The reading group on Scott Soames' Reference and Description: The Case Against Two-Dimensionalism (see this entry) has met twice so far. The first meeting covered chapters 1-3, which are mostly just background. In chapter 3, Soames does consider one of Frank Jackson's arguments for descriptivism, remarking somewhat incredulously that if it works, it is a priori and irrefutable -- prompting Frank's response, "That's an objection?". At the end of the chapter he also gives initial characterizations of "strong" and "weak" two-dimensionalism, both of which seemed fairly unrecognizable to the two-dimensionalists present. But all that is discussed in more detail later on in the book.
Things get going in chapter 4 on "Roots of Two-Dimensionalism in Kaplan and Kripke". The main theme here is that while Kaplan and Kripke are the main heroes of the anti-descriptivist revolution, their work contains "errors, slips, and misleading suggestions" that gave too much encouragement to later two-dimensionalists. Soames points to various errors, but the main "error" for both of Kripke and Kaplan is the suggestion that when a name or a 'dthat'-expression is introduced using a reference-fixing description, this can give rise to contingent a priori knowledge.
The relevant sorts of sentences are the following:
(1) Dthat[the youngest Chinese spy] is the youngest Chinese spy (if anyone is) [p. 52]
(2) Lee is the youngest Chinese Spy (if anyone is). [p. 55]
Here 'dthat' is Kaplan's familiar expression that turns a description into a rigid singular term, and 'Lee' is a name introduced with the stipulation that it refers rigidly to the youngest Chinese spy (if there is such a spy). (Soames also discusses analogous sentences involving natural kind terms, but I'll leave those aside, as the issues here are very close to the issues for names.) Kaplan holds that sentences such as (1) are examples of the contingent a priori, while Kripke holds that sentences such as (2) are examples of the contingent a priori. Soames holds that these claims are errors. Here I'll look at his argument for this claim, concentrating mostly on the Kripke-style cases.
Soames' argument can be summarized as follows. He says that if (1) and (2) are examples of the contingent a priori, then it is possible to know a priori, of a certain individual, that he or she is the youngest Chinese spy (if anyone is). And he says that this sort of a priori knowledge is impossible. He concludes that (1) and (2) are not examples of the contingent a priori. (This argument is fairly closely related to things that Donnellan and Salmon say about the contingent a priori, and my reaction to it in the following is related to my reaction to Donnellan and Salmon. But I don't have my copies of those papers handy, so I'll stick to Soames.)
What's odd is that Soames gives hardly any argument in the chapter for the claim that if (1) and (2) are examples of the contingent a priori, then it is possible to know a priori of a certain individual that he or she is the youngest Chinese spy (if anyone is). He seems to think that the claim is obvious. But pretheoretically, the claim doesn't seem especially plausible, especially in the case of (2). So there seems to be a big hole in the chapter's argument. Here I'll discuss options for how the argument might go.
One might put the overall argument in a little more detail as follows, with reference to the following sentences.
(3) Someone can know a priori that Lee is the youngest Chinese spy (if anyone is).
(4) Someone can know a priori, of the individual who is the youngest Chinese spy, that he or she is the youngest Chinese spy (if anyone is).
Soames argues, in effect:
(S1) If (2) is an example of the contingent a priori, then (3) is true.
(S2) If (3) is true, then (4) is true.
(S3) (4) is false; therefore(S4) (2) is not an example of the contingent a priori.
I think that (S1) and (S3) are nontrivial (I recall Robin Jeshion arguing for de re a priori knowledge in such cases), but I'll grant them here. For present purposes the action is with (S2). Presumably, most of those who hold that (2) is contingent a priori (including the Kripke of Naming and Necessity) will be inclined to deny that this claim entails anything about de re a priori knowledge. And prima facie, it is pretty natural to do so by denying (S2). It's a commonplace, after all, that one must be cautious about moving from de dicto attitude ascriptions, such as (3), to de re attitude ascriptions, such as (4). But Soames seems to take (S2) for granted.
