initial approval of the document that will become my proposal

Yesterday (July 24^th, 2006), Ludwig gave provisional approval to the "proposal proposal" I'd sumbitted in June. I have to clarify the positions taken in the document and re-write it in a clearer fashion. But I should be ready to defend the proposal in October (or November), 2006.

See the previous link for more current info.

Sketch of a basis for arguments against metaphysical realism

 I'll start with this old chestnut: possible worlds, state-descriptions, individual objects as instantiations of the properties that are their so-called object essences, etc. all seem to be a way of describing the distribution of properties across objects such that these distribution of properties across objects serve as the truthmakers for modal claims. Actually, with Jubien's properties in Platonic heaven and the instantiation relation things are a bit different -- it's the entailment relation between different sorts of properties (that exist above the Great Line of Being) that determine de dicto modal claims. So, for instance, if property A bears the entailment relation to property B, then any object which instantiates A must (with modal force) also instantiate B, and the modal claim, 'Necessarily, if x is A then x is B' is true.
 I'll say more about the possible worlds / state-descriptions / truthmakers as distributions of properties across a set of objects first, then say something about Jubien's approach. A most basic criticism of this approach (along with a metaphysical realist view) can be put with the following question. How do carve the world into 'individual objects' before settling on the distribution of properties across those objects? If I want an examination of possible worlds to tell me whether 'my truck could have been red' is true, I must have a way to pick out and think about my truck among all the other stuff. Could my truck have been something else? Could it have been my television? It's hard to know how to answer these questions if we don't have some conceptual knowledge about how to pick out trucks from among the other parts of the physical environment. I've argued that conceptual knowledge includes modal knowledge. One wouldn't have the concept TRUCK unless he could pick out (and think about) trucks in counterfactual scenarios. So, at least at first glance it seems that some modal knowledge is required even to think coherently about possible worlds or state-descriptions. If we must have modal knowledge to make sense of these things why not look to the source of that modal knowledge as the beginning of an explanation of the truth of falsity of statements like 'my truck could have been red'. That's the sketch, anyway.
 Now, as far as Jubien's stuff goes, I think he may leave a gap into which skepticism about modal knowledge could intrude. Let me say more. Of course, for Jubien, modality is analyzed mostly by the entailment relation which may or may not hold between occupants about the GLB. First, it's hard to see how we any epistemic contact with occupants above the GLB (that is Platonic properties) being that we cognizers are located below the line, unless we have some faculty beyond space and time which allows us epistemic contact with abstracta (this faculty might be reasoning, intellectual insight or some such). If we did have some such faculty, then it's easy to see how we could simply "observe" whether the relation relation held between such properties, and in so doing easily determine whether the modal claims that expressed these particular relationships were true or false. I think there are two immediate problems the first of which has an easy solution for Jubien. First, if we have such a faculty, when isn't the truth of falsity of an arbitrary modal claim transparent to us -- as it's immediate whether a certain stick is longer than another or not. Answer - we "see" above the GLB by reasoning and that's more difficult than simply seeing. A related point is that some modal truth are easier to affirm than others. For instance, it's obviously true that 'Necessarily, if x is red, then x is colored'. On the platonic ability approach, the entailment relation between the property of being red and the property of being colored is as obvious as being able to see the difference between a stick of length one meter and a stick of length two meters. The second difficulty seems more troubling. It can be put most brutely by the following questions. What is the relationship for Platonic properties and our words for them? Supposing there is the platonic property of being red, what is it's relationship with the predicate 'is red'? There are two options -- either there are is no obvious relationship between properties and our predicates or they are related in some way. If there's no obvious relationship then the semantics of modal claims (and our knowledge of the truths of falsity of sentences which express these claims), and the relationship of properties that are the truthmakers for these claims, then we're headed to skepticism of modal knowledge for the truthmakers are properly related to that for which they're truthmakers. If there is some relation, then it seems that we're back to the sort "two-tiered structure" of modality that we saw in the previous paragraph. It seems that being a competent speaker involves a modal ability. For instance, a speaker who's competent with the term 'truck' should be able to correctly identify a truck if he were presented with one. (emphasis to show the modal dimension of the ability). If being a competent speaker involves a modal ability, and modality was meant to be analyzed in terms of the entailment relation, then being a competent speaker involves having some knowledge about the entailment relation that holds between occupants of the above of the GLB. A few things: (1) I'm not sure if this is a riff against a reductive account of modality, (2) if we could tell a story about concept possession that explained our ability as competent speakers, then it seems that we could explain (give a semantics for) modal claims (sentences) without making use of the platonic machinery. Well ... spend some more time on this...

