Abstract
Boghossian (Philos Perspect 8:33–50, 1994) argued (a) that externalism is incompatible with a transparency thesis according to which we can know a priori whether any two of our occurrent thoughts have the same or distinct content, and (b) that this transparency thesis is integral to our commonsense conception of rationality, which requires the apriority of our logical abilities. Stalnaker (Our knowledge of the internal world, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008) offered a detailed compatibilist response to Boghossian. Boghossian (Philos Stud 155:457–465, 2011) criticized this response, and Stalnaker (Philos Stud 155:467–479, 2011) replied. But the outcome of that important discussion remained unclear, partly because it was unclear how to understand the amended transparency thesis at which Stalnaker was gesturing. My aim in this paper is to settle the matter. I wish (i) to clarify the terms of the debate, also by highlighting the relevant commitments of Stalnaker’s two-dimensionalist account, and (ii) to show that his compatibilist response, which appeals to diagonal propositions, is unsuccessful.
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Notes
Earlier versions of the central arguments are found in Boghossian (1989, 1992a, 1992b). Boghossian (1992a, p. 15) claimed that this kind of self-knowledge is “hollow: it carries with it none of the usual consequences of first-person authority about thought content.” Boghossian (1994) attained the most striking formulation of all the relevant points.
Boghossian (1994) opened with a quote from Dummett (1978, p. 131) who claimed that “meaning is transparent in the sense that, if someone attaches a meaning to each of two words, he must know whether these meanings are the same.” Boghossian extended Dummett’s thesis to mental content and added that the relevant knowledge must be a priori.
For instance, Falvey and Owens (1994, p. 110) wrote: “There is no question but that externalism is incompatible with introspective knowledge of comparative content. But this poses no problem for the externalist, because there are strong reasons for thinking that [it] is false independently of externalism.” More recently, Sainsbury and Tye (2012) argued that given their externalist view of concepts, comparative transparency is not needed to account for rational reasoning. Boghossian (2015) strongly suggests that their attempt is unsuccessful; though see Sainsbury and Tye’s (2015) reply.
For example, Brown (2004, p. 192) concludes: “Anti-individualism provides reason to reject the concept of a rational subject as one who is able and disposed to conform her thoughts to the laws of logic a priori.”
Some of these “comparative compatibilists” (as we might call them) talk about transparency issues not in terms of (sameness of) content but in terms of (co-)reference relations, and accept some principle of comparative transparency formulated in terms of (so-called “strict” or “de jure”) co-reference relations that are known to hold a priori. See e.g. Fine (2007), Schroeter (2007), and Recanati (2012: Part V; 2016: Ch. 2).
This anti-realist claim has roots in Stalnaker’s views about belief attribution. E.g. Stalnaker (1988/1999, p. 163) wrote: “[…] propositions believed are not constituents of belief states, but simply ways of characterizing them.”
I here choose a conclusion involving quantification rather than referential expressions, which can be evaluated as true or false, so that the reasoning can be declared valid or invalid.
Kaplan (1989, pp. 573–576) draws the same distinction between semantics and metasemantics. I will use Kaplan’s labels.
It is worth noting that, although for simplicity in this paper I move back and forth rather quickly between Millianism and externalism (which are both endorsed by Stalnaker), an externalist might, for example, agree that proper names and natural kind terms are rigid designators without holding that reference is all there is to mental content. For a recent discussion of the links between Millianism and externalism, see Bochner (2021, pp. 222–257).
Boghossian (1994, 2015) says that the problem arises for theories encompassing “Millian contents.” As Boghossian (1994, p. 47) highlights, Frege’s argument for the introduction of senses, hence for the move from referential content to non-referential content, tacitly relied on comparative transparency. As Recanati (2012, pp. 116–117) also writes: “Reference, as we all know, is not epistemically transparent. […] What about sense? It seems that, in contrast to reference, sense (mode of presentation) must be transparent. If modes of presentation themselves are not transparent, there is no reason to move from pure referential talk to mode of presentation talk in the explanation of rational behavior.”
Jackson takes only sentences, while Chalmers also takes thoughts, to be associated with two contents.
As Stalnaker (2008, pp. 129–130) notes, this principle looks less obvious in the special case of self-locating beliefs.
Burge (1998, p. 367) writes: “Anti-individualism does not say that every thought’s content is fixed by the type of object that occasions the thought. Although free-standing memories normally evoke the concepts utilized in or appropriate to the remembered context, the exigencies of reasoning will often take precedence. One commonly utilizes concepts used earlier in an argument to identify objects in memories invoked in later steps.” Schiffer (1992) had made a similar suggestion in response to an early version of Boghossian’s (1989) arguments. Boghossian (1992b) had replied that he failed to see what could prevent to conceive a scenario in which the premises are formed independently.
