Abstract
It is not rare to find students of language interested in the many ways in which speakers talk about Fred or about the weather, assert of Fred or of the weather that he is fat or that it is fine. Many philosophers, logicians, and linguists share an interest in what words or phrases designate or describe, and what speakers refer to, mention, and say things about. But it is also notable that the Grammarian and the Philosopher, especially the Metaphysician, have looked at intentionality in different ways. In this lecture I sketch the ways that the Philosophers Nelson Goodman and W.V.O Quine and by contrast the Grammarians have analyzed and used the notion of Aboutness, in Quine’s case in his famous argument against Quantifying Into intensional sentences. Goodman’s and Quine’s analyses are motivated by different intellectual goals from the Linguists’. By contrast Linguists have the notion of Topic Noun Phrase. I shall argue that the Linguists’ notion of Topic Noun Phrase offers clarification and an intellectual advance over Goodman’s and Quine’s notions, especially in the treatment of propositional attitude sentences.
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- 1.
N. Goodman, “About,” Mind, V. 70, 1961, pp. 1–24; reprinted in N. Goodman, Problems and Projects, Indianapolis, Indiana: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972, pp. 246–72.
- 2.
Goodman plays loosely with his notation; I take ‘S’ and ‘T’ to be meta-variables ranging over statements (not sentence-types). My ‘τ’ is a meta-variable ranging over singular terms and predicates. ‘║ τ ║’ denotes the extension of τ.
- 3.
In Goodman’s original 1961 essay he does not demonstrate that the negation < ¬S> of <S> is about τ if and only if <S> is about τ. This demonstration was provided by Hilary Putman and Joseph Ullian in “More about ‘About’”, Journal of Philosophy, V. 62, 1965, pp. 305–310. Of course this immediately should have raised the question for Goodman why both <P & P > and < P & ¬P > are not about the same things.
- 4.
This was an advantage of Hilary Putnam’s earlier, 1958 account of aboutness, one that I adopted in J.D. Atlas and S.C. Levinson, “It-Clefts, Informativeness, and Logical Form: an introduction to radically radical pragmatics,” in P. Cole (ed.), Radical Pragmatics, New York: Academic Press, 1981, pp. 1–61, see especially pp. 42–43.
- 5.
One finds comparable structures in French, Italian, and Japanese. For ‘It’s my car that broke down’, there are ‘C’est. ma voiture qui est. en panne’, ‘E la mia macchina che si è rotta’, and ‘Kuruma ga koshoo-shi-ta’ (Lambrecht 1994: 223).
- 6.
Goodman adopts the slovenly but sometimes useful mathematical practice of identifying a with the singleton set {a}. Item (iv) is then redundant.
- 7.
Some linguists dispute the details of the Atlas-Levinson account of clefts, particularly the entailment, by contrast with a Gricean generalized conversational implicatum, that Mary kissed only John. But that dispute will not affect the point of the contrast between a linguistic notion of aboutness and the notion that Goodman has constructed.
- 8.
The material first presented at UCLA and U. of Cambridge in 1982, and the U. of Duisberg, Germany, and U. of Groningen, The Netherlands, lectures of 1991 begins here in its more up-to-date version.
- 9.
If it does denote Ortcutt; cf. Frege.
- 10.
Mark Sainsbury (1991: 199) takes the view that substitutivity salva veritate is sufficient as well as necessary for referential occurrence. Christopher Kirwan (1978: 212) sticks to (ROF). Arthur Prior (1963) argues that in the sense of (ROF) there are no opaque occurrences of singular terms, though there are still differences in the scope of singular terms.
- 11.
Arthur Prior (1971: 150) adopts a similar condition on an expression n being used as a Russellian name, i.e. as a name that can be replaced by a bound variable:
An expression n is being used as a Russellian name only if, where δ is any expression that forms sentences from sentences and predicates from predicates, e.g. ‘not’, ‘allegedly’, or ‘possibly’, (δφ)n is indistinguishable in sense from δ(φn).
If the two statement forms state the same, and the former form is a canonical form of a statement’s being about the designation of n, we have, in effect, Quine’s criterion. A related, converse condition on referential occurrence is adopted by Hodges (1977: 157):
If, for a designating singular term τ, the statements A(τ) and the Peano abstraction τ έ A(he) – or equivalently, the lambda abstraction λxA(x)(τ) – make the same statement, i.e. are paraphrases, then τ occurs purely referentially in A(τ).
- 12.