How might one argue for (S2)? One way would be to appeal to a general exportation principle (E) that Soames discusses later in the book (simplifying slightly, and ignoring quotational niceties):
(E) For any name n and predicate F, if 'A knows/believes that n is F' is true, then 'A knows/believes of x that it is F' is true, where the referent of n is assigned to 'x'.
When he introduces (E). Soames says that it is "intuitively compelling" (p. 261). Elsewhere he says that a variant of (E) with 'knows a priori' instead of 'knows' or 'believes' is also obviously correct. If we accept this variant (and we accept that 'Lee' above is a name), then (S2) follows.
Now, I think that (E) has some intuitive plausibility where ordinary proper names are concerned. But it's far from obvious that it's correct where descriptive names such as 'Lee' are concerned. Note that nothing substantive here turns on the issue of whether these expressions are really names. If they're not, we just need to consider the plausibility of a modified principle (E') that applies to these expressions.
Consider a scenario where Jones has just introduced the term 'Lee' (to himself and Smith) with the stipulation that it refers to the youngest Chinese spy, if there is one, and consider the following knowledge ascriptions (N.B. not a priori knowledge ascriptions) made by Smith:
(5) Jones knows that Lee is the youngest Chinese spy (if anyone is).
(6) Concerning the individual who is the youngest Chinese spy: Jones knows that he or she is the youngest Chinese spy (if anyone is).
Principle (E) entails that if (5) is true, then (6) is true. But to my ears, (5) is true while (6) is false. And I suspect that this will be the most common pretheoretical judgment about these knowledge ascriptions. If we take students who have learned just enough philosophy to get a sense of the difference between de dicto and de re knowledge ascriptions, but haven't yet taken on board all the theoretical apparatus of direct reference, etc, my expectation is that a majority will judge that (5) is true while (6) is false. (I'm interested to hear about others' intuitions here -- though note that post-theoretical intuitions aren't really to the point here.) If so, then one certainly can't claim that principle (E), in the version that applies to descriptive names, is intuitively compelling. But it looks like this is the principle that Soames is presupposing.
One way to argue for principle (E) would be as follows. Let's assume that 'n is F' expresses a singular proposition P. Then if 'A knows that n is F' is true, then A knows the proposition P. And if A knows P (a singular proposition), then 'A knows/believes of x that it is F' is true, where 'x' is assigned the referent of n. So (E) is true.
Obviously, this argument is only as good as its assumption. In particular, the second step requires that the claim 'n is F' expresses a singular proposition. But clearly, to argue that 'Lee is the youngest Chinese spy (if anyone is)' is not contingent a priori, one can't simply assume that the sentence expresses a singular proposition. Plenty of people (including Soames himself, I seem to recall) will deny that the sentence expresses such a proposition. And certainly, many people who think that (2) is contingent a priori will deny that it expresses such a proposition. So one can't simply assume that the proposition expressed, if any, is a singular proposition.
All this makes Soames' objection to Kripke a bit baffling. If we could assume principle (E) for descriptive names, or assume that sentences such as (2) express singular propositions, then one could plausibly infer (S2), and with it the claim that (2) isn't contingent a priori. But principle (E) for descriptive names is prima facie counterintuitive, and the claim that (2) expresses a singular proposition is a controversial theoretical claim. So simply assuming these claims can't do any work in this context.
(Question: can anyone give any pointers to literature on the exportation principle for descriptive names? For example, I wouldn't be surprised if the objection I'm making to Soames is related to an objection that some people have made to Donnellan on the contingent a priori.)
At this point I'll quote the only paragraph from Soames that looks like it might be giving some further relevant argument (pp. 55-56):
In Kripke's case we may put the point by contrasting two different scenarios in which one might attempt to use a description to introduce and fix the referent of a name. In the first scenario, one does not know, or believe, of any object that it is denoted by the description introducing the name -- e.g. one doesn't know, or believe, of any individual i that i is the youngest Chinese spy. Clearly the mere performance of a linguistic ceremony of using the description to introduce a name can't change this. If, despite this, one's introduction of the name 'Lee' for i is successful, then [(2)] will come to express a proposition about i that one doesn't know to be true, and can't come to know except by gaining de re knowledge of i through further empirical investigation. Regarding this scenario, one must say either (i) that the name hasn't been successfully introduced after all, (ii) that the speaker doesn't understand the name he has introduced, or (iii) that understanding and justifiably accepting a true sentence containing the name is not sufficient for knowing the proposition p which it expresses to be true. Either way, a priori knowledge of a contingent truth has not been achieved.
