Abstract
Anti-individualists hold that having a thought with a certain intentional content is a relational rather than an intrinsic property of the subject. Some anti-individualists also hold that thought-content serves to explain the subject’s cognitive perspective. Since there seems to be a tension between these two views, much discussed in the philosophical literature, attempts have been made to resolve it. In an attempt to reconcile these views, and in relation to perception-based demonstrative thoughts, Stalnaker (Our knowledge of the internal world, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008) argues that an anti-individualist account of the facts that determine thought-content can be reconciled with a suitably qualified version of a principle of epistemic transparency. Acknowledging this, and in agreement with the view that thought-content should serve to explain the subject’s cognitive perspective, I argue that, his intentions notwithstanding, this view of transparency of thought-contents does not serve to explain the subject’s cognitive perspective on Stalnaker’s own terms and that the intricacies involved in his argumentation for saving his anti-individualist project are indirectly supportive of an individualist account of the subject’s cognitive perspective. In so doing, I leave intact some of his key claims that are plausible in their own right.
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Notes
I thank an anonymous reviewer for this journal for pressing me on this point.
There are, of course, referentialist philosophers such as Kaplan (1989) and Perry (1977) who do not take the content believed and expressed by an utterance of a demonstrative sentence (which is for them Russellian) to be transparent but do not take it to account for the subject’s cognitive perspective. By contrast, Stalnaker and some other anti-individualists hold that this perspective should be accounted for in terms of thought-content and my discussion is based on this assumption.
Stalnaker here draws upon Burge’s definition of anti-individualism as espoused by Burge in various places. For a thorough discussion of anti-individualism, see Burge (2010, pp. 25f).
Arguably, it would not be appropriate to credit the subject with the presupposition that this ship is that one if she were to have difficulty understanding it. This presumably happens when the information that causally derives from two different objects is combined in an indecomposable way such that the subject is unable to understand the claim ‘This1 ≠ this2’ (see Evans 1982, p. 297). This is presumed not to be the case here. As to Stalnaker’s analysis of the parallel ‘water’/‘twater’ case, Boghossian (2011) argues that crediting a subject called Peter with the ‘twater is water’ presupposition is unjustified since it is unclear that Peter would understand this proposition or that he would not regard it as a contradiction. Boghossian criticizes those views that violate content transparency on the grounds that they allow a rational subject to believe logical contradictions and make simple logically invalid inferences. On similar grounds, he has recently charged the theory of concepts propounded by Sainsbury and Tye (2012), according to which concepts are individuated by their origin (Boghossian 2015; see also Sainsbury and Tye 2015 for their response to Boghossian).
In this context, Stalnaker briefly considers a case in which the possibility that distinguishes the two propositions is explicitly recognized in that the subject refuses to believe that this ship is the same as that one (2008, p. 128), a case in which the subject entertains the thought that this ship is an aircraft carrier, while that one is not. For Stalnaker, this should make clear that the theorist attributes to the subject the presupposition that this ship is that one relative to a wider range of possibilities. But whatever the merits of this claim, it does not affect my argument concerning the case considered above and I shall not labour the point here. I want to note, though, that there is a good reason to treat this case analogously to the foregoing case (rather than the other way around), in view of the fact that the subject refuses to believe that this ship is the same as that one because accepting this belief would not fit in with the way the world is according to her. I thank an anonymous reviewer for this journal for pressing me on this point.
Brown (2004, ch. 6) argues that Fregean anti-individualists such as Evans (1982) and Campbell (1987, 1994), who combine anti-individualism with Fregean sense, face the opposite problem. Qua Fregeans they insist that a rational subject can always grasp a priori simple instances of validity and contradiction, while qua anti-individualists they accept that a rational subject cannot always grasp a priori simple instances of invalidity. (Brown uses “a priori” similarly to Boghossian). Brown claims that in order to avoid this asymmetry these philosophers need to abandon anti-individualism. She also claims that (non-Fregean) anti-individualism is incompatible with the transparency of sameness of thought-content just as it is incompatible with the transparency of difference of thought-content.
The case of Kripke’s (1979) Pierre who is unaware that in using ‘Londres’ he is referring to the same city as in using ‘London’ and in the case of Boghossian’s (1994) Peter who is unaware that he is switched from a world in which in using ‘water’ he is referring to H2O to a world in which in using ‘water’ he is referring to XYZ, Stalnaker attempts to account without invoking concepts which he takes to be creatures of darkness (2008: 105). But Schroeter (2013) has pointed out that without some account of the principles for determining how particular propositions (contents) are assigned—which historical, relational, or internal cognitive facts are relevant to favouring one assignment over another—we do not really know what a set of possible worlds is representing about the subject’s mental states. Schroeter is concerned with standing rather than occurrent beliefs and raises different issues from those that I raise here. She thinks that the cases of Pierre and Peter should be accounted for in terms of mental files and believes that the mental file account is not hostile to Stalnaker’s externalism.
Recanati speaks of mental files rather than of concepts (and so does Schroeter in relation to the cases mentioned above). For the purposes of the present discussion it suffices to speak of concepts in a broad sense without being committed to any substantial theory of concepts. This way we are not exposed to objections levelled at mental file accounts such as those raised by Fine (2007, pp. 67–69, p. 72). Concepts as I take them to be are consonant with the way Fine accounts for “cognitive significance”.
Schroeter (2013, p. 286) claims that depicting Boghossian’s Peter as thinking of H20 and XYZ via the same mental file does not commit him to having transparent access to semantic facts about reference or co-reference which way Stalnaker’s anti-individualism is not threatened. I shall not pursue this issue here nor will I pursue the issue of whether invoking mental files is compatible with other varieties of anti-individualism such as Burge’s, in view of the fact that Burge wants to reconcile anti-individualism with a Fregean account of thought-content (see Burge 1979, 1986, 1993). For a discussion of Burge’s and related views, see Brown (2004), ch. 5, Wikforss (2006), and Schroeter (2008). As to whether having access to thought-contents involves having meta-beliefs, see Schroeter (2007), Recanati (2012), ch. 10, and Wikforss (2015).
I do not make any claims as to whether Stalnaker’s view of epistemic transparency is capable of meeting the requirements that it is supposed to meet in Stalnaker 1978 in relation to conversational situations. For a discussion of this and related issues, see Hawthorne and Magidor (2009, 2011), Stalnaker (2009) and Almotahari and Glick (2010).
A ‘water’/‘twater’ case is (in Stalnaker’s view) one such case in which a subject such as Boghossian’s Peter has been (slowly and) unknowingly switched from a world in which the substance called ‘water’ is H20 to a world in which the substance called ‘water’ is XYZ.
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Acknowledgements
This paper is the result of my research done within the project Logico-Epistemological Foundations of Science and Metaphysics (179067) supported by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development of the Republic of Serbia. I thank two anonymous reviewers for this journal for helpful comments on an earlier draft as well as Timothy Williamson, Miljana Milojevic, Andrej Jandric and Una Stojnic.
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Bozickovic, V. Anti-individualism and transparency. Synthese 197, 2551–2564 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-1830-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-1830-8