occurrence (possibly for all times) of actual experiences and episodes of behaviour, and then face the consequence that vastly many M- and P-statements will have no determinate truth value, thus taking up one or other of the second and third positions I distinguished. But, whichever option one takes, a claim of reductive ordering will be made, and that is my chief concern here. Once the general form of phenomenalistic and behaviouristic anti-realism is clearly set out, as above, it is, I think, pretty evident why it is that the doctrines cannot be jointly affirmed. The reason is simply that they offer competing

365

This is Dummett's preferred formulation of anti-realism: see the works of his elsewhere cited in this paper.

366

Gilbert H. Harman explains the point tersely in Thought. (Princeton: University Press, 1973), 10 f., and Peacocke makes much of it in Holistic Explanation. (Oxford: University Press, 1979) .

367

The notion is fully explained in ‘What Is a Theory of Meaning? (ii)’, sect. iii; roughly, it is the property of not being made true by some other (more basic) statement.

368

An interesting asymmetry of attitude is worth remarking here. Told that material objects are ‘permanent possibilities of experience’, one readily suspects the claim to have dispensed with the objects, since it is extremely plausible that it is precisely their independent existence that sustains such possibilities; but the parallel claim for mental entities—they are ‘permanent possibilities of behaviour’, i.e. behavioural dispositions—has not been apt to provoke a parallel response. One would like to see a good reason for taking the cases differently, however.

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proposals as to what statements comprise the basal truths: phenomenalism takes E-statements, a subclass of Pstatements, as basic, while behaviourism takes B-statements, a subclass of M-statements, as basic. The result is that, where one reductive thesis represents a statement as not itself requiring the application of a reductive operation, the other insists that such a reduction be performed. Since a statement that is basal for one anti-realism is derivative for the other, it is plain enough that a vicious regress is generated by the conjunction of the two doctrines; and this, of course, effectively frustrates the reductive ambitions definitive of each anti-realist thesis. More explicitly, suppose we take a certain M-statements s.. Then phenomenalism will deliver as its reducing statement some E-truth s.′. But, since s.′ is a P-statement, behaviourism offers up some B-statement s.″ as its. reduction. Now s.″ is itself an M- statement; so it demands from phenomalism some further E-statement s.′″ to reduce it. And the cycle begins again, ad infinitum. So the two doctrines simply contradict each other on the crucial question of what statements make what other statements true.369 It follows that position (i) is unoccupiable. And this already suggests a limitation on any would-be global antirealism; it appears that there is going to be something. irreducibly realist in our language and system of the world.

III I imagine that the elimination of (i) will be fairly readily conceded: few philosophers would think idealism and (behaviouristic) materialism compatible, and the reasons traditionally prompting the two views have not been such as to establish one of them if and only if they establish the other. What is not at all immediately apparent, however, is that (ii) and (iii) exhibit any hint of self-destructive internal tension. To appreciate why it is that, as I claim, realism about one area requires realism about the other, let us articulate further the content of the realist interpretations of M- and Pstatements. The fundamental thesis of realism about the two classes of statements is captured in the notion of independence., that is, the denial that the truth of

369

Rudolf Carnap in The Logical Structure of the World., trans. R. A. George (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967) , remarks en passant. (in sect. 57) that it is possible to reduce all physical objects to psychological ones and also possible to reduce all psychological objects to physical ones. Since he does not confront the question which of these reductions is correct, the significance. of his constructions is hard to assess. If my argument is right, neither can be correct. Nelson Goodman, too, in The Structure of Appearance. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), 136 f. , raises the topic of the competing claims of ‘phenomenalistic and physicalistic systems’, but eschews the metaphysical question of which of them correctly characterizes the general nature of the world, and so again their philosophical significance remains uncertain. No doubt the pragmatic tone evinced by both writers reflects a familiar antipathy toward the metaphysical question of which, if any, is actually true. .

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suitable E- and B-statements constitutes logically necessary and sufficient conditions for the truth of corresponding Mand P-statements, and similarly for falsity.370 In other words, M-facts are not reducible to E-facts, and P-facts are not reducible to B-facts. The general notion of independence is reflected in a cluster of assumptions and practices which we customarily fall in with as uncritical realists and which would have to be abandoned, or at least radically reinterpreted, if the anti-realist were right. Thus the realist has it that it is possible for M-facts to obtain and no experiences be had as of their obtaining, so it is not a necessary. condition for an M-statement to be true that some corresponding E-statement be true; and further, since no set of purely experiential statements ever logically entails the truth of some M-statement, it is not a sufficient. condition for an M-statement to be true that some corresponding Estatement be true. Similarly, in respect of P-statements the realist view is that it is possible for P-facts to obtain in a person and he not behave in some manifesting way, so it is not necessary. for the truth of a P-statement that some appropriate B-statement be true; and further, since no set of purely behavioural statements ever logically entails the truth of some P-statement, it is not suffi-cient. for a P-statement to be true that some corresponding B-statement be true. And if the truth of the relevant statements can come thus apart, there can be no possibility of reduction, of maintaining that one kind of statement is true in virtue of the other. (The being of an M-fact does not consist in its being perceived, and the being of a P-fact does not consist in its being behaved.) And it should be clear enough that this property of two-way logical independence from experiences and behaviour on the part of M- and P-statements is precisely the source of the sceptical questions realism is prone to invite, on account of the alleged epistemic transcendence of subject matter (hence no necessity) and the correlative possibility of error (hence no sufficiency). As a natural corollary of the independence thesis your typical realist will hold to a certain conception of perception and action: viz. that a genuinely perceptual experience is caused. by some external object ontologically distinct from the experience, and similarly that a piece of intentional behaviour is caused. by a mental state or event from which it. is ontologically distinct. Those are peculiarly realist theses because the causality claim implies the distinctness. of the objects of perception from the perception itself, and of the mental antecedents of action from the caused action. Indeed, appropriate causation is plausibly regarded as criterial. for whether an experience is a genuine perception or a piece of behaviour a genuine action: these very distinctions are thus commonly drawn

370

Carnap formulates realism about material objects in the phrase ‘independence from the cognizing consciousness’, The Logical Structure of the World. , 281, and G. E. Moore employs the same style of formulation in ‘A Defence of Common Sense’, sect. ii, Philosophical Papers. (Reading, Mass.: Allen & Unwin, 1959) . Hilary Putnam's realistic view of the mental is similarly stated in ‘Brains and Behaviour’, repr. in Mind, Language and Reality, Philosophical Papers., vol. ii (New York: Cambridge, 1975) .

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in terms of realist materials.371 Connected with this causality claim, and reinforcing the irreducibility consequent upon logical independence, is the activity of (causally) explaining. the truth of certain E-statements by citing appropriate Mstatements, as when we explain why a perceptual experience occurred and had the intentional-phenomenal character it had by saying that it was brought about by some external material object being thus and so; and similarly we have the practice of explaining the occurrence and properties of certain bodily movements by reference to presumed internal mental states and events. If the anti-realist views were correct, and the truth of M-statements just consisted in. the truth of corresponding E-statements, while the truth of P-statements similarly reduced to the truth of corresponding Bstatements, then it would be hard to see how statements of the former kinds could possibly explain. statements of the latter kinds. So it appears that the ascription to M- and P-facts of such a causal-explanatory role vis-à-vis E- and Bfacts is bound up with a realist conception of their status in the world. If those are some characteristically realist contentions about M- and P- statements, why should they imply the inconsistency of positions (ii) and (iii)? The first stage of my answer rests upon a simple observation. Consider Mstatements first. I said that under a realist interpretation E-statements are neither necessary nor sufficient to fix their truth value; but if so, we can equally well say that M-statements are neither necessary nor sufficient for Estatements—the independence is symmetrical. To say that an M-fact is not necessary for an E-fact is to say that an Efact is not sufficient for an M-fact (delusive experiences), and to say that an M-fact is not sufficient for an E-fact is to say that an E-fact is not necessary for an M-fact (unexperienced M-facts). The independence cuts both ways, and implies realism as much one way as the other. Similarly for P-statements. To say that a P-fact is not necessary for a Bfact is to say that a B-fact is not sufficient for a P-fact (deceptive behaviour), and to say that a P-fact is not sufficient for a B-fact is to say that a B-fact is not necessary for a P-fact (unbehaved P-facts). In formulating the thesis that the truth of an M-statement does not consist in the truth of a corresponding E- statement we find ourselves saying—what is anyway hard to deny—that the E- statement is not true in virtue of the M-statement; and similarly for P- and Bstatements. (Notice that this observation does not crucially depend upon the actual or possible occurrence of delusive experience or deceptive behaviour, though I do think these are important in understanding the epistemological corollaries of realism; for no one would maintain that, when an experience is a genuine perception or an episode of behaviour has a mental description, the truth of the corresponding E- and B-statements just reduces to the truth of the

371

Cf. H. P. Grice, ‘The Causal Theory of Perception’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society., suppl. vol. 35 (1961) , and D. Davidson, ‘Agency’, in R. Binkley (ed.), Agent, Action and Reason. (Toronto: University Press, 1971) . I do not say that these authors explicitly view causal theories of perception and action as peculiarly realist.

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statements that report, as the realist asserts, their M- and P-causes.) So it begins to seem that realism about M- and Pstatements implies realism about E- and B-statements, under the independence formulation. But now E- and B- facts are just subclasses of P- and M-facts, respectively; and if we are prepared to admit these in unreduced realist fashion, there can be no objection of general principle to admitting the rest.372 The same result issues from the causalexplanatory formulations of the two realisms: if material bodies must be distinct from the experiences they cause in episodes of perception, then the experiences are symmetrically distinct from the bodies; and if mental states and events must be distinct from the behaviour they cause in events of intentional action, then the behaviour is symmetrically distinct from the mental antecedents—the effects must be as real, by this standard, as the causes. And parallel remarks apply to the explanatory relation, as the realist construes it, between M- and E-statements and P- and B-statements: explanandum cannot reduce to explanans. In short, the formulation of each realism in terms of independence seems, on the face of it, to imply an equally realist interpretation of the statements that comprise the assertibility conditions of our given statements. This argument will certainly seem too swift; for, as stated, it ignores a crucial manoeuvre open to the partial realist. Consider again the realist who desires his basal statements to be uniformly material; that is, he wishes to be a behaviourist and a realist about the external world. His response to the foregoing observations will be as follows: begin by formulating realism about M-statements in terms of independence, causality, and explanation, thus introducing the required E-statements; then claim, anti-realistically in respect of such statements, that they are to be construed as true in virtue of appropriate B- statements—so that the E-statements needed to formulate realism about M- statements at large are in turn reduced to a subclass of M-statements. Analogously, the realist about P-statements who wishes his basal statements to be uniformly psychological will initially state his mental realism in terms of independence from Bstatements, but then go on to subject the introduced B- statements to a phenomenalistic reduction, thus rendering them true in virtue of appropriate E-statements. The first philosopher is a behaviouristic realist about the external world, the second a phenomenalistic realist about the internal world. Are these not perfectly consistent positions? I think that ultimately they are not, but the reason is somewhat subtle. It is tempting to suppose that these reductive reformulations of the realist's characteristic claims are vulnerable to a regress argument, along the following lines. Suppose the realist about M-statements and anti-realist about Pstatements were to present us with his reductive B-statements. Then we would

372

Cf. Gottlob Frege's attempted refutation of idealism in ‘The Thought’, repr. in P. F. Strawson (ed.), Philosophical Logic. (New York: Oxford, 1967) , where he argues that there must be at least one object that isn't an idea, viz. the bearer of ideas, and so opens the door to the reality of all objects of thought.

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be entitled to put to him the question, in what his realism about these B- statements consists. To be constant he is obliged to offer an independence formulation, thus introducing a new range of as yet unreduced E-statements. He now proposes to reduce these to further B-statements, and inevitably invites a repetition of the question. Evidently this process of question and answer generates a chain of alternating E- and B-statements with no determinate upper bound. Again, suppose the realist about P-statements and anti- realist about M-statements were to present us with his reductive E-statements. Then we can ask him in what his realism about these E-statements consists. Constancy requires an answer framed in terms of independence from further B-statements. These would then in turn call for phenomenalist reduction, and the cycle recurs, thus generating an indefinitely extended series of B- and E- statements. However, the resulting series, though in a certain sense regressive, do not seem viciously so, since there is nothing in the general position of the differential realist to prevent him, at any arbitrary stage in the series, from producing the reductive statement demanded by his anti-realism as that in virtue of which the E- or B-statement yielded by his realist half is true. The case is unlike that of the joint anti-realist, because there we were presented with incompatible claims as to what constitutes reductive bedrock; but in the case of positions (ii) and (iii) the realist component need not, for all that has so far. been said, insist upon the irreducibility of the statements from which independence is alleged. I think, however, that the intuition that encourages one erroneously to suspect straightforward vicious regress here does have considerable force. Part of its force can be brought out by means of the following argument against the proposed reformulations. It was remarked earlier that realism implies a gulf between truth conditions and verification conditions—between truth and the recognition of truth—and that this gulf is what allows scepticism to get purchase on the area in question. In respect of the external world, this involves the idea that how experience represents the world as being may not coincide with how it really is—appearance and reality may fail to match. In respect of the mental, realism implies that what a true P-statement corresponds to transcends, and so may diverge from, the behavioural evidence on the strength of which we make psychological judgements. Thus it is that scepticism about the external world and other minds arises. Now our question must be: do the suggested reformulations of realism adequately preserve those epistemological corollaries? For if they do not, they fail to capture the content of the intended realist theses. The quickest way to see that they fail in this is to negate the realist views as thus reformulated and then test whether the resulting propositions fulfil our conditions on an adequate formulation of anti.-realism for the two areas. In the case of M- statements, then, the reformulated anti-realism would be to the effect (strange as it is) that statements about external material bodies reduce to statements about behaviour—a sort of behaviouristic phenomenalism. For P-statements

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the reformulated anti-realism about them would be that they are true in virtue of statements reporting experiences as of behaving in a certain way—a sort of phenomenalistic behaviourism. Just as we are advised under the reformulations to state realism about each area in a uniform vocabulary, so we state the corresponding anti-realisms in that very vocabulary. But clearly these. formulations of the two anti-realisms do not have the epistemological consequences we expect of anti-realism about material objects and about mental states. For, first, anti-realism about M-statements should have the consequence, enjoyed by standard phenomenalism, that our knowledge of the external world has a firm and scepticism-free characterization; but behavioural facts are in no way epistemologically privileged among Mfacts at large, and so cannot afford the epistemologically unproblematic foundation that anti-realism characteristically promises us. And, second, anti-realism about P-statements should have the consequence that our knowledge of other minds is innocent of illicit inference precisely because P-statements are seen, upon reductive analysis, not to go beyond the publicly accessible facts of behaviour; but if behavioural facts are reduced to experiential facts no epistemological progress of the sort desired by the anti-realist about the mental is made, since these are just as private and inaccessible as the P-statements they are intended to reduce. So negating the proposed reformulations of realism about M- and Pstatements does not lead to an adequate and consistent statement of anti-realism for the two domains. Unsurprisingly, the suggested reformulations also misrepresent the epistemological predicament of the realist about each area: for if we permit ourselves unproblematic epistemological access to behavioural facts as the surrogates for statements about how things appear in immediate experience, then we must already. have resolved the question of our knowledge of the external world—or else we simply deprive ourselves of the materials with which to raise that question. On the other hand, if we try to construe all B-facts as ultimately experiential, then we fail to capture the idea, essential to a realist view of the mental, that P-facts transcend and are distinct from the publicly. accessible facts of overt behaviour: for, under such a reduction, the assertibility conditions for P-statements turn out to be themselves as private and subjective as the statements whose truth they evidence. We cannot really claim to retain the distinctive features of the realist conception of the relation between mental states and behaviour if we insist upon reducing the latter to suitable experiences; room must be made for the public. The underlying point in both cases can be put as follows. According to realism about the external world, M-facts transcend their assertibility conditions in such a way that information about the totality of E- truths does not decisively settle what M-statements are true, or indeed whether any are; someone possessed of this information can still ask sceptical questions concerning M-statements. Similarly, knowledge of the totality of B-truths should not pre-empt the sceptical question whether there really are any mental states responsible for the observed behaviour. Even an ideal observer, in

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something like the position of God, could raise these sceptical questions given only information about assertibility conditions. But, if we reduce E-facts to B- facts, this no longer holds, since knowledge of E-facts will just consist in. knowledge of appropriate B-facts, and so will presuppose unproblematic access to a range of M-facts. Similarly, if our ideal observer were in receipt of all the B- facts and these reduced to corresponding E-facts, then he would already have settled the question of whether the world contains mental states over and above material objects. So neither reduction would have the required consequence that the truth conditions of M- and P-statements genuinely transcend their usual assertibility conditions; neither, therefore, gives an adequate characterization of that in which the reality of M- and P-facts consists. The simple truth is—and I shall have more to say on this later—that a proper statement of realism about material bodies requires unreduced acceptance of experiences as that from which the external world is allegedly independent, and that a proper understanding of realism about the mental requires unreduced acceptance of episodes of behaviour as that from which the internal world is independent. This point is just made more vivid by tracing out the epistemological consequences required of an adequate formulation of realism for the two areas. So I think that in the end our initial crude argument from independence must be accepted and positions (ii) and (iii) declared unoccupiable. But first a certain line of objection to the whole set-up must be disposed of.373

IV Anxious to avoid compulsory occupation of position (iv), someone might try to question the very idea of formulating realism in terms of independence from E- and B-statements. The hope would be to formulate realism for M- and Pstatements in such a way that no symmetrical condition on E- and B- statements results. The claim I now wish to defend is that such alternative conceptions of realism for the two areas as I can produce fail systematically either to provide necessary or sufficient conditions for an intuitive formulation of realism.

373

I should perhaps make it explicit that this paper does not, officially at any rate, address the question of solipsism. Solipsism is not realist about P-statements, in my sense, because it regards non-first-person ascriptions (what Carnap calls the ‘heteropsychological’) anti-realistically—other minds are logical constructions out of my. experiences (the ‘autopsychological’)—and thus it takes all. statements to be true in virtue of first-person P-statements. On the contrary, I assume the existence of a plurality of persons and ask after the relation between their experiences and the material world, and their behaviour and mental states. You might helpfully conceive of the issue as a very general question of radical interpretation: given that a speaker's language contains M- and P-statements, what metaphysical schemes of interpretation are possible, as represented by positions (i)–(iv)? My thesis is, then, that only scheme (iv) is consistent. Refuting solipsism would demand further considerations.

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A first proposal for doing away with explicit allusion to E- and B-statements for a realist interpretation of a class of statements might require that the class meet the following two conditions: (a.) the statements obey the law of bivalence, and (b.) there is no class of statements, genuinely distinct from the given one, such that statements of the given class are true in virtue of statements of that other class, that is, statements of the given class are barely true. There are two objections to this formulation of realism. First, it fails our requirement that an adequate formulation display the distinctive epistemological properties of the statements in question, in particular, the way in which the gap between truth and recognition of truth is apt to invite sceptical challenge. This failure is especially apparent if one tries to obtain a characterization of the intended anti-realisms by negating the realist formulation: the operation does not yield the specific doctrines of phenomenalism and behaviourism. Only if we instantiate the existentially general condition (b.) with experiential and behavioural statements do we get the right results, but of course this just takes us back to my initial argument. But second, failure of the given class to meet the condition of bare truth is not sufficient to indicate an anti-realist interpretation. For consider physicalism with respect to mental states, and elementary-particle microreduction with respect to macroscopic material bodies. Whether true or false, such theses are intuitively realist about Pand M-statements; not all reductionism is anti-realist.374 These doctrines are intuitively realist, I would say, because they do not deny a cleavage between truth and the recognition of truth. Unlike phenomenalism and behaviourism, they do not embody a purported reduction to assertibility conditions. So, because bare truth is not a necessary condition for a realist interpretation, independence from all. other classes of statements is too strong a requirement for such an interpretation. In reply to this objection someone might propose weakening the formulation by omitting condition (b.) altogether. There would still be the objection from epistemology, but there would now be the problem that the resulting formulation is too. weak. That mere conformity to bivalence is insufficient for realism is shown by recalling the first and third of the anti-realist doctrines I distinguished in Section II. Surely classical reductionist phenomenalism and behaviourism, with their invocation of subjunctive conditionals, count as anti-realist, yet both seek to retain bivalence; and the positivistic third view a fortiori rates as anti-realist. (It seems to me, incidentally, that these positions show Dummett's rather monolithic formulation of realism-across-the-board in terms of conformity to bivalence to be deficient;375 one needs to say something specific

374

As Dummett himself insists in ‘The Reality of the Past’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society., 69, and in ‘Common Sense and Physics’, in G. F. MacDonald (ed.), Perception and Identity. (London: Macmillan, 1979) .

375

See the articles by him I have cited. I think, in fact, that the formulation of realism in terms of irreducibility to assertibility conditions lies behind the bivalence formulation: it is just that there seems no necessity. for the assertibility conditions of a given class of statements to be incomplete with respect to the assertion of each statement of the given class—complete assertibility is quite compatible with anti-realism.

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about the relation of the statements in question to their distinctive assertibility conditions.) And if we ask in what the contrast between such doctrines and the realist reductions I just mentioned consists, I think the answer must be that the former deny, whereas the latter do not, the features of logical independence, causal relations, and explanatory role that I earlier set forth as definitive of a realist view of M- and P-statements. This leads me to conclude that my initial formulation in terms of these features uniquely captures the content of the realist conception of the two types of statement. But if the argument that starts from that style of formulation is sound, we are left with global realism as the only really viable position.

V Realism and anti-realism about M- and P-statements are theses about the kind of meaning possessed by these statements, that is, about what their truth conditions consist in. According to realism, their truth conditions are such as to transcend the conditions that we recognize as verifying or falsifying the statements in question; this, to repeat, is precisely why scepticism about the external world and other minds seems in order. It is thus clear that the task of defending realism about a class of statements is an enterprise quite distinct from rebutting scepticism concerning that class: one is not yet in the business of answering the sceptic unless one has already. assumed a realist interpretation of the statements. That these are distinct questions is apt to be disguised by the fact that anti-realism is at one stroke a theory of meaning and an account of how statements endowed with a meaning so characterized are known. Now I have claimed to establish realism about M- and P-statements on the basis of an a priori argument, by an appeal to definition indeed. This goes against the grain of the currently dominant view sometimes labelled ‘empirical realism’, this being some such thesis as that metaphysical realism should be grounded upon much the same considerations as realism about theoretical entities, or indeed a realistic view of particular kinds of theoretical entities, viz. some sort of simplicity or inference to the best explanation.376 That is to say, one should adopt something like an a posteriori scientific approach to the realism/anti-realism dispute. I strongly suspect that such an attitude arises at least in part from a conflation of the questions of realism and scepticism. It is perhaps to be

376

See, for example, Putnam's discussion in ‘Other Minds’, Mind, Language and Reality. , and J. L. Mackie in ‘What's Really Wrong with Phenomenalism?’, British Academy Lecture., 1969 . The view is well expounded (though not endorsed) in M. Williams, Groundless Belief. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977) , ch. 4.