This "first scenario" is the relevant one for our purposes. Sentence 3 amounts to (S3) above. The following sentence, sentence 4, seems to be the crucial one. Prima facie it's very unclear why anyone who believes in the contingent a priori should accept it. Again, if one assumes that if (2) expresses a proposition, it expresses a singular proposition, then one might accept the claim. But one can't simply assume that here. As for the following sentence, it's far from clear that (i)-(iii) exhaust the options. If we assume that the relevant proposition has to be singular, these might be the main options. But one who holds that (2) expresses a non-singular proposition can happily deny each of (i) through (iii).
[It may that the notion of a "name" is doing some work in the above passage: e.g. Soames might be assuming that a name must have singular content by definition, or that names require some sort of strong relation to their referent. But this doesn't change much. An opponent can simply deny that 'Lee' is a name in this sense, while continuing to maintain that (2) is an example of the contingent a priori.]
Of course there's something odd about using all this "proposition" talk to argue against Kripke, given that he resolutely refuses to say anything about propositions in Naming and Necessity (here I set aside the later Kripke of "A Puzzle about Belief", as his views clearly evolve in the meantime). He might respond simply by denying that the contingent apriori status of (2) is determined by the contingent a priori status of an associated proposition. But if he accepts that it is so determined, then he'll presumably deny that (2) expresses a singular proposition. Just what sort of proposition it expresses is up for grabs, but there are all sorts of theoretical views that are quite consistent with the contingent apriori status of the relevant proposition. It looks like Soames' argument just begs the question against these views.
So, I'm a little perplexed about what's going on in this chapter. If Soames is just indicating his disagreement with Kripke, that's fine -- it's clear how certain theoretical views that Soames holds entail that Kripke's claim is false. But it seems pretty clear that the chapter is more ambitious than that: it's trying to demonstrate an error in Kripke, presumably based on premises that don't presuppose controversial theoretical views (otherwise, none of this can do much work in arguing against alternative views, as it is intended to do). I don't see how this demonstration is supposed to go. Can anyone help out here?
Soames may be on somewhat firmer ground in the case of Kaplan. That depends on just how the 'dthat' operator is understood. If one understands it so that the content of 'dthat[the F]' is singular by definition (if it has content at all), then the argument gains purchase. To resist it, Kaplan has to either accept that we can have the relevant de re knowledge a priori, or deny that the apriority of 'dthat[the F] is the F (if anything is)' is determined by the apriority of the relevant content (e.g., maybe it's determined by the apriority of the relevant character). Maybe Kaplan would do one of these things (elements of his work suggest both responses), but one can at least make a case that there are costs here. My own view is that if 'dthat' is defined as above, it's far from clear that there can be an expression that satisfies the definition. If instead one simply defines 'dthat' as a rigidifying operator, then the definition is perfectly coherent, but Soames' argument now doesn't gain any more purchase than it does in the previous case of descriptive names.
Two final notes. First, Soames himself grants that his argument against the contingent a priori gains no purchase where 'actually'-involving rigid descriptions are concerned. E.g. he allows that 'The actual youngest spy is the youngest spy (if anyone is)' is contingent a priori. This means that the arguments in this chapter won't be of great concern to two-dimensionalists such as Davies, Humberstone, and Jackson, who base their framework on 'actually'-involving descriptions, and who hold that expressions such as 'Lee' are equivalent to expressions such as 'The actual youngest spy'.
