Abstract
Call an account of names satisfactionalist if it holds that object o is the referent of name a in virtue of o’s satisfaction of a descriptive condition associated with a. Call an account of names minimally descriptivistif it holds that if a competent speaker finds ‘a=b’ to be informative, then she must associate some information with ‘a’ which she does not associate with ‘b’. The rejection of both positions is part of the Kripkean orthodoxy, and is also built into extant versions of the file-picture of reference. In this paper, I argue that the rejection of minimal descriptivism only follows from the rejection of satisfactionalism given certain implausible assumptions about the nature of competence with a proper name. I do this by showing that considerations internal to the file-picture - in particular the idea that competence with a proper name constitutes an ‘epistemically rewarding’ relation to its bearer - motivate an acceptance of minimal descriptivism.
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Notes
Kripke doesn’t clearly commit himself to this in (1980), but comes close to do doing so (pg. 81). He expressly commits himself in (1979): “But to the extent that the indefinite descriptions attached or associated [with the names] can be called ‘senses’, the ‘sense’ assigned to ‘Cicero’ and ‘Tully’ or to ‘Feynman and ‘Gell-Mann’ are identical.” (1979, pg. 246).
These discussions occur in the context of potential arguments for Predicativism about names - see (Hawthorne and Manley 2012, Chp 6) and (Leckie 2012, pg 1144). The point here is not whether the apparent validity of such inferences is an argument for Predicativism, but that all participants in the discussion agree that they are apparently valid.
Kripke himself addresses this question, apparently without settling on a clear position. He admits that there is a sense in which being told that Tully is called ‘Tully’ would be ‘trifling’, but continues: “Actually, sentences like ‘Socrates is called “Socrates” are very interesting and one can spend, strange as it may seem, hours talking about their analysis. I actually did, once, do that. I won’t do that, however, on this occasion. (See how high the seas of language can rise. And at the lowest points too)” (1980, pg. 73)
Recanati, whose comprehensive theory of mental files will be central theoretical framework considered in the paper, appears to accept this. He writes that the mode of presentation of a name involves these metalinguistic properties, and that an utterance of the name ‘NN’ triggers a search for a mental file which contains the property called ‘NN’(Récanati 2012, 234n).
The terminology of ‘generic’ names comes from (Kaplan 1990). For our purposes we can just think of a generic name as the class of names which are articulated the same way. What Kaplan calls ‘common-currency’ names I will simply call ‘names’. I should mention here that I am assuming, for the sake of the paper, that the relation of competence holds between speakers and ‘public’ names (for the terminology of ‘public’ names, see (Récanati 2012, pg 142)). So I will be assuming that if a speaker encounters an utterance involving a name articulated with the sign s, she must disambiguate the utterance - interpreting s as the articulation of one of the public names which is an instance of the generic name s(for more on this assumption see note (21)).
I won’t be considering names in speakers’ idiolects. This means that I will also not be considering how to deal with Paderewski-type cases, in which a speaker mistakenly associates two files with one public name. The dialectic of this paper could be reinterpreted at this level, but this would involve an extra layer of complexity. Instead of focusing on a relation between a speaker and a public name (that is, competence) we would have to focus on classes of occurrences of the same public name. Paderewski cases show that a given speaker’s engagements with a single public name can cluster into two distinct uses. The question for this paper, reinterpreted at this level, would then be: what has to be true of a speaker’s relation to some subset of the set of occurrences of a single public name for that subset to pick out a distinct use of that name for that speaker? And in particular, what role does the descriptive information associated with each use play in carving out the distinctness of the uses?
For example in relation to the disquotation principle (Kripke 1979, pg 248).
In the philosophical tradition, the file-picture is usually traced back to work of Donnellan, and to (Grice 1969). Other important early works include (Lockwood 1971; Perry 1980), and (Evans 1985). The contemporary literature is voluminous. (Récanati 2012) offers an overarching account of the role of files in perception, thought and language. I will take Recanati’s approach as capturing the basic outlines of the current state of the art.
