1
The Perils of Pauline:
Comments on Sainsbury and Tye
1. A tradition stretching back to Frege assumes that
1. Belief and desire are relations to things we refer to with
complements clauses. The sentence
(PR) Paul Ryan believes that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme
reports that Paul is related to something named by
(CPR) that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme.
2. These objects are in some sense constituted by natural language
word meanings.
3. Such meanings being first and foremost what determine reference
and truth, attitudes are individuated in terms of their semantic
properties, properties they typically inherited from natural language.
A lot of recent work on the attitudes thinks this tradition is wrong. It
grants that the semantic properties of public languages help individuate
attitudes; it accepts contemporary views about such properties. But it also
thinks that whatever story we tell about the attitudes should cohere with the
ideas that they are explanatory of behavior and that there is an intimate
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relation between such things as consistency of belief objects and rationality.i
Painting with a broad brush, such work suggests:
1. We must distinguish the content of an attitude, which is
individuated externally, from its psychological medium, the thinker's
representational states.
2. It is the latter that is responsible for the epistemic and behaviorexplanatory properties of the attitudes; these are a matter, as Fodor put
it, of the medium, and not (so much) the message.
3. When we ascribe attitudes, we characterize them in terms of both
their semantic properties and properties of the medium of thought.
Details vary amongst theorists; on one version, (PR) comes to
something like
(PR1) Ryan has a belief realized by a representation that can be
translated for the purposes at hand by (CPR).ii
On such views, different aspects of the medium of belief are invoked in
different contexts; thus the truth of (PR) may vary across contexts without
variation in the facts about Representative Ryan.
Mark and Michael's –henceforth, MnM's --views about attitudes and
their ascription are in many ways like such views. They quote with approval
Fodor's suggestion that distinctions in cognitive value are due to the medium
of thought, not the message it carries. They take attitudes to involve
relations, not to the semantic contents of sentences, but to conceptual
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structures, structured entities whose ultimate constituents are what they call
concepts. Concepts are (types of) things that represent objects and
properties; they are "abstract continuants" that come into existence when
they are first used to represent an object or property. (Many) concepts are
"transmitted" from person to person by language use, much as words are:
when you apply the concept cat by using the word 'cat' in a child's presence,
she will typically, in virtue of deferential intentions, acquire not only the
word 'cat' but your concept. Like the words that express them, concepts are
much more finely individuated than what they represent.
Furthermore, MnM agree that attitude ascription involves a
complicated, contextually shifty process of conveying something about the
medium of someone's thought. For them and on a first pass, (PR) comes to
something like
(PR2) Ryan bears the ("psychologically real") relation BEL to a
conceptual structure that stands in R to the conceptual structure that
Social Security is a Ponzi scheme,
where the relation R varies from situation to situation, but is something like
the relation that conceptual structure p bears to structure q when, for the
purposes at hand, p has important features in common with q.
MnM's view, then, looks to be similar to a class of familiar views. But
in several ways it is quite different. I will argue that the differences are
important, and that where there is a difference their view is wanting.
2. One place where MnM depart from the views to which I have
alluded has to do with logical syntax. Most accounts of attitude ascriptions
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take complements like (CPR) to function as singular terms, so that (PR) is a
binary predication. These accounts take a sentence like
(OD) Obama doubts almost everything Paul believes about Social
Security
to involve quantification over the referents of such complements. Let 'LF'
name the view that complements and expressions like 'what Paul believes'
function as terms and quantifiers. Call the field of objects LF posits –the
potential referents of complements and range of the propositional quantifiers
–'semantic objects of belief', SOBs for short.
MnM say that complements "are not … genuine singular terms";
rather, they are expressions like 'the sake of France', in that their role is not
to supply an object. (111) They say that expressions like 'what Obama
believes' and 'everything Paul believes' are not objectual quantifiers.iii In
some ways, these claims are puzzling. MnM are not skeptical that belief and
the other attitudes have, as we might put it, psychological objects; witness
their view that (PR) (roughly speaking) is to be glossed with (PR2). They
are happy to quantify over these objects while theorizing. They seem to
think that a use of (CPR) determines a conceptual structure, and the truth
conditions of a use of (PR) are a function of the conceptual structure so
determined. Why then are they chary of LF?