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expected that our knowledge of the truth of realistically interpreted M- and P- statements should be a posteriori knowledge and that resistance to scepticism should therefore assume an empirical form. But the question of realism with respect to a class of statements is not whether and how we might justify our claim to know. the statements to be true (though to establish it would presumably be to show that we do know they have verification-transcendent meaning); and, given this conception of the enterprise, it is also not very surprising that it should be capable of a priori demonstration. (I do not mean to deny that there might. be an a posteriori defence of metaphysical realism; I am only insisting upon a careful separation of questions.) Moreover, I think one's strong conviction is that the falsity of phenomenalism and behaviourism, as theories about the meaning of M- and P-statements, is of a much deeper and more conceptual character than the standard talk of simplicity and the like would seem to suggest. It does not appear to have the status of a mere empirical fact, albeit a highly general one, that M-statements are not true in virtue of Estatements and that P-statements are not true in virtue of B-statements. If that is right, it seems preferable to have a way of establishing it which adequately reflects its intuitive status in our general conception of the world.

VI Dummett has advanced a perfectly general argument, based upon what is involved in understanding a language, designed to undermine realism about the meaning possessed by certain sentences of natural language.377 The purported upshot of the argument, which will not be repeated here, is that truth cannot, as realism requires, transcend the recognition of truth. Dummett suggests instead that we might do better to adopt a verificationist or assertibilityconditions theory of meaning, thus relinquishing (as he thinks) realism about the subject matter of the relevant statements. We already saw in Section II that there must be some limit on such a general argument, since the antirealisms to which it leads are jointly incompatible. But if the thesis of the present paper is correct, then, at least in respect of M- and P-statements, a realist interpretation of their subject matter is obligatory, and so a verificationist theory of meaning according to which the content of these statements reduces to the content of some suitable set of E- and B-statements cannot be acceptable. So I think that the considerations here adduced constitute a direct demonstration, not predicated on any particular theory of language mastery, that some. sort of truth- conditions theory, as opposed to a Dummettian verification-conditions theory, has to be right.

377

See especially ‘What Is a Theory of Meaning? (ii)’, in Truth and Meaning. . I have criticized the argument in ‘Truth and Use’ (1979); repr. as ch. 11 in this volume; that paper and the present one may be read in tandem.

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Our considerations also bear upon another theme of Dummett's. He insists that the semantic theorist produce some account of how his favoured meaning assignments to sentences are manifested in the use. a speaker makes of his sentences. This translates in the present case into a demand to specify in what way the phenomenalist or behaviourist differs from the realist in his employment of M- and P-sentences. What we have already said about what makes a person a realist suggests the outlines of an answer. Aside from commitment to bivalence for M- and P-sentences, which is plausibly necessary but not (I have suggested) sufficient for realism, the realist may be said to differ from the anti- realist precisely in his acknowledging the logical independence I have made so much of—he will assent to E- and B-statements without automatically assenting to the corresponding M- and P-statements, and vice versa—and he will employ the latter types of statement in a practice of explaining the former, as well as accept causal statements of the kinds I identified earlier. Given knowledge of such linguistic dispositions, the radical interpreter will be empirically warranted in construing his speaker as a realist about M- and P-statements. Taken together, these two points—the direct metaphysical argument for realism and the proposed manifestation conditions for a realist semantics—seem to me to add up to a. way of confronting and deflecting Dummett's general line of argument.

VII A discursive argument unbacked by an intuitive picture seldom convinces. I hasten in conclusion, then, to place the argument of this paper in some sort of overall perspective; what follow are some more or less impressionistic gestures in that direction. Our comprehensive realist conception of empirical reality is of an objective spatio-temporal world whose intrinsic nature is independent of the local and relative peculiarities of the conscious beings that form a part of it.378 We think of objective reality as causing changes in the course of experience undergone by these beings, notably in perception; and of changes in objective reality as being occasionally wrought by the actions and movements of these beings, as a causal result of mental states and events within them. Neither sector of reality—external or internal—is a closed system; they interact in various ways. Our picture of the world is in this way fundamentally dualistic (which is not to say Cartesian). This dualism exhibits a certain categorial difference which may be characterized as follows. The external world of material bodies and events has the characteristic of objectivity.; that is, it is to be conceived in an absolute way, as not owing its intrinsic nature to the relative

378

Cf. Bernard Williams's discussion of the ‘absolute conception’ of the world in Descartes.: The Project of Pure Enquiry. (New York: Penguin Books, 1978) , and Dummett on ‘absolute and relative forms of description’ in ‘Common Sense and Physics’.

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and subjective sensory modalities and conscious experience of the sentient beings that inhabit it. To conceive it aright, therefore, one needs somehow to prescind from one's subjective and local standpoint and aspire to what might be called an ‘absolute’ conception of the objective. By contrast, the internal mental world is distinctively subjective., and so, to grasp how it is for a conscious being, one needs to project oneself imaginatively into his subjective position, to ask what it is like for that. being.379 Rather than attempt to prescind from the subjective, one needs precisely to recognize the relativity of mental facts to a particular standpoint. The two kinds of fact—corresponding to M- and Pstatements—are thus categorially different: one sort of fact is essentially observer-independent, the other essentially observer-dependent. To put it yet another way, a proper comprehension of the objective external world requires a distinction between appearance and reality; but to understand the region of subjective reality—how it is consciously for a being—appearance is all; we are here interested precisely in how things seem.. If these rough and intuitive remarks have verisimilitude, it is not hard to explain why it is that phenomenalism and behaviourism should seem to the realist so rebarbative to reason: for phenomenalism represents a refusal to register the objectivity of the material world, since the materials it allows itself—viz. experiences—have the effect of assimilating its essential character to the subjective; whereas behaviourism for its part tries to assimilate subjectivity to objective and publicly accessible behavioural facts, and so fails to do justice to what the realist takes to be distinctive of the mental realm.380 Phenomenalism is objectionably anthropocentric; behaviourism is objectionably non-anthropocentric. These reflections help us appreciate better, I think, why realism about one area ineluctably brings realism about the other: it stems partly from the fact that our conception of the objective world is founded upon a contrast with how things subjectively seem. to us or to other creatures—independence and this notion of objectivity are thus two sides of the same coin, which is why the behaviourist reduction of E-statements was inadequate to capture the realist conception of M-statements; whereas, symmetrically, our notion of the subjective world is defined by a contrast with the objective—independence from behaviour and this notion of subjectivity are thus intimately related, which is

379

I rely here upon Thomas Nagel's ‘What is it like to be a Bat?’, Philosophical Review., 83/4 (Oct. 1974), 435–50 .

380

A large question raised by this sort of objection to behaviourism concerns whether physicalism is equally cast into doubt by it. Though I cannot discuss this issue here, I think that we should take a different view of the two cases. My reason, roughly stated, is that if an organism is in the same internal physical state as another for which there is something it is subjectively like to be that organism, then there is something it is like—the very same thing—to be that first organism; but it is not true that the subjective is similarly supervenient on the behavioural. To put it another way, corresponding physical make-up gives organisms the same range of accessible subjective viewpoints, but corresponding behaviour does not. Not all versions of physicalism need to deny the subjective; reductive behaviourism, it would seem, is another matter. But clearly the question requires further investigation.

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(in part) why the phenomenalist reduction of B-statements was inadequate to capture the content of a realist view of Pstatements. It is interesting also to observe that the assertibility conditions for M- and P-statements invert the categories that define their truth conditions: I mean that subjective experiences comprise the assertibility conditions for objective M-statements, while (at least for other-ascriptions) objective items of behaviour comprise the assertibility conditions for subjective P-statements. It is no surprise, therefore, to find that affirming realism about one area in terms of independence from assertibility conditions should place us squarely in the other area, and that the respective assertibility conditions should resist reduction to facts of the opposite category.381 What is more, it seems to me hardly to be doubted that E- and B- statements play a unique role in our assertion of M- and P-statements, a role which may be characterized by saying that it is an a priori truth that E- and B- statements constitute assertibility conditions for Mand P-statements: that is, that these classes of statements are related in this way is not something we know merely empirically, but is such that it is part of the sense. of M- and P-statements that E- and B-statements comprise assertibility classes for those statements. These assertibility conditions may be contrasted in this respect with (say) statements about the micro-structural properties of material bodies and statements about conditions in a person's nervous system. We can readily conceive of coming to learn empirically that such statements can function as assertibility conditions for ordinary material-object statements and mental attributions, but plainly knowing this to be so is not built into understanding the sense. of M- and P-statements; it could not be, since we understood those sentences before we knew of molecules and neurons. Clearly such empirically discovered assertibility conditions cannot play the same role in shaping our understanding of M- and P-sentences as does a grasp of their semantic relation to Eand B- statements.382 It is this fact, perhaps, that captures the element of truth in phenomenalism and behaviourism; but this alone.

Postscript to ‘An a Priori Argument for Realism’ The argument of this paper is intricate and difficult to follow on a single reading. It certainly took some sweat to figure out. I was actually quite surprised

381

Recall the discussion of reductively reformulated independence in Section II.

382

This difference seems to correspond to one aspect of Wittgenstein's distinction between symptoms and criteria; see The Blue and Brown Books. (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 24–5 . Notice that I claim (pace. Wittgenstein) an a priori evidential relation only between the classes. of statements, not between individual statements in those classes. A closely allied point about behaviour and the mental occurs in my ‘Mental States, Natural Kinds and Psychophysical Laws’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society., suppl. vol. (1978), 195–220, § 6 .

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when the Journal of Philosophy. accepted it for publication without any revisions or questions, thinking they might find it too opaque and ambitious. Re-reading it recalls the state of mental strain in which it was composed. It may help, then, if I try to give an intuitive restatement of the nerve of the argument. I begin by formulating realism about the external world as the thesis that material objects are logically independent of the perceptual experiences that afford grounds for making assertions about those objects. Notice that this implies that it is possible to know truths about experiences without thereby knowing any truths about material objects. Now conjoin behaviourism (anti- realism about the mind) with this kind of realism about the external world. That doctrine implies that experiences can be analysed in terms of behaviour—that experiential propositions are synonymous with behavioural propositions. But that implies that in knowing an experiential proposition you thereby know a behavioural proposition—and these are a subclass of material-object statement. But then the epistemic gap between experience and material objects gets closed at this point, so that propositions about material objects become knowable as directly as propositions about experience. But the existence of a gap here is what defines realism about the external world; so it is no longer possible to assert realism in this area. Hence we cannot consistently combine realism about the external world with anti-realism about the mind. Put simply, if Ryle were right then we could know facts about the external world (our bodies) just by knowing what we experience; but then there would be no logical gap between experience and the external world, so that realism becomes unformulable. The same kind of problem afflicts phenomenalism conjoined with realism about the mind. Realism about the mind depends upon the logical independence of mental statements and behavioural statements, but if phenomenalism is true behavioural statements translate into statements about experience, so that we lose the epistemic gap between mind and behaviour that is definitive of realism about the mind. Put simply, if Ayer were right then we could know facts about minds just by knowing behavioural facts, since these are equivalent to facts about the course of someone's experience; but then we lose the epistemic gap that gave us mental realism. It follows that we have to be realists in both areas (granted the more obvious point that we can't be anti-realists in both). This is an extraordinarily strong conclusion, showing (if correct) that phenomenalism is false and. behaviourism is false—less because of the details of the analyses they propose than for reasons of global coherence. Behaviourism requires realism about material objects, since anti-realism about material objects is inconsistent with behaviourism; but realism about material objects requires that behaviourism be false; so behaviourism is false. Behaviourism thus entails its own falsity. On the other hand, phenomenalism requires realism about the mind, since anti-realism about the mind (behaviourism) is inconsistent with phenomenalism; but realism about the mind requires that

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phenomenalism be false, since it requires that behavioural statements not imply mental statements; so phenomenalism is false. Phenomenalism thus entails its own falsity. Putting the two arguments together, we have the result that mind cannot be reduced to behaviour and material objects cannot be reduced to experiences (‘sense-data’). If this argument is correct, then we know in advance that any argument (such as Dummett's) that purports to establish anti-realism in either of these two areas has to be unsound. This doesn't tell us where any such argument goes wrong, but it constitutes a proof that there must be a mistake somewhere. One would therefore think it imperative for those who advance such arguments to expose the error in this argument for global realism—but I cannot say that there has been much of an effort in this direction. And I, at least, have been unable to find the flaw in my argument. To be sure, the argument is rather complex and hard to take in; I hope my reformulation of it here helps to make it more accessible—and hence open to refutation, if refutable it is.

13 Two Notions of Realism? In this paper I want to ventilate some misgivings I have about Michael Dummett's preferred characterization of realism and anti-realism.383 According to Dummett, the dispute between a realist and an anti-realist, with respect to a given class of statements, concerns what notion of truth is deemed appropriate to the statements in question—that is, what properties these contrasting positions ascribe to the notion of truth for the given class. A characteristic formulation from Dummett is the following: The primary tenet of realism, as applied to some given class of statements, is that each statement in the class is determined as true or not true, independently of our knowledge, by some objective reality whose existence and constitution is, again, independent of our knowledge. A realistic view of the past, for example, involves that the truth of a statement about the past does not depend upon whether there exist, in the present, any traces of the past state of affairs that would enable us to recognize it as true: if it is true, it is rendered true by what lies in the past, by how things were at the time to which it relates; and, since the past is determinate, it must either render the statement true or fail to do so.384 Inspection of this passage (and others like it) in search of the distinctive notions of truth adopted by realist and antirealist turns up, on the face of it, two distinct properties: there is the property of being epistemic., and there is the property of being determinate.. For truth to be epistemic is (roughly) for it to be applicable to a statement S. only if S. is in practice or in principle verifiable by us; and similarly for falsity. For truth to be determinate is (again roughly) for the statements to which it applies to be susceptible of a classical two-valued semantics; that is, bivalence holds. These two properties appear quite distinct and not mutually entailing: why should a notion of truth which is epistemic also be indeterminate (non-bivalent), and why should the converse hold? But if these properties are indeed inequivalent, then it seems that Dummett is tacitly operating with two notions of realism and anti-realism; and the question then

383

I shall concentrate upon Dummett's most recent discussion of the matter, ‘Realism’, ch. 20 of The Interpretation of Frege's Philosophy. (London: Duckworth, 1981); but see also Truth and Other Enigmas. (London: Duckworth, 1978) , passim. .

384

‘Realism’, 434.

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arises as to whether the two properties always go together, and whether both are legitimate characterizations of a realist/anti-realist opposition. In what follows I shall inquire whether an epistemic notion of truth is always a nonbivalent notion, and whether any anti-realist rejection of bivalence must imply or assume an epistemic notion of truth. The question of the equivalence of the two properties is relevant, not just to the metaphysical content of a realist or anti-realist view of truth, but also to the conceptions of meaning and of logic generated by the contrasting notions of truth. Granted the intimate connection between meaning and truth conditions, an anti-realist will be advancing a certain view of what it is to grasp the meaning of a sentence: if his anti-realism consists in adopting an epistemic notion of truth, then grasp of meaning will be a matter of knowing which evidential conditions warrant assertion of the sentence; but if the anti-realism consists in rejecting bivalence, and so in conceiving the subject matter of the sentences concerned as not fully determinate, then grasp of meaning will involve knowing which statements are to be taken as corresponding to a determinate reality. The consequences for logic will likewise differ according as truth is ascribed one or the other of these properties: if truth is epistemic, then the law of bivalence will be apt to assume a probabilistic form, on condition that all the statements in question are in principle assertible with a certain (non-zero) probability; but if truth value is indeterminate in some cases, then bivalence will be simply incorrect, and any logic presupposing it will rest upon faulty semantical foundations.385 In the light of these different repercussions of ascribing the two properties to the notion of truth, it is important to keep track of which property is being affirmed or questioned in any particular dispute. So: is the determinateness of truth sufficient for it to be non-epistemic; contrapositively, is it sufficient for truth to be non-bivalent that it is epistemic? Well, it is far from obvious that the very idea. that truth is constituted by the recognition of truth itself contains the thought that truth may fail of determinacy: for it seems neither analytic nor necessary that our ability to recognize the truth in some area should be incomplete; and if we were able to settle the truth value of any statement of some class for which our notion of truth is epistemic, then bivalence would not be infringed. Typically, of course, we do lack such a complete verification procedure for (interesting) classes of statements; but this does not present itself as a conceptually necessary truth. Consider the case of a simple sentient organism, capable of only a small range of sensations, whose behaviour is reliably and differentially correlated with the occurrence of those sensations: it moves towards things that make it feel warm, away from things that cause it pain, and so forth. Suppose we know the

385

I discuss the different implications for logic of different anti-realist notions of truth in ‘Realist Semantics and Content-Ascription’, (1982); repr. as ch. 14 in this volume.

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correlations between behaviour and sensation, so that we are always able to settle the truth value of any statement ascribing a sensation to this (kind of) organism. Now if we held the anti-realist thesis that the truth conditions of sensation statements for this organism consist in the conditions under which we recognize their truth, that is, in behaviour, then bivalence would not be called into question, because of the completeness of the verification procedure we associate with this class of statements. Or suppose the world were such that all past states of affairs left some evidential trace on the present, enabling us (in principle) to decide any question about the past (and who is to say that this is not actually the case?). Then equating the truth of a past-tense statement with the obtaining of present traces would not lead to the abandonment of bivalence—every past-tense statement would have a determinate truth-value. In both these cases, the anti-realist's epistemic notion of truth clearly diverges from that of the realist, yet both sides agree that every statement is determinately true or not true; one can hold that every statement of a given class is recognizable as true when it is true, but demur from the claim that being true is constituted. by being recognized to be true. Moreover, it would be wrong to say that in such cases we are committed to holding both. an anti-realist and a realist position; for the acceptance of bivalence which follows upon an epistemic notion of truth combined with a complete verification procedure is not plausibly characterized as realist in motivation or upshot. It is the epistemic notion of truth that qualifies a position as anti-realist, however it may be with bivalence.386 To the insufficiency claim just made it may be retorted that the bivalence condition has not been correctly formulated: we should require for a realist interpretation, not just that bivalence actually hold, but that it hold necessarily.. For then an epistemic notion of truth will not be compatible with the necessary obtaining of bivalence, since it is only contingent that we possess a complete verification procedure when we do. Go back to the examples of the simple organism and the presently represented past: one who holds that truth for the statements in question consists in the availability of evidence for their

386

Dummett himself gives (what he takes to be) a counter-example to the sufficiency of acceptance of bivalence as a criterion for realism, which prompts him to suggest adherence to a straightforward two-valued semantics as a better criterion. This is the case of a ‘neutralist’ about the future who combines bivalence with a notion of truth which is relative to a possible continuation of history; see ‘Realism’, 437. Dummett supposes that such a neutralist is an anti-realist about the future, despite the latter's attachment to bivalence. However, the case seems to me to be underdescribed. If the neutralist is simply taken to deny determinism, and so to hold that there are many open possibilities regarding future courses of events, then it is not clear to me that this view qualifies as intuitively anti-realist—to hold that the future is open is not eo ipso. to hold that it is not real. But if (what Dummett does not say) the grounds. for such neutralism involve the doctrine that future truth consists in the present evidence we have, where this evidence does not fix a unique continuation of history, then I think we are indeed in the presence of an anti-realist about the future. This case will then be of the same general kind as those I have considered; but my cases cannot be dealt with by Dummett's revised criterion.

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assertion cannot (it would seem) agree that each statement must. have a determinate truth-value, since it is not plausible that the availability of deciding evidence is non-contingent.387 So the realist holds that bivalence applies necessarily, whereas the anti-realist's epistemic notion of truth does not seem to permit bivalence thus modalized: the anti-realist cannot allow that bivalence would. hold even if our epistemic situation had been different, as the realist characteristically does. However, I do not think that necessary bivalence is always. incompatible with an epistemic notion of truth. In the case of certain first-person psychological statements, it is plausible that truth does necessitate the recognition of truth. If this is so, then the anti-realist thesis that truth for these statements consists in the recognition of truth will not conflict will the requirement that every statement must. have a determinate truth-value. The class of statements to which I am here alluding comprises those that report what are sometimes called ‘self-intimating’ mental states—sensations and occurrent thoughts, for instance. When the corresponding statements are true they are necessarily recognized to be true (at least according to a respectable philosophical tradition); so it will not be contingent that bivalence holds under an epistemic conception of their. truth. Someone might object to this case on the ground that there can be no divergence between a realist and an anti-realist interpretation of such statements once first-person knowledge is reckoned to their assertibility conditions; so it is not clear that we have a case which is anti-realist by the epistemic criterion and yet meets the realist's (putative) requirement of necessary bivalence. It is true enough, I think, that truth and the recognition of truth do not come apart for the realist in this case, as much as for the anti-realist; but it seems to me that the two views are nevertheless distinguished by the different conceptions they have of why this is so. The antirealist holds that the truth of a psychological statement of this kind is actually constituted. by the subject's recognition of its truth, in such a way that it has no content beyond that of a statement recording recognition of its truth. But the realist views the matter differently: he thinks that the recognitional judgement is a consequence. of the truth of what is recognized. Since these seem distinct conceptions of the relation between a self-intimating mental state and the subject's recognition of it, we still have a contrast between realist and anti-realist; and so we seem forced to acknowledge a class of statements for which an epistemic notion of truth is combinable with the admission of necessary bivalence. The general lesson I would draw from the preceding considerations is that the epistemic property of truth is prepotent over the determinateness property

387

We can take this to mean either that we do not have the recognitional capacities required to register the evidence or that the evidence itself does not exist. The former interpretation makes the contingency claim rather less problematic than the latter; for the latter requires the abrogation of what may be basic laws of nature. Of course if, in these cases, truth and evidence could not be pulled apart, the modal formulation would not serve to get around the original problem.

