synopsis + new directions

Perhaps it's time to review and see what some of the themes to emerge from the last month and a half are.

• I've focused primarily on papers to do with sententialism (Higginbotham and Ludwig & Ray) and opacity / the difficulties surrounding de re modality (Fine, Kaplan and Ludwig).


• The "dual use / mention" explanation of semantics for opaque contexts seems to be a promising one (although Higginbotham's position seems to have major difficulties), preferable to a Schiffer-style approach.


• Fine and Kaplan (in "Opacity") offer sustained treatments of some of the issues arising from Quine's assertion that modal and belief contexts are opaque. It seems that there are two sorts of approaches to the difficulties for quantifying into these contexts. The first of these is more properly "logical" or technical. Kaplan's formal and technological innovations show how opacity and quantification can be made to work together. Fine offers a clarification about the underlying notion of logical satisfaction and a careful treatment of the linguistic issues at stake in Quine's argument that the openness to substitution test fails in general for opaque contexts.


• In "Quantifying In", Kaplan offers a suggestion for when quantification into opaque contexts is permissible (even unproblematic) that makes use of epistemic material. If we have "standard names" then it seems that those can be used in (at least) modal contexts such that they can be replaced with variables in the construction of quantified sentences and quantification in is possible. Fine is careful to notice the difference between the epistemic solution (standard names) and the more properly logical (Kaplan's version -- he uses model theoretic ideas to show how we might understand intensional operators and the possibility for quantifying into some of these contexts) or semantic (Fine's version -- he uses uniformity to explain when a quantified sentence can be made sense of. Perhaps, ultimately this comes down, with a bit of work to the same sort of modal theoretic idea that Kaplan has. After all, uniformity has to do with references made by instances of a quantified sentence. Assessing the truth of those sentences comes to seeing if what's referred to is in a certain set or extension of a predicate).


• It's seemed to me lately that the conventionalist position needs to sit astraddle both of these positions: To explain how conventionalism might be plausible, we need the properly logical and semantic story to explain quantification into intensional contexts intelligible and we also need the properly epistemological story to show how we might be said to know the truth of modal claims on the basis of conceptual content alone.


• If this is right, then we may want to consider how the conventionalist thesis might play out for various views: one on which we make use of description names only, one in which there are c-names and maybe one in which we try to "predicatize" everything (that is, in our semantics analyses, we take there to be no singular referring terms like '1', but only the "singulary" predicates like "is the number 1").