PHILOSOPHICAL SEMANTICS: WHERE COMMON SENSE IS IN ORDER, II # (advanced draft)

This is from an advanced draft of the book "Philosophical Semantic: Reintegrating Theoretical Philosophy" (CSP 2018)

 Chapter II

The Most Suitable Methodology for Conceptual Analysis

 

 

 

Eine Art zu philosophieren steht nicht neben anderen wie eine Art zu Tanzen neben anderen Tanzarten ... Die Tanzarten schließen sich nicht gegenseitig aus oder ein … Aber man kann nicht ernsthaft auf eine Art philosophieren, ohne die anderen verworfen oder aber einbezogen zu haben. In der Philosophie geht es demgegenüber wie in jeder Wissenschaft um Wahrheit.

 [A way of philosophizing is not one way among others, like one way of dancing among others … Ways of dancing are not mutually exclusive or inclusive … But no one can seriously philosophize in one way without having dismissed or incorporated others. In philosophy as in every science, the concern is with truth.]

—Ernst Tugendhat

 

Philosophy has no other roots but the principles of Common Sense; it grows out of them, and draws its nourishment from them. Severed from this root, its honours wither, its sap is dried up, it dies and rots.

—Thomas Reid

 

Given the commonsense assumptions involved when we take the social role of language as a starting point, at least part of this book must be critical. The reason is clear. The new orthodoxy that dominates much of contemporary philosophy of language is largely based on what I wish to call a metaphysics of reference and meaning. Its views often focus on reference more than on meaning, or on something like reference-as-meaning, displaying a strong version of semantic externalism, hypostasized causalism, and anti-cognitivism. I call these views metaphysical not only because they oppose modest common sense but mainly because, as will be shown, they arise from sophisticated attempts to unduly ‘transcend’ the limits of what can be meaningfully said (Cf. Appendixes to Chs. I and II).

     One example of the metaphysics of reference is the position of philosophers like Saul Kripke, Keith Donnellan, and others on how to explain the referential function of proper names and natural species terms. According to them, it is not our cognitive access to the world but rather the mere appeal to external causal chains beginning with acts of baptism that really matters. On the other hand, what we may have in mind when using a proper name is for them secondary and contingent.

     Another example is the strong externalist view of Hilary Putnam, John McDowell, Tyler Burge and others, according to whom the conceptual meaning of an expression, its understanding, thought, and even our own minds (!) in some way belong to the external (physical, social) world. Using a metaphor always hinted at but never spelled out, it is as if these things were floating outside, determined by the entities referred to with words, in a way that recalls Plotinus’ emanations, this time not from the ‘One,’ but in some naturalistic fashion, from the ‘Many.’ In writing this, I am only trying to supply the right images for what is explanatorily wanting… In fact, externalism is an unclean concept. After refinements, externalism is defined in a vague way as the general idea that ‘certain types of mental contents must be determined by the external world’ (Lau & Deutsch 2014). This would be an obvious truism, insofar as we understand the expression ‘determined by the external world’ as saying that any mental content referring to the external world is in one way or another causally associated with things belonging to an external world. As Leszek Kolakowski once noted, ‘if there is nothing outside myself, I am nothing’ (2001). But this is trivial enough to be accepted by a reasonable internalist like myself (or by a very weak externalist, which in my view amounts to the same thing). Nonetheless, externalists have proposed in their most central and radical writings to read ‘determined’ as suggesting that the locus of our meanings, beliefs, thoughts and even minds is not in our heads, but somewhere in the external world… However, this sounds very much like a genetic fallacy.

     A third example is the view accepted by David Kaplan, John Perry, Nathan Salmon and others, according to whom many of our statements have as their proper semantic contents structured propositions, whose constituents (things, properties, relations) belong to the external world alone, as if the external world had any proper meaning beyond the meaning we give to it. As a last example – which I examine in the present chapter – we can take the views of John McDowell and Gareth Evans. According to them, we cannot sum up most of the semantics of our language in tacit conventional rules that can be made reflexively explicit, as has been traditionally assumed. Consistent with causal externalism, their semantic carriers tend to take the form of things that can be understood chiefly in the third person, like the neuronal machinery responsible for linguistic dispositions unable to become objects of reflexive consciousness.

     Notwithstanding the fact that most such ideas are contrary to the semantic intuition of any reasonable human being who hasn’t yet been philosophically indoctrinated, they have become the mainstream understanding of specialists. Today many theorists still view them as ‘solid’ results of philosophical inquiry, rather than crystallized products of ambitious formalist inspired reductionism averse to cognitivism. It is true that they have in the meantime rhetorically softened their extreme views, though still holding them in vaguer, more elusive terms. However, if taken too seriously, such ideas can both stir the imagination of unprepared readers and, more seriously, limit their scope of inquiry.

     In the course of this book, I intend to make plausible the idea that the metaphysics of reference is far from having found the ultimate truth of the matter. This is not the same, I must note, as to reject the originality and philosophical interest of its main arguments. If I did reject them on this ground, there would be no point in discussing them here. Such philosophical arguments usually cover insights related to their equivocal conclusions and remain of interest even if they are in the end-effect flawed. If so, they would ultimately require not additional support, but careful critical analysis. In the process of disproving them, we could face views with greater explanatory power, since philosophical progress is very often dialectical. For this reason, we should judge the best arguments of the metaphysics of reference in the same critical way we value McTaggart’s argument against the reality of time or Berkeley’s remarkable arguments against materialism. Consider Hume’s impressive skeptical arguments to show there is nothing in the world except flocks of ideas – an absurd conclusion that was first countered by Thomas Reid. What all these arguments surely did, even if we are unable to agree with them, was to draw illusory consequences from insufficiently known conceptual structures, presenting in this way real challenges to philosophical investigation, useful insofar as they force us to reconsider our views, answering them by means of a more careful analysis of assumed structures as they really are. Indeed, without the imaginative and bold revisionism of the metaphysicians of reference, without the challenges and problems they presented, it is improbable that corresponding competing views would ever acquire enough intellectual fuel to get off the ground.

1. Common sense and meaning

To contend with the metaphysics of reference, some artillery pieces are essential. They are methodological in character. The first concerns the decision to take seriously the so often neglected fundamental principles of common sense and natural language philosophy, respectively assumed by analytic philosophers like G. E. Moore and the later Wittgenstein. According to philosophers with this outlook, we should seek the starting point of our philosophical arguments as much as possible in pre-philosophical commonsense intuitions often reflected in our natural language. The link between common sense and natural language is easy to understand. We should expect that commonsense intuitions – often due to millennia of cultural sedimentation – will come to be strongly mirrored in our linguistic forms and practices.

     As Noah Lemos wrote, we can characterize commonsense knowledge as:

...a set of truths that we know fairly well, that have been held at all times and by almost everyone, that do not seem to be outweighed by philosophical theories asserting their falsity, and that can be taken as data for assessing philosophical theories (2004: 5).

Indeed, commonsense truths seem to have always reconfirmed themselves, often approaching species wisdom. Examples of common sense statements are: ‘Black isn’t white,’ ‘Fire burns,’ ‘Material things exist,’ ‘The past existed,’ ‘I am a human being,’ ‘I have feelings,’ ‘Other people exist,’ ‘The Earth has existed for many years,’ ‘I have never been very far from the Earth,’… (See Moore 1959: 32-45). Philosophers have treasured some of these commonsense statements as particularly worthy of careful analytical scrutiny. These include: ‘A thing is itself’ (principle of identity), ‘The same thought cannot be both true and false’ (principle of non-contradiction), ‘I exist as a thinking being’ (version of the cogito), ‘The external world is real’ (expressing a realist position on the external world’s existence), and even ‘A thought is true if it agrees with reality’ (correspondence theory of truth).

     The most flagrant objection to the validity of commonsense principles is that they are not absolutely certain. Clearly, a statement like ‘Fire burns’ isn’t beyond any possibility of falsification. Moreover, science has truly falsified many commonsense beliefs. Einstein’s relativity theory decisively refuted the commonsense belief that the length of a physical object remains the same independently of its velocity. But there was a time when people regarded this belief as a self-evident truth!

     This latter kind of objection is particularly important in our context because metaphysicians of reference have made this point to justify philosophy of language theories that contradict common sense. Just as in modern physics new theories often conflict with common sense, they feel emboldened to advance a new philosophy whose conclusions depart radically from common sense and natural language. As Hilary Putnam wrote to justify the strangeness of his externalist theory of meaning:

Indeed, the upshot of our discussion will be that meanings don’t exist in quite the way we tend to think they do. But electrons don’t exist in quite the way Bohr thought they did, either. (1978: 216)

One answer to this kind of comparison emphasizes the striking differences between philosophy of meaning and physics: the way we arrive at meanings is much more direct than the way we discover the nature of subatomic particles. We make meanings; we don’t make electrons. We find subatomic particles by empirical research; we don’t find meanings: we establish them. We do not need to read Plato’s Cratylus to realize that the meanings of our words are dependent on our shared semantic customs and conventions.

2. Ambitious versus Modest Common Sense

I do not have the ambition to end the debates over the ultimate value of common sense. However, I can reasonably demonstrate that two deeply ingrained objections to the validity of commonsense principles are seriously flawed, one based on the progress of science and the other based on changes in our worldviews (Weltanschauungen). The first is that science defeats common sense. This can be illustrated by the claim attributed to Albert Einstein that common sense is a collection of prejudices acquired by the age of eighteen… (Most physicists are philosophically naïve.) Changes in worldviews are transformations in our whole system of beliefs, affecting deeply settled ideas like moral values and religious beliefs. In my view, these two charges against common sense are faulty because they arise from confusion between misleading ambitious formulations of commonsense truths and their authentic formulations, which I call modest ones.

     I wish to begin with a closer examination of objections based on the progress of science. With regard to empirical science, consider the sentences:

 

(a)  The Earth is a flat disk with land in the center surrounded by water.

(b) The sun is a bright sphere that revolves around the Earth every 24 hours.

(c)  Heavy bodies fall more rapidly than light ones, disregarding air resistance.

(d) Time flows uniformly, even for a body moving near the speed of light.

(e)  Light consists of extremely small particles.

 

According to the objection, it is widely known that science has disproved all these once commonsense statements. Already in Antiquity, Eratosthenes of Alexandria was able to disprove the Homeric view that (a) the Earth is a flat disk rimmed by water by measuring the circumference of the Earth with reasonable precision. Galileo showed that (b) and (c) are false statements, the first because the Earth circles the sun, the second because in a vacuum all bodies fall with the same acceleration. And Einstein’s relativity theory predicted that time becomes exponentially slower as a body approaches the speed of light, falsifying statement (d). Bertrand Russell once pointed out that the theory of relativity showed that statement (d), like some other important commonsense beliefs, cannot withstand precise scientific examination (Cf. Russell 1925, Ch. 1; Popper 1972, Ch. 2, sec. 2). Finally, statement (e), affirming the seemingly commonsense corpuscular theory of light (defended by Newton, but already in some way evinced in Antiquity), has been found to be mistaken, since light consists of transverse waves (Huygens-Young theory), even though under certain conditions it behaves as though it consisted of particles (wave-particle theory).

     The point I wish to emphasize, however, is that none of the five above-cited statements legitimately belongs to correctly understood common sense – a sense I call ‘modest.’ If we examine these statements more closely, we see they are in fact extrapolations grounded on statements of modest common sense. These extrapolations are of speculative interest and were made in the name of science by scientists and even by philosophers projecting ideas of common sense into new domains that would later belong to science. In my view, the true statements of common sense – the modest statements for which (a), (b), (c), (d) and (e) could be the corresponding non-modest extrapolations – are respectively the following:

 

(a’)   The Earth is flat.

(b’) Each day the sun crosses the sky.

(c’)   Heavier bodies around us fall more rapidly than lighter ones.

(d’) Time flows uniformly for all bodies around us, independently of their motion.

(e’)   Light has rays.

 

Now, what is at stake is that these statements have been made for thousands of years and have been confirmed thousands of times by everyday observation and continue to be confirmed, independently of the scientific development. It is obvious that (a’) is a true statement if we understand it to mean that when we look at the world around us without having the ambition to generalize this observation to the whole Earth, we see that – discounting hills, valleys, and mountains – the landscape is obviously flat. Statement (b’) is also true since it is anterior to the distinction between the real and the apparent motion of the sun. If we consider only the apparent motion of the sun, we see that the sentence ‘The sun crosses the sky each day’ can be considered true without implying that the sun revolves around the Earth. All it affirms is that in equatorial and sub-equatorial regions of the Earth we see that each day the sun rises in the East, crosses the sky, and sets in the West, which no sensible person would ever doubt.[1] Even after science proved that bodies of different masses fall with the same acceleration in a vacuum, statement (c’) remains true for everyday experience. After all, it only affirms the commonplace notion that under ordinary conditions a light object such as a feather falls much more slowly than a heavy one such as a stone... Statement (d’) also remains true, since it concerns the movements of things in our surroundings, leaving aside extremely high speeds or incredibly accurate measurements of time. (In everyday life, one would never need to measure time dilation, which is detectable only when a body approaches the speed of light and has nothing to do with everyday experience. In everyday life, no one ever comes home from a two-week bus trip to discover that family members are now many years older than before). Finally, (e’) has been accepted, at least since Homer, as is shown by his poetic epithet ‘rosy-fingered dawn.’ And we often see sunbeams at dawn or dusk or peeping through gaps in the clouds on overcast days.

     But then, what is the point in comparing statements (a)-(b)-(c)-(d)-(e) with the corresponding statements (a’)-(b’)-(c’)-(d’)-(e’), making the first set refutable by science, while the latter statements remain true? The answer is that scientifically or speculatively motivated commonsense statements exemplified by (a)-(b)-(c)-(d)-(e) have very often been viewed equivocally as if they were legitimate commonsense statements. However, statements of modest common sense like (a’)-(b’)-(c’)-(d’)-(e’) are the only ones naturally originating from community life, being omnipresent in the most ordinary linguistic practices. They continue to be perfectly reliable despite the theoretical conclusions of Galileo and Einstein, since their truth is independent of science. The contrast between these two kinds of example shows how mistaken the claim is that many or most commonsense truths have been refuted by science. What science has refuted are extrapolations of commonsense truths by scientists and philosophers who have projected such humble commonsense truths beyond the narrow limits of their original context. If we take into account the aforementioned distinction, we find a lack of conflict between the discoveries of science and the claims of commonsense wisdom, also including ones used as examples by philosophers like G. E. Moore. [2]

     I do not claim modest commonsense truths are in principle irrefutable, but only that no one has managed to refute them. Nothing warrants, for instance, asserting that from now on the world around us will be different in fundamental ways. A statement like (b’) can be falsified. Perhaps for some unexpected reason, the Earth’s rotation on its axis will slow down so much that the sun will cease its apparent movement across the sky. In this case, (b’) would also be refuted for our future expectations. But even in this case, (b’) remains true concerning the past, while the corresponding ambitious extrapolation (b) has always been false. In fact, all I want to show is that true commonsense statements – modest ones – are much more reliable than scientifically oriented minds believe, and science has been unable to refute them, insofar as we take them at their proper, humble face value.

     Similar reasoning applies to the a priori knowledge of common sense. To justify this new claim, consider first the case of statements like (i) ‘Goodness is praiseworthy,’ which is grammatically identical with statements like (ii) ‘Socrates is wise.’ Both have the same superficial subject-predicate grammatical structure. Since in the first case the subject ‘Goodness’ does not designate any object accessible to the senses, Plato would have concluded that this subject must refer to ‘goodness-in-itself’: the purely intelligible idea of goodness, existing in an eternal and immutable non-visible realm only accessible to the intellect. Plato reached his conclusion based on the commonplace grammatical distinction between subject and predicate found in natural language. Under this assumption, he was likely to see a statement like (iii) ‘Goodness in itself exists’ as a commonsensical truth. In fact, according to his doctrine, it should be an a priori truth.

     However, we know that with Frege’s introduction of quantificational logic at the end of the 19th century, it became clear that statements like (i) should have a deep logical structure that is much more complex than the subject-predicate structure of (ii). Statement (i) should be analyzed as saying that all good things are praiseworthy, or (iv) ‘For all x, if x is good, then x is praiseworthy,’ where the supposed proper name ‘Goodness’ disappears and is replaced by the predicate ‘… is good.’ This new kind of analysis reduced considerably the pressure to countenance the Platonic doctrine of ideas.

     However, the suggestion that the subject ‘Goodness’ refers to an abstract idea clearly does not belong to modest common sense, and statement (iii), ‘Goodness in itself exists,’ isn’t even inscribed in our natural language. It also belongs to ambitious common sense. Statement (iii) was a speculative extrapolation by a philosopher based on an implicit appeal to the superficial grammar of natural language, and although (iii) is probably false, it would be unjust to blame modest common sense and our ordinary language intuitions on subject-predicate grammar. Finally, it is wise to remember that quantificational truth-functional logic has not undermined the (commonsensical) grammar of our natural language; it has only selected and made us conscious of vastly extended fundamental patterns underlying the representative function of natural language.

     What all these examples do is to undermine the frequently made claim that scientific progress contradicts common sense. Scientific discoveries only refute speculative extrapolations of common sense and natural language made by scientists and philosophers, such as the idea that the Sun revolves around the Earth or that there is a purely intelligible world made up of abstract ideas like that of Goodness in itself. But nothing of the sort has to do with the explanations given by modest common sense, the only ones long established by mankind’s shared practical experience down through the ages.

3. Resisting changes in worldviews

Finally, I wish to consider commonsense ideas that are challenged by changes in our worldviews. This is, for instance, the case with the belief that a personal God exists or that we have minds independently of our bodies. The objection is the following. The overwhelming majority of cultures accept a God (or gods) and the soul as undeniably real. In Western Civilization, for the last two-thousand years society has even sanctioned denial of these beliefs with varying degrees of severity, sometimes even resorting to capital punishment. Although they were once commonsense beliefs, today no one would say that they are almost universally accepted. On the contrary, few scientifically educated persons would agree with them. Consequently, it seems that common sense ideas can change in response to changes in our worldviews...

