Revisiting ‘Rabbit’:
A Fanatical Ambiguity-Monger Gets Her Way
By
GINA MARIE CALDERONE
B.A. (Arizona State University, Tempe) 2001
M.A. (University of California, Davis) 2005
DISSERTATION
Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
in
Philosophy
in the
OFFICE OF GRADUATE STUDIES
of the
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
DAVIS
Approved:
Michael Jubien, co-Chair
Paul Teller, co-Chair
G.J. Mattey
Adam Sennet
Cody Gilmore
Committee in Charge
2010
-i-
Gina Marie Calderone
March 2010
Philosophy
Revisiting ‘Rabbit’:
A Fanatical Ambiguity-Monger Gets Her Way
Abstract
In the latter half of the 20th century, W.V.O. Quine vigorously defended the view that
referring terms like ‘rabbit’ were indeterminate in meaning. He reasoned that we could
interpret such terms according to distinct views about how things persist through time,
and no evidence could decide between these views. Hence, there is no fact of the matter
as to what these terms mean. Philosophers have been no less vigorous in their attempts to
refute Quine’s thesis, usually by appealing to facts that Quine disregarded, but which
could, and do, determine meaning. I take it that the possibilities for what could determine
meaning are exhausted by three kinds of facts:
relational facts, internal facts, and
external facts. This, then, is a survey into what there is to determine the meaning facts
and whether these do succeed.
Semantic externalism has the meaning of ‘rabbit’
supervening on the linguistic community as a whole, where this is fixed by a relation
between speaker intensions and the way things are. We will find semantic externalism to
be inadequate to the task of solving Quine’s problem. Noam Chomsky is perhaps the
most influential critic of Quine. Chomsky thinks that linguistic meaning is a function of
internal syntactic-structural features of the human brain, with no explanatory role for the
relation between words and what they are supposed to represent. Innate content must
then play an enormous role in meaning, if meaning is determinate. We will find there to
be no evidence for the sort of innate content that could solve Quine’s problem. The final
hope looks to purely external facts, which are supposed to provide the most eligible
-ii-
interpretation of terms like ‘rabbit’. David Lewis posited that the myriad of potential
kinds have more or less natural properties, the most natural properties carving nature at
its joints. It is just these properties that finish the job of determining the meaning of
terms like ‘rabbit’. We will find competing properties for the meaning of ‘rabbit’ to be
equivalently unnatural, and so unable to solve Quine’s problem.
-iii-
1
Introduction
Quine famously held the view that linguistic meaning, being public, could amount to no
more than what could be gleaned from overt behavior in publicly observable
circumstances. Such is the seed that spawned the indeterminacy of translation and the
inscrutability of reference, two of the most celebrated and despised theses of the latter
part of the twentieth century. Today the hullabaloo is all but dead, and the theses
regarded moot, largely because Quine’s behaviorism has long since fallen into disrepute.
Even philosophers sympathetic with Quine’s naturalism nevertheless confidently regard
meaning as grounded in “physical facts”, if not solely in behavioral facts. 1 My work
suggests that confidence may be unwarranted.
Following Kripke (for exegetical brevity), Quine’s indeterminacy of translation is
the thesis according to which “the interpretation of sufficiently ‘theoretical’ utterances,
not observation reports, is undetermined by all my ideal dispositions” and the
inscrutability of reference is the thesis according to which “even given fixed
interpretation of our sentences as wholes and certainly given all our ideal dispositions to
behavior, the interpretation (reference) of various lexical items is still not fixed”. 2 I will
pursue a somewhat stronger thesis roughly equivalent to Quine’s “conjecture” that even
direct observation reports (e.g., “That is a rabbit”) are sufficiently theoretical to make it
the case that the interpretation of these is undetermined by all the evidence there is for
such an interpretation. I call this the thesis of the indeterminacy of meaning.
1
2
E.g., Soames, Richard, Kemp.
Kripke, 1982, p. 57.
2
There are two unsettling implications of the thesis that meaning is indeterminate.
One is that it stands sharply at odds with the feeling (for lack of a better word) that one
does intend a certain interpretation, from within. It seems that I can focus on my idiolect
and construct, all by myself, a dictionary of sorts—one that represents what I mean with
certain expressions.
I may find in attempting to carry this out that much of my
knowledge is incomplete—for example, when I use a term like ‘rabbit’, I may not know
the necessary and sufficient conditions for specifying the referent uniquely—but it is
nevertheless hard to deny that my intentions would at least rule out some interpretations
of many, if not most, of the words I feel competent to use in everyday discourse. We
assume that we are each similarly disposed to rule out certain interpretations of our
words: interpretations that are nevertheless consistent with all of our linguistic behavior.
This sort of introspective knowledge thus seems to be at odds with indeterminacy of
meaning.
The second is that the indeterminacy of meaning runs afoul of our intuitive notion
of truth.
The thesis says that so-called referring expressions are indeterminate in
meaning, so they do not actually refer. But without the relation of reference connecting
words or concepts rather directly with external things, it is hard to see how we might
justify the prevailing intuition that the external world is a certain way, complete with
things and their properties, and ours is just the task of discovering what things there are
and what they are like. So it is when we speak the truth. The relevant items are supposed
to be representations, after all, which may or may not capture what the world is really
like, independently of what we say about it. Thus, if speaking the truth depends on
3
successful reference, and there is no such relation, it seems to follow that there is no
attainable objective truth.
It is reasonably incontrovertible that Quine’s theses—the indeterminacy of
translation and the inscrutability of reference—do follow from the bare fact, if it is one,
that meaning is a property of behavior. Thus, it is standard in light of the supposed
perniciousness of indeterminacy in the realm of semantics to reject the doctrine upon
which it rests. Bolstering this tendency, perhaps, is that Quine seems to have little other
than his theoretical commitments to naturalism and empiricism to substantiate the view
that meaning is determined by behavioral facts alone, if determined at all. Claims of a
behavioristic bent appear as undefended premises in the opening paragraphs of both
Word and Object and “Ontological Relativity”:
“Language is a social art. In acquiring it we have to depend entirely on
intersubjectively available cues as to what to say and when. Hence there
is no justification for collating linguistic meanings, unless in terms of
men’s dispositions to respond overtly to socially observable
stimulations.” 3
“Meanings are, first and foremost, meanings of language. Language is a
social art which we all acquire on the evidence solely of other people’s
behavior under publicly recognizable circumstances.” 4
Quine clearly thinks that the public nature of language requires a behavioristic approach
to claims about linguistic meaning. That is, to the extent that one becomes a competent
speaker of a language, he has learned to emulate how his fellow speakers use their words.
And that is all there is to linguistic meaning.
Surely such an austere view of meaning does not follow from naturalism alone.
Naturalism is simply a scientific approach to philosophy. It stems from the view that the
3
4
Quine, 1960, p. ix.
Quine, 1969a, p. 26.
4
questions of philosophy (e.g., What exists?, What is knowledge?, What is meaning?) are,
or ought to be, on a par with the questions of the natural sciences; answerable to, and
justified by, the same sorts of empirical and pragmatic considerations. Thus naturalism
allows that all kinds of facts—behavioral, historical, causal, neurological, etc.—might
have a bearing on linguistic meaning. And to the extent that various kinds of facts might
have a bearing on linguistic meaning, the kinds of evidence for meaning ought to be
correspondingly unconstrained.
Nor does Quine’s behaviorism follow from empiricism. The empiricist insists
that all our knowledge of factual matters stems from the senses; that all evidence is
sensory evidence. So if there are facts about linguistic meaning, the empiricist will insist
that our knowledge of such facts be based on sensory evidence. Thus empiricism seems
merely to rule out a priori evidence of meaning—including, perhaps, what can be known
only on the basis of introspection. But as long as the evidence for meaning arises from
sensory experience, including reports of introspective knowledge, it ought to extend to
any and all such evidence that may be relevant. And there is no prima facie reason why
we should not expect to find relevant evidence outside verbal behavior.
So there is a simple and plausible argument behind seemingly out-of-hand
rejections of Quine’s indeterminacy theses: By and large, humans acquire language.
Language acquisition cannot be accounted for in terms of behavior alone. We have no
reason to think it must be. Therefore, other factors determine that ability. And if
language acquisition does not depend solely on observing other people’s behavior under
publicly recognizable circumstances, then linguistic meaning may be determined by—
5
i.e., made determinate in virtue of—various other kinds of facts. As Scott Soames
suggests, we should cast our net wider. 5
For one interested in defending the indeterminacy of meaning, the first task is to
say exactly where this argument goes wrong. It does, I think, go wrong. It is surely right
that language acquisition cannot be accounted for in terms of behavior alone. Quine
himself admits that the behaviorist is up to his neck in innate mechanisms. And there is
little doubt that the world itself does some of the work constraining what we are talking
about. But it does not follow that linguistic meaning is made determinate in virtue of
these and possibly other kinds of facts. We therefore need some reason to think that
meaning is determinate—intuition alone is insufficient (there is, after all, a long list of
intuitive beliefs that philosophical and scientific inquiry have shown to be, at least,
decidedly suspect). And the reason should come by way of an explanation of what the
meaning-determining facts are and how they are supposed to do the trick. This is a fairly
weak demand, but one that I think has not yet been met.
So Quine’s problem, I will argue, has not been solved. Quine’s problem, as I
understand it, is the problem of explaining the meaning facts in terms of the facts that
determine them. Quine thought that claims about linguistic meaning, in particular the
meaning of kind terms, outstrip what one could know (or represent): a variation of a
thesis that was developed earlier by Wittgenstein and later by Putnam. 6 Linguists and
philosophers of language today are generally more sanguine that these meaning facts are
indeed there to be discovered. Chomsky, for example, takes it as given that a child
“acquires knowledge of linguistic meaning—automatically”, and that the job of the
5
Soames, 1998.
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations. Putnam, 1980, “Models and Reality”. See also Kripke, 1982,
Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language.
6
6
linguist is to discover what that knowledge is.7 To have knowledge of linguistic meaning
is (minimally) to represent something internally. Thus, the job of the linguist is to
discover the content of internal representations that map onto linguistic expressions—
what a given speaker could come to know in the course of acquiring a language. I
assume too that, just as Chomsky counsels, there ought to be no a priori constraints (such
as an undefended adherence to behaviorism) on the evidence for that content.
Something—presumably the conjunction of use (conventions), context (the external
world), intentions, and innate structures—determines meaning in this sense. This work is
a study into whether the allowance of all of these factors actually overcomes the thesis
that meaning is indeterminate.
The argument I will pursue is roughly as follows: I accept Chomsky’s view that
we acquire knowledge of meaning and that the linguist’s job is to give an account of what
that knowledge comes to. The linguist, of course, is not constrained in the way Quine’s
field linguist is in radical translation. Knowledge of meaning is whatever information
could be “taken up” by speakers in the course of acquiring and using a language.
Linguists hold that certain expressions—e.g., ‘rabbit’—are aptly called referring
expressions, if only the sense that these expressions are used to refer. Quine would say
that these expressions are without meaning until other devices of the language are
interpreted according to “analytical hypothesis”; and linguistic behavior is insufficient to
settle on the “correct” set of analytical hypotheses—i.e., the ones we intend, or have in
mind. If there is no correct set of analytical hypotheses, there is no correct meaning of
‘rabbit’, so nothing to determine the extension of the term. I argue that this is basically
right, though I reject the implicit assumption here that linguistic behavior is the only
7
Chomsky, 2000, p. 54.
7
thing that could settle questions about meaning. I will instead argue that the property of
being a rabbit is a property had by at most one of several distinct kinds: enduring
wholes, exduring stages, perduring worms, etc. Such a property is thus incapable of
specifying a unique extension without building in a theory of persistence conditions.
Such a fact would determine the extension of the term. But no set of facts (or at least the
several that we will consider here) can settle the “correct” theory of persistence—the
theory we intend (or “take up” in the course of acquiring and using a language). No
correct theory of persistence, no correct meaning, and so no extension. Thus, so-called
referring expressions are indeterminate in meaning.
It should be emphasized that what I am calling the indeterminacy of meaning here
is not equivalent with either what Quine called the indeterminacy of translation or the
inscrutability of reference. 8
These two theses quickly fall out of the behaviorist
conviction that there is nothing more to meaning than what can be gleaned on the basis of
overt behavior in publicly observable circumstances (in other words, there is nothing
more to meaning than dispositions to behave), in conjunction with the fact that an
interpretation of the language on this basis will be underdetermined by the evidence. It
must be emphasized that the thesis I argue for here does not depend on the behaviorist
premise.
Again, our task here is to explain meaning in terms of the facts that determine it,
whatever those facts may turn out to be. So let us grapple with these questions here: in
casting our nets wider, what are the facts that are supposed to determine linguistic
8
Though I think that as I have characterized it here, my thesis is roughly equivalent to Quine’s
“conjecture” that even direct observation reports are sufficiently theoretical to make it the case that the
interpretation of these is undetermined by all the evidence there is for such an interpretation. See Quine,
“On the Reasons for Indeterminacy of Translation”.
8
meaning; and how might they do it? Our only undefended premise will be adherence to a
modest form of physicalism: that there can be no change in meaning facts without some
change in physical facts.
This constraint—the supervenience of meaning facts on
physical facts—falls out of the methodological principle that semantic phenomena are
natural phenomena; that ascriptions of meaning are true, if they are, in virtue of nonintentionally described facts, even if meaning is not reducible to, in the sense of being
explainable in the language of, a complete physics. There is a large gap, though, between
the facts explainable in terms of a complete physics, and facts expressible only in
intentional idiom; and our solution to indeterminacy is presumed to be in there
somewhere.
Three alternatives suggest themselves: semantic externalism, innate content, and
natural properties. The first, semantic externalism, attempts to appeal to facts external to
speakers to fill the gap. The externalist will suggest that indeterminacy stems from an
internalist conception of meaning: that meaning is determined solely by what is in the
head of the speaker. If so, acquiring a language appears to involve one in the task of
discerning what others mean with their words. Insofar as what one does in such a task is
formulate a theory of meaning, and test it in one’s own use of the language, it appears to
be true that the only evidence one has for meaning is linguistic behavior in publicly
observable circumstances. Quine’s behaviorism therefore follows from his internalism,
and so if internalism is false, the conclusion—indeterminacy—is blocked.
That is the negative argument. But how exactly is externalism supposed to help
make meaning determinate? The externalist avails himself of two seemingly additional
meaning-constitutive facts: indexicality and the “division of linguistic labor”.
9
Externalism, that is, allows the knowledge of experts, as well as facts about the purely
external world, to do their part in determining the meaning facts. So social, causal, and
historical facts external and possibly unknown to speakers are relevant to what individual
speakers mean and refer to when they use their words. It all sounds rather promising, but
when one delves into externalism, I argue, one finds that it has nothing to offer in the way
of meaning-constitutive facts that is not also available to Quine. That is the upshot of
Chapter 2.
Another promising avenue to determinate meaning is innate content. Chomsky
has long argued that Quine’s empirical assumptions are either undefended, or
demonstrably false; and when cleared away allow for a research program that looks to
“universal grammar”, or, what we might otherwise call innate content, as resolving at
least the kind of indeterminacy that Quine was worried about. 9
Innate content is
supposed to block the move from the underdetermination of a theory of meaning by
evidence—a thesis that Chomsky takes to be true but uninteresting—to the claim that
there is no fact of the matter which theory is correct (indeterminacy). There is a fact of
the matter as to which theory is correct if we are born with a particular way of
conceptualizing the world. If, for example, it is a fact that we are innately disposed to
view objects as material, whole, and enduring, such a disposition would rule out a
reference scheme according to which objects are thought to be, say, stages of fourdimensional spacetime worms (i.e., Sider’s view). If a particular theory of persistence
were built into our innate general object concept, presumably all rival theories, which
9
Vagueness is supposed to issue in a different kind of indeterminacy, which persists even if Quine’s theses
are rejected. Chomsky accepts whatever indeterminacy stems from vagueness while rejecting the
indeterminacy that stems from underdetermination of a theory of meaning plus behaviorism. I’ll try to
show that indeterminacy of meaning does not depend on behaviorism.
10
seem to determine rival reference schemes, would turn out to be not what we mean. So
there is a fact of the matter as to which theory is correct.
Is there any reason to think that we do innately conceptualize the world a
particular way? In New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind (2000), Chomsky
cites the work of Renée Baillargeon (1993, 1999) as giving us “considerable reason” to
believe that “recognition of identity over time” is something that appears in the first few
months of life—well before language acquisition begins. Baillargeon argues on the basis
of looking time data involving pre-linguistic infants’ reactions to occlusion events that
“young infants’ understanding of occlusion events is strikingly similar to that of
adults.” 10
Adults, according to Baillargeon, make three assumptions regarding the existence
of occluded objects: “that the occluded object continues to exist behind the occluding
object…that the occluded object retains the spatial and physical properties it possessed
prior to occlusion…[and] that the occluded object is still subject to physical laws.” 11 I
argue, however, that Baillargeon’s data can be re-interpreted according to distinct
theories of persistence. Moreover, this is exactly what the metaphysician has to do with
regard to our adult concept of object permanence: reinterpret what we say to bring
typical assertions into line with a theory of persistence. This calls into question the
factuality of what Baillargeon takes to be our adult assumptions regarding the existence
of occluded objects. The upshot of Chapter 3 is that, however useful it would be to posit
an innate metaphysical theory, there is no reason to believe that we have one.
10
11
Baillargeon, 1993, p. 572.
Baillargeon, 1993, p. 571.
11
A plausible response to the line taken in Chapter 3 is that certain ways of
conceptualizing the world—namely, according to certain kinds of properties, those that
carve nature at its joints—are more “natural”, and so more “eligible” to be meant by us.
David Lewis’s account of natural properties is supposed to provide a solution to Quine’s
problem. The claim would be something like this: the property of being a rabbit is more
natural than the property of being a rabbit-stage, or the property of being an undetachedrabbit-part, etc., and so the property of being a rabbit is more eligible to be meant by our
use of the term ‘rabbit’ than any of its rivals. Since meaning is determined by use plus
eligibility (on this view), even if use does not distinguish between competing theories of
meaning, the superior eligibility of one candidate makes it the case that we mean that
one. Thus, there is a fact of the matter which theory of meaning is correct.
One problem with this suggestion is that, as I argue in Chapter 2, nature does not
seem to come with neat joints, “out there” merely to be discovered by us. There is
always sufficient variation among individuals to make categories of things somewhat
arbitrary (driven by pragmatic considerations). Given this fact, it seems to be the case
that what has the property of, say, being a rabbit, is partly determined by us—by
decisions we make about what properties a classification system should track. And if this
is the case—if, that is, pragmatic decisions are constitutive of what has a particular
property—it is infelicitous to say that certain high-level properties (like being a rabbit)
carve nature at its joints and others (like being a rabbit-stage) do not.
The root problem with natural properties is that there is no language independent
way of saying things about the world. (As obvious as this is, I think that attempts to
refute meaning skepticism are at bottom attempts to refute this claim.) And so there is no
12
representation-free notion of naturalness. Being a rabbit, for example, is only more
natural than being a rabbit-stage relative to one of these theories of persistence; namely,
what Michael Jubien calls ‘naïve endurantism’. With respect to naïve endurantism, it is
perhaps true that rabbits are more natural than rabbit-stages; but with respect to, say,
Sider’s four-dimensionalism, stages are the rabbits, which is to say that it is stages (of a
certain sort) that have the “immutable” property of being a rabbit.
Thus, given
metaphysical dispute over fundamental ontology, I argue that there are multiple meaning
candidates for all our kind terms. Meaning candidates for ‘rabbit’ reflect persistence
conditions, which in turn determine its extension. Given that pragmatic considerations do
all of the work deciding between competing empirically adequate metaphysical theories,
there is no sense in which the property of being an enduring rabbit is more natural than
the property of being an exduring rabbit or the property of being a perduring rabbit. 12
So the argument of Chapter 4 is essentially this: theories of persistence are
necessary to determine the referent of some kind term, T, and so there are multiple
meaning candidates corresponding to conflicting theories about T. None of these Tcandidates fits use better than the others, as is established by the fact that metaphysical
theories of persistence, all of them, require some re-interpretation of linguistic practice.
What we say, that is, remains; what we mean changes according to the theory. None of
the T-candidates is more natural than the others, because what is at issue are the
satisfaction conditions for a relatively high-level property, like being a rabbit; and each
theory is a set of conditions at roughly the same level of complexity (insofar as we can
measure such things). Since no other T-candidate combines eligibility and fit with use as
12
Roughly, exduring entities persist via a counterpart relation between perishing stages, and perduring
entities persist by having contiguous temporal parts.
13
well as these candidates, even if meaning is determined by use plus eligibility, it follows
that T is indeterminate in meaning among T-candidates corresponding to the conflicting
theories of T. To put all of this another way: what Sider calls the ‘Schematic Argument’
is sound for instances containing kind terms like ‘rabbit’.
So my thesis here is a skeptical one: linguistic meaning is indeterminate. This of
course has been argued for before. My contributions are three: 1) I focus on three of the
most recent attempts to provide a naturalistic solution to what Quine might have seen as a
problem of interpretation, which seems to place undue constraints on the meaningconstitutive facts. I argue that no matter how far we cast the net, the facts do not yield
determinate meaning. 2) I make the case that distinct interpretations are generated by
metaphysical theories of persistence. Such interpretations issue in distinct theories of
what kinds of objects there are—what sorts of things we refer to in ordinary and scientific
discourse. Truth conditions therefore only make sense relative to a fixed interpretation.
Some philosophers nevertheless hold that the truth is out there. Sider, for example,
claims “that there is a single, objective, correct account of what things there are.” 13 What
Sider holds, in fact, is that there is a single, objective, correct account of what kinds there
are. I think there is ample reason to think that this is not so. 3) I defend a distinct
argument for the claim that meaning is indeterminate—one that does not depend on any
of Quine’s more dubious notions like stimulus synonymy, analytical hypotheses,
occasion sentences, etc. and instead takes seriously the presuppositions of contemporary
linguistics; in particular, the presuppositions of Chomsky’s “generative paradigm”.
It is usually supposed that Quine demonstrates an epistemological problem for
acquiring language, which involves interpreting fellow speakers in practice.
13
Sider, 2001b, p. xvi.
The
14
epistemological problem results in underdetermination of a theory of meaning by
linguistic data. From this doctrine, which no one seriously doubts anyway, Quine moves
to the outrageous metaphysical claim that there is no fact about what a speaker’s
utterances mean; a move which rests squarely on another doctrine, which no one
seriously holds anymore: philosophical behaviorism. I think we can reject behaviorism
and still find that meaning is indeterminate.
15
1. Interpretation and Meaning
My thesis is that meaning is indeterminate, a thesis held also by Quine. While I do not
intend to defend Quine’s arguments for the indeterminacy of meaning, my argument does
depend on certain considerations, brought to light by Quine, which establish an epistemic
problem for developing an interpretation of expressions of the language—i.e., specifying
what they mean—one that I argue has metaphysical ramifications. So let us begin with
Quine’s two famous doctrines—the indeterminacy of translation and the inscrutability of
reference—in order to leave them behind in pursuit of a distinct argument for the
indeterminacy of meaning. In §1.1, I spell out what I take to be the connection between
the two theses and their relation to a slightly stronger claim: Quine’s “conjecture”, and
my thesis, that there is no fact about what we mean even with our most basic assertions
involving ostensive definition.
In §1.2, I respond to Chomsky’s rebuttal that this
conjecture depends on the dubious supposition that if theory in this domain is
underdetermined by the evidence, it follows that there is no fact about which theory is
correct. I respond by showing how a non-Quinean, and highly plausible, explanation of
the meaning facts seems to imply that a full interpretation of the symbols of the language
is indeterminate. That argument starts with a theory that takes meaning to be fixed by the
conjunction of cognitive architecture and development, causal contact with things, and
social conventions. But the problem here might be with the theory: as is often the case
in philosophy, when the attempt to explain an “intuitive fact” leads to a theory that
implies the falsehood of the intuitive fact, we opt to reject the theory. So in §1.3, I
16
consider instead an alternative theory—namely, Chomsky’s—which attempts to explain
meaning strictly in terms of the generative procedure of the human language faculty. I
argue that Chomsky’s theory, while a significant positive step in explaining human
linguistic phenomena, does little to quell the nagging intuition that we are saying things
about the world. I hold that this is a philosophical problem; not a scientific one, and we
are well within the bounds of philosophy to pursue the matter of what fixes that
representational content claimed of “I-language” (internal properties of individuals 1 ).
§1.4 spells out the core argument we will thereafter pursue.
1.1
Indeterminacy of Translation and Inscrutability of Reference
It has become standard to understand Quine’s thesis of the “indeterminacy of translation”
as being a thesis about linguistic meaning having two parts: 1) it is possible to construct
conflicting interpretations of linguistic expressions compatible with all observable data,
and 2) there is no fact of the matter which interpretation is correct. It is also standard to
accept the first part of the thesis—simply underdetermination of a theory of meaning by
evidence—and reject the second, arguing that the second depends on Quine’s “radical
empiricism.” The limitations inherent in Quine’s view of language use and acquisition,
as detailed in Word and Object, do, I think, warrant its rejection (thereby blocking the
indeterminacy thesis), but this is not the only argument for the indeterminacy thesis. In
§1.2, I will argue that indeterminacy of meaning follows from a much more plausible
account of the meaning facts. Here we merely review Quine’s oft-rebuked argument if
only to show that it does bring up an epistemological problem for our intuitive idea of
reference: one that warrants this inquiry.
1
Chomsky, 2000, p. vii.
17
In Chapter 2 of Word and Object, Quine tells us that a translation is supposed to
tell us when, for some sentence S1 in some language L1, it means the same as S2 in L2. A
translation manual then is just an equation of sentences in one language with sentences in
another.
The native sentence “Gavagai” would thus be translated determinately as
“Rabbit” insofar as the native and the translator agree in their dispositions to respond to
all and only the same stimuli (e.g., the presence of a rabbit) with their respective
utterances. Such is the basis for all claims to meaning. The thesis of the indeterminacy
of translation stems from the difficulties of discerning the meaning of even one-word
sentences in radical translation, difficulties that become amplified as the meanings of
even one-word sentences involve collateral information, as is the case when one points at
Mario (the bachelor) and asserts “Scapolo”, or gestures at a track in a bubble chamber
and utters “Nuvola di elettroni”. The more theoretical the sentence, in just this sense, and
the more syntactically complex it is, the more difficult it is to rule out possible
interpretations—interpretations that manage to preserve through logical connections
agreement of sentence synonymy at the level of “direct” ostension, Quine’s criterion for
empirical adequacy. So the first part of the thesis is simple underdetermination of a
theory of sentence translation by evidence: that there will be more than one translation
manual possible, each empirically adequate, so yielding as wholes equivalent theories,
but yielding mutually incompatible translations at the level of theoretical sentences. To
claim on the basis of this fact, however, that translation is indeterminate—that there is no
fact about which translation manual among those possible is correct—arguably depends
on a rather impoverished notion of empirical adequacy.
18
Nevertheless, Quine takes “this much indeterminacy” to be uncontroversial,
especially when one is considering highly theoretical claims in radical translation. 2 As
difficult as it is to construct a general and unifying explanation for some body of physical
phenomena, it is that much more difficult to construct a translation manual that generates
the theory that the radically foreign speaker truly holds. What Quine conjectured is that
it is theory all the way down: that these same difficulties apply even to the home
language and “even to common-sense traits of macroscopic bodies.” 3 Quine supposed
that, given that the meaning of certain terms 4 is not entirely fixed by gesturing at an
object and making some sound, however systematically a similar sound is produced in
similar circumstances, distinct intra-linguistic translations (what I am calling
interpretations) involving these terms might each preserve “the net holophrastic meanings
of sentences” (which is just to say that each theory is empirically adequate) while
interpreting terms differently. The plausibility of the conjecture depends on there being
‘some lengthy non-observation sentences containing, for example, ‘rabbit’ which would
go into an interpretation in materially different ways according as ‘rabbit’ is understood
to refer to rabbits, or rabbit-stages, etc.’ 5 And this possibility depends on there being
some “freedom of choice” about interpreting “pronouns, identity, plurals, and related
apparatus.” 6
This connects the indeterminacy of translation thesis rather directly with Quine’s
thesis of the “inscrutability of reference”. Quine’s thesis of the inscrutability of reference
2
See Quine, 1970, p. 179-181.
