Scott Soames

This paper looks at philosophical accusations of talking nonsense from the perspective of argumentation theory.  An accusation of this sort, when seriously meant, amounts to the claim that someone believes there is something she means by her utterance when in fact she means nothing whatsoever by it.  Such accusations may indeed be peculiar to philosophy.  They also involve the claim that there can be ILLUSIONS OF ARGUMENTATION, both inter- and intra-personal.  The problem of how one could possibly diagnose such illusions is raised and I suggest that, if there is a way, it will require a therapeutic rather than a polemical approach.  This suggestion is of course made by Wittgenstein and some of his followers but, in my view, it has remained undeveloped.  It often takes the form of a comparison with psychoanalysis.  I note that the more like psychoanalysis it becomes, the less like traditional argumentation, philosophical or otherwise, it will be.

There are passages in Wittgenstein where he compares his method to psychotherapy and one or two where he seems to suggest that the ‘patient’ has the last word on his ‘illness’ and ‘cure’.  This paper tries to take these seriously, especially in connexion with the idea that victims of philosophical confusion talk nonsense.

Philosophical accusations of talking nonsense made in a polemical spirit are bound to fail, since the only way one can effectively criticise another’s utterance is by attaching some meaning to it.  But if the other acknowledges the possibility that his puzzlement arises from his having been taken in by nonsense, then perhaps a co-operative investigation of this suggestion might be fruitful.  Indeed self-diagnosis ought in principle to be possible.  Ought it not to have happened at least once in the history of philosophy if philosophical nonsense has ever been exposed? 

But there are difficulties.  For example:
a) We must ask whether or not philosophical nonsense, when exposed as such, is supposed to lose all appearance of meaningfulness.  Either answer is problematic.
b) The acknowledged similarity of the methodology under investigation to that of psychoanalysis exposes it to many of the familiar objections to the methodology of psychoanalysis, especially those that draw attention to the misleading influence of suggestion by an authority-figure.
c) The proposal that relentless cross-questioning of a suspected nonsense-talker will eventually lead her to ‘dry up’ (if she really is talking nonsense) seems to involve a version of the so-called Socratic Fallacy.

I suggest that, although the nonsensicalist challenge (obviously) matters, it has, at least in its Wittgensteinian form, been widely ignored.  On the other hand, those who still adhere to nonsensicalism (mainly Wittgensteinians) have been equally remiss in their failure to examine its presuppositions.

Few would doubt that one often encounters the preposterous in philosophy.  Some would claim that preposterousness in philosophy is often a matter of literal nonsensicality, i.e. meaninglessness.  Is this plausible or is it itself an example of a preposterous philosophical claim?

Renewed worries about the unity of the proposition have been taken as a crucial stumbling block for any traditional conception of propositions. These worries are often framed in terms of how entities independent of mind and language can have truth conditions: why is the proposition that Desdemona loves Cassio true if and only if she loves him? I argue that the best understanding of these worries shows that they should be solved by our theory of truth and not our theory of content. Specifically, I propose a version of the redundancy theory according to which ‘it is true that Desdemona loves Cassio’ expresses the same proposition as ‘Desdemona loves Cassio’. Surprisingly, this variant of the redundancy theory treats ‘is true’ as an ordinary predicate of the language, thereby defusing many standard criticisms of the redundancy theory.

I consider the dispute, not with a view to reaching a final verdict, but for the light it sheds on the notion of philosophical nonsense.  How does it look to a sceptic about philosophical nonsense?  It is generally agreed that the Tractatus is an unsatisfactory work, if the traditional reading of, for example, G. E. M. Anscombe or Peter Hacker is correct.  But is it any better on the ‘resolute’ reading of Cora Diamond or James Conant?  I maintain that it is more difficulty to handle the concept of nonsense than nonsensicalists of any stripe realise.  If the ‘ineffable truths’ and ‘important nonsense’ of traditional readings raise problems, so too do the contrast between meaningful frame and nonsensical core, Diamond’s idea that one can imaginatively identify with the nonsense-talker and the mysterious new entity, ‘transitional’ nonsense.  Meaning and communication, I suggest, keep reappearing precisely where they should not.