     My reaction to this does not differ very much from my response to the objection contrasting common sense with the progress of science. Beliefs regarding our worldviews lack universality, not really belonging to what could be called modest common sense. There are entire civilizations, particularly in Asia, where the idea of a personal God is foreign to the dominant religion. Regarding the soul, I remember a story told by an anthropologist who once asked a native Brazilian what happens after people die. The native answered: – ‘They stay around.’ – ‘And later?’ asked the anthropologist. – ‘They go into some tree.’ – ‘And then?’ – ‘Then they disappear’...[3] The lack of concern was evident. And the unavoidable conclusion is that belief in a personal God and an eternal soul do not enjoy the kind of universality that would be expected of modest common sense; if they are said to belong to common sense, this must be an ambitious form of common sense. In fact, these beliefs seem to result from the distortion of ordinary views through wishful thinking, which has happened particularly in Western culture.[4]

     Natural language also supports the view that these beliefs are not chiefly commonsensical: a person holding religious beliefs usually does not say he knows that he has a soul independent of his body… He prefers to claim he believes in these things. And even this belief has a particular name: ‘faith,’ which is belief not supported by reason and observation (against faith there are no arguments). On the other hand, the same person would never deny that he knows there is an external world and that he knows this world existed long before he was born… Modest commonsense knowledge is not a question of wishful thinking or non-rational faith.

     What all these arguments suggest is that modestly understood commonsense truths – together with the very plausible discoveries of real science – can reasonably be said to form the basis of our rationality, the highest tribunal of reason. Furthermore, since science itself can only be constructed starting from a foundation of accepted modest commonsense beliefs, it does not seem possible, even in principle, to deny modest common sense as a whole on the authority of science without also having to deny the very foundations of rationality.

     Not only do science and changes in our worldview seem unable to refute modest common sense, even skeptical hypotheses cannot do this in the highly persuasive way one could expect. Suppose, for instance, that radical skeptics are right, and you discover that until now you have lived in what was just an illusory world… Even in this case, you would be unable to say that the world where you lived until now was unreal in the most important sense of the word. For that world would still be fully real in the sense that people perceived it with maximal intensity, and it was independent of the will, was interpersonally accessible and obeyed natural laws… These are criterial conditions that when together satisfied create our conventional sense of reality, a sense in itself indefeasible even by skeptical scenarios (See Ch. VI, sec. 29).

4. Primacy of Established Knowledge

The upshot of the comparison between modest common sense and science is that we can see science as not opposed to modest common sense, but rather as its proper extension, so that both can be mutually supportive. According to this view, science is expanded common sense. Contrary to Wilfrid Sellars (1962: 35-78), the so-called ‘scientific image of the world’ did not develop in opposition to or even independently of the old ‘manifest image of the world,’ for there is no conflict between them. This conclusion reinforces our confidence that underlying everything we can find commonsense truths, insofar as they are judiciously identified and understood.

     In endorsing this view, I do not claim that unaided modest commonsense truth can resist philosophical arguments, as philosophers like Thomas Reid seem to have assumed. One cannot refute Berkeley’s anti-materialism by kicking a stone or answer Zeno’s paradox of the impossibility of movement by putting one foot in front of the other. These skeptical arguments must be wrong, but to disprove them, philosophical arguments are needed to show why they seemingly make sense, again grounding their rejection at least partially in other domains of common sense if not science, something reached only by the comprehensiveness of philosophical reasoning. Hence, what I wish to maintain is that the principles of modest common sense serve as the most reliable assumptions and that some fundamental modest commonsense principles will always be needed if we do not wish to lose our footing in everyday reality.

     I reject the proposal that a philosophy based on modest common sense and its effects on natural language intuitions would be sufficient. It is imperative to develop philosophical views compatible with and complementing modern science. We must construct philosophy on a foundation of common sense informed by science. That is: insofar as formal reasoning (logic, mathematics…) and empirical science (physics, biology, psychology, sociology, neuroscience, linguistics...) can add new extensions and elements beyond modest commonsense principles, and these extensions and elements are relevant to philosophy, they should be taken into account. As we saw above, it was through the findings of predicate calculus that we came to know that the subject ‘goodness’ in the sentence ‘Goodness is praiseworthy’ should not be logically interpreted as a subject referring to a Platonic idea, since what this sentence really means is ‘For all x, if x is good, x is praiseworthy.’

     I will use the term established knowledge for the totality that includes modest commonsense knowledge and all the extensions the scientific community accepts as scientific knowledge. Any sufficiently well-informed and reasonable person would agree with this kind of knowledge, insofar as he would be able to properly understand and evaluate it. It is in this revised sense that we should reinterpret the Heraclitean dictum that we must rely on common knowledge as a city relies on its walls.

     The upshot of these methodological remarks is that we should judge the plausibility of our philosophical ideas against the background of established knowledge, that is, comparing them with the results of scientifically informed common sense. We may call this the principle of the primacy of established knowledge, admonishing us to make our philosophical theses consistent with it. Philosophical activity, particularly as descriptive metaphysics,[5] should seek reflexive equilibrium with the widest possible range of established knowledge, the knowledge mutually supported by both modest common sense and scientific results. This is the ultimate source of philosophical credibility.

     Finally, if we find inconsistencies in challenging speculative philosophical theories because they seem to debunk much or our established knowledge, we should treat them as paradoxes of thought, even if they can be very instructive, and should search for arguments that reconcile these products of philosophical speculation with established knowledge. Lacking reconciliation, we should treat philosophical theses only as proposals, even if they can be sometimes extraordinarily stimulating from a speculative viewpoint, as is the case of revisionary metaphysics, superbly exemplified by Leibniz, Berkeley and Hume and in some measure also by most American analytic philosophers since W. V-O. Quine. This acknowledgment does not mean that their results require acceptance as ‘solid’ discoveries, but rather that they deserve attentive consideration, the sort we grant to the best cases of expansionist scientism. To proceed otherwise can lead us down the slippery slope to dogmatism.

5. Philosophizing by examples

We must complement our methodological principle of the primacy of established knowledge with what Avrum Stroll called the method of philosophizing by examples (1998, x-xi). He himself used this method to construct relevant arguments against Putnam’s externalism of meaning.

     Stroll was a Wittgenstein specialist, and Wittgenstein’s therapeutic conception of philosophy directly inspired his approach. According to Wittgenstein, at least one relevant way of doing philosophy is by performing philosophical therapy. This therapy consists in comparing the speculative use of expressions in philosophy – which is very often misleading – with a variety of examples, most of them of their everyday usage – where these expressions earn their proper meanings, using a method of similarity and contrast to clear up the confusion. He thought this therapy was only possible through meticulous comparative examination of various real and imaginary concrete examples of intuitively correct and even incorrect uses of expressions. This would make it possible to clarify the true meanings of our words so that the hidden absurdities of metaphysics would become evident... Since contemporary philosophy of language tends to be unduly metaphysically oriented, and in this way diametrically opposed to the kind of philosophy practiced by Wittgenstein, a similar critique of language, complemented by theoretical reflection, is what much of contemporary philosophy needs in order to find its way back to truth.

     I intend to show that today’s metaphysics of reference and meaning suffers from a failure to consider adequately, above all the subtle nuances of linguistic praxis. It suffers from an accumulation of potentially obscurantist products of what Wittgenstein called ‘conceptual houses of cards’ resulting from ‘knots of thought’ – subtle semantic equivocations caused by a pressing desire for innovation combined with a lack of more careful attention to nuanced distinctions of meaning that expressions receive in different contexts where they are profitably used, also because the reason why they might be interesting is that they are by queer ways magnifying some real insight.

     One criticism of Wittgenstein’s therapeutic view of philosophy is that it would confine philosophy to the limits of the commonplace. Admittedly, there is no good reason to deny that the value of philosophy resides largely in its theoretical and systematic dimensions, in its persistent attempt to make substantive generalizations. I tend to agree with this, since I also believe that in its proper way philosophy can and should be theoretical, even speculatively theoretical. Nonetheless, I think we can to a great extent successfully counter this objection to Wittgenstein’s views, first interpretatively and then systematically.

     From the interpretative side, we have reason to think that the objection misunderstands some subtleties of Wittgenstein’s position. The most authoritative interpreters of Wittgenstein, G. P. Baker and P. M. S. Hacker, insisted that he did not reject philosophical theorizing tout court. In rejecting philosophical theorizing, he was opposing scientism: the kind of philosophical theorizing that mimics science. Scientism tries to reduce philosophy itself to science in its procedures, range, and contents, as he personally saw happening in logical positivism.[6] Instead, he would countenance a different sort of theorizing, particularly the ‘dynamic,’[7] the ‘organic’ instead of ‘architectonic’ (Wittgenstein 2001: 43) – a distinction he seems to have learned from Schopenhauer (Hilmy 1987: 208-9). This helps explain why, in a famous passage of Philosophical Investigations, he argued that it is both possible and even necessary to construct surveillable representations (übersichtliche Darstellungen). These can show the complex logical-grammatical structure of the concepts making up the most central domains of understanding. As he wrote:

A main source of our failure to understand is that we do not command a clear view of the use of our words – Our grammar is lacking in this sort of surveillability. A surveillable representation produces just that understanding which consists in ‘seeing connections’; hence the importance of finding and inventing intermediate cases. The concept of surveillable representation is of fundamental significance for us. It earmarks the form of account we give, the way we look at things (Is this a ‘Weltanschauung’?). (1984c, sec. 122)

Now, in a sense, a surveillable representation must be theoretical since it must contain generalization, and this constitutes the ultimate core of what the word ‘they’ means. (Well aware of this, Karl Popper famously called the statement ‘All swans are white’ a theory, adding that this theory was falsified by the discovery of black swans in Australia…) If we agree that all generalizations are theoretical, any surveillable representation, as it must contain generalizations, must also be theoretical.

     Moreover, the addition of intermediate connections already existent but not explicitly named by the expressions of ordinary language justifies our making explicit of previous well-grounded conventions that serve as links connecting a multitude of cases. It is possible that because of the generality and function of these links, they never need to emerge in linguistically expressible forms (consider, for instance, our MD-rule for proper names). Expositions of these links are properly called ‘descriptive,’ insofar as they are already present under the surface of language. But it is fully acceptable to call them ‘theoretical’ – in the sense of a description of general principles inherent to natural language – if they are intended to be the right way to assure the unity in diversity that our usage of expressions is able to achieve.

     The addition of intermediary connections helps to explain why normal language philosophy, as initially developed by Gilbert Ryle and J. L. Austin gradually transformed itself into far more liberal and theoretical forms of philosophy inspired by natural language that we can already find in some works of P. F. Strawson and later in H. P. Grice[8] and John Searle. It also helps to justify the introduction of new technical terms to fill the gaps in natural language. Terms like ‘criterion,’ ‘language-game,’ ‘grammatical sentence,’ ‘forms of life’ and even ‘surveillable representation’ support this point in Wittgenstein’s own writings. In fact, even Austin, the chief defender of a quasi-lexicographical ordinary language analysis didn’t eschew the creation of new technical terms. Expressions like ‘locutionary act’ (composed of ‘phonetic,’ ‘phatic’ and ‘rhetic acts’), ‘illocutionary act’ and ‘perlocutionary act’ (1962, Lect. VIII) were created as the only way to express – guided by reasoning on interactive linguistic activity – fundamental deep structures totally unexpressed in our normal usage.

     Now, from the systematic argumentative side, we can say that independently of the way we interpret Wittgenstein, there are good reasons to believe theoretical considerations are indispensable. An important point is that philosophy can only be therapeutic or critical because its work is inevitably based on theoretical, that is, generalized assumptions that make possible its therapeutic efficacy. Usually, Wittgenstein did not explicitly state or develop the assumptions needed to make his conceptual therapy convincing. He was an intuitive thinker in the style of Heracleitus or Nietzsche. Because of this, he all too often did not develop his insights beyond the epigrammatic level. In any case, general assumptions are inevitable if our aim is expose equivocal views in an efficacious way: The critical (therapeutic) and the more constructive (theoretical) searches for surveillable representations can be understood as two complementary sides of the same analytical coin (Costa 1990: 7 f.). Theoretical assumptions are the indispensable active principle of logic-conceptual therapeutic potions.

     Recapitulating, we have found two main methodological principles for orienting our research in this book:

 

A.   The principle of the primacy of established knowledge (our principle of all principles), according to which modest common sense, complemented by scientific knowledge, constitutes the highest tribunal of reason in judging the plausibility of philosophical views.

B.   The method of philosophizing by examples, according to which the best way to orient ourselves in the philosophical jungle is to test our ideas in all possible opportunities by analyzing a sufficient number of different examples. If we do not use this method, we risk losing ourselves in a labyrinth of empty if not fallacious abstractions.

 

Oriented by the two above-considered methodological principles, I intend to accomplish several tasks, which are fundamental if we wish to put philosophy again on the right track.

6. Tacit knowledge of meaning: traditional explanation

I will assume the practically indisputable notion that language is a system of signs basically governed by conventionally grounded rules, including semantic ones. Linguistic conventions are rules obeyed by most participants in the linguistic community. These participants expect other participants to comply with similar or complementary rules and vice-versa, even if they aren’t really aware of them (Cf. Grice 1989, Ch. 2; Lewis 2002: 42). According to this view, the sufficiently shared character of language conventions is what makes possible the use of language to communicate thoughts.

     One of the most fundamental assumptions of the old orthodoxy in philosophy of language is that we lack awareness of the effective structures of semantically relevant rules governing the uses of our language’s most central conceptual expressions. We know how to apply the rules, but the rules are not available for explicit examination. Thus, we are unable to command a clear view of the complex network of tacit agreements involved. The reason is the way we learn expressions in our language. Wittgenstein noted that we learn the meaning-rules governing the correct use of our linguistic expressions not by means of explicit definitions, but by training (Abrichtung), that is, through informal practice, imitation, and correction by others who already know how to use them properly. Later analytic philosophers, from Gilbert Ryle to P. F. Strawson, Michael Dummett, and Ernst Tugendhat, have always insisted that we do not learn the semantically relevant conventions of our language (i.e., the semantic-cognitive rules determining referential use of expressions) through verbal definitions, but rather in non-reflexive, unconscious ways. Tugendhat wrote that we learn many of these rules in childhood through ostension by means of positive and negative examples given in interpersonal contexts: other speakers confirm them when correct and disconfirm them when incorrect. Hence, the final proof that we understand these rules is interpersonal confirmation of their correct application. (Tugendhat & Wolf 1983: 140) For this reason, it is often so hard or seemingly impossible to obtain an explicit verbal analysis of the meaning of an expression that is really able to reveal its meaning-rules. Using Gilbert Ryle’s terms, with regard to these meaning-rules we have knowing how, i.e., skill, competence, an automatized ability that enables us to apply them correctly; but this is insufficient to warrant knowing that, namely, the capacity to report what we mean verbally (1990: 28 f.).

     This non-reflexive learning of semantic rules applies particularly to philosophical terms like ‘knowledge,’ ‘consciousness,’ ‘understanding,’ ‘perception,’ ‘causality,’ ‘action,’ ‘free will,’ ‘goodness,’ ‘justice,’ ‘beauty,’ which are central to our understanding of the world (Tugendhat 1992: 268). Because of their more complex conceptual structure and internal relationships with other central concepts, these concepts are particularly elusive and resistant to analysis, opening room to the most various intentions. This insight certainly also applies to conceptual words from philosophy of language, like ‘meaning,’ ‘reference,’ ‘existence’ and ‘truth,’ which will be examined later in this book. Finally, to make things more complicated, relevant concepts are also in a sense empirically grounded and not completely immune to additions and changes resulting from the growth of our knowledge. For instance: before recent advances in neuroscience, bodily movement was considered essential to the philosophical analysis of the concept of action. Now, with sensitive devices able to respond to electrical discharges in our motor-cortex, we are able to move external objects using sheer willpower. Intentions unaided by bodily movements are now sufficient to produce external physical motions intended by the agent (See neuroprosthetics and BCIs).

     However, lack of semantic awareness can become a reason for serious intellectual confusion when philosophers try to explain what these terms mean. Philosophers are very often under the pressure of some generalizing purpose extrinsic to that required by the proper nature of their object of investigation. Consider theistic purposes in the Middle Ages and scientistic purposes in our time, which can easily produce startling but erroneous magnifications hinging on minor real findings. Wittgenstein repeatedly expressed these metaphilosophical views throughout his entire career. Here are some of his best quotes, in chronological order, beginning with his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and ending with his Philosophical Investigations:

 

Natural language is part of the human organism and not less complicated than it. ... The conventions that are implicit for the understanding of natural language are enormously complicated. (1984g, sec. 4.002)

 

Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness. (1958: 24)

 

We can solve the problems not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known. Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intellect by language. (1984c sec. 109)

 

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something – because it is always before one’s eyes.) The real foundations of his inquiry do not strike a person at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him. – And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful. (1984c, sec.129)

 

Contrary to empirical statements, rules of grammar describe how we use words in order to both justify and criticize our particular utterances. But as opposed to grammar book rules, they are not idealized as an external system to be conformed to. Moreover, they are not appealed to explicitly in any formulation, but are used in cases of philosophical perplexity to clarify where language misleads us into false illusions … (A whole cloud of philosophy is condensed into a drop of grammar.) (1984c, II xi)

 

Around the mid-twentieth century, a number of analytical philosophers were in significant ways directly or indirectly influenced by Wittgenstein views. They believed clarification resulting from the work of making explicit the tacit conventions that give meaning to our natural language was a kind of revolutionary procedure: We should identify most if not all philosophical problems with conceptual problems that could be solved (or dissolved) by means of conceptual analysis.

     Notwithstanding, except for the acquisition of new formal analytical instruments and a new pragmatic concern leading to more rigorous and systematic attention to the subtleties of linguistic interaction, there was nothing truly revolutionary in the philosophy of linguistic analysis and the critique of language associated with it. Analysis of the meaning of philosophically relevant terms as an attempt to describe the real structure of our thinking about the world is no more than the resumption of a project centrally present in the whole history of Occidental philosophy. Augustine wrote: ‘What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain it to him who asks, I know not.’ (2008, lib. XI, Ch. XIV, sec. 17) In fact, we find the same concern already voiced by Plato. If we examine questions posed in Plato’s Socratic dialogues, they all have the form ‘What is X?,’ where X takes the place of philosophically relevant conceptual words like ‘temperance,’ ‘justice,’ ‘virtue,’ ‘love,’ ‘knowledge’… What then follows are attempts to find a definition able to resist objections and counterexamples. After some real progress, discussion usually ends in an aporetic way due to merciless conceptual criticism. That is, philosophy based on analysis of conceptual meaning has always been with us. It is the main foundation of our philosophical tradition, even when it is hidden behind its most systematic and speculative forms.[9]

     Finally, by defending the view that philosophy’s main job is to analyze implicit conceptual knowledge, I am not claiming that philosophy cannot be about the world, as some have objected (Magee 1999, Ch. 23). Even as an inquiry turned to our conceptual network, philosophy continues to be about the world, because the concepts analyzed by philosophy are in one way or another about the world. Moreover, in a systematic philosophical work, central concepts of our understanding of the world are analyzed in their internal relations with other central concepts, with the same result that philosophy is indirectly also about the world – about the world as it is synthetically reflected by the central core of our conceptual network.[10]

     Indeed, even if the philosophical analysis of our conceptual structures does not depend on empirical experience as such, empirical experience has already in one way or another entered into the production and change of such conceptual structures.