Quine, 1970, p. 179.
4
Those that divide their reference—i.e., terms whose extensions are defined in terms of properties common
to its members.
5
Paraphrasing Quine, 1970, p. 182 to tailor the claim to intra-linguistic translation.
6
Quine, 1970, p. 182.
3
19
begins with the observation that ostensive reference involving causal contact with things
in the world does not by itself distinguish between cats, say, and undetached cat parts and
cat-stages and elements of cat-fusion, and other metaphysically distinct kinds. So-called
“devices of individuation” do the work of differentiating between competing schemes.
Quine argued that by making compensatory adjustments in the interpretation of
individuative devices of the language we could understand a speaker using the term ‘cat’
in the sentence “A cat is on the mat” as referring to a time-slice of a four dimensional
thing, rather than a whole and enduring object; and those are extensionally different kinds
of things. That no amount of querying could reveal a speaker’s “true intent” is the claim
that reference is inscrutable; a claim fairly construed as being about our epistemic
limitations. But if a speaker’s true intent must be (metaphysically) determined by this
evidence alone, it is indeterminate—i.e., “there is nothing to scrute.” 7
Again, finding reference to be indeterminate on the basis of an epistemological
problem appears to depend mostly on an impoverished notion of what there is to fix
reference. Obviously, there could be an intended referent even if it is impossible to
discover through querying the speaker what it is.
But even setting aside Quine’s
dispositional analysis of meaning facts, the epistemological point does have some
traction. We want to say that ‘rabbit’, as we use the term, refers to (all and only) rabbits.
But how do we know that ‘rabbit’ does not refer to (all and only) undetached rabbit parts?
All ostended reference to one is equally a reference to the other.
So interpreting
expressions containing these terms—i.e., deciding to what they are supposed to refer—
depends on interpreting other devices of the language used for the individuation of
things; e.g., plurals, articles, identity.
7
Quine, 1969a, p. 5.
As such, hypotheses about how a speaker
20
individuates things depend on assumptions about how things ought to be individuated,
and, in spite of the apparent transparency of the task, the evidence for reference is
consistent with mutually incompatible reference schemes of the sort: “cat” refers in
English to cats (and nothing else); “dog” refers in English to dogs (and nothing else); etc.
So we might understand Quine’s conjecture as follows: Insofar as a translation
manual equates sentences of one language with sentences of another, and natural
languages are capable of generating an infinite number of sentences, a translation manual
must provide the means for translating every possible sentence of some target language in
terms of another. With regard to translation of a radically foreign language, a field
linguist would have to break down foreign sentences into their semantically relevant
constituents and describe how these elements contribute to sentence meaning. To the
degree that linguistics aims to do the very same thing with the “home” language, the
indeterminacy of translation is just a thesis about linguistic meaning, in the sense of
propositional content: that linguistic data are consistent with mutually incompatible
theories of linguistic meaning. 8 And since meaning must be determined by this data,
meaning is indeterminate. 9
This thesis says that there is no fact about what we mean even with our most basic
assertions involving ostensive definition, as in “That is a cat.”
conjecture, and the target of volumes of rebuttals. 10
8
This is Quine’s
It is this strong notion of
I take it that this point is rather uncontroversial, given the inductive uncertainty in any theoretical
enterprise, as Chomsky has pointed out in numerous criticisms of Quine’s arguments for indeterminacy.
Chomsky admits to inductive uncertainty with regard to translation and interpretation, but takes issue with
Quine’s view that meaning and reference are determined by evidence alone.
9
Raatikainen, Føllesdal, Orenstein, and Ravnkilde are each explicit that the thesis is intended to be a thesis
about linguistic meaning. Even more to the point, Quine writes, “What the indeterminacy of translation
shows is that the notion of propositions as sentence meanings is untenable” (1992, 102).
10
Nevertheless, strictly speaking, indeterminacy of reference is neither necessary nor sufficient for
indeterminacy of translation. Translation of highly theoretical claims is underdetermined by evidence
21
indeterminacy, this conjecture about meaning, which troubles us here as well.
If
defensible, the thesis implies that there is no fact about whether in one’s own mouth
one’s utterances involving ‘cat’ refer to cats and not to, say, undetached cat parts or cat
stages or something else. Similarly, our so-called propositional attitudes regarding things
in the world and their properties seem to lose their grip in a way that defies sense. Scott
Soames has suggested that if Quine’s conjecture is right it follows that our beliefs about
what we mean and refer to in specific cases—such as my current belief that I am referring
in this very sentence to my cat Zoe—cannot be accepted as true. 11 Presumably, this is
because even my Zoe-thoughts are consistent with an interpretation according to which I
refer to Zoe-stages, or undetached-Zoe-parts, rather than Zoe.
Insofar as my Zoe-
thoughts invoke concepts that are language-like, my Zoe-thoughts are subject to the same
indeterminacy inherent in the language in which I think. If Soames is right, there is much
incentive to refute the thesis.
Chomsky has a number of influential arguments that attempt to refute the thesis.
The most pressing is his observation that we have no reason to think that meaning is
determined by nothing other than the data that give rise to competing interpretations.
Quine, Chomsky argues, gives us no argument for his claim that the correct interpretation
is determined (if determined at all) by evidence alone, which is a necessary premise in the
move from the underdetermination of theory by evidence to the claim that there is no fact
about which theory is correct. The premise is further confounding given Quine’s high
regard for science. It makes no sense to hold that the “truth” of a theory of meaning is
anyway, largely due to the fact that theories are themselves underdetermined by evidence. And certain
cases of indeterminacy of reference—namely the cases “proved” in 1969 (in “Ontological Relativity”)—
seem not to “bring indeterminacy of sentence translation in [their] train” (Quine, 1970, p. 182).
11
Soames, 1999, p. 321.
22
determined by observable evidence alone, and hold no such standard to other domains of
scientific inquiry. In chemistry, for example, covalence is invoked to explain certain
regularities in bonding behavior. Covalence is an explanation in the sense that sharing
valence (plus auxiliary assumptions) predicts these bonding regularities but valence is not
itself an observable feature of the world. There is thus inductive uncertainty in making
claims that involve covalence, but there is no serious worry that there is thereby no fact
about whether the theory gets things right. The same should apply to our theory of
meaning.
But to press the analogy, there is an ambiguity in what it means to talk about a
theory of meaning. One construal of “theory of meaning” tells us what the world must be
like to explain what we know about meaning. 12
A second construal of “theory of
meaning” is just an interpretation of the symbols of the language. One way to argue for
the indeterminacy of meaning is to show that the first (metasemantics) implies that the
second (semantics) is indeterminate. In fact, one way to understand Quine’s seemingly
undefended behaviorism is to see indeterminacy as resulting from what Quine called
“uncritical semantics”—the “myth” that words are simply labels for meanings, where
meanings are construed as either mental entities or Platonic properties or sets of objects.
Such a myth is a theory in the first sense, a claim about what accounts for intuitive
notions of synonymy, intentionality, reference, etc., and the theory is a myth according to
Quine because a critical look at what there is to determine meaning reveals the facts to be
insufficient to ground the claims we make about synonymy, reference, intentionality, etc.
This sort of argument is fleshed out in the following section.
12
This notion of a theory of meaning is perhaps more aptly called metasemantics.
23
1.2
Theories of Meaning, and Meaning
One notion of a theory of meaning deals with the question of what the world must be like
to explain what we “know” about meaning. So a prior question must be answered in
pursuit of that end: what are the meaning facts to be explained? As is always the case in
science, what we take to be the facts wanting explanation places constraints on what the
explanation turns out to be, and vise versa. Two meaning facts seem rather hard to deny:
One is that language enables us to say things about the world, to convey information
about our surroundings and ourselves.
This fact requires an explanation of the
“informational significance” of language. That is, our theory of meaning should explain
the “regular and systematic correspondence between language and the shared
environment, what is publicly accessible to many different human minds.” 13 This is to
say that our theory of meaning should account for our intuitive notion of reference: when
I use the term ‘cat’, I succeed in expressing something that links my utterances to cats.
Another meaning fact is that understanding what is conveyed involves recovering,
in some sense, an internal representation of what some expression means. This fact
requires an explanation of the “cognitive significance” of language tokens. That is, our
theory of meaning should explain our “ways of representing mentally what is meant by
what we and others say.” 14 Combining these facts into one, our theory of meaning
should describe what the world must be like to account for the given fact that we
represent mentally, and communicate, information about the external world.
One rough and intuitive way to explain this apparent fact appeals to causal contact
with things in the world, which imbues at least some of our basic concepts (mental
13
14
Chierchia & McConnell-Ginet, 2000, p. 13.
Chierchia & McConnell-Ginet, 2000, p. 15.
24
representations) with informational content, and the learning of language is partly
learning to associate the right concepts with the right words. Some sort of causal story
seems necessary to explain informational significance, but it cannot be the whole story.
Simple causal contact with things in the world cannot explain how two terms of the
language can pick out the same thing and yet function differently in one’s conceptual
repertoire (for a shopworn example, ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’); nor can it explain
how we can talk about things that do not exist, like unicorns and ewoks, and extant things
inaccessible to perception, like singularities and 1010. Indeed, there has to be more to
meaning than establishing an intersubjective lexicon, for we can generate and understand
indefinitely many sentences on the basis of finitely many lexical items. So the meanings
of sentences must be explained in terms of word meaning and rules of composition; all of
which must be internally realizable to meet the demand of cognitive significance.
Arriving at an explanation of sentence meaning through compositionality is tricky
though, since, in (a translation of) Frege’s words, “only in the context of a sentence do
words have meaning.” 15 This follows from the way things are present to the senses—via
a multiplicity of properties—and the problem of isolating a single property among the
myriad of those present to the senses and intending to speak about that. If I point to
something fuzzy, yellow, and round and utter, ‘ball’, for example, I seem to convey
minimally that that is a ball: a proposition. And yet there are still various possibilities
for what property I intend with my gesture to single out. Disambiguation requires saying
more, indicating that sentences have meaning only in a context even larger than
sentences. Making matters still worse, ostension is temporally bound, but the thing
ostended may not be (to the same degree). So the task of correctly associating internal
15
Chierchia & McConnell-Ginet, 2000, p. 431.
25
representations with words seems to presuppose an understanding of the meaning of the
sentences in which the words appear; and understanding the meaning of a sentence seems
to involve some grasp of some larger portion of the language.
So the task of accounting for the given already seems formidable. To know the
meaning of a word, you seem to have to know the language, but how do you come to
know the language without building it up from its terms? The modern linguist’s answer
to this question appeals to the unique capacities and structures of the human brain, which
are instrumental in systematizing language and generating aspects of meaning. Together
these considerations amount to a plausible theory according to which the meaning of
linguistic expressions is rooted in mental representations, where representational content
is determined by a set of factors whose membership includes: 1) cognitive capacities,
which develop in ontogeny thanks in part to our genetic endowment and in part to the
environment in which we find ourselves; 2) the noumenal world impinging on the senses
in a regular way; and 3) social conventions relating subjective concepts to linguistic
expressions. Cognitive capacities structure content imbued by the world and thanks to
the social aspect, language can “grow” concepts—we can learn to think about and speak
about things with which we have no direct experience by placing such concepts within an
internal system that generates the form of linguistic expressions.
Such a theory, however modern, is precisely the target of Quine’s problem:
whatever content subjective concepts have in virtue of casual contact with things in the
world is evidently not sufficient to determine the sort of informational content that we
presume our words to have (more on this in Chapter 2). Point to a cat and you have
pointed to, among other possibilities, undetached-cat-parts, a cat-stage, and a cat-worm.
26
Cognitive architecture could disambiguate only insofar as it generates the grammatical
form of sentences containing terms like ‘cat’ and that form fixes a single interpretation of
these sentences.
But grammatical form is compatible with multiple interpretations.
Again, this is evident, given the metaphysical dispute over fundamental ontology and the
reinterpretation of the language that accompanies each (more on this in Chapters 3 and
4). Thus, determinate meaning must be fixed by conventions. But conventions are
simply standards recognized in use, determined in fact by nothing other than use. If our
cell phone call drops and I wait for you to call me back and you do, we thereby establish
a convention for what to do the next time our cell phone call drops. But language use
does not distinguish between the various possibilities for meaning, as is also evident in
the dispute over fundamental ontology, so adopting a convention could not affect a
change in subsequent use, which is requisite for holding that conventions determine the
single correct interpretation (see Chapter 4). If these points turn out to be defensible,
given the modern linguists’ explanation of the meaning facts, there appears to be nothing
to fix a particular interpretation of the expressions of the language, so meaning appears to
be indeterminate.
There is a way in which this theory of meaning is exactly parallel with theories in
other domains. When we theorize about strictly non-intentional (external) matters—the
behavior of fundamental particles, for example—there is a justified expectation that this
behavior is determined by natural laws and so immutable. As such, our theoretical posits
in physics are undoubtedly underdetermined by actual evidence, even all possible
evidence in the restricted sense of what actually happens in the fullness of time that no
one actually observes, but physics proceeds on the assumption that it is always possible
27
to devise new conceptual frameworks, experiments, and instruments that would constrain
in the limit empirically adequate theories to just one. 16 Physics presupposes that there is
a God’s eye view of the world, even if we should never realize it. And there is no reason
to think that the meaning facts are not like this—language is a natural phenomenon and
so subject to natural laws. Ours is the job of discovering the laws by which language
arises and does what it does. As we discover more, the theory morphs, advances, and
explains more. All as it should be.
For all that, meaning appears to be indeterminate. Indeterminacy of meaning, that
is, seems to be implied by our theory of meaning. Recall that in one sense our theory of
meaning is supposed to explain the meaning facts, which include facts about reference
and the internal realization of semantic properties. Our theory of meaning tells us what
the world must be like to explain these facts. If we suppose that meaning is rooted in
conceptual content, our theory of meaning must tell us in virtue of what concepts have
the content we presume them to have.
Our theory of meaning is undoubtedly
underdetermined by the data, as is always the case when the explanation goes beyond
what is given in data; yet there is no reason to think that the theory we land upon could
not accurately reflect the way things are. The claim here is just that if this theory of
meaning does accurately reflect the way things are, it appears that meaning is
indeterminate. Meaning, after all, is a feature of the thing being explained.
This suggests that our theory of meaning implies that meaning is indeterminate in
much the same way that quantum theory implies the uncertainty principle, which is not so
much a claim about uncertainty as it is a claim about indeterminacy. The uncertainty
principle says that the position and momentum of fundamental particles cannot both have
16
See Devitt, 1997, pp. 117-121.
28
precise values at the same time. This is to say that if some particle has a definite position
at a particular time, there is no fact about its momentum. And if the particle has a
definite momentum at a particular time, there is no fact about where it is.
The
indeterminacy here is implied by a theory that describes particles as waves. 17
The
indeterminacy of meaning is implied by a theory that describes meaning as a kind of
cognitive achievement: we represent mentally, and communicate, information about the
external world thanks to our innate cognitive endowment, causal contact with things, and
social conventions.
There is another way in which this comparison is useful. Prior to quantum theory,
it would have been “given” that, like other bodies, fundamental particles have at any
given time definite position and definite momentum. Such a given no doubt played a role
in the evolution of our theory about the behavior and properties of the fundamental
constituents of reality. But that theory ends up telling us something quite surprising: socalled particles are not at all as we thought them to be, for it is not the case that they have
at any given time definite position and definite momentum. Similarly, we do seem to
take it as given (“a Moorean fact”) that the language has what David Lewis calls a “fairly
determinate interpretation” 18 —that ‘rabbit’, for example, as we use the term succeeds in
expressing something that links our utterances to rabbits (and not undetached rabbit parts
or rabbit-stages, etc.). Moreover, we do seem to think that this representational fact must
be grounded in non-representational facts. Platitudes like these no doubt play a role in
17
My rudimentary understanding is that indeterminacy is supposed to follow from taking the formal
description of the behavior of particles as wavelike to reflect the real nature of particles. One could instead
take the formal description to be merely a means of obtaining predictions, in which case there need be no
“real” indeterminacy.
18
Lewis, 1983, p. 371.
29
arriving at a theory of meaning, but the theory seems to tell us that the very idea of
reference, and so our fairly determinate interpretation, is complete nonsense.
I think this shows the flaw in this particular critique of Quine. Chomsky, who
thinks that Quine is just dead wrong about the psychological underpinnings of language
use and acquisition, maintains that uncertainty regarding meaning is just the same
mundane inductive uncertainty we face in all our scientific theorizing:
It is quite certain that serious hypotheses concerning a native speaker’s
knowledge of English, or concerning the essential properties of human
language—the innate schematism that determines what counts as linguistic
data and what intellectual structures are developed on the basis of these
data—will go “beyond the evidence”. If they did not, they would be
without interest. Since they go beyond mere summary of data, it will be
the case that there are competing assumptions consistent with the data. 19
Chomsky goes on to ask, “But why should all of this occasion any surprise or concern?”
The point of the question of course is to suggest that underdetermination of a theory of
meaning is no different than underdetermination in other domains, where a theory is just
supposed to be the best explanation for the data, and is insofar as the evidence supports it
over competing theories. Underdetermination of our theory of meaning does not thereby
imply that there is no fact about whether the theory accurately reflects the world. But this
criticism misses the point: the answer to the question of why underdetermination of a
theory of meaning should occasion any surprise or concern is that it should not, and it
does not. What is rather surprising is that our explanation of the meaning facts seems to
imply that expressions of the language do not have determinate meanings.
I claimed that the indeterminacy of meaning seems to be implied by a theory that
describes meaning as a kind of cognitive achievement: we represent mentally, and
19
Chomsky, 1968, p. 66-67.
30
communicate, information about the external world thanks to our innate cognitive
endowment, causal contact with things, and social conventions.
It is perhaps the
internal/external duality inherent in this description of meaning which gives rise to
indeterminacy; for it is the presumed link between speakers and the world which opens
the door to the sorts of problems Quine was worried about—namely, what fixes internal
content when ostended reference to things in the world is compatible with various
interpretations. It is worth noting that linguistics is dominated by Chomsky’s “generative
paradigm” and that this program has no place at all for anything outside cognitive
architecture in its explanation of linguistic meaning. So let us consider the essential
tenets of this theory next. I will argue in the following section that linguistic data suggest
compelling philosophical questions beyond I-language.
1.3
Meaning sans Reference
Chomsky’s own program attempts to explain meaning strictly in terms of a generative
procedure of the human language faculty. Language may be in some sense a social
phenomenon, but insofar as it succeeds as a vehicle of information, it is necessary only
that speakers have the same (or similar) representations. Since my understanding of your
verbal behavior depends on my ability to interpret it—to parse and associate components
of your utterances with meanings—and this seems to depend only on having at the ready
an interpretation of whatever such behavior I might produce, hypotheses about linguistic
meaning need only be aimed at features internal to individuals: namely, the having of
self-interpreted internal representations.
31
We might compare human linguistic phenomena with other complex forms of
communication to see that language may be useful and yet entirely devoid of “empirical
content”. The honeybee dance, for example—where certain kinds of bee behavior seem
to encode information about the distance and direction of food—requires an explanation
only at the level of the individual; for it is surely implausible that there is a “real”
correspondence between racing through a crescent shape, waggling one’s tail, and
buzzing one’s wings at 250 Hertz, and where the food is. Conveying such information
and interpreting it are distinct tasks for the individual, both of which can be fully
explained by appeal to evolved, shared, species-specific mechanisms. 20
Perhaps the same explanation applies to human language. We might suppose that
the difference between human language and the rest is just the level of abstraction
enabled by the human faculty.
Like honeybees, we can convey and understand
information about the whereabouts of food, but we can also convey and understand
information about language, and about the Platonic realm, and about the nature of
invisible n-dimensional strings at the root of all material being, and so much more. But
we convey theoretical and abstract ideas the same way we convey the more concrete
stuff: with sentences. Perhaps as far as communication strategies go generally, the one
contingently generated by the human brain is distinguished by being highly structured,
lexically profuse and so unique only in its scope and power. As such, linguistic meaning
may be merely a function of internal syntactic-structural features of the human brain,
with no explanatory role for the relation between words and what they are supposed to
represent. To turn a phrase, “semantics recapitulates syntax.”
20
See Wenner and Wells, 1990.
32
A generative grammar then is a description of the structures and capacities the
human mind must have in order to account for linguistic data. It is Chomsky’s theory of
meaning. Lexical items are taken to be internal functions of various types. Some may be
used to refer, but what they refer to plays no role in explaining their meaning. The use of
language thus constitutes the data, syntactic-structural features are postulated, and, since
having such features is all there is to knowledge of meaning, all of it is unabashedly
intentional.
Should an explanation of linguistic meaning in terms of the semantic properties of
syntactic-structural features of the human brain ‘occasion any surprise or concern’? It is
usually supposed that the primary criticism of this program is the inexplicability of
intentional phenomena in a “physical vocabulary”, to which Chomsky and others have
countered that just as we do not reject a realist interpretation of chemistry on the grounds
that it is not reducible to physics, we should not reject a realist interpretation of a
“linguistic ontology” for failing the same test. 21 But the reduction of intentional facts to
physics is beside the point. The naturalist requirement on linguistic ontology is no
different from the naturalist requirement on chemical ontology. In the latter case, if it
makes sense to say that O2 is chemically distinct from O3, there must be some physical
difference between the two types. Similarly, if it makes sense to say that T1 has content
distinct from T2, there must be some physical difference between the two thoughts, or at
least a physical difference somewhere that accounts for the intentional difference between
the two thoughts. In both ontologies, we are speaking of types and insisting that there be
some physical difference whenever distinct types are instantiated.
21
Hinzen, 2007.
33
But a prevailing intuition, which prima facie appears to be a linguistic datum,
seems to show that T1 and T2 could have different content and yet be internally identical
states. 22 This is the moral of twin-Earth and its colorless, odorless, drinkable, plentiful
liquid that is only phenomenologically similar to our water. Twin-water is by hypothesis
XYZ, a microstructure distinct from H2O. Without the relation of reference holding of
distinct kinds, and thereby imbuing distinct content, it is hard to see how to account for
the intuitive difference between mental tokenings of “water”-thoughts in the two worlds
(prior to the advent of chemistry). This is one reason to think that a real relation between
words and the world seems necessary in explaining linguistic meaning.
Chomsky, of course, is unmoved by twin-Earth thought experiments and the
intuitions they inspire. Intuitions will vary, he thinks, depending on how schooled a
person is in a particular technical notion of ‘reference’. If the externalist’s claim is that
‘water’ refers to H2O (only), the relation invoked (call it R) is a theoretical relation that
holds between some term of the language and objects in the domain D, where D is a set
of postulated entities, or concepts (in the non-subjective sense). Both R and D are
explanatory constructs, not part of the object language. Since ordinary speakers talking
about water have no natural intuitions about the validity of explanatory constructs,
philosophers’ (and their students’) twin-Earth intuitions are no indication of what a
person’s ‘water’ tokens mean. 23
22
The scenario imagined is two possible worlds, similar to each other in every way, except that the
“watery” stuff on one world is H2O and on the other is XYZ, and no one has yet discovered this fact.
Counterparts of these worlds thus have identical mental states, when non-intentionally described. The
intuitive difference in their thoughts, when intentionally described, is supposed to be explained by the
differences in their environments. We will have more to say about this thought experiment in Chapter 2.
23
See Chomsky, 2000, pp. 148-149.
34
This objection is puzzling on its face, for two reasons. One is that it is hard to see
how Chomsky can so easily disregard the kinds of thought experiments that compel an
appeal to the nature of external objects to explain meaning. 24 After all, one of the ways
we develop an integrated interpretation of the semantic properties of linguistic
expressions, even that of I-language, is to ask sometimes-outlandish questions of
speakers. What Oscar is thinking about on twin-Earth seems no more outlandish than
how many ways it could be true that every woman who owns a donkey beats it. And the
latter, a so-called “donkey sentence”, seems to play a respectable role in making claims
about linguistic meaning. 25
Moreover, the semantic properties of a generative grammar seem no less
incumbent upon external facts than the theory considered in §1.2. A generative grammar
is supposed to help explain the rapidity with which we learn our first language,
knowledge that is acquired with very little in the way of reinforcement. The insight is
that the basic structure of language is already there, the content of which is determined by
the development of this structure “under the triggering and shaping effect of
experience.” 26 What might trigger and shape I-language if not a shared environment
including other speakers and the things about which they speak? And while it may be
true that experience does not imply anything about the external world, 27 it is hard to see
why one would defend realism about linguistic ontology as specified by R and D (e.g.,
‘cat’ refers to cats) and not be a realist about the relation specified by R and the entities
specified by D (though such a position would not be incoherent).
24
To be fair, Chomsky has several other objections to externalism, many of which I end up agreeing with
in Chapter 2.
25
Jeff King, 2003.
26
Chomsky, 2000, p. 27.
27
Since I might be dreaming or plugged into the Matrix.
35
This points the way to what I take to be the right reply to the current objection.
Philosophers, it seems to me, take seriously the apparent commitments of theory, and
take steps to explain them that move a measure beyond science. Chomsky may think the
move is unwarranted, because it is not science, but all we can say here is that we do not
intend to be doing science. We are doing philosophy. If your theory of meaning says
that the semantic value of ‘cat’ is the (non-subjective) concept cat, the philosopher is well
within the bounds of philosophy to attempt to analyze the concepts posited by your
theory, since these are generally supposed to be triggered by and exemplified by things in
the world.
My criticism here is not aimed at Chomsky’s theory; rather, it is a defense of
further inquiry into the nature of representational content, posited by all accounts of
linguistic meaning. We speak as if certain terms refer to things, or kinds of things. What
would make this so? This question is, I believe, precisely the basis for Quine’s argument
in “Ontological Relativity.” We assume, both intuitively and theoretically, that some
conjunction of facts fixes what a term refers to. But even the observable world submits
to more than one description, depending on what it is to be the “same” object over time.
The problem is that there seems to be no justification for claims about what it is to be the
same object over time. Empirical evidence is consistent with various possibilities, as is
our use of the language, and introspective evidence is consistent with intending any of
these various possibilities.
Ted Sider’s temporal counterpart theory is a case in point. According to this
theory, 1) the world consists of four-dimensional objects (rather than three-dimensional
ones), where 2) persistence is to be understood in terms of a counterpart relation between
36
temporal parts (stages) of these objects; and 3) the things we ordinarily name and
quantify over are stages. As such, the dog to which I now refer is a stage of a fourdimensional object, the temporal parts of which are bound together by some special
relation. I certainly cannot ascertain the truth or falsity of this theory by examining the
ideal dog, or by consulting the ideal physics textbook. 28 Nor can I ascertain the truth or
falsity of 3 (the things we ordinarily name and quantify over are stages) by introspecting
my own (subjective) concept of a dog, for that concept is essentially bound up in claims I
am willing to make and accept about dogs. Even admitting privileged access to my own
beliefs, I must also admit that when I consider my beliefs about dogs in light of this
theory, they are all consistent with reference to the sorts of entities that Sider’s theory
countenances.
The essential point against introspective evidence is that for all I know when I talk
about rabbits I am talking about stages. Given that the extension of my own rabbit
concept depends on persistence conditions, and I do not know which (if any) of these sets
of conditions is correct, I do not know what my own concept refers to. Introspection
cannot reveal this. So if there were anything that could reveal this, it would have to be
encoded in the broader context of linguistic practice. But, as I will argue in Chapter 2,
the broader context of linguistic practice does not reveal it either.
I think the debate over fundamental ontology, to be elaborated in subsequent
chapters, very clearly shows the problem for representational content: no set of facts
seems available to fix it. If it is right that the one and only world can be whatever it is,
28
It has been suggested to me by Cody Gilmore that certain physical theories, namely special and general
relativity, may materially imply perdurantism; so that if relativity is correct, so is perdurantism (see
Gilmore, 2008). I have no doubt that appeal to scientific theories plays a role in arguments for and against
certain ontologies, but I am also quite confident in the ability of the apt defender of one of these theories to
make revisions and/or counter-arguments that would keep the theory alive.
