November 6, 2012
Week 11 Questions
Question:
Most philosophers discussing singular thought motivate their discussion by
noting that singular thoughts are *directly* or* immediately* about their
objects in some way that general thoughts are not. A natural project is,
then, to seek the epistemic conditions under which a subject can be said to
have an object (or mental name) as a constituent of her thought. Accordingly,
we turn to experience of an object, and then extend outward to memory
traces and communication chains terminating in experience. You have no
truck with this project, nor the motivation behind it. Indeed, the closest
thing you have to experience, RDRDs, anchor the subsitutional
superstructure to objects in the world, but do not result in thoughts that
are direct or immediate. *In this regard, then, it seems that on your view
there is no essential difference in the way a de re versus de dicto thought
is about an object, aside from the perspectival-subsitutional differences.*
If so, it seems that you will get some flack from the tradition for not
making a place for what was originally interesting about *de re* thought:
that at base it essentially involves a robust notion of subjectivity or
consciousness, one that issues in direct or immediate thoughts.
Shivam
On pg. 514, you present “He claims *of* the sun that it is shining” as a
specification of the content of “The seventh god graces us with his
presence”, one that we could “extract information from” and “reason with.”
I wonder if, when we take the *de re* ascription as characterizing the
content of the speaker’s utterance, there is a risk that we can get too far
from the speaker’s meaning. Surely many of the consequences the speaker
sees himself as committing himself to are lost in the propositional content
we ascribe to him, and many are gained. It seems, also, that there may be a
few *de re* ascriptions we might have chosen in this case, depending on the
circumstances, some of which could be true, and some false. Might it not be
problematic to pick one of these as characterizing *the *content of the
utterance?
-Billy Eck
In Making it Explicit, Brandom argues for an inferentialist semantics where
inferential relations are taken as primitive rather than reference and truth which
the representationalists take to be explanatory primitives. Although Brandom argues
that inference is fundamental, he does not reject the importance of the
representational dimension of content and consequently must be able to make room for
this essential aspect of intentionality. While the majority of the text is dedicated
to arguing for the normative and inferential dimension of language, Chapter 8 of
Making it Explicit makes the dual promise of offering us an account of the
representational dimension of content and of substantiating the claim that content
is essentially social. To this end, Brandom argues, roughly, that the
representational dimension of content is conferred by the social nature of language.
Brandom seems to offer an account of representational purport in inferential terms
when he contrasts de re specifications of content (attributor-centered) with de
dicto specifications of content (agent-centered). It is this de re specification of
content which can account for the representational aspect of content. However, is
this enough to satisfy the first part of his promise? Is this de re specification of
content (derived from the social nature of language) sufficient to give an adequate
account of representational purport, its extension as well as intension.
Specifically, is this account enough to explain our “cognitive grip on objects”
(to specify the relevant class of canonical designators for a singular term) and
account for the ‘vertical’ relation of world to word as opposed to the merely
‘horizontal’ relation between words (which Brandom previously argued would not
be complete until chapter 8)? It is not clear to me how these issues are resolved by
de re specifications of content.
Laura Davis
My question this week is about something you said in support of why we
should be compelled to get rid of the notion of belief for one of
commitment.
You make a distinction between talk of belief in the empirical sense,
noting it "does not involve inferential closure" and talk of belief in the
logical or ideal sense, which does. I've taken the former to mean that,
replacing the idea of belief with commitment, one can consequentially be
attributed more commitments than one acknowledges -- which, paraphrasing
one of your examples, could be that, in grabbing the bread, the muscles
flex, the synapses fire, et cetera; and in doing the first, one is
committed to being said to do all the latter -- and perhaps these
inference steps could be made more and more finely divisible ad infinitum.
I struggle to see the reason for calling the 'other half' ideal or
logical belief, because I don't see the connection between logic or
idealization in being able to stop the inference chains. So that's one
hiccup for me.
Part of the reason to prefer commitment is that it allows the situation of
a whole community to be wrong about something they take as true, and
because it is impossible to have a 'false belief'. And so for some group
to take it that some metal cannot be melted could mean that they've simply
never seen it exposed to a high enough temperature, nor heard any others'
testimony that might contradict their belief; there is no commitment to
that end that it can be melted because there has been no reason to infer
that thus is so. So far, might we even say the group has been entitled to
this (in fact wrong) belief? To talk of commitments one acquires due to
those one acknowledges seems to presuppose an ideal outside of the social
practice, because in any context there's going to be an extent to which
one's commitments have a right to go. Though science may later show that
by believing x meant believing in y without any notion of y existing at
the time person P performed x, I don't think talk of P having been
committed, or attributing of P a commitment to y is the right strategy.
Likewise, this group acknowledged M is a metal and later it was determined
that M melts at 1000 degrees. Were they committed to that by recognizing
M correctly, though they did not know one of its properties? It's here
that the need for commitment becomes more slippery for me, because it
feels distinguishing its part in the social-practice needs to supply
boundaries that are also developed in that same social-practice.
Maybe a way to split the difference is this: What if we take belief to be
the 'last step' of the inference chains an individual might have, along
with any priors to it that he would affirm? That way belief is controlled
by the individual's acknowledgement.
Commitment could leave open more space for further inferences.
Just a few thoughts on a few wrinkles.
Jacquet Kehm