7. A very simple model of a semantic-cognitive rule

We urgently need to clarify the structures of our semantic-cognitive rules as the concept is used here. However, it is not very helpful if we begin by attempting to analyze a conceptual rule constitutive of a philosophical concept-word. Not only are these concept-words usually polysemic, but the structures of central meaning-rules expressed by them are much more complex and harder to analyze and in this way to characterize or define. Anyway, although philosophical definitions can be extremely difficult to achieve, the skeptical conclusion that they are impossible can well be too hasty.

     To get a glimpse into the nature of a semantic-cognitive rule – in the case an ascription rule[11] – I strategically chose a very trivial concept-word, since its logical grammar is correspondingly easier to grasp. Thus, I wish to scrutinize here the standard meaning of the concept-word ‘chair,’ using it as a simple model that can illustrate our approach to investigating the much more complicated philosophical concepts. We all know the meaning of the word ‘chair,’ though it would not be so easy to give a precise definition if someone asked for one. Now, following Wittgenstein’s motto, according to which ‘the meaning of a word is what the explanation of its meaning explains’ (1984g, sec. 32), I offer a very reasonable definition (explanation) of the meaning of the word ‘chair.’ You can even find something not far from it in the best dictionaries. This definition expresses the characterizing ascription rule of this concept-word, which is the following:

 

(C) Chair (Df.) = a non-vehicular seat with a backrest, designed for use by only one person at a time (it usually has four legs, sometimes has armrests, is sometimes upholstered, etc.).[12]

 

In this definition, the conditions stated outside of parentheses are necessary and together sufficient: first a chair must be a non-vehicular seat (since seats in cars and airplanes… aren’t called chairs); second, a chair must be a seat with a backrest (since without a backrest it would be only a stool, a sattle seat, etc.); and third, it must be an artifact designed for a single person to seat at a time. These criterial conditions form an essential, indispensable condition, also called the definitional or primary criterion for the applicability of the concept-word, to use Wittgenstein’s terminology.

     What follows in parentheses are complementary (dispensable) secondary criteria or symptoms: usually, a chair has four legs, often it has armrests, and sometimes it is upholstered. These indications can be helpful in identifying chairs, even though they are irrelevant if the definitional criterion isn’t satisfied. A chair need not have armrests, but there cannot be a chair with armrests but no backrest (this would be a bench). Thus, with (C) we have an expression of our implicit conventional ascription rule for the general term ‘chair,’ which should belong to the domain of what Frege calls sense (Sinn).[13]

     Though I do not think that this definition couldn’t be improved (or changed), I find it hard to oppose it. Table-chairs, armchairs, easy chairs, rocking chairs, wheelchairs, beach chairs, electric chairs, thrones… all conform to the definition (a kneeling chair without backrest is rather a so-called chair). The definition gives the core of the conceptual meaning, while the different types of chair are recognized as sub-concepts adding to the core a diversity of sub-conceptual modulations.[14] However, car, bus and airplane seats are not called ‘chairs’ but by convention seats, only because they are made to bring persons in vehicles from a place to another. Anyway, we can always imagine borderline cases. There could be a seat whose backrest is only 20 cm. high (is it a stool or a chair?), a chair with a seat raised only 10 cm. above the floor (is it even a seat?), a chair whose backrest was removed for some hours (did it become a backless chair or provisionally a stool?). Suppose we find a tree trunk in a forest with the form of a chair that, with some minor carving and painting, is now being used as a chair (it was not manufactured as a chair, but minor changes turned it into something we could maybe call a real chair, depending on the relevance of the changes). Nevertheless, our definition is still reasonable despite vague borderline cases. Empirical concepts all have some degree of vagueness, and one can even argue that vagueness is a metaphysical property of reality. Indeed, if our definition of a chair had overly sharp boundaries, it would be inadequate, since it would not reflect the desired flexibility of application belonging to our normal word ‘chair,’ tending to stiffen the extension of the concept.

     An often overlooked point is that language is a pragmatic device: what really justifies a semantic-cognitive rule is its practical applicability to common cases. That is, what really matters are cases to which we can apply the ascription rule without much hesitation and not those rare borderline cases where we cannot know if the ascription rule is definitely applicable, since the rarity of these cases, so much praised by philosophers, makes them irrelevant from a practical point of view. Accordingly, the function of a concept-word is far from being discredited by a few borderline cases where we are at a loss to decide whether it is still applicable.

     Furthermore, we need to distinguish real chairs from ‘so-called chairs,’ because in such cases we are making an extended or even a metaphorical use of the word. A child’s toy chair, like a sculptured chair, is a chair in an extended sense of the word. In Victor Hugo’s novel Toilers of the Sea, the main character ends his life by sitting on a ‘chair of rock’ on the seashore, waiting to be swept away by the tide... But it is clear from our definition that this use of the word is metaphorical: a real chair must be made by someone since it is an artifact, but the immovable stone chair was only a natural object accidentally shaped by erosion into the rough form of a chair and then used as a chair.

     There are also cases that only seem to contradict the definition, but that on closer examination do not. Consider the following two cases, already presented as supposed counterexamples (Elbourne 2011, Ch. 1). The first is the case of a possible world where some people are extremely obese and sedentary. They require chairs that on the Earth would be wide enough to accommodate two or three average persons. Are they benches? The relevant difference between a bench and a chair is that chairs are artifacts made for only one person to sit on, while benches are made wide enough for more than one person to sit on at a time. Hence, in this possible world what for us look like benches are in fact chairs, since they are constructed for only one sitter at a time. If these chairs were ‘beamed’ over to our world, we would say that they remained chairs, since the makers intended them to be chairs, even if we used them as benches. The second counterexample is that of a social club with a rule that only one person at a time can use each bench in its garden. In this case, we would say they continue to be benches and not chairs, since they are still artifacts designed for more than one person to sit on, even if they are now limited to single sitters. Elbourne also asked if a chair must have four legs. The answer is obvious since according to our definition having four legs isn’t a defining feature: there are chairs with no legs, like an armchair, chairs with three legs, and we can imagine a chair with a thousand legs. The property of having four legs is what we have called a symptom or a secondary criterion of ‘chair-ness,’ only implying that a randomly chosen chair will probably have four legs.

     One can always imagine new and more problematic cases that do not seem to fit the definition, but if we look at the definition more closely we discover that the difficulty is only apparent or that these ‘exceptions’ are borderline cases or that they are extensions or metaphors. Perhaps the definition indeed deserves some refinement, remembering that refinement isn’t a mere change to something else.

     Finally, the boundaries of what we call a ‘chair’ can also undergo changes from language to language and over time; in French an armchair (easy chair) is called a ‘fauteuil’ in contrast to a ‘chaise’ (chair), though a French speaker would agree that it is a kind of chair. I suspect that thousands of years ago, in most societies one could not linguistically distinguish a stool from a chair since a seat with a backrest was a rare piece of furniture until some centuries ago. Finally, the conventional similarities are here much more impressive than the dissonances, and these similarities seem to increase with the centrality of our concepts.

8. Criteria versus symptoms

To make things clearer, it is already worthwhile to broaden our consideration of Wittgenstein’s distinction between criteria and symptoms. A symptom or a secondary criterion is an entity E that – assuming it is really given – only makes our cognitive awareness A of E more or less probable. In contrast, a definitional or primary criterion is an entity E (usually appearing as a complex criterial configuration) that – assuming it is really given – makes our cognitive awareness A of E beyond reasonable doubt (Wittgenstein 1958: 24; 2001: 28).[15]

     For instance, if I can see four chair legs under a table, this is a symptom of a chair, since it greatly increases the probability that a chair is behind the table. But if I perceive that what is visually given to me is ‘a moveable seat with a backrest made for only one person to sit on,’ this puts my cognitive awareness of a chair beyond doubt. The definition (C) expresses a definitional criterion, understood as such because its assumed satisfaction leaves no possibility to doubt that we can apply the ascription rule for the concept-word ‘chair.’

     I cannot guarantee with absolute certainty that entity E (criterion or symptom) is ‘really given’ because I accept that the products of human experience are inevitably fallible. Nonetheless, using this ‘assumed given-ness’ based on experience and an adequate informational background, we can establish a subjective degree of probability when a symptom is satisfied and a practical certainty when a criterion is satisfied. In this last case, we might claim there is a probability so close to 1 that we can ignore the possibility of error in the cognitive awareness A that entity E is given. (Correspondingly, one could also speak in this sense of a conditional necessity.)

     Symptoms or secondary criteria can help us identify entity E using cognitive awareness A, even if we cannot regard E as necessary. However, symptoms are of no use unless definitional criteria are also met. Four legs and armrests that do not belong to a chair would never make a chair.[16]

     Terms like ‘criteria’ and ‘symptoms,’ as much as ‘conditions’ have so-called process-product ambiguity. We can see them as (a) dependent (internal) elements of the rule that identifies what is given, but we can also see them as (b) something independent (external) satisfying the rule, which is really given in the world. Our semantic-cognitive rules are also criterial rules, able with the help of imagination to generate criterial configurations belonging to them internally as (a). Hence, we could say that definition (C) is the expression of a semantic-criterial rule with the form: ‘If we accept that E is really given, we must conclude A,’ where the conclusion A is our awareness with practical certainty that E is given.

     One problem here is to know what this awareness means. My suggestion will be that we can equate this cognitive awareness with our acceptance of the existence and applicability of a network of external inferential relations once a semantic-cognitive rule is satisfied. The conceptual meaning of ‘chair,’ for instance, consists of internal relations expressed by a definitional rule (C). But our awareness of the application of this conceptual meaning arises as a maze of external relations resulting from the satisfaction of (C). For example, if I am aware that a chair exists, I can infer that it has a particular location, that I can sit on it or ask someone to sit on it, that I could possibly damage it, borrow it, loan it, etc. I can do this even if I have no real consciousness of the structure of the rule I applied to identify the chair.

9. Challenges to the traditional explanation (i):
John McDowell

Supporters of semantic externalism have challenged the idea that the meanings of expressions consist in our implicit knowledge of their constitutive rules or conventions. According to their view, the meanings of expressions are predominantly related to physical and social-behavioral worlds, depending in this way only on objects of reference and supposedly also on neurobiological processes involving autonomous causal mechanisms. From this perspective, there is little room for discussing the conventionality of meaning.

     As evidence for the externalist view, we can adduce our lack of awareness of the structure of semantic rules determining the linguistic uses of our words. If we lack awareness of senses or meanings, it might be that they could as meanings be instantiated to a greater or lesser extent in a non-psychological domain. If this is so, in principle cognitive (also called pre-cognitive) participation in meaning could be unnecessary. Meaning could result solely from autonomous causal mechanisms, not recoverable by consciousness. In opposition to Michael Dummett’s ‘rich’ view of implicit meaning, John McDowell illustrated the externalist position on the referential mechanism of proper names, observing that:

We can have the ability to say that a seen object is the owner of a familiar name without having any idea of how we recognize it. The assumed mechanisms of recognizing can be neural machinery [and not psychological machinery] – and its operations totally unknown to whoever possesses them. (2001: 178)[17]

Some pages later, McDowell (following Kripke) asserts that the referential function of proper names would not be explained by implicit conventionally based identification rules that can be descriptively recovered, because:

The opinions of speakers on their divergent evidential susceptibilities regarding names are products of self-observation, as much as this is accessible, from an external point of view. They are not intimations coming from the interior, from a normative theory implicitly known, a receipt for the correct discourse which guides the behaviour of the competent linguist. (2001: 190)

This view is in direct opposition to the one I defend in this book, not as much because it can never be justified, but because it isn’t the usual case. In what follows, I intend to show that usually the implicit application of internal semantic-cognitive rules based on criteria is indispensable for the referential function. Moreover, we have already begun to see that to have a reference, a usually tacit and unconscious cognitive element must be associated with our expressions and should be instantiated at least in some measure and at some moment in the language user’s head. For in no case is this clearer than with McDowell’s main focus: proper names (Cf. Appendix of Chapter I).

     Here is how we could argue against McDowell’s view. If he were correct, an opinion about the given criterial evidence for the application of a proper name found through external observation of our referring behavior should be gradually reinforced by the cumulative consideration of new examples, that is, inductively. Even repetition of the same example would be inductively reinforcing! However, this is far from the case. Consider our characterizing semantic-cognitive rule (C) for applying the concept-word ‘chair.’ We can see from the start that (C) seems correct. We naturally tend to agree with (C), even if we have never considered any examples of the word’s application. And this shows that speakers are indeed only confirming a recipe for the correct application that comes from inside, as a matter of tacit agreement among speakers… Admittedly, after we hear this definition, we can test it. Thus, we can imagine a chair without a backrest but see that it is really a stool, which isn’t properly a chair. If we try to imagine a chair designed so that more than one person can sit on it, we will conclude that we should call it a sofa or a garden bench... We can understand supposed counterexamples only as means to confirm and possibly correct or improve the definition, thereby discovering its extensional adequacy in a non-inductive way. This specification of meaning seems to be simply a contemporary formulation of something Plato identified as reminiscence (anamnesis): the recalling of ideas to mind. We do not need to go beyond this, imagining all sorts of chairs (rocking chairs, armchairs, wheelchairs…) in order to reinforce our belief in the basic correctness of our intuitive definition. But we can do it in order to recognize its more precise delimitation.

     Now consider the same issue from McDowell’s perspective. Suppose he is right and our knowledge of the meaning of a common name like ‘chair’ were the result of self-observation from an external viewpoint. We could surely acquire more certainty that chairs are seats with backrests made for one person to sit on by observing the similarities among real chairs that we can see, remember or imagine. Inductively, the results would then be increasingly reinforced by agreement among observers about an increasing number of examples. As we already noted, even examples of people reaching a shared agreement by singling out thousands of identical classroom chairs should enable us to increase our conviction that we have the factually true evidential conditions for applying the concept-word ‘chair.’ But this makes no sense. Moreover, it is clear that one does not need much reflection to recognize that the idea is absurd of definition (C) capturing a neuronal mechanism and not resulting from an implicit shared agreement. Furthermore, alone the explanation of the implicitly conventional identification rule for the proper name Aristotle investigated in the Appendix of the last chapter is sufficient to make this whole discussion idle.

     We conclude, therefore, that the ascription rule made explicit in definition (C) does, in fact, have the function of rescuing for consciousness the tacit convention governing the referential use of the word ‘chair’ (as with our earlier definition of ‘Aristotle’ in the Appendix of Chapter I). It seems from the start intuitive and may only require the help of confirmatory, corrective and improving examples. And what is true for a general term should presumably also be true for other expressions, as we already saw regarding proper names.

     Indeed, if all we have in these cases is a shared convention, then a psychological element needs to be involved, even if only in an implicit way, constituting what could be called a non-reflexive cognitive application of the rule. Definition (C) makes explicit a convention normally instantiated in our heads as unreflected tacit application, whenever we make conscious use of the word ‘chair,’ which only confirms the traditional standard explanation.

10. Challenges to the traditional explanation (ii):
Gareth Evans

There is another argument against the claim that we have tacit cognitive access to semantic conventions that govern our use of expressions. This argument comes from the philosopher Gareth Evans, who directly influenced McDowell. Evans invites us to contrast a person’s belief that a substance is poisonous with a mouse’s disposition not to consume it. In the case of a human being, it is a genuine belief involving propositional knowledge; in the case of a mouse, it is a simple instinctive disposition to react in a certain way to a certain smell, not a true belief. Proof of the difference is the fact that:

It is of the essence of a belief state that it be at the service of many distinct projects, and that its influence on any project is mediated by other beliefs. (Evans 1985: 337).

If someone believes a certain substance is poisonous, he can do many different things based on that belief. He can test his belief by feeding it to a mouse, or if he is depressed, he can try to commit suicide by swallowing a dose. He can also relate his belief that the substance is poisonous to a variety of other beliefs. For instance, he might believe he will become immune to a poison by consuming small amounts every day, gradually increasing the dose... As our knowledge of semantic rules is not susceptible to such inferences, thinks Evans, it consists not of actual belief states, but rather of isolated states, not very different from those of the mouse. Therefore, they are not cognitive (or pre-cognitive) psychological states in a proper sense of the word. (Evans 1985: 339)

     The characterization of belief proposed by Evans is interesting and in my view correct, but his conclusion does not follow. Certainly, it agrees with many of our theories of consciousness, according to which a belief is only conscious if it isn’t insular, while an unconscious belief is insular – though there are degrees of insularity. But the crucial point is that Evans’ argument blinds us to the vast gulf between our semantic uses of language and the mouse’s behavioral disposition to avoid consuming poison.

     As a weak but already useful analogy, consider our knowledge of simple English grammar rules. A child can learn to apply these rules correctly without any awareness of doing so, and some adults who have never learned grammar are also able to apply these rules correctly to many different words in many different contexts. Moreover, even if our knowledge of these grammar rules is very often unconscious, with sufficiently careful examination we can often bring them to consciousness.

     The point becomes still clearer when we consider our simple example of an implicit semantic-cognitive rule, the criterial rule (C) for the application of the concept-word ‘chair’ to the identification of chairs. Certainly, a person can derive many conclusions from this rule. He can predict that five persons cannot sit side-by-side on a single chair. He knows that one can transform a chair into a stool simply by cutting off its backrest. He can know the price and if he could buy a similar chair. He knows that by standing on a chair, he can reach an overhead ceiling lamp… He knows all this and much more, even without ever having consciously considered definition (C). And this only means that we can have a belief state enabling us to identify chairs, putting it at the service of many different projects mediated by other beliefs without being explicitly aware of the involved meaning-rule (C).

     We can see a continuum, beginning with more primitive and instinctively determined dispositions and ending with semantic-cognitive rules of our language and their effects. It includes dispositions like those of mice, which cannot be cognitive, because they are instinctive (it is utterly implausible to think that a mouse could be reflexively conscious). There are also more sophisticated ones, like our unconscious beliefs, thoughts and cognitions, which we can consciously scan and reflexively access (presumably through metacognitive processes).

