rethinking the scope of the project + the notes from 18 April 2006

  Last Tuesday's (18 April 2006) meeting was productive, if a bit confrontational. I have some suggestions that were scribbled down that I'll try to transcribe in this entry after I first spend some time on structural and organizational issues.
  The first thing I realized was how much work it was to communicate the first, fundamental idea I had about how to use (an adaptation of) Fine's observation to clarify what one who endorses conventionalism is committed to. The idea is that Fine outlines two ways in which sentences in which a modal operator falls in the scope of a quantifier might be understood to be intelligible. The first way to understand such a sentence as intelligible is find that such a sentence has at least one proper instance, that is, minimally, a substitution instance in which the substituend is purely referential (if quantification is taken to be referential). I believe that this proposal for intelligibility is important, and that we can start with the basic idea of this proposal and adapt it in such a way that we are left with a requirement which is reasonable one for a reasonable version of conventionalism (which I'll try to flesh out in chapter 1). Briefly, the requirement is that for a conventionalist thesis to be workable, we must have semantic uniformity between a quantified sentence and a substitution instance. Why would we want this? Well because the subject of this entry is not a reworking of old material, I'll advert to the last paragraph of this entry. Admittedly, I need to work on this a bit more, but not here.
  Fine's second proposal for the intelligibility of quantified sentences with a modal operator in their scope is that the substitution instances of such sentences are such that they contain in the positions which are substituted into names which are "special" in that they are associated with conceptual content such that the substitution instances can be seen to be true in virtue of meanings alone or in virtue of conceptual relationships alone. The original quantified sentence can be understood to be intelligible because (1) a specific instance can be immediately recognized as true and (2) quantification is understood to be autonomous -- we're not quantifying over objects as referents of the variables, but rather the string with metalinguistic variables '[(∃x)φ(x)]' is understood as a sort of generalization of the string '[φ(t)]' (true in virtue of conceptual content); the generalization happens because we can substituted the string 'x' in the quantified sentence for the string 't' of the substitution instance. I want to argue that this proposal for a way to understand quantified sentences, is a requirement for the conventionalist thesis I'll defend. I think this argument is a bit easier, but still sort of tricky. Briefly, a conventionalist wants to analyze 'it is necessary that S' as 'it is analytic that S'. If we're to do this for a sentence like '(∃x)F(x)', and we want to say that there is something that is F, and a singular term for this individual, say 'n', is such that 'F(n)' is true, i.e. 'F(n)' is analytic. Naïvely, we think that if a sentence is analytic then we can recognize it as such and we can do so because we have the right conceptual contents associated with the singular terms and the contexts in which those terms occur. This, in a nutshell, is the reason that we must satisfy the second of Fine's two proposals for understanding quantified sentences which have a modal operator in the scope of the quantifier.
  There are two problems immediate problems with this suggestion (1) not just any old name will do -- we need a special class of names. It's possible that both 'a' and 'b' are names for the individual α and that both 'Fa' and 'Fb' are true, but that 'a' has conceptual content associated with it such that a cognizer can understand, just by possessing the name 'a' that 'Fa' is true as a matter of meaning alone. That is, the cognizer would see that it's a matter of meaning alone that the denotatum of 'a' is in the extension of the concept expressed by 'is F'. So a story needs to be told about what sort of names are appropriate and whether, in this example, 'Fb' is analytic or necessary after all (this actually seems to be a pretty important question -- and we might note Carnap's method of extension and intension to see how he deals with it.) (2) the relationship of meanings to concepts, i.e. the do predicates express concepts and if not what's their relationship exactly. It seems that we do want to require that meanings are, in principle, always knowable since the community of cognizers is responsible for the association between sign and signified)...
  Well... there's a lot there. In light of that, I've decided that the whole project will be plenty big and comprehensive if I go with maybe five chapters instead of the eight that I had planned. The fifth might be something like a bit about how this might fit in with Kaplan's Opacity because after developing some technology, he develops a characterization of '' and so too, necessity and how the thing stacks up against Chalmers 2D semantics and phenomenal concepts.
  And next, I'll try to transcribe what in the world Ludwig was harping on about.