Second: Throughout this chapter, Soames suggests that advocates of the contingent a priori confuse the claim that the relevant subjects know the proposition expressed by sentences such as (1) and (2) with the claim that subjects know that sentences (1) and (2) express a truth. As Daniel Stoljar pointed out, this claim itself has an interestingly two-dimensional flavor. In particular, it's very close to the strategy that Pavel Tichy, an early two-dimensionalist, used to argue against Kripke in his paper "Kripke on necessary a posteriori" (Philosophical Studies 1984). Tichy said that sentences such as 'Hesperus is Phosphorus (if it exists)' can be associated with two propositions: (i) the proposition expressed by the sentence, which is just the proposition that Venus is Venus (if it exists), and which is necessary and a priori; (ii) the proposition "associated" with the sentence, which is the proposition that 'Hesperus is Phosphorus (if it exists)' expresses a truth, and so is contingent and a posteriori. Tichy thinks that Kripke confuses the two propositions, and that once we've clarified the distinction, it's clear that there are no necessary a posteriori propositions in the vicinity. It's interesting to note that Soames' strategy, in the case of the contingent a priori, is so similar to Tichy's.
If in the case of a posteriori necessities we have a necessary secondary intension and a contingent primary intension, then in the cases of the contingent a priori we will have a necessary primary intension and a contingent secondary intension. Since the two-dimensionalists' main point is to talk in terms of these two dimensions, they will not accept Soames' assertion that if (3) is true, then (4) is true, because it is a move from one dimension (the primary intension) to another (the secondary intension). The 2D-ist holds that de re ascriptions depend on secondary intensions, and de dicto ascriptions depend on primary intensions. In the case of a potential contingent a priori sentence, the apriority comes from the primary intension, while the contingency from the secondary intension. In the case of "Lee is the youngest Chinese spy", we will say that it is knowable a priori because the primary intension (the a priori aspect) resulting compositionally from the primary intensions of the component terms "Lee" and "the youngest Chinese spy", is such that it is knowable a priori: "The youngest Chinese spy is the youngest Chinese spy".
When we move to considering de re knowledge, things change in respect of which intension we consider. In our case, ascriptions involving the actual referent of 'Lee' will involve the secondary intension, which is the a posteriori aspect of the meaning of the sentence under consideration. Therefore, the 2D people will not accept the move as regards a priori knowledge, in the case of contingent a priori sentences, from de dicto to de re.
I think Soames' premise would be acceptable for terms that have coinciding primary and secondary intensions. But I think cases of contingent a priori knowledge are those involving terms with differing such intensions. Am I right here?
Posted by: Istvan Aranyosi | February 08, 2005 at 04:17 AM
Well, I didn't want to presuppose two-dimensionalism in an analysis of this chapter, as Soames is suggesting that 2Dism itself is grounded partly in these "errors" by Kripke and Kaplan. But to think about what a 2Dist should say about these cases, I think you're right that they can reject the move from (3) to (4). It's not quite as simple as saying that de dicto attitude ascriptions operate on primary intensions and that de re attitude ascriptions operate on secondary intensions, though. If that were so, then the exportation principle wouldn't work even for ordinary proper names, but it looks fairly plausible there. Instead, I think that both sorts of ascriptions involve both sorts of intensions, but in different ways, roughly as follows (see section 8 of "The Components of Content" for more details):
As for the move from the de dicto ascription to the de re ascription: On this account, the two ascriptions constrain the secondary intension in the same way, so this part will be fine. The crucial question concerns the primary intension. Is it the case that when a belief (with the secondary intension of 'n is F') has an 'n is F'-appropriate primary intension, it will pick out the referent of n under a de re appropriate primary intension? I think the answer here is: plausibly yes when n is an ordinary proper name, but no when n is a descriptive name. When n is a descriptive name such as 'Lee', a 'Lee is F'-appropriate primary intension may pick out the referent under a non-acquaintance-involving descriptive intension, so a belief with this sort of primary intension may satisfy the de dicto ascription, but it won't satisfy the de re ascription.
