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“Assertion” and intentionality

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Abstract

Robert Stalnaker argues that his causal-pragmatic account of the problem of intentionality commits him to a coarse-grained conception of the contents of mental states, where propositions are represented as sets of possible worlds. Stalnaker also accepts the “direct reference” theory of names, according to which co-referring names have the same content. Stalnaker’s view of content is thus threatened by Frege’s Puzzle. Stalnaker’s classic paper “Assertion” is intended to provide a response to this threat. In this paper, I evaluate Stalnaker’s claim that the causal-pragmatic account of intentionality commits one to a coarse-grained conception of the contents of mental states, and argue that the apparatus laid out in “Assertion” is not sufficiently comprehensive to account for all versions of Frege’s Puzzle.

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Notes

  1. http://www.pyke-eye.com/view/phil_II_19.html.

  2. Stalnaker considers and rejects both the account of intentionality defended in Hartry Field’s (2001a), according to which the intentionality of mental states is to be explained in terms of the intentionality of expressions in the language of thought, as well as the interpretationist program of Donald Davidson. Field (2001b) persuasively replies to some of Stalnaker’s critiques of him.

  3. See e.g. pp. 78–79 of Salmon’s Frege’s Puzzle (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986) and Soames (2002, Chapter 3). It is worth mentioning that Salmon’s solution to these problems also involves other elements, outlined in Chapter 8 of Frege’s Puzzle.

  4. The notion of a non-defective context is obviously somewhat of an idealization (see Stalnaker’s discussion of ‘close enough to non-defective’, Ibid.).

  5. By “semantic presupposition” I am here referring to those presuppositions the failure of which gives rise to truth-value gaps. There may also very well be presupposition requirements dictated by conventional rules of the language, the violation of which lead to falsity rather than truth-value gaps. The second principle does not speak to these kinds of presuppositions.

  6. This is Stalnaker’s example, from Stalnaker (1999a, 91). I have updated it to fit the times.

  7. Stalnaker’s theory thus belongs in the tradition of views that take modal operators to operate on something different than epistemic operators such as “it is a posteriori/a priori that”. What is informative about an assertion is often one thing, for Stalnaker, and what is necessary is another. When the two diverge, Stalnaker takes what is said to be informative, or “news”, and what is necessary to be “the semantic content”. Evans (1985a), Forbes (1989, Chapter 5), and Stanley (1997, 2002) also think what is informative is often or always different from the object of modal predicates, and take what is said or what is believed to be the notion linked to the epistemic notions. The views I took in Stanley (1997, 2002) are explicitly inspired by Stalnaker’s discussion in “Assertion” (see Stanley 1997, pp. 146–148, and pp. 155–156), though following the terminology in Dummett (1991, p. 48), I call the object of modal operators, the ingredient sense.

  8. Why not treat the elimination of the deviant semantics world as a repair strategy? That is, why doesn’t the pragmatic repair strategy involve narrowing down the context set to worlds in which the semantics is the same? Then we are back to the problem with explaining informativity violations with the first Principle alone. Then, the proposition expressed by “Hesperus is Phosphorus” would be the necessarily true one in every world, and the assertion will have been pointless (a violation of the first Principle).

  9. A different concern is that it doesn’t seem that the proposition conveyed by an utterance of “Hesperus is Phosphorus” or “Water is H2O” is a metalinguistic proposition, that is, a proposition about words.

  10. “But while [the information that Hesperus is Phosphorus] is in this sense semantic, it is also astronomical. One who learns that Hesperus is Phosphorus learns something about the way the solar system is arranged.” (Stalnaker 1999d, p. 236); “…astronomical facts and semantic facts…are interconnected, and perhaps cannot be separated…” (Stalnaker 2003a, p. 200).

  11. There are definitely complications in the application of the framework to belief-ascriptions. For example, if John speaks a language neither Frank nor Sue does, it’s rather complicated to see how the derived context is even set up. Stalnaker’s most extended discussion of this issue (Stalnaker 1999g, pp. 127–128) is quite compressed, and I do not clearly grasp his solution.

  12. As Soames (2002, p. 228) writes in summarizing his approach to explaining speakers’ intuitive judgments about differences in meaning between cases such as S and S’, “…those intuitive judgments are based on a confusion of what a sentence means…with what speakers use it to assert and convey in particular contexts…speakers are prone to confuse the semantic content of a sentence, its meaning in the language, with what a speaker uses it to assert in a particular context…”.

  13. In contrast, some recent accounts of the challenges facing direct reference theories have appealed to non-Gricean pragmatic processes, such as free pragmatic enrichment (e.g. Soames 2005b).