     If we accept the view that our semantic rules are usually conventional rules exemplified in the simplest cases by models like (C), then we must reject the radicalism of positions such as those of Evans and McDowell. After all, the application of such rules allows us to make many different inferences and relate them to many other conceptual rules. Rule (C) has greater proximity to the rules of English grammar than to the innate dispositional regularities demonstrated by a mouse that instinctively avoids foods with certain odors. Moreover, it is clear that in such cases, unlike the mouse, for people inferences to other beliefs are always available. This can be so even if we admit that our semantic-cognitive rules do not in themselves possess the widest availability proper to those completely conscious belief states considered by Evans.[18]

     The root of the confusion is that the semantic rules in question, with and because of their apparent triviality, have not yet been investigated in a sufficiently systematic way. In an academic milieu dominated by science, the procedure that leads to their discovery does not seem worthy of careful investigation. Nevertheless, to proceed more systematically in this seemingly trivial direction is in fact philosophically invaluable, and this is what I will do in the remainder of this book.

11. Unreflected semantic cognitions

I believe contemporary theories of consciousness support the traditional view according to which we have implicit knowledge of our meaning-rules. I will begin by appealing to reflexive theories of consciousness. But first, what are these theories?

     In the philosophical tradition, the idea of reflexive consciousness was already suggested by John Locke with his theory of internal sense (1690, book II, Ch. 1, §19). Reflexive theories of consciousness were introduced to the contemporary discussion by D. M. Armstrong (1981: 55-67; 1999: 111 f.). We can summarize Armstrong’s view as saying there are at least two central meanings of the word ‘consciousness.’ The first is what he calls perceptual consciousness, which consists in the organism being awake, perceiving objects around it and its own body. This is the simplest sense of consciousness. John Searle wrote that consciousness consists in those subjective states of sentience or awareness that begin when one wakes up in the morning after deep, dreamless sleep and continue throughout the day until one falls asleep at night, or lapses into a coma, or dies (2002: 7). By this, he meant chiefly perceptual consciousness. This is also a very wide and consequently not so distinctive sense of consciousness since less developed species also have it. For instance, we can say that a hamster sedated with ether loses consciousness because it ceases to perceive itself and the world around it. We are surely justified to assume that when a hamster is awake it has some primitive form of cognition of the world around it, as shown by its behavior. However, this excessive extension of perceptual consciousness only contributes to its irrelevance. We are aware of the world in the same way a hamster seems to be conscious of it but in a much more sophisticated, more human sense of the word. Certainly, a mouse perceives a cat, but it is unlikely to know it is facing its archenemy. This also holds for inner feelings. A snake may be able to feel anger, but we hardly believe a snake is aware of this anger since it certainly has no reflexive consciousness.

     Now, what distinguishes a mouse’s perceptual awareness and a snake’s anger from our own conscious awareness of things around us and from our own feelings of anger? The answer is given by a second sense of the word ‘consciousness’ which Armstrong considers the truly important one. This is what he termed introspective consciousness and that I prefer (following Locke) to call reflexive consciousness: This is a form of consciousness that we can define as the reflexive awareness of our own mental states.

     According to one of Armstrong’s most interesting hypotheses, reflexive conscious­ness emerges from the evolutionary need of more complex systems to gain control of their own mental processes by means of higher-order mental processing. In other words: our first-order mental events, like sensations, feelings, desires, thoughts, and even our perceptual consciousness of the world around us, can become objects of simultaneous introspections with similar content (D. M. Rosenthal called these metacognitions higher-order thoughts[19]).

     According to this view, only when we achieve reflexive consciousness of a perceptual state can we say that this state ‘becomes conscious’ in the strong sense of the word. So, when we say in ordinary speech that a sensation, a perception, a sentiment or a thought that we have ‘is conscious,’ what we mean is that we have some kind of metacognition of it. This shows that Armstrong’s perceptual consciousness is actually a kind of unconscious awareness, while reflexive consciousness – the true form of consciousness – is probably a faculty possessed only by humans and a few higher primates such as orangutans.[20]

     Now, let us apply this view to our tacit knowledge of semantic-cognitive rules. It is easy to guess that we usually apply these rules without having a metacognitive consciousness of them and therefore without making ourselves able to consciously scrutinize their structure. In other words, we apply these rules to their objects cognitively[21], and these rules deserved to be called ‘cognitive’ because they generate awareness of the objects of their application. But in themselves these rules usually remain unknown, belonging to what I above called unconscious awareness. Hence, it seems that we need to resort to some kind of metacognitive scrutiny of our semantic-cognitive rules in order to gain conscious awareness of their content.

     One objection to using this kind of theory to elucidate tacit knowledge of our rules is that there are a number of interesting first-order theories of consciousness that do not appeal to the requirement of higher-order cognition. In my view, we can classify most, if not all, of these apparently competitive for theories as integrationist theories of consciousness. We can do this because they share the idea that consciousness of a mental state depends on its degree of integration with other mental states constituting the system. This is certainly the case of Daniel Dennett’s theory, according to which consciousness is ‘brain celebrity’: the propagation of ephemerally fixed contents influencing the whole system (1993, Ch. 5). This is also the case with Ned Block’s view, according to which consciousness is the availability of a mental state for use in reasoning and directing action (1995: 227-47). This is likewise the case with Bernard Baars’ theory of consciousness as the transmission of content in the spotlight of attention to the global workspace of the mind (1997). And it is also the obvious case of Giulio Tononi’s theory, according to which consciousness arises from the brain’s incredible capacity to integrate information (2004: 5-42). These are only some well-known contemporary first-order theories of consciousness that are historically consonant with Kant’s view, since according to him in order to be consciously recognized, a mental state must be able to be unified (integrated) into a single Self. From the perspective of such integrationist theories, an unconscious mental state would be one that remains to a greater or lesser extent dissociated from other mental states. And all these views seem to some extent plausible.

     The objection, therefore, would be that I am trying to explain tacit knowledge of language by relying solely on metacognitive theories of consciousness, ignoring all others. However, I believe there is more than one way around this objection. My preferred way is the following: we have no good reason to think integrationist and reflexive views of consciousness are incompatible. After all, it makes sense to think that a mental state’s property of being the object of metacognition also seems to be a condition – perhaps even a necessary one – for the first-order mental state to be more widely available and more easily integrated with other elements constituting the system. As Robert Van Gulick wrote in the conclusion of his encyclopedia’s article on consciousness:

There is unlikely to be any theoretical perspective that suffices for explaining all the features of consciousness that we wish to understand. Thus, a synthetic and pluralistic approach may provide the best road to future progress. (2014)

Indeed, we can reinforce our suspicion by reconsidering a well-known metaphor developed by Baars: A conscious state of mind is like an actor on stage who becomes visible and therefore influential for the whole system, because he is illuminated by the spotlight of attention. However, I think it seems reasonable to think that this could happen only because of the operation of some sort of searchlight of the will added to some sort of metacognitive mental state constituting the true spotlight. Hence, one could easily argue that the first-order mental state is accessible to the rest of the system and hence conscious due to its privileged selection by some kind of metacognitive state of attention.

     My conclusion is that our awareness of semantic-cognitive rules and the possibility of scrutinizing them metacognitively would be able to resist integrationist theories, since they also leave some room for conscious processes able to be scrutinized by means of reflexive attention. Consequently, assuming some kind of reflexive plus integrationist view, the plausible conclusion remains that we can have cognitive states that make us conscious of their objects even if such states are not in themselves proper objects of consciousness. Thus, it seems plausible that only if the first order cognitive processes are objects of the (reflexive, metacognitive) scrutiny of attention can we subject them to conscious analysis. And most of our semantic-cognitive rules belong to such cases.

     It seems to me that this kind of assumption could explain why we can have non-conscious or implicit or tacit cognitions when we consciously follow semantic-cognitive rules without being cognitively aware of the content of these rules and consequently without being able to analyze them. They remain implicit because we do not pay attention to these rules when we apply them and because even when this occurs, they are not there as objects of cognitive scrutiny. These rules are there, to use an old metaphor, like spectacles. When seeing things through them, we are normally unaware of the lenses and their frame. Assuming this kind of view, we conclude that we can distinguish two forms of cognition:

 

(i) Non-reflexive cognition: This is the case with cognitions that are not conscious, because they are not accessed by a higher-order cognitive process and/or focused on by inner attention, etc. (e.g., my perceptual consciousness when I use rule (C) for identifying a chair.)

(ii) Reflexive cognition: This is the case of cognitions accessed by a higher-order cognitive process and/or focused on by inner attention, etc., being for this reason able to be the object of conscious access followed by reflexive scrutiny. Any mental states, sen­sations, emotions, perceptions, and thoughts can be called reflexive if they are accompanied by higher-order cognitions and/or focused on by inner attention. (This is a previous condition needed for the kind of reflexive scrutiny that can make us aware of the semantic-cognitive rule (C) for the identification of a chair as requiring a seat with a backrest, designed for use by only one person at a time.)

 

Once in possession of this distinction, we can better understand the implicit or tacit status of the cognitive senses or meaning-rules present in uses we make of expressions. When we say that the structures of semantic-cognitive rules determining the references of our expressions are often implicit (as in the case of the semantic rules defining the words ‘chair’ or ‘Aristotle’), we are not assuming that they are properly pre-cognitive or definitely non-cognitive, lacking any mentality. Nor that they are completely isolated or dissociated from any other mental states (in the latter case, we would lack even the ability to choose when to apply them). What we mean is just that the cognitive instantiations of these conventional rules are of a non-reflexive type. That is, although consciously used (we know we are using them), they are not likely to be the subject of some form of reflexive cognitive attention. Moreover, as already noted, there is a reason for this, since the structures of these rules are not the focus of our attention when we use the corresponding concept-word in an utterance. By uttering our sentences our real concern is much more practical, consisting primarily in the cognitive effects of applying these rules. As an obvious example: if I say, ‘Please, bring me a chair,’ I don’t need to explain this by saying, ‘Please, bring me a non-fixed seat with a backrest, made to be used by only one person at a time.’ This would be discursively obnoxious and pragmatically counterproductive: it would be almost impossible to communicate efficiently if we had to spell out (or even think of) all such details each time we applied semantic-cognitive rules. What interests us is not the tool, but its application – in this case, to inform my hearer that I would like him to bring me a chair. In linguistic praxis, the meaning isn’t there to be scrutinized, but instead to be put to work.

     A consequence of this view is that in principle our inner attention must be able to focus on non-reflexive semantic-cognitive rules involved in normal uses of words and scrutinize them metacognitively by considering examples of their application or lack of application. Taking into consideration the variable functions and complexity of our semantic-cognitive rules enables the philosopher to decompose them analytically into more or less precise characterizations. It seems it is by this mechanism, mainly helped by examples, counterexamples, comparisons, and reasoning, that we become aware of the conceptual structure of our philosophically relevant expressions.

12. Conclusion

Summarizing this chapter, we have found two main devices for methodological orientation: (A) the primacy of established knowledge and (B) the method of philosophizing by examples. They will be used as guides in this book. Particularly relevant in this context is the idea that we can still see philosophy as an analytical search for non-reductive surveillable representations of our natural language’s central meaning-rules. It is almost surprising to verify that more than two-thousand years after Plato we still have reasons to accept the view that solving some of our most intriguing philosophical problems would require only deeper and better analyzed explanations of what some central common words truly mean.

 

 

 

 

Appendix to Chapter II

Modal Illusions:
Against Supra-Epistemic
Metaphysical Identities

 

 

 

Die Probleme, die durch ein Mißdeuten unserer Sprachformen entstehen, haben den Charakter der Tiefe. Es sind tiefe Beunruhigungen; sie wurzeln so tief in uns wie die Formen unserer Sprache, und ihre Bedeutung ist so groß wie die Wichtigkeit unserer Sprache.

[The problems arising through a misinterpretation of our forms of language have the character of depth. They are deep disquietudes; they are rooted as deeply in us as the forms of our language, and their significance is as great as the importance of our language.]

—Wittgenstein

 

Philosophy unties the knots in our thinking, which we have tangled up in an absurd way; but to do that, it must make movements that are just as complicated as the knots.

—Wittgenstein

 

Although exceedingly original and thought-provoking, Saul Kripke’s philosophical application of modal logic to problems of reference is in my view burdened by a disturbing web of confusion. Since many would disagree, I will give a short justification of my conclusion by critically discussing his article ‘Identity and Necessity’ (1971), which preceded the more developed views defended in his book Naming and Necessity (1980), since it takes his central ideas, as it were, directly from the oven. The paragraphs below summarizing Kripke’s article are in italics, in order to distinguish them from paragraphs containing my own comments. After my comments on this article, I provide an Addendum containing a series of brief criticisms of positions taken by Kripke, Hilary Putnam, Gareth Evans, David Kaplan, Tyler Burge and John Perry, as part of my project of debunking their metaphysics of reference and meaning.

 

Kripke begins by considering the modal argument for the necessity of identity statements. This argument can be summarized as follows. Given the principle of indiscernibility of the identical, according to which (x) (y) ((x = y) → (Fx → Fy)), and given the principle of identity, according to which (x) □(x = x), we can conclude that if the property F must necessarily be applied to x, then y must also have this property. That is, it is necessary that y equals x. In symbolic notation, (x) (y) (x = y) → (□(x = x) → □(x = y)), namely: (x) (y) (x = y) → □(x = y).

     This apparently inconsequential formal result leads Kripke to the bold conclusion that identities between proper names are necessary. We know this by universal instantiation □(x = y) → □ (a = b). That is, if a and b are real names and a = b is a true identity, then this identity is necessarily true. This would concern identities like ‘Hesperus is (the same as) Phosphorus’ and ‘Cicero is (the same as) Tulli’: they must necessarily be identical. Further, if F and G are theoretical predicates, defined as essential designators of properties, if they form a true theoretical identity of the form (x) (Fx = Gx), then this identity is also necessarily true. That is why identities like ‘Heat is (the same as) molecular motion’ and ‘A state of mind is (the same as) a physical state,’ if true, are necessary.

     Kripke recognizes that identities between names and between theoretical identities have generally been considered contingent. There seem to be good reasons for this. Consider the statement ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus.’ Since Hesperus is Venus seen at dusk (evening star), and Phosphorus is Venus seen at dawn (morning star), it was an important astronomical discovery that they are actually the same planet, as Frege pointed out. Therefore, this seems not to be a necessary, but rather a contingent empirical truth. The same applies to theoretical identities such as ‘Heat is molecular motion.’ This identity resulted from scientific discovery and could be false because if caloric theory (the theory that heat consists of a self-repellent fluid called caloric) were correct, heat would not be molecular motion. This seems to be a contingent statement since it clearly could be otherwise.

     Kripke’s thesis, however, is that contrary to appearances, all these identities, despite having been discovered a posteriori, are necessary, even if they do not seem to be: they are necessary a posteriori identities. To reinforce his thesis he introduces a famous distinction between the rigid designator, here defined as a term that refers to the same object in any possible world where this object exists or would exist,[22] and the non-rigid or accidental designator, which can refer to different objects in distinct possible worlds (1971: 146). Proper names and terms of natural species are rigid designators referring to the same object in different possible worlds. Most definite descriptions, by contrast, are accidental designators, designating different objects in different possible worlds. An example of an accidental designator would be the definite description ‘the inventor of bifocals,’ which in our world refers to Benjamin Franklin, but in some possible worlds could refer to any other person or even to no person. In contrast, the proper name ‘Benjamin Franklin’ always refers to the same person in any possible world where Benjamin Franklin exists. Thus, if we have an identity in which the identity symbol is flanked by proper names, this identity is necessarily true if true at all, considering that these proper names, being rigid, must have the same bearers in all  possible worlds where their bearers exist.

 

It is clear that a mathematical term can be seen as a rigid designator, insofar as its application does not depend on how the world is. But is it really impossible for proper names to be other than rigid designators? In an attempt to show that Kripke is wrong and that sometimes they could be accidental designators, we can imagine the following. Suppose it were discovered that shortly after G. W. Bush’s childhood an extra-terrestrial being took possession of his body, assumed his identity and impersonated him from then on, subsequently being elected president of the United States and performing all the actions attributed to him. In this case, wouldn’t the proper name ‘G. W. Bush’ be unwittingly used to refer to this extra-terrestrial being instead of to the son of Barbara and George Bush, who was born on 6.7.1946, becoming in this way an accidental designator?

     The idea that a proper name is a rigid designator could easily withstand objections like that. According to Kripke, the reference of a proper name is due to an act of baptism followed by a causal-historical chain. But this only means that the true G. W. Bush, as the bearer of the rigid designator ‘G. W. Bush,’ would long since have ceased to exist. On the other hand, the embodied extra-terrestrial being, whose true name was, say, Gkw9, would have had its proper first baptism in some remote place and time. Hence, the name G. W. Bush (in fact here a mere alias of Gkw9) would apply to this same extra-terrestrial being in any possible world where he existed, serving here as a homonymous rigid designator. With the same symbolic form (G. W. Bush), we have in fact two contextually distinguishable proper names that are two different rigid designators with different bearers and nothing more.

     It is important to remark that if we applied the neodescriptivist theory of proper names summarized in the Appendix of Chapter I, the results would be the same. Accordingly, the proper name’s bearer is the object that satisfies its identification rule. What this identification rule requires is that this object sufficiently and better than any other satisfies the inclusive disjunction of the fundamental description-rules, which are the localizing and the characterizing rules. Regarding the adult G. W. Bush (as Gkw9), for instance, the localizing description includes his earlier spatiotemporal career on another planet before his embodiment on Earth, and after that his service as President in Washington and his subsequent life. On the other hand, the characterizing description would include his main accomplishments, including his election as 43rd president of the USA, leading the country after 9/11, beginning wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, together with his earlier accomplishments on a distant planet as Gkw9... In every possible world where the identification rule is adequately satisfied, G. W. Bush (as Gkw9) would exist. Hence, the identification rule for the name is also a rigid designator. Something of the kind could also be easily established for the child really baptized G. W. Bush, born on the Earth on 6.7.1946 who had that tragic fate… also making this name a rigid designator of another bearer by satisfying its own identification rule.

     In addition, Kripke expects us to believe he has warranted the necessity of the identity between proper names by having discovered some radical metaphysical difference between proper names, on the one hand, and definite descriptions, on the other. What his words suggest is that a proper name could be attached to its reference without intermediaries by means of a direct (in my view mystical) relation instituted by the act of baptism. For him, this act does not really depend on any properties of the object, even if we are helped by their descriptions to identify it. Notwithstanding, he believes that this baptism allows the post-baptismal production of external causal-historical chains between speakers and hearers. These chains ultimately enable any speaker uttering the name as the last link of a chain to refer to the name’s bearer.[23] A definite description, in contrast, is only an accidental designator. It would refer to different objects in different possible worlds, presumably because it would have a completely different reference mechanism, based on what John Stuart Mill called a ‘connotation,’ defined by him as ‘the description’s implication of an attribute that the object may have’ (1881, I, Ch. 2).

