November 6, 2012
Week 11 Notes
1.
De re and De dicto ascriptions of propositional attitude as a scope distinction.
Start with example where the operator is tense, rather than belief:
“The PotUS will be a woman by 2020.” Two readings:
 First fix the referent of the singular term (the res): Barack Obama,
Then adjust the time variable: “Barack Obama will be a woman by 2020.”
De re.
 First fix the time variable: 2020.
Then determine referent of singular term: PotUS. “The PotUS in 2020 will be a woman.”
De dicto.
Then propositional attitude:
“Henry Adams believed that Bob’s favorite Philadelphian did not invent the lightning rod.”
Regiment disambiguation with “that” and “of”.
2.
Quine on referential opacity and referential transparency:
Can one intersubstitute coreferential terms?
a) Ortcutt believes whoever left the note is a spy.
b) The mayor left the note.
c) Ortcutt believes the mayor is a spy.
d) *Ortcutt believs that the mayor is a spy.
e) Ortcutt believes of the mayor that he is a spy.
f) Ortcutt believes the shortest spy is a spy.
g) Rosa Kleb is the shortest spy.
h) Ortcutt believes Rosa Kleb is a spy. (True de re, false de dicto.)
3.
Quantifying in and out:
a) In-quantification: There is someone Ortcutt believes is a spy.
Cf. Kaplan on “vivid names”—completing the conflation of denotational de re and
epistemically strong de re.
b) Out-quantification: Hob believes a witch cursed his cow, and Nob believes she blighted
his sow. Q: Could this be true if Hob and Nob have never heard of each other?
4.
Botanize the most important alternatives, according to the branch-points in the flow-chart
of specifying a theory.
(“Well begun is half done.”)
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There are three overarching choices to make:
i)
Focus on denotational de re (as above) or epistemically strong de re?
ii)
Does the de re/de dicto distinction most fundamentally distinguish kinds of belief or
kinds of ascription?
iii)
If either of de re (of either kind) or de dicto (beliefs or ascriptions) is to be explained
in terms of the other, which is more basic in the order of explanation?
Tradition and current conventional wisdom says:
i) epistemically strong de re,
ii) it is a special kind of belief,
iii)
that kind of belief is basic in the order of explanation—a kind of nonconceptual
content (by acquaintance) that is more fundamental a point of contact of our beliefs
with the world than the conceptual content of de dicto beliefs.
 This constellation of ideas is encouraged by thinking of causal theories of
demonstrative and indexical content, vs. descriptive theories, thought of as the form
of conceptual content.
 Intimate connection seen between epistemically strong de re beliefs and speaker’s
reference (and de dicto beliefs and semantic reference).
 This constellation of ideas is one way of putting representation at the center of one’s
understanding, rather than inference.
 It is resisted, in the form of resisting the de re/de dicto distinction for beliefs, in
different ways by Davidson, Searle, and Dennett (all of whom liked my way of
sorting things out here).
MIE view:
i)
Denotational de re is basic phenomenon.
ii)
De re/de dicto distinguishes kinds of ascription.
 Argument from iteration: not just two kinds, but a recursively generated indefinite
multiplicity.
 But there is a special kind of belief: object-involving belief (such that one cannot
have that kind of belief unless the object exists and one is appropriately connected
to it)
iii)
De dicto ascriptions more basic, de re ascriptions are formed from them.
Strategy:
5.
a) We have already looked at technical, systematic, theory-laden representational vocabulary:
‘true’, ‘refers’, ‘denotes’. It has a distinctive expressive role, which is achieved by anaphora.
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b) Now we look at how the representational dimension of discourse shows up explicitly in a
vocabulary.
Here the key thing is the distinction between what we are saying or thinking and what we are
talking or thinking of or about.
c) The strategy is to look at the vocabulary that is used to make explicit that
representational dimension, in ordinary discourse. This is an instance of a more general
methodological approach: understand what is implicit in what we are doing in terms of
how it is made explicit in a form that can be said and (so) thought.
d) Note that the claim to which the inferentialist order of semantic explanation is committed
is not that there can be inference without representation. It is that we can make the
inferential dimension of conceptual content explicit first, and only then, and in terms of
it, make explicit the representational dimension of discourse. Wherever inferences are
made, one also represents. But it is now a challenge to see why that should be the case.
6.
Claim: The home language-game of ‘of’ and ‘about’ when they express intentional
directedness (as opposed to their other uses) is their use to form de re ascriptions of
propositional attitude—as in our light disambiguating regimentation of de re and de dicto
ascriptions.
7.
Conclusion from (5) and (6): To understand the representational dimension of discourse
we need to understand what is made explicit by the use of de re ascriptions of propositional
attitude: what we are doing when we say what we are talking about.
8.
Specific Proposal: Think in scorekeeping terms. As with JTB account of knowledge
(and not coincidentally), in making an ascription that specifies content de re one is doing two
things: attributing one commitment (an assertional one) and undertaking another commitment
(an identificatory one).
A: S claims that t.
A: t=t’
A: S claims of t’ that (it).
Sly prosecutor.
9.
De re specifications of content let us make (relatively) explicit who is committed to what.
Scare quotes are the expressive dual of de re specifications of content: one undertakes the
doxastic commitment and attributes the identificatory one.
10.
Specifying the content of another’s belief in de re terms is how we extract information
from it, that is, put it in a form where we can use it as a premise in our inferences (those we use
to form our own beliefs). De re specifications depend on what is really (according to us)
coreferential, and what is true.
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11.
In de re ascriptions, interpersonal anaphora is made propositionally explicit in
ascription-structural anaphora. That is why they are critical to navigating across social
differences in doxastic perspective.
12.
Two perspectives on agency:
S intends that she shoot a deer.
S intends of a cow that she shoot it.
In-quantification version:
There is something such that S believes it is a deer and desires to shoot it.
(So merely desiring relief from dead-deer-lessness is not enough. This is one sense of “de re.”)
There is something that is a cow such that S believes it is a deer and desires to shoot it.
i) Predicting/explaining what agent will try to do: De dicto.
ii) Predicting/explaining what agent will succeed in doing: De re.
Both of these correspond to important senses of “explaining behavior.”
S intends that she shoot a deer.
S intends of a cow that she shoot it.
13.
Task: Read MIE:8 through the lens of the author of BSD. Talk of de re ascriptions in
terms of social perspectives is a pragmatic metavocabulary for representational vocabulary. It is
saying what one is doing in saying what one is talking about.
14.
15.
tt
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