Ontological Commitment Revisited

Jesús Padilla Gálvez, Jesús Padilla Gálvez

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9783110750119
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Philosophie analytique

Ontological commitment implies that each theory is supposed to specify the type of entities that form its components. Representatives of a theory share an ontological commitment in relation to the objects they refer to. There are theories that admit the existence of universals while others do not. As there are different ways of speaking about universals it is necessary to decide what a universal term corresponds to. It is essential to have a criterion that enables us to decide which kinds of objects are allowed as references for the terms used. In this volume two different approaches are discussed: first, in cases where only extensional languages are accepted; second, when intensional elements are required to determine the meaning such terms as "Sachverhalt", intentional statements or representations. The ontological commitment associated with extensional theories exclusively admits the existence of physical objects, whereas intensional theses additionally include universal and abstract entities. The study of ontological commitment enables us to measure the ontological economy of theories. This serves as a basis for the choice of theory. The authors of this volume discuss relevant issues of both models and provide new solutions.

Against Propositional Substantivism

Manuel García-Carpintero

Note: Financial support was provided by the DGI, Spanish Government, research project FFI2016 – 80588-R, and through the award “ICREA Academia” for excellence in research, 2013, funded by the Generalitat de Catalunya. This work received helpful comments from audiences at the Diaphora workshop on the Nature of Representation, Stockholm, and at LOGOS and MELL, LANCOG seminars. Thanks to John Collins, Richard Gaskin, Peter Pagin, Michele Palmira, Bryan Pickel, Indrek Reiland, François Recanati, Ricardo Santos and Elia Zardini. Thanks also to Michael Maudsley for the grammatical revision.

Abstract

Jeff King, Scott Soames, and Peter Hanks have advanced substantive theories of propositions, to deal with several issues they have raised in connection with a concern with a long pedigree in philosophy, the problem of the unity of propositions. The qualification ‘substantive’ is meant to contrast with ‘minimal’ or ‘deflationary’ – roughly, views that reject that propositions have a hidden nature, worth investigating. Substantive views, I’ll argue, create spurious problems by characterizing propositions in ways that make them unfit to perform their theoretical jobs. I will present in this light some critical points against recent substantivist proposals.

Keywords: propositions, unity of propositions, representational content, representational vehicles

1 Introduction

Unlike other concepts that philosophy has used from its earliest beginnings in formulating its proprietary set of questions (What are things ultimately (made of)? What do we know? What is a good deed, or a good work of art?), proposition, like a priori knowledge or possible world, are technical-theoretical notions that philosophers deploy to provide answers to such questions. They don’t figure as such in questions the layman asks. The closest folk pretheoretical conception that philosophical theories of propositions develop is deployed in talk about sameness of content, and in generalizations like ‘what S said/thought’.¹

Here are the core features in the philosophical ‘job description’ for propositions – the theoretical roles that they are posited to play, developing that folk notion.²

• Objects/contents of attitudes like belief, speech acts like assertion, and perhaps others in each category;
• (Partial) meanings of utterances of declarative sentences, and perhaps others;
• Referents of ‘that’-clauses;
• Bearers of truth and falsity, and the modalities of truth and falsity: necessity, possibility, probability (subjective or epistemic, objective or metaphysical);
• What gets assessed in determining the validity of arguments.

To properly perform these jobs, propositions should be sufficiently coarse-grained. It should be apt to ascribe the same proposition to an English sentence like “Sophie loves Carl”, and to its translation into an SOV language like Turkish, or an ergative language like Basque or Georgian (Collins 2014, 145). This would afford an easy explanation, say, for why it is rational for a bilingual speaker who has formed a belief in her English inner speech to assert it in its Basque translation for the benefit of her Basque audience. For related reasons, it is desirable to assign the same proposition as content to perceptual experiences (assuming that they have them, with many contemporary views) and to the perceptual beliefs they help to justify.³