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in classifying a notion of truth as realist or anti-realist: for it is sufficient to qualify a view as anti-realist that it adopt an epistemic notion of truth, but it is doubtful that one has to reject bivalence in order to be an anti-realist. Let us now consider the converse question: is the determinateness of truth necessary. for it to be non-epistemic; equivalently, is any departure from classical two-valued semantics sufficient to indicate an epistemic notion of truth? Here we need to distinguish two questions: (i) Is the rejection of bivalence sufficient to make for anti-realism? (ii) In the cases in which rejecting bivalence does signal anti-realism, does this always take the form of adopting an epistemic notion of truth? If the answer to (ii) is No, then we will have to acknowledge two notions of realism and anti-realism. As to question (i), it seems to me obvious that not all rejections of classical two-valued semantics imply, or are prompted by, anti-realist convictions. Consider empty singular terms and vague predicates, expressions which have been taken to call for rejection of classical bivalence in giving a semantic account of sentences containing them. On a Strawsonian view of empty terms, sentences in which they occur produce truth-value gaps; classical two-valued semantics accordingly fails to provide a correct account of their meaning. Vague expressions violate bivalence in a different way: an adequate account of the semantics of sentences in which they occur needs to recognize (at least on received treatments) truth values other than, or intermediate between, classical truth and falsity; the truth value of a vague sentence is precisely indeterminate. Indeed, in the case of vagueness acknowledgement of irreducible indeterminacy of truth value seems essential to adopting a realist. view of vague predicates. If a vague predication could always be non-arbitrarily sharpened so as to eliminate vagueness, then it would be implausible that vague predicates succeeded in picking out genuine vagueness in the world (i.e. intrinsically vague properties). In neither of these cases would it be reasonable to suggest that a departure from classical semantics signalled a genuine deviation from realism; and plainly, the rationale for rejecting bivalence in these cases has nothing to do with adopting an epistemic notion of truth for the sentences at issue. Evidently we need some principle with which to distinguish between anti-realist and other rejections of bivalence; the bare information that someone does not accept bivalence for some range of sentences tells us nothing, on its own, about his attitude towards a realist view of those sentences. Fortunately, however, it seems to me not difficult to exclude the cases of empty terms and vague predicates from the category of anti-realist rejections of bivalence. The natural restriction for Strawsonian truth-value gaps is simply the requirement that the sentences for which bivalence is rejected should succeed in expressing complete propositions; for the Strawsonian view is that no statement is made, no proposition expressed, by sentences in which empty terms occur. So to reject bivalence for these sentences is not to hold that there are any statements. which fail to be determinately true or false. Discerning truth-value gaps in semantically defective sentences. does not qualify

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as recommending an alternative anti-realist account of the content of genuine assertions. The case of vagueness invites a different response; it is true that vague statements correspond to no determinate. reality, but this is not at all to say that they correspond to no objective. reality. There is, on a realist view, some objective ‘fact of the matter’ as to the truth value of a vague statement; it is just that this fact does not have sharp boundaries. This conception of the truth conditions of vague statements goes naturally with the idea that a proper semantics for them will employ a notion of degrees of truth, and the apparatus of degrees of truth plainly does not involve accepting that vague statements may fail to have a truth value. That truth has degrees does not imply that it has gaps. Intuitively, then, there is always something in the world in virtue of which a vague statement has some truth value; but this is to reject what an anti-realist characteristically holds, namely that there is no fact of the matter about the truth value of certain statements. In making these qualifications to the bare bivalence formulation of realism and anti-realism we are, admittedly, lapsing from the ideal of a purely formal. characterization of the distinction; but, as we shall see more fully below, this is not an ideal we can hope to live up to.388 The interesting question, though, is whether only. an epistemic notion of truth can give rise to an authentically antirealist rejection of bivalence. Taking a lead from what we just said about vagueness, this question may be taken to ask the following: does the anti-realist denial that there is always a fact of the matter with respect to any statement of a given class invariably issue from an assumed epistemic notion of truth? Certainly the denial of determinateness may. issue from adopting an epistemic notion of truth, since generally our capacity to recognize truth does not extend to every statement of some given class; and clearly these grounds for rejecting bivalence are of an anti-realist character. In order to determine whether these are the only grounds for denying

388

Dummett does, in fact, discuss the cases of empty terms and vague predicates in ‘Realism’, 439 f. I find his attitude to both cases unsatisfactory. He seems prepared to acknowledge that Strawsonian truth-value gaps involve a species of anti-realism, viz. rejection of an ontology of Meinongian objects. But this strikes me as very odd: should we then say that someone who accepts, on general logico-linguistic grounds, Russell's theory of descriptions, which abolishes apparent truth-value gaps, is evincing a realist or an anti-realist philosophy? At best Dummett is stretching the notion of anti-realism in a way that undermines the interest of the classification; better to declare the case exempt through failure to qualify as genuine statements, or have recourse to the less formal notion of an anti-realist rejection of bivalence that I develop below. In the case of vagueness, Dummett concludes that realism with respect to vague predicates ‘has more affinity with various forms of anti-realism than it does with the corresponding forms of realism, in that it allows that reality may be in certain respects indeterminate; it is for this reason a signally untypical case’ (pp. 440–1). But the fact is that vagueness is a straight counter-example to Dummett's official criterion of realism, and so he owes us some constructive response to it; the kind of response I advocate does not seem contemplated by him. I think that Dummett's troubles in both cases stem from a misguided (if commendable) desire to provide a crisp logical formulation of the realist/antirealist dispute, but it seems to me that we must resort to more discursive formulations.

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determinateness which count as anti-realist, let us briefly consider the following cases: statements of personal identity, ethical statements, Quinean theories of radical interpretation, and mathematical statements. In the case of personal identity, it is often urged that there are actual or possible situations in which it is simply indeterminate whether we should say that we have the same or a different person: for example, a case in which A's brain is transplanted into the body of B while the personality of B is programmed into the transplanted brain. In such cases it is supposed that our concept of the self is incompetent to decide the matter; the concept does not succeed in picking out a class of entities that are well defined in respect of identity conditions for any possible situation. In response to cases of this kind some have wanted to suggest that personal identity cannot be understood as an all-ornothing matter; we can resolve the indeterminate cases only by arbitrary fiat, not by seeking further information about the case. Now it is very natural to interpret this type of view as a kind of anti-realism about the self, or at least as encouraging such an anti-realist view. We uncritically supposed that there was always a hard fact about personal identity, that the self is the kind of entity which either determinately exists or fails to exist; but we have been brought to see (according to the view under consideration) that it is not so: rather, we should think of personal identity as consisting in various relations which can hold to varying degrees, and which may give rise to intrinsically indeterminate cases.389 Thus broadly Humean views of the self count as anti-realist, and a consequence of such views is that there is not always a determinate fact of the matter about personal identity; bivalence may accordingly be rejected for this class of statements. But is this intuitively anti-realist rejection of bivalence occasioned by a prior commitment to an epistemic notion of truth for statements about the self? It is not at all obvious that it is so occasioned—as may be seen from the fact that one who took such a view might also consistently hold that there are statements of personal identity which are. determinately true or false yet whose truth value we cannot determine. That is to say, someone might hold, for anti-realist reasons, that not all statements of personal identity have determinate truth-value, but insist nevertheless that truth for such statements is not epistemic—there are truths about personal identity which are not guaranteed to be recognizable by us. In other words, truths about the self manage to exceed our powers of verification before such statements cease being determinate. If this is so, then it is possible to be a realist about personal identity as judged by the epistemic criterion, but an anti-realist as judged by the indeterminacy criterion. The only way to dispute this conclusion would be to claim that, contrary to initial appearances, it is an epistemic notion of truth which

389

I am thinking of views like that of Derek Parfit: see his ‘Personal Identity’, Philosophical Review., 80/1 (Jan. 1971), 3–27 . Thomas Reid, by contrast, would rate as a realist about the self.

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underlies the anti-realist reaction to the problematic cases of personal identity; but I think this would take some demonstrating. In ethics there also arise questions about which it is natural to feel that there is no determinate fact of the matter—whether it is wrong to kill a foetus at a certain stage of development, what duties we owe to unborn generations, whether the lives of ten monkeys count for more than that of a single severely abnormal human being, and so forth. Someone reflecting on such questions may come to think that his inability to answer them springs, not from any epistemic limitation he suffers, but rather from the inherent indeterminateness of the ethical truth. He might accordingly hold that this is because our ethical concepts and practices have just not been designed to deal with these out of the way cases: morality is a human invention and provision has not been made for every ethical question we can coherently formulate. Thus an anti-realist view of ethics—the idea that ethical truth has its roots in human practice, not in a prior objective reality which we more or less dimly perceive—may prompt, or be prompted by, the belief that certain ethical questions have no determinate answer: bivalence does not apply to every ethical proposition. But, again, it is unclear that this. anti-realist rejection of bivalence must imply that ethical truth cannot be recognition-transcendent; for it seems consistent to hold, at the same time, that there are also some ethical truths which we are not equipped to know. That is: there are the ethical truths that we are equipped to know, those that transcend our ability to know them, and then again those ethical statements which are simply not to be accorded a definite truth-value. The apparent consistency of this view of ethics again suggests that there are two notions of realism at issue here, and that it is possible to be a realist of one sort but not of the other sort. Quinean indeterminacy of translation looks like a paradigm of an anti-realist view.390 For Quine's thesis concerning statements reporting a person's beliefs and meanings is precisely that there is not (always) a fact of the matter as to their truth value. Now in some of Quine's formulations the indeterminacy in the subject matter of statements about mind and meaning does seem to spring from adoption of an epistemic notion of truth. Quine first persuades us that the truth of such statements cannot be settled on the basis of the behavioural evidence by which we recognize their truth, and then concludes that there can be no determinate truth about mind and meaning which is not determined by the behavioural evidence; and this is, in effect, an anti-realist rejection of bivalence on the strength of an epistemic notion of truth for mentalistic statements. But there is also a logically independent strain in Quine's indeterminacy thesis, stemming from the idea that intensional entities have no clear identity criteria. There is no fact of the matter about what a person believes and means

390

For a particularly clear statement see Quine's ‘Facts of the Matter’, in Robert W. Shahan and Chris Swoyer (eds.), Essays on the Philosophy of W. V. Quine., (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978) .

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because we cannot supply proper identity conditions for the intensional entities thus introduced.391 Now this. ground for asserting indeterminacy also seems anti-realist in force. We uncritically supposed there to be a well-defined objective fact of the matter about the contents of a person's mind, but it turns out (Quine suggests) that no clear account can be given of what this supposed reality consists in—in particular, there is no saying when it is in one state rather than another. Since this source of anti-realism is notionally distinct from the other epistemic source, we can imagine a view which accepts the former source while not sympathizing with the latter. This view involves an antirealist rejection of bivalence which does not presuppose an epistemic notion of truth. We might then say that Quine is doubly anti-realist about the intensional, since he rejects determinateness on epistemic grounds as well as on grounds of illdefinedness. The case of mathematics is closest to Dummett's concerns, and here I think he actually gives inequivalent formulations of the anti-realist position which bear out the point I am making. The epistemic formulation says that mathematical truth consists in the availability of proof, so that bivalence will fail for unprovable statements. But there is also the constructivist formulation which says that we create. mathematical reality—mathematical objects and structures ‘come into being as we probe’.392 Now it is clear enough that the verification-bound conception of mathematical truth does not entail the constructivist thesis about mathematical existence; just consider the parallel cases of phenomenalism and behaviourism. But it also seems to me that constructivist anti-realism is compatible with acknowledgement of recognition-transcendence for certain mathematical truths. The idea that mathematical reality is created by us leads naturally to rejection of bivalence, because our creative acts might not have generated a reality complete and determinate enough to settle the truth value of every statement of a given mathematical theory; but it is not obvious

391

Thus it is, for Quine, the irremediable unclarity of the synonymy relation that (in part) underlies the indeterminacy of translation; this unclarity prevents us making good sense of a claim of correct translation. In ‘Facts of the Matter’ Quine also emphasizes the connection between physicalism and indeterminacy: ‘I speak as a physicalist in saying there is no fact of the matter. I mean that both manuals of translation are compatible with the fulfillment of just the same elementary physical states by space-time regions’ (p. 167). This reason for anti-realism of the indeterminacy variety is plainly distinct from insistence upon an epistemic notion of truth for the statements in question: to say that there can be no fact which fails to correspond to a physical fact is obviously not to say that all facts are intrinsically epistemically accessible to us, i.e. knowledgedependent.

392

The phrase is Dummett's, from ‘Truth’, in Truth and Other Engimas. , 18. In the ‘Preface’ to that work Dummett explains (p. xxix) that this image is intended to go with the idea that (mathematical) reality is not ‘fully determinate’. But he does not remark upon the seeming distinctness of this conception from his usual formulation in terms of proof-bound truth; perhaps he is simply assuming the means of construction to consist in the production of proofs. If so, I would point out the possibility of a constructivist anti-realism which did not carry this assumption; which is enough to show that there are anti-realisms that reject bivalence on grounds independent of an epistemic notion of truth.

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that this rejection comes from embracing a proof-bound notion of mathematical truth. For why should it be ruled out that mathematical activity might bring structures into existence whose properties are not guaranteed to be open to proof? As an analogy, consider the case of fiction. Fictional reality is created or constructed by the activity of the author, and so bivalence will fail at just the places where the author has failed to invest this creations with determinate properties; but it does not follow that there are no truths about ‘the world of fiction’ which neither we nor the author can ascertain. One way in which an author may bring fictional entities into being which have verification-transcendent properties might be this: the characteristics the author confers upon his creations have their basis in his unconscious mind (as is sometimes said of certain plays of Shakespeare); and since the contents of the unconscious are not guaranteed to be accessible, the characteristics of the created fictional entities will themselves elude our (and the author's) recognitional powers. So here is a way in which one may be a constructivist about a class of statements and yet hold that truth is non-epistemic with respect to that class. It would, of course, be bizarre to suggest that a similar explanation could be given of how mathematical truth might be constructed though proof-transcendent; but it does not seem absurd to suppose that it was Cantor who brought transfinite numbers into being at a certain point in mathematical history, but that once he had done so their properties were not guaranteed to be susceptible of proof. For it is surely not an analytic or necessary truth that what is created is totally epistemically transparent. I think, then, that a constructivist and an epistemic rejection of bivalence are not necessarily extensionally equivalent, and that they are conceptually distinct kinds of mathematical anti-realism—the failure of determinate truth-value they envisage has a quite different rationale in the two cases. And since, as we have seen, the bare rejection of bivalence is not sufficient to define a view as anti-realist—since, that is, we need to consider the reasons. for such rejection—it looks as if we are compelled to acknowledge two notions of realism and anti-realism. So the conclusion to be drawn from the considerations of this paper is that Dummett is tacitly operating with two notions of realism: there is the epistemic notion, which sometimes but not invariably leads to rejection of bivalence on the part of the anti-realist; and there also seems to be a non-epistemic notion, which employs the idea of the existence of a ‘fact of the matter’—this not being directly explicable in terms of the acceptance or rejection of classical twovalued semantics. The former notion indisputably merits the title ‘anti-realist’, since it has the effect of cutting the world down to what may be comprehended by our powers of verification; the latter notion may also be reasonably described in terms of realism and anti-realism, but it is important to see that it has a quite different purport. It might, indeed, be better to restrict the labels ‘realism’ and ‘anti-realism’ to theses formulated in the former epistemic way, and designate issues of the latter kind with some different pair of terms—perhaps as the

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dispute between advocates of ‘determinateness’ and ‘anti-determinateness’. It might, just conceivably, be even better to drop such overarching labels altogether, and simply examine each case in the form in which it presents itself.

Postscript to ‘Two Notions of Realism?’ Dummett's discussions of realism held out two promises: that we might be able to unify the disparate philosophical debates in which the word ‘realism’ is apt to figure; and that we might be able to formulate a crisp logico-linguistic criterion for a vew's counting as realist or not. Dummett supposed that there is an interestingly uniform philosophical tendency associated with the word ‘realism’, and that this tendency can be understood in terms of the applicability of a certain logical principle, viz. the law of bivalence. I argue in this paper that neither of these promises can be fulfilled, at least in the way that Dummett suggests; in particular, mere bivalence is a hopelessly crude tool with which to capture the intuitive notion of realism. The best notion of realism consists in a claim of evidence-independence, which may or may not lead to a rejection of bivalence if denied. This is different from the standard idea of realism as claiming ‘mind independence’—which has the obvious problem of precluding realism about the mind. And once we have the idea of a class of truths admitted to transcend the evidence for their assertion, we can define the more general idea of a class of truths which poses epistemological problems—and thus include areas in which transcending the evidence seems the wrong model, for example, ethical values or modal facts. The result, however, is highly non-crisp and open to dispute about what counts as epistemologically problematic. By no stretch of the imagination can such a characterization aspire to logical purity, so there is no nice formalization of the notion of realism in the offing once we go in this direction. Certainly, the idea of realism as defined by the logical laws it accepts is no longer viable. This may seem like a relatively local dispute about how to define a philosophical term of art, but actually I think it carries more weight than that. During the 1970s there was a movement afoot to try to recast traditional philosophical debates in terms of the shining new concepts of philosophy of language and logic. The idea was that the inherited old mess could be cleared up by a more sophisticated philosophy of language, thus yielding sharper resolutions of traditional issues. The marked lack of progress in philosophy might indeed be overcome by means of a systematic theory of language. Thus it was claimed, notably by Dummett, that philosophy of language was the basic area of philosophy, with metaphysics to be erected upon its gratifyingly rigorous foundations. Hence the idea that realism equals bivalence, and the accompanying claim that if we could decide on the issue of bivalence, by undertaking

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a systematic theory of meaning, then we would have settled all the old metaphysical problems of realism. I was excited by this vision, as were many others, and so spent a lot of my early years in philosophy working on philosophy of language and logic. The present paper marks my disenchantment with this entire conception: realism cannot be formulated in the logicolinguistic style proposed by Dummett, and still less can it be evaluated by seeking the general form of a theory of meaning. Accordingly, philosophy of language, though clearly an important part of philosophy, is not the key to resolving metaphysical debates. The way to do metaphysics . . . is to do metaphysics.

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I We are disposed to assume that our sentences may possess conditions of truth transcending the conditions of assertibility which our recognitional capacities are capable of disclosing to us. This assumption is what is definitive of a realist. attitude toward the semantics of our language. Michael Dummett argues that realist semantics, so defined, is indefensible, because it fails to yield an ultimately satisfactory account of what mastery of a language consists in.394 My aim in this paper is to repel his attack on realism by questioning the theory of content-ascription underlying it; that is, I shall try to rebut his criticism of realist semantics by showing that it depends upon a conception of what it is that confers content upon sentences which need not and should not be accepted. My method will be to present (or rehearse) some cases which clearly expose the principles of content-ascription with which we operate: it will be apparent that these principles do not conform to the theory of content-ascription Dummett presupposes. Then I shall sketch the lineaments of the theory of content that lies behind the intuitions elicited by the present cases, arguing that it infringes no inviolable requirements on what sentence content may comprise. Dummett addresses himself exclusively to the meaning of sentences, but it seems clear that the issues he raises should have parallels in respect of the content of propositional attitudes. There are a number of reasons for this. First, the kinds of considerations he directs against a realist conception of sentence content have natural counterparts in application to thought content: essentially the same queries can be raised about that which determines the content of a propositional attitude. Secondly, one would expect that Dummett's theory of content-ascription should not prejudge the question of the relation between thought and language: we should be able to mount his attack in respect of the

393

I have profited from comments made on the ideas of this paper by members of a seminar at UCLA and from colleagues at Birkbeck College London.

394

See his ‘What is a Theory of Meaning? (ii)’, in G. Evans and J. McDowell (eds.), Truth and Meaning. (Oxford University Press, 1976 ), and Truth and Other Enigmas. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978 ). See also Crispin Wright, Wittgenstein on the Foundations of Mathematics. (London: Duckworth, 1980 ), esp. part Two.

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content of such thoughts as may be possessed by languageless creatures—so that the considerations he produces are not required to presuppose that the only handle we have on thought content is via the content of sentences. Thirdly, and connected, if thought content were not subject to the considerations in question, then the realist would be offered an easy way of undercutting Dummett's case against realist semantics: it would appear open to him to claim that our sentences express our thoughts and that Dummett has done nothing to show that they. cannot be ascribed recognitiontranscendent truth conditions. Fourthly, we should want to be able to apply Dummett's argument to the language of thought (if there is one): the content of internal sentences should be just as incapable of a realist semantics as sentences of the public language. Of course Dummett may in fact reject some of these ideas about the nature of thought, but I think his opposition to realist semantics should be independent of such rejection. So I shall take it that our topic is content-ascription in general; we want to know whether acceptable principles governing the ascription of content permit us to take a realist view of the content of our sentences and propositional attitudes. Dummett's fundamental contention, briefly stated, is that the practical abilities acquired by the language learner and manifested in his use of sentences consist in certain kinds of recognitional. capacities: specifically, capacities to respond appropriately to sentences (i.e. with acceptance or rejection) when confronted with what counts as evidence for or against the truth of the sentence in question. To specify such recognitional abilities we seem to need to advert only to the assertibility. conditions of sentences; the ascription of verification-transcendent truth conditions, by contrast, plays no role in characterizing the practical abilities acquired and manifested by speakers. But since the possession of such practical abilities must. be what linguistic understanding ultimately consists in, it looks indefensible to attribute to speakers grasp of transcendent truth conditions—for these are not implicated in the exercise of the abilities which constitute linguistic mastery. In sum, grasp of meaning can be nothing other than mastery of use, but use is a matter of recognizing and responding to assertibility conditions: truth conditions, however, are inherently unconnected with use, at least when they are verification-transcendent, and so cannot contribute to the determination of content. The operative principle here, plainly enough, is the idea that all that can warrant and determine content-ascriptions are the dispositions of speakers in respect of evidence: once these are captured no aspect of content can remain unaccounted for. With respect to propositional attitudes the idea will presumably be that content is exhausted by dispositions to judge when a propositional content is to be accepted into one's stock of beliefs. Let us label this idea the dispositional. conception of content, and let us note that the conditions for the manifestation of the capacities which underlie these dispositions are specified in terms of the evidential. confrontations which prompt the acknowledgement of truth. We can now inquire whether the

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dispositional conception, so understood, accounts for our practice of content-ascription.

II I shall present four cases designed to show that use, in Dummett's sense, does not exhaust content; the first two are intended to soften the reader up for the last two.

