Reference and Description

The Case against Two-Dimensionalism

Scott Soames

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780691130996, 9780691121000
• eBook ISBN: 9781400826452
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Mind & Body in Philosophy

In this book, Scott Soames defends the revolution in philosophy led by Saul Kripke, Hilary Putnam, and David Kaplan against attack from those wishing to revive descriptivism in the philosophy of language, internalism in the philosophy of mind, and conceptualism in the foundations of modality. Soames explains how, in the last twenty-five years, this attack on the anti-descriptivist revolution has coalesced around a technical development called two-dimensional modal logic that seeks to reinterpret the Kripkean categories of the necessary aposteriori and the contingent apriori in ways that drain them of their far-reaching philosophical significance.


Arguing against this reinterpretation, Soames shows how the descriptivist revival has been aided by puzzles and problems ushered in by the anti-descriptivist revolution, as well as by certain errors and missteps in the anti-descriptivist classics themselves. Reference and Description sorts through all this, assesses and consolidates the genuine legacy of Kripke and Kaplan, and launches a thorough and devastating critique of the two-dimensionalist revival of descriptivism. Through it all, Soames attempts to provide the outlines of a lasting, nondescriptivist perspective on meaning, and a nonconceptualist understanding of modality.

PART ONE

THE REVOLT AGAINST DESCRIPTIVISM

CHAPTER 1

THE TRADITIONAL DESCRIPTIVIST PICTURE

The modern discussion of reference begins with the reaction of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell to an initially attractive but overly simple conception of meaning and reference. The conception is based on the observation that the most important feature of language is our ability to use it to represent the world. Different sentences represent the world as being different ways, and to sincerely accept, or assertively utter, a sentence is to believe, or assert, that the world is the way the sentence represents it to be. The reason sentences are representational in this way is that they are made up of words and phrases that stand for objects and the properties we take them to have—physical objects, people, ideas, institutions, shapes, sizes, colors, locations, relations, and the rest. What it is for language to be meaningful is for it to have this representational capacity. But if meaning is essentially representational, it would seem that the meaning of any word or phrase should be just what it represents, or stands for. In short, the meaning of an expression is the thing it refers to; and the meaning of a sentence is determined by the words that make it up.

Although attractive, and even undeniable in its broad outlines, this picture gives rise to puzzles in particular cases that led Frege and Russell to suggest significant modifications. In “On Sense and Reference,”Frege considered an instance of the general problem posed by the observation that substitution of coreferential terms in a sentence sometimes changes meaning.¹ For example, in each of the following cases he would contend that the (a) sentence differs in meaning from the (b) sentence, even though they differ only in the substitution of terms that designate the same individual.

1a. The first Postmaster General of the United States was the author of Poor Richard’s Almanac

b.The first Postmaster General of the United States was the first Postmaster General of the United States.

2a. Benjamin Franklin was the first Postmaster General of the United States.

b. Benjamin Franklin was Benjamin Franklin.

3a. Ruth Marcus is Ruth Barcan.

b. Ruth Marcus is Ruth Marcus.

In each case, this contention is supported by three facts: (i) a person can understand both sentences, and so know what they mean, without taking them to mean the same thing, or to have the same truth value; (ii) a person who assertively uttered the (a) sentence typically would be deemed to have said more, and conveyed more information, than someone who assertively uttered the (b) sentence; and (iii) the (a) and (b) sentences would standardly be used in belief ascriptions, x believes that S, to report different beliefs with potentially different truth values. If, on this basis, one agrees that the (a) sentences differ in meaning from the (b) sentences, then one must reject either T1, T2, or T3.

T1. The meaning of a genuinely referring expression is its referent.

T2. Both singular definite descriptions—i.e., expressions of the form the so and so—and ordinary proper names—e.g., Benjamin Franklin, Ruth Barcan, and Ruth Marcus—are genuinely referring expressions.

T3. The meaning of a sentence, of the sort illustrated by 1–3, is a function of its grammatical structure together with the meanings of its parts; in these sentences, substitution of expressions with the same meaning doesn’t change meaning.

Whereas Frege rejected T1, Russell rejected T2. However, both agreed that the meaning of an ordinary proper name is not its bearer, and the meaning of a singular definite description is not the unique object that it denotes.

According to Frege, ordinary proper names and singular definite descriptions are terms that purport to refer to unique individuals. However, the meaning, or sense, of such an expression is never identical with its referent; instead, it is something that determines reference. For example, the meaning, or sense, of the description the even prime number is something like the property of being both an even number and prime (and being unique in this); its referent is whatever has this property—the number 2. Although different singular terms with the same sense must have the same referents, terms with the same referents may have different senses. This explains the difference in meaning between the (a) and (b) sentences in (1) and (2). The explanation is extended to the sentences in (3) by Frege’s contention that, like descriptions, ordinary proper names have senses that determine, but are distinct from, their referents. This is, of course, consistent with there being certain contrasts between names and descriptions. One such contrast is that most ordinary names are grammatically simple, and so, unlike descriptions, their senses are not determined by the senses of their grammatically significant parts. Because of this, it is common for different speakers to use the same name to refer to the same object, even though they associate it with different properties, or senses. Although Frege doesn’t dwell on this, the illustrations he provides support the contention that he regarded the sense of a proper name n, as used by a speaker s at a time t, to be the same as that of some description the D associated with n by s at t. Thus, he may be seen as adopting T4.²

T4. An ordinary proper name, n, as used by a speaker s at a time t, refers to (denotes) an object o iff o is the unique object that has the property expressed by the D (associated with n by s). When there is no such object, n remains meaningful while failing to refer to (denote) anything. In general, the meaning (for s at t) of a sentence…n…containing n is the same as the meaning (for s at t) of the corresponding sentence… the D… that arises by substituting the description for the name.

It follows from this that (3a) and (3b) differ in meaning for any speaker who associates the names Ruth Marcus and Ruth Barcan with descriptions that have different senses.

A second puzzle for the original conception of meaning and reference encompassing theses T1–T3 was Russell’s problem of negative existentials, illustrated by (4).³

4a. Santa Claus does not exist.

b. The largest prime n...

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• A WORD ABOUT NOTATION
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART ONE THE REVOLT AGAINST DESCRIPTIVISM
• CHAPTER 1 The Traditional Descriptivist Picture
• CHAPTER 2 Attack on the Traditional Picture Proper Names, NonߞDescriptionality, and Rigid Designation
• PART TWO DESCRIPTIVIST RESISTANCE:THE ORIGINS OF AMBITIOUS TWOߞDIMENSIONALISM
• CHAPTER 3 Reasons for Resistance and the Strategy for Descriptivist Revival
• CHAPTER 4 Roots of TwoߞDimensionalism in Kaplan and Kripke
• CHAPTER 5 Stalnaker’s TwoߞDimensionalist Model of Discourse
• CHAPTER 6 The Early TwoߞDimensionalist Semantics of Davies and Humberstone
• PART THREE AMBITIOUS TWOߞDIMENSIONALISM
• CHAPTER 7 Strong and Weak TwoߞDimensionalism
• CHAPTER 8 Jackson’s Strong TwoߞDimensionalist Program
• CHAPTER 9 Chalmers’s TwoߞDimensionalist Defense of Zombies
• CHAPTER 10 Critique of Ambitious TwoߞDimensionalism
• PART FOUR THE WAY FORWARD
• CHAPTER 11 Positive Nondescriptivism