Abstract
Scott Soames has argued that Rigidified Descriptivism wrongly predicts that one cannot believe, say, that Joe Strummer was born in 1952 without having a belief about the actual world. Soames suggests that agents in other possible worlds may have this belief, but may lack any beliefs about the actual world, a world that they do not occupy and have no contact with. I respond that this argument extends to other popular actuality-involving analyses. In order for Soames to hold on to his argument against Rigidified Descriptivism, he must provide alternatives to these analyses. I argue that there is reason to think that these alternatives are not forthcoming, so Soames should surrender his argument against Rigidified Descriptivism.
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Notes
This view is often attributed to Russell. But see Sainsbury (2002).
See Kripke (1981).
See Kripke (1981, footnote 21 to p. 21).
For one example, see Braddon-Mitchell and Jackson (1996, pp. 70–74).
See Nelson (2002).
Examples of this kind motivate the introduction of the actuality operator in Hughes and Creswell (1996, pp. 351–353).
This is supposed to be the proposition expressed by ‘◊∀x(@Rx ⇒ Px)’.
See, for instance, Schlenker (2003).
See Soames (1998, pp. 4–14).
The ‘↓’ operator is a technical expression of formal modal logic with a quirky semantics such that it does not rigidly designate a world relative to a context of utterance. However, the formal characterization of this operator does not provide any information as to its interaction with epistemic operators such as ‘believes that’. It is not clear to me whether the lack of rigidity in ‘↓’ can be developed so that belief ascriptions involving ‘↓’ do not ascribe de re thoughts about a possible world. If no implementation of this sort is forthcoming, then the backspace operator is of no more help to Soames than the actuality operator was.
Thanks to Michael Nelson for helping me get clear on this point.
Hodes (1984, p. 426) considers utterances such as (*) ‘there might have been some things which don’t exist. In fact, that’s a necessary truth’. Hodes thinks that (*) is not as trivial as it might seem. He thinks that on the most natural reading, (*) is equivalent to the assertion that there is no maximal world containing all possible objects. This motivates him to reject (9-@) as the interpretation of (9) in favor of an analysis that invokes the backspace operator. This might lend further motivation to the view that one would have believed that there might have been things which don’t exist even if the world had been a little different. Hodes’ rejection of (9-@) in favor of a backspace analysis is, of course, no help for Soames.
Soames (2004, p. 92). Thanks to an anonymous referee from Philosophical Studies.
“There are different ways of formally capturing the force of examples like these. However, since deciding among them would raise questions irrelevant to our main concerns, we need not do so here. The important point for us is that the truth of examples of […] [this form] don’t require the predicates is so and so to now, or actually, apply to individuals that do not now, or actually, exist” (Soames 2004, p. 93).
References
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Acknowledgments
I appreciate helpful comments from Derek Ball, Ray Buchanan, Kyle Ferguson, Marina Folescu, Daniel Korman, Genoveva Martí, David Sosa and Mark Sainsbury. Special thanks are due to Josh Dever, Michael Nelson and Jeff Speaks.
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Pickel, B. Rigidification and attitudes. Philos Stud 158, 43–58 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9666-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9666-1