Abstract
Le Verrier’s attempts to use ‘Vulcan’ to refer to an inter-Mercurial planet failed: Vulcan is a mere mythical entity. But, as the previous sentence demonstrates, we now use ‘Vulcan’ not in failed attempts to refer to a planet, but in seemingly successful attempts to refer to a mythical entity. These different uses of ‘Vulcan’ present critical pragmatics with a dilemma. On one horn, my use of ‘Vulcan’ cannot be conditionally co-referential with Le Verrier’s uses, because he failed to refer (to a planet), whereas I (seemingly successfully) refer to a mythical entity. But, on the other horn, such uses of ‘Vulcan’ are not a simple case of nambiguity, because what I say in uttering ‘Vulcan is a mythical entity’ is incompatible with Le Verrier’s assertion of, e.g. , ‘Vulcan is hot’. I propose to escape this dilemma by appeal to a different relation between uses of names which I call converse conditional co-reference.
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Notes
Flew presented his paper at a meeting of the Oxford Socratic Club in 1950. It was subsequently widely distributed in Feinberg’s popular (1968) textbook.
This is a simplification. For a brief history of astronomical uses of ‘Vulcan’, see note 4 in Braun (2014, pp. 620–621).
More precisely, the second horn implausibly implies that our success in using ‘Vulcan’ to refer to a mythical entity depends upon Le Verrier’s success in using ‘Vulcan’ to refer to a planet. If it turns out that, as an ontological matter, there are no mythical entities, then our uses of ‘Vulcan’ fail to refer. But even in this case it is implausible that our uses fail to refer because Le Verrier’s uses failed to refer. I will say more about the irrelevance of the ontological status of mythical entities in what follows.
Albert could also use a pronoun, or a different name, with an intention to conditionally co-refer with Le Verrier’s practice-inaugurating utterance. I will focus here on what Korta and Perry call “same-name coco-reference” (2011, p. 78).
There is nothing ad hoc about this conditional intention; that the conditions for success of a speech act are conditional upon the successful completion of a distinct speech act is the norm. For instance, in attempting to answer a question, one intends that one’s successfully answering is conditional upon a prior successful act of asking a question; in attempting to describe an object, one intends that one’s successfully describing is conditional upon a prior successful act of referring to an object to be described; etc.
The last clause of this definition is misleading, as it incorrectly implies that a speaker can succeed in referring without referring to something. This problem was pointed out by Stacie Friend, and acknowledged by Perry, in the February 15–17 ILCLI 2021 workshop Critical Pragmatics 10 Years On. Here is a formulation that seems to avoid this problem: “A later utterance coco-refers with an earlier one, if the second speaker’s intention is to refer to the same thing as the earlier utterance, if there is anything the earlier utterance referred to, and to fail to refer if there is not anything the earlier utterance referred to”.
Salmon describes Le Verrier as an “accidental storyteller” (1998, p. 83).
Geach’s (1967) puzzle of “intentional identity” anticipates Donnellan’s observation.
Korta and Perry (2011, p. 78) consider an example involving coco-referring uses of ‘Santa Claus’ for similar expository purposes, but the ‘Santa Claus’ example is complicated by the presence of an interrogative speech act, and a propositional attitude verb. In contrast, ‘Jacob Horn was an important person in colonial America’ is relevantly similar to ‘Vulcan is a mere mythical entity’. (The ‘Santa Claus’ example also appears in Perry 2001/2012, p. 176.).
Though Braun (2005, note 4) claims to be following Salmon’s (1998) use of ‘mythical name’, Salmon uses ‘mythical’ only to distinguish between kinds of non-linguistic abstract artificial entities. And, given the nambiguity of names, it is somewhat wrong-headed to conceive of names qua linguistic types as being mythical; it would be better to conceive of mythical as a category of particular uses of names: roughly, a use of N is mythical iff it belongs to a network whose roots are uses of N in the presentation of an erroneous theory, where the theory is erroneous in part because there is nothing that can play the role of referent of these root uses.
A “pretense” account of language use in fiction, an account that that supports Kripke’s view, is developed in Walton (1990). I briefly discuss uses of fictional names in the final section of the paper.
This is roughly analogous to what Kripke (2013) maintains in the case of the fictional name ‘Sherlock Holmes’: Kripke holds that in using ‘Sherlock Holmes’ in creating fiction, Arthur Conan Doyle did not refer to anything, but when literary theorists now use ‘Sherlock Holmes’ in metafictional discourse about Doyle’s stories, they successfully refer to an abstract entity that came into existence as a consequence of the author’s creative endeavors. But Kripke’s position with regard to fictional names is only roughly analogous to grasping the first horn of the dilemma for mythical names, because Le Verrier’s uses of ‘Vulcan’ failed to refer, whereas Doyle’s uses in fiction were not even attempts to refer.
This is not to deny that ‘Vulcan’, like all names, is nambiguous. This is to deny only that the difference between our utterances of ‘Vulcan’ and Le Verrier’s utterances can be explained away as an ordinary instance of nambiguity.
We would say something like, “We were wrong! Vulcan is not merely mythical; it’s a real planet!”
Following Strawson (1950, p. 330), we might want to say that, given an absence of an inter-Mercurial planet, the question of the truth “does not arise” for Le Verrier’s utterance.
Grasping the referential sub-horn, or a very similar view, is endorsed by Salmon (1998). Salmon defends a robust realism with regard to both fictional entities and mythical entities. Fictional realism had been antecedently articulated and defended, in various forms, by van Inwagen (1977) and Kripke (2013), but Salmon proposes extending the essential idea beyond metafictional discourse to scientific discourse (broadly construed).
“In our theory … intentions play the major part in determining reference, with words and their [conventional] meanings playing supporting roles” (Korta and Perry 2011, p. 37).
