Abstract
Chalmers (Mind 120(479): 587–636, 2011a) presents an argument against “referentialism” (and for his own view) that employs Bayesianism. He aims to make progress in a debate over the objects of belief, which seems to be at a standstill between referentialists and non-referentialists. Chalmers’ argument, in sketch, is that Bayesianism is incompatible with referentialism, and natural attempts to salvage the theory, Chalmers contends, requires giving up referentialism. Given the power and success of Bayesianism, the incompatibility is prima facie evidence against referentialism. In this paper, I review Chalmers’ arguments and give some responses on behalf of the referentialist.
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Notes
Chalmers (2006b), which was presented for the Online Philosophy Conference in May 2006, is the predecessor of Chalmers (2011a). In what follows, I will also be citing Braun (2006), which he gave as comments on the Chalmers paper at that conference. I found Braun’s paper only after writing the initial draft of this paper, but I have since worked in some of his comments.
Or at least the theorists that Chalmers associates with referentialism. In what follows, I argue that Chalmers mischaracterizes how we should properly understand referentialism.
I am intentionally avoiding the term “Millianism” because many Millians employ something like guises, which won’t surface until Sect. 4.
For simplicity, and since nothing hangs on it, I set aside other versions of conditionalization, such as Jeffery conditionalization.
I thank an anonymous referee for comments that helped to make this section clearer.
Braun (2006) makes similar points.
This has been adapted from Chalmers’ original example in Chalmers (2006b, Sect. 2)
The theoretical considerations are the direct reference theses that Kripke (1980) advances for proper names, that Kripke (1980) and Putnam (1975) advance for natural kind terms, and that Kaplan (1989) advances for indexicals. The simplicity (and also theoretical) consideration that recommends referentialism is that it adheres to “semantic innocence”: the constraint that an expression’s reference stays stable across linguistic environments. For more about semantic innocence, see Crimmins and Perry (1989).
There is some ambivalence regarding the nature of guises. According to one specific class of views, guises are mental states (or more specifically sentences in the language of thought). See Braun (1998, 2006) and Crimmins and Perry (1989). One may object to the sophisticated referentialist that the nature of guises is unclear, but that is an old objection, which I am not here to defend against.
Implicit reference to a property of propositional guise (a guise that attaches to an entire proposition rather than to propositional constituents) rather than a particular guise is made because in many cases of belief attribution, a belief reporter will not be aware of the specific guise under which the person to whom the belief is being attributed believes the proposition.
Salmon himself says that a believes that p “may be analyzed” as the material I have on the right of the biconditional.
My labels “naive” and “sophisticated” are somewhat non-standard. “Naive” is often associated with Salmon-style accounts, and Schiffer-style accounts are sometimes referred to as “sophisticated” or “contextualist.” What is important for me is that they both agree about the nature of propositions.
His fullest treatment can be found in Chalmers (2006a).
Weisberg (2011, pp. 5–6) suggests, in passing, something similar to my approach I’m giving:
On the other hand, philosophical considerations can make the sentence-based approach more perspicuous. Consider, for example, the sentences “Superman will save the world today” and “Clark Kent will save the world today”. To Lois, these two sentences represent very distinct eventualities, though in fact they correspond to the same possible outcome. On the set-based approach, these two eventualities are represented by the same set, and hence must have the same probability. It seems reasonable, however, for Lois to think that they have different probabilities, which is allowed if we use different atomic [for my account, guise-proposition pairs], A and B, to represent them
.
I have phrased this in terms of hit-style accounts. For a Salmon-style account, the conditions under which agents have a disposition to inwardly assent to a proposition when taken a certain way—and so a disposition to partially inwardly assent—are determined non-referentially.
This is especially clear when we compare Chalmers’ account with hit.
To put it again in terms of a Salmon-style account: Lois is disposed toward inward assent to the proposition that Superman flies when that proposition is presented in the Superman way and not when it is presented in the Kent way.
At this point, Chalmers might object that referentialism is, by definition, the thesis that belief and credence behave referentially. Indeed, he may hold this view: he classifies Salmon as a referentialist about language but a non-referentialist about belief (Chalmers 2011a, n.9). If Salmon ends up not being a thoroughgoing referentialist about both language and belief, then, although I understand the thesis that Chalmers is attacking, I’m less clear who holds it, for he gives no representative citations in his explication of the thesis.
His fullest treatment can be found in King (2007).
See King (2007, Chap. 1). To put the thesis non-semantically, propositions contain individuals as direct constituents, a thesis that Russellianism includes but is not exhausted by.
I’m leaving off some details of King’s account that have to do with indexicals because that aspect of his account isn’t relevant to our discussion.
This extreme fineness of grain that results from syntactic differences has been the source of some criticism. For a critical discussion, see Collins (2007).
One may find these two recent theories of propositions implausible and think that true referentialism ought to be packaged with Russellianism, but that would require much additional argumentation that Bayesianism would likely be irrelevant to.
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Acknowlegements
Thanks to Phillip Bricker, Christopher J. G. Meacham, and especially an anonymous reviewer for comments on earlier drafts that greatly improved this paper.
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Fitts, J. Chalmers on the objects of credence. Philos Stud 170, 343–358 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0223-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0223-6