W&O: §§ 40 - 43
Pete Mandik
Chairman, Department of Philosophy
Coordinator, Cognitive Science Laboratory
William Paterson University, New Jersey USA
Chapter VI: Flight from
Intension
Brief Review of intension v. extension:
Intensionality (with an ‘s’) = opacity =
contexts in which co-referential or
co-extensive terms or co-valued
sentences are not intersubstitutable
salva veritate
Extensionality = transparency =
contexts in which co-referential or
co-extensive terms or co-valued
sentences are intersubstitutable
salva veritate
2
Feel the hate!
Quine hates intensionality, thus his
flight from it.
3
Sec. 40. Propositions and
eternal sentences
“A sentence is not an event of utterance, but a
universal: a repeatable sound pattern. Truth cannot
on the whole be viewed as a trait, even a passing
trait, of a sentence merely; it is a passing trait of a
sentence for a man. ‘The door is open’ is true for a
man when a door is so situated that he would take
it as the natural momentary reference of ‘the
door’….Relativity to times and persons can be
awkward…This is no doubt one reason why
philosophers have liked to posit supplementary
abstract entities--propositions--as surrogate truth
vehicles….I find no good reason not to regard every
proposition as nameable by applying brackets to
one or another eternal sentence.”pp. 191-194
4
Eternal sentences
“Eternal sentences are standing sentences
(§9) of an extreme kind…Theoretical
sentences in mathematics and other
sciences tend to be eternal, but they have
no exclusive claim to the distinction.
Reports and predictions of specific single
events are eternal too, when times, places,
or persons concerned are objectively
indicated rather than left to vary with the
references of first names, incomplete
descriptions, and indicator words.” pp.
193-194.
5
“A…humdrum reason for supposing
that the propositions outrun the
eternal sentences could be that for
many propositions the appropriate
eternal sentences, though utterable
enough, just happen never to get
uttered or written.” p. 194
“If a sentence were taken as the class
of its utterances, then all unuttered
sentences would reduce to..the null
class…” p. 194
6
Solution: “We can take each linguistic
form as the sequence, in a
mathematical sense, of its
successive characters or
phonemes….We can still take each
component character…as a class of
utterance events, there being here
no risk of non-utterance.” p. 195.
7
Sec. 41. Modality
“Used as a logical modality, ‘necessarily’
imputes necessity unconditionally and
impersonally, as an absolute mode of
truth; and ‘possibly’ denies necessity, in
that sense, of the negation.” p. 195
Examples:
Necessarily, eight is an even number.
Possibly, Frank eats a hoagie on
Wednesday.
8
You can’t quantify into
modal contexts
In “There is an x such that necessarily
x is greater than 4” the second x is
in an opaque context:
“necessarily, 9 is greater than 4” is
true and “necessarily, the number of
planets is greater than 4” is false
even though the number of planets
equals 9.
9
Perhaps we can treat
modality as kind of
attribute?
So, we would get something like, the
property of being greater than 4 is
neccessary of 9.
However, this “yields something
baffling--more so even than the
modalities themselves; viz., talk of a
difference between necessary and
contingent attributes of an object.”p.
199
10
Quine’s objection:
Mathemeticians are allegedly
necessarily rational and only
contingently two-legged. Bicyclists
are allegeldy necessarily two-legged
and only contingently rational. “But
what of an individual who counts
among his eccentricities both
mathematics and cycling?” pp. 199
11
Sec 43. Toward dispensing
with intensional objects
“A need to posit propositions…has been felt
or imagined in a number of connections.
Propositions or other sentence meanings
have been wanted as translational
constants: as things shared somehow by
foreign sentences and their translations.
They have been wanted likewise as
constants fo so-called philosophical
analysis, or paraphrase: as things shared
by analysand and their analysantia. They
have been wanted as truth vehicles and as
objects of propositonal attitudes.” p. 206
12
“…it is a mistake to suppose that the notion
of propositions as shared meanings
clarifies the enterprise of translation.” p.
207
Because translation is indeterminate, there is
no “uniquely correct standard of translation
of eternal sentences” (p. 208) and thus
nothing, on this account, for propositions
as shared meanings to be.
13
“We come next to the appeal to
propositions as truth vehicles. But
instead of appealing here to
propositions, or meanings of eternal
sentences, there is no evident
reason not to appeal simply to the
eternal sentences themselves as
truth vehicles.” p. 208
14
Quine’s arguments against positing
propositions as objects for the
attitudes comes in § 44. “Other
objects for the attitudes”.
15
Study question:
What’s Quine’s complaint against the notion
of modality?
16
THE END
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