Abstract
A context-shifting example involves a putatively non-ambiguous, non-elliptical, non-indexical declarative sentence, some distinct utterances of which differ in truth value despite sameness of place, time, surrounding objects, and other physical factors. Charles Travis has spawned a large literature by arguing that such examples undermine compositional truth-conditional semantics. After explaining how prior responses to Travis’s examples fail in the metaphysical details, the present essay develops a new approach that treats a wide range of subject terms as disguised indexicals sensitive to mereological structure.
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Notes
As understood here, concrete objects bear spatial and temporal relations; abstract objects do not.
I will be silent on whether the character in question is strictly Kaplanian in any controversial sense. What matters for my purposes is that it serves the basic role of indexical meaning.
This is not to say that the general strategy of treating names and descriptions as neo-indexical is new. See e.g. Pelczar and Rainsbury (1998) and Stanley and Szabo (2000). Nor is it to say that the present account is substantially more complicated than many others in the literature, even in the particular way described. Cf. Elbourne (2008).
An example that seems to me to involve polysemous predicates: Pia’s friend is looking for a dense object to muffle sound waves and Pia utters ‘the real number line is dense’. Other examples seem to fail not because of polysemy but because there is no difference in truth values, just something like humorous or silly truth. Suppose Pia’s friend is looking for intimidating objects to use as Halloween decorations and Pia utters that a certain highly complicated proof in mathematics ‘is intimidating’. Unlike her utterance of (1) in the botanist context, Pia’s utterance to her friend in the Halloween case is true, just not practically helpful.
I restrict the discussion to basic predicative sentences and their subject terms for simplicity. It is my hope that the account to be developed here applies smoothly to other sentence forms and their noun phrases as well, but I do not have the space to nurture that hope in any detail in the present essay.
Anecdotally, when I have asked non-philosophers in tablecloth-using restaurants what color the tables are, they have answered regularly by giving the color of the tablecloths. But I do not pretend to have conclusive empirical findings on this. Nor do I require them, for a single working example suffices. In case other examples better match your intuitions, consider these two. Hands in gloves: are there not contexts in which an utterance of ‘Mickey Mouse’s hands are white’ is true? An iPhone in its case: Suppose my silver iPhone is in a blue case on my living room shelf. My elderly neighbor who knows nothing about iPhones is near the shelf and I request of her: ‘Please hand me that iPhone. It is the blue thing on the shelf.’ We can even imagine that she has poor hearing and asks back ‘the i-what is what? Did you say “glue”?’ to which I respond in a louder voice: ‘the iPhone is blue!’ Similar cases are easy to generate: a floor covered by a large area rug, a speedskater covered by a bodysuit, a head covered by a balaclava, and so on. Moreover, the point does not turn on any conventional or specialized functional relationship between the “covering” object and the object covered. The example involving (2) works just as well if we suppose that Pia has recently spilled a large bag of paprika all over her tan table as it does if we suppose that she’s spread a red tablecloth, yet there are no conventional or specialized functional relationships between paprika and tables.
Some metaphysical detail helps to see this. Consider two live and fairly widely defended options in the metaphysics of property exemplification: substratum theory and trope bundle theory. The substratum theorist holds that the table and the tablecloth have distinct substrata (for they are numerically distinct objects) and that the universal redness is instantiated by exactly one of them while the universal tanness is instantiated by the other. It is clear which instantiates redness and which does not. The trope bundle theorist holds that the table and the tablecloth are non-overlapping trope bundles. It is clear that the tablecloth bundle, not the table bundle, includes the redness trope. Now, if the tablecloth were stipulated to be a proper part of the table then these metaphysical details would differ accordingly. But we are assuming (with utter plausibility) that the table and the tablecloth are disjoint.
Let us agree to set aside certain complications from the metaphysics of color, for example, the possibility that color properties are extrinsically relational. Suppose colors are thought of as relations that, say, surface reflectance features bear to observers or to pairs of observers and reference frames. Still, the relevant surface will be the tablecloth’s, not the table’s.
Thank you to two anonymous referees for encouraging me to discuss the transfer suggestion and for helpful input on the relevant literature.