See also Schroeter (2007, pp. 607–613) for similar and detailed criticisms of Burge’s (1998) compatibilist strategy invoking preservative memory. As suggested earlier and discussed further, the order of the premises matters in two-dimensionalist accounts which are dynamic, but the objection from arbitrariness no longer holds against them, precisely, for the incremental process they describe explains how the interpretation depends upon the context created by the previous assertions/premises in any given conversation/train of thought.
Stalnaker (2011, p. 476) mentions that he prefers to speak of “radical contextualism” here. I think that the “anti-realist” label is deservingly dramatic: the point is not just that different descriptions of the content of a subject’s thought may be given in different contexts of attribution, but more radically that there is no fact about content which makes all these descriptions true or false. No attribution, no determinate content!
As Boghossian adds, this issue is reminiscent of issues that may be raised against views, such as Daniel Dennett’s, to the effect that a thinker’s having Intentional states just amounts to her being treated from “the intentional stance.”
Some, like Schiffer (1992) or Recanati (2012, p. 136), question the conceivability of Boghossian-cases. Burge (1998, p. 368) writes: “I am doubtful that there are any clear cases of invalid equivocation deriving from switching cases. But if there are, they are marginal.” For defenses of the claim that they are conceivable, see Boghossian (1992b), Schroeter (2007, pp. 606–610), or Gerken (2011, p. 389). Schroeter carefully indicates how to construct such a case (her “Jo”-case). For the claim that they are not only conceivable but actually common, see Ludlow (1995b). Like Stalnaker (2008: Ch. 6), I here grant that Boghossian-cases are possible.
A possible objection is this. An inference is valid if and only if, if its premises are true, then necessarily its conclusion is true. Correspondingly, an inference is invalid if and only if, if its premises are true, then possibly its conclusion is false. But in the inference (b) here, the premises are necessarily false, so the antecedent of the latter conditional is always false, and if the conditional is a material one, then it is always true. Given this, (b) should not count as invalid. In response, that is why I indicate that (b4) is “not valid,” rather than “invalid.” I think that the fundamental problem is not that semantic externalism predicts that rational thinkers occasionally draw invalid inferences, when intuitively they do not: it is rather that semantic externalism occasionally fails to predict that they draw valid inferences, when intuitively they do. So in my view, the important result we are after, in order to vindicate the intuition that the reasoning is rational and coherent, is not just that the inference be not-invalid, but that, at some level of content, it be valid.
We can in principle afford a solution in terms of false identity presuppositions if the space of possible worlds over which the diagonal and horizontal propositions are defined is the set of possible worlds compatible with what is pragmatically presupposed (in the case of speech) or with what is believed (in the case of thought), where presupposition and belief are not factive attitudes (see Bochner, 2021: Ch. 5). Two-dimensionalists construing the relevant space of possibilities as a set of worlds compatible with what is known a priori, like Chalmers (2006), cannot embrace this solution, simply because a false proposition cannot be compatible with what is known.
S3 might be identical to S1 or to S2, but given the necessity of difference, S3 cannot be identical to S1 and to S2.
This claim might sound surprising, as John is an ordinary person who need not have sophisticated attitudes about semantic externalism, but remember that given Stalnaker’s abstract and pragmatic notion of presupposition, it only means that in every world compatible with what John is taking for granted, semantic externalism is true of his thoughts.
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Acknowledgements
I first presented these ideas at the Transparency Workshop which I co-organized at the Université Libre de Bruxelles with my Belgian colleagues Philippe De Brabanter, Philippe Kreutz, Bruno Leclercq, and Antonin Thuns on June 13-14, 2018. Paul Boghossian, François Recanati, and Robert Stalnaker were the invited speakers. I thank them, as well as my colleagues and the other participants, for long and stimulating exchanges on these fascinating themes. I also thank Prof. Stalnaker, Laura Schroeter, and an anonymous referee for this journal, for their comments on earlier versions of this paper, which helped me to improve it. All remaining inaccuracies are mine. The project leading to this publication has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 799162. I began to write this paper in 2019 while I was a EURIAS Junior Fellow at the Paris Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), and it also benefitted from my involvement in an interuniversity research project in Belgium funded by the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (F.R.S.-FNRS, PDR T.0184.16, 2016-2020).
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Bochner, G. Externalism, transparency, and diagonal propositions. Synthese 200, 200 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03679-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03679-x