The necessary a posteriori poses a problem for possible worlds semantics. Truths such as Hesperus is Phosphorus are necessary and a posteriori. Necessary truths are true in all possible worlds, but a posteriori truths are informative and thus rule out some possible worlds in virtue of being false in them. Stalnaker uses his two-dimensional framework of pragmatics to represent the informativeness of necessary a posteriori truths. He represents the informativeness with possible worlds with alternative semantic facts, which are ruled out by utterances of such truths because they express falsehoods in those worlds. Soames points out that speakers make referential presuppositions about the names that they use, so those worlds are excluded from the context set before the utterances are made. Instead of metaphysical possibilities with alternative semantic facts, Soames proposes using metaphysical impossibilities as epistemic possibilities, and attributes this view to Kripke. However, as a main exegetical contention of the present work, Kripke has his own conception of epistemic possibilities in terms of epistemic counterparts. With the notion of epistemic counterparts, I propose the epistemic counterpart function that generates epistemic possibilities, and the description function that eliminates a proper subset of them. I then develop a notion of epistemic content along that line, and present a challenge to the project of representing epistemic states with possible worlds. I propose the epistemic function that takes, for any evidence, prior epistemic states to posterior epistemic states, in response to the challenge. I will then apply the notion of epistemic content to pragmatic contexts, and point out its complementary role to Stalnaker’s theory of pragmatics.

Several philosophers have recently appealed to predication in developing their theories of cognitive representation and propositions. One central point of difference between them is whether they take predication to be forceful or neutral and whether they take the most basic cognitive representational act to be judging or entertaining. Both views are supported by powerful reasons and both face problems. Many think that predication must be forceful if it is to explain representation. However, the standard ways of of implementing the idea give rise to the Frege-Geach problem. Others think that predication must be neutral, if we’re to avoid the Frege-Geach problem. However, it looks like nothing neutral can explain representation. In this paper I present a third view, one which respects the powerful reasons while avoiding the problems. On this view predication is forceful and can thus explain representation, but the idea is implemented in a novel way, avoiding the Frege-Geach problem. The key is to make sense of the notion of grasping a proposition as an objectual act where the object is a proposition.

In this paper, we defend Davidson’s program in truth-theoretical semantics against recent criticisms by Scott Soames. We argue that Soames has misunderstood Davidson’s project, that in consequence his criticisms miss the mark, that appeal to meanings as entities in the alternative approach that Soames favors does no work, and that the approach is no advance over truth-theoretic semantics. Keywords Donald Davidson Truth-theoretic semantics Meaning

I discuss Charles Pigden’s paper ‘Coercive theories of meaning, or why language shouldn’t matter (so much) to philosophy’ and ask whether theories of meaning whose primary purpose is to discredit rival philosophies as meaningless necessarily employ artificially narrow conceptions of meaningfulness.  In the course of my argument I ask whether the colloquial-rhetorical use of words like ‘nonsense’ and ‘meaningless’ has made it difficulty for philosophers to see just how novel and radical their own accusations of talking nonsense are.

Many recent semantic theories have involved explicit acceptance of the following two theses:

1. DIRECT REFERENCE (DR): The utterance of a simple sentence containing names or demonstratives normally expresses a "singular proposition" -- a proposition that contains as constituents the individuals referred to, and not any descriptions or conditions on them.

2. SEMANTIC INNOCENCE (SI): The utterances of the embedded sentences in belief reports express just the propositions they would if not embedded, and these propositions are the contents of the ascribed beliefs.

Such theories face a well-known difficulty: they seem to conflict with a third, and apparently obviously true, thesis:

3. OPACITY (O): Substitution of coreferring names and demonstratives in belief reports does not always preserve the truth of those reports.

In order to meet this difficulty, two different strategies have been proposed.

A. Conventional Implicature: The first suggestion, adopted by Salmon and Soames, is to claim that O is false: despite appearances, the substitution of coreferring names and demonstratives in belief reports does preserve the truth of those reports.

Now, of course, this suggestion leaves us with a puzzle, namely: why do we ordinarily suppose, and speak as if it were the case, that O is true? Here, Salmon and Soames suggest that belief reports carry conventional (or generalised) implicatures which can change under substitution of coreferring embedded names and demonstratives.
Neither Soames nor Salmon has given any details about the nature of these implicatures. However, they do say that what gets implicated is information about the mode of presentation under which a singular proposition is grasped by a subject. Consequently, it seems hard to resist the suggestion that what they require is a compositional theory according to which implicated modes of presentation associated with sentences are composed of implicated modes of presentation associated with the words which make up those sentences.

