outline 2.0

Here's a sketch of a revised outline (quite different from, but still holding on to a few of the things that were in outline 1.0):

1. If we wanted to defend a conventionalist thesis (in particular a view on which the locution 'it is necessary that ...' can be analyzed in terms of, among other theoretical devices, the locution 'it is analytic that ...'), then it seems that an obvious starting position to take is one of mediated reference. If, contrary to a direct reference thesis, we claim that the senses (or modes of presentation, clusters of descriptions, etc.) associated with names are sufficient to determine the referents of those names, then we'd be in a much position to claim that necessity could be analyzed in terms of the relations of concepts (and this position combined with a view about concepts on which predicates express concepts -- the predicate 'is water' expresses the concept WATER -- is a view on which we could analyze necessity in terms of analyticity). In Meaning and Necessity, Carnap asserts that there are individual concepts which are the intensional counterparts of the names for individuals in a domain of discourse. Could these individual concepts be the mediators which give us the conceptual content that makes modal conventionalism possible, or are the individual concepts secondary to how reference is secured (that is, is reference secured directly in Carnap's system)?
     On another approach to the conventionalist position, a special class of names are taken to be directly referring, but these names have conceptual content associated with them. It seems that we need direct reference for names if we're to hold onto the notion that semantics is to be given in terms of an interpretive truth theory. These special description names are said to be directly referring because they are given (base) reference axioms in the meaning theory. That's why we must hold on to the direct reference of these names in this sort of framework. And it seem also as if we need something like an interpretive truth theory to get a grip on analyticity. Or at least if we want to explain what analyticity comes to in a tractable way.
     One might also wonder why we couldn't try to assimilate names to predicates on the singulary predicate model: for everything that's named couldn't we simply form a predicate that is satisfied by only the thing so named. This seems to be a much easier background assumption for a deflationary story about 'it is necessary that ...' -- we could simply handle everything as does Koslicki in the case of 'water is H₂O'. The semantics of this sentence are given by the sentence '(∀x)(is-water(x) → is-H₂O(x)'. On the assimilation-of-names-to-predicates-view, we could give the semantics of the sentence '9 is greater than 7' as '(∀x∀y)((is-9(x) & is-7(y)) → x > y)' (in this case the predicate that "plays the role", or at least a similar role, of the name '9' is 'is-9' and '7' is 'is-7'). How would the semantics for the sentence '(∃x)(x > 7)' go on this account? Maybe, (∃x)((∀y)(is-7(y) → x > y))? I'm not sure what the disadvantage to this approach would be. Perhaps we should look at how things play out in the context of the theory of meaning that we favor. On this view, there wouldn't be any reference axioms for names. Does this mean that we have to go with a more traditional explanation of truth in terms of satisfaction and sequences, rather than a Matesian truth-all-the-way-down approach? That may be the issue with the predicates approach...


2. There are proposals for (directly referring) names with a sort of special core-content. Kaplan's standard names ("Quantifying In"), Føllesdahl's genuine names, Kripke's rigid designators, Gareth Evan's description names, Ludwig's description names. How each of these proposals get at the problem. The theoretical possibility of "c-names" like Ludwig's description names but which don't have quite all of the conceptual content that's required to determine every modally relevant property.
     Let's see if we can come up with some (admittedly shamelessly cooked-up) example of c-names which are not description names. If we admit that street names are description names, then, for instance, 'South West 43^rd Street' is directly referring and it has associated with it enough conceptual content for one who's competent with the name to know every modally relevant property had by the thing so named. In particular, a competent user would know that it's necessary that if South West 43^rd Street runs north-to-south then it is west of South West 40^th Street. So the modally relevant properties in this case (other than the modally relevant properties had in virtue of the street's being a physical object, etc) are mostly those involving the location of the street relative to other streets in the same system of streets. Since streets are numbered with an eye toward ease of navigation, it's obvious that certain claims (like the one above) involving street locations (relative to one another) will be true and necessarily so (analytically so).
     Now, imagine a diabolical mayor who's taken to a perverse scheme for re-naming streets. The mayor changes the names of the street such that South West 40^th, 41^st, 42^nd, ... , 49^th are all "permuted". For example, what had been 43^rd may be 49^th after the renaming; South West 44^th Street may become 45^th or may remain 44^th. The permutations are such that only the "ones place" of the number of a street name is changed. For instance, if the streets run north-south, then, after the diabolical permutation, we know that South West 54^th is west of South West 49^th Street, and that this holds of necessity, but we're unsure if South West 49^th is west of South West 40^th. If it is the case that South West 49^th is west of South West 40^th, this certainly isn't necessarily the case -- the diabolical mayor may have executed a different permutation.
   