In terms of Critical Pragmatics (2011, pp. 40–45) the absence of an inter-Mercurial planet wholly undermines Le Verrier’s referential plan: Given the absence of an inter-Mercurial planet, Le Verrier cannot have the right sort of “motivating belief,” so he cannot form a “directing intention,” nor the requisite “target intention” and “path intention”.
Braun (2005, p. 615) observes that Salmon’s mythical realism has such counterintuitive consequences. One might attempt to explain away the problematic intuitions by appeal to Kripke’s (2013) Grice-inspired distinction between speaker referent and semantic referent, but this distinction is not applicable to Le Verrier’s practice-inaugurating uses of ‘Vulcan’. In the case of a practice-inaugurating use of ‘Vulcan’, the so-called semantic referent is the speaker referent.
Another, even less plausible, sub-horn would have it that the shared ‘Vulcan’ network ends in a block created by our erroneous theorizing, not about planets, but about abstract artificial entities. This would imply that Le Verrier’s utterance of ‘Vulcan’ failed to refer not because there are no inter-Mercurial planets, but rather because we are mistaken in positing abstract artificial entities. This seems to involve a sort of backward causation.
Given our confidence that Le Verrier failed to refer to anything, it is not clear that we even could utter ‘Vulcan’ with the intention to coco-refer with Le Verrier’s utterances of ‘Vulcan’. Just as you cannot, e.g., intend to sell a car you know you do not own, so, it would seem, we Vulcan-skeptics cannot utter ‘Vulcan’ with the intention to co-refer, nor even coco-refer, with Le Verrier’s utterance. (Though of course we could intend to act as if we had the intention to sell the car, or to refer to a planet.).
I am not such a philosopher. Unlike Yablo and Gollois, I feel more than “a teensy bit ridiculous pondering the ontological status of these things” (1998, p. 126).
Among those who take such questions seriously, there is a debate over the ontological status of mythical entities (posits of erroneous scientific theories) and fictional entities (Sherlock Holmes and his ilk). Realists observe that we readily talk as if there were such entities, or at least as if we successfully refer to and quantify over such entities, and they take this empirical fact about our linguistic practices to support their ontologically profligate position. As Kripke put it, “everything seems … to favor attributing to ordinary language an ontology of fictional entities, such as fictional characters, with respect to which ordinary language has the full apparatus of quantification and identity” (2013, pp. 69–70). (In addition to Kripke, representatives of the realist camp include van Inwagen 1977; Salmon 1998; and Thomason 1999, 2003.) Skeptics (ontological nihilists) regarding mythical and fictional entities resist the inference from this empirical fact about our linguistic practice to ontological commitment to fictional and mythical entities by formulating error theories and/or ontologically economical paraphrases of the seemingly ontologically profligate linguistic practices. (Representatives of the skeptical camp include Everett 2005; Friend 2007, 2022; and Sainsbury 2009.) My point here is only that the resistors are not thereby compelled to grasp the non-referential sub-horn.
Korta and Perry would categorize this perlocutionary purpose as “Gricean” (2011, p. 8) in that I intend to add to the common ground the information that utterances of ‘Vulcan’ in Le Verrier’s coco-network failed to refer (to a planet) in part by way of my interpreters’ recognition of this very intention.
Note that in this sort of conversation, where it is an open question whether Le Verrier’s ‘Vulcan’ coco-network has an origin or ends in a block, one cannot felicitously use ‘Vulcan’ to coco-refer with Le Verrier’s uses. Such an attempt to coco-refer would, if you will, beg the open question of whether Le Verrier’s use of ‘Vulcan’ successfully referred. Such an infelicitous use would thus prompt an interpreter to either reject the utterance because it suffers from presupposition failure, or to accommodate the otherwise incorrect presupposition.
Am I hereby assuming that there really are such abstract artificial entities? No. I am assuming only that we often speak as if there were such entities. An ontological nihilist about abstract artificial entities is not thereby compelled to reject the analysis I am proposing; such a nihilist is compelled to maintain only that under my analysis, an utterance of ‘Vulcan is a mere mythical entity’ is not really true, so our intuitive judgement that it is true is, strictly speaking, incorrect. This sort of tension with the judgements of ordinary speakers is familiar ground for those who harbor ontological scruples about abstract artificial entities.
I here follow as closely as possible Korta and Perry’s method for characterizing network-bound content. See Korta and Perry (2011, p. 86).
Of course other predicates would serve my perlocutionary purpose just as well: ‘is made up’; ‘is a figment of Le Verrier’s imagination’; ‘is not a real thing’; etc. In Clapp (2020) I argue that ‘does not exist’ can also serve this purpose, though this requires the meaning of the verb ‘to exist’ to be pragmatically modulated to allow that abstract artificial entities are not in its extension.
Those who follow Quine (1951, p. 39) in conceiving of “total science” as including “the totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic” are not as likely to be misled by Braun’s characterization of mythical names.
Krebs made this assertion in a Tweet posted at 3:29 PM on November 7, 2020: https://twitter.com/CISAKrebs/status/1325188644966117376?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1325188644966117376%7Ctwgr%5Ee6ca756727fad047f7ca82fd5b624ca95219bd3d%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F% (Last accessed September 9, 2022.).
The same reason precludes us from holding that metafictional uses of ‘Sherlock Holmes’ coco-refer with Arthur Conan Doyle’s initial, in fiction, uses. Friend (2014) recognizes this limitation of coco-reference, and she presents a more inclusive anaphoric relation she dubs “identification” to explain metafictional uses of fictional names.
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Clapp, L. Vulcan is a Hot Mess: The Dilemma of Mythical Names and Cococo-Reference. Topoi 42, 935–945 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-022-09869-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-022-09869-z