Case A. Consider what have come to be called Twin Earth cases.395 These are thought experiments in which a word (phonetically identified) has distinct referents in the language (or idiolect) of a pair of speakers whose criteria of identification for their respective referents do not serve to discriminate the referents. Thus Putnam introduced us to the case of ‘water’: on Earth this word designates water, the liquid with chemical composition H2O; on Twin Earth, however, ‘water’ refers to a distinct liquid, call it retaw, whose chemical composition is XYZ. This difference of designation, and hence contribution to truth conditions, is compatible, Putnam argued, with the supposition that speakers on Earth and Twin Earth possess no tests, observational or other, which would enable them to distinguish water from retaw. This is simply because their criteria of recognition are not sensitive to the individuating real essence of the liquids in question: they go by how things look and taste, but water and retaw look and taste the same. It is important to note that this type of case cannot be assimilated to the division of linguistic labour: we are to suppose that no one. in the language communities in question is in possession of differentiating criteria—we may even suppose that no one can. come to have such criteria (perhaps they are terrible scientists).396 Nor is the point dependent upon controversial essentialist theses about natural kinds: we could construct essentially the same kind of case for a particular individual, say a man, whose Twin Earth counterpart has the same criteria of identification. As Putnam puts it, we should say of such cases that the referential component of meaning is not determined by what is in the speaker's head. I should like to describe this case as follows: the linguistic dispositions of the speakers on Earth and Twin Earth do not discriminate between the truth conditions of their respective sentences containing ‘water’. Although ‘water’ contributes differently to truth conditions on Earth and Twin Earth, speakers

395

See Hilary Putnam, ‘The Meaning of “Meaning’ ”, in Mind, Language and Reality, Philosophical Papers., vol. ii (Cambridge University Press, 1975 ).

396

Pace. Dummett's ‘The Social Character of Meaning’, in Truth and Other Enigmas. . We can simply stipulate. that ‘gold’ shall designate the substance exemplified in a presented sample, and yet be unable to discover which. substance it is; all that is required is the possibility of ostensive reference-fixing. So it is not plausible to assimilate Twin Earth cases to a socialized Fregean theory of sense. Also, we do not want to end up claiming that linguistic understanding requires scientific omniscience.

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do not differ in their readiness to assent to their sentences under conditions of evidence; for the same. evidence, viz. facts about how the liquids look and taste, will prompt them to acknowledge the truth of sentences with different referential content. Speakers on Earth and Twin Earth thus acquire the same recognitional capacities and manifest them in the same conditions of evidence, but their sentences do not mean the same: they have the same assertibility conditions but different truth conditions. This is shown in the fact that their dispositions to use ‘water’ would be equally triggered by the appearance of the liquid referred to by their counterpart in the event of interplanetary travel. I think this case already shows that there is something wrong with Dummett's conception of content-ascription: for here we have a case in which agreement in use does not entail agreement in content.397 (And I would say the same about the content of their propositional attitudes: what they think on Twin Earth is not what we think, although they are disposed to think it under the same evidential circumstances.)398 My preliminary conclusion, therefore, is that if. you take to heart the lesson of Twin Earth cases, then you are committed to rejecting the general principle of contentascription upon which Dummett relies in his argument against realist semantics.

Case B. This case is less familiar and a bit more controversial. Let us suppose that on Twin Earth the word ‘water’ is in use but that it fails of reference: there is neither water nor retaw on Twin Earth, though speakers erroneously suppose there to be some liquid to which they refer with ‘water’. They believe this because (say) of some peculiarity in the atmosphere that makes it look as if a liquid with the same appearance as water were filling the lakes, etc., or because they are hallucinating in some systematic way. We suppose, in short, that it is with them just as it is with us when we speak of water, but that they speak of nothing: they have the same experiences as we do and employ ‘water’ in response to them just as we do—it is just that their term is empty. Given all this, it seems we must say that speakers on earth and twin earth associate the same assertibility conditions with sentences containing ‘water’, since they assent to them under the same experiential conditions. But

397

It may be thought that this conclusion could be escaped by characterizing use in vocabulary relating to the environments. of the speakers on Earth and Twin Earth. But this reply is not available to Dummett, for two reasons: (i) the externally characterized linguistic dispositions will not be reflected in speaker's knowledge. , according to Dummett, and so meaning will cease to be essentially cognitive; and (ii) such environmental characterizations would give the realist an easy reply to Dummett—we could simply say e.g. that the past, realistically construed, does show up in use, because past-tense sentences are used in application precisely to the past. (similarly for the external world and other minds). Nor would it do to claim that the speakers are counterfactually. disposed to use (say) ‘water’ differently, i.e. were they to come to know the scientific nature of the substances; for they may simply lack the intellectual capacities needed to fulfil the antecedent of such a counterfactual.

398

See my ‘Charity, Interpretation, and Belief’ (1977); repr. as ch. 8 in this volume. This extension to propositional attitude content will be significant for the question of whether meaning can be cognitive for one who accepts the lesson of Twin Earth cases: see below.

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we cannot say that the sentences have the same total content; in fact, it would be proper to say that on Twin Earth sentences containing ‘water’ simply lack truth conditions, since they lack the semantic properties necessary for the possession of truth conditions—they suffer from truth-value gaps.399 If this description of the case is correct, then we have a radical difference of content accompanied by a coincidence of assertibility conditions: not only do assertibility conditions not determine what. truth conditions a sentence has (as shown by Case A)—they do not even determine that. a sentence has truth conditions.

Case C. This case is much less straightforward than the first two, and i must ask the reader's indulgence for its fanciful and problematic features: the aim is merely to bring out certain points about how we think of content-ascription in our own case by contrasting it with a case which differs from ours in certain critical respects.400 We now consider a more extensive fragment of our language, that dealing with the properties of (medium-sized) material objects in the spatially proximate environment; or better, we consider as semantic interpreters the corresponding fragment of the language of some other. community members of which perceive and act upon the material objects about which they purport to speak and think. On Twin Earth we suppose things to be very different: there the inhabitants are brains in vats, perceiving nothing and acting upon nothing. They are the unfortunate (or fortunate) victims of super-intelligent scientists who produce in them experiences qualitatively indistinguishable from those enjoyed by normally situated beings: it is with them just as it is with us, or with the community of perceiving agents just described. Moreover, the vat people are not even surrounded by the sorts of material objects they have experiences as of—they are suspended somewhere in empty space. Nor are the experiences produced in them the result of the scientists' perceptions of corresponding objects; nothing fits their experiences. They have, furthermore, always languished in this condition; in particular they learned their language while placed in a vat. Nor do they communicate with one another: the scientists simulate such communication just as they simulate perception and kinaesthetic sensations. Most importantly, they have no

399

Here I am taking it that natural kind terms are semantically ‘directly referential’ in the sense that their meaning is not independent of their reference. It is important to see that this conception of meaning already shows that whether a sentence has truth conditions is not something guaranteed to be introspectively accessible to the speaker (or thinker). Note that this is not to make the much stronger claim that empty terms are straightforwardly meaningless. : to the contrary, I would hold that the aspect of their meaning determined by assertibility conditions is independent of the existence of the referent.

400

Cf. P. F. Strawson's procedure in Individuals. (London: Methuen, 1959) , ch. 2: in employing the idea of beings in a non-spatial world Strawson was not required to claim such a thing metaphysically possible—only that we can make conceptual sense of one set of concepts applying to a being's experience while another set does not. However, I myself see no reason to think that the case I shall present is. metaphysically impossible; I am merely pointing out that we can get by on a weaker assumption.

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communication with anyone not situated as they are.401 We might suppose that they believe themselves to be as we believe ourselves to be; or we might suppose that they have never really reflected on their epistemological situation. Now let us suppose that they have acquired a language phonetically identical with our language of material objects in the same way we have, at least in this respect: they have learned under what experiential conditions to assent to their sentences. In short, they have acquired the same recognitional capacities in respect of evidence—they know what experiences justify acceptance of which sentences. They have therefore associated the same assertibility conditions with their sentences as normally situated people have. I hope it will be agreed that being a vat person does not prevent experiential assertibility conditions being ascribed to one's sentences. In fact this possibility seems to follow from the admission that truths about experience do not logically entail truths about material objects, so that we can conceive of the experiential statements remaining true while statements about the material world are imagined false. Now given this conceptural possibility it should be predictable what I want to say about the speakers we are imagining: I want to say that the vat people do not differ from us in point of recognitional capacities, associated assertibility conditions, and dispositions to use—but they do. differ with respect to the content of their sentences and their propositional attitudes.402 This is because, as we saw in Cases A and B, the environmental context is what determines the referential truth conditions of sentences—in particular, the causal, epistemic, and action relations in which a person stands to the environment in which he is embedded. Indeed, Case C is really just a generalization of Case B, so we should expect the same principles to be operative in the generalized case as in the localized case: we have a kind of global failure of reference. But then, since reference is a component of content, as Twin Earth cases show, it follows that the contents ascribable to vat people and normal people cannot be the same. There is a question, however, about exactly how the content of the vat people's sentences should be conceived. In Case B we said that the Twin Earth sentences simply lacked truth conditions, while possessing assertibility conditions. It is not so obvious that this is the correct description of Case C: there I find myself somewhat more inclined to say that the sentences do have truth conditions but that these just consist in their assertibility conditions. In other words, the content of the vat people's language is susceptible of a phenomenalist

401

This condition ensures that their words do not borrow semantic properties from the words used by speakers with whom they are in communicative contact: we want to exclude the operation of the division of linguistic labour.

402

A qualification: the vat people do not have the ability to obtain experiences by initiating movement as normal speakers do, so we need to provide for this difference in the way we set up the cases. We could do this either by comparing them with similarly immobile normal perceivers, or by allowing that the scientists may produce appropriate experiences in them as a result of their willing to move in certain ways.

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interpretation. Speaking crudely and intuitively, the difference from Case B is that since the vat people's sentences never had a chance of latching onto external material reality, they cannot be supposed to have failed in that endeavour: the vat people have never been in the business of referring to material objects. Perhaps the point can be brought out by looking at their intentions. in using language. In Case B the speakers can form the general intention to refer to material objects and so can fail locally to fulfil their intention; but it is doubtful that the vat people can form any such intentions, since there has never been an opportunity for their intentions to get the kind of outer-directed content necessary for the possession of the frustrated intention—and you cannot fail to do what you cannot intend to do. The issues here are obscure and the case perhaps too underdescribed to permit a firm decision between the two sorts of interpretation of the vat people's language: but whichever way we may decide, they and we will not share the same range of contentascriptions, despite our agreement in use. Before I can derive any consequences for the defensibility of realist semantics I need to show that the difference of content discerned in Case C is indeed a difference aptly characterized in terms of the applicability or otherwise of realist semantics: why should we say that the difference between the normal and the vat people is that the former invite the ascription of realist. content while the latter resist such an ascription? To answer this question we require a clearer statement of what it takes to qualify as a realist interpretation. As Dummett observes, realist and anti-realist semantic interpretations can differ only when the truth value of the sentences concerned is not ‘effectively decidable’; for only in that case will the realist commit himself to a notion of recognition-transcendent truth. Put differently, the anti-realist will object to the realist only with respect to sentences for which the latter claims that truth conditions and assertibility conditions diverge in some way. Now for some classes of sentences there will exist what Dummett calls a reductive. class, that is, a distinguishable class of sentences recording evidence for the given class.403 In such cases the anti-realist characteristically holds that sentences of the given class can be true only in virtue of the truth of sentences of the reductive class, so that truth does not transcend evidence. This reductive thesis leads to the abandonment of bivalence and excluded middle for the given class in the circumstance that the reductive class does not permit us to assert of any sentence in the given class whether or not it is true: for if truth is reduced to evidence and the evidence is incomplete, then no sentence can be true for which no deciding evidence exists. The realist, on the other hand, affirms his recognition-transcendent notion of truth by denying such a reduction to assertibility conditions and so holds to classical logic for the given class. In the light of these general remarks I now

403

For a discussion of this see Dummett, ‘Common Sense and Physics’, in G. F. Macdonald (ed.), Perception and Identity. (London: Macmillan, 1979 ), sect. ii. He distinguishes a reductive thesis from reduction ism. , which is characterized as a doctrine of effective translatability.

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have two questions to answer about Case C: (a.) should we try to formulate the realist interpretation as the denial of any reduction of material object statements to a distinguishable class of evidential statements? and (b.) should we make the distinction between realist and anti-realist interpretations turn upon whether bivalence and excluded middle are treated as valid? If the answer to (a.) is Yes, then the answer to (b.) will depend upon whether the reduction preserves bivalence. Given the way Case C was set up, it is clear the putative reductive class will consist of statements reporting the experiences of the speakers. Some have supposed that experiental statements cannot constitute a reductive class for material object statements because the former statements use vocabulary drawn from the latter: we characterize experiences intentionally, in terms of what material object conditions they are as of. Since experiential statements use. material object vocabulary, we cannot (it is said) claim that the former can be understood. independently of the latter, and so no reduction is feasible. This line of argument is often deployed to refute phenomenalism, construed as a claim about the meaning of material object statements. I think that this short way with phenomenalism is misconceived; it imputes to the phenomenalist commitments that are inessential to his position. To see this, let us distinguish two kinds of reductive thesis: the first, which we may label a meaning. reduction, holds that sentences of a given class are meaningful. only in virtue of sentences of some other class; the second, which we may call a truth. reduction, holds only that statements of the given class are true. in virtue of statements of some other class.404 The question, then, is whether it is consistent for a reductive phenomenalist to hold both. that there is a truth reduction for material object statements to experiential statements and. that there is no meaning reduction in that direction, indeed to concede that the meaning dependence runs in the opposite direction. And it does not seem to me obvious that there is any actual inconsistency here. We should first note that the putative reductive class is of a special sort—in that it consists of sentences ascribing intentional content; that is, the reducing sentences report representational properties of experiences. This fact in itself should make us suspicious of any quick refutation of reductive theses where the reducing sentences are thus representational.405 (The same holds for parallel reductive theses in mathematics: statements recording the existence of proofs are apparently not intelligible independently of what they prove just because proofs are characterized in terms of their content—‘x. is a proof that p.’.)

404

Dummett seems at one place to envisage such a distinction when he remarks that ‘one may, without abandoning the reductive thesis, concede that statements of the reductive class are not intelligible independently of statements of the given class’ (ibid. p. 5).

405

What this means is just that some kinds of evidence are unavoidably characterized in terms of what the evidence is evidence for. : but of course this is quite compatible with the evidential statements reporting states of affairs quite distinct from those reported by the statements for which they provide evidence.

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After all, if the phenomenalist's truth reduction were really circular in the way suggested, then it ought to be trivial—but in fact it would be a substantive and very strong thesis. Compare phenomenalism with the following (concocted) thesis: a sentence can be true only if it is believed to be true. Such a thesis is evidently extremely strong, but it too might be charged with infringing a circularity condition on reductive theses, since the reductive class is identified precisely by way of the class to be reduced. Of this extreme thesis it would seem to be true that the reducing statements are meaningful only in virtue of the reduced statements but that this does not render nugatory the claim that nothing can be true unless it is believed to be. There is also the point, brought out by this analogy with belief sentences, that a phenomenalist could appeal to the fact that expressions in content-clauses do not function in their usual way. Suppose the phenomenalist were to be a Fregean about the semantics of oblique contexts: then that would allow him to claim that the alleged meaning dependence is rather less straightforward than it might have seemed—words in experiential ‘as of ’ contexts do not have their usual sense.406 So a phenomenalist has more room for manoeuvre than the quick refutation reckons with. The distinction between meaning reduction and truth reduction is also what seems wanted in the analysis of secondary qualities. Many of us have found a phenomenalistic account of secondary qualities unavoidable: being red, say, can consist in nothing other than a disposition to produce certain kinds of experience. in perceivers. But it also seems that the content of such experiences cannot be specified save by using. the predicate whose application conditions we are defining. In the case of secondary qualities it is thus natural to say that the dispositional condition defines what (say) colour ascriptions are true. in virtue of, but that there is no understanding. a specification of colour experience independently of grasping the colour predicates themselves, for experience must be described content-wise.407 If we can combine these two claims about secondary qualities, as I think we can, then it would appear open to a wholesale phenomenalist to view his own reduction in the same way. But even if one rejects the idea that experiential statements can function as a reductive class, in the weak sense I have explained, we could still formulate a claim of truth dependence. between the two classes of statements. This is possible because experiential statements are clearly distinguishable. from material object statements, and so realist and anti-realist may be construed as (respectively)

406

Whether such obliquely occurring expressions could be understood independently of the corresponding expressions in regular contexts would depend upon whether the indirect sense of an expression could only be grasped by. grasping its customary sense. One can imagine a reconstruction of Frege's theory in which this dependence of understanding would be far from obvious, but it would be inappropriate to pursue the question now. I am merely setting forth the phenomenalist's options.

407

Gareth Evans hints at a similar position on secondary qualities in ‘Things Without the Mind—A Commentary upon Chapter Two of Strawson's Individuals.’, in Zak van Straaten (ed.), Philosophical Subjects. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980 ), note 27.

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asserting or denying that statements of the latter type are true independently of statements of the former type. The heart of the difference between them is that the anti-realist holds that the truth of material object statements consists in. the truth of suitable experiential statements while the realist denies this; it is relatively unimportant to decide whether this necessary dependence of truth value is appropriately characterized by the word ‘reductive’. For simplicity, however, I shall say that the realist view of material object statements is the thesis that these are irreducible to (not true in virtue of) experiential statements.408 We can now turn to question (b.): is it of the essence that the realist accepts bivalence and excluded middle while the anti-realist rejects them? It is true that Dummett makes this the touchstone of the disagreement, but closer attention to the anti-realist's reasons for rejecting them somewhat complicates the picture. Let us suppose that we are dealing with a straightforwardly reductive anti-realist; and let us call the reductive class R., the given class K., and the verification procedure associated with R. and K., V.. Then we can ask what are the decidability characteristics of V. with respect to R. and K.. In asking this it seems to me essential to distinguish two questions: (i) is V complete. in the sense that it will enable us to decide the truth value of any sentence of K. on the basis of statements drawn from R.; and (ii) is V conclusive. (or indefeasible)409 in the sense that is permits us to assert sentences of K. with certainty (maximum probability). These two properties of a verification procedure are clearly differently defined, and their combination yields four possibilities: (1) complete and conclusive, (2) partial and conclusive, (3) complete and non-conclusive, (4) partial and non-conclusive. It is then a question whether these four possibilities are actually instantiated. Without undertaking the detailed discussion needed to show that we can find instances of each possibility, let me just dogmatically cite examples that seem to me to fit each category: (1) certain first-person psychological statements, (2) arithmetical statements, (3) statements about the proximate macroscopic material world, (4) statements about other people's states of mind. But even if we could not find instances of each category we should still have the question of the impact upon our notion of truth for K. of a reductive thesis with respect to R. according as V. has one or another of the four decidability properties. An immediate consequence seems to be that we should acknowledge two notions of recognition-transcendence: the kind where we can find no. evidence bearing on the truth of a given statement of K., and the

408

The last few paragraphs give some of the rationale for the conception of anti-realism about the material world that I operated with in ‘An A Priori Argument for Realism’; (1979 now repr. as ch. 12 in this volume) and endeavoured to refute.

409

Actually there are at least three notions we need to distinguish here, though they are interdependent in certain ways, namely, conclusiveness, indefeasibility, and directness. Each of these properties of a verification procedure will have a different bearing on the notion of truth yielded by a reduction to evidence: but for my purposes here we can treat these as a family of properties to be contrasted with the quite distinct idea of completeness.

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kind where evidence can be found but it is inconclusive. This distinction affects how we should formulate the antirealist's attitude toward bivalence and excluded middle. The realist simply affirms these as logically valid, irrespective of the properties of the verification procedure we have for the statements to which they are applied. The reductive antirealist, on the other hand, lets his notion of truth for the given class be dictated by the conjunction of R. and V.: where V. is partial he will not treat excluded middle as valid in application to K., whether or not V. is conclusive; but what of the case in which V. is complete and non-conclusive? Here we can assert any sentence or its negation with some degree of probability; so it would be wrong simply to declare excluded middle unassertible. But it would not be assertible in the way a classical logician supposes, that is, as assertible with maximum probability even when its instances contain sentences not themselves conclusively assertible. Rather, we would expect the anti-realist to claim that the assertibility of excluded middle is some function of the assertibility of the statements to which it is being applied, where this falls short of certainty. So we seem to get two sorts of revision of classical logic depending upon the properties of the verification procedure associated with the reductive class: when the procedure is partial, excluded middle will be simply invalid and so not available in reasoning with the statements concerned; when the procedure is merely non-conclusive, but complete, excluded middle will be counted invalid only if one requires that logical truths preserve degree of assertibility—for if excluded middle is not assertible with maximum probability it will be liable to diminish the probability of conclusions drawn with its help. Whether such a notion of (deductive) validity is viable I shall not now discuss; my present point is just that a reductive thesis will generate rather different attitudes toward bivalence and excluded middle depending upon the way in which the given class is ‘undecidable’. This point is not generally appreciated, I suspect, because there is a tendency to take the case of mathematics as model, and for that case undecidability always takes the form of a partial though conclusive verification procedure (viz. proof). But if we are to apply Dummett's ideas to empirical sentences we need to allow for other ways in which assertibility conditions may fail to exhaust truth conditions: even when a sentence is assertible it can be that its truth conditions are recognitiontranscendent in the sense that they are not to be identified. with what is counted as evidence for their assertion. And correlative with the two kinds of verification-transcendence we have two ways in which, according to the anti-realist, knowledge of truth conditions may fail to be manifested in use—two ways in which what is grasped according to a realist interpretation may fail to be fully displayed in the exercise of dispositions to use language. Now realism about material object statements might. conceivably be formulated without appeal to a distinguishable or reductive class: it might be held (though wrongly, in my view) that anti-realism should (or may) take a nonreductive

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form in this case, so that the assertibility conditions of material object statements are to be given in terms of other. material object statements. The idea would then be that there are some. material object statements, perhaps those relating to remote regions of space, which cannot be asserted upon the basis of other material object statements, perhaps those recording the condition of the material world in the vicinity of the speaker. This type of formulation would go naturally with the conviction that we do not judge the truth value of material object statements via. our recognition of the truth of experiential statements—it might, indeed, accompany scepticism about the very existence or coherence of genuinely experiential statements.410 But, even if such a formulation is attractive in some contexts, it cannot be the form in which the dispute is to be stated in Case C: for the contrast between the normal people and the vat people consists in the fact that the sentences used by the latter never. have material object truth conditions — so we could not say that the truth of their material object statements in general does not transcend the truth conditions of some more accessible subset. of such statements. What Case C brings out is that verification-transcendence in this case essentially involves the nonconclusiveness of the verification procedure; and we omit part of what offends the antirealist if we concentrate solely upon the possible incompleteness of our methods of establishing the truth value of material object statements. So, whether or not we let the speakers in Case C possess a complete verification procedure, we can still make sense of the distinction between a realist and a non-realist semantics; the difference of content reflects the difference between assigning truth conditions which are irreducible to experiential assertibility conditions and refraining from assigning such conditions, and that difference is. the difference between realist and non-realist semantics. It follows that if I was right to discern a difference of content in Case C, then we have a case in which use is constant yet one language and set of beliefs invites a realist interpretation while the other resists it. Before I explore further the theoretical rationale for discharging the antecedent of this conditional, I shall present my final case.