One might be chary here if one thought (a) if LF is correct, then (PR)
says that Paul has a psychologically intimate relation to the SOB named by
its complement; (b) (PR) can be true even if one does not have an interesting
psychological relation to anything that could plausibly be thought to be
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named by (CPR). MnM certainly accept (b): they would say that in the
right context, (PR) might be true simply because Ryan sincerely tokened
(O) Social Security is a desperate attempt to fund yesterday's debts
with tomorrow's earnings.
I too accept (b). But (a) seems to me completely unmotivated. Why can't
'believes' name a relation that is the relative product of a psychological
relation to something and some other relation?iv In fact, MnM themselves
speak as if 'believes' should be understood in exactly this way, in terms of
the relative product of BEL and the contextually variable R. So (a) and (b)
can't be MnM's reason for departing from tradition here.
MnM say that ordinary language's propositional quantifers are "not
ontologically serious." (114) They are not, they say, on a par with the
ontologically committing 'there exists.' If so, that is a reason to reject LF.
As support, they claim that from (PR) we can infer only the first two
members of the trio
1. There is something that Paul believes
2. Paul believes something
3. There exists something that Paul believes.
I'm not all that impressed with this argument. It would be one thing if we
couldn't validly export the relevant quantifiers –that is, validly infer (1) from
(PR).v That is an indicator of a non-committal use of a quantifier.vi But of
course propositional quantifiers export across 'believes'. I agree that (3) is
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pretty awkward. Some of its awkwardness is surely a result of the fact that
there exists is stilted and poncy. The sentence
(K) There exists something that Paul kicked.
is awkward in pretty much the way (1) is. But surely (K) follows from 'Paul
kicked Mitt.' I'd say the same thing about (PR) and (1). I also suspect that
speakers have a preference for confining 'exists' to quantification over what
has fairly determinate spatio-temporal boundaries.vii If so, the fact that we
don't infer (3) from (PR) doesn't show –absent an argument that there are no
abstract entities –that the quantifier 'what Paul said' isn't just as objectual as
'what Paul kicked'.
I suspect the real reason MnM dislike LF is that it sits poorly with the
idea that talk about the attitudes is grounded in facts about conceptual
structures. I think here they are wrong. Consider the claim
(M) For every object s, there is a claim / potential thought / truth / that
s exists; and if s is not s', then the claim / potential thought / truth that
s exists is distinct from the claim / potential thought /truth that s' does.
The various things (M) says do not seem to be particularly odd things to say.
They seem to be humdrum truths. But their truth can't be grounded in the
fact that for every object s, there is a conceptual structure involving a
concept of s. For one thing, there aren't enough concepts.viii
The basic problem here has nothing to do with cardinality. There is
every reason to think that there are objects and properties we could think
about, if only we had the requisite concepts. And we could, if we were
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lucky enough to have the right experiences or theorized very diligently, have
the relevant concepts. But we don't have the right concepts and probably
won't ever have them. That doesn't mean it is false that there are tons of
truths and claims and potential thoughts about these objects and properties
that we will never be in a position to think. To suggest otherwise is simply
to be willful in one's use of 'true', 'claim', and 'thought'.
The fact of the matter is that for every object s, it is true that s exists
because, for every object o, the result of assigning o to the variable 's' in 'that
s exists' gives us something that corresponds to a fact. Given that ordinary
objects (and variables under assignment) are not concepts, conceptual
structures in MnM's sense have no explanatory role to play here.ix In
explaining how something like (M) is true, we do best not to tie our
explanation too closely to the existence of conceptual structures. Since the
function and meaning of the complements in (M) and (PR) are presumably
on a par, we do best not to tie not to tie our explanation of (PR)'s truth
conditions to their existence, either.
MnM could back peddle at this point. They could say that things like
(DR) There is an object s such that it is true that s exists
(BR) There is an object s such that Paul believes that s exists
are not made true by a conceptual structures. They could say that (DR) and
(BR) are made true by a "hybrid" structure containing a concept and an
object. In fact, they flirt with saying just this about (BR). (121-3) They say
that one can think about an object without conceptualizing it and seem to
suggest that if Paul did this, it could make (BR) true. But if that is right,
then it seems wrong to say that the psychological object of belief is
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invariably a conceptual structure. Sometimes it is something more like the
traditional singular proposition which 'that s exists' is supposed to name
relative to an assignment.