Certain ways of imagining the case might elicit the verdict that there is no clear fact about what she believes. While I don’t want to deny that such cases are possible, it is wrong to think that there can be no clear fact in a case like this. If we imagine that her patterns of non-verbal behaviour are perfectly consistent with respect to the two brothers, that the two bodies of information were dominantly formed otherwise than by testimony, and that her expressions of belief are consistent with respect to their patterns of coordination (in the sense of Fine (2009)) even if inconsistent with respect to which names are used to express which beliefs (e.g. She would always assert something with the structure ‘ α is taller than β and β is older than α ’ but which name occupies which position changes), then the there is no reason to deny that there is clear fact about what she believes. The problem can be determinately located with the inconsistency with which she links names with the two bodies of belief.
Recanati also seems to allow that some sort of reliability is required in that way the utterances of a name are sorted into a file to establish the proper connection between the two (2012, pg 141-143). He discusses a case, due to Cappelen, in which a speaker sorts information about two different Ciceros into the same file. What he says is that in such a case the file is not based on either common currency name but rather on the generic name. I take this to mean that even though the utterances the person processes involve different common-currency names, the fact that he is unaware of this means that the file he maintains doesn’t stand in the correct relation to either common currency name to achieve competence.
In speaking of an agent as having or failing to have a reason for one interpretation or another, I do not mean to be assuming an intellectualized picture of the psychology of disambiguation. It is merely shorthand for talking about the speaker’s epistemic situation. See note (17) for a related point about ‘inference’.
Note, I’m using disambiguate as an epistemic success term. To disambiguate an utterance, it’s not enough that one assign it the correct interpretation, one must do so in a way that one thereby knows what was said.
Nor even that the information is relevant, as far as topic is concerned, to the subject matter of the utterance. Suppose instead of the beliefs above, Sally was under the impression that someone knowledgeable about Alfredson’s past has been calling various of his acquaintances, revealing secrets from his past (perhaps, some of her friends have received similar phone calls). This, itself, may be enough to make the acquired belief knowledge (again, on the assumption that Sally does not believe something similar about Alvinson).
For example that visual object move in spatio-temporally continuous paths, that distinct visual objects exclude each other, that visual objects persist across occlusion, etc.
Recanati claims that files based on communicative chains are “more enduring than perceptual buffers because the [epistemically rewarding] relation established through a communicative chain lasts longer than a transient perceptual relation” (2012, pg 36) and later that learning the name of an object puts a speaker in “stable relation [to the referent of the name] which enables [the speaker] to accumulate information about the object across linguistic encounters” (ibid. pg 103)
We should not identify the involvement of these higher-level representational states with the inferential process being somehow conscious, deliberate, or available to the speaker. That is, the process might count as non-inferential according to the taxonomy in Recanati (2002) - see, especially, his footnote 6 for a relevant discussion. Note also that I am not suggesting that disambiguation involves an identity judgment (e.g. the John he is referring to = the John who works at the pub). I am only suggesting that the relation between the information in the speaker’s files and the information in the audience’s files plays a role the information-processing and therefore in the epistemic credentials of the resulting beliefs.
This is a favourite example of Fodor’s to illustrate the cognitive-impenetrability of perceptual modules (1983, pg. 66). As tends to be the case, the facts are never as neat as one would like. Evidence of cross-cultural variability in susceptibility to the illusion has been taken to suggest that the process is diachronically penetrable (McCauley and Henrich 2006).
Consider garden-path effects, e.g.in ‘The horse raced past the barn fell’. Even in contexts which would make the reduced-relative reading of ‘raced’ much more sensible than the main-verb reading, the sentences are still difficult to process, suggesting that the context does not substantially promote the main verb reading (Macdonald et al. 1994, pg 680). And this fits well with theories which hold that syntactic ambiguity resolution is controlled initially by a set of ‘dumb’ heuristics which are only sensitive to local syntactic relations and the left-to-right order of expressions (Frazier 1987, pg 562). It is only when this initial parse fails that other processes are wheeled in (ibid pg 571). Note this sort of evidence has been taken to suggest that syntactic disambiguation and lexical disambiguation involve different degrees of access to contextual facts, the standard assumption being the lexical disambiguation involves more access to contextual information (though (Macdonald et al. 1994) calls into question the sharp distinction between the two kinds of disambiguation. See also note (22) for other evidence of early contextual effects on syntactic disambiguation).