     As I already noted, Kripke’s explanation for this modal dichotomy, suggesting a difference in the nature of each referring process, is as illusory as it is dispensable. The only way to explain the modal dichotomy seems to be by appealing to the already exposed meta-descriptivist theory of proper names, which gives a really plausible justification for the contrast between the rigidity of proper names and the accidental character of their associated definite descriptions (See Appendix of Chapter I, sec. 7, 8). As we saw, the application of meta-descriptivist theory shows that descriptions are rigid only insofar as we compare them to the reference of the proper names they are associated with, which means that definite descriptions lacking an associated proper name are rigid. After such explanations, the idea of a rigid designator, at first seemingly so profound, turns out to be nothing but a technical formulation of an in the end much more trivial idea. It is the idea that if we assume the existence of a proper’s name bearer (that is, if we consider any possible world where this bearer exists) this proper name must be able to refer to it. But no one would disagree with this!

     Furthermore, unlike Kripke’s view, the necessity of the rigid designator is here the product of de dicto conventions. I say this in agreement with John Searle’s brilliant demystifying analysis of the de dicto/de re distinction (1983: 208-220). According to him, so-called de re beliefs are only a sub-class of de dicto beliefs, so that there can be no irreducible de re beliefs, as Kripke supposed. As Searle notes, beliefs are de re only in the sense that they are intended to refer to real objects, not that they harpoon real objects. Although there is a class of beliefs whose explanation depends on contextual characteristics, one should not equivocally conclude that such characteristics cannot be entirely represented as part of the intentional (mental) content! Under this assumption, the true difference between beliefs called de dicto and ones called de re, turns out to be a mere difference between reports. In a de dicto belief like ‘Ralf believes that the man with the brown hat is a spy,’ we commit ourselves only to the report of Ralf’s belief. In a de re belief like ‘About the man with the brown hat, Ralf believes he is a spy,’ we also commit ourselves to the existence of the man with a brown hat. Hence, there is no reason why both beliefs at bottom should not be de dicto beliefs. Now, if we reject irreducible de re beliefs, we feel ourselves free to reject the supra-epistemic metaphysical de re necessities assumed by Kripke.

     As it was noted in the Appendix of Chapter I (sec. 6), my proposed metadescriptivist view of proper names makes them rigid designators because in any possible world where the proper name has a bearer, at least one combination of fundamental descriptions that allows its reference in accordance with its identification rule must be sufficiently and majoritarily satisfied. However, the reason for this rigidity is not metaphysical. It is simply because the identification rule is what defines what any bearer of the proper name can be. Now, considering identity between different proper names in statements of the form a = b and assumed the proposed metadescriptivist theory of proper names, we may have two clearly different cases. The first is the following:

 

 

(A)   Two different proper names of the same object have two different identification rules that identify their bearer under different guises, under different modes of presentation, simply because they take into consideration different perspectives in which different descriptions or groups of descriptions are satisfied. In this case, even being in themselves rigid designators, identifying the same object in all possible worlds as their own objects, we cannot without additional information conclude that they in fact refer to the same object in any possible world. Here it is an empirical matter to decide. We still do not know whether the identification rules of two names could be part of a common, wider identification rule and a new rigid designator having these rules as guises since we still do not have established this last rule. Consequently, in a first moment the empirical finding of an identity statement of the kind a = b would be seen as contingent a posteriori. The modal form of this identity would be ◊ (a = b). This was the case before astronomy showed beyond reasonable doubt that the morning star is the evening star, for instance, when for the first time someone observed the evening star in the sky all through the night and realized that it seems to be always the same as the morning star. (Venus cannot be tracked each night; it disappears for earthly observers during part of the year, when it passes behind the Sun, what must have given place for doubts).

 

The second case is the following:

 

(B)   Often, after many and varied empirical experiences we have no reasonable doubt that a = b. In this situation, we establish a new convention – a rule according to which the different modes of presentation a and b, the two different identification rules, are blended into a single identification rule with two different guises, each of them emphasizing a different aspect or mode of presentation of the same object. In this case, however, what we ultimately have is a single rigid designator able to identify the same object in any possible world, even if under at least two different guises. The identity resulting from the newly established convention is then considered necessary a priori. Its modal form is □ (a = b) or □ (a[b] = b[a]). This is the case today, when we identify the morning star with the evening star, having as a conditional background our modern knowledge of astronomy. It is important to notice that at no point in this process do we need to resort to a Kripkean necessary a posteriori identity, unless we confuse the a posteriority of case (A) with the necessity of case (B).

 

Summarizing: The two initially independent identification rules are made constituents of only one more complex identification rule that includes both anterior rules. One could write this identity as ‘Morning star [-evening star] = evening star [-morning star],’ differing only by different emphases on each side of the identity sign. Anyway, the names ‘morning star [-evening star]’ and ‘evening star [-morning star]’ are used here as rigid designators for the same object, the planet Venus. Moreover, they are conventionally assumed to be de dicto rigid designators. Whether they are also metaphysically de re rigid designators, above and beyond any convention, is something that, it seems, no human being has the power to know.

 

Kripke also considers the problem of apriority. A priori truths are ones we can know without appealing to experience. Many consider the necessary and the a priori to be equivalent. However, for him, the concept of necessity is metaphysical – about how the world must be – while the concept of a priori is epistemic – about how we know the world. Kripke thinks the two classes are not equivalent. Consider, he writes, Goldbach’s conjecture that any natural number is the sum of two primes. This may be a necessary truth without the possibility of our knowing it a priori. In this case, it would have metaphysical necessity.

 

The claim that necessity is metaphysical while apriority is epistemological seems to me not fully mistaken, but requires better specification. I reject this distinction in Kripke’s formulation. His understanding would be justified only if we could discover real metaphysical de re necessities, since a de dicto necessity follows from a more trivial, conventionally established apriority, even if rooted in experience. Moreover, it seems to me that the awareness of the existence of metaphysical de re necessities in Kripke’s sense is something that goes far beyond what our cognitive faculties could reach, simply because our empirical knowledge is inherently fallible – a point that has been consistently emphasized by philosophers of science from C. S. Peirce (1991, Ch. 7) to Karl Popper (1989, Ch. 10). From this perspective, the most we can do is to postulate as natural laws those empirical regularities that are not only strongly inductively grounded, but also the most deeply entrenched ones, in the sense that they are strongly inferentially integrated with our most plausible system of scientific and modest commonsense beliefs.[24] We cannot speak of a natural law’s necessity going beyond this well-grounded postulation, since to prove this metaphysical necessity we would need absolute knowledge – something our epistemic fallibility precludes. Therefore, the so-called necessity of natural laws and what follows from them is simply a result of a well-grounded decision to treat them as necessary, and since this conventional decision is well grounded by deep entrenchment, we have a right to expect (pace Armstrong[25]) that they will resist counter-factual situations. These assumed necessities are necessities in a secondary sense of the word, of course, since they can possibly be denied without contradiction. However, once we postulate these necessities, we have a right to treat them as what we have made of them: rules of our own conceptual system. This explains why we constantly use derived statements of necessity like ‘It is necessary to have fire to light a candle.’ Such natural necessities should be epistemically identified with practical certainties, once we see that they can be treated as certainties, insofar as we can grant them a sufficiently high degree of probability to put them beyond reasonable doubt.

     Finally, we must ask what remains of the empirical root, the seemingly unknowable real objective essences responsible for ‘metaphysical necessity.’ One possibility is that it still has a function in a sense that recalls what Kant called an idea of reason. It seems that we have a directive idea (whose supposed reference is cognitively impossible to find), constructed only to offer a horizon able to measure and pragmatically motivate our investigation. This would be only a directive idea of a metaphysically de re necessity, which could justify our search for generalizations, as approximations of a mere ideal of an absolute, unquestionably necessary empirical knowledge. This ideal seems to serve as an in fact unreachable target, able to make possible the comparison between our approximations, allowing us to establish comparative degrees of assurance between our judgments. In this context, ideas like that of a real essence serve as heuristic tools, even if they cannot be true objects of reference. We proceed as if something achieved were objectively necessary. And in a similar way, we also proceed as if we knew ultimate truth and as if we had ultimate knowledge, at least until we discover that we have made a mistake.

     Summarizing the profession of faith of the apparently old fashioned empiricist that I am: I admit that necessity might be a metaphysically loaded concept. However, it works for us as a conventional de dicto necessity which we can only believe to be rooted in some de re necessity, in a way similar to the way we can only believe that a nominal essence is rooted in some real essence. Anyway, it is not a de re necessity that can be epistemologically spelled out in the forms of a priori knowledge usually expressed.

     If this approach to necessity is accepted, one could go ahead in suggesting a very broad distinction between two main kinds of necessity, both of them conventional and with essentially epistemic (and only ideally metaphysical) import:

 

(A)Unconditioned necessities. These are the formal necessities that we find in logic and mathematics, along with linguistic conventions. Their statements are clearly analytic and their negations are, regarding the system of signs to which they belong, contradictory or inconsistent.

(B) Conditioned necessities. These are necessities arrived at a posteriori, depending on empirical experience to be achieved. Because of this, they are not necessities in the strict sense of the word intended by Kripke when he speaks of metaphysical necessities because after being inductively or hypothetically-deductively reached, they are simply conventionally postulated and assumed as necessities. This is a very common sense of the term, though a weaker one, insofar as it is circumstantial, presupposing something like the truth of a theory or system or cluster of empirical beliefs sustaining it, e.g. the nomological necessity expressed in a statement such as ‘Necessarily V = ∆D/∆t [assuming traditional kinematics].’

 

Although diversely defined, these two general kinds of necessity have a long tradition in philosophy that began with Aristotle. For him (A) was absolute necessity, the necessity in the fundamental sense, understood as the cause of itself, as in the case of the principle of non-contradiction (1984, vol. 2, Met. 1015b10). On the other hand, (B) would be a hypothetical necessity, a derived form, a necessity due to an external cause, like the necessity of water for sustaining life (1984, vol. 1, Phys. 2, 9, 200-230).  The first was a necessity in the proper sense, since the opposite of it would imply a contradiction. The second, so-called hypothetical necessity, is such that its opposite does not imply a contradiction, or implies a contradiction only under a given condition, like the assumption of a belief-system or a linguistic praxis. Both A and B are conventionalized in the innocuous sense that they depend on conventions with varying degrees of arbitrariness.[26] Although I do not intend to elaborate this point here, my impression is that Kripke tends to oversee the distinction between A and B, treating weakened conditioned necessities as if they were unconditioned.

     As for Goldbach’s conjecture, the fact that it may be a necessary truth without our being aware of it does not mean that in this case its suggestion that any natural number is the sum of two primes is not an a priori truth, since it can also be an a priori truth without our being aware of it, insofar as we see an a priori truth as a truth that can be known without experience. It might also be necessary but unknown, insofar as it can be also a priori but unknown, presently being for us only possibly necessary and only possibly a priori. If it happens that we never discover its truth a priori, we will also never discover its necessity. And it is not impossible that someone will find a proof of this conjecture, finally giving it its cognitive status of a theorem with a priori necessity. Indeed, it is because mathematicians maintain the heuristic rule that it is possible to reach such an a priori necessity that they still insist on searching for proofs.

 

The most striking and revealing example of a necessary a posteriori statement introduced by Kripke is that of the wooden lectern in front of him. He starts with the question: could this lectern have consisted, since the beginning of its existence, of ice from the Thames? Certainly not: It would be a different object. Thus, the statement ‘This lectern, if it exists, cannot be made of ice,’ is a necessary truth known a posteriori. Lecterns are usually not made of ice. This lectern seems to be made of wood, and it is not cold. Hence, it is probably not made of ice. Of course, this could be an illusion. It could actually be made of ice. But that’s not the point, writes Kripke. The point is that given the fact that the lectern is not made of ice, but of wood, one cannot imagine that it could be made of ice. Given the fact that it is not made of ice, he concludes, it is necessary that it is not made of ice. More precisely: being P = ‘This lectern is not made of ice,’ and considering that we know both the a priori truth that ‘If P then □P’ and, from empirical research, that P is true... Kripke constructs the following argument, applying a modus ponens:

 

           (A)

           1     P → □P

           2     P

           3     □P

 

It is, therefore, necessary that the lectern is not made of ice, although this is only known a posteriori, through empirical research. The statement ‘This lectern is not made of ice’ is a striking example of a necessary a posteriori!

 

Unfortunately, there is a well-hidden mistake in Kripke’s argument. It concerns the epistemological status of P (‘This lectern is not made of ice’) in the second premise. In this premise, the truth of P is affirmed in complete disregard for the fact (earlier confusingly introduced by him) that P, like any empirical statement, can only be known to be true by inevitably fallible epistemic subjects. However, if this is so, then P can in principle be false. In order to show my point clearly, I first need to define a statement as practically certain if it is so likely to be true that we can ignore the probability of its being false. This is usually the case when we can assign a statement a probability of being true very close to 1.[27] On the other hand, I define a statement as absolutely certain, if it logically cannot be false, having a probability 1 of being true, which makes it obviously necessary.[28] Considering this, we can instead say that statement P of the second premise should more precisely be written as (2’): ‘It is practically certain (that is, it has a probability very near 1 of being true) that P.’ Indeed, (2’) must be true, because we know this. However, only God – the infallible and omniscient epistemic subject – could know with absolute certainty the truth of statement P (that is, God would be able to assign it the probability 1), warranting the factual existence of P. He would in this way give the state of affairs described by P a truly metaphysically de re necessity. Unfortunately, we cannot appeal to God in this matter… All we can know is that P is practically certain in the already stated sense. If we assume that all available information is true, then it is sufficiently likely that we can accept it as true. This must be so if we accept the fallibility of our empirical knowledge, its lack of absoluteness. (Not impossible is a radically skeptical scenario in which Kripke believes he knows that he is standing before a hard wooden lectern, which is supported by all available testimony and possible empirical tests, and, nevertheless, the lectern is really made of ice.[29])

     Assuming this, consider Kripke’s premises again. First, it is fully acceptable that given the fact that P, P follows by necessity.[30] So, what P → □P says is, ‘If it is really the case that P, then it is necessary that P,’ and this, I concede, is a logical truth. However, what the antecedent of P → □P requires is that P implies □P only if P is really the case, which demands that our knowledge of P must be absolutely certain, with a probability of 1 and not just an assertion that a fallible knower ‘holds to be true.’ Only when P has a sheer probability 1 of being true is it an unconditioned necessary truth.

     In other words, only an absolutely certain truth would warrant the necessity of the consequent, which would require an infallible being as its knower. Hence, the most complete analysis of premise (1) must be (1’): ‘If it is absolutely certain that P is the case (if P has the probability 1), then it is necessary that P.’ Surely, premise (1) could not be analyzed as (1’’) ‘If it is practically certain that P is the case (that is, if P has a probability close to 1), then P is necessary,’ because the mere probability of P, no matter how high, as it is less than 1, would not warrant the necessity of P. Once we admit the change of premises (1) to (1’) and (2) to (2’), Kripke’s argument can be made completely explicit as saying:

 

      (B)

1’   If it is absolutely certain (with probability 1) that P, then it is necessary that P.

2’     It is practically certain (with a probability close to 1) that P.

3’     It is necessary that P.

 

Obviously, argument (B) is not valid, since the modus ponens cannot be applied to (1’) and (2’) to give us (3’). The reason is that the antecedent of (1’) does not mean precisely the same thing as (2’), which makes the argument equivocal, hence fallacious. I conclude that under more careful scrutiny Kripke’s argument is clearly flawed and consequently insufficient to convince us that the utterance ‘This lectern is not made of ice’ is a metaphysically necessary a posteriori truth.

     Now we can easily see a reason for Kripke’s misleading claim that the conclusion of his argument must be necessary a posteriori. He ignores the fine semantic differences made explicit in version (B) of his argument, and in doing so he jumps to a conclusion that unduly joins the necessity of his argument’s first premise with the aposteriority of its second premise, interpreting the flawed conclusion (3) as a necessary a posteriori truth, in which ‘necessity’ is used in the unconditioned sense.

 

Kripke then goes on to the analysis of identities between proper names such as ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus’ and ‘Cicero is Tulli.’ These empirical identities were traditionally seen as contingent. However, for Kripke they are identities between rigid designators, which makes them necessary identities, since in the most diverse possible worlds these names will refer to the same object, which would not be possible if Hesperus weren’t Phosphorus or if Cicero weren’t Tulli. We could, he says, have identified Hesperus and Phosphorus with two different celestial bodies, but in this case the sentence ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus’ would have a different meaning…

 

In order to demonstrate that the statement ‘Hesperus is (the same as) Phosphorus’ cannot be necessary a posteriori, here we can produce an argument analogous to the argument applied by Kripke to the indexical predicative case of the wooden lectern. Calling Hesperus h and Phosphorus p, we can construct the following Kripkean modus ponens:

 

           (h = p) → □ (h = p)

           h = p

           □ (h = p)

 

The Kripkean conclusion of this argument is that ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus’ would be an (unconditioned) necessary identity that has been reached a posteriori.

     Nonetheless, here as well the modus ponens does not apply because although the first premise is true, the second premise would only conjoin with the first one to reach the conclusion ‘□ (h = p)’ if it were able to give us an absolute certainty that ‘h = p.’ However, empirically this cannot be the case. In order to obtain absolute certainty (probability 1) that ‘h = p’ is the case, which enables us to reach the conclusion of the conditional, this truth must be discovered, not by inevitably fallible human epistemic subjects only capable of practical certainty, but again only by God, the omniscient and infallible epistemic subject.[31] Because of this, ‘h = p’ can be seen here as merely an empirically reached fallible conclusion, stating that it is practically certain (sufficiently probable) that ‘h = p,’ which is still far from absolute certainty or probability 1. The following reformulation demonstrates the argument’s hidden flaw:

 

                If it is absolutely certain (with probability 1) that h = p,

                then □ (h = p).

                It is practically certain (with a probability close to 1) that h = p.