But then the question naturally arises why it should not be supposed that these allegedly implicated modes of presentation are actually part of the semantic content of belief reports. Given that we need a theory which associates modes of presentation with words, won’t all of this talk about implicated modes of presentation be just a pointless and unmotivated complication in the theory?

B. Unarticulated constituents: The second suggestion, adopted by Crimmins and Perry, is to deny that the theses DR, SI, and O are inconsistent. This response seems most unpromising. Consider the following quasi-logical principle which connects the notions of truth and semantic value:

4. FUNDAMENTAL SEMANTIC PRINCIPLE (FSP): If the substitution of expression E1 for expression E2 in sentence S (in context C) leads to a change in (literal) truth-value, then this change is due to the semantic values of E1 and E2 (in context C)

I take it that this is more or less a definition of what it is to be a semantic value: semantic values are whatever it is that words contribute to the determination of the literal truth-values of sentences in which they occur (upon particular occasions of utterance, or more generally, of tokening of those sentences). Moreover, I take it that it is obvious that FSP entails that if the substitution of a name or demonstrative E1 for a coreferring name or demonstrative E2 in a sentence S (in a context C) leads to a change in the literal truth-value of S, then it follows -- contrary to DR, or SI, or both -- that E1 and E2 do not have the same semantic content.

Not surprisingly, Crimmins and Perry are at least tacitly committed to the rejection of FSP. In their words, their view is as follows:

"It is very common in natural languages for a statement to exploit unarticulated constituents. When we consider the conditions under which such a statement is true, we find it expresses a proposition which has more constituents in it than can be traced to expressions in the sentence that was spoken. Each constituent of the content that is not itself the content of some expression in the sentence, is an unarticulated constituent of the content of the statement. ... The important principle to be learned is that a change in the wording can precipitate a change in propositional constituents, even when the words do not stand for constituents."

In other words, the "important principle" to which Crimmins and Perry wish to draw attention is that the substitution of an expression E1 for an expression E2 in a sentence S (in a context C) can lead to a change in the semantic content of the sentence S (in the context C) even though E1 and E2 have exactly the same semantic content -- and this is the denial of FSP.

In order to illustrate the notion of "unarticulated constituency", Crimmins and Perry consider the example of utterances of:

(1) It's raining.

As they note, if one utters (1), one will be understood to be claiming that it is raining at the time of one's utterance at some place which is indicated by features of the context of utterance. (Often this place will be the place of one's utterance, but it needn't be.) Moreover, there is no (surface) expression in (1) which has the place in question as its content.

However, there are two points to note about this example. Firstly, this example does nothing to support the principle that a change in wording can precipitate a change in propositional content even when the words do not stand for the constituents. Rather, this example supports the principle that there can be a change in propositional constituents when there is no change in wording even in the case of sentences which contain no indexical expressions. (In other words: sentences can exhibit an indexicality which is not derived from the indexicality of their component expressions.)

Secondly, and more importantly, the genuine principle which can be derived from cases like (1) does nothing to support the account of belief reports which Crimmins and Perry wish to defend. In their view, the semantic contents of

(2a) Scott believes that Hesperus rises in the morning.

and

(2b) Scott believes that Phosphorus rises in the morning.

in a given context C, may differ because the context contributes different unarticulated constituents to (2a) and (2b). But it is incredible to suppose that cases like (1) lend any credence to such a view. In the case of (1), there is no word which can plausibly be connected to the place which (allegedly) forms part of the semantic content of (1). However, in the case of (2a) and (2b) there are obvious candidate words -- namely, "Hesperus" and "Phosphorus" -- which could be semantically associated with the (allegedly) unarticulated constituents of the semantic contents of (2a) and (2b). So why suppose that these constituents of the semantic contents of (2a) and (2b) are not (parts of) the semantic contents of the words "Hesperus" and "Phosphorus"?

