Abstract
I propose that an adequate name for a proposition will be (1) rigid, in Kripke’s sense of referring to the same thing in every world in which it exists, and (2) transparent, which means that it would be possible, if one knows the name, to know which object the name refers. I then argue that the Standard Way of naming propositions—prefixing the word ‘that’ to a declarative sentence—does not allow for transparent names of every proposition, and that no alternative naming convention does better. I explore the implications of this failure for deflationism about truth, arguing that any theory that requires the T biconditional to be a priori cannot succeed.
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Notes
That van Inwagen uses this example shows that he is not strictly distinguishing names and definite descriptions. Thus his thesis is that any proposition that can be named or described in any way at all can be named formally.
A useful introduction to the phenomenon is in (King 2002).
See (Field 2001), 163, where the moral is that it is not propositions, but sentences that we understand, that are what is doing the explanatory work.
See, e.g., (Armour-Garb and Beall 2005). I understand ‘deflationism’ here in their sense of the position that the T biconditionals are necessary and a priori: “The instances of (ES) [the T biconditional schema] are bedrock. ... The instances of (ES) are more or less analytic, as well as being necessary and a priori.”
The real numbers do not have transparent names because they cannot all have unique names. Names must be finite, and transcendental numbers, being uncountable, cannot be distinguished by finite names. Thus only a few, π and e among them, have names.
We do have other conventions for very long linguistic items. In the case of a text, the convention useful for words and sentences would not serve—it would not do for the conventional name for a text to be the text itself. In the first place, the names would be too long to be practical: The text whose quote name begins ‘Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa ...’ is much more easily named by the title given it by its author: Middlemarch. In the second place, the relationship between texts is complex: King Lear names a text anywhere from about 2800 to about 3200 lines long, for example. A single quote name wouldn’t name all of them (and exclude other equally divergent readings that are not King Lear) and maintain the simplicity that the linguistic convention has for words.
On the other hand, letters do seem to have histories. ‘I’ and ‘J’ were once the same letter.
But there may be cases of sentences that have changed spelling. I have a copy of King Lear that includes the sentence ‘I will die bravely, like a smug bridegroom’ (IV.vi); the First Folio prints this sentence ‘I wil die brauely, Like a smugge Bridegroome’. This might naturally be explained as a sentence that has changed spelling.
This is Quine’s convention in Word and Object. Other writers (e.g., Horwich) use angle brackets (‘< >’).
Horwich’s account of the concept of truth—called “minimalism”—is based not on the T biconditionals themselves, but rather on one’s “inclination to accept” them. The theory is based on Horwich’s broader theory of meaning, on which the meaning of a word is given by whatever fundamental (“explanatorily basic”) facts explain all my uses of the word. In the case of truth, the explanatorily basic fact is that I am inclined to accept, on no evidence, every instance of the T sentence that I understand. This is essentially the same insight behind Field’s brand of individual disquotationalism. The chief advantage is that it entirely removes the need to give names to the propositions. In this kind of theory, it is not really the T sentences that are at issue, but really some mental process or state, that of taking to be materially equivalent one’s understanding of ‘the proposition that snow is white is true’ and ‘snow is white’.
It is also true, as I have argued, that opaque names cannot underlie any theory that requires the T biconditionals to be a priori, but there are some versions of deflationism that do not require this. For example, Horwich’s axiomatic theory MT requires that the axioms—the T biconditional propositions—be necessary, but does not need them to be a priori. Because the criticism does not affect Horwich’s axiomatic theory, I find many of Horwich’s responses to Davidson to be puzzling. See, for example, (Horwich 2001, 1998).
Lewis’ method would also work if there were a fragment of English in which every proposition could—in principle—be named, even if they can’t all be named. But there is no such fragment, at least none that I can see.
References
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Christensen, R. Propositional Names. Philosophia 39, 163–177 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-010-9264-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-010-9264-7