37
and yet distinct descriptions are consistent with all of these facts, what does this say about
the emergence of semantic properties that suggest reference to external objects? It says
that unless some metaphysical theory is innate, imposing a determinate reference scheme
for the language faculty, the semantic properties of the language faculty are
indeterminate. Chomsky may be happy to accept innate content, but if, as I argue in
Chapter 3, we have no reason to think we have that much innate content, this would be a
serious problem for the intuitive (and theoretical) idea that in many cases our terms refer.
And it is just this intuitive idea that gets this problem going in the first place:
Ultimately, the problem is accounting for the “obvious” fact that, for example, ‘rabbit’, as
we use the term, represents, via something, rabbits and not undetached rabbit parts or
rabbit-stages, or some such. I am calling this a meaning fact, though it does gloss over
the traditional distinction between meaning and reference. We could, honoring that
distinction, take the meaning of ‘rabbit’ to be the property of being a rabbit, a property
we each express in our various assertions involving the term. 29 As such, and insofar as
use determines meaning, the meaning of ‘rabbit’ is determinate. Then it will be claimed
that what I am calling the problem of representational content is simply disagreement
about what falls under the extension of the concept. Fair enough. The reason I think it
makes sense nonetheless to call my thesis the ‘indeterminacy of meaning’ is that if
‘rabbit’ is a referring expression, and the meaning of ‘rabbit’ is the property of being a
rabbit, this property must contain “in itself” the means of distinguishing the rabbits from
the non-rabbits—i.e., the property metaphysically determines its extension. Insofar as an
analysis of the concept attempts to specify these conditions (x is a rabbit if and only if…),
29
My thanks to Michael Jubien for pressing me about this way of viewing the matter. I will address it
again in Chapter 4 when we take up conceptual analysis directly.
38
without which there is no referent, a disagreement about extension is perforce a
disagreement about meaning.
Quine argued that disagreements relevant to meaning could not be settled by
appeal to any fact, and though I have argued that indeterminacy of meaning does not stem
from the mistake of thinking that our theory of meaning is somehow unlike theories in
other domains, the thesis does depend on the claim that the meaning of a term, insofar as
it is determinate, must be grounded in something (non-intentional) that could make it so.
One will immediately suspect, undaunted by what has been said thus far, that something
surely could make it so, like the correct theory of persistence for example, even if we
cannot know with any certainty that it is correct. I certainly cannot counter this suspicion
without considering various positive proposals that purport to show how meaning can be
determinate in spite of the difficulties brought to light by Quine. So let us consider the
problem anew.
1.4
The “Negative” Argument for Indeterminacy
Like many problems in philosophy, I take this one to stem from an evident truth: in this
case that we represent mentally, and communicate, information about the external world.
This conviction has led many naturalistically inclined philosophers to propose the
following principle: representational content—and in particular the supposed content of
mental items corresponding to referring terms like ‘rabbit’—must be explained in terms
of non-intentional features of the world. (I accept this principle here without argument.)
This principle then suggests various places to look for the defining features of our
intuitive claims about representation content:
causal contact with things, structural
39
features of the brain (innate content), social conventions, natural properties, etc. Insofar
as the list is exhaustive, and none, nor their conjunction, suffices to fix representational
content, representational content is indeterminate.
So the thesis I will be pursuing hereafter is that, on the assumption that this list is
exhaustive, and a careful examination of the available facts reveals them to be
insufficient to fix the content we presume them to have, the representational content of
mental items corresponding to so-called referring expressions is indeterminate. This is
the thesis I am calling the indeterminacy of meaning. The argument is intended to be
valid. In its barest form, it says that if there are facts about reference, they are fixed by
either x, y, z, or the conjunction of these. Neither x, y, z, nor their conjunction is
sufficient to fix the claims we make about reference. Therefore, there are no facts about
reference.
I take it that Quine has established the claim that the evidence weakly
underdetermines a reference scheme for the language.
That is, more than one
interpretation is possible and yet there is no evidence that counts in favor of one reference
scheme over another. This is weak underdetermination because it does not entail that
there could not be evidence favoring one interpretation over another. The conviction that
there could be—indeed, must be—some fact (or set of facts) that determines a particular
interpretation underlies the tendency to dismiss Quine’s indeterminacy of translation
thesis, at least among philosophers who accept the naturalism thesis. Nevertheless, what
we assert here, is that no fact, and so no evidence, could decide between competing
interpretations.
40
This claim is highly controversial because many philosophers agree with
Chomsky that a reference scheme is just a theory and theories are merely weakly
underdetermined.
This view harkens back an earlier point:
namely, the scientific
realists’ view that scientific inquiry proceeds on the assumptions that there is a God’s eye
view of reality and that it is always possible to devise new conceptual frameworks,
experiments, and instruments that would constrain in the limit empirically adequate
theories to just one. On this view, even if we are forever incapable of reaching that limit,
weak underdetermination is nevertheless a limit on certainty only. But I argue that
meaning is strongly underdetermined: there appears to be nothing in the world that could
decide between competing reference schemes (and so, there is something special about
meaning after all). Subsequent chapters are thus each in defense of this premise.
The form of this problem is actually common in philosophy. We start with an
intuitive principle, which, upon closer scrutiny of the facts relevant to this principle leads
to a dilemma: either the intuitive principle is false, or something equally as plausible is
false. Paradoxically, in these cases, we seem nevertheless to maintain that both are true.
Take, for example, the highly intuitive principle that we cannot be held morally
responsible for what is not within our control. When we look at the circumstances
affecting the object of moral assessment, however, we find that there is virtually nothing
that is within the agent’s control. Such a fact clearly undermines the intuitive principle,
or the rationality of moral assessment, but in fact it seems to dissuade no one from
maintaining both. 30
Thomas Nagel suggested that this sort of paradox mirrors one that arises in
epistemology. There we start with this intuitive idea that we cannot know something if
30
Nagel, 1979, pp. 24–38.
41
we are possibly mistaken about it, but upon close scrutiny of our epistemic situation, it
looks like it is always possible that we are mistaken, which seems to undermine either the
intuitive idea of infallibilism, or our very claim to knowledge. A paradox ensues when
we are unwilling, or incapable, of giving up either. 31
Our problem here, as I see it, has the very same form: we start with the apparent
truism that representations, e.g., words and sentences, cannot represent unless something
suffices to fix what these items represent. So if ‘rabbit’ represents rabbits, some set of
facts must make it so. But when we carefully scrutinize the facts available to fix
representational content (meaning) as such, we find the facts to be insufficient, which
suggests that either this condition on representational content is wrong, or words and
sentences do not represent. I think it would be paradoxical to hold, in light of the
considerations brought to bear in the foregoing, that representational facts are determined
by something non-representational, and that linguistic items indeed represent.
31
We could understand the problem of evil this way too: Intuitively, an all-good, all-powerful being would
eliminate unnecessary evil. But unnecessary evil abounds, which ought to cast doubt on either the intuitive
idea about what such a being would do, or that such a being exists. Paradoxically, theists seem to maintain
both.
42
2. Semantic Externalism
There are volumes of rebuttals of Quine’s indeterminacy theses, 1 most of which attempt
to show that the theses depend on some outmoded doctrine of the logical positivism of
Quine’s day. The easiest target is of course Quine’s avowed behaviorism, although
Kripke, whose work on Wittgenstein’s so-called “meaning paradox” appeared in 1982,
suggested that
Wittgenstein’s problem may lead to a new look at Quine’s theses. Given
Quine’s own formulation of his theses, it appears open to a nonbehaviorist to regard his arguments, if he accepts them, as demonstrations
that any behavioristic account of meaning must be inadequate—it cannot
even distinguish between a word meaning rabbit and one meaning rabbitstage. But if Wittgenstein is right, and no amount of access to my mind
can reveal whether I mean plus or quus, may the same not hold for rabbit
and rabbit-stage? So perhaps Quine’s problem arises even for nonbehaviorists. 2
I have already made a partial case for the claim that indeterminacy of meaning follows
from a plausible non-behaviorist theory of meaning. But that argument depended on the
claim that, given various possible interpretations of our scheme of referring expressions,
if there were anything that could reveal the correct one, it would have to be encoded in
the broader context of linguistic practice. Many philosophers hold that the correct
interpretation of the language is a function of the broader context of linguistic practice.
Such is the founding principle of semantic externalism.
1
For example, Words and Objections, 1969; Essays on the Philosophy of W.V. Quine, 1979; Translation
Determined, 1986; Perspectives on Quine, 1993; Indeterminacy of Translation: Philosophy of Quine,
2001.
2
Kripke, 1982, p. 57.
43
Here we will consider a fairly recent attempt by Panu Raatikainen (2005) to argue
that the real culprit behind semantic indeterminacy is not after all Quine’s behaviorism, it
is his internalism.
As such, semantic externalism offers a means to “avoid” it.
Raatikainen thinks that various philosophers including Quine scholars have
misunderstood Quine’s indeterminacy of translation thesis, abandoning or ignoring it on
the basis of its supposed dependence on flawed doctrines like radical behaviorism,
reductionist-physicalism, and verificationism. Rightly grounded, Quine’s thesis rests on
none of these doctrines and consequently falls with none of these doctrines. I agree with
Raatikainen’s assessment of the limits to which semantic indeterminacy depends on these
disagreeable premises, but I aim to show that externalism fails to provide a means around
indeterminacy.
Rightly grounding the indeterminacy thesis involves a distinct argument for it,
and Raatikainen appeals to a rather tidy and plausible argument for the indeterminacy of
meaning, which was originally given by Dagfinn Føllesdal and on which Quine has
commented approvingly. This argument, to be elaborated in §2.1, begins with the simple
idea that meaning is the product of the evidence by which it is learned. Raatikainen
seems to accept this premise; though he clearly thinks that semantic externalism avoids
the conclusion that meaning is indeterminate. Perhaps this conclusion can be avoided by
pointing out the argument’s reliance on an implicit premise that can be rejected; one that
other philosophers making this same kind of move have failed to notice. §2.2 fills out
Raatikainen’s suggestion that indeterminacy depends on a conception of meaning
according to which what determines meaning is locked within the heads of speakers. 3
3
Note that Chomsky’s theory of meaning would thus be similarly plagued.
44
Thus invoke externalism and the slippery slope from the epistemic problem
(underdetermination of a translation manual) to indeterminacy is avoided.
According to the externalist, there are two contributions to meaning overlooked
by “traditional” accounts:
the real world, which makes its way into meaning via
indexicality, and the knowledge of experts. I shall consider the supposed contribution of
each in turn and argue that neither, nor both, actually skirts the problem. If meaning is
partly determined by this “unnoticed indexical component” involved in fixing the
reference of, in particular, natural kind terms, it would help to avoid indeterminacy of
meaning only if it is possible for ostensive reference to distinguish, independently of
theory, between possible reference schemes for a language. I argue, with Quine, that
reference, and so linguistic meaning, is inextricably tied to physical theory.
That
argument is taken up in §2.3. Even if we add the contribution of expert knowledge, the
problem is that expert knowledge is theoretical and internal to some speaker(s). Even by
Raatikainen’s lights, this gives rise to exactly the sort of translation problem that leads to
indeterminacy of meaning. Thus, as I argue in §2.4, semantic externalism fails to provide
a means of avoiding the indeterminacy of meaning. In §2.5, I suggest that, given the
limitations we find for an externalist conception of meaning, that theory offers nothing in
the way of meaning-constitutive facts that is not also available to Quine.
2.1
Føllesdal’s Argument for Indeterminacy
Raatikainen’s interpretation of Quine’s reasoning which gives rise to the indeterminacy
of translation has the following highlights. Most notably, Quine’s avowed behaviorism
devolves over the years into a rather attenuated form amounting to empiricism with
45
regard to language acquisition. In his own writings, Quine clearly accepts that language
aptitude is innate, 4 but, having rejected innate content and telepathy, holds that “each of
us learns his language by observing other people’s behavior and having his own faltering
verbal behavior observed and reinforced or corrected by others.” 5 It is Quine’s talk of
reinforcement (classic conditioning) that apparently gets him into trouble, since, as
Chomsky argued, a child’s vocabulary and linguistic ability “explodes” with relatively
little in the way of reinforcement. Indeed, it is Quine’s explicit sympathy with Skinner 6
and Chomsky’s crushing critique of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior 7 that justifies much of the
tendency to simply dismiss Quine’s indeterminacy theses. But it is one thing to be
sympathetic with a doctrine and argue from it to an unnerving conclusion; and it is
another to have no other route to that conclusion beyond taking the flawed doctrine as a
premise. And in spite of Quine’s insistence that the linguist has no other choice than to
be a behaviorist, Quine has commented approvingly of Føllesdal’s (1990) proposal that
all that matters to the indeterminacy of translation is the thesis of man-made meaning
(MMM): The meaning of a linguistic expression is the joint product of all the evidence
that helps learners and users of the language determine that meaning. 8
Quine writes:
Dagfinn has illuminated the indeterminacy of translation by clearing away
what does not pertain. What matters is just that linguistic meaning is a
function of observable behavior in observable circumstances….Broader
behaviorism is irrelevant; physicalism is irrelevant; monism is irrelevant. 9
4
See Quine, 1969b.
Quine, 1987, p. 5.
6
Quine, 1960, p. 80.
7
Chomsky, 1959.
8
Føllesdal, 1990.
9
Quine, 1990a, p. 110.
5
46
How does one get from MMM to the indeterminacy of meaning? Presumably the
rest of the argument goes something like this: Since what is evident in the use and
inculcation of language fails to specify a unique interpretation (i.e., a reference scheme)
of the language (i.e., interpretation is underdetermined by the evidence), and a reference
scheme is just the sort of thing that we must glean from this evidence, there is no fact of
the matter which interpretation is correct.
One might immediately object, as Searle has, that such an argument fails to
acknowledge speaker intentions, which, when taken into consideration, clearly constrain
the available interpretations, perhaps to just one.
The question of course is what
determines the relevant intentions if not what is evident in the use and inculcation of
language; and this is just what we are trying to find out. Moreover, there is some prima
facie reason to think that the evidence for meaning must be public.
Recall the
incoherence of what is sometimes called the Humpty Dumpty theory of meaning—that I
can mean with my utterances whatever I want to mean. Even Grice’s theory of meaning
involves conveying intentions, indicating that these intentions must be made public if
they are to succeed in determining meaning. 10 In any case, Searle’s objection shows that
this argument goes through only on the supposition that the evidence for meaning must be
public, which we will call the publicity principle (PP) and revisit in §2.4.
A kind of semantic behaviorism, which is more aptly called empiricism about
language acquisition, is still carrying the bulk of the load here, since empiricism is the
basis of both MMM and PP. And while it may yet be doubted that MMM and PP are
true, it is important to notice that one can reject Skinner’s story about operant
conditioning (traditional behaviorism) and still accept that linguistic meaning gets a
10
Grice, 1957.
47
foothold only through ostensive association of things (or properties) with words. The
latter is rather hard to deny. Underdetermination of theory by evidence is also a key
factor and is not without its detractors. And in fact the only underdetermination thesis
that could get from MMM and PP to indeterminacy of meaning is strong
underdetermination:
the claim that no possible evidence could decide between
competing reference schemes. It is just here, presumably, where semantic externalism
could help: the facts are “out there”, in some sense, determining meaning even if we
admit that the available evidence weakly underdetermines a reference scheme (i.e., we
are never in a position to find out what it is). But on this matter, I do not think that
Raatikainen is correct.
2.2
The Role of Internalism
Raatikainen’s position is that the ground of the indeterminacy thesis can be rejected if
there is another plausible account of what it is to understand a sentence or expression of
the language, such that understanding does not depend on knowledge of meanings. That
account, thinks Raatikainen, is entailed by externalism. So in what follows, we take up
the following question:
to what degree could semantic externalism, as outlined by
Putnam, avoid the indeterminacy of meaning?
Semantic externalism, as the name suggests, takes the meaning of S’s utterances
to be a function of matters external to S—specifically, the meaning of S’s terms is fixed
by facts that go beyond, in some sense, the head of this particular speaker. Regarding the
determination of reference, Putnam writes:
The extension of our terms depends upon the actual nature of the
particular things that serve as paradigms, and this nature is not, in general,
48
fully known to the speaker. Traditional semantic theory leaves out two
contributions to the determination of reference—the contribution of
society and the contribution of the real world; a better semantic theory
must encompass both. 11
Putnam goes on to argue that it would be “counterintuitive” to think that, for example,
‘water’, as it is used on Earth, means the same as ‘water’ as it is used on Twin-Earth,
although they refer to different things (H2O and XYZ respectively); “why not say, then,
[when our knowledge would not distinguish them] that ‘elm’ in my idiolect has the same
meaning as ‘beech’ in your idiolect, although they refer to different trees?” 12 Thus,
external facts play a role in what determines meaning, and meaning determines extension.
Regardless of one’s intuitions on this matter, I maintain (see §1.3) that reference
is a semantic notion, and that the indeterminacy thesis that concerns us is one involving
the representational content of referring expressions, which must, if they are referring
expressions, contain the means of distinguishing the haves from the have-nots (the rabbits
from the non-rabbits, for example). If the indeterminacy thesis depends on leaving out
the contribution of the real world, or the contribution of society, perhaps our problem has
been solved. What meaning-constitutive facts are available to the externalist, and not to
Quine?
Raatikainen is moved by the so-called “arguments from error and ignorance.”
Key to these arguments is the “general insight that there is often more to meaning than is
known by the average speaker, or even any speaker.” 13 The insight is essentially the
recognition that a speaker can successfully refer even when he is quite ignorant of the
facts regarding the thing to which he is referring. For example, when one utters the
11
Putnam, 1973, p. 294.
Putnam, 1973, fn 2, p. 295
13
Raatikainen, 2005, p. 410.
12
49
sentence “I wonder if wombats are friendly”, one successfully refers to wombats even
when the speaker knows no more about wombats than that they are some kind of animal.
Moreover, one’s “understanding” of what it is to be a wombat might in fact be quite
mistaken—for example, the speaker might have some notion that wombats are a kind of
bat—such that some other animal more closely satisfies the knowledge invoked when one
uses the term. And yet the term, as it is used by this speaker, nevertheless refers to
wombats, and not the thing the speaker apparently has in mind. Such an argument calls
into question the widely accepted view that speaker meaning is essentially tied to what
one knows (or believes).
One way to explain successful reference despite error and ignorance is to
countenance a “division of linguistic labor”. Putnam, for example, has suggested that not
everyone who has reason to use a word has to know the necessary and sufficient
conditions for membership in the extension of the word, or be able to recognize when
something belongs and when it does not. Although, Putnam appreciates, “[w]e could
hardly use such words as ‘elm’ and ‘aluminum’ if no one possessed a way of recognizing
elm trees and aluminum metal.” 14
Putnam’s externalism is thus the view that “the
features that are generally thought to be present in connection with a general name…are
all present in the linguistic community considered as a collective body.” 15
Tyler Burge extends Putnam’s thesis to all sorts of terms and mentation. That is,
while Putnam’s was a limited thesis about the meaning of a certain class of linguistic
expressions—namely, natural kind terms—Burge was concerned to show that the same
sorts of considerations apply to the content of individual mental states like belief. Even
14
15
Putnam, 1973, p. 291.
Putnam, 1973, p. 291, emphasis his.
50
my private thoughts that token my notably subjective wombat-concept refer to wombats
regardless of what I know. The same may be said for my thoughts involving ‘arthritis’,
‘red’, ‘sofa’, and a host of other terms. 16
Burge’s examples emphasize the rather intimate connection between linguistic
meaning and the content of individual states like belief. It suggests, contra Grice, the
priority of a pre-established language over speaker intentions, where linguistic meaning
depends on various factors, most conspicuously some weighted measure of the beliefs of
the whole linguistic community. So the semantic externalist rejects the commonsense
notion that every competent user of a natural kind term knows its meaning, while yet
maintaining that there are meanings and these determine extensions. This kind of “wide”
meaning is none other than the putative necessary and sufficient conditions for
membership in the extension, which are in effect recognized by the linguistic community
considered as a whole, 17 and which determine for each speaker of the language what his
use of one of these terms is about. As such, my claim, “Wombats are bats” is about
wombats, and consequently mistaken, since the putative necessary and sufficient
conditions for wombathood designate a class of creatures, none of which are bats.
This is supposed by Raatikainen to be exactly opposite Quine’s take on the
matter. Quine, claims Raatikainen, accepts that speakers learn meanings, in the sense
that one acquires dispositions to linguistic behavior, but rejects that these dispositions
determine reference. Raatikainen writes:
At first sight, one might think that Quine should be thought of as an
externalist, for he is certainly opposed to the traditional views on meaning,
16
Burge, 1979.
Since it is possible that we are all wrong about what it is to be a wombat, the putative necessary and
sufficient conditions include an empirical presupposition to refer to all and only things like this thing. I
will argue that such a presupposition fails to provide sufficient constraints on reference.
17
51
according to which meanings are mental or abstract entities grasped or
intuited by the mind. But looking closer, Quine’s view of meaning is
nevertheless internalistic. …; meaning, in Quine’s view, is still determined
by what is in the speaker (by his/her dispositions to verbal behavior)
considered in isolation from the speaker’s social and physical
environment. Meaning for him is “inside the skin.” 18
Raatikainen’s point seems to be that Quine’s notion of linguistic meaning is rooted in
individual understanding, and individual understanding is rather obviously internal to
speakers. Indeterminacy of meaning arises because, given this kind of internalism, verbal
behavior is thus the only thing that could fix meaning, and it seems rather plain that any
given person’s behavior and behavioral dispositions do not yield a unique interpretation.
Yet underdetermination of interpretation applies regardless of how meaning is
fixed, at least in the sense that the actual evidence yields various possibilities. So
Raatikainen’s move here is intended to block the second part of the indeterminacy thesis,
according to which there is no fact of the matter which interpretation among those
possible is correct. There is no fact of the matter according to Quine because meaning is
the sort of thing that if determined, is determined by what learners of the language can
come to know about what their teachers mean. But we cannot come to know what our
teachers mean, because all we have to go on is their behavior and behavior alone does not
yield a unique interpretation.
If, however, what the individual speaker means is
determined by a wider range of facts, no indeterminacy threatens from the fact that we
cannot glean from linguistic behavior alone which possible interpretation is correct.
Raatikainen’s proposal must be that externalism determines for the individual speaker
what is meant because meaning is a determinate fact for the larger community. But in
virtue of what is meaning determinate for the larger community?
18
Raatikainen, 2005, p. 407.
52
2.3
Externalism and the Role of Indexicality
Internalism is supposed to be a factor in the argument for indeterminacy in the sense that
it places undue limitations on what determines meaning: insofar as linguistic meaning is
rooted in internal matters, the evidence for linguistic meaning is limited to what we can
glean about the mental states of others. Even assuming mentalism (invoking mental
states to explain behavior), these states are only interpretable in behavior, in particular
linguistic behavior; so behavior is all we have to go on when deciphering meaning.
Internalism would account for Quine’s continued adherence to a kind of behaviorism, if
not Skinner’s. As late as 1990, Quine writes: “Where I have insisted on behaviorism is
in linguistics, because of how language is learned.” 19
Quine’s internalism, claims Raatikainen, has the consequence that “it is not
possible…for two speakers to know and believe and be disposed to do and say the same
things and yet mean something different by a word.” 20
But this is just what the
externalist denies. The externalist thinks he has shown, by way of Twin Earth thought
experiments, the details of which will be reviewed in this section, that it is possible for
two speakers to be identically disposed to do and say the same things and yet mean
something different by a word. If so, linguistic meaning is not solely the product of one’s
acquired understanding of what others mean. Other factors play a role in determining
meaning. Those factors, according to Putnam, are society and the “real world”. Society
plays a role by dividing up linguistic labor among experts of one sort or another. We will
consider the contribution of experts in the following section. The real world plays a
rather more substantive role, the significance of which will be considered here.
19
20
Quine, 1990c, p. 291.
Raatikainen, 2005, p. 407.
53
As noted above, Raatikainen suggests that externalism has this rather interesting
implication: “there is often more to meaning than is known by the average speaker, or
even any speaker” (emphasis mine).
Given Putnam’s hypothesis that meaning
supervenes on the linguistic community as a whole, why think that meaning can go
beyond what anyone knows? There is some evidence that Putnam suggests this—for
example, in what he says about the meaning of ‘water’ before and after the discovery that
water is H2O. In his Twin-Earth thought experiment, Putnam was concerned to show that
two people could have the same grasp of a term, in the sense of knowing all the same
“facts” relevant to its application, and yet be situated in distinct circumstances such that
we are inclined to say that each person must mean something different. That is, we seem
inclined to agree (I am told) that the English-speaking person who lives on Earth and uses
the term ‘water’, means H2O (and not XYZ), and the Twin-English-speaking person
living on Twin-Earth where the oceans, lakes, and streams are filled instead with XYZ
means with that same term XYZ (and not H2O). According to Putnam, this applies to
people on Earth and Twin-Earth even at a time when no one knows that what we call
‘water’ is H2O and what they call ‘water’ is XYZ. This suggests that meaning can go
beyond what anyone in the linguistic community knows.
Note how strange a suggestion this really is.
The reason that MMM is so
plausible, if not indispensable, is due to the “non-naturalness” of linguistic meaning.
Whatever causal link there is between words and the world is insufficient to fix meaning.
As Mark Richard puts the point, “Touch a cat and you touch an undetached cat part.
Smell a dog and you are causally in touch with the dog fusion, as well as any number of
54
miscellaneous scattered objects which include the dogs.” 21 But if meaning can somehow
be determinate in virtue of facts that no one knows, a causal story seems to be exactly
what is required. For Putnam, the causal story makes its way into meaning in virtue of
indexicality.
Putnam thinks that in the case of ‘water’, a speaker’s ostensive definition (H
points to a glass of water and says, “This liquid is called water”) involves an “empirical
presupposition” that the body of water H is pointing to “bears a certain sameness
relation” to most of the stuff H and others in H’s community have on other occasions
called ‘water’.
This presupposition acts as “the defeasible necessary and sufficient
condition for being water.” 22 It is defeasible in the sense that, if the presupposition is
clearly false—for example, when one is unwittingly pointing to a glass of, say, gin
instead of water—had the speaker known the glass contained gin instead of water, he
would not intend his ostensive definition to be accepted. Presumably, the same may be
said about one’s inclination to retract the claim should one find out that the glass
contained something, anything, that did not bear the same-liquid relation (“sameL”, as
Putnam calls it) to the stuff around here that we call ‘water’.
Clearly lots of stuff we have no past or current knowledge about could bear the
same-liquid relation to the stuff around here that we call ‘water’, so our ostensive
definition is not meant to preclude these heretofore un-ostended substances from being in
the extension of our ‘water’. Putnam thinks that it is a fact that we mean H2O and only
H2O even before we know that water is H2O, and we mean H2O because of this empirical
presupposition that decides what we should say about the XYZ case, were it actual.
21
22
Richard, 1998, p. 166.
Putnam, 1973, p. 290.
55
‘Water’, that is, has this “unnoticed indexical component”, and water around here
happens to be H2O, and that conjunction suffices to fix the meaning of the term. Putnam
sums up these considerations by stressing the role of scientific investigation in the
“determination” of meaning: “The key point is that the relation sameL is a theoretical
relation: whether something is or is not the same liquid as this may take an indeterminate
amount of scientific investigation to determine.” 23
The point seems to be that we decide what will count as water by our intention to
refer to all and only the stuff that is like this stuff, the stuff around here. And what
determines whether something is like this stuff? The “discovery” view at work here
assumes that the world alone decides that.
Here I will argue that this is a naïve
assumption—given variation among all things and “stuffs”, whether something is the
same kind of thing as that, or some stuff is the same kind of stuff as this, depends on what
features one takes to be theoretically relevant, and that is not something the world decides
at all.
Supposing there is this presupposition involved in our early ostensive definition
of ‘water’, does the presupposition help to determine the meaning of the term prior to the
development of a chemical theory that explains water in terms of its microstructure? It
seems rather plain that it does not, for it could not. That is because, contra Putnam,
bearing this certain sameness relation to—i.e., being the same liquid as—what others in
my community have on other occasions called ‘water’ hardly amounts to the defeasible
necessary and sufficient condition for being water. Earth water and Twin-Earth water
are, by hypothesis, the same in their phenomenological macro-properties though distinct
in their chemical compositions. So they are the same and distinct in different respects.