On Frege’s view if the terms in the ‘believes that’ context had the same Bedeutungen, truth-value under substitution of terms would be preserved; hence, their reference in that context is not their usual Bedeutungen. Frege’s theory gives this explanation: since their ordinary Sinne are not the same, their indirect Bedeutungen (which are taken to be their ordinary Sinne) are not the same, which explains the difference in truth-value. The Substitutivity Principle for singular terms is preserved by the Context Principle and a hierarchy of Sinne and Bedeutungen.
- 13.
This spelling is Charles Sanders Peirce’s.
- 14.
- 15.
- 16.
For discussion of these criteria of Aboutness, see Atlas (1988: 383–8) and Atlas (1989: 107–12). For a discussion of Observation (IV) see Atlas (2004) and Strawson (1964). As Curtis Brown suggested to me, one might be inclined to think that Quine’s doctrine that there is a transparent sense of the sentence-type ‘Ralph believes that the man in the brown hat is a spy’ is sufficient to yield the conclusion that a statement carrying that sense of the sentence is about the reference of ‘the man in the brown hat’. I shall argue that the singular term’s merely having an extension does not suffice to make a statement of the sentence (taken in that sense) about the extension of the singular term.
- 17.
- 18.
If Quine’s premiss (d) were true, it would have to be true for reasons other than those Quine provides. Indeed, if (d) is a material conditional, it is true, but only because Quine’s premiss (c) is false.
- 19.
The arguments that derive from earlier, similar ones in the UCLA and U. of Cambridge lectures of 1982, and the U.of Duisberg, Germany, and U. of Groningen, The Netherlands, lectures of 1991 end here. See Appendix A.
- 20.
- 21.
I take contrastive stress to be a property of statement-types, not sentence-types. Whether or not there are transparent and opaque senses of these ‘believes that…’ sentences, the unstressed ‘Tully’ is a Topic Noun Phrase in Quine’s statement Tom believes that Tully denounced Catiline.
- 22.
Alternatively: he does not believe that the man seen at the beach is a spy.
- 23.
Alternatively: he does not believe that it is the man seen at the beach who is a spy.
- 24.
Compare (Conv ROQ**) in Appendix A.
- 25.
Even on Goodman’s views in “About,” the statements (19) and (20) do not need to be about the same things.
- 26.
Alternatively, the attributions of the contents of belief and non-belief are also consistent.
- 27.
- 28.
See Appendix A of this essay and Atlas (1988) “What are Negative Existence Statements about?”, and Atlas (1989, 2004).
- 29.
This essay was presented as a Keynote Lecture at the First International Conference on Pragmatics and Philosophy, University of Palermo, Italy, May 16–19, 2016, at 9:45 a.m., May 18, 2016 and is one more in a sequence of papers exploring the applications of Topic/Comment to various problems in linguistics and philosophy of language that I have written since Atlas and Levinson (1981), problems of Gricean Implicature, Strawsonian Presupposition, the semantics and pragmatics of English Cleft sentences, Negative Existence Statements (Atlas (1988, 1989, 2004)), the semantics and pragmatics of sentences with focal particles like ‘only’ (Atlas 1991 et al.), and propositional attitude sentences. My development of some of these ideas since 1981 was accelerated by my research with Professor Morton G. White at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, 1982–84 – I am deeply indebted to Morton G. White and Robert Sleigh. I presented some of these ideas in the Philosophy Colloquium, Department of Philosophy, University of California, Los Angeles, in March 1982 and to the Linguistics Colloquium, Department of Linguistics, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom, in October 1982, under the title “Non-Existence and Quantifying In.” I am grateful to Rogers Albritton, David Braun, Tyler Burge, Keith Donnellan, Donald Kalish, Stephen Levinson, and Terry Moore. Lectures were also presented to the Linguistic Agency Symposium, the University of Duisburg, Germany, 19 March 1991 and in the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, 28 March 1991, under the title “Negative Existence Statements and Intensional Contexts: the Relation between Bedeutung and Topic/Comment.” I am grateful to P. Blok, S. de Mey, R. Dirven, R. Geiger, J. Hoeksema, and F. Zwarts. (The week in Duisburg was notable for two reasons: I spent most of the week explaining to philosopher Charles Travis the concept of semantical non-specificity for negative sentences, and I did the same for the Canadian psycho-linguist John Macnamara; these were fruitful conversations for all concerned.) More recent lectures were presented to the Semantics Seminar, Department of Linguistics, University of Southern California, in 2006 – my thanks to Eleanor Guerzoni, and in the Linguistics Colloquium, Pomona College, Claremont, California, in November 2007; I am grateful to Martin Hackl, Stephanie Harves, and Charles Young. My criticism of Quine’s famous argument against Quantifying In was encouraged by Noam Chomsky’s interest in my use of Topic/Comment in my 1988 “Negative Existence” paper; he assured me that it possessed some theoretical interest, as Sir Peter Strawson had done earlier, despite my flying in the face of many standard views. This version of the essay benefited greatly from criticism by my colleague Curtis Brown, Professor of Philosophy, Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas, USA.
