Abstract
There is a core to the referential/attributive distinction that reveals a propositional ambiguity that is scope-related and rooted in syntax.
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Notes
See Kaplan (1989) for the notions of singular and general proposition.
Although Strawson did not speak of singular propositions, his focus on indexicals in establishing when two sentences are used to make the same statement presage the idea. Soames (1994) takes Donnellan’s highlighting of the notion of a singular proposition to be a primary accomplishment.
“Strawson, it is true, points out nonreferential uses of definite descriptions, but which use a definite description has seems to be for him a function of the kind of sentence in which it occurs; whereas, if I am right, there can be two possible uses of a definite description in the same sentence” (Donnellan 1966, p. 282).
Insofar as the subject of the proposition is being determined, content is still, of course, an issue.
Kripke is concerned with the replacement of the de re/de dicto distinction by the referential/attributive distinction, and so his examples all involve explicit intensional or modal operators or both, e.g., Jack’s asserting, “John believes that the richest debutante in Dubuque will marry him.” The view I advance here is not one, therefore, that he addressed or engaged.
With a nod to Wettstein (1983, p. 188), who explained that when (2) is given the referential interpretation, it expresses a singular proposition “true with respect to a possible world w just in case the very individual demonstrated in the actual world is insane in w”; when (2) is given the attributive interpretation, it expresses a general proposition that “is true with respect to a world w just in case Smith was murdered in w by exactly one person and that person is insane in w.”
“Kaplan has suggested that a demonstrative “that” can be used, in English, to make any definite description rigid. “That bastard—the man who killed Smith, whoever he may be—is surely insane!” The subject term rigidly designates Smith’s murderer, but it is still attributive in Donnellan’s sense” (Kripke 1977, p. 260). Note that Kripke assumes the type 2 referential/attributive distinction: the subject term is attributive because the referent is determined as the one uniquely satisfying the appropriate predicate. It is Kaplan’s other requirement on \(dthat\,\Upphi\) (about which Kripke is silent), namely, that \(\Upphi\) be external to the proposition expressed, that makes it referential in the type 1 sense.
“[D]emonstrations have both a sense and a demonstratum. It is just that according to the demonstrative analysis the sense of the demonstration does not appear in the proposition. Instead the sense is used only to fix the demonstratum which itself appears directly in the proposition” (Kaplan 1978, p. 233).
To be sure, four dthat operators, each representing one of the four possible combinations of rigid/nonrigid and referential/attributive could be posited. The position lacks beauty, which is enough reason to move on. I will return later with a more serious failing.
See Szabo (2005).
Some years back, Cartwright (1968) denied that there was a clear conventional way of expressing the distinction in natural language. More recently, Bach (1981, p. 221) has expressed reservations that the locutions currently used by philosophers, linguists and logicians to express de re and de dicto beliefs are adequate to the task: “Sentences both of the form “a believes of the F that it is G” and of the form “a believes that the F is G” can be used to ascribe either de re or de dicto beliefs about the F….” On the other hand, Quine (1956, p. 177) claimed that some languages mark the distinction in grammar: “Appreciation of the difference [between the relational and notional senses of belief] is evinced in Latin and Romance languages by a distinction of mood in subordinate clauses; thus ‘Procuro un perro que habla’ has the relational sense:
$$ (\exists x) (x \hbox{ is a dog }\cdot x \hbox{ talks }\cdot \hbox{ I find }x) $$as against the notional ‘Procuro un perro que hable’:
$$ \hbox{I strive that } (\exists x)(x \hbox{ is a dog }\cdot x \hbox{ talks }\cdot \hbox{ I find }x)\hbox{''} $$Actually, s-assertions.
Bach (1997, p. 215) writes: “My thesis is very simple: belief reports do not report beliefs. But that needlessly sounds paradoxical. What I mean is that a belief report does not do quite what it appears to do, namely, say what someone believes. That is, it does not specify what the person believes but merely describes it.”
I simplify their views in the interest of sharpening the contrast.