I think MnM should just toss in the towel here and say that the job of
a complement in an attitude ascription is to pick out something determined
by its utterance –sometimes a hybrid structure consisting of objects and
concepts, sometimes a wholly conceptual structure. The ascription as a
whole says that the person under discussion bears a complicated relation to
this object –the relative product of some psychological relation and a
contextually shifty R. Indeed, they should expand the ranks of the hybrid
entities to include things like Russellian propositions, so they have a
straightforward story to tell about the likes of
(CR) There's a property P and an object o such that Paul thought o
had P.
And they might as well say that the quantifier in a sentence like (OD) ranges
over the class of conceptual structures and hybrid structures. What of
significance that they want to say would they then be unable to say?
3. MnM's central claim is that attitudes like belief –at least in their de
dicto flavor –are grounded in 'psychologically real' relations to conceptual
structures. I think this idea is fundamentally misguided.
MnM's concepts, and thus their conceptual structures, are individuated
externally. Concept identity is determined by things, like deference to the
usage of others and historical origin, that are typically opaque to the thinker.
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A standard objection to externalist views of the objects of belief is that they
rob beliefs of motivational and epistemic properties they obviously have. I
think MnM are vulnerable to some such objections. Here is one case they
discuss.
Paul and the French Nanny. Paul is raised by a French nanny who
speaks to him in English, save that she uses the word 'chat' for cats. It
is plausible to think that the French 'chat' and the English 'cat' express
the same concept, so it is plausible to think that Paul acquires the
concept cat from his Nanny. His parents, on their occasional visits,
speak to him of 'cats'. Paul acquires 'cat'; presumably he associates it
with the concept his parents do, the concept cat. It never occurs to
Paul to ask himself whether chats are cats. One day he suddenly
thinks to himself 'Merde! Chats are cats!' He seems to have learned
something that he did not know, namely (as he would put it to
himself) that chats are cats.
MnM are willing to grant that 'cat' and 'chat' express the same concept.x
They deny that if this is so, then at story's end Paul learns that cats are
chatsxi: for then the conceptual structure that cats are chats is the conceptual
structure that cats are cats; Paul knows this as soon as he acquires the
concept cat. They suggest that Paul learns something "meta-conceptual",
that 'cat' expresses the concept chat. (129)
This won't do if the concept cat is the concept chat, for in that case
the conceptual structure, that 'cat' expresses the concept chat, is the
conceptual structure, that 'cat' expresses the concept cat; Paul already knew
that. I take it this was a slip of the pen, and what MnM meant to say was
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something along the lines of: what Paul learns is (what he expresses when
he utters)
(P1) 'chat' and 'cat' express the same concept.
There are two problems with this response. The minor problem is that
it does not work for allied cases that surely should receive the same
diagnosis. Consider, for example, the case of
Pauline and the Scottish Nanny. The details of this case are like
Paul's, save the nanny is from Glasgow, speaks only English and
pronounces 'cat' cah-at; Pauline's parents are from New York and
pronounce the word keat. As in Paul's case, it is some time before
Pauline cottons onto the fact that (as she thinks to herself) 'keats are
cahats.'
In this case, Pauline acquires the same concept twice over, once from her
nanny, once from her parents. And she acquires the same word twice over.
Here, a meta-linguistic or 'meta-conceptual' explanation will not turn the
trick if we individuate concepts as do MnM. On their view,
(P2) 'keat' and 'cahat' express the same concept
expresses something Pauline knows as soon as she acquires the word 'cahat'
from her nanny.
Here's why. When Pauline's nanny uses the word she pronounces
cahat –that is, the English word 'cat' –Pauline gains, in virtue of her
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deferential use of 'cahat', two concepts: the concept expressed by 'cahat'
(the concept cat), and a concept of the word used, the English word 'cat'.
The word concept Pauline acquires is presumably the concept, common to
the nanny and to us, which we all express with the phrase "the word 'cat' '.
So what Pauline thinks to herself when she mentally tokens
(P3) 'cahat' expresses the concept cahat
is the very same conceptual structure that we think when we token
(P4) 'cat' expresses the concept cat.
Analogously, when Pauline hears her parents first use 'keat', her deferential
use of their word makes it the case that she "reacquires" the same two
concepts. When she hears her parents speak, she (speaking metaphorically)
opens up a new concept file, labeled keat, that is deferential to her parents
use of 'keat'. She also opens a new entry in her linguistic lexicon for the
word –'keat' –she acquires from her parents. The upshot is that what she
thinks when she mentally tokens
(P5) 'keat' expresses the concept keat
is the conceptual structure her parents think when they token this. But the
conceptual structure her parents token is, of course, just the one we think
when we token (P4). It should now be clear that when Pauline tokens (P2)
she expresses the very conceptual structure she does when she tokens
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(P6) 'cahat' and 'cahat' express the same concept,
a structure Pauline has known from the get-go.
