Abstract
Aristotle and Aquinas may have held that the things we believe and assert can have different truth-values at different times. Stoic logicians did; they held that there were “vacillating assertibles”—assertibles that are sometimes true and sometimes false. Frege and Russell endorsed the now widely accepted alternative, where the propositions believed and asserted are always specific with respect to time. This paper brings a new perspective to this question. We want to figure out what sorts of propositions speakers believe. Some philosophers have argued that we must take agents to believe temporalist propositions—propositions that are inspecific with respect to time—if we’re to explain the agent’s own thoughts and inferences. I’ll explore another strategy. I’ll focus on our ability to think and reason about the beliefs that other people have. I’ll suggest that an adequate account of that ability requires that we take others to believe some temporalist propositions. I also ask whether all propositions can be specific with respect to worlds, and close by exploring some general issues.
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Notes
Künne (2003, pp. 295–298) helpfully discusses the relevant history in more detail.
Russell (1906, p. 257) similarly holds that “in order to express explicitly the whole of what is meant, it is necessary to add the date, and then the statement is no longer ‘variable’ but always true or false”.
Contemporary eternalists include Michael Glanzberg, King (2003), Richard (1981), Salmon (1989), Soames (2011), Robert Stalnaker, and Jason Stanley. Contemporary temporalists include Brogaard (2012), Kaplan (1989), Lewis (1980), Ludlow (2001), MacFarlane (2003), and Sullivan (2014).
This use of these terms extends Schaffer (2012)’s original use, where he’s only interested in the semantic values of sentences in contexts. If those semantic values are identical with the objects of the attitudes, he endorses views exactly opposed to mine.
The necessitarian who rejects the Limit Assumption need not reject (CanEntertain). She can suppose that the proposition believed is about a set of worlds, either descriptively or singularly. Such a necessitarian can take my reliance on the Limit Assumption to be merely expository, and replace my references to a single world with reference to a set of worlds.
I delay a discussion of this suggestion, because this suggestion isn’t particularly helpful for the necessitarian at this point. There’s no guarantee that the agent in the counterfactual world believes the things that we’re taking for granted in the actual world during our conversation. For that reason, it’s implausible that the proposition believed describes the world she inhabits as one where those assumptions hold. But what’s assumed in the conversation does have to the potential help the necessitarian, as we’ll see as the paper unfolds.
My formulation of (CanEntertain) ignores a complication about what’s knowable a priori. Soames (2010) distinguishes two ways of entertaining a proposition that contains a world. One involves grasping the propositional content of the world, and one doesn’t (Soames 2010, p. 136). Propositions entertained in the first way will be knowable a priori to be false (or true); for example, the proposition that Obama is president in 2013 in @ is knowable a priori when entertained in that first way. (CanEntertain) should be restricted to the second way of grasping propositions, the way that doesn’t involving grasping the propositional content of any constituent worlds. (2b) is knowable a priori to be false in the second way as well as the first; you don’t need to grasp the propositional content of @ in order to know a priori that it’s false. (CanEntertain) only assumes that there is some way of entertaining the proposition that (1) takes you to believe where the proposition believed isn’t knowable a priori to be false—and taking (2b) to be the proposition believed violates even that minimal constraint.
Jeshion (2010, pp. 125–129) helpfully details some serious problems for Semantic Instrumentalism.
This general claim is continuous with the objection in Soames (1998) to descriptivist proposals that take proper names to be synonymous with rigidified descriptions. If his objection persuades you, it’s likely that you already accept the assumption this section has defended. Both this section and Soames’ objection assume that few agents are in a position to think singularly about other worlds.
If you want to hold that speakers make on-the-fly readjustments of what’s taken for granted to get the right restriction for universal generalization, you’d need a constructive account of the on-the-fly readjustments made. It’s hard to see why you’d drop the proposition that BR got more home runs than HA, other than the fact that it produces the wrong results in the cases that matter here.
You can prove this equivalence, as long as you assume that no world is closer to another than it is itself. But I omit the proof, because it’s long and ugly.
I here follow Schaffer (2012)’s helpful characterization of the dispute.
King (2001, p. 307) gives a powerful argument that day designators aren’t directly referential. Despite its relevance, it’s too complicated to discuss here.
Someone who looks back at this inference after considering the problems I detail below might wonder about step (4); you might wonder how a temporalist can allow it to be true. I take (4) to express a tensed truth—a counterfactual that is true at some but not all times. In particular, it’s true throughout the near future, but it’s false at times in the more distant future.
Cappelen and Hawthorne (2009, p. 96) emphasize a similar point: “in the case of location, it is natural to say both that ‘Ernie is dancing’ makes no reference to a location and that it is true simpliciter, since the location of dancing is intuitively irrelevant to its truth”.