                □ (h = p)

 

Since we cannot have the absolute certainty required by the identity of the antecedent of the first premise with the second premise, the equivocal character of the argument becomes clear. We cannot use the modus ponens to derive the a posteriori necessity of h = p. In this inter­pretation, the statement ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus’ is contingent a posteriori. It cannot be metaphysically necessary, because since this identity is only highly probable, it will always be possible that Hesperus is not Phosphorus. For instance, although extremely unlikely, it isn’t logically impossible that the gods have until now maintained an incredibly complex illusion of knowledge in human minds, and that the planets are nothing more than a swarm of fireflies that assemble every night to decorate the celestial Vault. In this case, when seen by the naked eye, Hesperus would have a different location than Phosphorus, but it would appear identical to Phosphorus when viewed through a telescope – not because it is the same planet or even a planet at all, but as an effect of witchcraft. (The identity would be falsified, but together with it as well our whole astronomical system of beliefs. This once more shows that we can defend a conditional natural necessity regarding an identity statement, since by assuming its grounding system its opposite is made inconsistent.)

     Kripke’s second example is very different, and one should not confuse it with the first one. It concerns the utterance ‘Cicero is Tulli.’ Assuming my proposed neodescriptivist theory of proper names, the localizing description for his identification is (concisely) ‘the person born in Greece on March 1, 106 BC and deceased in Rome on July 12, 43 BC,’ while the characterizing description is (concisely) ‘the most famous Roman orator, also a statesman, jurist, and philosopher.’ His whole name was ‘Marcus Tullius Cicero.’ Since the proper name is not a fundamental description, but rather an auxiliary one (he could easily be given another name in a different possible world), Kripke is only relying on the fact that not all speakers know that Cicero and Tullius are parts of the same proper name, as a convention in our own world. The statement informs the hearer that the same bearer of the fundamental descriptions implied by each term flanking the identity sign is referred to by only part of the same person’s whole name.

     The result is that the statement’s aim turns out to be a trivial one, namely, to communicate to the hearer a convention regarding the auxiliary description ‘the person whose name was “Marcus Tullius Cicero”.’ Hence, the right answer is that ‘Cicero is Tullius’ only communicates part of a necessary a priori linguistic convention, once the convention that the whole name is ‘Marcus Tullius Cicero’ is decided a priori, just as is the convention that a triangle is a trilateral figure. Moreover, to say that the statement ‘Cicero is Tullius’ is a posteriori would be to confuse its belonging to a definition in our actual world – which is a question of being informed about conventions – with the possible names that the same reference could have been given in different counter-factual situations. Indeed, it is possible that Cicero could have been given the name ‘Marcus Titus Cicero’ in a different possible world and even in ours, making the identity ‘Cicero is Tullius’ false. However, this is as trivial as to say that in a very different language (or world) people use a different name for ‘triangle,’ for instance, ‘colmio.’[32] Consider the statement found in a bilingual dictionary, ‘triangle means colmio.’ It is not, say, an a posteriori inductive result of experience. It is the obvious expression of a necessary a priori identity regarding conventions.

 

The next of Kripke’s examples concerns the identity between kinds of things, as in the already discussed statement ‘Heat is molecular motion.’ Many think that this identity, being the result of empirical research, expresses an a posteriori truth. However, for Kripke this is a necessary a posteriori identity because the heat (in a gas) cannot be anything other than molecular kinetic energy, since the terms ‘heat’ and ‘molecular motion’ are rigid designators. It may be, he says, that the Earth could at some time have been inhabited by beings who feel cold where we feel hot and vice versa, so that for them heat would not be identical with molecular motion. However, this would not be the case, since we understand heat as the sensations caused in us by this molecular motion.

 

The fact that the two nominal terms flanking the identity sign are rigid designators does not warrant that they are rigid designators of the same bearer, picking up the same object in the same possible worlds, since any identity can be false (e.g., ‘8 = 8’ is true, ‘8 = 9’ is false, though these numbers are all rigid designators). Thus, the claim of identity alone warrants nothing.

     On the other hand, as noted in the Appendix to Chapter I, since we have ways to translate rigidity in descriptive terms for proper names, we have reasons to guess that the same can be done with general terms. That is, we could link the two ascription rules for heat in gas and kinetic molecular energy to create a unified ascription rule that has two different guises – two different but interchangeable main designative criteria, producing a necessary a priori identity.

     On the other hand, assuming the independence of the identification rules, we can employ the same strategy used above in order to discredit Kripke’s view that ‘Heat is molecular motion’ is a case of a necessary a posteriori. Thus, considering heat in gas and kinetic molecular energy as rigid designators that necessarily designate one essence, we could construct the following Kripkean argument calling heat in gas H and kinetic molecular energy M:

 

           (x) ((Hx = Mx) → □ (Hx = Mx))

           (x) (Hx = Mx)

           (x) □ (Hx = Mx)

 

Clearly, the same problem reappears. The first premise says only that given that (or if) the identity (x) (Hx = Mx) is really the case, then it is necessarily the case that all heat is molecular motion. Or, in the epistemic parlance, if it is absolutely certain that all heat in gas is kinetic molecular energy, then it is necessary that all heat in gas is kinetic molecular energy. However, since the identity affirmed in the second premise, being empirical, is inevitably fallible, the following paraphrase of the above argument is inescapable:

 

         (x) If it is absolutely certain (with probability 1) that (Hx = Mx),

                         then □(Hx = Mx).

          (x)  It is practically certain (with a probability close to 1) that (Hx = Mx).

         (x) □(Hx = Mx)

 

Here again, the more explicit formulation shows an equivocal and consequently fallacious argument for the same reason given in the above cases. It is thus clear that we cannot in this way conclude that the statement ‘Heat (in gas) is the same as molecular motion’ is a Kripkean necessary a posteriori truth. Thought of in this way, it is a contingent a posteriori truth.

 

The last of Kripke’s examples should be the most important one. It is intended as a refutation of identity theories of the mind-body relation, according to which ‘Pain is (the same as) such and such a brain state’ would be a contingent a posteriori scientific discovery that has not been made. But, as Kripke writes, ‘pain’ and ‘such and such a brain state’ are rigid designators here, for they refer to essential properties. However, if this is the case, the identity theorist is in trouble, because this identity should be necessary, which frontally clashes with the fact that whenever you feel pain you do have pain, while no one is denying that it is possible to conceive that we feel pain without having the corresponding brain states. For a theistic philosopher like Kripke this makes identity theory implausible.

 

I find this argument puzzling. First, as a matter of fact, one can feel pain without there being an identifiable physical cause, for instance, in the case of hypnotized subjects who feel imaginary pains, and in many other cases. However, even if we ignore this, admitting that we cannot consciously feel legitimate physical pain without having some qualitative subjective state of pain, the fact that we can conceive of pain without a corresponding brain state does not prove anything. Similarly, the fact that Descartes could imagine his mind existing without his body could not prove that a mind can exist without a body.[33] Why does this force us to think that a future neuroscience might not be able to show us that by speaking of such and such a brain state we make a rigid reference to exactly the same thing we experience as a state of pain, so that this identity would then be established as conditionally necessary, in a way similar to the case of heat as molecular kinetic energy?

     It is true that feeling pain isn’t the same as detecting heat outside us by feeling hot inside. Only the feeling of being hot inside is subjective and immediate like pain. But in the same way that a Martian might feel cold when we feel hot, a Martian might feel a tingling sensation when we feel pain. And we can similarly imagine that feelings of pain, like those of heat, could in some way be interpersonally identified in the brain using suitable technical procedures (Cf. Ch. III, sec. 13). Hence, the only real difference that remains between the two cases is that kinetic molecular energy in gas is located externally, outside of a person’s head, while such and such a brain state is located internally, within a person’s head. But why should it be relevant to show that pain isn’t the same as neuronal behavior, and even necessarily the same in a conditioned, non-metaphysical sense of the word?

     Kripke concludes his argument by saying: ‘...heat is picked out by the contingent property of being felt in a certain way; pain, on the other hand, is picked out by an essential property’ (1971, note 18). However, even in the case of pain there is no certainty that the feeling of pain, if it is put into words, picks out the real essential property of pain, just as there is no guarantee that a discovered general neuronal pattern of pain picks out the real essential property of pain, beyond a new kind of nominal essence. The identity can be stated as real only from the hypothetical perspective of a conditionally established necessity. To see this, imagine a world where most people’s pain is imaginary and it is extremely easy to mistake imaginary for real physical pain; worse than this, try to imagine a tribe a people whose pain is always imaginary, but so well justified that we all mistakenly believe their pain to be real.

     As I see it, in most cases Kripke confuses the a posteriori element of a contingent a posteriori discovered identity with its well-grounded conventional establishment as something necessary a priori – a de dicto necessary truth. This leads him to believe in a supra-epistemic de re metaphysical necessity which is discovered a posteriori. In doing so, he assigns to ontologically unknowable identities the same status of epistemo­logically assumed identities. He proceeds as if we could assert ontological (metaphysical) truths without considering our epistemic capabilities and their intrinsic fallibility. He refuses to accept that we can never completely separate the epistemic from the ontic; and in so doing, he denies an insight that marks the foundation of modern philosophy by Descartes, namely, that we lack access to supra-epistemic truths.

Addendum: disposing of externalism

A great variety of arguments developed by Kripke and other externalist philosophers merit closer examination. In what follows, I will limit myself to a few comments, since a more detailed analysis would far exceed the scope of this book.

 

1. There are a variety of supposed examples of necessary a posteriori truths that were later proposed by Kripke and others. I will consider as example (i) ‘Cats are animals’ (Kripke 1980: 181-2) because unlike the above examples, it is no identity statement. For Kripke this is a necessary statement since we cannot conceive of a cat that is not an animal; but it is also a posteriori, since it was discovered by means of empirical experience. Therefore, it is a necessary a posteriori truth.

     Now, for me, this is all wrong. Statement (i) can be interpreted in two ways, depending on the context. Here they are:

 

(a)  Contingent a posteriori: a primitive tribe that sees a cat for the first time might easily suppose, based on its aspect and behavior, that it is an animal like others. The tribe arrives at this knowledge a posteriori, because it is based on experience, and contingently, because it is liable to revision since, for them, it could be that the cat is, in fact, a legendary forest spirit, that merely chooses to assume the form of an animal.

(b)  Necessary a priori: Zoologists, accepting the truth of our contemporary taxonomy, according to which the cat is classified as an organism belonging to the Animalia kingdom, assume that the statement (i) is necessary a priori. So interpreted, the statement is necessary in the conditioned or hypothetical sense of the word, and it is a priori (analytic) because it abbreviates tautology (ii) ‘Animals called cats are animals.’

 

One can only arrive at the necessary a posteriori by confusing the conditioned necessity of interpretation (b) with the a posteriori character of interpretation (a).

 

2. Another form of necessary a posteriori later suggested by Kripke concerns origins. For him, rigidity makes true parenthood necessary. He considers the case of Queen Elizabeth II (1980: 112 f.). Indeed, she would not be Queen were she not the daughter of Albert, Duke of York, and his wife, Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon.

     This is a suggestive, but biased example, since in the case of a queen the ovum origin acquires maximal importance, which we would easily analyze as a case of contamination of the identification rule by descriptions of origins (Cf. Appendix to Ch. I, sec. 9 (v)). Suggestiveness and biased concrete examples work here as a way to confuse things and mimic a false sort of relevance. In the case, Elizabeth became Queen of England because her uncle abdicated the throne, making Elizabeth’s biological father the new King, thereby establishing her as the biological heir to the throne. A similar case is the necessity of the origin of the species homo-sapiens as a result of evolution from such and such previous species of hominids (McGinn 1976) – an empirical discovery that can achieve definitional status. But from another perspective, precisely identical exemplars of homo-sapiens fabricated in a future biological laboratory could be devoid of any proper necessity of origin, due to the indirectness and irrelevance of a possible link between such clones and our ancestors. Anyway, there is no reason to see the association of natural necessities with proper names as more than a well-grounded de dicto necessity established by us.

     By contrast, consider the statement (i) ‘Ishmael Lowenstein is the son of Abel and Berta Lowenstein.’ According to a Kripkean philosopher, this statement should be necessary a posteriori, because even if it is known a posteriori, an adult with different parents stemming from a different ovum and a different sperm cell would not be Ishmael Lowenstein.

     However, suppose that the adult Ishmael makes the shocking discovery that his parents are not his biological parents. He was mistaken for a different infant in the hospital where he was born, and a subsequent DNA analysis showed that he was actually the son of Amanda and Mario Belinzoni, whose supposed son was baptized with the name Carlos. Of course, this is no reason to think that Ishmael thereby ceases to be Ishmael or should be renamed Carlos. This name is even printed on his birth certificate and driver’s license. If asked, he could insist on answering that his name is Ishmael Lowenstein, certainly with the agreement of others who know him. This is consistent with our identification rule, since Ishmael still satisfies the localizing and characterizing conditions sufficiently better than does any other person.

     Nevertheless, our conclusion might also be less straightforward. Consider again the complete statement (i) ‘Ishmael is the son of Abel and Berta Lowenstein,’ addressing the question of parenthood.[34] One could use as a criterion of parenthood those who cared for the child and raised him with loving care until adulthood. In this case, we can regard the statement ‘Ishmael is the son of Abel and Berta Lowenstein’ as true, even though he was conceived from Mario’s sperm cell and Amanda’s ovum. So understood, the statement ‘Ishmael is the son of Abel and Berta Lowenstein’ could be better seen as contingent a posteriori. Contingent because it could be false that they cared for and nurtured him; a posteriori because knowledge of this kind is acquired through experience.

     Notwithstanding, it is not difficult to imagine a situation in which Kripke’s view would apply. Suppose we were in Nazi Germany, the Lowensteins were Jewish, and the Nazis had arrested the family. For the Nazis the criterion of parenthood was clearly biological. In this case, if the Nazis were well informed about the mix-up of babies, Ishmael Lowenstein would be considered the son of Mario and Amanda Belinzoni, while Carlos would be considered the true son of Abel and Berta Lowenstein, and as such should be arrested and sent to a concentration camp… With regard to the proper name, however, the matter isn’t so simple. Nonetheless, it is conceivable that the Nazis decided to establish a rule according to which a person’s true and legal name must be the name linked to his biological origin so that they would replace the name of Ishmael Lowenstein with Mario Belinzoni, and the unfortunate young man called Mario Belinzoni would become Ishmael Lowenstein. In this case, the statement (ii) ‘Carlos Belinzoni (Ishmael Lowenstein) is the son of Mario and Amanda Belinzoni’ isn’t a necessary a posteriori truth. It could be seen (a) as a very probable contingent a posteriori discovery, insofar as one emphasizes the fact that the name Carlos Belinzoni (= Ishmael) should now mean the same thing as the son of Mario and Amanda as an (a posteriori) discovered truth and a (contingent) conclusion reached inductively. On the other hand, it could be seen (b) as emphasizing the stipulated decision to treat ‘Carlos Belinzoni’ (= Ishmael), as an abbreviation of ‘the son of Mario and Amanda Belinzoni…’ making this an essential part of his identification rule, so that statement (ii) would be seen as a conditioned necessary a priori.

     I guess that Kripke would answer these objections by noticing that what we discover about parents doesn’t matter. What matters is that if one were born to parents x and y, then one could not have been born to any other parents (1980: 113). But so understood, this is a trivial a priori statement like ‘If a woman is wearing a hat, she must have something on her head.’ The problem is that any attempt to give a concrete example will lose its supposed character of metaphysical necessity, since it will be based upon unavoidably limited empirical experience, being therefore in principle fallible. Indeed, there is only one way in which a given origin would generate a necessary a posteriori, namely when viewed by an infallible knower. God would discern that Ishmael is definitely the son of Mario and Amanda Belinzoni, giving this the probability 1 of necessity independently of experience, and he would know it as a de re metaphysical necessity. He would know this as the only being able to achieve supra-epistemic knowledge. We, as fallible knowers, do not possess this gift. By using concrete examples, Kripke gives the impression of having made a metaphysical discovery about the world when he is really only saying something that is either trivial or contains an anticipation of what can be easily derived from the already proposed neodescriptivist view of proper names.

 

3. Worse than the necessary a posteriori is Kripke’s later invention, the contingent a priori (Kripke 1980: 54-56). It uses a case involving the platinum rod stored in Paris, once designated as the standard metric unit of length. According to Kripke, analysis of meaning is something different from definition; the first is necessary, the second is not (although he gives no satisfactory justification for this). Then he claims that the definition of ‘one meter’ as ‘the length of S at t₀’ is not necessary a priori, but contingent a priori! The reason is that the term ‘one meter’ is a rigid designator, while ‘the length of S at t₀,’ being a definite description, is an accidental designator, only helping to fix the reference. The accidental designator can change its reference. For example, in different possible worlds the length of S at t₀ could be greater or less than a meter on Earth, for reasons such as heating or cooling. Thus, in another possible world (in a contra-factual situation) one meter could be a length different from ‘the length of S at t₀.’ Consequently, the statement ‘the Paris platinum rod is one meter long (has the length S),’ although established a priori, is contingent.

     This argument could be adequate if we accept the existence of some metaphysical reason for the distinction between names as rigid designators and descriptions as accidental designators. However, the real reasons for the distinction are non-metaphysical, as I think I made clear enough in the Appendix of Chapter I (sec. 8-9): definite descriptions are only accidental when dependent on proper names, but not when they make proper names depend on them, as in the present case. Consequently, we have reason to doubt Kripke’s affirmation that after being established definitions are neither meaning-giving nor necessary. For it seems clear that the definition of a meter as ‘the length of S during ∆t’[35] is a stipulative definition made to establish the proper meaning of one meter. Thus, why cannot ‘one meter’ have been chosen as a mere abbreviation of ‘the length of S during ∆t,’ whatever this length is? Why cannot ‘the length of S during ∆t’ be a rigid designator, no less than is ‘average kinetic molecular energy’? Assuming this, our intuitive reasoning would be to think that whether the length of the standard meter changes or not, in its function as a standard of measurement, the meter remains the same, since the standard meter is defined as being necessarily whatever length S has in the ∆t when it is used as a standard. This means that in any possible world where the standard meter exists, the length of this meter will continue to be considered the same, no matter what its cross-world comparative length may be.

     It is only for practical reasons that, wishing to preserve the comparative function of measuring length, it is better for us to use the most rigid and most unchangeable possible standard meter. Suppose, by contrast, that the standard meter were a kind of very elastic rubber rod, continually changing its length. It would remain the same standard meter, of course, but it would be quite impractical as a model for measurement. Using this elastic standard in accordance with the given definition, we could be forced to accept the absurd conclusion that a woman who two hours ago was 1.67 m tall is now 2.24 m tall; or that objects with very different sizes could be the same size if we measured at different times…

      The point is that if you accept that the statement ‘A meter = the length of S during ∆t, whatever length it has when measured’ is the actual definition of a standard meter – and it really is – this definition given by the definite description ‘the length of…’ isn’t contingent, but necessary, since it is a convention that cannot be falsified in any possible world where it holds. Moreover, this definition is a priori, for we do not need to have any experience in order to know its truth. Consequently, the following identity can be considered the right definition of a meter:

 

One meter (Df.) = the length of the standard rod S during any moment of ∆t, disregarding the possible world-circumstance in which its length is permitted to be effectively considered.