Case D. This is a case that does not require any elaborate defence of the

410

It should be obvious that there is no inconsistency between the thesis that truth for a given class of sentences is verification-transcendent and the idea that we may be said to perceive. the subject matter of those sentences. (This implies, of course, that the former thesis is not controverted by acceptance of the latter idea.) For we can clearly be in a position to perceive facts whose existence we do not have conclusive grounds for asserting. Thus suppose someone is hallucinating half the time and knows this: from the fact that his experiences do not justify him in asserting the appropriate material object statement with any assurance—since the usual association of experience and causally operative material state of affairs has broken down—it plainly does not. follow that he is not really perceiving the material world when he is not hallucinating. In view of this we do not close the gap between evidence and truth, at which the anti-realist jibs, by claiming, however plausibly, that we perceive the facts in dispute. This consideration seems to me to cast doubt upon the strategy deployed by John McDowell in ‘On “The Reality of the Past’ ”, in C. Hookway and P. Petit (eds.), Action and Interpretation. (Cambridge University Press, 1978 ).

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claim that there exists an unproblematic reductive class. We are to consider now the psychological vocabulary of a pair of speakers; and we shall describe a case in which the use of this vocabulary stays constant while the ‘psychological environment’ is varied. Thus, analogously to Case B, we might stipulate that a certain sensation term ‘S’ refers to a particular type of sensation on Earth but that on Twin Earth ‘S’ is empty of reference, though it is used in the same evidential conditions. In order to avoid the complication arising from the fact that speakers on Twin Earth themselves have psychological states which may serve to endow their third-person uses of psychological terms with reference, let us suppose that ‘S’ refers to a type of sensation enjoyed by some species distinct from that of the speakers we are considering: for concreteness, suppose ‘S’ refers to the sensation bats have when they use their sense of echolocation.411 So on Earth speakers are surrounded by bats exhibiting certain kinds of behaviour which warrant the ascription to them of sensation S; the behaviour constitutes the assertibility conditions for S-ascribing sentences, while sentences containing ‘S’ are true according to whether sensation S is present in the bats' stream of consciousness. On Twin Earth, however, the bats (or ‘bats’) lack this sensation, though they are otherwise behaviourally and psychologically indistinguishable from Earth bats—perhaps they have been tampered with by some super-intelligent zoologists. So there is a gap in the bats' psychological life, analogous to the gap in the physical environment envisaged in Case B, but speakers use the term ‘S’ on the strength of behavioural evidence just as they do on Earth. Now, assuming we are not behaviourists, I think we should say of this case that sentences containing ‘S’ lack truth conditions, though they possess assertibility conditions; and this means that the sentences on Earth and Twin Earth differ in content despite their equivalence in respect of use. This is because the psychological environment contributes to the determination of meaning in just the way Putnam argued that the physical environment does. Indeed we might have given a psychological case analogous to Case A; we invert the spectrum of some creatures on Twin Earth with respect to those on Earth and consider how this affects the meaning of the corresponding psychological terms used by speakers to refer to these experiences (keeping their. psychology fixed). I think that anyone who accepts the possibility of cases of this kind will have to agree that a parallel conclusion must be drawn in respect of psychological vocabulary.412 Now the next step is predictable: we imagine that

411

See Thomas Nagel, ‘What is it like to be a Bat?’, Philosophical Review., 83 (1974) for the general conception of sensations I am adopting.

412

Accepting such possibilities is probably tantamount to rejecting Wittgenstein's Private Language Argument, since it seems to make the individuation of experience-kinds independent of public dispositions. If this is so, then Dummett may wish to contest the significance of my Cases C and D on that ground. However, this would be to deny realism about sensations for reasons apparently independent of Dummett's own argument for anti-realism. I therefore think it is fair, dialectically, for me to ask whether Dummett. 's argument can rule out a realist interpretation of sensation sentences. Besides, if Wittgenstein's argument really does contradict the cases of inverted qualia commonly used to refute functionalism I would find it necessary to question the argument. But, however this may be, we surely do not want to commit Dummett at the start to some question-begging brand of behaviourism. (I suspect that a comparison of Dummett's assumptions with Wittgenstein's argument would help clarify the underlying issues.)

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on Twin Earth the counterparts of Earth bats are totally robotic—they have not mental states at all. In these circumstances I want to say that the range of sentences used in application to the robot bats have no truth conditions, or again that their truth conditions collapse into their assertibility conditions; the case is thus comparable to Case C. The reference of a psychological term contributes directly to the truth conditions of sentences containing such a term; so if the term lacks reference it lacks truth conditions. Accordingly, we get a content difference in the sentences and propositional attitudes of speakers on Earth and Twin Earth in D-type cases, yet the recognitional abilities of the speakers in respect of behavioural evidence do not differ: for they are disposed to assert the sentences in question under the same evidential conditions. It should be uncontroversial that the content difference I have claimed to discern in Case D is a difference that requires to be characterized in terms of the applicability of realist semantics. The reductive class consists of statements about behaviour, and the realist claim is that truth for the class of psychological sentences does not reduce to truth for that reductive class—the truth of psychological sentences is verification-transcendent. We again have the question of the properties of the verification procedure employed in this case and thus of the precise character of the recognitiontranscendence implied by realism. And it is, perhaps, more vividly apparent in this case that completeness and conclusiveness are to be distinguished, and that we may have the former property and not the latter—for example, if there is some simple and reliable correlation between some creature's sensations and its overt behaviour which always allows us to assert, with some probability, whether or not the creature has a given sensation. Even if the behavioural verification procedure were thus complete, the full-blooded realist would still hold that there was a sense in which the truth conditions of psychological sentences transcend the behavioural grounds on which they are asserted. And if so Dummett would insist that there is some ingredient of content, on a realist view of psychological sentences, which cannot be exhaustively manifest in use. What I have wanted to suggest is that this is precisely what we should expect, given the way content is in fact determined. In the next section I shall examine Dummett's reasons for holding to his theory of content-ascription.

III In Section II I claimed that there can be differences of content unaccompanied by differences of use, when use is explained as the exercise of recognitional capacities in respect of assertibility conditions. I did not undertake to prove. that

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this is so, beyond appealing to intuition, nor did I attempt to spell out in any detail the principles of content-ascription underlying the intuitive judgements I sought to elicit. The basic point was that we let (our theory of) the environment of a speaker or thinker contribute toward the content of his sentences and propositional attitudes: that is how we operate in the ascription of content. Dummett, by contrast, proceeds as though content can be read off someone's behaviour quite independently of how he is situated in the world. Why does he proceed on this assumption? The answer he gives to this crucial question is that if meaning were not thus manifestable in behaviour it would be unobservable and undetectable—and meaning must be something wholly overt if it is to be public and communicable. Let us agree for the sake of argument that no account of meaning which rendered it in principle undetectable could be correct. But then are the content differences claimed in Cases A–D somehow empirically inaccessible? Surely not: we make the distinctions we do in these cases on the basis of public and objective facts about the relation between the speaker and his environment—this is what controls our assignments of reference. Compare the relation of perception. Suppose we were to require that perceptual facts be manifest in behaviour; we will not acknowledge any distinctions in what is perceived unless these can be mirrored in dispositions to behaviour. Such a requirement would soon lose its appeal once we reflect upon cases of distinct objects presenting the same perceptual appearance: behavioural dispositions could be the same in such cases, though what is perceived is different. But this obvious fact does not make perceptual facts undetectable; to detect them we look to the environmental relations in which the perceiver stands. Perceptual facts will seem undetectable only if one tries to detect them in the wrong place, viz. behavioural dispositions.413 To say this is not to claim that we possess an explicit philosophical account of the principles governing our intuitive assignments of perceptual objects—why we judge that the table is seen and not one's own retina, say—but theoretical unclarity on this matter should not make us think it somehow illicit to reckon something an object of perception, thought, or reference in cases where the identity of the object is not reflected in behaviour. To insist that content be exhaustively manifest in behavioural dispositions begins to look like a dogma we have been given no good reason to accept.414

413

When I claim that the discerned content distinctions are detectable I am not, of course, claiming they are necessarily detectable from the inside. ; indeed, it is an immediate consequence of my position that content is not (all) introspectively accessible. I thus reject another assumption of Dummett's—the principle of the ‘transparency’ of meaning: see his ‘Frege's Distinction Between Sense and Reference’, Truth and Other Enigmas. , 131. It would not, I think, be incorrect to regard this principle about meaning and the manifestation requirement as but two sides of the same coin. Considering the structure of perception shows why intentional directedness need. not meet Dummett's twin conditions. It does not follow that meaning is not cognitive, unless one assumes that intentional content is self-intimating.

414

Hilary Putnam, in ‘Models and Reality’, Journal of Symbolic Logic., 45 (1980) , gives expression to the conception of meaning I have been arguing against: ‘To adopt a theory of meaning according to which a language whose whole use still lacks something—viz., its “interpretation”—is to accept a problem which can. only have crazy solutions. To speak as if this. were my problem, “I know how to use my language, but, now, how shall I single out an interpretation?” is to speak nonsense. Either the use already. fixes the “interpretation” or nothing. can. . . . the world doesn't pick models or interpret languages. We. interpret our languages or nothing does’ (pp. 281–2). And he goes on to recommend anti-realist semantics as that which will close the ‘gap’ between use and reference. Some observations on Putnam's position here are in order. The first is that the lesson he is here drawing from the Löwenheim–Skolem paradox seems to go flat against the lesson he taught us with Twin Earth cases, though he gives no indication of this tension in his views. Secondly, why does he thus opt for a use theory of semantic interpretation? I suspect it is because, given his official methodological solipsism about mental states, the doctrine that meaning is not in the head leads to the conclusion that meaning is not that which is understood. —and this he finds intolerable. But I would suggest that he does better to repudiate methodological solipsism about mental states, including semantic understanding, so that meaning is restored to cognitive status. Perhaps the reason he does not take this line stems from his underlying functionalism. : for if mental states were not in the head it would be hard to see how they could be functional states. That philosophy of mind, combined with Dummettian talk of us ‘conferring’ meaning on our words, is what is leading Putnam astray. (This is not to say that no problems for a realist notion of reference are generated by the Löwenheim–Skolem paradox—though I do not find the alleged problems very compelling.)

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The root of Dummett's conception of what determines content is, I think, a certain view on the relation between sense and reference. About the notion of sense (content of a sentence) Dummett makes two claims: (i) that the theory of sense should be seen as explaining what knowledge of reference, and hence reference itself, consists in; and (ii) that the notion of sense should be characterized epistemically, in terms of the grounds or justification distinctive of the sentence in question.415 Combining these two claims leads rapidly to the collapse of reference and truth into epistemic notions, that is, into assertibility conditions, so that the whole of content comes to be seen as determined by recognitional capacities. What Cases A–D bring out, I suggest, is that reference is in fact independent of sense, so epistemologized: we can agree with Dummett that Fregean sense should be conceived epistemically, but if we do we must give up the (logically independent) Fregean thesis that sense determines reference. My position, then, illustrated by Cases A–D, is that sense should be explained in terms of use, but that it is false that content is exhausted by sense, so understood: the referential truth conditions of sentences are independently determined and constituted.416 Once we take this step of factoring total content into these two components we shall no longer expect all ingredients of content to be overt in the same way: epistemologized sense will consist in assertibility conditions and grasp of these will be manifested in much the way Dummett suggests, that is, in the exercise of recognitional abilities; but reference will supervene upon facts about how the speaker is embedded in the world—upon

415

See ‘What is a Theory of Meaning? (ii), esp. 132 f.

416

This ‘dual component’ conception of content is articulated in more detail in my ‘The Structure of Content’ (1981); repr. as ch. 6 in this volume. The present paper to some extent relies upon that one for the theory of content it opposes to Dummett's. What I am doing here is directing the principles advocated there to the question of realism.

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certain causal or contextual facts, perhaps. Reference and sense will thus be related in rather the way that perceiving an object and the aspect under which the object is perceived are related, and they will be detectable in rather the way these two aspects of perceptual facts are detectable. Dummett rightly insists that grasp of meaning must involve (at least) knowledge of assertibility conditions, but infers that truth conditions must drop out because he assumes that meaning is a unitary phenomenon, to be explained in terms of a single key concept. My Cases A–D are designed to show that content-ascription must take account of two. sorts of factor: use and environmental relations. It may be felt that there is something unsatifactory about entirely severing truth conditions from the use of language: surely, it may be objected, the reference of words does play some. part in the practice of speaking a language. Here I think we need a distinction between two ways in which the semantic features of an expression may relate to its employment: on the one hand, a semantic feature may have its home in characterizing the basis. of a practical capacity, in specifying the conditions that trigger the capacity and the manner of its exercise; on the other hand, a semantic feature may relate to the point. of employing sentences, to what a speaker aims at when he asserts a sentence. When sense is conceived epistemically it connects with use in the first kind of way. Reference does not connect with use in that way, but it does, I think, connect in the second way: for the point of assertion, I take it, is to communicate to one's audience the condition of the world. Thus we may be prompted by the evidence we have to assent to a sentence and so to use it to communicate how we take the world to be: referential facts do not themselves prompt use, but they are implicated in its point. A full description of the activity of speech would therefore need to invoke the notion of reference to make sense of what speakers are up to when they assert sentences, but it would be wrong to infer that reference must be manifest. in use in the way I have been opposing. What I have tried to show in this paper is that there is no principled obstacle such as Dummett alleges prohibiting the applicability of realist semantics to our sentences. This is not yet to say that we positively should take a realist attitude toward the content of our sentences and propositional attitudes, even those concerned with material objects and psychological states. In fact, given the way I handled Cases C and D, the indicated view of our own sentences is that a realist semantics is correct for them if and only if metaphysical. realism about the sectors of reality concerned is true. That is, if. reality and our relation to it are as we suppose them to be—we are neither brains in vats nor surrounded by robots—then our language has a realist semantics in the areas in question: but if it is not, as sceptics would have us believe possible, then there is no verification-transcendent reality capable of conferring realist content on our sentences and thoughts. In short, if metaphysical solipsism is true, then the conditions for the possession of recognitiontranscendent content are not met. If this conditional is correct, we cannot establish whether our sentences have a

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realist semantics until we have refuted the sceptic; for if we cannot know that the material world exists or that others have mental states, we cannot know whether the corresponding sentences have the sort of truth conditions definitive of a realist interpretation.417 In this sense semantics is posterior to metaphysics. All I have claimed is that no principle of content-ascription extractable from Dummett shows that our sentences cannot have the sort of interpretation a realist claims; so there is no route such as he attempts to travel from general semantical principles to rejection of metaphysical realism. I might summarize my argument by reconstructing Dummett's case against metaphysical realism as an argument by reductio. of the following shape: even supposing metaphysical realism to be true, reality so conceived cannot get represented in our sentences, because such verification-transcendent truth conditions do not show up in use; so it cannot be true. I have tried to break the argument by rejecting the assumption that content is determined by use; it is a further question whether reality is. such as to confer upon our sentences the kind of content a realist semantics is designed to capture. I suspect it is, but there are those who would disagree.

Postscript to ‘Realist Semantics and Content-Ascription’ This is the last paper I wrote on Dummett and realism. It goes considerably beyond ‘Truth and Use’ and in the direction of ‘The Structure of Content’. By the time I wrote this paper I felt I had got to the bottom of Dummett's arguments and where they went wrong; I have not felt the need to return to the topic since then (indeed, I wonder now why I spent so much time on what presently strikes me as so wrong-headed). The chief interest of this paper lies less in its response to Dummett and more in the four cases I present in order to bring out how content is determined—particularly the case of the brain in a vat and its mental contents. Readers of Putnam's Reason., Truth and History., which also introduced the question of the mental states of an envatted brain, may wonder why I make no reference to that work. The answer is that Putnam's book was not yet published at the time I was writing this paper and its contents were unknown to me; indeed, I took myself to be constructing this kind of case for the first time (I first presented it in a seminar at UCLA in 1979). Putnam and I differ somewhat in what contents we ascribe to the envatted brain, but we both think that they cannot be the same as those of the regular world-connected brain. I stick with my claim that the envatted brain could in principle share my

417

This statement is less extraordinary than it doubtless sounds: in fact, it is, I think, a pretty direct consequence of the conception of meaning exemplified in the Mill–Russell–Kripke view of how a proper name contributes to truth conditions—for on that view we cannot know whether a name succeeds in making such a contribution unless we know that the bearer of the name exists.

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perceptual experiences, at least if these are understood to involve only a limited class of observational contents, but my point was that this is consistent with supposing—what seems very plausible—that we could nevertheless differ in the kinds of truth conditions our world-directed beliefs have. This is really just a rather radical illustration of contextual externalism about content. I do not argue, as Putnam does, that consideration of the brain in a vat refutes scepticism—since I do not believe that (see Mental Content.); but I do think that the case refutes Dummett's equation of meaning and use (in his restricted interpretation of that notion). And the same lesson follows from the parallel case of a speaker surrounded by mindless robots: the world itself fixes content, not the use a speaker makes of his words (unless we simply describe the use in terms of the world, thus presupposing realism). That observation is enough by itself to refute Dummett's argument against realism. Dummett's mistake (or one of them) is in effect to assume that meaning is ‘in the head’, and then to worry how our words ever make contact with reality.

15 Another Look at Colour

418

In The Subjective View.,419 I defended (unoriginally) a dispositional theory of colour and drew out some consequences of that theory. The dispositional theory. (DT) maintains, roughly speaking, that for an object to instantiate a colour property is for it to have a disposition to cause experiences as of an object having that property in normal perceivers in normal conditions. This theory has notable merits in capturing (assuming one wants them captured) the subjectivity and relativity of ascriptions of colour, while allowing that it is external objects themselves that are coloured. It makes colours both sense dependent and object qualifying.420 But it runs into prima-facie problems in giving a plausible account of the phenomenology of colour perception, as I ruefully observed in my earlier book (op. cit. 132–7). The difficulty, crudely put, is simply that colour properties do not look. much like dispositions to produce colour experiences, so that an error theory of colour perception comes to seem inescapable. Colours turn out not to look the way they are said dispositionally to be, which is to say that ordinary colour perception is intrinsically and massively misleading. I struggled to resolve this problem, suggesting—somewhat desperately—that the best way out is to say that colour terms cannot be replaced with dispositional terms inside the ‘looks’ context, despite their analytic equivalence. My thought was that such contexts are hyperintensional, so that we are here confronted with a Mates-type case, in which sameness of sense and reference does not guarantee substitutivity salva veritate.. I now think, however, that the problem cannot be dealt with in this way, principally because the manoeuvre does nothing to avert the fundamental intuitive point that DT is

418

I am grateful for comments to Mark Johnston, Brian McLaughlin, Consuelo Preti, Barry Stroud, and members of an audience at the University of California/Berkeley.

419

New York: Oxford, 1983.

420

The dispositional theory thus attempts to steer between two extremes: on the one hand, the idea that colour properties apply properly to mental items like sense-data; on the other, the idea that they belong to external objects quite independently of anyone's subjective response, being (say) just microphysical properties of things. I shall not be attempting to argue against these views here; my aim is rather to explore some difficulties internal to the dispositional view. I shall be assuming that it is desirable to treat colours as both subjectively constituted and yet also features of external objects in space.

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phenomenologically. incorrect: we just do not see. colours as. dispositions to cause experiences. Nor is it possible to maintain that colours-as-dispositions are the de re. objects of vision, without themselves corresponding to the de dicto. content of colour perception, since some further properties will need to be introduced in order to capture the de dicto. content of perception—and these will present essentially the same problem (as well as being nothing other than colours as properly conceived). The right response, I now believe, is to abandon DT—at least in its usual interpretation. It turns out, though, that the abandonment need not be as radical as we might fear: we can keep much of the spirit of the theory without being forced to accept its unpalatable consequences for the veridicality of perception. That is, we can consistently combine a form of naive realism about colour perception with endorsement, not indeed of the classic DT, but of a natural descendant of that theory. (Let it be noted, then, that the assumption of the general veridicality of colour perception will be held constant in this paper; I shall not be attempting to defend this assumption here.) I shall begin by explaining why DT has trouble accommodating the nature of colour perception; then I shall propose my intended solution to the problem; finally, I shall examine the metaphysical implications of the new theory, spelling out its assumptions and peculiarities.

I Let us make DT maximally explicit, so that we are not shielded from its implications for how the world ought to look if it is true. The best way to understand the theory is as claiming that colour properties are higher-order psychophysical properties comprising relations between objects and perceivers. To be red, say, is to have some first-order physical property P. which has the specific second-order causal role of generating experiences of red in perceivers.421 It is in virtue of having the grounding physical property P. that objects are disposed to cause experiences in selected perceivers. Logically, then, the theory is analogous to functionalist theories of mental properties which identify those properties with causal roles founded upon lower-level physical states of the organism. Colour properties, we might say, are logical constructions from categorical physical realizations and higher-order causal relations to perceptual experiences. It is only a notational variant of the same theory to bring in the notion of law. explicitly: for x. to be red is for it to be a law that, ceteris paribus., x. produces experiences of red in suitable perceivers. Objects have colours in virtue of laws

421

For a careful formulation of DT, see Mark Johnston, ‘How to Speak about the Colors’, Philosophical Studies., 68 (1992), 221–63. I am indebted to this paper, especially for the discussion of what Johnston calls revelation. —the idea, roughly, that the nature of colour properties is revealed in their appearance.