To address your last point: If the above is right, then exportation doesn't require that the relevant singular term has the same primary and secondary intensions (cf. the case of ordinary names). It's an interesting question whether this feature would suffice for exportation to work, though. I think exportation pretty clearly fails for nonrigid descriptions with the same primary and secondary intensions ('the largest object in the universe', say). But I presume we're restricting ourselves to rigid singular terms. If so, then sameness of primary and secondary intension requires a rigid primary intension, as happens with what Martine Nida-Rumelin calls "super-rigid" expressions (those that pick out the same referent throughout a 2D matrix). Super-rigidity is pretty rare, but it's plausibly that some singular terms, such as mathematical expressions for numbers and maybe some terms for abstract objects, are super-rigid. It's plausible that in at least some of these cases, exportation will work. And it's arguable that these cases are the only cases where one can have full-scale de re a priori knowledge.
Posted by: djc | February 08, 2005 at 09:49 AM
David,
I heartily endorse your comments (though I'm relying on your interpretation of his arguments, since I must confess to not yet having read Soames's new book -- for gosh sake, I'm still in the middle of Volume 1 of the history of analytic books).
In particular, isn't the central purpose of Evans's "Reference and Contingency" (one of the founding 2-dimensionalist papers) to challenge (S2)? In that paper, Evans advances descriptive names such as "Julius" as counterexamples to (S2). That motivates a distinction between a name licensing epistemic de re exportation and modal de re exportation. According to Evans, descriptive names allow the latter, but not the former. Certainly, this is how I use descriptive names in my papers on this topic -- as counterexamples to (S2), counterexamples that motivate making a distinction between epistemic content and modal content.
So, one of the original 2-D moves was to introduce descriptive names as cases in which you can have a modal content that is singular, but an epistemic content that is non-singular (hence requiring two notions of content -- thought vs. modal profile, in roughly Evans's terminology, or assertoric content and ingredient sense, in Dummett's terminology). Given this dialectical situation, it is illegitimate to presuppose that descriptive names express epistemically singular propositions (that is, express singular propositions when embedded under epistemic operators such as attitude verbs). As you say, this might not be a problem for Soames, since he is here not here arguing against Evans or Dummett's positions, or subsequent 2-Ders; he's making clear his disagreements with Kripke and Kaplan. But some of the principle original arguments in favor of 2-Dism involve using descriptive names to reject (S2).
Posted by: Jason Stanley | February 12, 2005 at 01:01 AM
Hi Jason, thanks for this. I finally dug up my copy of Evans. You're right that his theoretical account in that paper is well-suited to resist exportation. I almost cited him in the entry, but didn't on the grounds that Evans' account takes for granted the claim that the relevant sentences are contingent a priori, and Soames seems to think that this claim already involves some relatively pre-theoretical "error".
Also, on looking through the Evans paper, there's not really any discussion of sentences embedded in epistemic contexts. So there's also not really any discussion of principles such as (S2), involving exportation in these contexts. There's a lot of discussion of sentences embedded in modal contexts, but there's his discussion of epistemic issues is largely cast in terms of metalinguistic locutions such as "the truth of (S) can be known a priori". Of course there must be some connection between these metalinguistic epistemic claims and ordinary epistemic contexts, but the connection isn't completely straightforward (see e.g. this entry). So I'm somewhat hesitant to ascribe views about ordinary epistemic contexts (or about exportation in these contexts) to Evans on the basis of this paper. It's certainly true that the view in the paper lends itself naturally to claims about exportation in epistemic contexts, though.
Posted by: djc | February 17, 2005 at 07:26 AM
There are just a few comments i want to make about your reconstruction of Soames' arguement against the contingent a priori, in particular S2. you complain that Soames does not offer any argument for S2 in the chapter, but rather assumes it. That is because he has already presented Kripke's decisive(epistemic and semantic)arguments that ordinary proper names cannot be equivalent to descriptions in chapter 2. If the description "the youngest chinese spy" gave the meaning (semantic content) of "Lee", then if we know the proposition expressed by "The youngest chinese spy is the youngest chinese spy" a priori, then we should know the proposition expressed by "Lee is the youngest Chinese Spy" a priori. Chalmers and others might respond, "well, what's the problem? We do know the proposition expressed by 'Lee is the youngest chinese spy' a priori". This is not in general correct. It is an open question whether Jones, (the intoducer of the name "Lee" via the description "the youngest chinese spy") knows the proposition a priori. But, it is not an open question whether everyone who is a competent user of "Lee" knows it a priori. The answer is no, not everyone knows it a priori. We can imagine Jones making all kinds of statments regarding Lee, e.g, "Lee is F, and Lee is G, and Lee is not H, etc. Smith might hear some of the things Jones is saying and pick up the name "Lee". So,then Smith can use the name. Among other things, Smith believes that Lee is F and G and not H. Yet, Smith may not know that she is the younest chinese spy. In order to know that, Smith would need the (empirical) information from Jones that Lee is the youngest Chinese spy. Well, a proposition is either knowable a priori or it is not. If some competent speaker grasps a proposition P but cannot determine whether it is true simply on reflection, then P is not knowable a priori. So, then Jones probably does not know it a priori either.
