124.400 Proseminar in philosophy I Fall 2003 Notes on miscellanous topics—I Propositions “That-clauses”, e.g. ‘that snow is white’, ‘that Frege is a genius’, appear to function as singular terms (at any rate when they are not being quantified into). The things, if any, that they refer to are called ‘propositions’. Going by grammatical appearances, when Vann believes that snow is white, he stands in the belief-relation to one of these propositions. (Hence ‘propositional attitude’, a term derived from Russell.) Also going by appearances, propositions are the meanings of sentences: ‘La neige est blanche’ means (in French) that snow is white. All this is basically Fregean doctrine in modern jargon. However, one might doubt whether the appearances do support the claim that when Alfred believes that snow is white he stands in the belief-relation to the proposition that snow is white, on the grounds that one often cannot substitute salva veritate ‘the proposition that snow is white’ for its corresponding that-clause. For instance, ‘Vann said the proposition that snow is white’ is not even grammatical, and ‘Vann fears the proposition that snow is white’ (true, apparently) may diverge in truth value from ‘Vann fears that snow is white’ (implausible). For a defence of the “relational theory of believing” against this sort of worry, see King, “Designating Propositions”, Phil Rev (forthcoming). What is the proposition that Frege is a genius? According to Lewis and Stalnaker, it is the set of all possible worlds in which Frege is a genius. According to the neo-Fregean, it2is a structured entity composed of the sense of ‘Frege’ and the sense of ‘is a genius’ (whatever these may be). According to the neo-Russellian, it is a structured entity composed of Frege and the property of being a genius, a so-called “singular proposition”. According to Quine, propositions are “creatures of darkness” (an opinion shared by Davidson, who developed a theory of meaning in the style of a Tarski-style truth theory, and a semantics for propositional attitudes, that supposedly do not need propositions); cf. Russell in PLA, lect. iv. See Cartwright, “Propositions”; many of the papers in Salmon and Soames (eds), Propositional Attitudes; and Schiffer, Remnants of Meaning. The Slingshot The argument, “derived from Frege” (according to Davidson in “Causal Relations”), that shows, given certain assumptions, that all true sentences refer to the same thing, ditto false sentences. Apparently so-named by Barwise and Perry after the famous bout between David and Goliath. It’s unlikely that Frege had anything like the slingshot in mind. Apart from Davidson, see Church, “Carnap’s Introduction to Semantics”, Phil Rev 1943, Quine, “Three Grades of Modal Involvement”, in The Ways of Paradox; Gödel, “Russell’s Mathematical Logic”, in The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell; Barwise and Perry, Situations and Attitudes; and Neale’s “The Philosophical Significance of Gödel’s Slingshot”, Mind 1995, and Facing Facts (Oxford 2002). Quotation marks A useful survey of the differing accounts of quotation marks is in Cappelen and Lepore, “Varieties of Quotation”, Mind 106 (1997). See also Davidson, “Quotation”, in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation.3Frege on ‘I’It is particularly obscure what the sense of an indexical like ‘I’ might be, a problem famously raised by Perry in “Frege on Demonstratives”, Phil Rev 86 (1977). A Fregean reply is in Evans, “Understanding Demonstratives”, in Collected Papers. Three classic papers on the same philosophical topic (although not concerned with Frege’s views) are: Perry, “The Problem of the Essential Indexical”, Noûs 13 (1979); Lewis, “Attitudes De Dicto and De Se”, in Philosophical Papers, Volume 1, and Stalnaker, “Indexical Belief”, in Context and Content. Perry’s papers are reprinted in his collection The Problem of the Essential Indexical: and Other Essays. Kaplan’s character Consider: (*) I am hungry Suppose Smith and Jones both utter (*). It may be that what Smith said is true, and what Jones said is false. Hence they say different things—in the sense that their utterances express different propositions. This is because (of course) the referent of ‘I’, as uttered by Smith, differs from the referent of ‘I’, as uttered by Jones. Thus, there is a sense of ‘meaning’—content, in Kaplan’s terminology—in which the meaning of (*) and ‘I’ varies across contexts. But there is also a sense of ‘meaning’—character, in Kaplan’s terminology—in which Smith and Jones uttered words with the same meaning. In particular, there is a sense in which ‘I’, as uttered by Smith, means the same as ‘I’, as uttered by Jones. What these two tokens have in common is that the type ‘I’ has (something like) the following rule attached to it:4An utterance of ‘I’ in a context refers to the speaker in that context. We can think (as Kaplan suggests) of the character of ‘I’ as a function from possible contexts to contents. See Kaplan, “Demonstratives”, in Themes from Kaplan, ed. Almog et al. Scope In artificial logical languages, the scope of an expression (quantifier, name, predicate, connective) in a sentence is the smallest well-formed formula in which it occurs in that sentence. Thus, the scope of ‘&’ in ‘(p & q) v r’ is ‘(p & q)’, and the scope of ‘v’ is ‘(p & q) v r’. The scope of ‘∀y’ in ‘∃x∀y Lxy’ is ‘∀y Lxy’. The scope of ‘~’ in ‘∃x (Cx & ∀y (Cy ⊃ x =y) & ~Ix)’ is ‘~Ix’, and the scope of ‘∃x’ is the whole formula. α has wide scope with respect to β (β has narrow scope with respect to α) in some sentence σ iff the scope of β in σ is a proper part of the scope of α in σ. (Cf. Russell’s “primary occurrence” and “secondary occurrence”.) By transferring this talk in a natural way from a sentence σ of a logical language to a sentence s of a natural language that is formalized by σ, we can speak of various expressions of a natural language as having scope, and as taking wide scope with respect to other expressions. A scope ambiguity occurs when a sentence has at least two readings that are due to a difference in scope (e.g. ‘Everyone loves someone’, and Russell’s examples of ‘The King of France is not bald’