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that connect them to perceivers' experiences, these laws being grounded (inter alia.) in the physical properties of the objects. The laws simply spell out what it is to have the appropriate dispositions. And it is easy to see that both these formulations are essentially equivalent to a formulation that focuses on the mental end of the colour-conferring relation: for x. to be red is for there to be a mind M. such that M. is disposed to have experiences of red in the presence of x. (I here ignore the standard refinements). In other words, the colours objects have are fixed by the dispositions to undergo experiences that perceivers have in response to those objects. So, really, two entities and their dispositions are in question here: the external object of sight and the mind with which that object interacts. And just as the object has its dispositions in virtue of its intrinsic physical properties, so the mind will have its dispositions in virtue of (presumably) the physical properties of the perceiver's nervous system. DT is thus a double. dispositional theory, and this is because it treats colours as constituted by relations. between objects and perceivers. An object is red in virtue of its disposition to engage with the disposition of a perceiver's sensory apparatus in such a way as to produce the manifest property of seeing something red. Colours will thus inherit all the structural complexity entailed by this analysis, since they are identified with the corresponding ensemble of dispositions. DT is a theory about the nature of colour properties and hence about what it is for an object to be. coloured. But we also have the question of how colour looks.—of how an object appears. when it is seen as coloured. These questions cannot be independent of each other. Does the coloured object look the way DT says it is? If it does not, then colour perception must be systematically misleading. The real nature of colour properties would have to be disguised by their perceptual appearance. So when an object looks red, does it look as if it has the sort of disposition that DT says that redness consists in? I shall argue that it does not, and therefore that colours are not dispositions to cause experiences. Four difficulties will be raised, each on its own sufficient to discomfit the theory, at least in its classic version. (1) The first difficulty can be briefly stated thus: dispositions are not visible properties of things in the way that colours are, so the two cannot be identical. When you look at an object you do not see (de dicto.) its dispositions to act in certain ways in certain circumstances, but you do see what colour it is. Here, of course, I mean direct-object perception, not just seeing-that—seeing the property itself, not merely seeing that it is instantiated. You may see that. something is soluble by watching it dissolve, but you do not see its solubility—that property itself. You can see the manifestations of the disposition, and you may also see the categorical basis of the disposition in the object's molecular structure, but your eyes do not acquaint you with the property of being disposed. to dissolve. You do not, in the direct-object sense, see things under dispositional

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descriptions. Solubility is a property you infer., rather than one that it is directly revealed to you. And now the point about colours is that they enter the very content of primitive visual experience, being part of how objects appear, but dispositions of whatever kind cannot themselves enter visual content in this way. Dispositions lie strictly outside of what is immediately perceptually presented, but colours figure in the very pith of perceptual presentation. To use a much-maligned term, colours are given., while dispositions are posited.. It follows that, if colours really were dispositions, they would not be visible in the way they are. To be sure, there are dispositions associated with colours, and perhaps inferable from them, but these dispositions are not given in. the colour. I think this point is intuitively plain once it has been noticed, but we can also give it a more theoretical gloss. Let us go back to the nomological formulation of DT—that colours consist in laws of perceptual response. Surely, one does not see. the laws that connect the object to the perceiver; for one never sees any law per se. This is so for broadly Humean reasons: laws are simply not possible objects of sensation (though, of course, their instances may be). And the underlying source of this is that laws and dispositions are inherently modal notions—and you do not sense modalities with your sense modalities. You do not see what would. obtain in certain counterfactual situations; you see only what actually obtains. When you see something as red you do not see the counterfactual possibilities that constitute its having a disposition to appear red. Your eyes do not respond to woulds. and might have beens.. The possible-worlds analysis of counterfactuals makes this point vivid: I certainly do not see what is going on in those nearby possible worlds in which the object is appearing red to perceivers.422 Dispositions depart too far from the actual world to be objects of simple sight. (Notice that this kind of objection has little force against dispositional behaviourism about mental states, since we are not inclined to suppose that mental states are visible to begin with: here the epistemology and the ontology march in step. The contrast between redness and pain, in this respect, underscores the visibility problem for DT: in its case the dispositional ontology leads to an epistemology in which the colours lack their accustomed perceptual availability.) There is an irony for DT in this, because part of the point of the dispositional element of the theory is to allow un. perceived objects to be coloured, say, in the dark. But the upshot is that colours are no longer perceptible in the light.. Dispositions allow for mere potentiality of perception, but the price is that mere potentiality is not the kind of thing one can see. Of course, it is quite true that the manifestations of a disposition can be visible, but that does not help

422

See David Lewis, Counterfactuals. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 1973). In the text, I assume that a distinction between the perceptual given and what can be inferred from it is viable. Not everyone accepts that, of course, but surely it would be odd if DT required. that we abandon the distinction: the theory ought at least to be compatible with the idea that colours belong to a privileged class of perceptible properties.

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DT, because it identifies colour not with the manifestations of the disposition—occasions of objects looking red to someone—but with the disposition itself, as it must in order to make room for unperceived colours. Even when seen, the colour red is a disposition, according to DT; but then it will not be seen. at all. At best, the disposition could lurk somewhere behind the appearances—but colours themselves are transparently revealed in how things look. Colours constitute. the appearances. The cost of identifying colours with dispositions despite. the appearances is precisely that of convicting our eyes of systematic error.423 (2) The second problem concerns the structure of perceived colour. According to DT, colours consist in relations. between objects and perceivers; these relations are at the very least dyadic, bringing in the perceiver and the conditions of perception. But surely this misrepresents the phenomenology of colour perception: when we see an object as red we see it as having a simple, monadic, local property of the object's surface. The colour is perceived as intrinsic to the object, in much the way that shape and size are perceived as intrinsic. No relation to perceivers enters into how the colour appears; the colour is perceived as wholly on. the object, not as somehow straddling the gap between it and the perceiver. Being seen as red is not like being seen as larger than or to the left of. The ‘colour envelope’ that delimits an object stops at the object's spatial boundaries. So if colour were inherently relational, as DT maintains, then perception of colour would misrepresent its structure—we would be under the illusion that a relational property is non-relational. Contraposing, given that perception is generally veridical as to colour, colours are not relational—which contradicts DT.424 (3) DT analyses colours by reference to experiences. of red, so that these experiences enter into the nature of the property: they are what redness is a disposition to produce. But then we have the question of how these experiences figure in the perception of red—in the intentional content of colour experience. Do the experiences get represented. in perceptions of red? On the face of it, they do not. But if they contribute to the very identity of redness, to its analysis, then they should figure somehow in how red things look. And if they do not, are we not again convicting perception of systematic error? Try to replace ‘red’ in ‘x. looks red’ with its alleged dispositional equivalent; we obtain the curious locution,

423

One of the advertised attractions of DT, as opposed to other standard theories of colour, is its promise of conservatism with respect to common sense; so it is ironic that it should encounter the same kinds of revisionist problems that its rivals encounter (the irony is especially poignant for the author of The Subjective View. ). In particular, it runs into the same kinds of problem that afflict physicalist theories: the intrinsic nature of colour turns out to be radically at variance with the way colours seem, and to lie behind the appearances rather than constituting them.

424

Remember that DT was meant. to save common sense, not to contradict it. One can imagine giving up this ambition and still holding to DT, though then we would have to reconsider its alleged superiority to rival theories. In any case, here I am taking it that DT must. respect veridicality. My question is how it might do this.

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‘x. looks to have a disposition to produce experiences of red in perceivers’. What does that mean? It asserts a relation between the object and a certain class of sensations. Perceiving redness will then presumably involve perceiving the terms. of this relation, since these are what fix its nature. That implies that sensations of red can themselves enter the content of visual experience—be an aspect of how the world looks. But this is surely absurd: I do not have experiences of experiences. when I see something red. When I see an object as red I see it. as having a property; I do not see. any sensations that might be occurring in perceivers. To have an experience as of a red object is not to have an experience as of. an experience as of a red object. My experience type does not enter its own content! This point becomes more evident when we switch to the alternative mind-centred formulation of DT mentioned above, to the effect that the colour of an object is a matter of the disposition of minds to perceive the world in certain ways. For it is scarcely credible to suppose that when an object is seen as red some mind. is seen as disposed to undergo experiences of red in the presence of the object. Such mentalistic facts are simply not visible features of the world. DT, as I remarked, is really a double dispositional theory, so that, if colours are visible, then so must both dispositions be visible. But one of these pertains to minds, so we have it, unacceptably, that minds are visible. The truth is that when an object looks red to me, no mind. looks any way to me—nor could it. So minds and their states cannot enter into the constitution of colour properties, given that these properties are visible. Colours are visibilia. par excellence, but experiences are not even possible objects of perception. Again, DT has to say that we fail to perceive colours as they are. (4) DT construes colours as dispositional, relational, and mental; each of these makes trouble for the naive idea that we see colours as they are. But there is a further problem that arises from the fact that it is a disposition to look red. that is held to constitute the essence of redness. What is this property which things are disposed to look to have when they are red? The property of being red, clearly; but then they must look to have whatever property that property itself consists in, namely, a disposition to look red, since that is. what redness consists in. But this invites the same question: What is it to look to have a disposition to look red? Well, it must be to look to have a disposition to look to have a disposition to look red. But there is that little word ‘red’ again, dangling at the end; and again we must ask what property that word designates—only to find the dispositional analysis raising the same question yet again. The problem is that DT never allows us to say that an object looks red simpliciter.; it must always look to have a disposition to look red, which latter property is itself a disposition to look . . . red. Not only can an object never look that way, as I argued above; it cannot even be said that DT has fixed any way in which objects could. look, since the predicate ‘red’ that purports to fix how things look is never allowed to exist in unanalysed form. Just as it seems that we

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might learn how red things look, by being told that they look red., the word ‘red’ disappears into a dispositional phrase that invites the same question. Intuitively, when something looks red it looks to have a simple categorical property that determines its appearance; but this property vanishes under analysis, so that no determinate way of looking has been specified. We can never say how the object has a disposition to look because a new disposition arises whenever we try to insert the word ‘red’ into a description of the original disposition. The simple property of being red is always at one remove from perceptions of red, incapable of figuring in its content in the way we ordinarily take it to do. Again, the visibility of colour is the casualty.425 The four problems just cited all arise from the fact that colours are not merely properties of objects but also characterize the content of visual experience. In effect, their role as content determinants imposes a constraint on any account of their status as instantiated properties: there must be a match between what colours are said to be and how they seem. And the basic reason for this is that unless the constraint is respected, we end up with an error theory of perception.426 The question, then, is whether we can respect the constraint while retaining whatever seemed right in DT. I now want to propose a way of doing this, a way that does not require total rejection of DT's motivating ideas, but only the application of a familiar conceptual distinction.

II The problems all stem, plainly enough, from the thesis that colours can be identified. with dispositions—that they are reducible. to them. But identity and reduction are not the only relations that can serve our philosophical purposes; there are weaker notions, notably supervenience., that can still do substantial work.427 Let us then consider the following proposal: instead of construing DT as an identity theory of colour, let us interpret it as a supervenience theory. The problems arose because we were taking colours simply to be. dispositions, neither more nor less; but we can weaken the theory, in a way familiar from other areas, so as to claim only that colours are supervenient on dispositions. That is: necessarily, if two objects have the same dispositions to produce experiences of colour, then they have the same colour; and if two objects differ

425

This regress argument is derived from Paul A. Boghossian and J. David Velleman, ‘Color as a Secondary Quality’, Mind., 98 (1989), 81–103.

426

In effect, we can avoid an error theory only if the same. property occupies a dual role: it is instantiated by external objects, and it individuates colour sensations; for only then will the object have the very property that experience presents. it as having.

427

For a general discussion of supervenience, see Jaegwon Kim, Supervenience and Mind. (New York: Cambridge, 1993).

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in colour, then they must also differ in their dispositions. The colour of an object is thus fixed by its sensory dispositions, so that there cannot be variation in the former without variation in the latter, but it is not the case that these covarying properties are numerically identical. In view of this failure of identity, we need not be troubled by the fact that there are characteristics that distinguish the two sorts of property—for example, that one sort is visible and the other is not. We can thus consistently maintain that colour properties themselves are categorical, simple, monadic, intrinsic features of objects, despite the fact that the properties they supervene on are dispositional, complex, relational, extrinsic features of objects. Supervenience tells us merely about the interdependency of properties; it says nothing about the nature or analysis of the supervening properties. This supervenience dispositional theory. (SDT) does not purport to tell us what colours are or how they should be analysed; it claims only that colours and their dispositional bases are indisseverable. Let me now try to clarify and defend this proposal. First, SDT is a metaphysical thesis about what determines the distribution of colours across the world; it is not a theory about the reference of colour terms or the content of colour experience. It is colour properties themselves, not their supervenience bases, that figure in these two domains. The underlying dispositions do not encroach upon semantics and phenomenology, precisely because SDT does not identify colours with dispositions. So no revisionism with respect to meaning and perceptual content is implied by SDT: we can be as naive and commonsensical as we like about colour, as it is meant and seen, while insisting that colours supervene on dispositions to cause experience. In particular, there is no reason whatever to suppose that the dispositions must be perceptually revealed—only colours themselves are. Since the two are not numerically identical, to see one is not to see the other. The levels are ontologically and conceptually distinct. Second, SDT allows us to retain the goodness in the dispositional theory while avoiding its untoward consequences. Part of the point of the dispositional theory is to mark a distinction between secondary qualities like colour and primary qualities like shape, which latter are conceptually independent of dispositions to appear in such-and-such ways. This is something we can still maintain, since shapes do not exhibit the same kind of supervenience on sensory dispositions—they are exemplified quite objectively.428 The strong dependence of colour on sensory response is still part of SDT, though not so directly as before. Similarly, the claim that the truth of colour ascriptions is fundamentally relative to a specific sensory response can also be maintained. We can still say that when Martians call ripe strawberries green, because of a constitutional difference in their sensory faculties, what they say is true relative

428

See The Subjective View. , esp. ch. 1, for a defence of this way of drawing the distinction.

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to them—as is what we say relative to us.429 This is because what looks red to us is disposed, in their case, to produce sensations of green; and such dispositions are sufficient for objects to have the corresponding colour. This kind of relativism is as formulable under SDT as it is under DT; so SDT retains that virtue (assuming one finds it to be so). The idea is that colour terms are not logically relational in themselves; rather, their application is merely controlled by inherently relational dispositions. In much the same way, pain might be supervenient upon certain relational facts about the nervous system, without the predicate ‘pain’ itself having any relational analysis. Third, colour and shape exhibit a certain pleasing symmetry in their relations to sensory dispositions under SDT. Just as we do not identify being square (say) with the disposition to look square, so we do not identify being red with the disposition to look red—though for quite different reasons in the two cases. The difference between colour and shape is not that colours are. sensory dispositions while shapes are not; it is rather that the order of ontological dependence is inverted in the two cases. Objects are disposed to look square because they are. square, while things are red in virtue of looking. red. Yet colours are in fact just as numerically distinct from their grounding dispositions as shapes are distinct from the dispositions they ground. The two sorts of property are mirror images of each other, logically speaking. The difference lies in their explanatory priorities with respect to the associated dispositions. Fourth, we should observe a significant difference between the present supervenience thesis and more familiar varieties, namely, that SDT offers necessary as well as sufficient conditions for what supervenes. There is thus no analogue in the colour case of the usual multiple realization thesis: pain may supervene on different types of physical state in humans and Martians, but redness cannot supervene on anything other than a disposition to look red (though this disposition may in turn be multiply realized in the object's physical make-up). Furthermore, the identity of the subvenient dispositional property is deducible a priori from the identity of the supervening property: if you know that an object is red, you can infer that it has a grounding disposition to appear red. The two properties are thus conceptually yoked together in all possible worlds. This implies, of course, that we cannot maintain the numerical distinctness of colours and their corresponding dispositions while holding that property identity is determined by necessary coextensiveness. I cannot pursue the question of property identity here, but let me say that I do not believe that the necessary coextensiveness criterion is very plausible or well motivated on independent grounds—and properties such as trilaterality and triangularity seem to me to be counter-examples to it. Property identity, I would say, is best seen as

429

I am not trying to defend this relativism here, just stating it; for more, see The Subjective View. , 9–11, 119–21.

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determined by the needs of theory, and in the present case we have every theoretical reason to distinguish colours from dispositions—while insisting on their necessary coextensiveness. In any case, there seems no good reason to deprive ourselves of the benefits of supervenience in the colour case just because it does not mimic the kind of multiple realization we find elsewhere. In summary, then, we can keep the main insights of the dispositional theory so long as we reduce its ambitions to mere supervenience. It will then do what we want without taking us where we do not want to be. The basis. of colour is indeed a disposition to appear, but what. appears is not the disposition itself but rather the colour property that supervenes upon it. Thus, the disposition does ontological work, while not getting the phenomenology of colour perception wrong. The content of visual experience is fixed by the unreduced colour properties, with the grounding dispositions lying strictly outside of such content. The trick is to let the dispositions control the colours, via supervenience, while not collapsing the colours into the dispositions. There is a question, though, about whether, once so weakened, the theory still deserves to be called a dispositional theory of colour. I think, on balance, that it should not. be so called, since it explicitly rejects the claim that colours are. dispositions. To avoid confusion, then, I propose that the new theory be labelled impressionism. about colour. The label is appropriate for two reasons: first, the theory ties colours to sensory impressions, in the traditional way; second, it insists that the nature of colour properties be approached by way of the content of colour experience. Impressionism makes colour ascriptions not only dependent upon how objects are disposed to look; it also holds that the nature of colour is revealed in. how coloured objects look. Impressionism takes colours to be just as they appear to be, which DT cannot do. To have the property of being red is precisely to have the very property that fixes the look of objects when they appear red. Colour properties are what populate our visual impressions, while being (as we might say) ex. pressions of underlying sensory dispositions, of which impressions are impossible.430

III It might well seem that the strategy I have adopted to deal with the problems for DT is rather obvious and elementary. So why has it not been suggested before? The answer may be that it violates a set of deeply rooted ontological assumptions about the kinds of properties there can be, to the effect that all (empirical) properties should be either mental or physical or some combination of the two. On the classic DT, this dualistic assumption is respected, since

430

I am here stating a form of externalism. about the content of colour perceptions: the property itself acts as a ‘constituent’ of the colour experience. This is a case of what I call weak externalism. : see my Mental Content. (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1989), ch. 1.

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colours are taken to be constructions from mental and physical properties. But the revised impressionist theory implicitly rejects such a dualism: colours, for impressionism, form a distinct family of properties, not reducible to the psychophysical dispositions upon which they supervene. Now we have, in addition to mental and physical properties (and combinations thereof), a further set of basic properties that objects may instantiate—the colours. Impressionism is ontologically pluralist; it is, in one sense, radically anti-Cartesian. Although mutually irreducible, the three sorts of property we have distinguished—first-order physical, second-order dispositional, superveniently chromatic—are hierarchically arranged, with colour properties standing at the apex. Despite their dependence on lower-level properties, the colours really are in an ontological class of their own, not assimilable to anything else. We have become accustomed to this kind of picture of an irreducible hierarchy when articulating the relation between the special sciences, but now we must enrich our ontology by adding an extra layer for the colours. We need mental and physical properties and then. colours. To the old question, ‘Are colours mental or physical, subjective or objective?’, we must answer, ‘Neither: they constitute a third category, just as real as, but distinct from, mental and physical properties.’ Such a position has not been unheard of for ethical and mathematical properties, among others, but in the case of colour the presupposed dualism has operated more occlusively, no doubt because colours are so empirically accessible and otherwise perspicuous. We can see. them laid out in space, qualifying the most mundane of objects. How could those unspooky properties fail to fit into our dualistic scheme? How could we perceive features of things that are neither mental nor physical?431 So it might be felt when in the grip of the Cartesian picture, but the fact is that, if what we have been saying is correct, colours simply do challenge the usual dualistic metaphysical scheme; they expose that scheme as an unwarranted prejudice, a remnant of creeping reductionism. And they undermine it on what might have seemed its strongest ground—for colours are, after all, properties of physical objects.. What we must accept is that it is just not true that every property of a physical object is either physical or mental: colours are a straight counter-example to that claim. One consequence of this is that physicalism would not be vindicated merely by providing a reduction of mental states like sensing something red, since even if that state were physically reducible it would not follow that redness itself can be reduced to a physical property. Redness might indeed be supervenient on wholly physical properties, of both the external object and the perceiver's nervous system, but it will not thereby itself be. physical—even if sensations. of

431

When I say ‘physical’ here I mean, of course, ‘the kind of property dealt with in physics’; it is not my claim that colours are not properties of. physical objects. Some properties can be properties of physical objects without being physical. properties of them (think, say, of aesthetic properties).

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red are as physical as you could wish. To a certain type of metaphysical outlook this result makes colours seem mysteriously free-floating, other-worldly, de trop.; but if SDT is correct then it is that outlook that needs to be questioned. The upshot is that in order to account for colour-as-perceived we need, ultimately, to reject the idea that the world can be exhaustively divided into a physical part and a mental part. Indeed, it will not suffice to append the category of the abstract to this traditional duality, since colours are not assimilable to the abstract either: they are properties of. spatio-temporal entities after all. Let me now note some further consequences and corollaries of SDT. It should be clear from what has been said already that the theory allows colours to be straightforwardly properties of external objects—not of sense-data, or of points in the visual field, or of nothing. So when it looks to you as if some external object is red that is precisely how things are—the object is. red. Naive realism about colour perception can thus be vindicated to the hilt, precisely because the dispositional component of the theory is not forced upon the colour properties themselves, with the mismatch between colour property and colour content that inevitably results. Not only does the outer object have. the colour property; it also has it in just the way. it seems to have it.432 Circularity objections are sometimes lodged against the classic DT. The complaint is that ‘red’ is being used in its own analysis, as when we say that the object has a disposition to look red.. Now it is not clear that such circularity is fatal to the theory, since it still imposes a substantive condition on the satisfaction of colour predicates;433 but we can in any case note that SDT does not face this objection, because it does not purport to define colour predicates dispositionally, nor to analyse the nature of colour properties in dispositional terms. We are thus no longer trying to explain the meaning of ‘red’ in terms of ‘looks red’, so it does not matter that we use ‘red’ in specifying the disposition upon which redness supervenes. According to impressionism, indeed, colours are primitive. properties, not analysable in any other terms: ‘red’ simply denotes the property of being red, not the property of being disposed to look red (and that last use of ‘red’ denotes the property it usually denotes, too). It is quite true, however, that the supervenience base is specified by reference to the property red., since that property is mentioned in the description of how things dispositionally look. But it occurs there only qua represented, not qua instantiated; so we are certainly not saying that instantiations of redness are supervenient on instantiations. of redness. They are supervenient, rather, on

432

So, in particular, the colour is had intrinsically, not relationally. This implies that an instrinsic property can be supervenient upon a relational property. That may seem odd, a violation of the principle that supervenience should preserve polyadicity. But I do not see why we should insist on such a principle: aside from lacking self-evidence, it takes supervenience to be more of a reductive or explanatory relation than it is.