 

The definiendum ‘one meter’ is nothing but an abbreviation of the definiens. Like any stipulative definition, this identity is necessary and a priori. The description that constitutes the definiens is rigid because we have established it as applicable in any possible world where the standard rod S exists, and the name ‘one meter’ is rigid because it abbreviates the characterization rule established by the definiens.

 

4. Another attempt to exemplify the contingent a priori could come from Gareth Evans’ example using the name ‘Julius,’ which he arbitrarily stipulates as naming ‘the inventor of the zipper’ (1982: 31). According to some authors, the statement (i) ‘Julius was the inventor of the zipper,’ is contingent a priori. It is a priori because we do not need experience to know this; but it is also contingent, since it is possible that ‘Julius’ e.g., sustained brain injuries when very young and grew up too retarded to invent the zipper (Papineau 2012: 61).

      Concerning statement (i), we again find a dual reading:

 

(a)  On the one hand, it is contingent a posteriori. It is contingent because in a counter-factual situation it could be that the zipper was not invented by anyone or that it was invented by several persons… but it is also a posteriori, because its truth depends on experience to be discovered.

(b) On the other hand, we could paraphrase ‘Julius invented the zipper’ as (ii) ‘Assuming that the zipper was invented and that only one person invented the zipper, we have decided to call this person “Julius”.’ However, this paraphrase of (i) is not contingent a priori, but necessary a priori. It is a conditioned necessary harmless stipulation that is a priori because it is established independently of experience.

 

We conclude that neither in case (a) nor in case (b) do we have a contingent a priori.

 

5. A curious attempt in the same direction was given by the following utterance: ‘I am here now,’ proposed by David Kaplan (1989: 509). This would also be a contingent a priori truth. It is said to be a priori because each of its terms directly refers respectively to the agent, the place and the time of a given context of utterance. This excludes the possibility of its falsity. However, since we can imagine counter-factual circumstances in which I would not be here, this utterance is only contingently true.

     This example is also deceptive. Even ‘I am here now’ can be a false statement in our real world. I remember a case related by Dr. Oliver Sacks of a patient who had a seriously deranged perception of temporal continuity. Because of this, her daily life was a succession of time-lapses: she could think ‘I am here now,’ imagining that she was still in her bedroom, when in fact she was already in her kitchen. Thus, in this case, ‘I am here now’ is intuitively felt by us as empirically false! This shows that the statement ‘I am here now’ can be in fact contingent a posteriori, since it is falsifiable and since we need to know the real context of the experience to determine its truth.

 

6. I also disagree with Hilary Putnam’s view, according to which the meaning of the word ‘water’ must fundamentally be outside our heads.[36]

     This is perhaps the most influential argument for semantic externalism. According to Putnam’s Twin-Earth fantasy, in 1750 Oscar1 on the Earth and his Doppelgänger Oscar2 on Twin-Earth – two almost identical planets with the same history – both simultaneously saw water and called what they saw ‘water.’ Since the chemical structure of water wasn’t yet known in 1750, all that Oscar1 and Oscar2 could have had in their heads was the idea of a watery fluid (a substance that at room temperature is liquid, transparent, odorless, tasteless…). However, in the hypothetical case, they were actually referring to very different compounds, Oscar1 to H₂O, while Oscar2 was referring to XYZ. Water on Twin-Earth (in the example) has a very different chemical composition, summarized by Putnam as XYZ, even though it has the same appearance and properties of water on our Earth. For Putnam this proves that the meaning of water – a word that for him essentially refers to quantities of molecules with the same microstructure of H₂O – could not have been in the Oscars’ heads, since in their heads they had the same state of mind, namely, the idea of a watery fluid and nothing more. Putnam’s slangy comment is the most famous externalist statement: ‘Meaning just ain’t in the head.’(1975: 227) As he summarizes in a central passage:

 

Oscar1 and Oscar2 understood the term ‘water’ differently in 1750, although they had the same psychological state, and although, given the state of development of Science in their epoch, the scientific community would need to take circa 50 years to discover that they understood the term ‘water’ differently. Hence, the extension of the term ‘water’ (and, in fact, its meaning in the pre-analytic intuitive use of the term isn’t a function of the speaker’s psychological state). (1975: 224; my italics.)

 

That our understanding and meanings are not in our heads is a shocking conclusion, later radicalized by John McDowell’s inference that even the mind must be external to the head because it is the locus of our manipulation of meanings (1992: 36).

     My neodescriptivist answer is that Putnam’s result is due to his over­looking the fact that ‘water’ has two descriptive nuclei of meaning: a popular and a scientific one.[37] First, there is an old popular nucleus of meaning of the word ‘water.’ This nucleus is phenomenal and also dispositional and can be summarized by the expression ‘watery fluid.’ It is a substance that at normal temperatures is a transparent, odorless liquid that quenches thirst, can be used to wash things, is a universal solvent, extinguishes many kinds of fire, falls from the sky as rain, forms rivers, lakes and oceans, freezes when cooled below 0 degrees C, evaporates when heated above 100 degrees C, has high surface tension, etc. This was the well-known meaning until the end of the eighteenth century. Then a great semantic upheaval occurred. A new dimension of meaning was increasingly added: the scientific nucleus, which can be summarized as ‘quantities of H₂O.’ Water was discovered to be a chemical substance that results from combining hydrogen and oxygen, as summarized in the formula 2H₂ + O₂ = 2H₂O, which can be shown by burning hydrogen mixed with oxygen and by electrolysis. Moreover, inter-molecular hydrogen bonds are responsible for water’s high surface tension, liquid state at room temperature, etc. Both nuclei of meaning are intrinsically inferential. Nonetheless, they are also obviously objects of descriptions (since in opposition to anti-descriptivist bias, the domain of what can be described is much wider than a merely perceptual domain, containing descriptions of dispositions, micro-structures, etc.), which can be confirmed by consulting any good dictionary.[38] We use the word ‘water’ on an everyday basis in accordance with what we know from the inferential semantic rules of these two nuclei. Meaning is not a question of all and nothing.[39] Furthermore, it is easy to see that depending on contextual factors, one of these two clusters of meaning tends to come to the fore.

     This summary already allows the following plausible internalist explanation of the Twin-Earth fantasy. First, in 1750 the two Oscars had in their heads only the nucleus of meaning expressed by ‘watery fluid,’ so that the extension and meaning of the word water were the same for both Oscars. However, when Putnam considers what is happening, he is overvaluing and unconsciously projecting the scientific nucleus of meaning of the word ‘water’ into the two Oscars’ utterances, as if it were the only semantically relevant one. What he does then is simply to treat the two Oscars as mere indexical devices for the projection of the new scientific nucleus of meaning, whose true locus is in fact our own heads/minds (i.e., those of Putnam and his readers), based on our knowledge that Oscar1 is pointing to H₂O, while Oscar2 is pointing to XYZ. Consequently, the different scientific meanings of the word ‘water’ are not in the world and outside of our heads, as Putnam believes. They are in Putnam’s head when he thinks his thought-experiment, and in our heads when we read his texts. Today we all have some general knowledge about the scientific nucleus of meaning (summarized as H₂O) and may guess that a different scientific nucleus with similar effects (XYZ) would perhaps not be completely impossible. Finally, since Putnam and his readers have different scientific meaning-descriptions in their heads (H₂O and XYZ) when unconsciously projecting them (respectively) onto Oscar1 and Oscar2 by using them as indexical devices, these different meanings obviously remain, as they should, internal properties of minds. This also explains why (again helped by our instrumental referential devices called ‘Oscars’) we give them different extensions.

     The neodescriptivist view suggested above leads us to see that the meaning of ‘water’ receives variations of emphasis according to with what we could call the context of interest in which a word is used, that is, the context of its circumstantial utility. In this case, there is a popular and a scientific context of interest leading to different interpretations as follows:

 

(a)  In a popular context of interest (e.g., of fishermen who use water for cooking, drinking, and washing) the sense that is emphasized in the statement ‘Water is H₂O’ is that of a watery fluid. In this case, ‘Water is H₂O’ means above all (i) ‘Watery fluid = fluid consisting of H₂O.’ Taken at face value, this is a contingent a posteriori statement. Contingent because, at least in principle (though very improbably), it could be proved false; a posteriori because the conclusion is based on experience. Its modal form, though possessing a high level of probability, is still ◊ (a = b).

(b) In a scientific context of interest (e.g., in a chemist’s laboratory) the scientific nucleus of meaning is emphasized. Here ‘Water is H₂O’ means above all (ii) ‘Water as dihydrogen oxide = H₂O.’ As expected, (ii) is a conditioned necessary a priori statement with the modal form □ (a = b), more conspicuously, □ (a[b] = b[a]), assuming the truth of basic chemie. In this context, even if water were not a watery fluid, but rather something like a black oily fluid, it could still be called ‘water,’ insofar as it had the right microstructure.

 

Conclusion: the Kripkean classification of the statement ‘Water is H₂O’ as a necessary a posteriori statement results from a confusion between the a posteriori nature of statement (a) and the (conditioned) necessity of the similar statement (b). Since both senses are components of the whole meaning of ‘water’ and may alternatively come to the fore, it is easy to fall into a confusion resulting from lack of attention to the pragmatics of natural language, since Putnam and Kripke overvalued the scientific nucleus. We will deal with these kinds of confusion when we examine Wittgenstein’s account of transgressing the internal limits of language. In this case, the confusion is a matter of equivocity resulting from the ill-fated attempt to import popular into scientific usage (Cf. Ch. III, sec. 11).

 

7. There are two other examples of Putnam trying to show that meaning is not only located in the external physical world, but also in society. In the first one, he assumes that aluminum and molybdenum are only distinguishable by metalworkers and that Twin-Earth is rich in molybdenum, used to manufacture pots and pans. In addition, he imagines that the inhabitants of Twin-Earth call molybdenum ‘aluminum’ and aluminum ‘molybdenum.’ In this case, he writes, the word ‘aluminum’ said by Oscar1 will have an extension different from that of the word ‘aluminum’ said by Oscar2, so that they mean different things with the word. However, as they are not metalworkers, they have the same psychological states. Hence, the meaning of these words is external to what happens in their heads, depending on their societies.

     Our answer is the following. Consider how Oscar1 and Oscar2 use the words ‘aluminum’ and ‘molybdenum.’ They are not metalworkers, and what they have in their minds is indeed the same thing. It is as much so as the extension that they are able to give to their concepts of aluminum and molybdenum, which in the example includes both. For the metalworkers of Earth and Twin-Earth, on the other hand, aluminum on the Earth and the molybdenum of Twin-Earth (called by their inhabitants ‘aluminum’) have very different constituent properties, which means that metalworkers would have something very different in their heads. The Oscars may confuse both things, but only because they do not really know the intrinsic properties of these things and they are using the words in an incomplete, subsidiary sense. However, since we know the differences between the amounts of these metals on both planets, we can consider the aluminum and the molybdenum respectively observed by Oscar1 and Oscar2 and unconsciously take both persons as referential devices for the different meanings we have in our heads. In this case, we would say that Oscar2 is referring to what his linguistic community calls aluminum, but which in our linguistic community is called molybdenum, while Oscar-1 is indeed referring to what we and our linguistic community call aluminum.

     That people should use the words in accordance with the conventions of their linguistic community does not make the meaning external. It only makes it dependent on implicit or explicit agreements of members of their communities. In the two Oscars case, this agreement concerns only superficial properties. In the metalworkers’ case, this agreement also concerns intrinsic properties. These agreements are always located in individual heads, even if differently distributed in heads belonging to a social network.

     In his second example, Putnam considers differences between elm and beech trees. Most of us do not know how to distinguish between the two. However, we are able to guess correctly that these words are not synonymous, having different extensions, even without knowing the meanings of the two words. Hence, according to him the difference in meaning is not in our heads, but in society.

     In response to Putnam, the important point to be noted is that most of us really do lack sufficient knowledge of the meanings of the words ‘elm’ and ‘beech.’ However, we already know something very generic about them: we surely know that they are trees, and we consider it probable (though not certain) that these two names refer to distinct kinds of trees.[40] With the help of these convergent descriptions (Cf. Appendix to Chapter I, sec. 5), we are able to insert these words into a sufficiently vague discourse. Moreover, we often do this while waiting for the suspected distinguishing information to be offered by specialists – those privileged speakers with sufficient knowledge of the meanings of these words. They are the only persons really able to identify examples of these different kinds of trees, so that without them these words would have no specific usage. The point is that meaning – sufficient or not – is always in the heads of speakers, even if (as I also agree) this meaning is located within many heads that make up the communicative network of a socio-linguistic community.[41]

     Concerning these two cases, Putnam appeals to a division of linguistic labor in order to account for the variety of meaning dimensions that may be possessed by different speakers. As he writes:

 

We may summarize this discussion by pointing out that there are two sorts of tools in the world: there are tools like a hammer or a screwdriver, which can be used by one person; and there are tools like a steamship, which require the cooperative activity of a number of persons to use. Words have been thought of too much on the model of the first sort of tool. (1975, p. 229)

 

This is an important suggestion. However, it is far to confirm an externalist view of meaning. It is rather neutral. After all, the idea of a division of labor in language has already been suggested by internalist philosophers, from John Locke to C. S. Peirce (Smith 2005: 70-73). The former philosopher championed a theory of meaning as something consisting of internal psychological ideas. In effect, the division of labor is perfectly compatible with the fact that, even if socially shared, meaning remains in the heads of speakers, specialists or not, in different dimensions and degrees. In none of the above cases does meaning need to be located outside of heads.

     Finally, to be fair, Putnam expresses himself much more cautiously in a later text (1988, Ch. 2), e.g., by suggesting that ‘reference [as meaning] is fixed by the environment itself,’ calling it ‘the contribution of the environment’ (1988: 32). However, we can read the word ‘fixed’ in two ways. In the first, we understand ‘fixed’ in the sense in which the external physical and social world is what ultimately produces referential meanings in our minds or heads. This is an obvious truism – something that a weak internalist (= a very weak externalist) like myself would be proud to agree. In the second way, which Putnam must intend to suggest, what he means with the word ‘fixed’ remains a too subtle metaphor to be intelligibly rescued, except by confessing that he is speaking about reference and not really about meaning. But one does not need to be a philosopher to know that references are in these cases obviously external, since belonging to the external world. Putnam’s externalism is an imaginatively brilliant philosophical effort that ends either in triviality or in confusion.

 

8. Now, I wish to reinforce my anti-externalist arguments discussing Tyler Burge’s social externalism of thought, which in some ways complements Putnam’s argument (Burge 1979). What Burge’s text supports is the view that the proper contents of thought or belief and propositional attitudes are external.

     I will first summarize Burge’s argument and then show that it is easy to find a much more plausible weak internalist explanation of what happens, simply by elaborating a point already made by John Searle (2004: 284-6). In order to make it as clear as possible, instead of following Burge’s counter-factual mental experiment, I will follow Searle’s version. Suppose that a man named Oscar, residing in region A, feels pain in his thigh and therefore goes to see a certain Dr. Fugly, whom he tells:

 

(i) I think I have arthritis in my thigh.

 

Since arthritis is a painful inflammation of the joints, the doctor regards this belief as obviously false, since one cannot have arthritis in the thigh. Suppose that Oscar afterward travels to the very remote region B of his country and visits a certain Doctor Enoc because of the same health issue. But although in region A arthritis has its usual conventional meaning, in the remote region B people use the word ‘arthritis’ in a much broader sense, as referring to any kind of inflammation. Suppose that having forgotten his visit to the first doctor, Oscar once more tells this new doctor that he has arthritis in his thigh, having in mind exactly the same thing as previously. Now, in region B, as expected, the new doctor will confirm his suspicion, agreeing with Oscar’s unquestionably true belief.

     Based on a similar example, Burge’s reasoning goes as follows. Without doubt, when Oscar claims he has arthritis in his thigh in both the first and second regions, his psychological states are exactly the same, just as his behaviors are the same. But the thought-contents expressed in the two utterances must be different, since thought-contents are truth-bearers, and the thought expressed in the first utterance is false, while the thought expressed in the second is true. However, the same thought cannot be both true and false! Moreover, in the second region the word ‘arthritis’ receives a new meaning, called by Burge ‘tharthritis.’ His conclusion is that the contents of the thoughts cannot be merely psychological. These contents must also belong to the outside world, to the social communities where the speakers live. (Burge 1976: 106)

     Against this conclusion, it is not hard to find a commonsense internalist-descriptivist explanation for what happens. For a healthy weak internalism (that is, a minimalist externalism that admits that our mental subjectivity unavoidably depends on external inputs), in region B the concept-word ‘arthritis’ is the expression of an ascription rule constitutive of a meaning that is more general, designating any kind of inflammation. According to this rule, ‘an inflammation that occurs in the thigh’ serves as a criterial condition and belongs to the sense affixed to the word ‘arthritis’ in the linguistic community of region B. Thus, although the thought expressed in the sentence ‘I think I have arthritis in my thigh’ spoken by Oscar is precisely the same in the two linguistic communities, there is a fundamental difference that John Searle rightly identified as follows:

 

Our use of language is presumed to conform to the other members of our community, otherwise we could not intend to communicate with them by using a common language. (2004, 184-5; my italics)

That is, when Oscar says to Doctor Fugly, ‘I believe I have arthritis in my thigh,’ he must assume that his ascription rule for the predicate ‘arthritis’ conventionally belongs to the language that other competent speakers of the language conventionally apply. The whole of what Oscar has in his mind (first actually and then dispositionally) in his utterance in the linguistic community of region A is:

 

(a)    I have arthritis in my thigh… (and I am assuming that pain and inflammation in my thigh are accepted as a usual symptom of arthritis by the linguistic community of region A, to which my present interlocutor, Dr. Fugly, belongs).

 

This is false because the second sentence of the conjunction is false. Let’s now see what is (first actually and then dispositionally) meant when Oscar tells the second doctor he has arthritis in his thigh:

 

(b)    I have arthritis in my thigh… (and I am assuming that pain and inflammation in my thigh are accepted as a usual symptom of arthritis by the linguistic community of region B, to which my present interlocutor, Dr. Enoc, belongs).