One response to context-shifting that I will not discuss in detail grants Travis that meaning alone is insufficient for the determination of truth conditions but denies that this is a problem for traditional semantics, which, according to advocates of this response, does not entail that meaning alone suffices for determining truth conditions (Predelli 2005). The point of the present essay is not to argue that this conception of semantics is inferior to those that assign more responsibility to meaning, but rather to offer a new approach to context-shifting for those who already believe it is.
Thank you to an anonymous referee for suggesting this reply on behalf of the semantic minimalist.
Furthermore, there is reason to worry that semantic minimalism ends up requiring a very large amount of the semantic content of successful basic predicative discourse about concrete objects to be false even in cases where property exemplification typically is thought to hold. Cappelen and Lepore describe the semantic content of sentence S as the content that all utterances of S share (2005, pp. 143–144). And they focus on (and dismiss) worries about this description from the metaphysics of properties, worries to the effect that ‘is red’ in ‘A is red’ needs to be spelled out beyond just saying that it means being red simpliciter (ibid., pp. 157–162). But they also need to say something about its consequences for how to understand ‘A’ in ‘A is red’. Consider (1). An utterance of ‘the leaves’ in (1) cannot semantically pick out something that includes some green paint as a part if what it semantically picks out is supposed to be picked out in every utterance of ‘the leaves’, for the great majority of leaves are not coated with paint. But if it cannot pick out something that includes some green paint as a part, then it cannot pick out something that satisfies ‘is green’ in the relevant context. So even in the original Pia case, the semantic content seems to be false, barring further explication of what exactly minimal semantic content is supposed to be.
Szabo considers his account to be ‘context-sensitive’ rather than an ‘indexical’ predicate account, but this terminological point does not matter for present purposes.
Rothschild and Segal individuate predicates syntactically by subscripts that correspond to contexts. So, for example, ‘\(\hbox {red}_\mathrm{p}\)’ is only ever predicated (and thus \(\hbox {red}_\mathrm{p}\) is only ever expressed) in the context of Pia and her photographer friend.
Of course, the conjunction (i)–(iii) may well be denied. For example, it may be that (i) is false because ‘spherical’ as used in the example is elliptical for ‘seemingly spherical’ and thus does not pick out the intrinsic property of being spherical. Simply for the point of illustrating metaphysical perspicuity, however, let us stipulate (i)–(iii).
The approach developed here has features in common with several prior approaches. I have already highlighted its similarity to the approach taken in Szabo (2001), which also focuses on mereological facts. Another approach with interesting mechanical similarities is the one outlined in Nunberg (1993) and formalized in Elbourne (2008). The elements in Nunberg’s approach include an index and a relational component, which, along with classificatory components, might yield a content based on relations between the index and some other object. This bears some natural resemblance to the present apparatus’s metaphysically perspicuous designatum and pseudo-mereological operation (though it should be clear that there are important differences). Thank you to an anonymous referee for pointing me to Nunberg (1993) and Elbourne (2008).
The present account is consistent with the claim that names are rigid designators. Suppose it is common knowledge among Pia and her friends that her tan table from the going example is named ‘Mable’. Suppose Pia says truthfully to the photographer: ‘Mable is red, but might have been some other color’. When we “look at” other possible worlds in evaluating the modal conjunct, the relevant possible object we consider is (whatever sort of de re representative we favor of) the numerically same table-and-cloth fusion as is actually picked out by Pia’s utterance of ‘Mable’. Her utterance is true just in case that table-and-cloth fusion is a color other than red at some possible worlds. By contrast, when Pia says to the installation artist that ‘Mable is tan but might have been red’, it is MABLE’s being red at some possible worlds that makes the modal conjunct of that utterance true, independently of what the tablecloth is like at those worlds. So on the view defended here, if names are rigid designators then a given metaphysically perspicuous utterance of ‘Mable’ picks out the same table at all worlds, unlike, for example, a given metaphysically perspicuous utterance of the definite description ‘the table in Pia’s kitchen’. That some imperspicuous utterances of ‘Mable’ refer to a table-plus-cloth fusion instead of a table is quite consistent with the rigidity of naming, for those utterances pick out the same table-plus-cloth fusion at all worlds. Thank you to an anonymous referee for encouraging me to discuss rigid designation.