This mystery is deepened when we note that Crimmins and Perry claim that "the whole utterance, the context and the words uttered, are relevant to identifying the unarticulated constituent". The point in the first example seemed to be that, since there is no word in (1) which could have the place in question as its semantic value, it is necessary to suppose that the place in question is an unarticulated semantic constituent; but now we are told that in (2a) and (2b) the words "Hesperus" and "Phosphorus" are "relevant to identifying" certain constituents of the semantic contents of (2a) and (2b), and yet that these words can't have those constituents as (parts of) their semantic values.

This time, I take it that the obvious question to ask is: Why not suppose that the semantic constituents which Crimmins and Perry claim are unarticulated semantic constituents in propositional attitude reports are actually (parts of) the semantic contents of the names and demonstratives which appear in those reports? Isn't all this talk of unarticulated constituents of belief reports a pointless and unmotivated complication in the theory?

In sum, then, the crucial question for the two types of semantic theory which I have discussed centres on the thesis of semantic innocence. Crimmins and Perry claim that it is "well-motivated by many considerations in the philosophy of language". However, I cannot see that this is so; rather, it seems to me that this thesis is completely unmotivated, and that, in virtue of the above considerations, it is obvious that semantic theory would be better off without it. The point of the rest of this note is to explain why this is so.

The phenomenon of quantification into attitude ascriptions has haunted broadly Fregean views, according to which co-referential proper names are not always substitutable salva veritate in attitude ascriptions. Opponents of Fregeanism argue that a belief ascription containing a proper name such as ‘Michael believes that Lindsay is charitable’ is equivalent to a quantified sentence such as ‘there is someone such that Michael believes that she is charitable, and that person is Lindsay’. They conclude that the semantic contribution of a name such as ‘Lindsay’ is the same as the semantic contribution of a variable under an assignment, which these opponents suggest is merely the object assigned to that variable. However, renewed interest in variables suggests that they make a more complicated contribution to the semantic processing of sentences that contain them. In particular, a variable contributes both an assignment-unsaturated and an assignment-saturated semantic value. I use this dual role of the semantics of variables to develop a response to the argument from quantifying in. I take as my point of departure Cumming’s (2008) view that an attitude ascription relates the subject of an attitude to the assignment-unsaturated semantic value of an open sentence. I argue that this approach fails. I propose an alternative, according to which the truth of a belief ascription depends on both the assignment-saturated and the assignment-unsaturated semantic value of an open sentence. This approach reverses standard assumptions concerning the relation between quantification and substitution.

The discussion about the semantics of proper names underwent an important change of philosophical setting since Kit Fine"s Semantic Relationism. Before this book appeared, the Fregeans and the referentialists 1 shared at least one assumption about semantics which prevented both sides from satisfactorily solving the problems connected with proper names.

This thesis suggests a new version of the act-type theory of propositions and argues that this version can explain representationality of propositions in a more satisfactory way than the leading versions of the theory (i.e., Soames's and Hanks's). Chapter One overviews the traditional theories of propositions to see why it is thought that those theories cannot explain representationality of propositions satisfactorily. Chapter Two focuses on two leading versions of the acttype theory and argues that Soames's version cannot satisfactorily explain representationality of propositions. Chapter Three argues that Hanks's version can satisfactorily explain representationality of propositions only if Hanks's cancellation maneuver is successful. Chapter Four argues that Hanks's cancellation maneuver is not successful. Chapter Five focuses on another version of the act-type theory (Reiland's) and argues that it does not work too. Chapter Six suggests a new version of the act-type theory and argues that it preserves the advantages of the competing versions but avoids their weaknesses.

Scott Soames has proposed an account of propositions as cognitive event-types wherein agents represent by means of predicative actions. Taking his cue from recent literature, Soames locates an explanatory reversal in a theory of meaning and takes propositions-cum-event-types as representational in virtue of being events that include agent acts of predication. However, cognitive event-types cannot be identified with propositions. They include extra constituents that propositions do not, fail to be wholly representational, and cannot be properly considered the objects of propositional attitudes. In place of Soames' theory another may be offered. One that naturalizes propositions by recognizing them as constructions out of concepts and that emphasizes them as primarily tokens instead of abstract types. In sketching such an account some attractive features of the view will become apparent pertaining to meaning across languages, fineness of grain, and Frege's puzzle.