- 30.
The converse of Strawson’s thesis was discussed by Gundel (1977):
(G)
If the statement A(τ) is about the designation of τ, then asserting A(τ) presupposes <τ exists>.
This is not a thesis that I accept, for the following reason: The conjunction There is a queen of England and the queen of England is fat does not presuppose that there is a queen of England. Principle (G) would then predict that There is a queen of England and the queen of England is fat is not about the designation of the queen of England. But it seems evident that the conjunction is, at least, about the queen of England. Thus principle (G) makes an incorrect prediction.
- 31.
Consider the converse of Quine’s criterion:
(Conv ROQ)
If the statement A(τ) is about the designation of τ, then τ occurs purely referentially in A(τ).
This principle is plausible, for the following reason: If the statement A(τ) is about the designation of τ, then we may paraphrase the statement by <As for τ, A(he)>. In the latter statement τ occurs purely referentially. Of course, it is assumed in the statement of the principle that there is a designation of τ; if τ has no designation, A(τ) is not about the designation of τ. (In that case, if ‘if...then’ in the principle is the material conditional, the principle will be trivially true.) We should distinguish (Conv ROQ) from the related:
(Conv ROQ*)
If a statement A(τ) is about the designation of τ, if any, then τ occurs purely referentially in A(τ),
and the related:
(Conv ROQ**)
If, in a statement A(τ), τ is a Topical Noun Phrase, then it is “non-controversial” in the context that τ occurs purely referentially in A(τ),
where:
(N)
If P is “non-controversial” in a context K in which U is asserted, the utterer of U takes P for granted or purports to take P for granted and assumes that his addressee will do so as well.
See Atlas and Levinson (1981: 40–1).
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For Noam Chomsky
APPENDIX A
APPENDIX A
Cleft sentences in English, like ‘It is the queen of England who raises the best racehorses’, also provide an interesting test of a thesis about presupposition. In Atlas and Levinson (1981) it was observed that the cleft statements:
(1) | It is the queen of England who raises the best racehorses |
and:
(2) | It is not the queen of England who raises the best racehorses |
presuppose that someone raises the best racehorses and do not presuppose that there is a queen of England. This explains, for example, the evident falsity, rather than truth-value-lessness, of the cleft statement:
(3) | It is the king of France who raises the best race horses, |
a datum noted but not explained by James McCawley (1981: 241), and it also explains the anomaly of (4):
(4) | ? It’s no one who raises the best race horses, |
pointed out to me by Ivan Sag (personal communication). Cleft sentences show that the plausible thesis:
(RP) | If τ occurs in referential position in A(τ), then asserting A(τ) presupposes < τ exists > |
is a false thesis. A related thesis, due to P.F. Strawson (1954, 1964), is:
(PA) | If asserting A(τ) presupposes < τ exists >, then the statement A(τ) is about the designation of τ. |
Strawson’s thesis is one that I have defended and do defend, though the meta-linguistic version of it that I prefer is:
(PA*) | If asserting A(τ) presupposes < τ exists >, then τ is a Topical Noun Phrase in the statement of A(τ).Footnote 30 |
Notice that the two theses (RP) and (PA) together entail Quine’s criterion of referential occurrence (ROQ) from “Three Grades of Modal Involvement” (1953/1976). If these two theses were both acceptable, Quine’s criterion should also be acceptable; his criterion is not acceptable, so it is happily consistent with that claim that (RP) is also, independently, unacceptable. Yet (RP) and (PA) are both plausible, so it is no surprise that what they entail, viz. Quine’s criterion, should also be plausible even if incorrect.Footnote 31
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Atlas, J.D. (2018). Aboutness and Quantifying Into Intensional Contexts: A Pragmatic Topic/Comment Analysis of Propositional Attitude Statements. In: Capone, A., Carapezza, M., Lo Piparo, F. (eds) Further Advances in Pragmatics and Philosophy. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 18. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72173-6_2
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