How are we to interpret noun phrases (e.g. ‘paint at t’ or ‘leaf parts’) as deployed in content explications like the one to which this note is appended? Answer: in accord with standard semantic treatments of such expressions. They need not, for example, be understood as uttered metaphysically perspicuously (though they could be so understood without any trouble). For example, it is not a problem if some dust particles on the surface of the paint are included as parts of the designatum of ‘paint at t’. There is no onus on the present account to weigh in on this question since the content explications are not basic predicative sentences.
One Travis example that I omit because it is not a genuine case of context-shifting involves ink that looks black when contained in its bottle but that is intrinsically blue. In particular, it is blue when spread out enough for normal lighting to reflect off its surface, as when used for writing (Travis 2000). Depending on speaker/auditor interests, an utterance of ‘blue’ might be used to pick out intrinsic color, for example if someone is interested in ink for writing, in which case ‘the ink is blue’ is true when uttered about the ink in question. Or an utterance of ‘blue’ might be used to pick out apparent color in certain conditions (perhaps by being elliptical for ‘blue-looking’), for example if someone is interested in photographing bottles of liquid (in standard lighting) that will show up blue in the photograph, in which case ‘the ink is blue’ is false when uttered about the ink in question. But intrinsic color is not the same property as apparent color. So this attempt to flesh out the example turns on a difference in meaning of the two predicate utterances and thus is not a genuine instance of context-shifting.
It is instructive to notice the difference here with the leaves case. In the ink case, generating the difference in truth conditions requires the photographer’s interest to be in apparent colors of objects (otherwise Pia’s utterance of ‘the ink is blue’ would be true). By contrast, the relevant difference in truth conditions can be generated in the leaves case even if we stipulate that the photographer makes it very clear that he is interested in intrinsically green objects (which need not be metaphysically perspicuous leaves), whether they end up appearing green in the photograph or not. In that case, Pia’s utterance of ‘the leaves are green’ is still true to the photographer, for the coat of paint on the leaves is intrinsically green. Yet the utterance would remain false to the botanist, who is interested in intrinsic greenness of metaphysically perspicuous plant matter. The force of the leaves example thus does not turn on the difference between intrinsic and apparent color.
It should be assumed throughout that the tablecloth is draped on the table in customary fashion. If, by contrast, the tablecloth were, say, glued to the table, then it would be less clear that perspicuous utterances of ‘table’ exclude reference to the tablecloth.
Clapp (2012) contains two further objections to indexicalist treatments of context-shifting. The first is that indexicalist approaches have no principled reason for locating indexicality in exactly one from the trio of subject term, copula, and predicate. The present essay furnishes reasons not to choose the predicate. One reason not to choose the copula is that it is unclear how an indexical copula could work in “mixed” conjunctive predications like (3) ‘The table and the fire extinguisher are both red’, as uttered to the photographer. Another reason is that multiplying semantic values for the copula runs the risk of closing open questions of fundamental ontology by semantical theorizing—a methodology typically thought imprudent nowadays. Clapp’s final objection concerns the distinction between semantic and pragmatic content. The indexicalist needs to endorse a Gricean distinction between semantic sentence content and pragmatic speaker content in order to motivate truth conditional semantics over rival pragmatics (Stanley 2000); and she needs to invoke something like a Gricean principle of cooperation in order to explain how the proposed indexicals contribute to truth conditional semantic content; but once the principle of cooperation has been employed to attain the truth-conditional semantic content, it is no longer available as a means to determine that a certain semantic content is being used for merely pragmatic speaker content a la Gricean implicature. I think the indexicalist should respond to this objection by rejecting the last step. The process of checking for communicative cooperation in cases of context-shifting predication may not be the same process as that of checking for communicative cooperation in cases of implicature. One could invoke a system of several principles of cooperation wherein each such principle is relativized to certain speaker interests and neutral with respect to other speaker interests. This allows the general method of appealing to a principle of cooperation to be recursive within the context of a single utterance.
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Giberman, D. Moving parts: a new indexical treatment of context-shifting predication. Synthese 193, 95–124 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0747-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0747-8