Writers including Gaskin (2008), King (2007), Soames (2010) and Hanks (2015) advance different substantive theories of propositions, to deal with issues they have raised, in the vicinity of a concern with a long pedigree in philosophy, the so-called problem of the unity of propositions.⁴ ‘Substantive’ here is meant to contrast with ‘minimal’ or ‘deflationary’. One might be skeptical of substantive views about propositions on account of a general attitude about the theoretical posits of philosophy. This might be motivated by Yablo’s (2014a) “quizzical” standpoint – the notion that there is no reasonable way that controversies among proponents of prima facie conflicting substantive ontologies can be adjudicated. Or instead by the view that such entities are posits of an “easy ontology” (Thomasson 2015) and, as such, lack a “hidden nature” worth investigating and debating about. Or the skepticism might be rather grounded on a deflationary attitude specific to the case of propositions; say, one motivated by the measure-theoretic perspective on their explanatory role promoted by Davidson, Perry, Stalnaker and others.⁵ Like numbers measuring quantitative properties, on this view propositions are just convenient tools used to represent through their relations the semantic relations among attitudes and acts in their job description. The latter motivation is of course consistent with the former.

Skeptical attitudes about propositions predict that substantive views will create spurious problems, by characterizing propositions in ways that make them unfit to perform their theoretical jobs. In support of a skeptical view, this paper aims to show that recent substantivist proposals confirm the prediction. After briefly outlining the unity debates in the next section, I will rehearse along such lines in the third critical points against King’s view, and against Hanks’ (2015) view in the fourth. On the view I want to promote, the explanations that have been sought by ascribing controversial natures to propositions should be instead given in terms of features of the representational vehicles to which they are ascribed. I intend to provide here indirect support for this view, in so far as it explains the difficulties here presented for substantive accounts.

2 Substantive vs. Deflationary Solutions to Unity Problems

A cluster of unity of the proposition problems exercised the founding fathers of Analytic Philosophy, following in the footsteps of a distinguished tradition traceable back to Plato’s later dialogues. What is it that holds the constituents of a proposition together? As this way of framing it shows, the problem presupposes that we can somehow discern ‘constituents’ in propositions’ – the scare quotes will be explained soon.

In fact, as it has been pointed out,⁶ there are several problems that have been discussed under that label. A deflationary attitude toward propositions suggests that they are created by the assumption that propositions, like the theoretical entities posited in empirical science, have hidden natures of which we can provide substantive explanatory accounts. King (2019, 1346) makes it explicit. He says that the unity problems concern properties that “seem to call out for further explanation and whose possession seems as though it should be grounded in the possession of ‘more basic’ properties. It may be hard to give a criterion for being such a property, but properties like being alive, believing that snow is white, and being morally good seem to be examples of such properties”. Against this, philosophers like Bealer (1998) and Merricks (2015) advance a ‘quietist’ or ‘primitivist’ view, opposing the project of providing substantive accounts. As Lewis (1983, 352) protests in a similar context discussing the related Third Man-like regresses: “Not every account is an analysis! A system that takes certain Moorean facts as primitive, as unanalysed, cannot be accused of failing to make a place for them. It neither shirks the compulsory question nor answers it by denial. It does give an account.”

Now, against bare deflationism (like perhaps Bealer’s and Merricks’s), the deflationary view I want to promote takes on explanatory concerns in the vicinity of those allegedly addressed by substantive proposals, offering informative answers for them but shunning substantive commitments to the nature of propositions. We can increase our understanding of Moorean facts that are to be taken as primitive by placing them within a wider net of interlocking concepts, some of which receive analyses or definitions. Even though proposition, a priori knowledge and possible world are theoretical kinds, we are acquainted with the phenomena they are intended to categorize, and have intuitions about them. As indicated, there are folk pretheoretical conceptions that philosophical theories of propositions develop, manifest in talk about sameness of content, and generalizations about what S said/thought. In indicating how propositions are supposed to perfor...