23
Putnam, 1973, p. 290, emphasis his.
56
And by hypothesis, prior to certain advances in chemistry, English speakers and TwinEnglish speakers are the same in their “narrow” content (what they “know” 24 about
water) as well as their intentions to use ‘water’ as others in their community do; though
they are distinct in their proximity to H2O. So, since neither community intends to rule
out as of yet undiscovered stuff “like” this stuff just because it is far away, nothing in the
collective intention to pick out the same liquid, or the same stuff, that one’s compatriots
pick out sheds any light whatsoever on which sorts of properties are even relevant to
deciding whether anyone has succeeded. 25
What does settle the relevancy problem is presupposed essentialism: the idea that
certain things, instances of natural kinds in particular, have certain properties
independently of human cognition and in virtue of which they belong to a natural
grouping.
If in fact there is widespread agreement among English speakers that
chemically unsophisticated Earthlings and Twin-Earthlings have different meanings for
‘water’, presupposed essentialism accounts for the agreement.
Community-wide presupposed essentialism behind the meaning of ‘water’ seems
to lend itself to resolving indeterminacy of meaning. Presupposed essentialism amounts
to an additional meaning-constitutive fact, perhaps an innate disposition of the sort
Chomsky posits is constitutive of universal grammar, such that ‘water’ has a determinate
meaning before or apart from what anyone knows about water. In virtue of presupposed
essentialism, we intend to pick out all and only the stuff that has the same essential nature
24
This begs the question to put it this way since, if externalism is correct, knowledge of water is knowledge
of H2O, even if speakers do not know that water is H2O. Narrow content, therefore, must be roughly
aligned with what speakers would be disposed to say in characterizing the nature of water.
25
As something of a side point, it is not clear why we would even take chemically unsophisticated English
speakers and Twin-English speakers to be distinct linguistic communities. The languages are indiscernible,
after all, in every other respect.
57
this stuff has. Since H2O is the “essence” of our watery stuff, whether we know it or not,
the watery stuff on Twin-Earth is not and could not be water.
It should be noted that the fact in question here is again an internal fact—an
innate (or acquired) disposition to see the world as containing natural kinds in the sense
that certain objects having independent existence belong to natural groups in virtue of
having certain essential properties in common. So despite appearances, the notion of
indexicality is not, or not obviously anyway, the rejection of the idea that internal states
ultimately determine meaning. Externalism has not yet, that is, moved meaning outside
the heads of speakers.
Still, presupposed essentialism is an empirical claim that could solve our problem;
and in fact Putnam’s thought experiment seems to count in favor of its being a fact about
us; if, that is, there is significant untutored agreement about what we should say about
XYZ. 26 Moreover, the notion that there are necessary and sufficient conditions to be
discovered—expert knowledge that determines linguistic meaning—seems parasitic on
the idea of essentialism.
Here I will just suppose that we do in fact have such a
disposition and explore to what extent meaning might be constituted by such a fact. I
assume the answer lies in whether this presupposition is defeasible or not. If, that is, we
could have reason to reject it and its rejection could find its way into meaning, having an
innate (or acquired) disposition to see the world and the things in it a particular way does
not resolve indeterminacy of meaning.
And there is good reason to think that
essentialism, presupposed or not, is likely false.
26
This is a big “if”, as Stephen Stich attempts to show. Culture seems to play a role in whether the
intuitions are as Putnam claims. Chomsky and Searle are also dubious of the intuition, for philosophical
reasons. And Jubien flatly rejects it.
58
Turning away from the fortunes of water for a moment, consider other
paradigmatic “natural kinds”: species, for example. No doubt taxonomy of living things
has been concerned with carving nature at its joints. Underlying the supposition that we
can carve nature at its joints is essentialism. Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural
selection, however, casts doubt on the notion of essential properties. Observing that
variation is so fundamental and ubiquitous that no two individuals are alike in every
respect, Charles Darwin suggested that species boundaries were arbitrary, if they could be
drawn at all. 27 Taxonomists today may be more sanguine about the reality of species but
they are still grappling with the problem of delineating them. Each program has its
advantages and disadvantages depending on what features—properties, that is—the
system is designed to track. This is the same problem noted earlier: individuals are
similar and distinct in different respects. How to specify which properties are relevant
for a grouping does not seem to be something the world alone can tell us. Indeed, guided
by the theory of evolution by natural selection, we seem to have discovered that the
mind-independent world does not contain categories of living things marked by essential
properties. It follows that the world plus a community-wide essentialist disposition does
not fully determine meaning for species terms. If the meaning of “dog”, for example,
depends on taxonomy, and taxonomy is a theoretical enterprise aimed at tracking features
of organisms we deem to be theoretically important, then taxonomy is underdetermined
by what the world has to give. Thus, the meaning of these terms is not made determinate
in virtue of a disposition to be essentialists about natural kinds.
With regard to water, we have a case that looks rather different from the
delineation of living things. We may be inclined to think that if anything truly is a
27
Darwin, 1859.
59
natural kind in Putnam’s sense, water is. That water is H2O is a genuine scientific
discovery, some will say, one that is comparatively free of whatever caprice infects
taxonomy of living things. But there is an analogous underdetermination involved in the
meaning of ‘water’. One need only take heed of the fact that everything we call water is
not strictly H2O to see that a certain amount of variability (garden variety impurities as
well as “heaviness”, a measure of isotopic variation involving deuterium) is tolerated in
what we take to be in the extension of the term ‘water’. 28 Thus it is incumbent upon the
essentialist to say how indexicality and nature determine meaning when it is apparent that
there is always some variability within kinds, and hence some latitude in what might be
admitted in the extension of natural kind terms. I submit that we ought to take seriously
the “rogue” intuition that we might just as easily admit XYZ if we should find some in
the world.
I have argued that indexicality does not suffice to move speaker meaning outside
the heads of speakers. The world may be what it is, but a system of mind-independent
categories marked by essential properties it evidently is not. It seems that we can
“discover” this, guided by theory of course, even if we come into the world wired to think
that there are natural groups of this sort. And without such dispositions playing a
determinate role in meaning, the problem again becomes one of gleaning meaning on the
basis of observable behavior in observable circumstances. It is this fact that gives rise in
every case to indeterminacy of meaning.
28
As Paul Teller recounts, “Mark Wilson liked to point out that (at that time) the percentage of H2O in
celery was higher than that in the water in Like Erie.” For an extended discussion of this point, see
Chomsky (2000), 148ff. Chomsky points out that when we put a tea bag in a glass of water, we call it tea,
but if the tea bag were located somewhere in line behind the faucet, we would probably call the stuff
flowing out of the faucet water, albeit with a funny color and taste.
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2.4
Externalism and the Role of Expert Knowledge
According to Putnam, “traditional semantic theory leaves out two contributions to the
determination of reference—the contribution of society and the contribution of the real
world.” I have argued that the real world does not get us as far as we would like. Even
in the case of ‘water’, the fact that the watery stuff around here is (mostly) H2O has little
bearing on what we ought to say should we find some watery stuff (i.e.,
phenomenologically and functionally identical to H2O) that is not H2O. What we ought
to say reflects a theoretical decision. Perhaps, then, the full force of externalism is
brought to bear only when we consider the role of society—in particular, the role of
expert knowledge in fixing reference.
According to Putnam, some experts possess
knowledge of the necessary and sufficient conditions for membership in the extension of
the term while others still possess the ability to recognize when something belongs to the
extension and when it does not. The knowledge of the few bears on the meaning of the
many.
One problem immediately presents itself:
if, as I have argued, the role of
indexicality and all that that entails 29 is insufficient to fix reference, then externalism is
just the thesis that meaning is a function of expert knowledge. That thesis does not seem
to move meaning outside the heads of some speakers, and if that knowledge is to provide
a fixed meaning for the rest of us, that knowledge has to be inferred from what the expert
is disposed to say, and surely a theory about what the expert means will be
underdetermined by what the expert has to say. This is because the (world-directed)
theory, which does the work of establishing for the expert, and in turn for the linguistic
29
E.g., how the world is, including how we are, which may include an innate predisposition to be
essentialists about natural kinds.
61
community, the reference of certain natural kind terms, is itself underdetermined by
evidence. If so, semantic facts that depend on this knowledge necessarily involve us in
the same kind of “translation” problem that Quine was at pains to reveal as the source of
indeterminacy of meaning.
Quine insisted that the proper ground for his indeterminacy of meaning was
underdetermination of physical theory by all possible evidence, where “all possible
evidence” is to be construed as all observable (though perhaps not observed) events
across the spectrum of time in the actual world.
Physical theories can be at odds with each other and yet compatible with
all possible data in the broadest sense. … This is a point on which I expect
wide agreement, if only because the observational criteria of theoretical
terms are commonly so flexible and fragmentary. People who agree on
this general point need not agree as to how much of physical theory is
unfixed in this strong sense; some will acknowledge such slack only in the
highest and most speculative reaches of physical theory, while others see it
as even extending to common-sense traits of macroscopic bodies. 30
This is known as the “argument from above”: the underdetermination of physical theory
by evidence has consequences for the meaning of theoretical terms. The question is
where we draw the line between theoretical terms and non-theoretical terms.
As a relatively clear example of a theoretical term, we might suppose some
theorist has invoked ‘dark matter’ to account for, among other things, gravitational
effects on visible matter. How does the theorist’s expert knowledge fix the meaning of
the theoretical terms involved? One would think that the theorist engages with his peers,
writes papers, gives talks; in short, articulates the theory however he can, connecting it
with evidence and other bits of common knowledge in attempt to convince others of its
(probable) truth. But if that is the case, the meaning of ‘dark matter’ must be inferred
30
Quine, 1970, p. 179.
62
from all of this evidence, which simply comes down to behavior and context. Whether
you call this inference “translation” or “interpretation”, there is surely more than one way
to understand what the theorist has in mind because there is more than one way to
account for the evidence for dark matter itself. If linguistic meaning is just a function of
the evidence for what the theorist has in mind, the meaning of theoretical terms is pretty
clearly indeterminate.
But it can plausibly be objected that expert knowledge, of the sort to which the
externalist appeals, is not itself speculative enough to be underdetermined by all possible
evidence. Externalists are not after all spelling out the conditions for the meaning of
‘dark matter’; they are spelling out the conditions for the meanings of ‘water’, ‘elm’, and
‘aluminum’—things we can experience rather directly. If the expertise that settles the
meanings of these terms is not itself underdetermined by what we could find out about
the world, then the theory of linguistic meaning involving these terms stands a better
chance of yielding a single correct interpretation of sentences containing them.
I have already argued in §2.3 that experts about water (and other natural kinds)
are engaged in physical theory and that pragmatic decisions have a bearing on what water
is, and so what ‘water’ means.
claim:
But Quine’s conjecture involves a much more radical
‘rabbit’ is a theoretical term in the sense that it might refer to rabbits or
undetached rabbit parts or rabbit-stages (etc.) depending solely on how such things ought
to be individuated. But how such things ought to be individuated does not seem to be
given by how the external world is. How things ought to be individuated is the question
of what it is to be the “same” thing over time, which is answered simply in terms of how
we interpret the grammatical devices of the language.
63
Now the present suggestion is that experts determine how such things ought to be
individuated. One might even suppose that the meaning of these terms is fixed noninductively; that is, merely in virtue of playing a certain role among the theorist’s beliefs.
Since this flies in the face of the publicity principle—that the evidence for meaning must
be public—we should consider whether the externalist ought to reject the publicity of
linguistic meaning. Rejecting publicity is tantamount to accepting the view that the
content of mental states determines linguistic meaning, though the content of mental
states outstrips what can be communicated (which, frankly, does not sound very
externalist at all). Searle, in fact, seems to take this line when he complains that Quine
simply fails to take into account speaker intentions as furnishing the supposed
indiscernible fact of the matter. 31 Prima facie, this appears to be just the rejection of
externalism, but it is not. Externalism is a thesis about what determines meaning, and
thus can spell out the conditions for having determinate meanings without regard for our
epistemic limitations. Thus, externalism minus publicity implies that the knowledge of
the expert is sufficient to fix the meaning of whatever theoretical terms are tied to the
theory in question. This preserves the insight of MMM since amid the evidence relevant
for meaning is the evidence the expert takes into account in formulating his theory.
The problem with this view—((externalism + MMM) – publicity)—is its failure
to avoid Quine’s problem and thus its failure to provide determinate meaning. Simply
put, if a reference scheme for the language is determined by the knowledge of the
experts, there must be some fact that determines who the experts are, but where might we
find such a fact? Suppose that the meaning of ‘rabbit’ and other natural kinds could be
31
See Føllesdal (1990) for an extended criticism of Searle’s arguments against indeterminacy of
translation.
64
fixed by expert knowledge. In what would this expert knowledge consist? Ted Sider, for
example—an expert in fundamental ontology—argues that our rabbit talk picks out
instantaneous stages (see §1.3). His argument appeals to how well his theory (to be
elaborated in Chapters 3 and 4) solves certain metaphysical puzzles that arise in ordinary
discourse about objects that persist through time. But his theory thereby necessitates
reinterpreting lots of ordinary claims: for example, the claim that that is the same rabbit
we saw yesterday means that that bears a certain relation (notably not identity) to a
previous stage. Sider’s ontology, under this hypothesis about meaning, thus “determines”
a reference scheme but does not appear to affect what we say about the world. The
question is: what determines what Sider means?
The externalist clearly thinks that the world goes some of the way in determining
this. I have tried to show that the world cannot go far enough—theoretical decisions are
a necessary component of what constitutes a kind, and rabbits and rabbit-stages are
distinct kinds. All that is left then for the externalist are the theoretical decisions of the
experts, which might be sufficient except that in the case of fundamental ontology, there
appears to be a question about who the actual experts are, since Sider’s is not the only
theory consistent with all the evidence about the fundamental constituents of reality. If
the evidence does not favor a particular ontology, it surely cannot determine the true
expert, so again, it appears that externalism gets us no closer to determinate meaning.
It remains open to object that, independently of actual evidence, there may still be
a fact about which ontology is the best explanation for the evidence, and that it is this fact
that determines who the experts are, and hence the meaning of ‘rabbit’. This is the
suggestion that meaning is only weakly underdetermined by evidence. I will forego a
65
reply to this objection until Chapter 4, at which time we consider the role of natural
properties in the determination of meaning.
2.5
How Internalist is Quine?
What was supposed to avoid the indeterminacy of meaning was the externalist’s appeal to
factors outside the heads of speakers: facts about our social and physical environment
that are somehow unavailable to Quine. I have argued that although externalism smacks
of the idea that external matters determine internal ones, insofar as these external matters
involve just the beliefs and dispositions of other speakers, it is not so clear that
externalism is as externalist as it first appears. We may now consider how Quine’s own
view diverges from what externalism actually has to offer.
What remains obscured in this discussion is the fact that ‘meaning’ involves a
systematic ambiguity—namely, the old distinction between speaker meaning and
linguistic meaning; the former being subjective and the latter intersubjective. Whatever
one’s theory of meaning, no one doubts that there is often a discrepancy between what I
might be inclined to say and what I ought to, given that language is intersubjective and
thus subject to normative constraints. That I apply ‘rabbit’ even to hares is a mistake on
my part, and this is because there is some recognized distinction such that hares are not
rabbits. Surely the world itself provides distinctions; I argued that it provides too many.
For just as Darwin pointed out, there is always variability between individuals, and yet
certain variations are singled out as significant such that otherwise very “rabbity”
creatures do not fall under our term ‘rabbit’. This reflects a theoretical decision, one that
66
has bearing on what the term means, regardless of what the user of that term is disposed
to say.
The insight of externalism is to make linguistic meaning sensitive to the world
and to these theoretical decisions, both of which place normative constraints on how an
individual speaker ought to use the language. Externalism makes sense of the idea that
we are speaking English, a language common to us despite the obvious disparity of
linguistic dispositions across speakers. The externalist therefore rejects the idea that
narrow content—i.e., content which supervenes solely on the intrinsic features
(dispositions) of the individual—fully determines linguistic meaning. But the externalist
does not thereby reject that there is narrow content, which was invoked in the first place
to describe the psychological state of the speaker who is mistaken about the extension of
a term he employs. 32
Raatikainen claims that Quine’s view of meaning is “internalist”—“determined
by what is in the speaker (by his/her dispositions to verbal behavior) considered in
isolation from the speaker’s social and physical environment”. But the charge seems to
gloss over the distinction between speaker meaning and linguistic meaning. It is surely
right that according to Quine there can be no more to speaker meaning than what is “in
the speaker”, but this maps onto the externalist notion of narrow content. 33 If, situated as
we are with respect to a glass of XYZ and H2O respectively, my twin and I each claim
that that is water, there is a sense in which we “mean” the same thing. Namely, our
dispositions to use ‘water’ are identical and we each intend to be picking out all and only
32
Putnam (1973) also uses the word “concept” for this notion. See Martinich, 2001, p. 290.
Burge, I should note, is an “extreme externalist” who disavows the existence of narrow content
altogether, but there are a number of arguments that purport to show the explanatory necessity of narrow
content even if Putnam is right about typical natural kind terms.
33
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the stuff that is like the stuff around here that we call ‘water’. So with respect to each of
our worlds, we each say something true. In this sense we share, according to Putnam,
narrow content. The thought experiments are supposed to show that this content alone
could not determine linguistic meaning—a speaker’s social and physical environment
play an ineliminable role. Is Quine’s notion of linguistic meaning insensitive to these
contributions?
Raatikainen’s charge, it seems to me, is false if he means to claim that Quine’s
view of linguistic meaning is insensitive to a speaker’s social and physical environment.
The thesis of man-made meaning says that the meaning of a linguistic expression is the
joint product of all the evidence that helps learners and users of the language determine
that meaning. That evidence, even for Quine, excludes none of what the externalist has
available to him.
Ostension involves external things, after all, and communication
presupposes a social structure ‘trimming and training individuals to take the same
shape’. 34 On the first page of Word and Object, Quine writes:
Each of us learns his language from other people, through the observable
mouthing of words under conspicuously intersubjective circumstances.
Linguistically, and hence conceptually, the things in sharpest focus are the
things that are public enough to be talked of publicly, common and
conspicuous enough to be talked of often, and near enough to sense to be
quickly identified and learned by name; it is to these that words apply first
and foremost.
Pages later, Quine underscores the importance of social factors in shaping the degree to
which we speak “the same language” given variability of beliefs across speakers:
The uniformity that unites us in communication and belief is a uniformity
of resultant patterns overlying a chaotic subjective diversity of
connections between words and experience. Uniformity comes where it
34
Paraphrasing Quine’s lovely topiary analogy on p. 8 of Word and Object.
68
matters socially; hence rather in point of intersubjectively conspicuous
circumstances of utterance than in point of privately conspicuous ones. 35
In these pages, Quine hints at an externalist notion of meaning: Linguistic meaning has
its basis in ostensive association of things (or properties) with words; and so all there is to
linguistic meaning is what can be observed in just these circumstances. 36 Externalism
seems to amount to no more than that.
35
36
Quine, 1960, p. 8.
See Davidson, 2003.
69
3. Innate Content
The argument of Chapter 2 comes down to the claim that facts about the external world
are insufficient to fix a reference scheme. One problem is that kinds, even so-called
“natural kinds”, are partly determined by theoretical decisions. I argued that individuals
“of a kind” vary, and that even if we are innately predisposed to be essentialists, we could
come to discover that essential properties are not in the offing, and that such a discovery
could find its way into meaning. But all this shows is that what speakers ought to say
about rabbits and cats and the rest is constrained by the pragmatic decisions of scientists.
In most of science, however, a particular theory stands out as the best explanation, and in
that sense does determine reference. So that argument does not show that there is no fact
about what we mean. This last step is supposed to be licensed by the claim that it is a
metaphysical theory—namely, a theory of the persistence conditions of objects, or, as it is
sometimes called, fundamental ontology—which is necessary to determine a reference
scheme and there is nothing in the external world to fix fundamental ontology into the
language. It remains open to my opposition to suggest that a particular metaphysical
theory could nevertheless be the best explanation in the relevant sense, or that
fundamental ontology is innate. We will consider the first suggestion in Chapter 4 and
the second suggestion here.
Relevant to the innateness hypothesis is some influential work by Renée
Baillargeon (1993), which attempts to test a particular hypothesis: whether pre-linguistic
infants conceive of objects over time as adults do. Adults, according to Baillargeon,
70
make a number of very specific, though perhaps unarticulated, assumptions regarding the
persistence conditions of objects; assumptions amounting to what she calls “a concept of
object permanence”:
In the realm of infancy research, investigators have also sought to
characterize infants’ physical world. Most of this research has focused on
issues of content, and more specifically, on infants’ understanding of
occlusion events. When adults see an object occlude another object, they
typically make three assumptions. The first is that the occluded object
continues to exist behind the occluding object. The second is that the
occluded object retains the spatial and physical properties it possessed
prior to occlusion. The third is that the occluded object is still subject to
physical laws; its displacements, transformations, and interactions with
other objects do not become capricious or arbitrary but remain regular and
predictable. Collectively, these assumptions are generally referred to in
the developmental literature as a concept of object permanence or, more
broadly, as an object concept. 1
Baillargeon goes on to argue that, contra Piaget’s experimental findings in the mid-1950s,
new experiments that do not rely on manual search tasks, which may have been an
obstacle to obtaining accurate information about infants’ purely cognitive capabilities,
“suggest that young infants’ understanding of occlusion events is strikingly similar to that
of adults.” 2
Though this is perhaps not one of Baillargeon’s concerns, this is interesting
because it suggests that a concept of object permanence is something we are born with, or
acquire at such an early stage of life that we are surely born with something that
determines its acquisition.
The empirical suggestion of innate content is important
because it is innate content of this very sort that seems to provide one plausible response
to the argument I have been developing here: ‘rabbit’ refers to rabbits, the argument
1
2
Baillargeon, 1993, p. 571, italics in original.
Baillargeon, 1993, p. 572.
71
would go, because we innately conceive of objects (like rabbits) as enduring entities. I
am going to argue that there is simply no basis for this claim.
As Baillargeon observes in the above quotation, our adult concept of object
permanence is a collection of assumptions regarding the ontology of physical objects that
go in and out of view. Notably, we (adults) expect objects to continue to exist as they
were and maintain their causal efficacy when occluded. How exactly these expectations
are articulated in the mind is an interesting question, but we will here assume that
however it happens, these amount to internal representations of the sort used in
negotiating the landscape of life—i.e., they are encoded in neural processes that issue in
behavior. One way to pick out the relevant representations is by using language that
describes their content. We might say, for example, that objects are represented as mindindependent and enduring. Another way to pick out the relevant representations is by
using language that describes their physical character—we might say that objectknowledge is represented by some complicated pattern of neural activity that issues in
recognizable behavior given certain kinds of stimuli. Either way, we aim to pick out the
same event-type, a type of internal (mental) representation.
Individuating mental representations in terms of their content is rather tricky since
content is not a publicly observable feature of neural activity. Thus, content attributions
(to others) are theoretical—they stand or fall on evidence. But as is the case with all
theory, it would be naïve to think that evidence is the whole story. Interpretation of
evidence involving background assumptions plays an ineliminable role in theory
confirmation and/or falsification.
We bring to every experiment a hypothesis that
together with other assumptions materially implies (we hope) some observable
72
consequence that the experiment is designed to test. Thus, as Pierre Duhem observed,
experimental results leave us with some choice about how to revise our theory.
Hypotheses regarding mental content are no different. Background assumptions
include claims about what objects are “really” like and experiments designed to test
infants’ object concept rely on behavioral evidence. In §3.2, I will try to make explicit
the background assumptions involved in confirming Baillargeon’s hypothesis. In §3.3, I
will argue that background assumptions are doing all of the relevant work involved in
moving from the behavioral evidence to the content ascription.
Change those
assumptions, and the content ascription will change as well, and in just the way that
makes trouble for resolving the indeterminacy problem. In §3.4, I will suggest further
that no amount of evidence could decide between certain competing hypotheses about
what the infant actually represents—i.e., what content ascription best models what the
infant has to “know” about objects—because the content ascription depends on a
metaphysical theory, which is not the sort of thing for which there is non-linguistic
evidence. Given the epistemological problem of discerning which metaphysical theory
the infant “employs”, I argue that it is illegitimate to attribute content that depends on
one. The relevant content ascriptions are, after all, theories of persistence conditions.
But such theories arise from language—they attempt to reconcile the concrete reality of
what we say with the abstract reality of what we must mean if our ordinary claims about
the world form a consistent set. Internal consistency, coherence with other doctrines, and
elegance—all pragmatic considerations—seem to constitute all there is in the way of
argument for one theory of persistence over another. Thus, it would be circular to argue
that infants employ a particular theory which partly determines linguistic meaning on the
73
basis of what we take our adult theory to be; especially in light of all the philosophical
wrangling over what our adult theory is, or should be. All of this, I will argue in §3.5,
has some bearing on what we can truly say about our adult concept of object permanence.
But first, let us consider a negative argument for innate content, and how innate content is
supposed to solve our problem.
3.1
The Innateness Hypothesis
Empirical evidence for innate content is important because innate content seems to
provide one plausible response to the argument for the indeterminacy of meaning. But
even without any evidence at all, innate content appears to be something of a necessity
given Chomsky’s systematic refutation of Quine’s empirical assumptions.
In New
Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind (2000), Chomsky writes:
Quine puts forth the “naturalistic thesis” that “The world is as natural
science says it is, insofar as natural science is right” (Quine 1992); but that
is not informative until we are told what “natural science” is. … He takes
natural science to be “theories of quarks and the like.” What is “like
enough” to be part of science? Neurons are evidently allowed, along with
certain psychological processes: thus language, Quine asserts, “is linked to
our neural input by neural mechanisms of association and conditioning.” 3
Regarding Quine’s view about how we acquire language, Chomsky goes on to say: “The
empirical evidence is overwhelming that association and conditioning have little to do
with language acquisition or use.” 4 Indeed, the so-called “poverty of stimulus” is widely
regarded to be sufficient to show that association and conditioning “have little to do” with
language use and acquisition.
3
4
Chomsky, 2000, p. 92.
Chomsky, 2000, p. 92.
74
But, as I hope to have established here, the argument for indeterminacy does not
depend on defending Skinner’s behaviorism. If Chomsky is simply objecting to the idea
that purely random babbling behavior becomes fixed in humans as language due in large
part to the powers of positive and negative reinforcement, that, even if true, does not by
itself refute the indeterminacy of meaning.
The Skinnerian picture of language
acquisition and use is undoubtedly false, but there is a kernel of truth there: no human
raised by wolves ends up speaking a human language. Thus, I take it, while association
and conditioning are surely not sufficient for language acquisition and use, association, at
least, may be seen as necessary in the sense that an interpretation of the expressions of
the language compels an inference from use. It is this fact that seems to give rise to
indeterminacy.
But Chomsky’s implicit point seems to have more traction: Chomsky frequently
complains that Quine’s “naturalistic thesis” is undefended, and so arbitrarily constrains
empirical inquiry in the domain of mental content. In particular, it is arbitrary to hold
that, since claims about conceptual content cannot be reduced to ‘quarks and the like’, the
only evidence for conceptual content is linguistic behavior. And only from this does it
follow that inquiry into conceptualization is inseparable from inquiry into language use
and acquisition, 5 a view that may have “misled” Quine to think that a “concept of object
permanence” is acquired rather late, well after language acquisition begins.
So as
Chomsky views the matter, Quine has no basis for the claim that
“reification of bodies comes in stages in one’s acquisition of language,”
the “last stage” being recognition of identity over time. If that is an
empirical hypothesis, one wants to know how it can be put forth with such
confidence. It is surely not obvious, or even particularly plausible. We
5
See Quine, 1960, p. 3: “Conceptualization on any considerable scale is inseparable from language, and
our ordinary language of physical things is about as basic as language gets.”
