Abstract
We conceive of many general terms we use as having satisfaction conditions that are objective in that the thought that something meets them neither entails nor is entailed by the thought that we are currently in a position in which we are ready, or warranted, to apply those terms to it. How do we manage to use a given term in such a way that it is thereby endowed, and conceived to be endowed, with satisfaction conditions that are objective in this sense? In the first half of the paper, I present a number of interrelated problems for some extant metasemantical accounts of how use determines objective satisfaction conditions. In the second half, I then propose a novel account that avoids all of these problems.
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Notes
This is meant to be so on both the doxastic and the propositional understanding of warrant or justification (cf. Firth 1978). Note that the notion of objectivity being invoked here is more demanding than Peacocke’s notion of minimal objectivity according to which a judgement is minimally objective just in case making this judgement does not make it true (Peacocke 2009, pp. 739–741).
This question, with its explicit appeal to the idea that use determines meaning, crucially differs in kind from the question Peacocke seeks to answer by means of a transcendental argument (see Peacocke 2009).
Here I will exclusively be concerned with views that forego invocation of any Gricean intentional superstructure in their attempt to explain how objective content is being determined. The reason for this is that as long as the relevant intentions are not shown to have objective content, their invocation is of little use but rather pushes the issue back to the question of how their content is being determined. Answers to this latter question had better not invoke further intentions, lest we embark on a regress or are caught in a circle.
The term a must be a referring expression; so some or all definite descriptions fail to qualify.
Provided that disquotational principles of truth (and satisfaction) hold, it follows from blatant anti-realism thus understood that ‘it is warrantedly assertible that’ satisfies the S4 axiom. Williamson’s well-known argument against this claim would seem to presuppose that blatant anti-realism is false, as it rests on a conception of reliability of warrant for applications of ‘round’ as involving answerability to conditions under which ‘round’ is satisfied (Williamson 1995). If, as the blatant anti-realist holds, our conception of the conditions under which ‘round’ is satisfied just is the conception of conditions under which applications of ‘round’ are warranted, then it is hard to make sense of any such answerability. In any case, blatant anti-realists are most likely to reject disquotational principles of truth (and satisfaction) because neither ‘a is round → it is warrantedly assertible that a is round’ nor ‘It is warrantedly assertible that a is round → a is round’ is assertible. See next but one footnote.
See Field (1994) for a deflationist view of content. Horwich (1998a, b), a self-proclaimed deflationist about truth, faces problems analogous to the one raised here; see Sect. 4. For a critical assessment as to whether Horwich really counts as a deflationist about truth given that he avails himself of the notion of a proposition and aims to provide a substantive account of meaning-that, see Field (1992).
Since neither ‘a is round → it is warrantedly assertible that a is round’ nor ‘It is warrantedly assertible that a is round → a is round’ is assertible, this version of blatant anti-realism is best viewed as conceiving of deductively valid inference in terms of preservation of warranted assertibility and as implying failure of conditional proof. The following principle of conditionalisation will be said to hold instead: if Γ, A ⊢ B, then Γ ⊢ It is warrantedly assertible that A → It is warrantedly assertible that B.
We may safely assume that with respect to certain terms, and the subject matter to which they purport to relate, we have already reached the relevant end of enquiry. For all we know, ‘fluidentical’ may belong to this class. But recall that the blatant anti-realist’s challenge must be answered with respect to each term; and we cannot safely assume that with respect to every term, and the subject matter to which this term purports to relate, we have already reached the end of enquiry.
Peacocke distinguishes between perceptual experiences and genuine perceptions, where only the latter are factive states even if they are subjectively indistinguishable from mere perceptual experiences (Peacocke 2008, pp. 194, 208, 264; 2009: 739, 252–256).
The term ‘assumption’ has more than one reading. Thus, it is often employed to refer to background beliefs or conversational presuppositions. No such use is intended here. Rather, ‘to assume that p’ and ‘to make an assumption by means of ‘p’’ are here understood to relate to the kind of act we perform when we assume a statement or proposition in the context of proofs.
Use of conditional proof (if valid), together with an insight into its normative significance, will be one notable exception.
This suggests that ‘x assumes that’ creates a hyperintensional context. Well, then so be it.
This needs of course be qualified: commitments to infer are not obligations actually to arrive at the relevant conclusions. Since a claim has infinitely many deductive consequences, and ‘ought’ implies ‘can’, there can be no such obligations. The sense in which one is committed to infer any deductive consequence of p when one assumes that p is the same sense of ‘commitment’ that is at work when Brandom speaks of commitments to claim whatever deductively follows from what one claims (Brandom 1994, 2000).
The contention that we sometimes are in states of informed neutrality with respect to p and ~p does not in any way beg the question against the blatant anti-realist. It would do so if his claim of the mutual entailment of ‘a is round’ and ‘It is warrantedly assertible that a is round’, and of ‘a is not round’ and ‘It is warrantedly assertible that a is not round’, forced him to accept the (contraposable) conditionals ‘a is round → it is warrantedly assertible that a is round’ and ‘a is not round → it is warrantedly assertible that a is not round’. But since he neither endorses disquotational principles of truth nor regards conditional proof as valid, he is not forced to accept these conditionals. See footnote 7.
Recall that the blatant anti-realist makes a claim about content and not about there being some intricate logical reasoning that leads us from ‘a is round’ to ‘It is warrantedly assertible that a is round’, or from ‘a is not round’ to ‘It is warrantedly assertible that a is not round’. So if her claim was right, the relevant entailments would have to be obvious enough for competent speakers to recognise that if reasoning under the assumption of ‘It is warrantedly assertible that a is round’, or of ‘It is warrantedly assertible that a is not round’, was counterfactual so would be reasoning under the assumption of ‘a is round’ or of ‘a is not round’.
See previous footnote.
Just as the warranted assertibility of one claim p may depend on the warranted assertibility of another claim q, the success of an explanation of why there are clues for p may depend on the success of an explanation of why there are clues for q. Even so, the explanation of why there are clues for q is not already given by saying that there is such an explanation (that q is warrantedly assertible). Accordingly, in the envisaged case, the explanation of why there are clues for p will only be given (in full) if the explanation of why there are clues for q is also given.
I greatly benefited from discussions with Manuel García-Carpintero, Josep Macià, Genoveva Martí and Manolo Martínez. I owe much older debts to Patrick Geenough, Stewart Shapiro and Crispin Wright; they will know why. I am also grateful to two anonymous referees for their critical feedback and suggestions for improvement.
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Rosenkranz, S. Objective Content. Erkenn 74, 177–206 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-010-9227-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-010-9227-1