Preparation for 7.March meeting

I slowly worked my way through Fine's "The Problem of De Re Modality" in his Modality and Tense. I wrote a longish exposition of the paper; upshot being that quantification into opaque contexts seems possible as long as a quantified sentence is uniform with its instances. Quantification may be referential or irreferential. If we understand Quine's assertion that sentences which attempt quantification into opaque contexts are unintelligible, as a claim that de dicto readings of such sentences lead to a failure of substitution which in turn causes the quantified sentence not to be uniform with its instances and this in turn causes the quantified sentence to be unintelligible then the assertion can be saved.

I also made a first attempt to see what the implications of Fine's arguments are for Ludwig's assertion that conceptual necessity should be understood as the fundamental sort of necessity. It seems that there may be more to do in this regard.

Preparation for 21.February meeting

During the last two weeks, I worked my way through Kaplan's "Quantifying In" and then trudged my way through his "Opacity". There was so much in the latter, that I had to write a relatively short paper (of perhaps borderline coherence) just for the purposes of exposition. For the former, I provided only a sketchy summary of the main points. I'm thinking that the summary foreshadows the expository work I'll be doing for the stuff I read from now on.

I also read Fine's "The Problem of De Re Modality" a few times in the last two weeks. It was even more challenging that "Opacity". I'll try to have some expository work on that soon (as soon, that is, as I figure out what's happening in it).

Preparation for 7.February meeting

I wrote another short paper in the effort to get clear on and offer some criticisms of Kirk Ludwig's "A Conservative Modal Semantics with Applications to de re Nececssities and Arguments for Coincident Entities". The main idea in the paper is that if there are appropriate description names (explained by the relationship of numbers and numerals for the purposes of exposition) conceptual necessity can be taken as the primary notion of necessity and more specifically necessity can be made sense of in terms of analyticity in the context of an interpretive truth theory. Of course, my main concern was whether description names (which at once pick out a referent directly and make use of some conceptual content) are always in principle available.

Preparation for 24.January meeting

I wrote a short paper outlining Higginbotham's position in his "Sententialism: The Thesis that Complement Clauses Refer to Themselves" and making a few criticisms of it. One puzzle that emerged for any sort of sententialist view is whether, in the context of an interpretive truth theory (like Davidson's as developed by LePore and Ludwig), differences in meaning can all be accounted for by difference in truth-conditions. It seems that they can't -- Ludwig suggests that although differences in meaning will outstrip differences in truth conditions, we can handle it by including in the metalanguage all of those sentences for which we desire M-sentences in the meaning theory. My hunch is that, as that manoeuver doesn't seem to be readily available in most cases of reporting propositional attitudes ("Galileo believed that the earth moves"), in cases where the object language is not included in the metalanguage, only truth conditions are relevant as far as meanings are concerned.

Reading List

A chronological list of all the stuff I've read (or should have read) for PHI7979, 80 Spring 2006 -- ???

[the strings enclosed in brackets at the beginning who assigned or suggested the piece; an asterisk at the end means I've read it]

(1) [kl] James Higginbotham's "Sententialism: The Thesis that Complement Clauses Refer to Themselves" *

(2) [kl] Kirk Ludwig's & Greg Ray's "Semantics for Opaque Contexts" *

(3) [kl] Kirk Ludwig's "A Conservative Modal Semantics with Applications to de re Nececssities and Arguments for Coincident Entities" (two versions) *, *

(4) [kl] David Kaplan's "Quantifying In" *

(5) [kl] David Kaplan's "Opacity" *

(6) [kl] Kit Fine's "Reference, Essence and Identity" (first chapter of Modality and Tense) *

(7) [kl] Kit Fine's "The Problem of De Re Modality" (second chapter of Modality and Tense) *

(8) [kl] Kit Fine's "Quine on Quantifying In" (third chapter of Modality and Tense)

(9) [kl] Kathrin Koslicki's "The Semantics of Mass Predicates" (added 12 March 2006) *

(10) [is] David Wiggins' "The De Re 'Must': a note on the Logical Form of Essentialist Claims" (added 12 March 2006)

(11) [jb] Saul Kripke's "Is There a Problem about Substitutional Quantification?" (added 12 March 2006)

(12) [is] Scott Shalkowski's "The Ontological Ground for Alethic Modality" (added 12 March 2006) *

(13) [jb] Amie Thomasson's "Modal Conceptualism: A Clarification and Defense" (added 15 March 2006) *

(14) [jb] W.V.O. Quine's "Notes on Existence and Necessity" (added 10 March 2006) *

(15) [jb] Alan Sidelle's Necessity, Essence and Individuation: A Defense of Conventionalism (added 15 March 2006)

(16) [jb] W.V.O. Quine's "Three Grades of Modal Involvment" (added 10 March 2006)

(17) [kl] Greg Ray's "De Re Modality: Lessons from Quine" (added 15 March 2006)

(18) [kl] Carnap's Meaning and Necessity (added 16 March 2006) *

(19) [kl] W.V.O. Quine's "Reference and Modality" (added 10 March 2006)

(20) [kl] Gareth Evans' "A Causal Theory of Names" (added 12 April 2006)

(21) [jb] relevant sections (part I) of LePore's and Ludwig's "Donald Davidson Meaning, Truth, Language and Reality" (added 12 April 2006)

(22) [jb] Ludwig's "What is the Role of a Truth Theory in a Meaning Theory?" (added 12 April 2006)

(23) [jb] Chalmers' "The Foundations of Two-Dimensional Semantics" (added 12 April 2006)

(24) [jb] relevant sections of David Lewis' On the Plurality of Worlds (added 12 April 2006)

(25) [jb] Michael Dummet's "What is a Theory of Meaning?" (added on 13 April 2006)

(26) [jb] Peter Lasersohn's "Compositional Interpretation in which the meanings of the complex are not computable from the meanings of their parts" (added on 17 April 2006)

(27) [kl] Quine's "Truth by Convention" (added on 18 April 2006)

(28) [kl] Ted Sider's "Reductive Theories of Modality" (added on 18 April 2006)

(29) [kl] Ted Sider's draft "Reducing Modality" (added on 18 April 2006)