75
need not keep to anecdotal evidence; infant studies of past years provide
considerable reason to believe that such “reification” appears in the first
few months of life, long before any manifestation of language. 6
Chomsky then cites the work of Baillargeon and others as providing that “considerable
reason.”
It is worth accepting this criticism and considering an argument along the
following lines: If “recognition of identity over time” appears in the first few months of
life, it does not depend on language acquisition; and if it does not depend on language
acquisition, it is innately determined; and if it is innately determined, it is a cognitively
real semantic rule that constrains linguistic meaning and does so non-inferentially. That
is, as a nascent English speaker, I do not need to infer from linguistic behavior in publicly
observable circumstances that you mean to refer to rabbits and not rabbit-stages with
your use of the term, ‘rabbit’. It is true simply because you and I share the same
genetically determined “language acquisition device”, to speak in Chomsky’s terms, that
determines linguistic meaning in the only sense in which you and I do speak the same
language.
Part of our shared language acquisition device is a concept of object
permanence.
Though the suggestion of innateness is what interests us, I will here be focusing
on Baillargeon’s more modest claim, evidently shared by Chomsky, that the empirical
evidence favors the hypothesis that pre-linguistic infants possess an object concept that
entails a well-defined notion of identity over time. My purpose here is to question this
claim via an exploration of two related questions: 1) What does it mean to be in
possession of a concept of “object permanence”; and 2) To what degree do current
findings taken at face value actually support the supposition that infants have the concept
6
Chomsky, 2000, p. 92-93.
76
that Baillargeon attributes to them? I will argue that current studies demonstrate only
very weak constraints on infants’ object concept; that Baillargeon’s data can be
reinterpreted according to distinct metaphysical theories about the persistence conditions
of objects; and that this possibility is precisely why meaning is indeterminate.
Again, this is important because if anything counts as a “cognitively real semantic
rule” that could systematize how we conceive of particular kinds of things in a way that
makes sense of the rapidity with which we acquire language given the poverty of
stimulus, it is our most primitive object concept. It is plausible that the way we represent
objects primitively has bearing on how we represent kinds (like rabbits), and this has
bearing on the meanings of terms used to express those concepts. This is precisely how
an innate predisposition to conceptualize objects a certain way would block Quine’s
indeterminacy thesis: our interpretation of the expressions of the language may yet be
underdetermined by actual behavior in the sense that there is more than one theory of
meaning (more than one conceptual scheme) that would account for all linguistic
behavior. But there is nevertheless a fact about which of these theories is correct, a fact
made determinate, in part, in virtue of innate content.
Regarding his own empirical assumptions, Chomsky is explicit about two things:
that the evidence for meaning quite likely goes beyond linguistic behavior; and that what
we discover may not be reducible to—i.e., explained in terms of—fundamental physics
(quarks and the like). I will be arguing that, even given Chomsky’s assumptions, to the
extent that the evidence for our most primitive object concept—this internal rule that is
supposed to constrain interpretation of subsequent linguistic behavior—allows for
77
multiple interpretations according to distinct ontologies, so does it fail to provide the
constraints claimed for it regarding linguistic meaning.
My argument here mirrors the one Chomsky employs above against Quine:
Chomsky claims that Quine has no basis for his rather stringent naturalism (the reduction
of intentional facts to ‘quarks and the like’), which places arbitrary constraints on
evidence; and moreover, the evidence suggests against these constraints. I argue below
that there is no basis to hold that innate content solves Quine’s problem since what is
needed is evidence that favors a unique interpretation of infants’ object concept, but
Baillargeon’s evidence does not distinguish between interpretations that map onto distinct
theories of persistence.
3.2
Testing the Hypothesis
Consider the evidence for adult assumptions, given by 1-3 below, about object
permanence:
1) “the occluded object continues to exist behind the occluding object”;
2) “the occluded object retains the spatial and physical properties it possessed prior
to occlusion”; and
3) “the occluded object is still subject to physical laws; its displacement,
transformations, and interactions with other objects do not become capricious or
arbitrary but remain regular and predictable.”
Presumably, the claim that adults make these three assumptions is a testable hypothesis—
we can just ask them. More expeditiously, one can make the following argument: the
primary reason I have for thinking that all adults have this sort of object concept stems
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from the fact that I have it, which I know on the basis of introspection; and since I am
also entitled to think that anything very much like me in relevant respects will have a
concept very much like mine, it is reasonable to suppose that other adult English speakers
share the basic features that determine my object concept. That this is a gross violation
of the criteria for inductive strength is unproblematic since it is clearly testable by a
simple process of polling. Moreover, there is a significant body of research involving
manual tasks demonstrating that children as young as 2 years of age have a welldeveloped object concept exhibiting assumptions 1)-3). 7
I think that there is good reason to worry about what it means to say that adults
assume 1)-3), and the general point I attempt to make in the following is that 1)-3) are
consistent with various interpretations of what these claims mean. I will for now forgo an
argument to that end beyond the mere suggestion, to be elaborated in the final section of
this chapter, that the kind of trouble we find here for inferring the “correct” content of
infants’ object concept ought to make one wonder what in the world could establish the
adult content necessary for determinate meaning. For now, it will suffice to bring out
that trouble.
Since we cannot ask infants what they think about objects, and we cannot trust
that their manual dexterity is sufficient to indicate what they think about objects, we must
rely on looking time data. Looking time data for infants’ representation of the continued
existence of occluded objects has the following character: subjects tested looked reliably
longer at an “impossible” scenario juxtaposed with a possible one, indicating surprise at
the impossible scenario and expectation of the possible one. We could even say that the
expectation of the possible scenario is the very thing being tested, as this expectation just
7
See Baillargeon, 1993, pp. 571-574 for examples and references.
79
is the representation of object permanence under a coarser-grained description. So one
underlying assumption here is that if a subject spends more time looking at A than B,
where A and B are alike in every way except one, this is evidence that the subject is
surprised by the difference depicted by A, and so is evidence for an expectation more in
line with the depiction given by B. That we tend to look longer at things that are
surprising to us is perhaps independently testable; again against what adults do in
corroboration with what they say and their similarity in relevant respects to infants of the
same species. I accept these assumptions as they are minimal, plausible, and some
assumptions are going to be necessary to get any scientific inquiry underway.
Actual experimentation on infants involved a series of conditions that were
carefully constructed to avoid possible reinterpretations of the data.
In particular,
researchers sought to design experiments that would rule out alternative explanations,
such as explanations that appeal to the fact that infants are already attuned to object
disappearances in their actual environments and would thus be surprised by certain kinds
of disappearances (e.g., implosion, dissolving) regardless of their object concept; as well
as alternative explanations based on the possibility that infants repeat prior actions with
the expectation of producing the prior results of those actions. For example, an infant
tracking an object that goes behind a screen and comes out the other side appearing to be
something else typically looks back to the screen after the new object appears. This fact
might be understood in either of two ways: the infant expects the original object to
continue behind the screen and reappear as such; or the infant expects to produce the
original object where it was last seen.
While seemingly less plausible, the latter
interpretation held sway prior to about 1980.
Piaget, in fact, had argued rather
80
persuasively that infants up to 9 months old do not have a concept of independent
existence—that everything is for the infant a product of its own action. 8
Baillargeon’s set of experiments indicating a very early emergence of a concept of
object permanence is supposed to have refuted Piaget’s findings and ruled out
reinterpretations of the sort noted above. The literal conditions and results of one such
series are given below for reference:
In a series of experiments, 5½-month-olds (Baillargeon et al., 1985) and
4½-month-olds (Baillargeon et al., 1987) were habituated to a screen that
rotated back and forth through a 180° arc, in the manner of a drawbridge.
Following habituation, a box was placed behind the screen and the infants
saw a possible and an impossible test event. In the possible event, the
screen stopped when it reached the occluded box; in the impossible event,
the screen rotated through the 180° arc, as though the box were no longer
behind it. Both the 5½- and the 4½-month-old infants looked reliably
longer at the impossible than at the possible event, suggesting that they (a)
represented the existence of the box behind the screen; (b) understood that
the screen could not rotate through the space occupied by the box; and
hence (c) expected the screen to stop and were surprised in the impossible
event that it did not. 9
Further experiments were conducted to rule out the possibility that infants were merely
looking longer at the impossible event because it lasted longer than the possible event,
which stopped when the rotating screen actually hit the box. The same conditions were
used with 3½-month-olds, with the result that fast habituators in that group shared the
looking time results of the older infants. All of this is taken to show that infants as young
as 3½ months, like adults, represent the continued existence of occluded objects. Further
experiments were conducted which were taken to show that infants’ object concept is rich
enough to contain detailed knowledge about what is possible and what is not regarding
the interaction of two objects.
8
9
Piaget, 1954.
Baillargeon, 1993, p. 576.
81
Baillargeon’s interpretation of the experiments appears to be exemplary scientific
reasoning. The conclusion that infants represent the continued existence of occluded
objects is inferred from infants’ behavior in carefully controlled settings.
After
familiarization with a rotating screen (habituation), the screen rotates away from the
infant toward a box, occluding the box just before the screen is either stopped by the box
or proceeds through its arc unimpeded.
So the infant sees the box, then the box
disappears behind the screen. If the infant represents the now-occluded box as existing,
the infant will expect the screen to be stopped by it. If the infant expects the screen to
stop, the infant will be surprised if this does not happen. If the infant is surprised by what
does happen, the infant will look longer than if these expectations are met. The infant
does look longer when the screen proceeds through its arc unimpeded than when the
screen stops where the box should have been. Thus, the infant represents the occluded
box as existing.
The argument of course is not valid but it is a typical case of hypothesis
confirmation. It rests on the idea that if it were not the case that infants represent the
continued existence of occluded objects, then it would not be the case that infants look
longer at events that appear to conflict with the continued existence of occluded objects.
That we do have positive looking time data then is good reason to accept the hypothesis.
This version of the argument is valid, but the antecedent of the conditional premise is, I
think, ambiguous. That is, I think it can be shown that the representation of the continued
existence of occluded objects has multiple interpretations, and thus, does not supply the
requisite evidence to think that meaning is made determinate by it.
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3.3
Alternative Interpretations
These experiments are supposed to provide evidence for the claim that very young infants
represent objects much like adults do, where the adult representational content is given by
1)-3) in §3.2. According to Baillargeon, very young infants expect objects to continue to
exist, and they have expectations about causal processes that the occluded object can and
cannot participate in. Reinterpretations of the data have been anticipated and set aside
with further experiments.
I will argue in this section that certain other ways of
reinterpreting the data have not been considered and set aside.
Consider, for example, the hypothesis that ordinary objects are temporal slices of
four-dimensional space-time worms. 10 Ted Sider’s four-dimensionalism is the view that
the things we ordinarily name, quantify over, and discuss are stages in just this sense. On
this view, we understand reality as consisting of myriad 4-D space-time worms, each
having temporal and spatial parts. At every time-slice, each worm has some extant
spatial parts that are about to be replaced by entirely distinct spatial parts. Spatial parts at
a time are called “stages”. Stages are the things we name and talk about—they are what
Sider calls “continuants”. The odd thing about Sider’s continuants is that they do not
continue in the ordinary sense of that word. Stages are constantly being replaced by new
stages, and so a stage does not continue to exist through any temporal change, and so
does not continue to exist through occlusion events. And if ordinary objects do not
continue to exist, there is nothing that could retain spatial and physical properties, again
10
Another kind of four-dimensionalism not presented here is what Sider calls “orthodox fourdimensionalism.” Orthodox four dimensionalism takes continuants—the things named and quantified
over—to be worms rather than stages. For the orthodox theory, see Sider, 2001b, Chapter 1, pp. 1-10.
That there are other versions of four-dimensionalism should not bear on the point to be made here—
namely, that Baillargeon’s evidence supports distinct object concepts.
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in the ordinary sense of that word. Thus, Sider’s account of objects appears to be
incompatible with Baillargeon’s findings that very young infants possess an object
concept according to which occluded objects continue to exist while retaining their
spatial and physical properties. Should we say that Baillargeon’s experiments show that
infants do not conceive of objects as stages of four-dimensional worms?
Probably not. Sider is likely to help himself to a reinterpretation of the occlusion
event in terms of relations between continuants.
Call the 4-D worm that is the
mereological sum of box stages, B; and the worm that is the mereological sum of rotating
screen stages, RS. Though B and RS are composite objects, they are not continuants—
that is, B and RS are not the sorts of objects we ordinarily name and talk about. Now we
may describe the infant’s observed behavior of looking longer at the “impossible” event
as expecting there to be, during occlusion (an event stage), extant stages of B standing in
some important relation (e.g., “genidentity” 11 ) with previous stages of B, a relation no
stage of B stands in with respect to any stage of RS. Insofar as B and RS have no spatial
parts in common, the box and the screen (the continuants involved in the occlusion event)
cannot occupy the same space at the same time. The infant must “know” that temporal
parts of B are related to each other in a way that they are not related to parts of RS; and
that this relation precludes the box and screen sharing the same space at the same time.
That is, the infant’s object concept must represent these “facts”.
Of course, it seems rather implausible that the infant would represent these sorts
of facts. On the other hand, it seems rather implausible that the infant would represent
what we might call the endurance view: that objects are discrete, wholly present at all
11
Genidentity is the mysterious ‘glue’ that supposedly unites stages of spacetime worms. I am not trying to
evaluate Sider’s account of the persistence conditions of objects here, only show that Baillargeon’s
experiments in particular do not count against Sider’s view.
84
times they exist, and endure through certain kinds of events but not others. This strikes
me as just another way of interpreting the claim that objects continue to exist, that they
retain their spatial and physical properties, and that they are still subject to physical laws,
some of which must also be known by the infant. That the endurance view (a.k.a.
“endurantism”) is our default metaphysics is perhaps a common assumption among
metaphysicians. Michael Jubien, for example, states in his most recent book, “It is clear
that in everyday life we think of ordinary items like barns as if they were threedimensional objects that are wholly present on different occasions—we are, so to speak,
naïve endurantists about such objects.” 12 Similarly, with regard to the debate between
endurantists and perdurantists, Cody Gilmore writes:
The debate cannot be settled empirically in any straightforward way: the
world might well look, sound, and feel just as it actually does regardless of
which view is correct. Any grounds for preferring one view to the other
are likely to be more philosophical than empirical. Unsurprisingly, the
philosophical considerations have pulled in different directions, with
endurantism receiving support from common sense and perdurantism
receiving support from its alleged puzzle-solving ability. 13
In my view, the knowledge encoded in Sider’s object concept (or Jubien’s for that
matter 14 ) is no more bizarre or implausible than the knowledge encoded in naïve
endurantism. In any case, what we are after here is some reason to think we come to this
world as naïve endurantists, and I see no reason yet to think that this is the case. For with
different background assumptions in place about what objects are actually like,
12
Jubien, 2009, p. 12.
Gilmore, 2008, p. 1.
14
Jubien’s view is what Sider might call orthodox four-dimensionalism, and what Gilmore would call
perdurantism.
13
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Baillargeon’s data give us no reason to reject either concept. Hence, the observed
behavior seems to be compatible with two distinct object concepts. 15
Nevertheless, one might be inclined to think that one of these ontologies is
somehow more “natural” than the other and so more “eligible” to be the content of our
earliest object-representation. If so, there would be another meaning-constitutive fact—
naturalness—not evident in behavior, which could issue in a single interpretation of
Baillargeon’s findings and justify Jubien’s claim regarding the propensities of the adult
mind. David Lewis defends a notion of naturalness that is supposed to do this kind of
work, the fortunes of which will be reviewed in Chapter 4.
There are two other responses one might have to the claim that Baillargeon’s data
are compatible with these two distinct object concepts, which I will address in turn. One
is that while this particular set of experiments does not distinguish between these distinct
concepts, some future experiment could. Now that we are alerted to this alternative, we
might yet devise experiments that can distinguish between them and hence reveal the true
content of infants’ object concept. This suggestion is just the claim that our theory of
innate content is merely weakly underdetermined by the evidence—in the limit, some
theory would rise to the top as the best explanation for the data and that theory
determines meaning (even now). We will consider this suggestion in §3.4.
An alternative response is that there is something common to both ways of
conceiving objects and it is this commonality that the experiments register. According to
this response, it is just these limited features that pre-exist and facilitate language
acquisition and hence linguistic meaning. And if what is common to both theories places
15
They are distinct, that is, if it ever makes sense to argue, as Sider does, that “there is a single, objective,
correct account of what things there are” (2001b, xvi).
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constraints on what we can subsequently say about kinds of objects, these may be
sufficient to resolve the indeterminacy problem. We will proceed by considering what
sort of “information” is common to both theories, if only to show that it is not sufficient
to resolve the indeterminacy problem.
I have suggested that Baillargeon’s data are consistent with two distinct object
concepts and we want to know what is common to both these concepts. Minimally,
whether “a concept of object permanence” comes to enduring existence and retention of
properties, or continual replacement of parts related in some special way, it would seem
that anything that could be permanent as such must have mind-independent existence—
mind-independent insofar as objects are discrete and bound by causal laws, which are
themselves mind-independent.
And since occlusion events occur over time, both
conceptions must take objects to persist, though persistence conditions—the account of
what it is for X at t1 to be “identified with” X at t2—are different. According to one
account, objects are wholly present and endure through different times— X at t1 just is
(numerically identical with) X at t2. On the other, stages are short-lived but “exdure” by
being related to other stages by, say, the “genidentity” of counterparts. On the latter
account, strictly speaking (that is, relative to endurantism) X at t1 ≠ X at t2, but this special
relational property permits us to speak loosely (loosely, that is, relative to endurantism)
of X at t1 and X at t2 as being “the same”. Should we grant, then, that Baillargeon’s
experiments have demonstrated that infants represent objects as (at least) persisting mindindependent entities?
Even this very limited “knowledge” is more than the evidence can sustain.
Consider the hypothesis that objects are ideas in the mind. Classic Idealism is the view
87
that objects do not enjoy mind-independent existence. On such a view, “to be is to be
perceived”, so to persist is to be perceived continuously by someone. On one reading of
Bishop Berkeley, an object like this elm persists when no one (no human, that is) is
thinking about it only because God maintains this elm idea in order to give content to His
will that lesser spirits should have the general idea of elms. 16
It may seem that
Baillargeon’s experiments show that infants do not conceive of objects as ideas in the
mind of God, but again, this is too quick. We can interpret the data to indicate an
expectation that the mind of God is orderly and thus that objects (ideas) have a certain
degree of stability even when they become occluded (from our point of view). That is,
spell out the details of Berkeley’s Idealism as a set of background assumptions about
what objects are really like, and Baillargeon’s data are compatible with yet another object
concept. This interpretation explains the surprise registered in the data by appealing to
infants’ understanding of God’s mental diligence. Thus, we cannot suppose, on the basis
of these data anyway, that infants possess a concept of objects as mind-independent.
We seem to have persistence left as the basic content of infants’ object concept—
the “knowledge” that there is some immutable reality binding the behavior of objects
over time. But this is not saying much. Since persistence is compatible with various
distinct sets of conditions, we are surely not justified in claiming on the basis of these
experiments that infants have an object concept sufficiently rich to resolve the
indeterminacy of meaning. This is because how one cashes out persistence is precisely
the issue delineating competing schemes of reference in the current argument for
indeterminacy. Quine, I have argued, correctly brought to our attention the fact that a
term like ‘rabbit’ refers to rabbits and not rabbit-stages when and only when we have
16
See Winkler, 1989, 207-224.
88
settled upon the correct interpretation of individuative devices of the language. What is
it to settle upon such an interpretation? It is to “know” the meaning of various locutions
and grammatical devices, including what we might call ‘the “is” of identity’, such that the
language renders a coherent account of what it is to be the “same” x on “different”
occasions. Since the meaning of “is the same as” shifts according to one’s theory of
persistence conditions, settling upon an interpretation of devices of individuation just is
adopting a metaphysical framework.
If Chomsky believes that this metaphysical
framework is innate, we so far have no evidence substantiating that belief.
3.4
On Future Disambiguation
I have argued that Baillargeon’s looking time data are consistent with multiple object
concepts, each of which says something very different about what objects are like. A
discrete enduring whole is not the sort of thing that exists only for an instant to be
replaced by something completely new (though quite similar); and neither of these is
anything like an idea. The fact that infants register surprise at an “impossible” event
nevertheless permits multiple interpretations about what exactly infants “know” about
occluded objects and their properties.
Thus, we cannot conclude on the basis of
experiments heretofore performed that, as Chomsky puts it, “recognition of identity over
time…appears in the first few months of life, long before any manifestation of
language”—not, that is, if what is recognized is supposed to be something like a theory of
persistence sufficient to thwart the indeterminacy of meaning.
Nevertheless, one might hold that some experiment, not yet conceived perhaps,
could disambiguate these findings. This sort of “content realist” holds that there is still a
89
fact of the matter to be discovered, and we have said nothing yet which should dissuade
one from expecting that in the fullness of time the facts about meaning-determining
content could be brought to light. This is just the claim that, like all scientific theories,
our theory of infants’ object concept is only weakly underdetermined by the evidence—in
the limit, some theory would rise to the top as the best explanation for the data and that
theory determines meaning (even now).
But we have to wonder how confident we ought to be that there is a fact of the
matter to be discovered here. It seems clear that if there is some fact to be discovered, it
is a fact about whether the infant really conceives of objects as enduring instead of
exduring, material instead of ideal, etc. As such, the infant mind must encode a specific
metaphysical theory about what objects in spacetime are like. But that would be very
puzzling. Wrangling about persistence conditions always seems to be directed at what
we say about objects rather than at objects per se; what we say apparently being
incoherent without some reinterpretation of what we mean. 17
Since the infants in
question are pre-linguistic, there seems to be nothing that could establish in the infant
mind one metaphysical theory over another in the first place. So unless we happen to
encode a particular theory as a biological accident, there is some reason to be skeptical
that there is a metaphysical theory employed by the infant mind at all.
Perhaps a biological accident, however, would be sufficient to thwart the
indeterminacy of meaning.
At the outset, I claimed that infants’ object concept is
important because it is a natural candidate for an internal semantic rule that could
systematize a scheme of reference for terms of a language. Quine thought that language
and conceptualization “on any considerable scale” are interdependent, but it seems
17
More on this in Chapter 4.
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nevertheless incontrovertible that some content has to be there before language. 18 David
Buller sums up this point by noting Popper’s comparison between science and the infant
mind:
Karl Popper argued that some kind of hypothesis always had to precede
the gathering of data in science, since data gathering that is not guided by
hypotheses would be overwhelmed by the literal infinity of “facts” that
could be recorded. …Further, he argued, this must also be true of how the
mind learns about the world; there must always be some innate hypotheses
about the world guiding our experiential accumulation of the data against
which those hypotheses are tested. 19
Following Popper, we could understand our most fundamental object concept to be a
working hypothesis, which could be wrong, but which nevertheless gives us something
with which to approach reality and discover more about it. That such a hypothesis could
be wrong is in stark contrast with Kant’s suggestion that we have certain modes of a
priori knowledge without which experience would be impossible. For Kant, the telling
feature of this knowledge is that its content expresses a necessary truth. Kripke taught us
that what is necessary is not necessarily a priori, and we seem to have discovered that
some of what Kant thought was a priori is not necessary—that space is Euclidean, for
example. Nevertheless, the idea that we employ a priori hypotheses (even if they turn
out to be false) without which (codified) experience would be impossible is still with us.
The question is thus whether and to what extent a priori hypotheses constrain linguistic
meaning.
Plausibly, an innate working hypothesis about what objects are like, in the most
general way, would have a direct impact on our conceptual scheme. If our most primitive
18
Even Quine seems aware of this fact, though he seems not to want to talk about it. See, for example,
Chapter 3 of Word and Object, “The Ontogenesis of Reference”, pp. 80-124, especially 83-84.
19
Buller, 2005, pp. 152-153, italics in original.
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general object concept encodes something like mind-independent, enduring matter, and
this concept guides how we divide up reality, any and every recognized instance of that
general concept would also encode those properties. My rabbit concept, insofar as I
recognize rabbits to be a kind of object, would thus encode the “fact” that rabbits are (at
least) mind-independent enduring objects. So too for apples, books, boxes and rotating
screens, etc. Such an innate hypothesis would explain why the language encodes one
scheme and not another, and why it seems more natural to us to say that objects endure
rather than exdure (or perdure).
What additional evidence might there be to make the case that infants do conceive
of objects as mind-independent and enduring? Can the poverty of stimulus plus the early
onset of endurantist language help make the case? I think any argument along these lines
would just beg the question. First, the claim about the early onset of endurantist language
faces the same problem we find for interpreting looking time data: the evidence, now
linguistic behavior, fails to account for alternative interpretations of what young speakers
say. Sider, for example, argues that when we make claims about rabbits, we are really
making claims about exduring stages of four-dimensional objects. Presumably, this goes
equally for nascent speakers, since there is no point at which speakers seem to realize that
fundamental ontology involves exduring stages.
Second, that there are various ways of interpreting Baillargeon’s looking time
data shows that we seem to infer, largely on the basis of non-empirical (i.e.,
metaphysical) background assumptions about what we adults take to be facts about
rabbits, apples, boxes, and rotating screens, what the content of our most primitive object
concept is. At the same time, in order for this to resolve the indeterminacy problem, we
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must suppose that our most primitive object concept is constitutive of what we adults take
to be facts about rabbits, apples, boxes, rotating screens, and all the rest, in just the
respects that seem to be in question. Thus, in light of the fact that from our adult
conceptual repertoire, we find that there are various ways we could slice things up all
consistent with infants’ behavioral evidence, coupled with arguments like Sider’s that
endurantism does not in fact reflect what we (adults) mean at all, the claim that infants do
have an object concept “strikingly similar to that of adults” looks circular. Why do
infants employ that metaphysical theory? Because adults do. Why do adults employ that
metaphysical theory? Because infants do. This is not a very satisfying argument.
But the main problem with staunch adherence to the claim that we are
endurantists (or whatever) is that such adherence appears to be at odds with a modest
naturalism—that the meaning facts supervene on other sorts of facts. For suppose, as a
matter of biological accident, humans were destined to “view” things like rabbits and
apples and boxes to be whole, mind-independent and enduring. Then, one day, or
perhaps over time through evolutionary processes, our innate general object concept is
replaced with one that takes objects instead to be exduring stages of spacetime worms.
From this modest naturalism, what exactly has changed? Clearly, the behavior of objects
themselves gives us no evidence one way or the other, and hence, a deep history of
ancestral interaction with objects would be causally inert. What sort of advantage would
evolution confer upon the organism that views his food as enduring rather than exduring,
or vise versa? Are exduring rabbits any more (or less) edible to exduring entities like us?
Would it change the way we speak, or think?
Manifestly, in light of the sort of
reinterpretation of ordinary language that accompanies all metaphysical argumentation
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for one theory of this sort over another, there is little reason to suppose that the exact
same complicated pattern of neural activity could not instantiate either conceptual
scheme.
This is precisely Quine’s point in “On the Reasons for Indeterminacy of
Translation”:
The metaphor of the black box, often so useful, can be misleading here.
The problem is not one of hidden facts, such as might be uncovered by
learning more about the brain physiology of thought processes. To expect
a distinctive mechanism behind every genuinely distinct mental state is
one thing; to expect a distinctive mechanism behind every purported
distinction that can be phrased in traditional mentalistic language is
another. …. That is what I am getting at in arguing the indeterminacy of
translation. 20
This point does not depend on behaviorism, but it hints at an argument for it. It suggests
a real problem for the “modest naturalist” who accepts that there must be some material
difference between a world in which humans conceptualize objects as whole and
enduring, and a world in which humans conceptualize objects as temporal slices that
exdure. Mark Richard, for example, admits that naturalism requires supervenience to
hold of our content ascriptions, which places the onus on the advocate of determinate
content to produce the natural facts that are supposed to determine it. Richard writes:
We should give a naturalistic account of semantic phenomena. So we
must take such phenomena as supervening on naturalistic phenomena. So
when we ascribe different semantic properties, we need to be able to point
to a relevant difference between the subjects of the ascriptions, that
underlies the difference in the account. 21
20
21
Quine, 1970, p. 180.
Richard, 1998, p. 182.