You might wonder whether this suggestion works with full generality. The suggestion seems only to work when the complement is about some particular agent. And there seem to be complements that aren’t about any particular agent, as in ‘Ernie thinks that it’s raining’. So I can’t use an agent and a time to pick out a particular location, as I suggest in the text. So it’s unclear whether my strategy works with full generality. In response, I do in fact think the same strategy works in all these cases. To show how it would go, I’ll assume a standard Davidsonian event semantics, so that ‘it’s raining’ contributes the content that there’s a raining event: that is, that [\(\exists \hbox {e}\)] (Raining(e)). Agents don’t normally believe a content that is this minimal - a content that is true as long as there’s some raining somewhere. (Those cases where they do are no problem for the present strategy. The proposition that it’s raining somewhere is true at some but not all times—no contradiction looms.) They rather believe an enrichment of the bare Davidsonian content. The normal enrichment contains the matrix subject—it’s that [\(\exists \hbox {e}\)] (Raining(e) and e occurs near Ernie). That enrichment plays the same role as the contents I discussed in the main text. Now there may be other enrichments, where the speaker has some description in mind—for example, [\(\exists \hbox {e}\)] (Raining(e) and e occurs near that place we’ve been talking about). There won’t be any problem about reasoning about these contents, either, as long as the hearer can recover which description the speaker intends. If the hearer can’t recover that content, the speaker has violated an important conversational maxim: the maxim that Stalnaker (1984, p. 110) describes as requiring “[that] speakers ought, in general, to assume that their addressees have whatever information is necessary to determine what they are saying”. If the speaker isn’t cooperative enough to conform to this maxim, it’s unsurprising that her hearers can’t reason about what she’s trying to communicate. As far as I can see, the present example doesn’t undermine the point I defend in the text. I’m grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out this kind of case.
Suppose that the quantifier didn’t bind ‘c’; instead, the consequent contained a singular term that contributed the relevant world: \(\mathbf w _b:\)
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(a)
If BR is better than HA, then BR hit more home runs than HA.
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(b)
If the sun is shining, then BR hit more home runs than HA.
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(a′)
\(\forall \hbox {x}\) [If \(\lambda \hbox {y}.\)BR is better than HA in y.(x) is true, BR hit more home runs than HA in \(\mathbf w _{b}.\)]
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(b′)
\(\forall \hbox {x}\) [If \(\lambda \hbox {y}.\)the sun is shining in y.(x) is true, BR hit more home runs than HA in \(\mathbf w _{b}.\)]
So (a) is true iff (b) is true.
-
(a)
Meghan Sullivan’s motivation for temporalism have a similar dialectic vulnerability to Richard’s argument. She’s a temporalist for metaphysical reasons. She explains: “I am driven to temporalism because I endorse the A-theory of time and change, and some metaphysically accurate propositions about objects with A-properties will have to be temporalist propositions” (Sullivan 2014, p. 476). She notes a plausible platitude about truth—that “a proposition is true only if it accurately represents reality” (Sullivan 2014, p. 475). We should assume that a single sort of content both accurately represents reality and is the object of belief. Given that assumption, Richard’s argument that temporalist propositions aren’t the objects of belief forces the conclusion that temporalist propositions don’t accurately represent reality. Sullivan develops a a complex proposal about communication to answer Richard’s arguments that conforms to these constraints.
This suggestion echoes Aronszajn’s proposal (1996, p. 81). But it doesn’t have the problems that Aronszajn’s appeal to pronouns of laziness does. Fitch (1998, pp. 255–256) notes that he can tell someone ‘I am in Arizona’ on May 1, and report that he still believes what he said then several months later, even if he’s no longer in Arizona. It’s not clear how Aronszajn would handle that case. But that case is no problem for the proposal I favor; the speaker is just indicating that he still accepts the proper pragmatic enrichment that he also accepted on May 1.
This proposal is a version of what Sullivan (2014, p. 488) calls ‘conciliatory temporalism’. Matching this paper’s concerns with her concerns about conciliatory temporalism isn’t straightforward, as she has an eye on metaphysical questions that I haven’t attended to. I’m equally happy with the response to the Richard problem that she favors. But it is a more radical revision than the conciliatory response I’ve sketched here. The metaphysical issues she attends to may warrant the more radical revision—but the argument I’ve offered in this paper only warrants my less radical revision.
She gives one argument against conciliatory temporalism that is less bound up with metaphysical questions. She imagines someone locked in a prison for several years without any way of knowing what year it is. During her stay, she gets a copy of the New York Times with the date blacked out, that tells her that Bush is president. Sullivan (2014, p. 488) objects to the conciliatory temporalist that such a person “believed the temporalist proposition [Pres(bush)]. She was not able to form the corresponding eternalist belief [Pres(bush,2003)], because she didn’t know what year it was”. So pace the conciliatory temporalist, the belief retained throughout captivity couldn’t have been the eternalist belief [Pres(bush,2003)]. There are, I think, two eternalist propositions that she might retain belief in—either the existentially quantified [\(\exists t{:}\) t was during my stay in prison] ([Pres(bush,t)]), or the singular proposition [Pres(bush,t)]. Sullivan’s observations are entirely compatible with the prisoner believing the existentially quantified proposition. But they’re also compatible with her believing the singular proposition. If you doubt that ‘2003’ refers directly, you think that the singular proposition [Pres(bush,t)] is distinct from [Pres(bush,2003]—so you can acknowledge that the prisoner doesn’t believe the latter even though she believes the former. If you think ‘2003’ does refer directly, you should see Sullivan’s case as an instance of Frege’s puzzle, to be solved in whatever way you favor. So I don’t think that this argument shows conciliatory temporalism to be mistaken—though I admit that the metaphysical considerations might decisively favor her proposal.
He gives that name to views that deny the assumption that “a sentence expresses at most one thing (a proposition) at a time” (Richard 1981, p. 9). My sketched response holds that an utterance of a sentence can communicate more than one proposition at a time, so I don’t quite deny his assumption. But I deny something close.
MacFarlane and Kolodny (2010) illustrate the sort of work that such a proposal can do.
Cappelen and Hawthorne (2009, p. 96) emphasize a similar point.
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Perl, C. An argument for temporalism and contingentism. Philos Stud 172, 1387–1417 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0355-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0355-3