Abstract
Speakers often judge the sentence “Lois Lane believes that Superman flies” to be true and the sentence “Lois Lane believes that Clark Kent flies” to be false. If Millianism is true, however, these sentences express the very same proposition and must therefore have same truth value. “Pragmatic” Millians like Salmon and Soames have tried to explain speakers’ “anti-substitution intuitions” by claiming that the two sentences are routinely used to pragmatically convey different propositions which do have different truth values. “Non-Pragmatic” Millians like Braun, on the other hand, have argued that the Millian should not appeal to pragmatics and opt instead for a purely psychological explanation. I will present two objections against Non-Pragmatic Millianism. The first one is that the view cannot account for the intuitions of speakers who accept the identity sentence “Superman is Clark Kent”: applying a psychological account in this case, I will argue, would yield wrong predictions about speakers who resist substitution with simple sentences. I will then consider a possible response from the non-pragmatic Millian and show that the response would in fact require an appeal to pragmatics. My conclusion will be that Braun’s psychological explanation of anti-substitution intuitions is untenable, and that the Millian is therefore forced to adopt a pragmatic account. My second objection is that Non-Pragmatic Millianism cannot account for the role that certain commonsense intentional generalizations play in the explanation of behavior. I will consider a reply offered by Braun and argue that it still leaves out a large class of important generalizations. My conclusion will be that Braun’s non-pragmatic strategy fails, and that the Millian will again be forced to adopt a pragmatic account of intentional generalizations if he wants to respond to the objection. In light of my two objections, my general conclusion will be that non-pragmatic versions of Millianism should be rejected. This has an important consequence: if Millianism is true, then some pragmatic Millian account must be correct. It follows that, if standard objections against pragmatic accounts succeed, then Millianism must be rejected altogether.
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Notes
In this paper, I will not try to determine whether those objections in fact succeed, although I do find many of them persuasive (v. Sect. 3.3 infra for a brief overview of the objections).
The reader can find a list of numbered sentences at the end of the paper.
A subject “disbelieves” a proposition just in case he/she believes its negation.
I borrow this taxonomy from Braun (1998), who uses a different terminology.
More precisely: although Braun does think (for Paderewski-related reasons) that we should identify ways with mental and not with linguistic representations, he is open to non-LoT construals of the mental representations in question.
Expressions in block capitals are used to refer to mental representations.
Following Braun, I will assume for the sake of simplicity that natural language sentences can work as mental sentences in a LoT.
The schema is inspired by Schiffer’s “Frege Constraint” (Schiffer 2006, p. 362).
This rules out clearly irrational subjects who do satisfy (i)–(iv), but who also believe that (α) and not-(α) are both true, or who believe that (α) is true and (β) false for no reason, etc.. Thanks to the “ceteris paribus” clause, (Sch) will not count these subjects as rational. Notice that neither Lois nor Peter is obviously irrational in any of these ways, so (Sch) applies to both of them.
More precisely: S’s judgment (that (α) is true and (β) false) is rational. I will leave this qualification implicit in what follows.
This variant was originally brought up by Stephen Schiffer as a problem for Millian theories in general: cf. Schiffer (1987, pp. 463–466).
From now on, I will simply refer to them as “Peter” and “Randy”, taking for granted that they are both enlightened.
We will see shortly (Sect. 4.3) how NPM could try to deny this.
Braun agrees that speakers who resist substitution about belief reports are rational, although he claims that they might not be fully rational; v. Braun (1998, p. 589).
Braun and Saul (2002, p. 22) seem to deny that speakers who resist substitution about simple sentences are irrational.
This argument is offered by Braun (1998, pp. 586–587), although he uses it to argue for a different conclusion.
Alternative principles might be: “The sentences ‘Lois Lane believes that Superman flies’ and ‘Lois Lane believes that Clark Kent flies’ express different thoughts/contents/encode different information…”.
Braun usually employs a different anti-Millian principle to account for the rationality of enlightened speakers like Peter (Braun 1998, p. 582; Braun 2006, pp. 377–378) :
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(11)
If Lois is rational, reflective, and attentive, and she believes that Clark Kent doesn’t fly, then she doesn’t also believe that Clark Kent flies.