94
I am suggesting that we have no basis for saying that infants are endurantists rather than
exdurantists (or idealists for that matter) because there need be no difference in the
external world nor in the infant brain instantiating one scheme rather than another.
3.5
Our Adult Concept of Object Permanence
I have endeavored here to show that the evidence for infants’ object concept does not
distinguish between competing hypotheses regarding the fundamental properties of
objects.
These competing hypotheses amount to metaphysical theories about the
persistence conditions of objects. If we insist on attributing a particular set of persistence
conditions to infants’ concept regardless, we can do no better than beg the question (or
reject the supervenience of meaning facts on other sorts of facts). But all of this, if
correct, should make us wonder what in the world could make it that case that adults
conceive of objects according to an endurantist interpretation of assumptions 1-3. If there
is no reason to think that endurantism is innately determined, and there is no reason to
think that semantic externalism helps, how have we arrived at the view that we are naïve
endurantists?
A serious problem with holding this view—that we (adult English speakers) are
naïve endurantists—is that the claim seems to presuppose what the metaphysician wants
to deny. The metaphysician interested in ontology, that is, tells us what we really mean
when we choose our words, which involves giving us an interpretation of what we say
such that we make (mostly) true claims. So if English speakers would be inclined to
assert, or think, under certain circumstances, things like, “That rabbit was in the garden
yesterday”, the exdurantist (Sider) tells us that our rabbit talk refers to stages, which
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perish with each passing moment; rather than whole and enduring objects. Alternatively,
Jubien tells us that our talk about a particular rabbit refers to a four-dimensional
spacetime worm, only part of which could be in (a part of) the garden at a time.
Jubien is explicit about this point. As part of the argument for his version of
perdurantism, he writes: “The only apparent drawback for perdurantism is the required
(and rather extensive) reinterpretation of things we normally say and think as a result of
our everyday naïve endurantism.” 22 But there is something funny about the claim that
what we say and think is a consequence of our naïve endurantism. Naïve endurantism is,
after all, just another interpretation of the very same language tokens. We have yet to
uncover what it is about us, or the language, or the world, that makes naïve endurantism
the default interpretation.
So I reiterate the argument for indeterminacy of meaning in a way that parallels
the argument above for there being no fact of the matter whether infants are endurantist,
exdurantists, perdurantists, or idealists. It begins with the assumption that semantics is a
natural phenomenon. If so, meaning supervenes on natural phenomena. That is, if by
‘rabbit’ we mean whole enduring rabbits and not, for example, exduring rabbit-stages (or
vise versa), there must be some material difference between our world and one in which
speakers mean something else. But, the external world submits to distinct descriptions of
how things persist; object talk can be interpreted according to distinct theories of
persistence; and infant reactions to occlusion events, which could indicate innate
dispositions, can be interpreted according to distinct theories of persistence. So there
seems to be nothing about the external world, or the internal one, that could determine a
“correct” theory. No fundamental ontology is in any sense more natural, and so more
22
Jubien, 2009, p. 13.
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eligible to be meant by us. Thus, meaning is indeterminate with respect to theories of
persistence.
We turn now to a defense of the final premise: that no fundamental ontology is
more natural, and so more eligible to be meant by us.
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4. Natural Properties
Chomsky claims that Quine’s “naturalism” is unduly restrictive in the sense that it
constrains, without warrant, naturalistic inquiry into the domain of mental content.
Insofar as the indeterminacy of meaning thesis rests on Quine’s insistence upon the
“reduction” of all real science to physics, it fails to prove indeterminacy. For, according
to Chomsky, it is nowhere demonstrated or even argued that something like a concept or
a thought must be explained in terms of “quarks and the like”. 1 Chomsky is surely right
about this. An appeal to the electrical activity in one’s brain fails to explain one’s
thought that the moon is full just as surely as an appeal to fundamental particles fails to
explain the rising cost of crude oil. This failure of explanatory reduction is so even if at
bottom there could be no change in economic facts, or representational facts, without
some change at the level described by physics. Supervenience, however, does not require
the explanation of intentional facts into the language of fundamental physics.
Nevertheless, this more modest naturalism does require explanation of intentional
phenomena in terms of something non-intentional, if only in the sense that intuitions
about a difference in intentional facts between speakers must be accounted for in terms of
a difference in neurological facts, or facts about objects, or historical facts, or some fact
we may loosely call a physical fact. Perhaps the dearth of such facts led Quine to a
1
There are various ways of cashing out reductionism, the weakest of which I here accept: that meaning
supervenes on other sorts of facts. Chomsky, however, seems to object to a much stronger thesis: that
meaning facts are supposed to be explained in the vocabulary of the “ideal” physical theory. I agree with
Chomsky that this cannot be done; but I argue nonetheless that if there are meaning facts, what can be
done, and what should be done, is to give a plausible account of the meaning facts in terms of something
else (non-intentional facts) that could fix meaning.
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behavioristic view of meaning. But insofar as the indeterminacy of translation thesis
rests on even the weaker thesis of methodological behaviorism, Chomsky insists that
naturalistic inquiry should not be so limited—that the evidence for meaning, and what
determines it, can come from anywhere, not strictly from observable behavior in
observable circumstances.
Agreed again: the goal of this work is to cast the net as wide as possible and see if
it yields a solution to the problem of semantic indeterminacy—a solution, that is, that
accounts for beliefs we have about meaning and reference, given the more modest
naturalistic thesis that such beliefs supervene on other sorts of facts. I have argued that
semantic externalism fails to provide that solution, as does innate content: at least insofar
as what is innate is determined by a genetic propensity to conceptualize objects according
to a particular metaphysical theory. The problem with an innate metaphysics is just that
there seems to be no basis for the belief that humans innately implement one theory of
persistence as opposed to another—the evidence does not support it and the argument for
it is circular.
What might yet solve the problem before us is the idea that certain ways of
conceiving of things are more “natural” than others, where naturalness is supposed to be
a feature of just those properties that “carve nature at its joints”. The more natural
conceptions are thereby more “eligible” to be the meanings of our natural kind terms.
The notions of naturalness and eligibility go back to David Lewis, 2 but we will here be
focusing on a more recent application by Ted Sider, which applies Lewis’ account of
natural properties to the question of personal identity to argue that the meaning of
‘person’ is indeterminate with respect to certain metaphysical theories about what it is to
2
See, for example, Lewis, 1983, pp. 343-377.
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be the same person over time. But, contrary to the case I will make here, Sider thinks
that ‘person’ is a special example of indeterminacy—that science and ideal philosophical
analysis, and sometimes just the nature of the thing in question, do yield determinate
meanings for a broad spectrum of terms.
The case for ‘person’ notwithstanding, Sider is interested in refuting broad
application of what he calls “the Schematic Argument”.
Where there is some
“metaphysical dispute” involving T, the argument concludes that T’s meaning is
indeterminate if there are conflicting theories about T (at least as good as any other) and
none of these theories yields a candidate meaning that is either the best fit with use or the
most eligible to be the meaning. The Schematic Argument has the following form:
1. There exist multiple candidate meanings for T, corresponding to the conflicting
theories about T.
2. None of these T-candidates fits use better than the rest.
3. None of these T-candidates is more eligible than the rest.
4. No other T-candidate combines eligibility and fit with use as well as these
candidates.
5. Meaning is determined by use plus eligibility.
6. Therefore, T is indeterminate in meaning among T-candidates corresponding to
the conflicting theories of T, and so there is no fact of the matter which of these
theories is correct. 3
For the class of Ts that interests us—namely, so-called natural kinds 4 —the Schematic
Argument’s application to all such kinds may be seen as a contemporary advance of
3
Sider, 2001a, p. 2
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skepticism about the prospects for determinate meaning; but one that does away with
Quine’s empirical assumptions and allows naturalness, or eligibility, or both, to play a
role in what determines meaning. As such, the argument schema should not extend to
‘rabbit’, my opposition will claim, because one candidate meaning is more natural than
the others and hence more eligible to be meant. So premise 3 will turn out to be false in
that instance. I will be arguing that the Schematic Argument is sound for ‘rabbit’ (et al.).
To that end, this chapter will proceed as follows: In §4.1, we consider how the
Schematic Argument is supposed to be applied to ‘person’. I think Sider’s argument here
is (mostly) right, and this justifies extending it more broadly. In §4.2, I attempt to show
why there is a true instance of premise 1 when the concept in question is ‘object’. If
that’s right, every kind of an object will be similarly plagued (or so I argue). Thus, in
§4.3, I argue that, because there are rival theories of fundamental ontology, there are
distinct candidate meanings for ‘rabbit’ (and other such kinds) not settled by use, which
is to say that premises 1 and 2 of the Schematic Argument are satisfied for ‘rabbit’ (and
the rest). In §4.4, I argue that no candidate is most natural and no other candidate
combines eligibility and fit with use better, which is to say that premises 3 and 4 of the
Schematic Argument are satisfied for ‘rabbit’ (and the rest). Thus, on the assumption that
meaning is determined by use plus eligibility (premise 5), it follows that ‘rabbit’ (and the
rest) is indeterminate in meaning among candidates corresponding to conflicting
ontologies. Finally, in §4.5, I deal with an argument Sider marshals in numerous places
4
I claim that the Schematic Argument regards conceptual content, though Sider takes T to be a term. But
if, as I assume to be the case here, linguistic meaning is rooted in conceptual content, the meaning of the
term ‘rabbit’ is given by the analysis of the concept ‘rabbit’. For this reason I conflate terms and concepts
throughout this chapter.
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against the proposal that I argue for here: that the Schematic Argument applies equally to
theories of persistence.
4.1
The Schematic Argument Applied to ‘Person’
Consider premise 1 of the Schematic Argument:
There exist multiple candidate
meanings for T, corresponding to the conflicting theories about T. This already appears
problematic, for the premise appears to involve a use/mention confusion involving a term
T (before the comma), and the things designated by T (after the comma). 5 This is
perhaps excusable if theories about the nature of a kind are perforce theories about the
meaning of the term denoting the kind. Quine certainly thought this was the case, and it
is, I think, the core idea underlying an externalist view of meaning: narrow content is
defeasible, subject to the discoveries of science. Meaning is thus wide content. This
explains why we are inclined to say that since water (around here) is H2O, ‘water’ means
H2O, and why one would retract the claim that whales are fish when expert testimony
about the nature of whales and the nature of fish are brought to bear. Such knowledge
routinely finds its way into linguistic meaning.
Sider, however, is concerned with the domain of philosophical expertise:
conceptual analysis, which just is the elucidation of conceptual content on the basis of
philosophical intuition about how the concept in question is and ought to be applied. To
give an analysis of our concept of knowledge, for example, is to say what knowledge is.
Accordingly, the evidence for what knowledge is comes from what speakers say about it
(and related concepts). The normative constraints on our use of “knowledge” seem to be
determined by use alone, albeit weighted by the views of those who think the hardest
5
Thanks to G.J. Mattey and Michael Jubien for stressing the need to clarify this.
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about the issue. But, contra Quine, prevailing wisdom (well represented here by Sider)
says that sometimes when use is insufficient, and philosophical intuition is inconclusive,
there may be a highly natural property eligible to be meant. Eligibility may not be
knowable a priori, but it is a fact that can help fix meaning.
So the Schematic Argument says that if there are competing analyses of a concept
T, each analysis generates a candidate-meaning, in the sense of application conditions,
for the concept in question (consider the analysis of ‘knowledge’: S knows that p if and
only if….). Other factors—like fit with use, and eligibility—are necessary to determine
meaning. The conclusion of the argument, which says that there is no fact of the matter
which of these theories is correct, is therefore about analyses: if use does not decide
between competing analyses of a concept T and none is most eligible, there is no fact
about which concept is actually meant.
This must be so even if the concept in question is a natural kind concept. Suppose
that, after hearing a twin-Earth thought experiment, English speakers were equally
divided about whether our concept of water includes XYZ. Some say water is H2O
(only), and others say that water is H2O or XYZ. This fact would generate two theories
about ‘water’; that is, two analyses of what ‘water’ means. 6 Presumably, in such a case
where use alone does not decide the matter, the superior naturalness of one property
would make it the case that we mean that one. Putnam urges that use does settle it in the
case of ‘water’ thanks to our community-wide intention to refer to all and only the stuff
that turns out to be like (pointing at H2O) that stuff. But it is worth mentioning here that
if, as I argued in Chapter 2, this intention does not settle the matter, being H2O does
6
I am assuming that there would be philosophers on both sides of the issue as well.
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appear to be more natural than being H2O or XYZ, since the latter property is disjunctive,
the very mark of relative unnaturalness.
Sider applies this idea to the case of ‘person’ by underscoring the metaphysical
dispute as to whether persons are essentially psychological or biological entities: if, over
time, it is psychological continuity that holds a person together, or physical continuity (x
is the same person as y if and only if….). It is a dispute, in part because our ordinary
person talk is ambiguous: sometimes our person talk applies to bodies and other times it
applies to something more ethereal, like psychological characteristics.
When someone dies, we say things like “Grandpa is gone”; but also we
say, “There’s Grandpa, there in the casket”. The first corresponds to the
psychological criterion of personal identity, the latter to the bodily
criterion. Phenomenologically, I detect something like a shift in my
thinking when I talk these two ways. When pressed to say which way of
speaking is literally correct, non-philosophers typically resist making a
choice. They tend to say that in a sense it is Grandpa in the casket, and in
a sense it isn’t.
Something like the same shift occurs in our talk about cases of
amnesia, and perhaps even in cases of extreme personal transformation
due to mental illness or radical religious conversion. …
Thus, usage in actual cases of death, amnesia, and radical
psychological transformation does not support either candidate over the
other. 7
Why then do we not consider the ambiguity benign, as we do when we note that
according to ordinary use we have various meanings for ‘bank’? With regard to our bank
talk, there is no serious worry that banks are either places to keep money, or steep natural
inclines, or piled-up masses, but not all three; so why should there be any such concern
with regard to persons? 8
The disanalogy between ‘person’ and ‘bank’ is rooted in the fact that I am a
person and it is an interesting question as to what makes me the same person over time.
7
8
Sider, 2001a, p. 10-11.
My thanks to Michael Jubien for pressing this objection.
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This question can be put to any of the speakers that routinely use the term ‘person’
ambiguously, and the question will, I believe, compel the speaker to admit that only one
of these uses applies to what is essential to being and remaining himself, though it is
exceedingly difficult to say which one it is.
Conceptual analysis often involves
judgments about strange possibilities, like surviving one’s own death. The pervasive
intuition that survival is possible leads plenty of speakers to judge that “There’s Grandpa,
there in the casket” is not a claim about Grandpa (the person) after all. Grandpa is
essentially a psychological-person.
On the other hand, worries about which one is
Grandpa if his psychological characteristics were duplicated and embodied elsewhere
push us in the other direction: The intuition that Grandpa is anything other than a
continuous human organism—i.e., a body-person—appears to be untenable.
So the
debate rages on. That is the problem of personal identity. 9
Once premise 1 is established, Sider’s argument for the indeterminacy of ‘person’
rests largely on his defense of premises 2 and 3: that ordinary use and intuitions
concerning counterfactual situations involving the concept do not settle whether persons
are body-persons or psychological-persons; and there is nothing more natural, and hence,
more eligible, about the property of being a body-person vs. the property of being a
psychological-person.
Use pretty clearly does not settle the question. With regard to eligibility, Sider
claims that these candidate meanings are equivalently natural in the sense that neither is a
9
‘Person’ is benignly ambiguous in another way however. Moral theorists attempt to give an analysis of
‘person’ relevant to according rights and obligations. As such, their analyses involve, for example, selfawareness and the ability to communicate, which may be irrelevant for being the same person over time. In
this case, the two concepts in question are moral-person and persisting person. Such ambiguity as there is
must be teased out before analyzing these disparate concepts, just as the analysis of knowledge involves
propositional knowledge, and not the various other ways we use the term (acquaintance and knowledgehow).
105
perfectly natural kind—i.e., they are not the sorts of kinds describable by a complete
physics—nor is either property relatively more natural.
This is to say that neither
property has “a more ‘complicated’ or ‘disjunctive’ basis in the perfectly natural
kinds.” 10 Roughly, this means that being a body-person and being a psychologicalperson are each higher-level properties with roughly the same level of complexity when
it comes to specifying conditions of satisfaction. This is supposed to be unlike the
relative naturalness of being grue and being blue. “Grue”, recall, “applies to all things
examined before t just in case they are green, but to other things just in case they are
blue.” 11 As such, the property of being grue is more disjunctive, and so less natural, than
the property of being blue, since “blue” applies simply to all things (at all times) that are
blue.
Moreover (in defense of premise 4), no other T-candidate, say for example, being
a body person or a psychological person, combines eligibility and fit with use as well as
these candidates. For one thing, the puzzle of personal identity suggests that when we
judge that the person just is his psychological characteristics, we reject in that judgment
that he is either his body or his psychological characteristics. For another, the disjunctive
property is by definition less natural than either of the other candidates. Thus, if meaning
is determined by use plus eligibility, the meaning of ‘person’ is indeterminate.
Not surprisingly, I find this argument to be utterly persuasive. But it does not go
far enough. In my view, the very same sort of argument applies to our object talk, and
thus extends to various kinds of objects, for example, rabbits. I argue ultimately that
multiple candidate meanings exist for ‘rabbit’ (and other natural kind-terms) because
10
11
Sider, 2001a, p. 14.
Goodman, 1955, p. 74.
106
there are multiple theories of persistence conditions for objects generally, not settled by
use or eligibility, so the conclusion of the Schematic Argument applies to fundamental
ontology: there is no fact about which ontology is meant. In other words, meaning is
indeterminate. So the first thing I attempt to establish is that there are multiple theories
of persistence conditions for objects (generally speaking) not settled by use. To that end,
I illustrate in the following section a problem with a more general version of chaste
endurantism—namely, that it gives rise to a well-known puzzle that has moved
metaphysicians to theorize about alternative ontologies. All of these theories require
some reinterpretation of ordinary claims involving the notion of “sameness.” 12 Thus, use
does not decide between them.
4.2
Premise 1 and Our Object Concept
In spite of the plausibility of the Schematic Argument applied to ‘person’, full stop, Sider
maintains that “[w]hether multiple candidate meanings exist, and what they are like,
depends on what the correct ontology of persistence turns out to be.” 13 With respect to
worm theory, candidate meanings include being a perduring body-person and being a
perduring psychological-person. 14
With respect to “promiscuous endurance theory”,
which allows multiple entities to co-exist in a location at a time, we may find in one
location at a time an enduring body-person as well as an enduring psychological-person.
So, with respect to each of these theories there are two highly eligible candidate
properties available to be meant, but neither property fits use better, nor is either property
12
This is in scare quotes because the notion of sameness is itself interpreted by the theory of persistence.
Sider, 2001a, p. 4.
14
Sider’s own version of worm theory does not involve perdurance. Thus, candidate meanings according
to his temporal counterpart theory are being an exduring body-person and being an exduring
psychological-person.
13
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more natural than the other. 15 In contrast, the view Sider dubs “chaste endurantism”,
according to which “i) persons exist, ii) persons have no temporal parts, iii) in
uncontroversial cases the (strict and literal) persistence conditions for persons are
basically what we ordinarily take them to be, and iv) distinct entities never coincide,” 16
constrains candidates to just one. Sider writes, “If chaste endurantism is correct, there
seems to be one and only one candidate meaning for talk of persisting persons: a
meaning that concerns, with respect to any person, the one and only one enduring object
in the vicinity of that person.” 17
The upshot is that, relative to some theories of persistence, there may be multiple
candidate meanings, but relative to other such theories, there may not be. If chaste
endurantism is “correct”, says Sider, premise 1 of the Schematic Argument (where T is
‘person’) is false, and so the conclusion is blocked; but if any one of a number of other
theories is correct, the Schematic Argument is sound for ‘person’. And of course Sider is
inclined to think that a particular version of worm theory is the “true ontology of
persistence”. 18
I think relativizing candidate meanings to the “correct ontology” is strange for
several reasons.
First, since metaphysical dispute is supposed to have bearing on
candidate meanings, why doesn’t the metaphysical dispute over fundamental ontology
also play a role in determining candidate meanings? (I argue that it does.) Second, if
candidate meanings are given by metaphysical dispute, and meaning is determined by use
15
Sider thinks that mereological essentialism and nihilism also generate multiple candidate meanings for
our person talk, but I’ll ignore the details of these theories here since they do not have bearing on my
argument.
16
Sider, 2001a, p. 8, italics in original.
17
Sider, 2001a, p. 8-9.
18
See Sider, 2001b, Four Dimensionalism.
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plus eligibility, and eligibility is determined by natural properties, and natural properties
are a feature of things-in-themselves, how can there be anything leftover—like
fundamental ontology—to determine meaning? Isn’t the “correct” ontology, insofar as it
is correct, determined by things-in-themselves (i.e., natural properties)? Third, notice
that if the very fact of what we could mean is relativized as such, and chaste endurantism
turns out not to be the correct theory of persistence, chaste endurantists seem not to mean
anything at all with their person talk, since there are thus no candidates to be meant.
Perhaps more to the point, Sider grants that there is ambiguity in ordinary person
talk and that the problem arises from conflicting intuitions about whether I go where my
body goes, or where my memories go. How does chaste endurantism then make this
problem, in effect, go away?
The answer is that a condition of the theory places
limitations on what sorts of things are eligible to be the meaning of our person talk:
Recall the theory of chaste endurantism…. On this view, persons exist,
have no temporal parts, and persist in basically the way we ordinarily take
them to, but distinct entities never coincide. No one accepting this theory
will accept anything like premise 1 in the schematic argument. In my
immediate vicinity, there is exactly one person-shaped thing. The strict
and literal persistence of this sort of thing over time is what is ordinarily
meant by talk of persisting persons. We can point to it and meaningfully
ask: how long will it continue to exist? Would it be possible for it to
continue to exist even after losing all its memories? … Given chaste
endurantism, there will be a single correct criterion of personal identity,
namely the criterion that gives the correct account of the persistence
conditions for things like the object I singled out. 19
The claim here is that chaste endurantism has but one object in the running for questions
about persistence—namely, a physical body. As such, with respect to this theory of
persistence, there will be one candidate meaning for our person talk—namely, ‘person’
means body-person. All other applications of the concept are mistaken.
19
Sider, 2001a, p. 18, italics are in original.
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One problem with this claim is that it ignores too much person talk—talk that
seems to refer to a non-physical entity. Consider the following addendum to Sider’s
examples above (in §4.1): for instance our tendency to say things like “Grandpa has
passed on,” or, with regard to someone who is dead, “He is in a better place.” The sheer
ordinariness of claims like these indicates that the strict and literal persistence of bodies
over time is not what is “ordinarily meant by talk of persisting persons.” It also indicates
another dimension of ambiguity in our person talk, for being a psychological-person can
be instantiated by either a physical body or a non-physical one.
As such, it is surely possible for a chaste endurantist (recall from §3.3 that this is
supposed by various philosophers to be our default metaphysics) to single out a personshaped object and ask, “Would it be possible for that thing to exist after losing its body?”
The answer to this question clearly depends on what sort of thing the chaste endurantist
takes “the thing” singled out to be; and this, the question suggests, regards not simply a
property of a physical thing, but a “coincident” non-physical thing. That we sometimes
intend to pick out an immaterial thing has to be the case if it ever makes sense to think of
persons as having “passed on”. And it is competing intuitions about the answers to these
sorts of questions that make personal identity a persisting metaphysical problem. In other
words, it is not clear that the person-shaped thing in one’s immediate vicinity is really the
person, according to ordinary speakers. So, since coincidence is a problem only for
physical objects, 20 there appears to be more than one candidate meaning for our person
talk, even given chaste endurantism.
Perhaps the reason Sider takes the view that chaste endurantism has but one
object in the running for questions about persisting persons is the fact that chaste
20
Technically, an immaterial thing cannot be located at all, so cannot be coincident.
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endurantism is not really a theory about persons per se; it is a general theory of
persistence of physical objects, which Sider here extends to persons. In fact, chaste
endurantism is arguably just an abstraction from ordinary linguistic practice about all
sorts of physical objects, which makes explicit various beliefs about the basic nature of
these objects in spacetime: i`) objects (that is, composites) exist, ii`) wholly at a time (no
temporal parts), and iii`) they endure (they continue to exist through various changes),
iv`) one and only one object to a place at a time. 21 But this fact points the way to another
problem with the claim that chaste endurantism yields only one candidate meaning for
our person talk—namely, chaste endurantism appears to be false. That is, the theory so
formulated does not appear to be compatible with the indiscernability of identicals, and
this fact gives rise to alternative ontologies, all of which necessitate reinterpreting
ordinary object talk. For i`-iv` give rise to a familiar puzzle.
Consider Monday’s lump of clay; call it “C”. On Tuesday, C is fashioned into the
likeness of a dog; call Tuesday’s clay statue “D”. On Tuesday, C endures, since it has
been fashioned into a statue, namely D. Is C numerically identical with D? By our vast
adherence to another intuitive principle—the indiscernibility of identicals—C=D only if
C and D have all and only the same properties. But C has a property that D lacks: it is
capable of surviving being squashed, whereas D—a statue of a dog—would thereby
cease to exist. This is just to say that C and D have different persistence conditions: C
persists through radical changes in shape and D does not. But now there is a problem: If
C≠D, on Tuesday there are two things occupying the same space at the same time. So
something about our pre-philosophical view about persisting objects must be wrong.
21
Compare these conditions to Baillargeon’s concept of object permanence in §3.2.
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There are several proposed solutions to the problem. One solution is what Sider
calls promiscuous endurance theory, which rejects condition iv` and admits of multiple
objects in the same space at the same time when ordinary intuition says that their
persistence conditions are different.
Worm theory instead rejects condition ii` and
reinterprets endurance—persistence, really—in terms of a relation between temporal
parts. Having temporal parts solves the problem because the statue—a four dimensional
object on this view—is merely a temporal part of the more durable clay; and just as there
is no problem with your arm occupying some of the space that is you at a given time,
there is no problem with the clay having a statue part. Nihilism rejects condition i`.
According to the nihilist, there are no composite objects at all, and so no lumps of clay or
statues per se. If there are no lumps of clay or statues, it is meaningless to ask whether
the statue is the very same object as the clay; and so the puzzle simply does not arise.
Michael Jubien’s solution points to a seldom-recognized mistake in our
interpretation of condition iii`—i.e., our ordinary claims about the persistence conditions
of objects. 22
Jubien makes a rather convincing case that our ordinary talk about
persistence teeters between object-talk and kind-talk. When we seem to judge that some
one object both persists and does not persist through some change, as we do in the case of
the clay statue, we are really making judgments about kinds (properties) in addition to the
object per se. For example, when we say that C is capable of being squashed but D is
not, we mean that this one physical object, qua clay, is capable of surviving significant
rearrangement, but this one physical object, qua statue, is not; which is just to say that the
property of being this clay is compatible with being squashed, whereas the property of
being this statue is incompatible with being squashed. We consider a single object (a
22
See Jubien, 2001, pp. 1-15.
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mereological sum of matter) qua various properties it has, so our modal judgments
regarding the object are analyzed in terms of stuff having properties, which stand in
certain relations to other properties. The puzzle is thus solved since the judgments we
make regarding the persistence conditions of the clay statue depend on how we think of
the object and thus do not commit us to the problematic outcome that C and D are not the
same object.
Arguably, Jubien’s suggestion does the least damage to our ordinary intuitions
about persistence. It leaves unscathed the idea that composite objects exist wholly at a
time (conditions i` and ii`); it accounts for our tendency to agree that a piece of clay can
endure certain kinds of changes that a statue cannot (a revised interpretation of condition
iii`); and it accounts for our reluctance to give up condition iv`; a clay statue is after all a
single physical object. It does, however, require a good deal of comfort with Platonic
properties; something some philosophers may take to count against the view.
What these metaphysical theories have in common is that they are all attempts to
formulate a consistent theory around our ordinary talk of persisting objects. That is,
chaste endurantism is a theory that arises from ordinary talk and which reveals certain
commitments we seem to have about the nature of physical objects over time. But when
we consider a little story about a clay statue (an object, most would say), we find that
chaste endurantism, so formulated, cannot be correct. Various proposals are made about
how to reconcile intuitions about persistence and sameness with the story of the clay
statue.