Of course, Russell was also concerned here with the proper semantic treatment of ordinary proper names like Scott which, unlike logically proper names, stands for objects we have no direct acquaintance with.
Throughout, I rely on an anonymous, nonauthorized translation entitled “Articles and Definiteness” that circulated in typescript at MIT.
Heim conceives of the referential/attributive distinction she is testing to be lexically based and not syntactic in character. In the next section, I will provide syntactically marked readings of these two sentences.
My proposition-forming operator that does not by itself impose any scope interpretation on a quantifier phrase, unlike Kaplan’s semantic rigidifying demonstrative dthat whose intended effect is to render the term “scopeless” like a Russellian logically proper name. My syntactic approach is far more flexible than Kaplan’s semantic approach: in Sect. 3, I will show that it can accommodate the intermediate scope interpretations his cannot.
[R′′1] does not say who is making the presupposition: in (27), it could be John who is making the presupposition or it could be the person putting forward (27).
The fact that no scope ambiguity is introduced when embedded in a that-clause, in no way diminishes the fact that these should be understood as quantified expressions. For that, ultimately, is the story that needs to be told in order to identify their semantic properties.
“[S]ome might analyze these cases as showing that ‘each’ and ‘every’ should be distinguished scopally. In particular, it might be suggested that the former be analyzed as: Max believes of each grain of sand on the beach that it is quartz, but does not believe that every grain of sand on the beach is quartz. But this is not the understanding of the sentence that I wish to focus on. It helps to consider Max is aware of the belief that each grain of sand on the beach is quartz, but is not aware of the belief that every grain of sand on the beach is quartz, which has a perfectly consistent interpretation” (Fiengo 2007, p. 89). But the propositions represented as (33) and (34) provide precisely the “consistent interpretation” Fiengo seeks.
I favor, borrowing from Fiengo-Curme, individualized, to accommodate these and other cases—e.g., the plural referential description “Smith’s murderers”—in which there need not be a single object in the proposition.
Heim uses Jedesmal, which is naturally translated either as Every time or as Each time. I do not know which reading, in particular, she intended, whether, in fact, she made the distinction. But Every time, which is the choice of the anonymous translator, does render her intuitions plausible to a native English speaker and allows me to make the point clearly. The issue here, in any event, is theoretical and concerns quantifier ordering.
They project “a comparable semantic ambiguity…for numerical determiners such as two, three, seventeen, and so on, and also for some, several and many….” But not every, all, and each, which they claim “have only a quantifier interpretation.” (355) This last is contrary to the view Fiengo (2007) later advanced.
Although at no place do they clearly identify the type 1 distinction and distinguish it from the type 2 distinction.
See the discussion by Peter Geach (1962).
Neale (2004) calls the defenders the Unitarian School and the critics the Ambiguity School. The Russellian position I defend—not necessarily the one Russell explicitly held—is contrary, to this received option, that of the Ambiguity school. Insofar as Russell’s is (really) the ambiguity position, the argument for the pragmatic interpretation of Donnellan’s referential/attributive distinction—Recanati (1989) sets it out nicely—is undercut: the application of Grice’s (1978) Modified Occam’s Razor offers no possibility of relief by parsimony.
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Acknowledgement
Earlier drafts were read to the Logic and Philosophy of Science group at UCI, the Workshop in Philosophy of Language at UCLA, and the Seminar in Logic and Games at CUNY. I am grateful for the comments, questions and discussion from an anonymous referee, as well as to Aldo Antonelli, Joseph Almog, Jeffrey Barrett, David Kaplan, Robert May, Rohit Parikh, Terence Parsons, Kai Wehmeier, Howard Wettstein, and most especially to Robert Fiengo, with whom I discussed these issues for the better part of a year. Thanks to the LPS group at UCI for their hospitality while writing this essay. Thanks finally, for the support provided under PSC-CUNY Grant No. 67445-00 36.
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Mendelsohn, R.L. Referential/attributive: a scope interpretation. Philos Stud 147, 167–191 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-008-9276-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-008-9276-3