433

I discuss this in The Subjective View. , 6–8.

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instantiations of the property of being disposed to look red. It is just that that. property is specified by referring to the property of being red inside an intentional context. We could say that redness fixes its own instantiation by way of a disposition to produce experiences that are individuated by reference to that property. This shows how little the theory attempts to analyse. colour properties; it simply tells us what their instantiation turns upon—by mentioning that very property. The property gets to be instantiated by objects in virtue of the fact that objects produce experiences in which that property is represented.434 This bears upon an apparent puzzle that might be raised for the impressionist theory. Why do colour properties exist at all if that theory is correct? Why does the world not contain just the basic dispositions? Are not the colours themselves otiose, an addition that makes no difference? This question is inapplicable to the classic DT, since colours are. dispositions for that theory, but once we distinguish the two properties the charge of imparsimony looms. I do not think this objection can be dismissed out of hand: there is, on the face of it, an odd ontological excess in acknowledging colour properties in addition to sensory dispositions. Of course, the objection is uninteresting if it is merely a special case of the ‘problem’ of why we have any. supervening properties in addition to more basic ones. But there is more to it than that. For, first, we have necessary coextensiveness here, so no cross-classifying justification can be given for introducing colours over and above dispositions. And, second, there is a puzzle about why visual systems bother to detect colours instead of just restricting themselves to representing dispositions. Our earlier discussion has laid the groundwork for an answer to the alleged puzzle: visual systems cannot. limit themselves to detecting the dispositions that underlie colours because such dispositions are simply not perceptible features of objects. Perhaps visual systems would so limit themselves if (per impossibile.) they could, but actually they have no choice: they need to represent colours and not dispositions because such dispositions are not possible objects of sight. Colours are, as it were, the visible distillate of those invisible dispositions—their emissaries into the world of sight. Moreover, without the existence of colour properties, objects could not even possess dispositions to cause sensations of colour, since colour properties figure—qua represented—in the very specification of such sensations. There is no such thing as a disposition to produce sensations of colour properties unless colour properties exist; so we cannot really imagine a world in which the dispositions are present without the colours. We cannot properly individuate

434

That is, it is a necessary consequence of sensations' having the content they have that colours are distributed across objects as they are; while it is not similarly a necessary consequence of sensory content that objects have the shapes they have. This is a way of formulating the traditional distinction between primary and secondary qualities: secondary qualities are those which have their primary occurrence as contents, while primary qualities do not show this kind of content primacy. (Again, I am formulating the distinction, not trying to defend it.)

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colour sensations without referring to the colour properties that fix their content. Thus, far from being redundant, ontologically, they are a precondition of the existence of the corresponding dispositions. We cannot then construe the dispositions as ontological rivals. to colour properties; each needs the other. Logical relations between propositions about colours can be smoothly interpreted under the new theory. Consider the proposition that no surface can be red and green at the same time (at least relative to a particular class of perceivers). There is something right in the idea that such conceptual truths derive from necessary features of sensory experience, to the effect that nothing can seem. red and green to a given perceiver at the same time in the same region of the visual field. They record phenomenological necessities in some way.435 But it looks misguided to try to translate. such truths into statements about. perceivers and how things can seem to them. They are about what they appear to be about, namely, colours themselves. How can we reconcile the natural naive semantics of these statements with the idea that the root of their truth lies in experiential necessities? Here, I think that SDT allows us to have the best of both worlds: the truths hold in virtue. of the underlying experiential necessities, but the statements strictly refer. to the primitive properties that colours are. An object cannot be disposed to look both red and green to me, since my visual field precludes such a combination of appearances—and this is the foundation of the truth that the object cannot be. both red and green (relative to a given perceiver). But it is the primitive properties of redness and greenness that the statement is strictly about.. Their modal features are indeed supervenient upon the modal features of experience, but there is to be no reduction of the former to the latter. This is simply because the property of being disposed to seem a certain colour is not the same. property as the property of being a certain colour. Conceptual truths about colours are no more translatable into experiential terms than is the statement that nothing can be round and square at the same time. Since the instantiation of redness is consequential upon sensory dispositions, the co.-instantiability of this property with others is similarly consequential; but the resulting necessities concern a distinct sui generis. level of existence. Finally, let me point to two other areas of philosophy in which this account of colour might serve as a useful model. The first is in the analysis of value. Some people have maintained that values are analogous to colours in that both are analysable as dispositions to produce certain sorts of psychological response.436 This conception of value raises analogues to the phenomenological problems I cited for the classic DT, even when it is not claimed that values are perceptible features of things. For the view seems to misrepresent the content of moral judgements: when we say that something is good, we do not seem. to be

435

I discuss this in The Subjective View. , ch. 3.

436

The locus classicus. is David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature. , book III, part i, section i. I argue against the analogy in The Subjective View. , 145–55; so it is not that I myself wish to defend a dispositional theory of value.

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making a claim about how people are liable to respond to the thing in question, but rather to be ascribing a simple categorical property to the object of judgement. Thus, the dispositional theorist of value is pushed toward semantic revisionism. But the strategy that worked for colour could be exploited here, too: goodness, it might be claimed, is supervenient upon dispositions to generate judgements of goodness, but there is no identity between the two levels. The property of goodness is not reducible to the dispositions that control its instantiation; it is ‘emergent’ with respect to those dispositions. When we judge something to be good we are not then judging. it to have a disposition to be judged good. The property of goodness can be in itself a simple unanalysable monadic property, while nevertheless being supervenient upon complex relational dispositional properties. This adds a new option to the range of available positions here, and one that is in certain respects more attractive than the usual identity version of the doctrine. The other area is in the theory of truth. It can be objected against the correspondence theory of truth (in any of its forms) that ‘true’ is not a relational predicate but a monadic one: it ascribes a property to a proposition rather than expressing a relation between the proposition and some other entity. We have the relational phrases ‘true of ’ and ‘true to’, but the use of ‘true’ in application to a complete proposition does not admit of this kind of relational modifier. Nor does this seem like a superficial fact about the truth predicate—it is part of its very meaning. Yet there are also felt to be attractions in the venerable idea that truth depends somehow upon correspondence to the world: no proposition is true but reality makes it so, as the saying goes. Are these two claims as incompatible as they seem? They are if the correspondence theory is taken as an analysis of the truth predicate, or as a claim of property identity. But, following the colour paradigm, we can begin to see how the two ideas might be consistently combined. A proposition is true in virtue of its relations to the world (however that is to be construed), but ‘true’ does not denote any correspondence relation: truth and correspondence are linked not by identity but by supervenience. Thus, if two propositions have the same correspondence relations, then they must have the same truth value; and if they differ in truth value, they must differ in what they correspond to. But that is not to say that the truth property is nothing over and above correspondence relations, nor that judgements of truth are judgements of. correspondence. We might take truth to be a simple unanalysable monadic property while insisting that its instantiation is determined, supervenience-wise, by relations of correspondence. Clearly, much more needs to be said about this proposal, but it does at least offer the prospect of respecting two sets of powerful and persistent intuitions about the nature of truth. Is the apparatus we have been employing ad hoc? Are the distinctions it makes merely artful and artificial dodges whose sole purpose is to sidestep certain problems? The answer depends on whether the problems are real and

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the apparatus well defined. If the apparatus does useful work, and is intrinsically coherent, then it earns its place in resolving the problems of colour.

Postscript to ‘Another Look at Colour’ When I wrote The Subjective View. there was very little to read on the topic of colour—just Locke, Descartes, and a few contemporary Australians. It was considered a decidedly old-fashioned and fusty topic. No great controversies raged around it. I adopted a dispositional view of colour, which was pretty much received wisdom at the time, not saying much in defence of it, and then went on to consider some consequences and analogies. Since that time the literature on colour has billowed dramatically, and a great variety of positions have been urged. It is now de rigueur. to have a theory of colour. The literature has accordingly grown far more ‘sophisticated’ than it was when I first became interested in the topic. The good thing is that a deep and difficult philosophical problem, with many ramifications, has now received the attention it deserves from analytical philosophers. Apart from the topic of the a priori, I would even say that colour is the most philosophically significant topic dealt with in this book. It is not some little local puzzle that can be figured out on a wet afternoon. I never quite asserted the identity version of the dispositional theory in The Subjective View., though I did not refrain from asserting it either; I was simply not totally clear on exactly how strong the analysis was intended to be. But I was aware of the phenomenological problems that arise if colour is analysed dispositionally. The present paper is a belated response to these problems. I view its main thesis—the supervenience of primitive colour properties on complex dispositional properties—as the best compromise in accommodating the various constraints on an adequate theory of colour. This is an area in which ontology and phenomenology are exceptionally intimately related, and the difficulty is to get the ontology right without making the phenomenology come out wrong. In particular, how do we register the ontological relativity of colour while respecting the phenomenological simplicity and thereness. of colour? How do we combine the appearance of colours as distal properties of spatially extended objects with the recognition that without perceivers there would be. no colours (I am speaking ultimately here)? These twin constraints, which pull colours in opposite directions, are argued to be met by the theory I here label impressionism.. I hope that the theory receives some critical scrutiny in the future literature, because I am anxious to know whether I can finally lay to rest my own perplexities on the subject. Colour, like consciousness (to which it is interestingly related), is one of those topics that keeps you awake at night; but, unlike with consciousness, there seems no very good reason why the problem cannot be cracked.

16 The Appearance of Colour In my paper ‘Another Look at Colour’437 I argued that colours are simple monadic primitive properties whose instantiation supervenes on complex relational dispositions to appear to perceivers in such-and-such ways. I objected to the literal identification of colours with such dispositions on the grounds that the phenomenology of colour perception contradicts this identification. Not only does colour perception not represent colours as relational dispositions of this kind (negation here having wide scope); it has a content that is inconsistent with this account of the nature of colour (negation now taking narrow scope). One response to this argument is to concede the inconsistency but undertake to live with it: agree that the true nature of colour is inconsistent with the phenomenology of colour perception, but decree perceptual experience systematically erroneous. This, it may be said, is just one more area in which philosophy (or science) needs to correct common sense. In my earlier paper I took it as an assumption that this approach was best avoided, and I shall continue with that assumption. But there is another way to try to block my argument, which does not convict experience of systematic error with respect to the nature of colour: maintain that colour experience is neutral. about key properties of colour. It is not that colour perception presents colours as. simple monadic nondispositional properties while they are nothing of the sort; rather, it is noncommittal about such matters, and hence is quite consistent with the dispositional identity thesis. Since colour experience is neutral about the nature of colour, it cannot be contradicted by the ontology of colour. If no predications are made, then no errors are possible. On this view, then, it is impossible to argue from the phenomenology of colour perception to any constraints on the kind of property colours have to be (always assuming we want to avoid systematic illusion). In this paper I want to articulate and evaluate this neutrality thesis. The point is not merely to plug up a potential gap in my earlier argument, but to investigate the content and consequences of the neutrality thesis. I think some such conception still tacitly operates in a variety of contexts, and I am anxious to undermine its appeal. So I shall begin by formulating the thesis a bit more

437

Journal of Philosophy. (Nov. 1996).

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explicitly, before criticizing it and offering what I believe to be a preferable view of the nature of appearance. But before I set about this task let me sketch a possible position that I will not consider in any detail; I think it is a wrong position, but it does have some intrinsic interest. This is the idea that a visual experience has both a surface structure and a deep structure or hidden logical form.438 There are two versions of this idea of interest to us. One version takes the surface structure to carry its own commitments about the nature of colour properties, much as natural language sentences can carry such commitments. But since these may differ from the commitments carried by the deep structure, the experience may be evaluated for accuracy at two levels: (a.) does the surface structure correctly represent the ontology of colour? and (b.) does the deep structure do so? In principle, the surface could get it wrong, while the deep gets it right; and in that case, the deep might be allowed to dominate, thus establishing the experience as veridical. The surface might, say, represent colours as monadic, while the deep supplies an extra argument place for perceivers. If colours really are such two-place relations, then the experience is veridical at the deep level—where this level might not be apparent to introspection. The position would then be analogous to natural-language sentences about existence on the Frege–Russell view of existence. But another version of the idea would be that the surface form of colour perception is neutral about the nature of colour while the deep structure makes definite commitments about colour. Thus it would be open to us to hold that experience represents the dispositionality of colour at the underlying level and hence represents colour correctly, while the surface level—the level available to introspection—is quite neutral about such questions. Since I shall be arguing that there is no neutral level of experiential content I reject this kind of mixed position, but it exists in logical space for those who favour some kind of neutrality thesis but also wish to assign correctness conditions to perceptual experiences. In any case, I shall be discussing the simpler neutrality thesis from now on—the idea that experience is through-and-through neutral about what kind of property a colour property is. It is one thing to baldly state the neutrality thesis; it is another thing to get a feel for its picture of perceptual content. A good way to do the latter is to consider the relation between sentences as syntactic objects and their meanings. The syntax or orthography of a sentence is neutral with respect to the sense and reference of the sentence: nothing can be inferred about meaning from mere syntax (‘shape’), and you can vary syntax and meaning independently of each other. Just so, the neutrality thesis says that phenomenal content is independent of the reference of perceptual experiences: you cannot infer anything about colour properties from the phenomenal content of experience, and you can in

438

On the idea of a hidden logical form to states of consciousness see my ‘The Hidden Structure of Consciousness’, in The Problem of Consciousness. (Basil Blackwell, 1991) .

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principle vary content and reference independently of each other. The experience, considered intrinsically, relates to its reference—the colour property—as a word relates to its reference: in a word, arbitrarily. The two are associated by whatever determines the reference relation—as it might be, causal relations—but there is no intrinsic or ‘logical’ relation between them. If you think of there being a ‘language of vision’, then phenomenal content consists of words in this language, and no mere word can carry any commitments as to the nature of what it refers to (i.e. without considering its sense). Accordingly, it can never be right to charge experience itself with misrepresenting the nature of a property, since experiences are semantically mute. So, in particular, it cannot be right to say that colour experience represents colours as monadic while the dispositional theory says they are relational. The neutrality thesis no doubt has its attractions in avoiding apparent clashes between semantics and ontology: ontological theses about the nature of certain properties can never be criticized for failing to match how experience represents them, or vice versa. Indeed, there is a prima-facie problem for my own account of colour that would be neatly sidestepped if the neutrality thesis were sustainable—namely, that I am committed to regarding colours as relative and yet I deny that colour experience represents them that way. If experience is neutral about the polyadicity of colour properties, then there can be no clash between accepting that colours are relative to a type of perceiver and allowing that colours are not represented that way in experience. However, I think that accepting neutrality is too large a price to pay to avoid the alleged problem of colour relativity. The way I prefer to avoid it is this: claim that experience represents colours as monadic, which they intrinsically are, but explain the agreed relativity to perceivers without making colours themselves into relations. This is a somewhat subtle issue, but the key point is to arrive at the right interpretation of the relativity that must be accepted and not inflate it beyond what is proper.439 Consider our old friends the Martians, who see surfaces we see as red as green. The relativity thesis says that their perceptual systems make no error, since such surfaces are green ‘for them’. But what is this property of being ‘green-for-them’? I suggest that it consists simply in this: that their perceptions of the surfaces that look red to us are veridical if those surfaces look green to them. Why? Because that is the disposition that these surfaces have relative to their perceptual systems. The right picture is that a given surface has each of the monadic colour properties that there are dispositions for it to appear as; the relativity consists simply in the fact that whether a perception of the surface is veridical depends upon what disposition to appear that surface has with respect to the class of perceivers in question. The colour properties themselves are instantiated, superveniently, by virtue of the underlying dispositions,

439

I am grateful to Mark Johnston for pressing me on this issue, and for other colourful conversations.

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but they are not thereby relational properties. We do not need to reconstrue colours by introducing an extra argument place into them, since the relativity is simply a matter of humans being right to see tomatoes as red and Martians being right to see them as green—given that tomatoes have the two sets of dispositions. So there is no mismatch between the ontology of colour properties and the way they are represented in experience. The relativity, we might say, is external to the colour properties themselves. Clearly, the neutrality thesis is not false with respect to every truth about colour properties. That redness is instantiated by my sneakers is not a property of redness that ordinary experiences of red can be expected to reveal—that is, when looking at red objects other than my sneakers. Equally, the physical wavelengths that underlie redness are not part of the content of red experiences: these experiences do not have an opinion about wavelengths that might be contradicted by the physical facts. Where we would expect to find the neutrality thesis least plausible is in the constitutive or essential features of colours. How neutral about redness can experiences get and still be about that property? How can they hang on to the topic if they refuse to make any comment about it? Take the most extreme neutrality claim—that experience is neutral as to which. colour is being represented. This would have the consequence that nothing about the intrinsic features of experiences of red offers any clue that it is red. that is being represented: it might be blue or green or even square. This kind of identity neutrality allows it to turn out that your experience of a ripe tomato might really represent it as being green, despite the ‘red-like’ neutral component of the experience that is presented to introspection! Presumably, this is absurd. But this absurdity already puts a huge dent in the syntactic analogy and the logical conception it works with. There is surely no neutral core of visual experience with respect to which the identity. of a represented colour is indeterminate. So experience operates at the level of sense and not mere syntax. Or consider the location of perceived colour: is experience neutral as to whether the colour of an object is at its surface rather than internal to it or two inches out from its surface? That would mean that when I look at a tomato my experience does not tell me that its surface is red, but is rather quite consistent with it looking to me that the interior of the tomato is red (not its surface) or with there appearing to be a sort of red halo two inches from its surface. Presumably, again, this too is absurd. Experience is not neutral about the apparent location of colours—it puts them on the surfaces of objects. My experience of a tomato is fully committed both as to which colour it appears to have and to that colour's being the colour of its surface. This is a matter of its phenomenology, not some extraneous addition. And I also think, though I will not argue the point here, that experience represents colours as non-relational and non-dispositional. But the claim I am making now is that the neutrality thesis has to be wrong considered as a perfectly general thesis. Experiences really do have determinate correctness conditions as a function of their

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phenomenology. What is more arguable is which. truths about colour are part of the intrinsic content of colour experiences. It is simply a myth that experience floats free of all. semantic commitments. And it is a myth that feeds into other dubious conceptions. There is the idea that experience has special intrinsic features called ‘qualia’ that are non-intentional; these are held to constitute the phenomenology of experience. But if there is no neutral core involved in colour perception, then this conception has to be wrong.440 Experience of colour just is the ascription to external objects of colour properties; it is not that experience is constituted by some purely intrinsic dimension that makes no reference to the colour property itself (more on this below). The phenomenology of colour perception is inseparable from its intentionality, since there is no semantically neutral experiential core that alone suffices to fix phenomenal content. This myth of intrinsic qualia is connected to another familiar myth—the myth of the given. This is precisely the idea that experience can be described in ways that entirely prescind from predicates that apply to objects in the external world—that what is given is inherently preobjectual. The given is what precedes representations of external states of affairs. If there were a neutral core, then this conception would be floatable; but since there is not it cannot be. The idea of a sense-datum that has qualities that advert to no property of external objects is empty. Call it a ‘yellowish’ sense-datum if you like, but you are tacitly describing it as a sense-datum in virtue of which things. look yellow.. This is an old point, of course, but it is amazing how often the myth of the neutral ‘given’ resurrects itself in new contexts. There is a tremendous temptation to think of visual experience as constituted by an array of purely inner items that dance naked before consciousness and owe nothing to the world of objects and properties. And here is where the myth of the given connects with internalist intuitions about the mind: if the pure essence of the mind can be characterized without reference to properties of objects, as internalism supposes, then there is a mental residue left over when the intentional has been sheared away, and this can serve as the given in the bad old sense.441 Put the other way, if there is a given, then there are materials to which the internalist can appeal in support of his conception of the mind. Internalism and the given play into each other's hands, and each presupposes the neutrality thesis. Abandon that thesis and they go with it. Or: if you don't like the look of internalism and the given, then you had better not go for the neutrality thesis.

440

On the relation between qualia and representational content see my ‘Consciousness and Content’, in The Problem of Consciousness. .

441

On internalism and externalism see my Mental Content. (Basil Blackwell, 1989) . In the terms of that book internalism reflects substantialism. about the mind—the idea that the mind has the ontological characteristics of a substance. This implies that the notion of the given is itself bolstered by substantialism: the alleged properties of the given are precisely those purely intrinsic features of the mind that render it substance-like. The notion of narrow content, on some construals, works suspiciously like this idea of the given. There is a whole package of ideas here, which stand or fall together (and fall, I am arguing).

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A further connected consequence is that if experience is semantically neutral then it cannot serve as a reason to believe anything. That was always the trouble with the given: in denuding experience of world-involving content we prevent ourselves from using experiences as evidence for belief, since evidence must have propositional content in order to be evidence for. the truth of some other proposition.442 The neutrality thesis makes it unintelligible how it is that colour perception could afford reasons for forming beliefs about the colours of objects. In fact, of course, we form beliefs about the colours of objects by having experiences in the having of which things look to have certain colours.. Neutrality protects experience from error, allegedly, but the cost is that experience can no longer inform. the subject of anything about the external world. For experience to be informative, it has to say something; but once it says something what it says may be false. The given is prompted by fear of scepticism—by the possibility of perceptual error: but to preclude error it renders experience unable to ground belief, by expunging representational content. What view of the nature of appearance should be put in the place of the neutrality thesis? The view I want to suggest is simple and radical: visual experience is a relation between a conscious subject and a cluster of properties, which may or may not be instantiated.443 In the case of an experience of red, say, the property of being red is presented to the conscious subject in the mode of appearance. There is no mental intermediary between the subject and this property—no neutral quale, no non-conceptual content, no concept. The experience of red is wholly constituted by this relation between subject and property, made possible by the possession of perceptual faculties on the part of the creature in question. Experience is simply the appearing of properties to subjects of consciousness. It is not that the subject is first related to some mental intermediary which in turn is related to the property of being red—as it might be, a concept, a non-conceptual representation, or a neutral quale. Rather, he is directly related to the external property. On this view, colour perception is about as non-neutral as can be, since its very identity involves the colour property. The experience can hardly be neutral about the nature of the property since it is constituted by it. The phenomenology of visual perception incorporates. colour properties, and hence their essence will be reflected in experience itself. Experience of colour is as of. whatever colours are.. If colours are simple monadic primitive properties, then experience of colour will be as of just such properties. If colours are relational dispositions, then experience will be as of just such dispositions. Hence, if experiences are not. as of relational dispositions, then either experience is mistaken or colours are not such dispositions. The reason for this exceptionally tight relation between appearance and reality is that colours are a reality that constitutes. the appearances of objects. In

442

John McDowell focuses on this requirement in Mind and World. (Harvard University Press, 1994 ).