One type of deflationism about metaphysical modality suggests that it can be analysed strictly in terms of linguistic or conceptual content and that there is nothing particularly metaphysical about modality. Scott Soames is explicitly opposed to this trend. However, a detailed study of Soames’s own account of modality reveals that it has striking similarities with the deflationary account. In this paper I will compare Soames’s account of a posteriori necessities concerning natural kinds with the deflationary one, specifically Alan Sidelle’s account, and suggest that Soames’s account is vulnerable to the deflatonist’s critique. Furthermore, I conjecture that both the deflationary account and Soames’s account fail to fully explicate the metaphysical content of a posteriori necessities. Although I will focus on Soames, my argument may have more general implications towards the prospects of providing a meaning-based account of metaphysical modality.

John Haldane commented recently on Lonergan's absence from the analytic conversation— not a single entry of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy mentions him. If this situation is to be remedied then Lonergan, Meaning and Method may prove a useful resource. With fine sensitivity to the historical roots of philosophical discussions, especially in the British context, this fourth book by Andrew Beards attempts to build bridges between isolated traditions by skilfully discerning latent connections and new developments. It touches on epistemology, science, art and semantics. Beards finds a measure of agreement with Timothy Williamson who espouses an " anti-luminosity " doctrine: self-knowledge is not always easy; the transition from conscious self-presence to genuine self-knowledge requires a subtle and diligent inquiry. On the other hand, in view of the post-Gettier preoccupations, Beards questions whether Williamson has the final word. Gettier's famous article had shaken up epistemologists by bringing to prominence cases in which true, justified belief is not knowledge as when we think we know the time by looking at a clock that has stopped at what unbeknown to us happens to be the right time. These have been taken to vindicate externalism over internalism, the idea that knowledge does not necessarily involve knowing that we know—sometimes we know without having luminous access to our inner states. We might think of children, the unsophisticated, or those successfully trained chicken-sexers who reliably make accurate judgements. Beards shows, however, that this cannot be the whole story. " If I claim (judge) that knowledge is not warranted assertion because the way things are in the world makes a statement true, and the warrant in certain cases does not guarantee this, then this itself is a case in which I am claiming to know what is true in the world (reality) because of the sufficiency of the rational warrant of my argument. " In exploring the certainty of self-knowledge, Beards opens up Insight's " little discussed " section on degrees of certainty. Beards stresses that he has only offered a sketch, and perhaps would agree with Dalibor Renić, whom he cites favourably, that there are also externalist elements in early Lonergan (influenced by Newman's Grammar). Or again, that the deepest foundation offered by Insight is a " pragmatic engagement. " Science is another fruitful domain for building bridges and, in the first essay, Beards is keen to note how late on Lonergan returned to characterize his approach as " generalized empirical method " rather than " transcendental method. " This has rhetorical advantages insofar as it underlines Lonergan's distinctiveness from transcendental Thomism. Beards continues to

Forty-three years ago, Donald Davidson, in "Truth and Meaning" (1967) suggested that insight into meaning might be gained by reflection on how to construct and confirm a Tarski-style truth theory for a natural language.  In a recent paper, Scott Soames argues that Davidson’s project in truth-theoretic semantics has run its course (2008). He argues that Davidson's two rationales for his project were unsuccessful and that what he sees as the most promising recent attempt along the same lines, by Jim Higginbotham, is likewise unsuccessful.  It should be replaced, he argues, with an older style theory that assigns entities to expressions, and which aims to explain the meaning of complex expressions by showing how to recursively construct appropriate entities to assign to them on the basis of assignments to their significant parts.  This paper argues (a) that Soames has misunderstood Davidson's project, (b) that once we clarify the project, we can see it escapes his objections unscathed, and (c) that the appeal to meanings as entities does no work in Soames's alternative approach to semantics and is no advance over truth-theoretic semantics.

I discuss Charles Pigden’s paper ‘Coercive theories of meaning, or why language shouldn’t matter (so much) to philosophy’ and ask whether theories of meaning whose primary purpose is to discredit rival philosophies as meaningless necessarily employ artificially narrow conceptions of meaningfulness.  In the course of my argument I ask whether the colloquial-rhetorical use of words like ‘nonsense’ and ‘meaningless’ has made it difficulty for philosophers to see just how novel and radical their own accusations of talking nonsense are.

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