Whether this arguement is convincing or not is a separate matter. the point is that Soames has given (Kripke's) arguement that the meaning of "Lee" cannot be "the youngest chines spy". At most, the description fixes the reference.
Regarding Kaplan's Dthat, Soames is dead on. "Dthat [the youngest chinese spy]is the youngest chinese spy" expresses a singular proposition. How do we know? "Dthat" is an artifical term and Kaplan has decreed that any supplemented "Dthat" term, e.g., ^Dthat [the youngest chinese spy]^ (^ is a corner quote) is directly referential. So, the content of ^Dthat [the youngest chinese spy] is the youngest chinese spy^ is the singular proposition about Lee, that she is the youngest chinese spy. In order to grasp this content, one needs de re knowledge of Lee. In order to have the requisite de re knowledge regarding Lee, One needs empirical information that she is the younest chinese spy. And, this empirical information, which is necessary to grasp the content, is also necessary to justify our belief in the truth of the content expressed by the sentence. Thus, we do not know the content of the sentence to be true a priori.
Of course Kripke never comes out and says that proper names are directly referential. the only conclusion he arrives at is that they are rigid. Well, what does their rigidity consists in.
Option 1: The semantic contents of names are descriptive, but the descriptions must be rigidified in some way. However, Kripke's semantic and epistemological arguments show that they cannot be descriptive.
Option 2: Names are directly referential.
Given that there are only two viable optins, and that Kripke has refuted option 1, it follows that option 2 is the only option.
For these and other reasons, Soames believes it is safe to accept S2.
Posted by: Dan | March 25, 2005 at 04:48 PM
Thanks for this. Your argument seems to be: (1) Names such as 'Lee' are not descriptive; (2) If these names aren't descriptive they are directly referential; (3) If these names are directly referential, sentences involving them can't be contingent a priori. My initial reaction is that none of the three premises is obviously correct, and I don't think any of them would clearly be accepted by Kripke.
Re premise (1): It's notable that Kripke never runs his epistemic or semantic arguments for names (such as 'Lee') whose reference is fixed by a description, and he seems to exempt such names from these arguments. Certainly there will be later users who pick up the name without the associated descriptive information, and for whom the sentence won't be contingent a priori. But unless one makes a host of additional theoretical assumptions, that doesn't show that the sentence isn't contingent a priori for the original speaker. Recall that for Kripke the apriority of a sentence is always relativized to a speaker.
Re premise (2): One can't presuppose that the only theoretical options are descriptions and direct reference. Certainly Kripke doesn't want to presuppose that these are the only options. And later work suggests all sorts of intermediate options: cf. two-dimensionalism and the views of Evans and Burge, to pick three. No doubt there are others.
Re premise (3): One can hold that names are directly referential and that the sentences involving them are contingent a priori, as long as one holds that the apriority of a sentence is not determined by the apriority of the (singular) proposition it expresses. A number of people have done just that.
I don't know which, if any, of these options Kripke was inclined to take at the time of Naming and Necessity, but all of them seem compatible with the views therein, and none of them can be ruled out without a lot of additional argument, or without heavy-duty theoretical assumptions. So if this is really Soames's tacit argument that Kripke is mistaken, then there's a lot more work to be done.
Posted by: djc | April 18, 2005 at 08:09 AM