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Framing Event Variables

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Abstract

Davidsonian analyses of action reports like ‘Alvin chased Theodore around a tree’ are often viewed as supporting the hypothesis that sentences of a human language H have truth conditions that can be specified by a Tarski-style theory of truth for H. But in my view, simple cases of adverbial modification add to the reasons for rejecting this hypothesis, even though Davidson rightly diagnosed many implications involving adverbs as cases of conjunct-reduction in the scope of an existential quantifier. I think the puzzles in this vicinity reflect “framing effects,” which reveal the implausibility of certain assumptions about how linguistic meaning is related to truth and logical form. We need to replace these assumptions with alternatives, instead of positing implausible values of event-variables or implausible relativizations of truth to linguistic descriptions of actual events.

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Notes

  1. Though perhaps given indeterminacy, some class of metalanguage sentences is “the” logical form of S relative to M; see Quine (1960), Davidson (1984). A further complication is that we speak of true friends, true north, and true walls. But I grant that a “semantic” notion of truth, applying to judgments and invented sentences, can be isolated and connected with logic; though see Etchemendy (1990) on the need to avoid implausible model-theoretic conceptions of validity.

  2. We can define ‘logical form’ so that inscription (H) encodes a triviality. But we can also define ‘logical form’ or ‘sentence’ or ‘is’ so that inscription (H) encodes a manifestly false claim. As used here, ‘logical form’—or if you prefer, ‘Logical Form’—is a theoretical term. So one shouldn’t take any proposed definition too seriously. One can say that Human Language sentences do not have compositionally determined meanings that determine logical forms, perhaps because logical forms reflect normative constraints on judgment that are not reflected by those sentences. But then it is misleading to say that Human Language sentences have logical forms, except relative to regimentations; see Quine (1951). By contrast, I think that grammatical form determines logical form, and that (H) should be rejected.

  3. If framing a question one way leads people to endorse a wrong answer that cannot be justified, and framing the question another way leads people to endorse a correct answer that they can justify, then other things equal: frame the question in the first way if you want people to endorse the wrong answer; frame it in the second way if you want people to endorse the correct answer.

  4. For simplicity, assume that no household has more than two children. But it doesn’t matter if there is also a tax deduction for each child beyond the second, perhaps up to some cap, or if we take the “standard household” to have ten children (reducing the base tax and imposing surcharges accordingly). Some descriptions of the policy with lead more people to think/recognize that they have a tax incentive to have more children. But that is part of the point.

  5. Taylor (1985) discusses such examples, citing Christopher Arnold who cited Gareth Evans.

  6. But we cannot identify both stabs with <dawn, Scarlet, Mustard>. More generally, events need to happen at times and have participants, but without being n-tuples of times and participants.

  7. See, e.g., Taylor (1985), Lasersohn (1990), Schein (2002, forthcoming). Plural event descriptions, as in ‘The rocks collided and rained down on the huts’, are beyond the scope of this paper; see Boolos (1998), Lasersohn (1995), Schein (1993), Landman (1996), Pietroski (2005b).

  8. See Schein (2002). Perhaps Alvin did some piano-lifting. But (43) implies that some event was a lifting of the piano by Alvin. Moreover, ‘the piano’ can be replaced with ‘five pianos at once’.

  9. The phrase ‘heard that Mustard yelled’ is different again. If (44) is true, and Mustard was the tallest officer, then Peacocke heard the tallest officer yell. But if she heard that Mustard yelled—say, because Plum passed on the rumor—she need not have heard that the tallest officer yelled.

  10. See Wilson (1989), Ginet (1990), Pietroski (2000). Perhaps (52) and (53) can both used to talk about the relevant “root action,” whatever it turns out to be. Speakers can use expressions to talk about things that the expressions are not true of; see, e.g., Donnellan (1966). One can posit forms like the following: ∃a∃e[R(a, e) & Shot(e, Scarlet, Green)]; where R(a, e) is true of <α, β> if and only if α is the action “at the root of” β. But even if this formal claim is true if and only if Scarlet shot green, this may reflect the metaphysics of shooting, not the meaning of ‘shoot’.

  11. Of course, Simon played the song by playing his tuba, and not vice versa. But this asymmetry, which may well reflect order of intentions, is not yet any reason for distinguishing α from α′; see Anscombe (1957), Thomson (1977), Hornsby (1980).

  12. See especially Tenny (1994) and further references there.

  13. In personal correspondence, Schein says that he finds theses (H) and (D)—from section one—untenable, and that he does not identify meanings with truth conditions. He is, though, inclined to retain a modified version of (H): if S is a sentence of a Human Language, and S* is the logical form of S, then S has no truth condition that deviates from the truth condition if any that S* specifies. This is because Schein takes a logical form to represent both subjective and objective aspects of a speaker’s situation—her mental state and ambient conditions, at a moment of utterance—in a way the capture certain invariance(s) across expressions, thoughts, and contexts; cp note 2 above. See Luldow (2011) for related discussion.

  14. For helpful comments and discussion, my thanks to the conference participants, the PHLING group at Maryland, Norbert Hornstein, Terje Londahl, Georges Rey, Zoltan Szabo, and especially to Barry Schein for many conversations over many years.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, 20742, USA

    Paul M. Pietroski

  2. Department of Linguistics, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, 20742, USA

    Paul M. Pietroski

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Correspondence to Paul M. Pietroski.

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Pietroski, P.M. Framing Event Variables. Erkenn 80 (Suppl 1), 31–60 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-014-9659-0

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