 

Now statement (b) is true. Although the statement ‘I have arthritis in my thigh’ says the same thing, it has a hidden indexical content that differs from (a) to (b). However, this hidden indexical meaning still belongs to Oscar’s mind. Thus, it is true that if we confine ourselves to the content expressed by Oscar’s thoughts when making the same utterance in both places, we see the statements as identical. However, there is an overall difference in what the hearers have in their minds (that is, in their heads) when hearing each utterance. It is different because Oscar wrongly assumed he was following conventions accepted by Doctor Fugly in the first linguistic community, while he later correctly assumes he is following conventions accepted by Doctor Enoc in the second linguistic community.

     When he speaks with the doctor from community A, Oscar infringes on the principle that in order to achieve truth, verifiability rules constituting the content of thoughts should be in consonance with the conventions assumed by the linguistic community where the thoughts are expressed. But the correlative assumption isn’t infringed on in community B, when Oscar speaks with Doctor Enoc. The conventional truthmakers given to members of the two social communities of speakers are different, although the semantic assumptions related to them by Oscar remain the same.

     To be fair to Burge, we need to remember that he called attention to something important: the truth or falsehood of utterances depends on their conformity with linguistic conventions adopted by the speaker’s community. This is already a relevant point, although it does not touch the claim that anything involved in thought-contents or beliefs (understood as senses or meanings of sentences) is outside the internal psychological realm, as it were in some mysterious way dispersed throughout the external socio-physical environment, as a strong externalist would like us to believe.

     A final and more important point is the following: The given explanation allows us to make a healthy internalist paraphrase of the well-known distinction between narrow content and wide content. For the externalist point of view, narrow content is what is in the speaker’s mind, while wide content is in some way external. A healthy internalist analysis of Burge’s example allows us to propose that the narrow content of a thought restricts itself to the semantic-cognitive verifiability rule that constitutes it. This rule is expressed by the statement ‘I think I have arthritis in my thigh.’ On the other hand, the wide content of a thought is what is indexically assumed in the speaker’s mind as the adequate social convention that he expects to be satisfied by the narrow content.

 

8. Finally, one word about John Perry’s argument for the essential indexical (1979). I will be brief since I am repeating an argument I presented in more detail in another text (Costa 2014, Ch. 4). Contrary to Frege, Perry’s view is that the senses of indexicals are inevitably linked with the external circumstances of utterances, which can be proved by the fact that one cannot translate them into eternal sentences without any loss of meaning. The upshot is that, regarding indexicals, externalism of meaning is unavoidable.

     In Perry’s main example, he is pushing his shopping cart through a supermarket and notices that there is a trail of sugar on the floor. He begins to search for the source of the mess only to realize that he himself is the one who is spilling sugar on the floor. This leads him to say: (i) ‘I am making a mess,’ and as a result, he changes his behavior. Now, suppose we translate his statement into a non-indexical statement like (ii) ‘Perry is making a mess.’ This (almost) non-indexical statement cannot preserve exactly the same meaning. He could, for instance, be suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, so that he has forgotten his name is Perry. In this case, he would know the truth of (i), but not the truth of (ii). The conclusion is externalist: no non-indexical statement is able to rescue the whole content of an indexical utterance. Some semantic content must unavoidably belong to the world.

     However, I think there is, in fact, a way to preserve the whole content of the indexical, detaching it entirely from its indexical context. It is a technique I call transplanting: if you need to change the location of a plant, you almost never take the plant alone, but the plant together with the necessary amount of earth in which it is rooted… By analogy, here is how Perry’s example appears after transplanting:

 

(iii) At 10:23 a.m. on March 26, 1968, in the confectionery supplies section of Fleuty Supermarket in the city of Berkeley, CA, after noticing a sugar trail leading away from his shopping cart, Perry says that he is making a mess (or: ‘I am making a mess’).

 

What counts now is the truth of this eternal sentence[42] (iii) in which the indexical subordinate sentence is presented after a that-clause. Although containing indexical elements (‘he’ plus present tense), statement (iii) does not refer to the indexical context, since the indexical subordinate clause refers indirectly. It refers to what Frege called the thought (the belief-content) expressed by Perry in the subordinate clause that follows (a that-clause) or in the sentence with quotation marks (1892: 28). Thus, protected by its surrounding description (the ‘volume of earth’ offered by the eternal sentence), the Fregean sense of ‘I am making a mess’ is here integrally transplanted without loss into the non-indexical context of a thought-content with a much wider reference.[43] What this argument shows is that the so-called essential indexical is not essential at all, since we can explicitly internalize its apparently external components.

 

 

 

 

---

[1] This is a statement like that by Heraclitus of Ephesus, who noted that ‘The sun is the width of a human foot.’ As an interpreter wrote, we need only lie on the ground and hold up a foot against the sun to see that this is true.

[2] I am unable to find real exceptions. Under normal circumstances, fire has always burned. Some say that the idea that trees draw energy from the earth was once a commonsense truth until photosynthesis was discovered… But this idea wasn’t a very basic or modest commonsense truth since it could easily be refuted by the well-known fact that trees do not grow in complete darkness. The idea that a new sun crosses the sky each new day is surely absurd – but is it a commonsense idea? In fact, it was suggested by a philosopher, Heracleitus, going beyond the humble intentions of modest common sense. Modest, humble common sense is not interested in answering such questions, which have no relationship to ordinary life concerns.

[3] Roberto DaMatta, in an interview. (A more forceful example is the obstinate rejection of any kind of theism of the Pirahã tribe in the Amazon rainforest studied by Daniel L. Everett).

[4] It was certainly much easier to believe in the existence of a personal God and an eternal soul independent of the body a thousand years ago, before the steady accumulation of divergent knowledge discovered by the natural and human sciences.

[5] The expression ‘descriptive metaphysics’ was introduced by P. F. Strawson in contrast to ‘revisionary metaphysics.’ It aims to describe the most general features of our actual conceptual schema, while revisionary metaphysics attempts to provide a new schema to understand the world. Strawson, Aristotle, and Kant developed descriptive metaphysics, while Leibniz and Berkeley developed revisionary metaphysics (Strawson 1991: 9-10).

[6] As these interpreters wrote: ‘Wittgenstein’s objection to “theorizing” in philosophy is an objection to assimilating philosophy, whether in method or product, to a theoretical (super-physical) science. But if thoroughgoing refutation of idealism, solipsism or behaviorism involves a theoretical endeavor, Wittgenstein engages in it.’ (Baker & Hacker 1980: 489) Anthony Kenny (1986) preferred to think that Wittgenstein actually held two competing views on the nature of philosophy – therapeutic and theoretical. But the here proposed unified interpretation seems more charitable.

[7] As he writes, ‘We have now a theory, a “dynamic” theory (Freud speaks of a “dynamic” theory of dreams) of the sentence, of the language, but it appears to us not as a theory.’ (Zettel 1983b: 444).

[8] Paul Grice’s sophisticated and ingenious work contains an influential (albeit qualified) criticism of ordinary language philosophy as practiced by Ryle, Austin and Strawson (1989, Chs. 1, 2, 10, 15, 17). According to him, these philosophers often confused ordinary uses of statements resulting from conversational implicatures with their literal meaning. When implicature failed, they mistakenly concluded that these statements had no meaning. This would be the case of statements like ‘This flag looks like red’ (supposedly understood by Austin as showing that sense-data do not exist because this statement is devoid of sense), ‘The present King of France is wise’ (understood by Strawson as a statement without truth-value) and ‘If green is yellow then 2 + 2 = 5’ (understood by him as showing the odd character of material implication). I agree with Grice’s rejection of all these ordinary language philosophers’ conclusions, even if I remain suspicious regarding his own explanations. Material implication, for instance, still belongs to our practice of truth-functional reasoning, which makes explicit a basic general layer subsumed under our more informative factual language. In this sense, it also provides wide intermediate connections. That is, under sufficiently critical scrutiny, natural language intuitions still provide a valuable guide – a point with which Grice would certainly agree.

[9] Philosophers like Berkeley, Leibniz and Hegel can be seen as doing revisionary conceptual analysis, refuting and replacing ambitious interpretations of common sense by new ones.

[10] Rudolf Carnap’s formal mode of speech (1937, part 5, sec. A, § 79) instead of material mode of speech, and particularly W. V-O. Quine’s broader semantic ascent (1960, Ch. 7, § 56) point to this same fact, namely, that by means of conceptual analysis we emphasize linguistic forms only in order to have a clearer sight of them.

[11] A good glimpse into the nature of identification rules was already provided in the Appendix of Chapter I.

[12] If you wish to avoid the word ‘seat,’ you can also define a chair as ‘a moveable piece of furniture with a raised surface and a backrest, made for only one person at a time to sit on.’

[13] As will be frequently recalled, I do not deny that referential meanings include things that cannot be really captured by descriptive conventions, unlike case (C) – things like perceptual images, memory-images, feelings, smells. However, they belong much more to the semantic level called by Frege illuminations (Beleuchtungen), based on natural regularities more than on conventions.

[14] You can continue using the word ‘chair’ when pointing to a wheelchair, but even this semantic flexibility is already definitionally sustained, insofar as you are allowed to identify a chair with wheels as a chair. The sub-conceptual semantic modulation here is nothing but an addition to the definition of a chair. There are well-known cases like (i) ‘cut’ (Df.): using a sharp-edged or another device to separate something into parts, (ii) ‘love’ (Df.): an intense feeling of affection, (iii) ‘game’ (Df.): an activity with rules intended to be used as a means of entertainment (pace Wittgenstein), and (iv) ‘abuse’ (Df.): damaging use of something. These definitions, even if incomplete, express meaning-giving conventional cores that can receive conventional sub-conceptual supplements by the addition of words in expressions such as for (i) ‘cut the cake,’ ‘cut the grass,’ for (ii) ‘love a woman,’ ‘love a child’ (‘loving chocolate’ is already an extended, metaphorical use), for (iii) ‘play chess,’ ‘play tennis,’ ‘play solitaire,’ and for (iv) ‘abuse a drug,’ ‘abuse a child.’ Such sub-conceptual modulations can also be made without a subsidiary word, by the context alone. Contemporary philosophy has in my view an insufficiently justified bias against definitions. (For a somewhat different view, see Recanati 2010: 29 f.)

[15] The correct interpretation of this distinction is a controversial issue that does not concern us here; I give what seems to me the most plausible and useful version.

[16] At first view, it seems that these logico-conceptual remarks appeal to old-fashioned semantic definitions leading us to the rejection of findings of modern empirical psychology (Cf. E. Margolis & S. Laurence, 1999, Ch. 1). But this is only appearance. Consider Eleanor Rosch’s important results. She has shown that we are able to categorize under a concept-word much more easily and quickly by appealing to prototypical cases (Cf. Rosch, 1999: 189-206). For example, we can more easily recognize a sparrow as a bird than an ostrich or a penguin. In the same way, an ordinary chair with four legs can be recognized as a chair more easily and quickly than can a wheelchair or a throne. However, this does not conflict with our definition, since for us the psychological mechanism of recognition responsible for the performance is not in question, but rather the leading structure subjacent to it. We can often appeal to symptoms as the most usual ways to identify things. For instance, we identify human beings first by their faces and penguins first by their appearance, even if human faces and a penguin’s appearance are only symptoms of what will be then confirmed by expected behavior, memories, genetic makeup, etc. Hence, the ultimate criterion remains dependent on a definition. (In one wildlife film fake penguins outfitted with cameras deceived real penguins. The trouble with these moronic birds is that they are overly dependent on innate, instinctive principles of categorization.)

[17] The expression in brackets appears in the author’s footnote on this passage. In Dummett’s more orthodox position, McDowell sees a relapse into the psychologism justifiably rejected by Frege.

[18] Freud distinguished (i) unconscious representation able to associate itself with others in processes of unconscious thought from (ii) unconscious representation that remains truly isolated, not associated with other representations, which for him would only occur in psychotic states and whose repression mechanism he called exclusion (Verwerfung). Evans treats the relative insularity of our non-reflexive awareness of semantic rules in a way that suggests Freud’s concept of exclusion.

[19] Cf. Rosenthal 2005. In this summary, I will ignore the dispute between theories of higher-order perception (Armstrong, Lycan) and higher-order thought (Rosenthal), and still others. In my view, David Rosenthal is right in noting that Armstrong’s perceptual ‘introspectionist’ model suggests the treatment of cognitions of a higher-order as if they contained qualia and that it is implausible that higher-order processes have phenomenal qualities. Armstrong, on his side, seems to be right in assigning a causal controlling role to higher-order introspection, since for him consciousness arises from the evolutionary necessity to maintain unified control over more complex mental systems. Aside from that, although Armstrong doesn’t use the word ‘thought,’ he would certainly agree that there is some kind of higher-order cognitive element in the introspection of first-order mental states, an element that interests us here. I prefer the term metacognition for these higher-order cognitions since I believe that not only Rosenthal but also Armstrong would agree that introspection is a cognitive phenomenon.

[20] I will pass over the traditional idea that of themselves first-order mental states automatically generate metacognitions. This view would make it impossible to have perceptual consciousness without introspective consciousness. However, this view not only seems to lack a convincing intuitive basis; it also makes the existence of unconscious thoughts incomprehensible.

[21] Some use the term ‘pre-cognitive’ for what is implicitly known. I use the word ‘cognitive’ in a broader sense, including the cognition of what is implicitly, unconsciously known.

[22] Later he generalized, writing that a rigid designator ‘in every possible world designates the same object,’ which includes worlds where the object does not exist (1070: 48). However, this last view directly contradicts the meaning of the verb ‘to refer,’ which can only be rightly applied when the referred to object exists (Cf. Searle 1969: 77; Plantinga 1974: 80).

[23] Rejecting the view of a particular as a bundle of abstract properties, Kripke concludes: ‘What I do deny is that a particular is nothing but a “bundle of qualities,” whatever that may mean’ (1980: 52). He was certainly unaware of the then only recently introduced trope theory. (See Appendix of Chapter III)

[24] This high level of entrenchment seems to me the relevant reason we distinguish between regularities that have the ‘necessity’ of natural laws and those that are merely coincidental. This entrenchment creates the impression that our knowledge of natural law is of something that exists by logical necessity. (For similar approaches, see Tugendhat & Wolf 1983: 253; See also Mackie 1974.)

[25] D. M. Armstrong defended the view that scientific laws are necessary because they are relations between universals, which explains their resistance to counter-factual examples (2010, Ch. 5). However, the ontological price of this view seems simply too high.

[26] I think that Wittgenstein would classify as (B) conditioned necessities those implicit conventions that he called ‘grammatical rules,’ grounding useful linguistic practices (1984a). Here is his suggestion, in which I read the word ‘rule’ as a conventional (a priori) conditional necessary proposition: ‘Every empirical proposition can serve as a rule if it is fixed as the immovable part of a mechanism, in such a way that the entire representation revolves around it, making it part of a system of coordinates independent of the facts.’ (1984e, part VII: 437)

 

[27] The concept is relevant for those who accept that (empirical) knowledge is justified true belief, because then they will need practical certainty regarding the conditions of truth and, consequently, knowledge itself. (Cf. Costa 2014, Ch. 5).

[28] I assume that ‘P is necessary’ means the same as ‘P has probability 1.’ Seen as a probability, the idea of a necessity without any epistemic import appears to be nothing but an empty fetishism of necessity.

[29] For a discussion of skeptical hypotheses, see Ch. VI, sec. 30.

[30] This works well and trivially with formal necessities. If P were 5 > 3, one could argue (1) ‘If it is the case that 5 > 3, then it is necessary that 5 > 3. (2) It is the case that 5 > 3. (3) Therefore, it is necessary that 5 > 3.

[31] God would be the only being able to know created things in their metaphysical necessities de re, perhaps because he knows them by sustaining them in their existence.

[32] ‘Colmio’ means triangle in Finnish.

[33] In the last case, this is because ‘imagine,’ like ‘doubt’ and ‘conceive,’ are verbs of propositional attitudes, which do not allow extensional inferences.

[34] Today there are at least five competing theories of parenthood (genetic, labor-based, intentional, causal and pluralistic ones), and there is no consensus on the right cluster of criteria (Cf. Brake & Millum 2016, sec. 4).

[35] The symbol ‘∆t’ is more correct. The rod served as a standard not only at t0, but rather during the entire period in which it was conventionally designated to have its function.

[36] I say ‘fundamentally,’ because Putnam admits that surface descriptions (stereotypes) and classifications (semantic markers) are internal secondary mental features of meaning (1975: 269).

[37] For a more detailed argument, including a more careful neodescriptivist analysis of the meanings of ‘water,’ see Costa 2014, Ch. 3.

[38] For instance, the main definition in a Merriam Webster dictionary contains elements of both popular and scientific nuclei of meaning. It is the following: water = the liquid that descends from the clouds as rain, forms streams, lakes, and seas, and is a major constituent of all living matter and that when pure is an odorless, tasteless, very slightly compressible liquid oxide of hydrogen, H₂O, which appears bluish in thick layers, freezes at 0°C and boils at 100°C, has a maximum density at 4°C and a high specific heat, is weakly ionized to hydrogen and hydroxyl ions, and is a poor conductor of electricity and a good solvent. (On the descriptive relevance of the dispositional and scientific properties of water and their presentation in dictionaries, see Avrum Stroll, 1996: 71).

[39] We need to know only the most common descriptions, and this is enough for our adequate use of the word in more or less vague contexts. We do not need to know all the descriptions of water; even chemists do not know all of them. Did you know, for instance, that when water is cooled to near absolute zero (-273.15° C.), it changes again from a solid to a liquid state?

[40] In a later text (1988: 29), Putnam notes that if I know that a beech tree isn’t an elm, I also know that an elm isn’t a beech tree, which means that my knowledge is symmetrical, so that the representations are the same; furthermore, the words ‘beech’ and ‘elm’ are only phonetic shapes without meaning (1988: 27). But the semantic element here is just that we have reasons to believe that with these two names privileged speakers mean different kinds of trees, being able to detail the differences. Thus, that the description ‘A beech tree is a tree that is different from an elm tree’ is sufficient to allow us to insert these words in discourse as probably referring to different kinds of trees that after correction by others will be asymmetrically classified.

[41] We can also find the right information in books, the internet, etc., but in order to be there, it must first in some way or measure be located in the human minds inside our heads...

[42] This might not be a perfect eternal sentence, but this does not change our conclusions since it is questionable if a statement without any kind of indirect indexical dimension is possible. If I say, ‘The Earth is round,’ I am already localizing the subject in our solar system. In this sense, all our empirical statements are indexicals.

[43] Phenomenal elements are obviously lost, but they do not belong to the conventionally grounded meaning. For a reconstruction of Frege’s indirect reference in subordinate clauses, see the Appendix of Chapter IV, sec. 5 (iv).