All of these proposals are refinements, which constitute rival theories of
persistence, including Jubien’s proposal that our ordinary talk regarding the persistence
conditions of objects is to be analyzed partly in terms of relations among properties.
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The salient point for our purposes is that there is clearly metaphysical dispute
about the nature of persisting objects, which seems to arise from ordinary linguistic
practice about all sorts of things. But of what consequence? Does such a fact really have
any bearing on meaning? Some philosophers want to claim that the meaning of a
designating term is given simply by a property: the meaning of ‘object’, for example, is
simply the property of being an object. To have the concept of an object, then, is to have
something in one’s conceptual repertoire that represents, however vaguely or incorrectly,
this property.
That allows speakers to say things about objects, and to answer
philosophical questions regarding instances of objects, like clay statues. Our various
claims are puzzling, perhaps even inconsistent, depending on what sorts of things fall
under the concept. Metaphysicians are thus concerned to show only that a particular
theory about how the world is does the best job of reconciling apparent inconsistencies.
Such a theory has consequences for reference—what sorts of things have the property of
being an object—but such theories do not play a role in what determines meaning. Use
determines meaning. 23
But what is it to possess a concept that vaguely or incorrectly represents the
property of being an object? It can only be idiosyncratic “knowledge” about how to use
the concept; a subjective understanding, that is, of its application conditions. This is the
knowledge that philosophers seek in analyzing a concept (and that linguists seek in
giving the meaning of a term), except that we abstract from ordinary usage, and impose
upon it, a claim about what the correct application conditions are. So a consequence of
the dispute about persistence arising from use is that there are various possibilities for
which set of application conditions we ought to associate with the property of being a
23
This is essentially the same argument, due to Michael Jubien, we considered in §1.3.
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[persisting] object. The dispute above comes to the question of whether the property of
being a [persisting] object is identical with the property of being an enduring object or
the property of being a perduring object or the property of being simples arranged
object-wise. 24 Insofar as our use of ‘object’ is supposed to be governed by such a
property, it is thus a dispute about what we mean with our object talk.
Moreover, the metaphysical dispute over fundamental ontology of objects should
bear on meaning if the metaphysical dispute over persons does; for the two cases appear
to be analogous. In the case of ‘person’, the so-called problem of personal identity arises
because our various claims about persons are puzzling—they cannot all be true.
Philosophical analysis yields competing views about how we ought to apply the concept
of person. One analysis says that persons are essentially bodies, and another says that
persons are essentially psychological characteristics. And according to Sider, whichever
analysis is correct—i.e., whichever analysis provides the best balance of fit with use and
eligibility—gives the meaning (in the sense of application conditions sufficient to place
normative constraints on use) of ‘person’. Insofar as neither of these (or none at all) does
provide the best balance of fit with use and eligibility, there is no fact about the meaning
of ‘person’.
In sum, it seems to me that premise 1 of the Schematic Argument is satisfied for
our person concept even according to a refined version of chaste endurantism simply
because ordinary person talk does not necessarily refer to a physical object. When Sider
claims that according to chaste endurantism there is in my immediate vicinity exactly one
person shaped thing, I argued that even if this is true, it does not rule out a distinct
coincident non-physical entity “in the vicinity” (speaking loosely). I think ordinary
24
These, of course, do not exhaust the possibilities.
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speakers talk as if an immaterial entity “inhabits” a body and this talk is not inconsistent
with chaste endurantism 25 because a coincident non-physical entity does not violate the
principle that distinct [physical] entities never coincide.
So it remains a candidate
meaning for ‘person’.
But a broader point is more relevant to our concerns here. Candidate meanings
for ‘person’ amount to the application-conditions for the concept, which issue from
incompatible views (metaphysical dispute) about what it is to be the same person over
time: are we essentially bodies, or essentially psychological characteristics? If use does
not tell and there is no reason to think that one of these properties is more natural, there is
no fact about what we mean. I see no reason to think that this point would not apply
equally to our more general object concept. When the concept is simply ‘object’, the
dispute concerns how we are supposed to square the intuitive idea of persistence with
other intuitive “truths” like the indiscernability of identicals and the principle of noncoincident physical objects. In the following section, I will press this idea to its logical
end: that premise 1 of the schematic argument is true for various natural kind terms
because there is metaphysical dispute about the persistence conditions of objects
generally. I will further argue that none of the candidates fits use better than the others,
as is demonstrated by the fact that metaphysical theories of persistence, all of them,
require some reinterpretation of what we say. What we say, that is, remains; what we
mean changes according to the theory. And in §4.4, we consider whether any of the
candidate meanings are in any sense more natural than the others.
25
It is, I think, inconsistent to talk of an immaterial thing inhabiting a body, but that is another matter.
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4.3
The Schematic Argument Applied to ‘Rabbit’
I claimed above that the schematic argument can be seen as a contemporary advance of
skepticism about the prospects for determinate meaning; but one that does away with
Quine’s empirical assumptions and allows naturalness, or eligibility, to play a role in
what determines linguistic meaning.
We should consider then how the schematic
argument is supposed to fail for terms like ‘rabbit’. Presumably, one of its premises must
be false for such instances. In this section, I will argue that for kind terms like ‘rabbit’,
there are multiple candidate meanings corresponding to conflicting theories of
persistence. That is, for all such terms, there is an instance of the schematic argument
where premise 1 is satisfied; and moreover, none of the candidates fits use better than the
rest.
Quine argued that there are different sorts of things that might be meant by
‘rabbit’ according to different ways of interpreting the individuative devices of the
language—the grammar, as it were—which can be done in various ways. I think this
idea comes down to just this: the meaning of ‘rabbit’ depends on metaphysics: what we
take the persistence conditions of these objects to be. But there is dispute about what
those conditions ought to be. If you are a chaste or promiscuous endurantist, objects, and
so rabbits, are whole and enduring things of a certain sort; but if you are a worm theorist,
objects, and so rabbits, are either static spacetime worms or instantaneous stages of a
spacetime worm (of a certain sort). So it would seem that, just as there are multiple
candidates for our person talk corresponding to conflicting metaphysical theories about
what it is to be the same person over time, there are multiple candidate meanings for our
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rabbit talk corresponding to conflicting theories about what it is to the same object over
time.
Sider would likely object that there is a disanalogy here. Premise 1 of the
schematic argument covers just those cases where there are conflicting metaphysical
theories about the nature of the thing in question. Where T is ‘person’, the debate is
about whether, when considering some interesting counterfactual cases where the
psychology and the body split, persons go where their bodies go, or where their memories
go; and so whether our person-talk refers to body-persons or psychological persons.
Though the debate surely takes place in ordinary English—i.e., in complete ignorance of
abstract metaphysics—Sider thinks that there are distinct candidate meanings for ‘person’
only if certain select theories of persistence are correct. That is because worm theorists
confronting a tale of bifurcation, for example, agree that there is a worm ‘in the vicinity
of the person’ that instantiates psychological-person and there is a distinct worm that
instantiates body-person. If worm theory is the correct ontology, there are two highly
eligible candidates and it makes sense to ask, “Which worm is the person?” Similarly,
promiscuous-endurantists agree that there is an enduring entity instantiating body-person
as well as a possibly distinct enduring entity instantiating psychological-person. If
promiscuous endurantism is the correct ontology, there are two highly eligible candidates
and it makes sense to ask, “Which enduring entity is the person?” So, with respect to
each of these ontologies, there are multiple candidate meanings for our person talk.
Not so, according to Sider, if you are a chaste endurantist.
This theory is
supposed to preclude indeterminacy because no chaste endurantist would accept two
things occupying all and only the same space at the same time, nor would he accept
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extant four-dimensional worms of any kind. Thus, since there is only one highly eligible
candidate, no chaste endurantist would accept premise 1.
I argued that chaste
endurantism must countenance an immaterial entity in order to account for ordinary
linguistic practice, and so that theory too admits multiple candidate meanings. But
Sider’s general point stands: premise 1 of the schematic argument will be accepted only
when, given some instance, all disputants agree that the rival object exists, and the
dispute comes down simply to which object we mean by T. A candidate can hardly be
eligible, after all, if it does not exist.
The dependence of premise 1 on fundamental ontology is one way to block the
schematic argument’s application to other kind-terms, like ‘rabbit’. If disputants must
agree that there is a distinct entity instantiating each candidate meaning for it to be a
candidate meaning at all, proponents of rival ontologies will likely deny the existence of
the sort of object the rival theory postulates; and hence in these cases they will deny the
truth of premise 1 altogether. A perdurantist, for example, does not admit that one of the
candidate meanings for ‘person’ is enduring body-person because he does not think that
there are any enduring entities at all. Thus the perdurantist need not admit that one of the
candidate meanings for ‘rabbit’ is an enduring creature of a certain sort. What is special
about our person talk, it will be argued, is that it is ambiguous given a particular ontology
of persistence. This is not the case for our rabbit talk. So perhaps even one in agreement
regarding the soundness of the schematic argument for ‘person’ can nevertheless deny
that there are multiple candidate meanings for our rabbit talk.
But this much agreement between disputants is unnecessary to establish premise 1
of the schematic argument. The schematic argument concerns conceptual analysis. As
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such, premise 1 is established whenever there is more than one analysis of the concept in
question arising from ordinary use. As is evident in a number of other cases, analyses of
a concept do not imply existence. Suppose, for example, we were analyzing our concept
of God.
The ontological argument notwithstanding, surely one could advance an
analysis, which takes certain features of the most divine being to be necessary and
sufficient, and still recognize that such a being may fail to exist. Similarly, it is hard to
see how we could give an analysis of our concept of a unicorn if candidate meanings
depended on some extant object to be meant; and bachelors would still be unmarried
adult males even if the adult males had all been married off. The strongest example is
perhaps a familiar analysis of knowledge—one that takes objective certainty to be a
necessary condition of it—which seems to imply that there are no instances of
knowledge. (I am also suggesting here that our analysis of ‘meaning’ seems to imply that
it is indeterminate.)
So it seems that giving an analysis of a concept does not commit one to the
existence of the thing so defined. Nor does engaging in reasonable debate commit one
even to the possibility of seemingly rival candidates.
Consider two devoted worm
theorists debating the nature of personhood. Both may assume that there is an essential
nature to such things and that our use of the term ‘person’ aims at capturing what that
nature is. Now speaker A brings to bear a crude counterexample to the claim that persons
are essentially their bodies. The counterexample goes something like this: “You can
imagine waking up in a completely different location in a completely different body.
Your old body continues on but is no longer you, of course, because here you are
remembering being elsewhere in a different body yesterday. Our tendency to agree that
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if such a split were to occur, you would go where your memories go, shows that the
‘essence’ of personhood is one’s psychological characteristics and not the associated
body.”
Sider would say that there are two worms in the running for being you, and A’s
argument is that the one that is you is the one that tracks your psychological
characteristics. Now what sort of response is the body-person adherent (speaker B) likely
to give? Here is what he should say: “No, I cannot imagine waking up in a completely
different body. If I were to wake up across the world and notice that I have a very
different appearance (perhaps I even look very much like a cockroach), I would think that
I have changed significantly, and perhaps that I have been sleeping a very long time, or
that I am dreaming, or that I have gone mad; but not that I am in a distinct body. Your
staging of the counterfactual scenario assumes that I could exist without my body, but
since I am essentially my body, that assumption is based on a false theory of what it is to
be a person. So your envisaged “rival” worm is no more a candidate for being me than
my shirt.”
What B is asserting is that A’s transmigrating psychology is not even a candidate
for being a person, in virtue of what persons are (according to B). Imagining A’s
“person” is a bit like imagining a “rabbit” coalescing from swamp-swill during a bizarre
electrical storm. I can imagine such an event, but if, say, it is lineage that determines
what it is to be a rabbit, imagining an entity indistinguishable from a rabbit coming to be
sans lineage has little bearing on the true nature of rabbithood. 26 Swamp-rabbit is not a
rabbit.
26
Similarly, though the staunch body-person adherent can surely imagine
This example is adapted from Karen Neander’s swampcow in “Swampman Meets Swampcow”, 1996.
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continuous psychological characteristics hopping from body to body, he need not think
that ours is such a world; and hence that it is possibly a person.
Here the first speaker, A, posits the kind denoted by ‘person’ as being essentially
a psychological entity capable of transcending a particular body. B, however, denies
this—since persons are (according to B) essentially continuous bodies of a certain sort,
A’s “person” could not be a person, whatever the case may be for its epistemic
possibility. This way of cashing out the dispute connects with Kripke’s distinction
between metaphysical and epistemic possibility:
We could have found out that the actual cats we have are demons. Once
we have discovered, however, that they are not, it is part of their nature
that, when we describe a counterfactual world in which there were such
demons around, we must say that the demons would not be cats. It would
be a world containing demons masquerading as cats. Although we could
say that cats might turn out to be demons, of a certain species, given that
cats are in fact animals, any cat-like being which is not an animal, in the
actual world or in a counterfactual one, is not a cat. 27
The parallel with our discussion of persons is that, from the point of view of B, who takes
it as given that persons are in fact continuous bodies, the counterfactual world imagined
by A where person-like entities hop from body to body is a world containing something
else masquerading as persons. So for our world too, for if persons are essentially bodies,
this is a necessary fact, and so B’s psychological persons are not, and could not, be
persons.
Nevertheless, it is hard to deny that there is a genuine dispute here about what sort
of thing persons are, and hence a genuine dispute about the meaning of our person talk.
Since we are doing conceptual analysis here, even presupposing that there is an essential
nature to such things and that our person talk aims at capturing what that nature is, it is
27
Kripke, 1980, p. 126.
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evident that the nature of the thing in question could in principle elude us all. This is
why there is supposed to be a role for eligibility in the first place: when the dispute is
metaphysical, it appears that no amount of physical evidence can help decide the issue, so
the proponent of determinate meaning must hold that at most one of our theories, or some
theory anyway (perhaps one not yet conceived), is true—i.e., it describes the world as it
is independently of what we say about it. Kripke’s talk of how things “turn out” and
what we “discover” to be the case implies that the way things are in the actual world does
much of the work determining the meaning of our kind terms and the modal truths
pertaining to them. Similarly, Lewis’ notion of eligibility suggests that certain ways of
conceiving of things carve the world at its joints. But these facts function merely to rule
out certain interpretations (candidate meanings) that arise from use.
So candidate meanings for a concept arise from a metaphysical dispute about how
we ought to apply the concept in question—that is, candidate meanings arise from dispute
about the actual application conditions of the concept. What establishes premise 1, it
seems to me, is simply recognition that there is a distinct theory on the table about the
metaphysical nature of the kind in question. Disputants can agree about that. If this is
right, there are consequences for rabbits. Even though the perdurantist will likely insist
as a matter of ontology that there are no enduring objects at all in the vicinity of the
rabbits, and the endurantist will likely insist as a matter of ontology that there are no 4-D
worms in the vicinity of the rabbits, if the debate over fundamental ontology is really a
debate, and one that has any bearing on what we mean when we use the term, there is a
true instance of premise 1 for ‘rabbit’:
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1`. There exist multiple candidate meanings for ‘rabbit’, corresponding to conflicting
theories about the persistence conditions of objects.
It follows that the debate over ‘person’ has another dimension of
underdetermination. I have argued that ‘rabbit’ has multiple candidate meanings because
there are multiple accounts of persistence for physical objects generally. If this is right, it
applies to any and all such objects, including persons (but only if persons are physical
objects). Thus, even if so many of us were not compelled by the intuition that we could
survive the loss of our bodies thanks to our free-floating psyches, it would still be the
case that our then seemingly unambiguous talk about [body-]persons is nevertheless
ambiguous according to distinct theories of persistence. With respect to the debate over
fundamental ontology, the perdurantist’s objects (and so persons) are, after all, static 4-D
worms, the exdurantist’s objects (and so persons) are instantaneous stages, and the
endurantist’s objects (and so persons) are 3-D wholes. Each theory specifies what sorts
of things could, given our use of the language, have the property of being an object. As
such, they are theories about where the most fundamental joints of nature are; and hence
they specify for any kind of object k, some of the application conditions for the property
of being k.
So the argument here generalizes over various kind terms. For any such term,
there is a true instance of premise 1 of the schematic argument corresponding to
competing theories about fundamental ontology. Thus, the advocate of determinate
meaning must claim that some other premise of the schematic argument is false in these
instances, and I think it is pretty clearly not premise 2: it is relatively uncontroversial that
use (behavior) does not by itself distinguish between competing ontologies. This is
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surely the basis for Quine’s arguments for indeterminacy, but the more recent treatments
of ontology just drive this point home.
Sider’s temporal counterpart theory, for example (according to which the things
we ordinarily name and quantify over are stages of four-dimensional objects) requires a
re-interpretation of things we commonly say. The claim “That is the same rabbit that was
in the garden yesterday”, for example, must mean something like that time-slice-of-arabbit is R-continuous with another time-slice-of-a-rabbit that was then in the garden;
where R specifies some relation that captures something sufficiently close to identity but
of course is not identity. 28
Similar remarks apply to Jubien’s perdurantism. Jubien takes the rabbit, qua
object, to be a four-dimensional mereological sum, which instantiates being this rabbit.
At any given time, there is just a stage, itself a mereological sum, which of course could
not instantiate being this rabbit, since it is not a rabbit. It is in virtue of being a temporal
part of something that instantiates this sort of property (a k-essence) that relates in the
appropriate way distinct mereological sums over time. This theory thus involves a reinterpretation of ordinary claims involving the notion of “sameness” over time in terms of
a relation that is neither similarity nor identity.
I have argued that even chaste endurantism, which is supposed to be the theory
that takes our language and intuitions at face value, similarly requires some reinterpretation of ordinary talk if it is consistent with the indiscernibility of identicals (see
§4.2). Interestingly, metaphysicians in every corner of this debate have no compunction
28
Note that such a rendering is nevertheless couched in the idiom of the rejected language. R is not
identity, that is, only according to a rejected theory of what it is to be the “same” object over time. Similar
remarks apply to rendering the meaning of ‘rabbit’ as time-slice-of-a-rabbit; for this is so only according to
a (rejected) scheme that takes something other than stages to be the rabbits. For according to Sider, these
temporary entities are the rabbits.
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about asserting that some string of words means such-and-such, though most people,
perhaps all people, using the words have no idea that that is what they mean with them.
But the reinterpretations are necessary since the criterion specified by any of these
theories would seem to make much of what we say about ordinary objects false; and it is
a normative constraint on interpretation that we take most of what a person says to be
true. If ordinary speech is endurantist and this gives rise to apparent inconsistencies,
there is (arguably) some warrant to reinterpret much of our talk to refer to more exotic
entities, like stages or worms or properties of mereological sums. But it is just this fact—
that we can reinterpret what we say to refer to various kinds of entities—which shows
that the multiple candidate meanings for our kind-talk given by the metaphysical dispute
over fundamental ontology are not narrowed by fit with use.
Thus, premises 1 and 2 of the schematic argument are satisfied for ‘rabbit’. So
either, among the candidate meanings for ‘rabbit’, one is more natural than the others, in
which case premise 3 is false; or some other candidate combines eligibility and fit with
use better than these candidates, in which case premise 4 is false. Either possibility
would allow one to argue that there is a determinate meaning for ‘rabbit’ after all, thanks
to the relative eligibility of a single candidate. We turn now to the reasons why eligibility
is something of a moot point in this particular debate.
4.4
Natural Properties?
In “New Work for a Theory of Universals”, David Lewis argues that “Putnam’s
Paradox” 29 ought to be taken as a reductio for one of his premises—in particular, the
premise that there are no constraints on reference beyond what we say and think (our
29
Also known as The Model Theoretic Argument. See Putnam, 1980.
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theory of the world, as it were). If it is a “Moorean fact” that “our language does have a
fairly determinate interpretation,” it is our job to look for another constraint, and natural
properties are supposed to do the trick. 30 But since any additional claims about the use of
language, or its users, or the causal relation between users and the things they are talking
about, admittedly just adds more theory to the theory (which is, in virtue of being a
theory, susceptible to innumerable permutations and so “unintended” interpretations), the
additional meaning-constitutive facts must be facts about the referents themselves.
Natural properties do the job of delineating highly eligible referents and thereby do the
job of determining the most eligible interpretation available. This is because what makes
a relatively natural property relatively natural is just the fact that it belongs to relatively
well-demarcated things.
As such, natural properties are supposed to solve the problem of “unintended
interpretations”—interpretations consistent with linguistic use but which do not map onto
what we actually mean—and as such undermine the application of the schematic
argument to natural kinds. I will argue here that the notion of a natural property does
nothing to undermine the application of the schematic argument to natural kinds. This is
in part because the relative “naturalness” among members of one set of putative meaning
candidates—for example, being a rabbit vs. being a rabbit-stage—depends on which
ontological perspective one assumes. This shows that these are not the relevant meaning
candidates given the dispute over fundamental ontology. Even assuming neutrality in this
regard by distinguishing a different set of meaning candidates, the relative naturalness of
these candidates amounts to no more than the relative naturalness of a theory of
persistence, or fundamental ontology, since these determine the application conditions of
30
Lewis, 1983, p. 371.
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the concepts involved. But the relative naturalness of fundamental ontology seems not to
be a matter of things-in-themselves, which seems to undermine the work the referent is
presumed to do in determining meaning.
I have argued (§4.3) that there are multiple candidate meanings for our rabbit talk
corresponding to distinct theories about the persistence conditions of objects. So what
exactly are the candidate meanings for our rabbit talk? As Quine characterized the
problem, it looks like competing candidate meanings for ‘rabbit’ are the properties of
being a rabbit, being a rabbit-stage, being an undetached rabbit-part, being an element
of rabbit-fusion, etc. If so, employing the notions of naturalness and eligibility, one
might object to Quine’s indeterminacy theses with the following argument: Consider the
relative naturalness of being a rabbit, and, say, being a rabbit-stage. Rabbit-stages are
like grue things in the sense that being a rabbit-stage has application conditions that are
more ‘complicated or disjunctive’ than being a rabbit. You seem to have to know what a
rabbit is before you can start talking about rabbit-stages. Anyone can think about rabbits,
but to think about rabbit-stages requires a theory. So being a rabbit is more natural, and
so more eligible, to be meant.
This argument, however, fails to appreciate the fact that rabbit-stages are only
more complicated or disjunctive from within a theory that takes whole enduring objects
to be the things that have the property of being a rabbit. From another such theory
(Sider’s), being a rabbit is instantiated by stages, a perspective from which the claim that
the property of being a rabbit-stage is less (or more) natural than the property of being a
rabbit does not even make sense.
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This is roughly the same point that Goodman makes regarding the relative
“qualitativeness” of blue and grue:
“Consider”, it will be argued, “the predicates ‘blue’ and ‘green’ and the
predicate ‘grue’ introduced earlier, and also the predicate ‘bleen’ that
applies to emeralds examined before time t just in case they are blue and
to other emeralds just in case they are green. Surely it is clear”, the
argument runs, “that the first two are purely qualitative and the second two
are not; for the meaning of each of the latter two plainly involves
reference to a specific temporal position.” To this I reply that indeed I do
recognize the first two as well-behaved predicates admissible in lawlike
hypotheses, and the second two as ill-behaved predicates. But the
argument that the former but not the latter are purely qualitative seems to
me to be quite unsound. True enough, if we start with “blue” and “green”,
then “grue” and “bleen” will be explained in terms of “blue” and “green”
and a temporal term. But equally truly, if we start with “grue” and
“bleen”, then “blue” and “green” will be explained in terms of “grue” and
“bleen” and a temporal term; “green”, for example, applies to emeralds
examined before time t just in case they are grue, and to other emeralds
just in case they are bleen. Thus qualitativeness is an entirely relative
matter and does not by itself establish any dichotomy of predicates. This
relativity seems to be completely overlooked by those who contend that
the qualitative character of a predicate is a criterion for its good
behavior. 31
Though Goodman is concerned with relative qualitativeness and we are here concerned
with relative naturalness, the comparison is analogous in the sense that which property is
more disjunctive or complicated depends on the theoretical perspective from which we
make such judgments. With regard to rabbits and rabbit-stages, rabbits are perhaps
simpler, or purer, or more fundamental; but only from an endurantist perspective. But
rival ontologies tell us that other sorts of things are the rabbits. Being a rabbit and being
a rabbit-stage (etc.) are thus not the candidate meanings for ‘rabbit’ if the candidates are
a function of metaphysical dispute about fundamental ontology.
31
Goodman, 1955, pp. 79-80.
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Is there some ontology-neutral way of specifying the candidate meanings for
‘rabbit’? I think we can do better by following Sider’s way of specifying the candidate
meanings for our person talk:
The debate over criteria of personal identity, for the worm theorist,
concerns which of the aggregates we refer to in our talk of persons…. The
disputed term in this debate is ‘person’; the candidate meanings are the
properties of being a perduring body-person and being a perduring
psychological-person. Since psychological-persons and body-persons
both exist, the only question is which of these candidates we mean by
‘person’. 32
Sider follows the intuitive idea here that what we refer to is linked to which property is
meant.
Rabbits clearly exist.
I take it that the debate over fundamental ontology
concerns which kind of thing we refer to in our talk of objects (e.g., rabbits): worms,
stages, wholes, simples, etc. Moreover, I take it that it is fundamental ontology that
specifies for any kind-concept T what it is to be the same T on different occasions; and as
such, ontology is necessary for giving an interpretation of T sufficient to determine what
is in the extension of T. Thus, when the disputed term is ‘rabbit’ and the metaphysical
dispute is over fundamental ontology, the candidate meanings are being an enduringrabbit, being a perduring-rabbit, being an exduring-rabbit, being simples-arrangedrabbit-wise (?), etc. (Mutatis mutandis, the same may be said for other natural kind
terms.) Presumably we can mean only one of these. Is one of these properties either
perfectly natural or more natural than the others?
A perfectly natural property is the sort of property described by physics, perhaps
the ideal physics, but, since the properties in question issue from metaphysical theories,
none is perfectly natural. One may be yet be relatively more natural than the others, but
32
Sider, 2001a, p. 5.
130
the difficulty in deciding their relative naturalness stems from what it is to be a relatively
natural property. Relatively natural properties do the work of delineating the most
eligible meaning among the candidates by being the property a thing has in virtue of
being the most well-demarcated thing. In other words, it is facts about referents that
determine the facts about meaning.
This is really just externalism all over again, and I have already argued that
externalism does not solve our problem (see Chapter 2). Facts about the referent are
insufficient to determine the facts about meaning. The theoretical decisions of experts
are thus constitutive of kinds and yet it is supposed to be the salience of kinds that
determines who the experts are. This problem strikes me as bad enough but it leaves
open the possibility that it is nevertheless the salience of kinds that determined who the
experts are, and so what we mean. The idea here is that, although we surely do have our
epistemic limitations, there are purely worldly facts that our theories aim to describe and
we can be more or less successful at accomplishing this. The most successful theory is
the best explanation, and it determines meaning. And this is precisely where relatively
natural properties do their thing—they determine an interpretation by being a property of
the most well-demarcated thing among the candidates.
The problem is that rabbits, however you slice them, are well-demarcated things.
It is undeniable that there is a bit of vagueness that infects all our concepts, but even
granting this, there is little doubt that, whether we refer to wholes or stages or worms or
simples, it is other facts about rabbits that set them apart from the non-rabbits. Since our
candidates are equivalently natural in presuming whatever else it takes to be a rabbit,
what then determines which of these candidate meanings is more natural? Is an exduring
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rabbit or a perduring rabbit any more or less well-demarcated than an enduring rabbit? I
take it that the answer is “no” for precisely the reason Sider gives regarding the
candidates for ‘person’:
“Denying this would be like saying that Victorian houses
comprise a more natural kind than Tudors.” 33
Though this is clearly not at all what Lewis had in mind, I can imagine
metaphysicians arguing for the relative naturalness of one of these candidates on the basis
of how many of our pre-philosophical intuitions remain intact once all the reinterpreting
has been carried out. This suggestion is in sharp contrast to the idea that the world is a
certain way and objects actually persist by, say, exduring, rather than enduring. That is
just the way the world is, Sider would say (at least in some places 34 ), and it is in virtue of
that fact that when we use our words an intended interpretation exists, regardless of how
difficult, or impossible, it is to find out how the world really is in this regard. I think that
this is a deeply problematic view of meaning but the present suggestion is no better. It
posits that, since no other kind of fact could make it so, pragmatic and/or psychological
reasons to think that one of these properties is more natural than another, are constitutive
of which property is most natural.