Myself, I think it is obvious that Pauline has made a "substantive
discovery" at the end of the case. But it doesn't seem MnM can agree. I am
willing to describe the discovery as a matter of Pauline's coming to believe a
"conceptual structure" she did not believe before. But the conceptual
structure is idiosyncratic –it involves Pauline's distinct concepts, cahat and
keat; she came to know, as she would put it, that cahats are keats. Of
course, it is only with a certain amount of stage setting that we can describe
what Pauline came to learn, for we do not have her idiosyncratic concepts.
Some will object that we all share a concept we all express with our
common word 'cat', namely the concept cat. But if so, then since I have
described the case of Pauline as one in which she acquires that concept
(twice), I have ruled out the idea that Pauline failed to know all along what
she says, when she thinks
(P7) Keats are cahats.
For what she thinks is simply that cats are cats. I respond as follows.
Consider four utterances about Pauline's cat, Cipollotto:
C:
1. Nanny:
Cipollotto is a cahat.
2. Pauline:
Cipollotto is a cahat.
3. Dad:
Cipollotto is a keat.
4. Pauline:
Cipollotto is a keat.
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I think we all have fairly strong pre-theoretic inclinations to say each of the
following:
I:
1. In (C1) and (C2), the nanny and Pauline use the same words and
express the same concepts / say the same thing.
2. In (C3) and (C4), Dad and Pauline use the same words and express
the same concepts / say the same thing.
3. In (C1) and (C3), the nanny and Dad use the same words and
express the same concepts / say the same thing.
4. In (C2) and (C4), Pauline does not use the same words and does not
express the same concepts / say the same thing.
Now it appears that these claims are jointly inconsistent, and so something's
gotta give. But what?
I'm inclined to say that questions along the lines of
(Q)
Are these tokens of the same word?
Are those people expressing the same concept with their words?
Did those people say the same thing with their sentences?
don't have fixed, context and interest invariant answers. We sometimes
individuate words in terms of mutually reinforcing chains of deference and
overlapping usage. We sometimes individuate them by internal functional
roles, roles grounded in part in entries in a "mental dictionary" used in
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parsing, interpretation, and production. Something similar is true of
concepts. A concept can be individuated in more or less external terms –in
terms of public, shared categories or what those represent –or in terms of
(these and) internal psychological roles. Ditto for thoughts. For everyday
purposes, these two modes of individuation often overlap. It takes a case
like Pauline's to make them come apart.
There are good reasons to invoke different ways of individuating
token utterances or mental states. Attitude ascription involves a range of
interests. We ascribe attitudes in order to mine them for information about
the world. When we do, it is natural to catalog them in terms of public,
shared properties. But we also ascribe attitudes in order to rationalize and
explain behavior, a task that will be most successful when we catalog
attitudes using a taxonomy that reflects "how things look from the thinker's
perspective."
The inclination to endorse all of (I1) trhough (I4) results from our
applying both schemes of concept and thought individuation. When
comparing thoughts across persons, we often individuate them in terms of
publicly shareable properties, and thus endorse (I1) through (I3). In the
intra-personal case, there is good reason to employ a different scheme of
individuation, one that reflects, as we might put it, internal identity and
difference. Thus (I4). Rightly understood, (I1) though (I4) are not only
jointly consistent –they are spot-on correct.
An account of thought's objects and their ascription should be flexible
enough to acknowledge the validity of both ways of individuating thoughts.
Not only does it need to allow that the token vehicles of thought can be
individuated more finely than the vehicles provided by public language --it
needs to allow that the objects of attitudes expressed by such vehicles may
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be individuated as finely as the vehicles themselves. Pauline thinks one thing
when she thinks 'keats meow', another when she thinks 'cahats meow.' An
account of these matters also needs to make room for the fact that we often
identify beliefs and the like when they are realized by shared public
language words or concepts; for that matter, that we sometimes identify
attitudes when they are realized by sentences that express the same
Russellian or possible worlds proposition.