  14. This response also undermines a recent criticism of Jeff Speaks (2006, pp. 448–449) against Stalnaker’s account of the problem of deduction. Speaks assumes that if a speaker understands the statement of Fermat’s last theorem, then “we may suppose that he believes the meta-linguistic proposition expressed by “No whole number raised to a power greater than two is equal to the sum of two other whole numbers, each raised to that power” means that no whole number raised to a power greater than two is equal to the sum of two other whole numbers, each raised to that power.” However, Stalnaker clearly would not grant that speakers would grasp the metalinguistic proposition in question—at most they would grasp the diagonal proposition conveyed by that metalinguistic proposition relative to a particular context of use. See Sect. 4 below for a discussion of Stalnaker’s view of grasp of meaning.

  15. Presumably in this paper Stalnaker is somewhat of a skeptic about de re belief simpliciter.

  16. Thanks to Eric Swanson here for the example.

  17. Thanks to David Manley, Sarah Moss, and Eric Swanson for extensive discussion of Soames’s objection. Sarah Moss pointed out unclarities in my original discussion, David Manley suggested the interpretation of Stalnaker on de re belief that entails that Soames’s case is in fact a case of de re belief, and Eric Swanson raised the concern that Manley’s construal results in an account of de re belief that over-generalizes.

  18. Speaks (2006, pp. 442ff.) raises additional concerns about the role the appeal to optimal conditions plays in Stalnaker’s causal-pragmatic account.

  19. There are two models here. First, it could be that propositions are functions from epistemically possible worlds to truth-values (this is the possibility envisaged by Stalnaker above). Secondly, it could be that propositions are functions from metaphysically possible worlds to values, where the functions are individuated in epistemic terms, as in the work of David Chalmers (2002) and Frank Jackson (1997).

  20. Perhaps Stalnaker could here appeal to a thesis about the metaphysics of worlds—that, for example, possible worlds are conceptually determined by the activities of rational agents. After all, Stalnaker (1984, p. 166) does claim that “Possible worlds, as I understand them, are abstractions from the dispositions of rational agents”. Given this conception of possible world, there is no gap between the alternatives distinguished by the contents of the attitudes of rational agents, and the possibilities themselves. However, it is very difficult to see how Stalnaker can say this. First, as Jeffrey King (2007, p. 451) has emphasized, this would leave us with distinctions that cut more finely than metaphysical possibilities, for the reason Field gives above. Secondly, and more pressingly for present purposes, the thesis that metaphysically possible worlds are determined by the distinctions made by the contents of the attitudes of rational agents is flatly inconsistent with the informational semantic program that is the basis of Stalnaker’s work. It is for this reason that, in his response to King’s discussion, Stalnaker (2007, p. 482) goes out of his way to “emphatically retract” this earlier “careless remark” of his, and states “I think it is wrong that [possible worlds] depend for their existence on the kind of rational activities that we use them to help explain.”

  21. Stalnaker’s view that we (often) lack knowledge of reference is in tension with some of the considerations that lead to the direct reference theory that he advocates. For example, according one version of the semantic argument against description theories of names and natural kind terms, a speaker can know the meaning of a name or a natural kind term while possessing very little information about its referent:

    The picture associated with [a certain version of the description] theory is that only by giving some unique properties can you know who someone is and thus know what the reference of your name is. Well, I won’t go into the question of knowing who someone is. It’s really very puzzling. I think you do know who Cicero is if you just can answer that he’s a famous Roman orator. (Kripke 1980, p. 83)

    So Kripke holds that it is fairly easy to “know what the reference” of a name is.

  22. Thanks to Jeff King for this point.

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Acknowledgments

Thanks for valuable discussion to Joshua Armstrong, Sam Cumming, Andy Egan, Thony Gillies, Barry Loewer, David Manley, Sarah Moss, Matthew Stone, Eric Swanson, and the audience at MIT’s 30th anniversary birthday party for “Assertion”. Jeffrey King provided comments on the penultimate version, and invaluable input throughout the whole process. The greatest thanks go to Robert Stalnaker. I owe a debt to him for the numerous lengthy conversations about the topics in this paper stretching over many years. He also provided lengthy detailed comments on the penultimate draft that much improved the paper. But the largest debt I owe him is for his body of work. The combination of scope, vision, and argumentative detail it embodies serve as a great inspiration about what one can achieve in philosophy.

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Stanley, J. “Assertion” and intentionality. Philos Stud 151, 87–113 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9588-y

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