3. Conventionalism and Fine's failure to keep apart the two proposals for the intelligibility of quantified sentences. What about uniformity and autonomous quantification? Fine claims that there are two proposals for determining whether a quantified sentence is intelligible. The first is understood in terms of proper instances: for the quantified sentence '(∃x)φ(x)' is intelligible if there's a proper instance 'φ(t)' of it. If we're taking quantification to be referential, a proper instance is one which is uniform with respect to the original quantified sentence (that is, the context 'φ( )' of both sentences function syntactically and semantically to "say something about the referent" and the singular referring term 't' functions to pick out a referent about which the context says something -- as of course does 'x' in the original sentence on an assumption of referential quantification) and one in which the substituend 't' is purely referential as the variable 'x' in '(∃x)φ(x)' is purely referential on an interpretation of the quantifiers which is referential. Once we have a proper instance, we can understand the quantified sentence by informally saying "There is something, such that what the context 'φ( )' created on the uniform interpretation of 'φ(t)' about it is true of it." Which is, of course, an informal paraphrase of the truth condition of '(∃x)φ(x)'.
     The second proposal was that there be some class of standard names with the right core content such that that which they referred to could be substituted into an intensional context and quantification over which into those sort of contexts makes sense. Let's try to spell it out with an example: the standard names are the numerals, the intensional context it makes sense into which to quantify is the modal context represented by '', and for simplicity let the context 'φ( )' be ' > 7'. Fine's assertion is that since we have a standard name for each of the numbers, then we can understand a quantified sentence like '(∃x)(φ(x))' because there is a standard name such that if we substitute for 'x' in ^⌈φ(x)^⌉ that which is named by the standard name '9', the sentence resulting from this substitution is true because ^⌈φ('9')^⌉ (this is just the sentence '9 > 7') is true and true in virtue of the conceptual content that's so represented. Fine claims that the quantification is autonomous. I guess the reason being that to make sense of the quantified sentence, we look to instances which can only be constructed with the use of standard names. We assess the truth of the sentences which include standard names in the relevant contexts. The truth of these sentences, then can be thought of as strictly "de dicto" because the names themselves tell us enough about the content expressed to let us know if the sentence is true or not. So there's an important difference between this sort of quantification and purely referential quantification: the truth of a quantified sentence in which quantification is referential is determined (on an assumption of semantic uniformity with the sentence's instances) by whether one of the members of a domain over which the quantifier ranges is such that to make a claim of it which is made by the context (that is, everything in the sentence besides the singular referring term) is true, on the other hand the truth of a quantified sentence in the which the quantifier is autonomous (in the standard name sense) depends upon whether they are instances, characterizable orthographically as those in which a standard appears (such as ' ... α ... ', where 'α' is a standard name, that are true. The truth of the (autonomously) quantified sentence depends upon the truth of (substitution) instances in which standard names are written into the context presented in the quantified sentence. For this sort of quantification, since we characterize truth in terms of truth of instances with standard names instead of merely the assignment of values to variable, we say this quantification is autonomous.
     Fine makes the prima facie mysterious claim that it's unlikely that for a sentence 'φ(n)' in which 'n' is standard name, 'n' is purely referential. I'm not sure why this should be so. Does the fact that the right core-content is associated with these names do something to make it the case that they aren't purely referential. More generally, is Fine saying that names with which are associated rich conceptual contents are such that they cannot be purely referential? Let's consider numerals as "right core-content" names for the numbers to see if Fine's point is borne out.
     Well, from the high-on-the-mountaintop view that Fine is so fond of, it seems that having the right core-content does stand in the way of pure referentiality. For a purely referential quantified sentence '(∃x)φ(x)', proper instances of which are 'φ(t)' and 'φ(s)', truth is understood in terms of whether the object which is referred to by the singular referring terms 't' and 's' are, respectively, in the extension of the context indicated by 'φ()'. The conceptual content associated with either 't' or 's' is completely irrelevant to the truth of the proper instances (and hence the truth of the quantified sentence of which they're instances). Compare this the autonomously quantified case where truth depends upon standard names and which contexts they appear in. The truth of such a sentence depends upon the truth of its instances, in which standard names take the positions occupied by variables in the quantified sentence. How is the truth of an instance determined? A natural response is that the truth of these instances are determined by whether the conceptual content associated with the context 'φ()' and the referring term 'n' is such that 'φ(n)' is conceptually true -- or true as a matter of meaning alone (depending on how we understand the relationship of concept and predicate). And so it seems that truth is determined differently for the two kinds of quantified sentences. There are important questions about whether an autonomously quantified sentence (in the standard name sense) could be made intelligible in terms of referential quantification. Naïvely, it seems that to make a conventionalist thesis work, we need to have both things -- see the previous post on this topic.
   


4. A view on description names, c-names, contexts, concept possession and some taxonymizing.
    Does a particular view on concepts and concept possession make any one interpretation of quantification seem more likely? In particular, if I possess the concept WATER and know that the predicate 'is water' expresses the concept, then, on a certain view, for any individual x named by 'α', I know whether the sentence 'α is water' is true. Now if we take the direct reference view of proper names, then if 'β' is a standard name and the sentence 'ψ(β)' is true, then the sentence '(∃x)ψ(x)' is true for under both the referential and autonomous interpretation of quantifiers. If 'ψ( )' is 'φ( )' then, on the autonomous interpretation of quantifiers, we see why the quantified sentence is true -- it's true in virtue of the conceptual content had by possessing the concept(s) expressed in the predicate(s) of which context 'φ( )' comprises and the conceptual content associated with the standard name 'β'. If 'ψ( )' is 'φ( )' then, on the referential interpretation of quantifiers, we see that the quantified sentence is true only if there arexistentsts which are necessary and which fall under the predicate(s) laid out in context 'φ( )'. It shouldn't be surprising that those things which bear standard names (at least in Kaplan's sense of "standard name") are those things which are necessary existents. Perhaps there are other context for which things which are not necessary existents hold in virtue of meaning alone. As always, we must investigate further...
   


5. Conventionalism versus 2D semantics and the problem of reductive stories about modality and meaning.