MnM's account of thought, I fear, does not have the necessary
flexibility here. But it wouldn't require all that much of a change to give it
that flexibility. What would be necessary would be to
A. think of psychological objects of belief in terms of concepts that
are (typically) idiosyncratic, ones potentially more finally
individuated than publicly shared conceptsxii ;
B. identify what's picked out by complement clauses with things that
are individuated as finely as the sentences within them;
C. take the ascription a believes that S to say that some psychological
object of a's belief bears a certain (contextually shifty) relation to the
semantic object of belief that S --the latter "represents" or "translates"
the former.
The main difference between this and MnM's view is that psychological
belief objects turn out to be more finely individuated than MnM take them to
be, as is what is provided by the use of a complement in an attitude
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ascription. But the spirit of (A) though (C) is very much the same as the
spirit of MnM's view. On both
D. beliefs and such are relations to things that are more finely
individuated than natural language contents, and
E. attitude ascription involves saying that something provided by a
complement clause bears some contextually shifting relation to one of
the ascribee's psychological objects of belief.
And so I hope MnM will take this suggestion as a friendly amendment.
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i
Examples: My own work (Propositional Attitudes, the papers collected in Meaning in
Context, Volume I), that of Mark Crimmins and John Perry (e.g., Crimmins' Talk about
Belief), Jerry Fodor's work (e.g., The Elm and the Expert). Jim Higginbotham's work
(e.g., 'Sententialism') strikes me as being in the same ballpark. Much of this work, in
turn, was motivated by an acceptance of a broad externalism about natural language
content explicit or implicit in the work of Putnam, Burge, Kripke and others in the '70's.
ii
Some (Perry and Crimmins, for example) said such ascriptions involve "tacit reference"
to the medium of thought or its psychological properties, so that (PR) comes to
something like
(PR') Ryan is a belief state which involves representations of such and such a
type and which has the Russellian / possible worlds content that Social
Security is a Ponzi scheme.
Others (myself) suggested that (PR)'s complement functions as a term that picks out
something broadly linguistic –the (interpreted, English) sentence it contains, or a fusion
of that sentence with its semantic interpretation. Call what is picked out an articulated
proposition. In (PR) this articulated proposition is offered as a good representation or
"translation" (under the standards of the context) of the vehicle of one of Ryan's beliefs
so that (PR) comes to something like
(PR") Ryan has a belief realized by a representation that is well translated (in
context) by the articulated proposition that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme.
iii
Precisely, they say they are not "object quantifiers", by which I take them to mean what
others mean when they speak of devices of objectual quantification.
iv
That is: why not think that for some psychological relation P and (contextually
shifting) relation R, 'believes' picks out a relation that x bears to what's named by a
complement (p call it) iff for some q, x Ps q and q Rs p?
v
There are, as MnM note, readings of sentences involving intensional transitives, ones
like
Ponce de Leon sought something wet and wild
Robert hallucinated a singing detective
which don't entail what you get when you give the determiner phrase wide scope. But on
the relevant readings, the quantifier can't be exported.
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vi
Before you object: the criterion I have in mind here is exportation of the quantifier
possibly en bloc with the rest of the quantifiers in the sentence. 'an Asian country' is
committing in 'Each student read a book about Asia after visiting an Asian country' (in
the sense I am trying to isolate) even when its scope is narrow because, on the relevant
reading, the sentence entails '(For) Each student s (there is) a book b about Asia (and) an
Asian country c (such that) s read b after visiting c'.
vii
Discuss n.7, p. 114.
viii
I need the benign (in this context) assumptions that numbers are objects and that there
are not continuum many concepts.
MnM might –they do –blanch at the idea that there are as many potential thoughts
as (M) claims there are. My view is that they are using 'thought' in an idiosyncratic way
when they say this. But the point I am making here really depends only on there being as
many truths as there are things for there to be truths about, along with the assumption that
the function of the complement in ascriptions of truth is the same as in ascriptions of
attitudes.
ix
Truth may be tied to representations, but there are more representations than MnM's
conceptual structures. (As I see it, a sentence with a free variable under assignment is a
representation.)
x
It is easy enough to generate cases where an analogous assumption is quite plausible –
for example, one involving the German 'Katze' and the Dutch 'kat'.
xi
xii
Note about word salad
In the case of "atomic concepts" of language users, this would be tantamount to
adopting the rule that (for the most part) words in one's lexicon that one treats as different
words give rise to different concepts.