Dickie holds that the heuristics which guide object awareness match the “traditional ontological category of ordinary objects” (2011b, pg. 304).
There seems to be very little work in psycholinguistics which deals with the disambiguation of proper names (in contrast with work in computer-learning literature which attempts to build algorithms for disambiguating names across large corpora). To take an example, the goal of Macdonald et al. (1994) is to present a general theory of lexical and syntactic ambiguity but when it comes to proper names the authors simply ignore the fact that disambiguation is required (pg. 687). There are a number of issues here, but perhaps the most important one is that linguists are much less likely than philosophers to think of proper names as lexically ambiguous at all, rather than simply as referentially context-sensitive. That is, the default view in linguistics of the semantics of proper names is something much closer to Predicativism (Bach 1981; 2002; Burge 1973; Geurts 1997; Fara 2014), or Indexicalism (Recanati 1997; Pelczar and Rainsbury 1998; Maier 2009) rather than the philosophically-popular individual-constant model. In this paper I’ve been assuming the individual-constant view because this is the common interpretation of Kripke’s results. The issues in the paper would change substantially if that assumption were dropped - talk of competence with a name would have be dropped in favour of the establishment of a coherent use of a name. But analogous questions would arise - see note (5) for a discussion.
Evidence from eye-tracking studies suggests that higher-level representations of contextual features can influence even the immediate, on-line processing of utterances. Speakers do not generate an initial parse based on merely bottom-up processes, and then revise it if things crash higher up. Rather, top-down information is relevant at the very early stages of parsing. For example, studies have shown that the processing of ambiguous constructions is “guided by the listener’s situation-specific evaluation of how to achieve the behavioral goal of an utterance” (Chambers et al. 2004, pg. 687). Eye-tracking studies have suggested, for example, that if you and I are cooking together my initial interpretation of the referential intentions associated with your ambiguous utterances will be guided in part by my monitoring the various possibilities for action available to us, consistent with our mutual goals.
For example, (Chambers et al. 2004, pg. 687) studied real time parsing of the temporary ambiguity in
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(1) (a) Pour the egg in the bowl...
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(b) over the flour
The ambiguity is temporary in that by the time the hearer parses (1b), it is clear that ‘in the bowl’ should be construed as a modifier of the theme ‘the egg’, rather than as an argument to ‘pour’ (specifying a goal). Hearers create an initial parse of (1a) before (1b) is encountered. Whether they (correctly) parse (1a) as a theme-modifier depends not only on whether there is another egg around to serve as a potential referent, but also on whether that egg is in liquid form, and thus a reasonable target of a pouring instruction.
To take another example, this time dealing with the interpretation of referential domains (thus more directly related to name disambiguation). Hanna and Tanenhaus (2004) suggest that speakers’ initial parsing of the reference of context-sensitive referring expressions is guided in a sophisticated way by their representation of the goals and possibilities for action of the participants in a discourse. Audiences are more likely to initially interpret an utterance of
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(2) Could you put the cake mix next to the mixing bowl?
to refer to the cake mix near the speaker, rather than the cake mix near the audience, if the speaker’s hands are full (and thus, not in a reasonable position to reach the nearby cake mix himself). “These results demonstrate that addressees can quickly take into account task-relevant constraints to restrict their referential domain to referents that are plausible given the speaker’s goals and constraints.” (Hanna and Tanenhaus 2004, pg 105)
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Mahrad Almotahari, Imogen Dickie, James Genone, Nick Kroll, participants in the Philosophical Reunion Conference at the University of Chicago, and participants in my seminar on coreference at UIC for very helpful and illuminating conversation and comments. Thanks to Chris Kennedy, Ming Xiang, and Christina Kim for help in negotiating the literature on ambiguity resolution. Special thanks to Rachel Goodman for teaching me much about names and singular thought.
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Gray, A. Minimal Descriptivism. Rev.Phil.Psych. 7, 343–364 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-014-0202-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-014-0202-7