Peter’s reasoning is supposed to go thus: “Lois believes that Clark Kent doesn’t fly, since she dissents from (2); assuming (11), it follows that she doesn’t also believe that Clark Kent flies; therefore, (4) is false even though (1) and (9) are true”. Accepting (11) (which is again inconsistent with Millianism) gives Peter excellent reasons to think (4) is false, so he is not irrational in resisting substitution with (3)–(4).
The problem with (11) is that, unlike (10), it doesn’t enable Peter to have suitably different ways of taking the proposition expressed by (3)–(4). (Indeed, notice that now Braun’s account doesn’t at all rely on the ways in which Peter takes that proposition, but only on the reasons he has to resist substitution). So (C) still holds: under both options A and B, if Peter has suitably different ways, Randy also does. Therefore, Braun cannot explain Peter’s rationality by appealing to (Sch), for that would also entail that Randy is rational.
Couldn’t Braun simply appeal to (11) and drop his original psychological account? First, this would destroy one of NPM’s main claims, i.e. that we can explain anti-substitution intuitions about simple sentences in the same way we explain intuitions about reports. Such an explanation would have to be based on (Sch), while the explanation based on (11) is not. Second, I hope my arguments in this section will show that NPM’s appeal to any anti-Millian principle is bound to fail; if this is true, then appealing to (11) rather than (10) would not help the non-pragmatic Millian.
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(11)
Schiffer (2006) briefly considers the possibility of appealing to anti-Millian principles to save Millianism. His objections are different from mine (although I do share some of his concerns) and don’t seem very strong to me, but I will not discuss this here.
This is suggested by Salmon (2006, p. 373).
V. Prinz (2002, ch. 8) for a useful overview of the literature.
Isn’t the pragmatic strategy just outlined going to be psychological after all? The NPM theorist might stress how psychological processes play a crucial role in all pragmatic explanations (cf. for instance the classic Gricean account, or Relevance Theory), so that even PM accounts will count as psychological.
Of course, I grant that, on this reading of “psychological”, the Millian can offer a psychological explanation of speakers’ rationality. But this is irrelevant for my purposes; what I deny is that the Millian can provide an explanation of speakers’ rationality which “does not assume that utterances of (3) and (4) pragmatically convey different propositions” (Braun 1998, p. 579). This is the psychological account I am attacking, and this is what Braun himself means by “psychological explanation”. Notice that, by Braun’s own definition, if an explanation assumes at any point (i.e. even when explaining acceptance of (10)) that (3)–(4) pragmatically convey different propositions, that explanation will still count as non-psychological.
I switch to a Twain/Clemens case to follow Braun’s examples.
I present the objections in this section as aimed against NPM only, for PM would have a different response against them; v. infra.
Notice that the ceteris paribus strategy would not be of any use here. That strategy can at best show that Lucy is a tolerable exception rather than a counterexample to (12). The problem with (13), however, is not that Lucy is a potential counterexample to it, but rather that she cannot satisfy its antecedent once we assume NPM. There is no way for NPM to deny this by appealing to the ceteris paribus clause of (13).
Braun does consider a similar move (with respect to (12)) as a possible alternative to the ceteris paribus strategy: v. for instance Braun 2000, Sect. 11.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to audiences in Paris, Princeton, Austin, St. Andrews, Milan and Reading for very helpful feedback. In particular, thanks to John Butterworth, Jeremy Goodman, Nat Hansen, Mark Harris, Travis Hobbs, Michael Murez, Simon Prosser, Francois Recanati, and Margot Strohminger. Special thanks to an anonymous referee, Derek Ball, Herman Cappelen, Thomas Hodgson, and Dilip Ninan for their very careful and helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. My greatest debt of gratitude is owed to Ray Buchanan, whose feedback and suggestions were immensely helpful in shaping this material.
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Onofri, A. On non-pragmatic Millianism. Philos Stud 166, 305–327 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-0031-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-0031-4