443

I first stated this position in Mental Content. , 114–17. Fred Dretske defends a similar position in Naturalizing the Mind. (MIT Press, 1995), 101–2 .

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perception properties appear, so whatever properties appear had better belong to the appearances. The world contains a level of properties that constitute the appearance of things, and these properties are the very ones that fix the identity of the experiences in. which things appear. Since appearances are nothing other than appearing properties, appearances cannot be neutral about the nature of such properties. On this conception of experiences, then, the phenomenology of experience is authoritative about the essential nature of colour properties; there is nothing in experience that could. maintain neutrality about the colours. Experience has to be committed about the properties it presents because these properties make it what it is. This view is obviously a kind of externalism about perceptual content, and it may help to put the point explicitly in those terms. Consider my belief that this apple is red, and assume externalism about belief content. That belief then has its content individuated by the apple in question and by the property of being red. But then the content of my belief cannot be neutral about the property of being red, since that property is a component of the content: whatever is constitutively true of the property shows up in the content itself. It is not that the property exists at one remove from the belief content. Given the content, you can read off the property. Sense includes reference. Now, just as believing is a relation to entities in the world, so is perceptual appearing. It makes no more sense to say that experience could be neutral about whether colour is a relation than it does to say that meaning could be neutral about whether loving is a relation. If loving is a relation, and if this relation individuates the meaning of sentences about loving, then that meaning cannot be neutral about whether loving is a relation. In the same way, if colours are not relations, but monadic properties, and if colours individuate experiences, then experiences are committed to colours not being relations. So if we know that experiences are committed to the non-relationality of colours, then we know that colours are not relations, since things can only appear a certain way if the properties that form. the appearances are a certain way. This is the peculiarity of appearance-fixing properties. Let me now respond to some queries about the thesis that experience can be analysed as a relation to a cluster of properties. First, how can this view handle dreams, illusions, and hallucinations? The answer can be briefly stated: these are all cases in which the presented properties are not instantiated. The properties themselves are ‘before the mind’, and they are objective non-mental entities, but no object has them (or no object at the right place). If I dream of pink rats, for example, then the property of being pink and the property of being a rat are presented to my consciousness, but there are no pink rats at the place they seem to be—say, at the bottom of my bed. It is not that nothing objective is before my mind, but only some purely mental item, since properties are perfectly objective items. In a case of veridical perception, the same properties are presented as in a case of hallucination, but they are also instantiated

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by objects (as well as working to cause my experience). Experience is externalistically individuated in both cases; the difference lies merely in whether the external properties are instantiated (and cause my experience in the right way). How does introspection work on this view? Not, certainly, by being directed to some purely inner item with no objective involvements. Rather, introspection must record which property is the object of my experience and include this in its report about what experience I am having. In other words, introspection cannot be purely ‘inward’, given externalism. But enough has been said elsewhere on the topic of externalism and first-person authority; suffice it to say that I do not think that any real problems arise from this source for the present view of appearance.444 It might be wondered how we can account for the phenomenal differences between the different sense modalities on the present view. This is quite a puzzling question, but I do not think we are forced back to the neutral content view by it. The thought is that different senses can have the same properties appearing to them, but surely they are phenomenologically different. Shape is presented to touch and sight, for example; so what distinguishes them if not some neutral qualia that define their respective phenomenologies? The first point to note is that different secondary qualities are presented to sight and touch: sight has colour properties presented to it and touch does not. Thus these two senses are distinguished by the range of properties that can appear to them. This may well handle all the phenomenological differences that need to be handled, but we can also appeal to the fact that the properties are presented precisely to different senses, and decline to explain this difference in terms of a neutral medium. To appear visually, as opposed to tactually, need not consist in some indefinable content of consciousness; for a mode. of appearing is not necessarily a something. that appears (it is not a nothing—but it is not a something either). Phenomenal differences need not correspond to different phenomenal objects. But I will not go further into this topic here. It may also be objected that the view cannot account for the notion of the way. an object appears, since it works only with entitites that themselves appear: how does the view accommodate the level of sense? The answer is that a way of appearing is just another property that appears. When we say that an object appears a certain way we mean that certain of its properties are apparent to us.445 I do not think that there is any respectable notion of a way of appearing that cannot be accommodated by finding an appropriate appearing property. The angle of an object, say, which may affect the appearance of its shape, can be explained simply in terms of the spatial relations that hold between the object

444

See, for example, Dretske, Naturalizing the Mind. , ch. 2.

445

Sense is often glossed in terms of aspects. of objects, but an aspect of an object is just a property it has. What I am saying is that in perception we can get by with reference alone once we count properties as references.

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and the perceiver. If a red surface appears lighter in one place than another this can be explained in terms of the property of being lighter, without bringing in purely subjective somethings. The level of sense, in perception, is just the level of appearing properties. A final important objection needs to be addressed: if perceptual appearing is basically a relation to a cluster of properties, then how does perception differ from thought? We have applied externalism to both, so what explains the difference? The Kantian view, taken up by McDowell,446 seeks to account for the difference in terms of an active/ passive or spontaneity/receptivity distinction. In thought or judgement the understanding employs its concepts actively or freely or with ‘spontaneity’, while in perception the very same concepts are employed passively or unfreely or in the mode of ‘receptivity’. The presence or absence of concepts cannot explain the difference, since concepts are taken to be exercised in both perception and thought; rather, the difference consists in the manner in which they are employed—with the co-operation of the will or without. I disagree with this approach on two fronts. First, I do not think that concepts are needed for perception (nor a fortiori do I believe in ‘non-conceptual contents’), since I hold that objects and their properties are presented to the subject without mental intermediary. The perceptual faculty does not itself bring objects and their properties under any concepts. I think that the whole point of concepts is to enable the subject to represent things that are not. present to her; so if they are perceptually present, then concepts are otiose. Concepts are precisely devices for representing absent things—things not in one's current field of perceptual awareness. If concepts were part of perception, then there would be no need for the objects to be present to the perceiver in order to be perceived. This is why animals without concepts can perceive just as well as we can; what they are no good at is thinking about things they are not perceiving—for that they need concepts. Bringing concepts into perception is suspiciously reminiscent of the bad idea of the given, ironically enough—a mental something standing between the conscious subject and external states of affairs. What is given, if anything is to be so described, is simply—the world. So I want to keep concepts out of it: with concepts come conceptions, and these threaten to occlude the properties themselves—which simply appear before the mind as they are. When I think about things concepts do indeed mediate my intentionality; but when I perceive there is no such mediation—which is why the object and its properties stand right there before one's mind. Secondly, the notion of passivity is the wrong notion to do the job. Some of my belief formation is clearly passive, not subject to my will, so mere passivity does not make something into a perceptual state. I do not perceive something

446

McDowell, Mind and World. , e.g. 10–11. The criticisms I make in the text are only an indication of where I differ from McDowell, but it may be useful to articulate a point of view he does not consider in that book.

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just because I cannot help thinking about it! The Kantian doctrine ties cognition too closely to freedom. The real difference here has to with the fact that perception presents properties as instantiated., while belief does not. When I look at an object I am confronted by facts., by objects instantiating properties (assuming veridicality). But when I form a belief, however involuntarily, no fact is thus presented to me; rather, I combine concepts so as to represent what I take. to be a fact. The essence of perception is the way the world takes hold of one's consciousness, intrudes upon it—saying, as it were, ‘Here I am, don't try to deny it!’ But that is not the case with judgement: in judgement the world does not offer itself up to the judging faculty. In belief-formation there is no analogue for opening one's eyes and having reality flood in. It is the fact that reality is presented. to perceptual consciousness that is crucial, not the mere fact that one is passive in the way one applies one's concepts to the world. Some philosophers make perception too much like thought by placing concepts at the heart of both faculties; others make thought too much like perception by thinking of concepts as mental images or some such; the right approach is to recognize the essential difference between the two, by acknowledging the different ways in which intentionality works in the two areas.447 And if you want to know how there can be epistemic links between experience and thought, given their different modes of intentionality, then I think we need say no more than this: in perception it appears to the subject that p., and this is a sufficient basis for forming the belief that p.. It can appear to the perceiver that p. without his exercising the concepts that are involved in judging that p.. Rational links do require propositional content—truth conditions—but that is not yet to say that such contents must be conceptually (or ‘non-conceptually’) mediated. Of course, there has to be a subpersonal mechanism underlying such appearings that p., but this need not realize a set of concepts that are brought to bear on the properties perceived. The properties are directly apprehended by the senses, and hence need no grasping concepts to bring them into consciousness. That is the whole point of perception: to enable you to be aware of things without having to think about them.448

447

One interesting difference here concerns the possibilities for generating nonsense. in thought and perception. Language readily permits the formation of nonsense sentences (‘Colourless green ideas sleep furiously’ etc.), and thought seems capable of comparable flights into nonsensical content. But perceptual content is far more tied down to the possible and meaningful—one cannot have a perceptual experience as of colourless green ideas sleeping furiously. Even Escher drawings have to make a semblance of sense.

448

One reason I don't want concepts introduced into perceptual content is that this enforces a substantial sense-reference distinction in the perceptual presentation of properties. The property of being red, say, could be presented under two non-equivalent concepts when it is perceived, each determining the manner in which that property appears. This seems phenomenologically quite wrong, and to put a gap between appearance and what appears. Of course, if concepts are simply identified with properties, then this problem lapses—but then the theory is equivalent to mine.

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Postscript to ‘The Appearance of Colour’ This is the only paper in this volume not previously published elsewhere. It was written for a meeting of the American Philosophical Association for December 1997, given with Barry Stroud, with John McDowell as commentator. In some ways it is continuous with earlier papers about intentionality, though here I am dealing explicitly with perceptual intentionality. Unsurprisingly, then, the theory I favour is externalist, regarding perceptual appearances as wholly individuated by the properties that appear. I take the appearing relation to be primitive, in effect, not subsuming it under the relation of concept satisfaction: that is, I reject the idea that for an object to appear square to me is for my concept of squareness to be satisfied by that object in the mode of perception. I think this is no more plausible than the idea that property appearance is a special case of predicate satisfaction—that when something appears square to me this is to be analysed as the object having the predicate ‘square’ applied to it. Perceptual presentation is far more primitive than that, being possible in creatures that lack both language and concepts. And even for creatures that possess language and concepts the perceptual systems do not themselves recruit those capacities, though of course they feed into them. When a concept is applied to a presented object that is always a further operation of mind, superadded to the mere appearance of the object in perceptual consciousness. On my way of looking at it, concepts figure as substitutes. for perceptual appearance—in the sense that they are needed for intentionality only when the object is not. being perceived. While you are staring at something it will stay in your consciousness even while your concepts are off doing other things; but once you turn away from the object your mind will stay tuned to it only if your concepts take up where your perceptions left off. Perform the following experiment: stare at an object and take in the properties that constitute its appearance; now close your eyes and keep thinking about it—can't you feel. your conceptual capacities clicking into gear to replace your perceptual receptivity? It is as if a back-up system has come into operation, now that the perceptual channels to the world have been closed. Indeed, it seems to me quite conceivable that a person could wake up after suffering an accident to the head, open his eyes, take in the appearances, and then discover that he is no longer capable of thinking about the objects of perception. He has lost the capacity to deploy concepts, but can still experience the world around him. I briefly criticize McDowell in the paper for giving an account of perceptual presence that is too weak to capture the phenomenon in question. My point is not that he fails to recognize the full force of the notion of perceptual presence, as many philosophers indeed do; my point is that the theoretical materials he employs to account for it are not strong enough to do the job he wants them to do. That is, his analysis does not provide sufficient conditions for perceptual

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presence; it does not entail that the object represented is perceived.. Briefly put, the point is that the notion of passivity is too weak to deliver perceptual presence, since it is possible to form mere beliefs passively. The absence of the operation of will in representing an object is not enough for that object to be perceived. It is perfectly coherent to imagine someone being forced. to form a certain belief by the impact of the world (or by the person's own psychology) and this belief not amount to the perceptual presence of the object. It is quite true, of course, that perception is involuntary, perhaps necessarily so; but that is not to say that involuntariness is sufficient for perception. Something extra has to be added. It is not that I think this is an easy task; indeed, part of my point is that we don't really have an adequate philosophical account of the notion of perceptual presence—though we have plenty of metaphors to play with. We need some account of that sense of being invaded. by the world when we open our eyes in the morning, of objects populating. our mental space, of the world being spread before. our consciousness. My criticism of the Kantian line defended by McDowell is simply that the idea of being compelled to represent the world does not capture the phenomenon these metaphors evoke. In other words, we don't have an adequate account of appearance..

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Index action 169, 186 actualism 89–90, 93; ‘personal actualism’ 89 analytical reduction 24; foundational vs.. holistic 25 anaphora 208–9, 212 anti-realism 87–9, 95–7; personal and impersonal anti-realist reduction 90 Austin J. L. 8 Baldwin, T. 85 behavioural disposition 226, 229 behaviourism 139, 150, 245–6, 249–52, 255, 256–7, 261, 264 belief 30–4, 168–80, 181–96; causal role in psychological explanation 112–51; de re. 206–8, 217; formation 181–96; and sensory stimulation 185–6; justified true belief 32–4; as relation to internal representation 111–12, 125, 127, 129; transparent and opaque ascription of 118 brain in a vat 25–9, 186, 195 Braithwaite, R. 98 Burge, T. 113 Cantor, G. 276 capacity 30–1; capacity to discriminate truth 19–20, 23–4, 26, 27, 29, 30, 33; recognitional 87, 103, 248–66, 294; recognition-transcendent 225–46, 248–66, 279–97 causal relations 7, 21, 38–9, 43, 52–3, 57, 70, 88, 94, 254, 255 charity, principle of 168–80, 182–96 Chomsky, N. 35 colour ; dispositional theory of 298–313, 314–25; supervenience dispositional theory of 305–13; nature of 298–313, 314–25; phenomenology of colour perception 298–313, 314–25; neutrality thesis of 314–25 communication 227, 236, 293 concepts , see. content content ; abstract 213, 227; ascription 279–97; of colour content 298–313, 314–25; two-stage method 189–96; assertibility-conditions conception of 261, 279–97; and behaviour 193, 245; causal theory 168–80, 182–96, 200–22; and causation 152–67, 174–5; and context 113, 200; demonstrative 216; description theory 200–22, 238; dual component conception of structure of 115–51; and experience 187–9, 194; and force 131, 230, 239; and individuation 168–80, 186–9, 245, 318–25; notional 179–80, 183; observational and non-observational 188; parameters and powers of 155–67; perceptual 298–313, 314–25; and reducibility 219–20, 245; and reference 121–4, 173, 197–222; self- reference 214; use conception of 120–1, 123–4, 137–40, 226–46, 262, 279–97; and thought 322–3; and tone 135; truth-conditions

conception of 136–8, 223–46, 247–66; and Twin Earth cases 111–51, 152–3, 158–64, 176–8, 281–4, 291–2; wide and narrow 163, 166 counterfactual phenomenalism 16 counterfactuals 8, 13, 15–17, 18–20, 94–5, 100 contingency 36, 43 convention T 67

328

INDEX

Davies, M. 85 Davidson, D. 69, 86, 136–7, 168–80, 181–96 d-continuity 62–3 definite descriptions: ; referential and attributive use of 215 Donnellan, K. 202, 215–16 Dretske, F. 25 Dummett, M. 42, 58–9, 66, 76, 88, 89, 122–3, 125, 129–31, 135, 137–9, 142, 146, 148, 225–46, 247–66, 267–78, 279–97 empathetic faculty 97 empiricism 38, 98, 99, 104; empiricist epistemology 66, 100–2, 107 essentialism 57, 66 events 69–70, 72 experience 38, 181–96 explanation ; rationalizing 169 externalism 150–1, 320 see also. content Field, H. 100, 119, 121, 125–7, 132–4, 220 Fine, K. 74 Fodor, J. 111–19 Frege, G. 43, 84, 119, 122, 130, 143, 146, 157 Gettier case 13, 15, 39 Godel, K. 87 Goldman, A. 8 Gricean semantic theory 140–1 Gupta, A. 85 Harman, G. 120 holism 170–80, 182 Hume, D. 57, 90, 94, 98, 99, 107, 235 idealization 203–4 identity 53, 61, 91, 273–4, 304–13 impressionism 313 indeterminacy 178–9, 192, 241, 274 indexicals 113–14, 117, 158, 163, 198, 200–5 individualism 149, 176 see also. content induction 40, 77; enumerative 76 infinite totalities 242 intentionality 165–6 introspection 90, 321 intuition 37, 82; mathematical 41, 97 intuitionism 84, 225, 242 justification 78, 184–5 Kant, I. 38, 46, 47 Kaplan, D. 221 Katz, J. 140 knowledge ; a posteriori 36–48, 79, 103; of essence 43; of necessity 44; a priori 21, 36–48, 78, 103–4; of analytic truth 40, 42; epistemically contingent cases of 45; of logic 40, 47; of mathematics 40–2, 47, 78, 101, 103; causal theory of 7, 8, 9, 10, 13, 20, 21, 38–9, 104–5; closure vs.. non-closure thesis of 25–8; empirical 99–100, 125–7; foundationalist conception of 34, 35; holistic conception

of 42; inferential 37–8; introspective 47; linguistic 226; of meaning 191–6; of modality 42–4, 75, 77, 90, 102, 105; of one's own mental states 43; possibility of 11; and reality 66; reliability theory of 8–11, 17, 22; global 16–18, 20, 21, 22, 35; local 15–18, 22 see also. truth, tracking; second-order 28; as subrational 32; of synonymies 42; unity of 7, 30 Kripke, S. 43–6, 49–56, 57–64, 67, 80–3, 116, 141–3, 172 language of thought hypothesis 112, 119, 127, 216–17 laws 101, 103, 299–300, 301; constant conjunction conception of 101 learning 128 Leibniz, G. 46 Lewis, D. 10, 67, 70–4, 79–82, 85, 106 Locke, J. 49–54, 141 logical form 315 Lowenheim–Skolem paradox 294 McDowell, J. 145–6, 233, 322, 324–5 McGinn, C. 96 Mackie, J. L. 49–53, 57–64 Mates, B. 298 Maudlin, T. 107 meaning , see. content mental representation 115–51 methodological solipsism 112, 118, 149 Mill, J. 41, 143 mind–body problem 195 modality ; alethic 65, 95; de dicto.

INDEX

65; deontic 65; de re. 65; epistemic 65; epistemology of 77; logical 93; modal discourse 243–4; nomological 93–4, 98–9, 100; possible worlds conception of 48, 58; transempiricality of 101–2 modal mode 84 modal statements 65–107; non-objectual interpretations of 66, 97, 106; objectual interpretations of 66, 81, 82, 83, 84, 106; paratactic theory of 86; truth conditions of 65–78; verification conditions of 78–9 myth of the given 318 Nagel, T. 96 naming 172, 197–8 necessity 37, 43, 63, 79, 106; analytic 95; de re. 43, 58, 60, 62, 64; of origin 58, 60–4, 95; synthetic 95 see also. modality Nozick, R. 8–11, 13–16, 19, 22, 25, 34 observation 98 opacity 86 operator 90 other minds 11, 88, 195–6 pain 158 Peacocke, C. 85, 105 perception 20–1, 44, 90, 127–8, 172–6, 178, 185, 203, 205, 207–8, 211–12, 293, 295, 298–313; causal theory of 38–40, 262 Perry, J. 114 phenomenalism , 249–52, 255, 256–7, 261, 264, 284–5, 287, 311 possible worlds 65–107; as postulated entities 82; as states of the actual world 80–1 Prior, A. N. 58, 59, 70, 83 properties ; accidental 92; causal 151–67; essential 49–52, 55, 59, 92; first order 84–5; identity of 306–7; modality of 50–2; nature of 307–9; primary quality 52–4; reference to 221; relational 319–25; secondary quality 52–4, 163, 287; see also. colour; second order 84–5 propositional attitudes ; object-involving , see. belief; content psychology 117–18, 129, 152, 158, 160, 162, 163–4 see also. belief; content Putnam, H. 93–4, 112–15, 120–1, 123–5, 131, 146, 147, 168, 281–4 ‘puzzle about belief ’ 143 quantification 84, 86 Quine, W. V. 41, 92, 94, 100, 139–40, 132–3, 175, 181, 185, 189–90, 192, 235, 240, 241, 245, 274–5 radical interpretation 144, 146–8, 168–80, 181–96, 236 rationalization 186–96, 319 realism 65, 86, 247–66; ethical 87–8; mathematical 100–1; modal 66–107; semantic 225–46, 247–66, 267–78, 279–97 reference , see. content reference-fixing stipulative definitions 45

329

rigid designation 58, 173–5 rigid relation 61–2 Russell, B. 47, 68, 175 scientific enquiry and reductive identifications 52 scepticism 25–9, 33, 34, 78, 88, 89, 183–5, 189, 193–6, 319 secondary qualities , see. colour; properties semantics 65, 315–16; instrumentalism about 65, 225–46, 247–66, 267–78, 279–97; truth-conditions theory of 225–46; possible worlds 66–107, 106; conditions of acceptability about 67–9; verificationism in 86–7, 231, 232, 238, 245, 256, 267, 279–97; see also. capacity; content; truth space and time 72–3, 76, 82, 99 species 63 Stalnaker, R. 80 Stich, S. 146 Strawson, P. 271 Stroud, B. 322 supervenience 93–4, 96–7, 114, 149, 177, 197, 294, 304–13, 316 syntax 316–17 Tarskian truth theory 65, 85, 134, 137, 220, 226–7

330

INDEX

tensed discourse 243–4 true belief 9; accidentally true belief 9–11 truth ; bivalence of 268–78, 288–9; contingent 14, 15; determinateness of 267–78; discrimination of 16–19, 21, 22, 25; see also. capacity; epistemic notion of 267–78, 294; mathematical 275–6; necessary 13–15, 18, 76; a priori 13; a posteriori 13; theory of 312–13; tracking 9–13, 16–18, 22, 23, 26, 35 Twin Earth cases , see. content understanding 230–2 value, theory of 311–12 Wittgenstein, L. 91