As Lewis would say, “that way lies the futile
bootstrap-tugging that we must avoid.” 35
So as I see it, the claim that natural properties can solve our problem is
unfounded. Insofar as natural properties provide eligible meaning candidates, it must be
because the most natural properties are had by the most well-demarcated things—they
33
Sider, 2001a, p. 14.
For example, see Sider, 2001b, pp. xiii-xxiv. In 2001a, however, he suggests the line, with regard to
persons, that we are now pursuing: “In essence, the challenge is that philosophical reflection in the ideal
limit might favor one of the candidates. For the very theoretical grounds philosophers use to decide which
theory to believe — simplicity, comprehensiveness and the like — are constitutive of which theory
provides a candidate that has a more natural basis in the perfectly natural properties and relations” (p. 14,
italics his).
35
Lewis, 1983, p. 372.
34
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carve nature at its joints. But persistence conditions, whatever they are, are had by welldemarcated things, and we have not been able to make sense of persistence conditions
themselves being more or less natural. So I think we should take premise 3, with regard
to the meaning candidates for ‘rabbit’, to be true.
Could some other meaning candidate combine eligibility and fit with use better
than these candidates? This is really the question of whether there is some other theory
of persistence, not yet conceived perhaps, that could rise above the others in terms of
naturalness, since fit with use is unlikely to fair any better than those already on the
table. 36 But I think the argument above for why perduring and enduring entities are
equivalently natural would apply to any other such account. Hence, there is at least good
reason now to think that premise 4 is also true.
So if the meaning of ‘rabbit’ is
determined by use plus eligibility, it follows that the meaning of ‘rabbit’ is indeterminate:
there is no fact of the matter which candidate we mean.
4.5
The Meaning of ‘Existence’
Sider has one final argument for why disputes over fundamental ontology are “immune”
to the sort of argument I have been developing here: disputes over fundamental ontology
can be described by appealing to nothing but logical vocabulary, in which case the
dispute must be about what exists rather than how the world should be described. Sider
argues as follows:
Pretend that nothing exists other than two persisting electrons, which have
no proper spatial parts. Then the nihilist, the chaste endurantist and I
disagree over which of the following sentences are true, where the
36
I think the current debate about fundamental ontology shows that ordinary object talk is too loose to
narrow the candidates this way.
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quantifiers are intended to range unrestrictedly over absolutely all
(concrete) things:
∃x∃y x≠y (“there are at least two things”)
∃x∃y∃z (x≠y & x≠z & y≠z) (“there are at least three things”)
∃x∃y∃z∃w (x≠y & x≠z & x≠w & y≠z & y≠w & z≠w) (“there
are at least four things”)
The nihilist thinks only the first sentence is true. The chaste endurantist
admits the second sentence in addition to the first (provided she is willing
to admit the existence of arbitrary fusions). The defender of temporal
parts admits all three sentences: assuming she thinks time is dense, she
thinks every electron has infinitely many temporal parts. Thus, the
defender of temporal parts, the nihilist and the chaste endurantist disagree
over sentences stated just with quantifiers, variables, and the identity sign.
Given this it is difficult to see how the schematic argument could be made
in this case. Since the disagreement between these theorists extends to the
logical vocabulary, there is no neutral language in which the existence of
multiple candidates could be asserted that would be acceptable from the
point of view of everyone in the debate. What multiple candidate
meanings could there be for unrestricted quantifiers, boolean operators and
the identity sign? 37
Sider goes on to argue that the only way to defend the Schematic Argument in this case is
to suppose that there are multiple candidate meanings for ‘existence’.
Not so. I have already argued that disputes about what exists are disputes about
how the world should be described. That is because such a dispute is about which
property is identical to the intuitive one we naively take to be the meaning of a term. If,
for example, one takes the meaning to ‘object’ to be the property of being an object, the
dispute comes down to whether that property is identical to being a perduring object, or
being an enduring object, etc.
Each of these properties involves a distinct set of
application conditions, and application conditions are knowledge, in the widest sense,
about how we should apply the concept in question.
37
Sider, 2001a, p. 20.
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I have also argued that agreement among metaphysicians about the existence of
rival candidates is not requisite for such disputes to generate candidate meanings. I
argued that, insofar as there is supposed to be a fact of the matter about which theory is
correct, its correctness would preclude even the possibility of rival candidates
instantiating the property in question. As such, perdurantists arguing about the nature of
a person may agree that there are persons around, and that there are various worms
around that could, in an epistemological sense, be persons; but insofar as it is a dispute
about the correct application conditions of the concept, each theorist must presuppose the
falsity of his rival’s view. For if persons are continuous bodies (or whatever), no other
worm around could be a person. Similarly, I want to suggest, metaphysicians theorizing
about fundamental ontology may agree that there are objects around, but each does, and
must, presuppose the falsity of rival views. It does not follow from that there is thereby
only one candidate meaning. In fact, positing candidate meanings seems to be the only
way to make sense of the dispute, given the impossibility of finding out which ontology
is correct.
But the right response to Sider’s argument here is just this: since the thought
experiment asks us to “pretend that nothing exists other than two persisting electrons,
which have no proper spatial parts”, the nihilist has it right: only the first sentence is
true. This is just to say that the telling of the story itself interprets the symbols. In
particular, the telling of this story interprets what it is to be a thing.
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5. Indeterminacy of Meaning
Let us take stock. So as not to overstate the case, here is the argument I take myself to
have defended:
1. We represent mentally, and communicate, facts about the external world (intuitive
claim about linguistic meaning).
2. Representational content must be explained in terms of non-representational facts
(naturalist assumption).
3. Non-representational facts available to fix meaning are exhausted by 1) relational
facts between speakers and their environment; 2) innate content; and 3) natural
properties (the nature of things-in-themselves).
4. Relational facts appear to be insufficient to fix meaning.
5. Innate content appears to be insufficient to fix meaning.
6. Natural properties appear to be insufficient to fix meaning.
7. The conjunction of all three appears insufficient to fix meaning.
8. Thus, the meaning of paradigmatic referring expressions appears to be
indeterminate.
The first two 2 premises are largely undefended. Premise 1 is just an intuitive claim,
which, in a manner similar to other philosophical problems, gives rise to a paradox:
namely that paradigmatic referring expressions do not refer.
Premise 2 does warrant an explanation, however, since it can and has been argued
that the premise is just a demand for the “reduction” of intentional idiom into the
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language of physics; as if we could, and should, explain a belief (or some such) in terms
of “quarks and the like”. I do not intend to be endorsing this kind of reductionism here.
Rather, I assume a modest supervenience thesis: that all intentional facts supervene on
some set of non-intentional facts (no change in intentional facts without some change in
other sorts of facts; or, as Mark Richard puts it, “when we ascribe different semantic
properties, we need to be able to point to a relevant difference between the subjects of the
ascriptions, that underlies the difference in the account”). As I suggest in §1.3:
The naturalist requirement on linguistic ontology is no different from the
naturalist requirement on chemical ontology. In the latter case, if it makes
sense to say that O2 is chemically distinct from O3, there must be some
physical difference between the two types. Similarly, if it makes sense to
say that T1 has content distinct from T2, there must be some physical
difference between the two thoughts, or at least a physical difference
somewhere that accounts for the intentional difference between the two
thoughts. In both ontologies, we are speaking of types and insisting that
there be some physical difference whenever distinct types are instantiated.
Premise 3 does seem to me to exhaust the possibilities of what there is to
determine meaning. There may be aspects of meaning that supervene on purely internal
facts—this is what is claimed of innate content. There may be aspects of meaning that
supervene on purely external facts—this is the job of natural properties (privileging the
most eligible interpretation). There may also be aspects of meaning that supervene on
relational facts, such as causal and historical facts, between speakers and their
environment; as well as conventions between speakers.
This is where semantic
externalism is supposed to do its job.
I sketch here in §1.2 what I take to be a plausible explanation of premise 1 that
incorporates all three kinds of facts:
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The meaning of linguistic expressions is rooted in mental representations,
where representational content is determined by a set of factors whose
membership includes: 1) cognitive capacities, which develop in ontogeny
thanks in part to our genetic endowment and in part to the environment in
which we find ourselves; 2) the noumenal world impinging on the senses
in a regular way; and 3) social conventions relating subjective concepts to
linguistic expressions. Cognitive capacities structure content imbued by
the world and thanks to the social aspect, language can “grow” concepts—
we can learn to think about and speak about things with which we have no
direct experience by placing such concepts within an internal system that
generates the form of linguistic expressions.
There are two things to note about this sketch: 1) it is not Quine’s theory of meaning;
and 2) even Chomsky’s generative grammar seems committed to it since the semantic
properties of the language faculty are supposed to be triggered in experience. Where
Chomsky and I depart company is my claim that intuitively, when one talks about rabbits,
one is really talking about rabbits, not a concept—reference to real things is built into
ordinary language and we can legitimately ask the philosophical question: what could
make this so? The bulk of my work attempts to show that what could make this so, does
not; i.e., premises 4-7 are true.
Semantic externalism is the view that the meaning of a term, like ‘rabbit’, is partly
determined by facts external to the speaker. As Putnam puts it, “traditional semantic
theory leaves out two contributions to the determination of reference—the contribution of
society and the contribution of the real world; a better semantic theory must encompass
both” (p. 48).
So why are we talking about meaning here and not reference?
Here is an
objection I encountered frequently in my discussions with others about the indeterminacy
thesis: meaning is determined by use, the objection goes, and so the meaning of ‘rabbit’
is (determinately) just the property of being a rabbit; the meaning of ‘object’ is the
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property of being an object; and so on. We have disputes about what sorts of things have
these properties, so the disputes are about reference, not meaning.
My response begins with the observation (theoretical assumption, perhaps) that
linguistic meaning is rooted in conceptual content. As such, our problem is explaining
what exactly we are attributing to someone we claim to be in possession of a concept that
vaguely or incorrectly represents the property of, say, being an object. I argue that it can
only be idiosyncratic “knowledge” about how to use the concept; a subjective
understanding, that is, of its application conditions.
This is the knowledge that
philosophers seek in analyzing a concept (and that linguists seek in giving the meaning of
a term), except that philosophers (and linguists) abstract from ordinary use, and impose
upon it, a claim about what the correct application conditions are. A consequence of the
dispute about persisting objects arising from use, I argue, is that there are various
possibilities for which set of application conditions we ought to associate with the
property of being a [persisting] object. This dispute comes to the question of whether the
property of being a [persisting] object is identical with the property of being an enduring
object or the property of being a perduring object (among others). Insofar as our use of
‘object’ is supposed to be governed by such a property, it is thus a dispute about what we
mean with our object talk.
So we are looking at factors capable of fixing the content of individual mental
representations from which the meaning of terms is derived. Externalists claim that such
content is fixed in the following way: we all intend with our use of some referring
expression T to refer to what others in our linguistic community refer to, which is
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supposed to be determined by the original ostensive definition—pointing with the
intention to refer to (all and only) things like that thing—and the nature of the thing itself.
My argument is that when one points to a rabbit, for example, one is pointing (at
best 1 ) to an individual with certain properties—it has a certain pattern of color, a
particular shape, a unique history and lineage, etc.—and so the intention to refer to things
like that does not fully determine reference even given the nature of things-in-themselves;
for there is sufficient variation between things to make the decision about when one does
have something sufficiently like that thing somewhat arbitrary. That is, there are various
ways to delineate a kind (in terms of superficial similarities or lineage, for example). The
choice is a pragmatic one—not determined solely by this intention and the way these
things are.
This is where the decision of theorists could make a relevant difference. Experts
decide which features of things are relevant to belonging to a certain kind, and those
decisions go the rest of the way in determining what the rest of us mean when we use a
term designating a kind. This is the claim that expert-guided conventions fill the gap in
determining reference (via some set of conditions on the term’s use).
This is promising but I argue that it does not work to solve Quine’s problem.
Quine’s problem reveals various metaphysical possibilities for conceptualizing all
[concrete] things; it is not concerned with the physical differences between things. That
is, Quine’s problem does not regard run-of-the-mill vagueness, which might be resolved
simply by “precisifying”, however arbitrarily, the concept in question (as we do when we
make a distinction between hares and rabbits). Quine’s problem arises because being a
rabbit has no reference at all until we specify what it is to be the same rabbit over time.
1
Ostension is also temporally bound and the thing ostended may not be, or not to the same degree anyway.
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This requires a metaphysical theory, like endurantism or perdurantism. Given one of
these theories, we do have a means of determining extensions, so we do have the means
of resolving the indeterminacy thesis. (This is why philosophers take this to be an
epistemological problem only.)
The problem, I argue, is that there is more than one “expert” vying for the
privilege of deciding what the rest of us mean by ‘rabbit’. What determines who the real
expert is? The problem does not dissolve when one steps up and declares that we will
conventionally assume that objects, say, perdure because, as the debate over fundamental
ontology shows, everything we say can be reinterpreted according to different theories.
As such, no change in subsequent use issues from adopting this convention over some
other, which is tantamount to having no convention at all. (This is decidedly unlike
conventions that distinguish between rabbits and hares, or regard jadeite and nephrite as
the same kind, both of which do impose constraints on use.)
So there are just two things left that could determine who the real expert is: one
possibility is that we innately manifest a particular way of conceptualizing objects (i.e.,
we have an innate theory of persistence); and another is that there is a correct theory of
persistence, even if we should never realize what it is.
Chapter 3 looks at the first of these two reference-fixing facts: innate content.
Intuitively, if we innately represent objects as, say, enduring, we have a fact that could
resolve the indeterminacy thesis. Every recognized instance of an object would similarly
be represented as enduring and our reference scheme would be fixed by this fact, in spite
of the metaphysical wrangling over what objects are really like. Chomsky has in fact
cited the work of Renee Baillargeon and other cognitive scientists as providing
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“considerable reason” to think that pre-linguistic infants have a well-defined concept of
object permanence, indicating, contra Quine, that reification of bodies comes well before
any manifestation of language. This is supposed to be evidence, then, for a means of
resolving indeterminacy which does not depend on verbal behavior.
The argument of Chapter 3 is not terribly bold: what is needed to establish a
reference scheme is an innate theory of persistence. But there is no evidence for this sort
of innate content. This is because 1) no evidence stemming from external matters can
decide between competing views; and 2) all the evidence stemming from behavior, of
adults and infants alike, can be interpreted according to distinct theories of persistence.
The effect of the latter point is that any argument for innate content from assumptions
about the content of our adult concept will be circular.
Let me emphasize that the argument is not against innate content per se—I am as
sure as the next guy that we have lots of it. I am merely arguing that we have no
evidence for a unique, innate theory of persistence. And in any case, the idea of an innate
theory of persistence seems like a red herring. Various philosophers hold that we are
naïve endurantists, but that we should not be. Other theories, it is claimed, do a better job
of resolving certain metaphysical puzzles that arise from our ordinary use of the
language. If there is anything to this claim, it means that our innate theory is defeasible,
so does not in fact fix a particular reference scheme into the language. It takes things
persisting a certain way to do that.
This brings us to the all-important intuition that evidence is not what matters here.
As long as the external world is one way and not another, even if we shall never know
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which way it is, that fact suffices to fix a reference scheme, and so meaning is
determinate after all.
I attempt to refute this intuition in Chapter 4, but this is a difficult task indeed
since I cannot give any a priori grounds for rejecting the intuition, nor can I bring to bear
empirical evidence against it. Instead I try to show that the properties in question are all
relatively unnatural, and that none could rise above its competition, given what it is to be
a natural property. I guess this is an a priori argument, but its target is not the general
intuition that evidence only weakly underdetermines a theory; its target is the intuition
that, in the matter of fundamental ontology, one is in any sense most natural.
I do not share the intuition that eligibility plays a role in fixing meaning, but I
admit that if meaning is a determinate affair, something like this must be right. So for the
sake of argument, I accept the proposal by Ted Sider, in a paper on personal identity, that
meaning is determined by use plus eligibility.
I then try to give an argument for
wholesale indeterminacy (of a reference scheme) that parallels Sider’s argument, via an
instance of the Schematic Argument, that the meaning of ‘person’ is indeterminate. My
argument parallels Sider’s in some ways and not others. In fact, I have to show how
some of Sider’s assumptions are wrong in order to get my argument through. That is
why I think it is important to spend the time on personal identity, though as a
philosophical issue, personal identity is tangential to my thesis.
With regard to ‘person’, Sider argues as follows:
9. There exist multiple candidate-meanings for ‘person’, corresponding to bodily
and psychological continuity theories.
10. Neither candidate fits use better than the rest.
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11. Neither candidate is more eligible than the rest.
12. No other meaning-candidate combines eligibility and fit with use as well as these
candidates.
13. Meaning is determined by use plus eligibility.
14. Therefore, talk of persisting persons is indeterminate in meaning between
candidates corresponding to the psychological and bodily continuity theories, and
so there is no fact of the matter which of these theories is correct.
9 is true because, with respect to various theories of persistence, there are multiple
objects in the running for being a person. If you are a worm theorist, for example, there
is a worm corresponding to the body-person, and another worm corresponding to the
psychological person (because, usually, the body-worm will outlast the psychologicalworm). Conflicting theories tell us which worm is the person.
10 is true because we say things that correspond to each theory. Why isn’t our
person talk “benignly” ambiguous, as it is when we talk about banks and sometimes
mean to refer to buildings and other times to clouds? I suggested that the issue of
personal identity stems from how one sees himself, especially in imagined counterfactual
scenarios—that the issue comes to which one is you if, say, you imagine a transfer of
your psychological characteristics into a distinct body. Some theorists use such cases to
argue for psychological continuity, pointing out that most of us would say that we go
where our psychologies go (i.e., that use favors psychological continuity). But Sider cites
an example by Bernard Williams that is supposed to show that if we describe the body
switching case differently, say involving the anticipation of torture, one will not be
comforted by being told that when he is tortured, he will not remember being forewarned.
144
The philosopher recognizes that one should either be relieved that he will be transferred
before torture, or fear his own torture, but not both. So our person talk is not benignly
ambiguous, and use does not seem to favor a candidate.
11 is true because neither property is more natural than the other. The most
eligible properties are the most natural in the sense that natural properties ‘carve nature at
its joints’. The “perfectly” natural properties classify, or delineate, the fundamental
constituents of reality—it is the objective of physics to discover these. Arguably the
nature of persisting persons does not belong in the domain of physics. Relatively natural
properties have ‘a less complicated or disjunctive basis in the perfectly natural
properties’. As such, ‘blue’ is more eligible than ‘grue’, since being grue is a disjunctive
property and so less natural than being blue. But being a body-person and being a
psychological-person are equally unnatural (in the relevant sense), so neither is more
eligible to be meant.
12 is true because the disjunctive candidate being a psychological-person or a
body-person is less natural in virtue of its being disjunctive. Moreover, certain intuitions
seem to rule out one of the candidates; for example, in one’s judgment that he will be
tortured even if his memories are gone, one thereby judges that he is not the
psychological-person. Any other candidate, presumably, would be quite at odds with use.
Thus, given the premise that meaning is determined by use plus eligibility, there is no
fact about which property is meant in our talk of persisting persons.
I argue that the same sort of argument applies to our talk of persisting physical
composite objects, and so it extends to our talk about all kinds of persisting physical
composite objects, like rabbits. Hence:
145
15. There exist multiple candidate-meanings for our talk of persisting rabbits,
corresponding to distinct theories of persistence (endurantism, perdurantism,
exdurantism, etc.).
16. None of the meaning-candidates fits use better than the rest.
17. None of the meaning-candidates is more eligible than the rest.
18. No other meaning-candidate combines eligibility and fit with use as well as these
candidates.
19. Meaning is determined by use plus eligibility.
20. Therefore, talk of persisting rabbits is indeterminate in meaning between
candidates corresponding to persistence theories, and so there is no fact of the
matter which of these theories is correct.
With regard to 15, one might object (and Sider certainly would object) that there
is a disanalogy between his claim that there are multiple candidate-meanings for ‘person’
corresponding to psychological and bodily continuity theories, and my claim that there
are multiple candidate-meanings for ‘rabbit’ corresponding to various theories of
persistence. ‘Person’, he would claim, has multiple candidate-meanings only if there are
distinct objects “in the vicinity”, which all parties agree exist, and the question comes to
which object is the person. (Eligibility, after all, requires existence.) But the debate over
fundamental ontology is not like this: perdurantists and endurantists do not agree that
there are, for example, 4D worms around, in addition to 3D wholes, and each might be
what we mean with our object talk. Both theorists will deny 15 for this reason.
My reply is that 1) all parties agree that there are persisting rabbits; 2) conceptual
analysis deals with the definition of these things—in this case, what is it to be the same
146
rabbit over time (without which there is no reference); and 3) a view about how to answer
this question is always the denial of other accounts. If one argues that persons are
perduring psychologies, for example, he thereby denies that persons are possibly
perduring bodies. That there is material around corresponding to what a perduring-bodyproponent would call a body-person is immaterial; it is no more a candidate for being a
person than a person’s arm. Similarly, if one argues that rabbits perdure, he thereby
denies that rabbits possibly endure. 9 and 15 of their respective no-fact-of-the-matter
arguments both ‘tacitly presuppose the falsity of one of the views in question’.
Regardless, competing analyses are candidate-meanings, and if no candidate is ‘the best
combination of fit with use and eligibility’, there is no fact of the matter which candidate
is meant.
Use does not decide between candidates, I argue, because talk about persisting
objects of various kinds is what gives rise to the various puzzles that in turn give rise to
competing theories of persistence. All going theories of persistence, including what we
might call naïve (or chaste) endurantism (if it is consistent), require some reinterpretation of ordinary language claims. The further problem for fit with use, of
course, is simple (weak) underdetermination of a reference scheme by the evidence. As
Chomsky points out, claims about meaning will always go beyond the evidence; if they
did not, they would be without interest.
Key to my defense of broad application of the Schematic Argument is the defense
of the claim that none of the candidate-meanings is more eligible than the rest. The way
Quine put the problem, one might think that candidate-meanings for ‘rabbit’ are rabbit,
rabbit-stage, undetached rabbit parts, etc. If so, the claim that rabbit is more natural is
147
quite plausible; for rabbit-stage and undetached-rabbit-parts are surely more
complicated or disjunctive than rabbit.
But since the metaphysical dispute is over
fundamental ontology, these are not the candidate-meanings for our rabbit talk (for the
claim about rabbit being most natural presupposes endurantism). Rather, the candidatemeanings in question are (among others) enduring-rabbit and perduring-rabbit.
What sense can be made of the idea that one of these properties is more natural
than the other(s)? Again, natural properties are those that carve nature at its joints, the
perfectly natural properties being the domain of physics, and the relatively natural
properties having the least complicated or disjunctive basis in the perfectly natural
properties. As David Lewis puts it, “Once we are away from the perfectly natural
properties, one thing that makes for naturalness of a property is that it is a property
belonging exclusively to well-demarcated things.” 2 Bruce the cat is clearly more welldemarcated than the cat-shaped chunk of matter following a few steps behind Bruce
(Lewis’s example) and blue things are clearly more well-demarcated than grue things.
Is the property of being an enduring rabbit perfectly natural? I think that rabbits
are no more in the domain of physics than persons—both are, in that sense, relatively
unnatural. Is the property of being an enduring rabbit any more (or less) natural than
being a perduring rabbit? If so, this would mean that one is had by a more welldemarcated thing. But rabbits, no matter how you slice them, are well-demarcated things
(in Lewis’s sense). That is, it is other facts about rabbits that set them apart from the nonrabbits. How they persist would be shared by rabbit and non-rabbit alike (if the domain
is persisting composite objects), so persistence conditions cannot be the features of welldemarcated things that determine their eligibility to be meant.
2
Lewis, 1983, pp. 372-373.
148
One might object, however, that fundamental objects are in the domain of
physics, and since my claim about our rabbit talk having multiple candidate-meanings is
derivative of a claim about our general object talk having multiple candidate-meanings,
the correct criterion of persistence is, arguably, a perfectly natural property after all.
Maybe so, but at this point in the argument there is little either of us could appeal to in
defense of our positions that would not be question-begging. My opponent would argue
that, since one can imagine things persisting in one of various ways, there must be a fact
of the matter about how they do persist. 3 I would argue that, since no conceivable
empirical test could favor one theory over another (a point of agreement between us),
there is good reason to think that there is no fact of the matter which theory is true of the
mind-independent world. I can imagine, in the same way, Michael being to the left of
Paul, and also Michael being to right of Paul, but it does not follow from this that there is
just one way the world is—this is a fact whose factuality depends on a third relatum.
Persistence conditions may be relational as well, except I have argued that conventions
cannot suffice to fix what we mean because adopting such a convention would have no
bearing on what we say.
Sider has a different argument for the claim that things must persist one way or
another, independently of how we conceive of objects:
‘existence’ has only one
meaning, so the dispute about ontology must be a dispute about what actually exists.
Jubien claims that Sider makes the mistake of “presuming that being an object is intrinsic
to the things that instantiate it instead of an intentional relational property reflecting a
quantifier convention.” 4
3
4
See Jubien, 2009, pp. 9-15.
Jubien, 2009, fn. 14, p. 14.
I believe I have just made the same point in the previous
149
paragraph, modulo the belief that such a convention could somehow be fixed into the
language.
So I think that this strong intuition that things really persist a certain way—that
one theory of persistence is true strictly in virtue of the way things persist—is not on
solid ground. One could nevertheless say that insofar as some theory of persistence is (or
could be), in virtue of coherence, simplicity, conservativism and other theoretical virtues,
the best explanation for the evidence, that theory is “true” in much the same way that our
best theory of gravity, underdetermined as it is, is true. The best fundamental ontology in
this sense would be sufficient to determine meaning.
I think this should be granted, followed by an argument along the following lines
for why no theory of persistence will likely transcend all others in the relevant respects:
ordinary linguistic practice does not even distinguish between theories, given the
reinterpretations of ordinary language claims necessary to bring assertions into line with
theory; and we have no reason whatsoever to think that any theory is either perfectly or
more natural than the others. Given these two points, in addition to the problems found
for innately employing and conventionally adopting a particular theory of persistence, it
is hard to see what would even count as a theory of persistence being simpler, or
superiorly conservative, or more coherent with the rest of science. It would be folly to
say that none could rise above the rest in these respects, but I am inclined to think it
unreasonable to expect at this point that one will. Thus, 17 and 18, and so 6 (natural
properties appear insufficient to determine meaning), are plausibly established. For all
the same reasons, I think it is clear that the conjunction of facts available to fix a
reference scheme is insufficient to do so.
150
I suggested early on that the form of this problem is common in philosophy.
Thomas Nagel, for example, showed that when we look at the circumstances affecting the
object of moral assessment, we find that there is virtually nothing that is within the
agent’s control. Such a fact clearly undermines the highly intuitive principle that we
cannot be held morally responsible for what is not within our control, or the rationality of
moral assessment. Paradoxically, however, it seems to dissuade almost no one from
maintaining both. Here I have endeavored to show that when we look at the facts
available to fix meaning, we find that they are insufficient to establish Lewis’s Moorean
fact of a “fairly determinate interpretation”. The study ought to undermine either the
highly intuitive claim that representational facts are determined by non-representational
facts or the highly intuitive claim that we represent mentally, and communicate, facts
about the external world. I think it would be paradoxical to hold both in light of the
considerations brought to bear in the foregoing, so I am going to recommend embracing,
however uncomfortably, the indeterminacy of meaning, which is essentially the denial of
premise 1.
Sider seems worried that this sort of argument has untoward consequences: “Give
the fanatical ambiguity-mongerer [sic] her way, and disagreement in any area of
philosophy vanishes…. The philosophical community would become a Babel of speakers
of different languages who mistakenly think they disagree about a common subject
matter.” 5 I dare say I think Sider is right, at least when the common subject matter is
fundamental ontology.
5
Sider, 2001a, pp. 16-17.
151
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