A few observations about the first third of the project -- update of Carnap

Just a few quick thoughts about the first part of the project in which I update Carnap and delimit the (acceptable) class of state-descriptions with the use of a particular notion of concepts. The idea is that roughly that there is a separation between the imagined mini-world (which could be expanded to a full fledged possible world) and the description of it. This itself may require a bit more work -- does it mean that something must exist if we imagine it? It doesn't seem prima facie that it must -- anyway I'll have to say more about that... And the possession of concepts and their correct and consistent application to those imagined counterfactual scenarios. I've said more about just how the idea works in the proposal, here I'd just like to say that there are reasons to think that such an account is a good one to take. First off, it seems that this approach principally avoids skepticism about de dicto modal claims. If we insist that to possess a concept is to be competent in its deployment in imagined scenarios, then it seems that this insistence guarantees that our thoughts (about the properties had by individual objects in the world) are related to the world in the sort of way that assures that when a cognizer possessing concept C coherently imagines (spelled out in terms of consistent concept deployment) a counterfactual scenario in which object o falls under concept C, then it seems that this counterfactual scenario makes sense in that things could have been the way that the cognizer imagines without fear of contradiction. [[Maybe this 'coherence' could be cashed out in terms of informed cognizers communicating in virtue of their interpretability rather than by some sort of 'metaphysical' contradiction which makes it seem that conceptual coherence is founded on some sort of ultimately metaphysical notion of modality. Have to do more with this. It's difficult to see how to speak of the right thought world relation if an analysis of modality is to be reductive. I want to say that if we can coherently imagine some scenario, then that scenario could have been in fact been actual but that seems to make our imaginings depend upon some sort of mysterious metaphysical possibility - and then we stuck in some sort of circle... But if I say that possessing a concept allows the possessor to correctly identify each sample of something which has the property expressed by that concept, and the possessor can also deploy the concept correctly in counterfactual scenarios, what does that 'correctly' come to? It could mean that the individual objects 'in' the imagined counterfactual scenarios are exactly like the actual samples identified by the cognizer in the actual world in the ways relevant to making those samples such that they had the property expressed by the concept. Can we then say that the ''in' the imagnined counterfactual scenarios' is metaphorical -- that is there need be no existing counterfactual scenario against which the imagination must be "checked"? I hope so. I think we can just leave it at that -- we say that a cognizer possesses a concept if when he imagines a scenario in which individual object has the property expressed by the concept which is possessed then in his imagining this object is attributed all the features that an identical, actual such individual object would have. There's still the sneakily modal "would have were it to exist" or "would have were it actual". Does this seemingly unreducible feature doom the account to circularity? I'm not sure -- have to think more about this particular feature of the account. ]]
 Second, it seems that this sort of treatment of concepts fits appropriately with what we hold intuitively as "knowing the meaning of a word [that expresses some concept or other]". We want to say that knowing the meaning of 'is a philosopher' doesn't simply come to knowing the extension of 'is a philosopher', but rather knowing what it takes to make one a philosopher, or (I think) in other words, what would fall under the concept 'philosopher' in counterfactual scenarios. This idea of concepts seems to fit our intuitive notion of knowledge of meaning (at least for the concept of 'philosopher' -- I'm not sure how it would fare in those contentious areas in which a 2d semantics seems plausible, for instance for concepts like WATER).

Difficulties for reductive "metaphysical" accounts of modality

 In the first part of my updating of Carnap, I noticed that his account fell prey to the same sort of criticism that Shalkowski offered for "ontologically-based" reductive accounts of modality -- specifically possible worlds as concreta or abstracta. Whereas it looks as though, if Shalkowski's paper finds purchase, there is a trouble with no real solution in sight for these metaphysical sort of reductions, I tried to sketch a way out of this sort of difficulty for semantically- (or more generally epistemically-) based approaches to the reductive account of modality of the sort that I think Carnap is aiming at. Basically, the idea was the following. Carnap's state-descriptions are sets of sentences that, in terms of a formal language, describe the possible worlds of (say) Lewis. These state-descriptions are essentially sets of sentences that describe, to speak a bit in the manner Levine in his [1998], the distribution of properties across individuals. [[Of course, this is a bit misleading, because it seems that we must have some way to carve-up the matter of our environment into individual objects before we can even begin to assign properties to those individuals -- so it seems that our system of concepts must be deployed before we can even begin marking out individual objects.]] But before we can even take something like these state-descriptions sets of sentences describing possible worlds (even if they only have conceptual ontological status), it seems we must have some way to delimit the class of these state-descriptions. We don't want every combination and permutation of properties across objects to be permissible -- in that case, we'd be left without any true de dicto modal claims -- a triangle might lack the property of being a trilateral for instance. [[This is the equivalent of allowing impossible worlds into the pluriverse.]] I believe the divide between world and how the world is described is important in helping resolve this issue.
 The suggestion was to allow only those state-descriptions which corresponded to (imagined) worlds (or perhaps mini-worlds) in which concepts could be coherently deployed in describing the environment of the world (or mini-world) by a cognizer who possessed those concepts. For example, if a cognizer possessed the concepts WATER and H₂O, then no state description in which there was an individual which was water but not H₂O would be permissible. I need to spell the suggestion out in more detail, but I believe the basic idea is that, with the help of "possible worlds" as useful metaphor, certain kinds of de dicto modal claims can be addressed in terms of concept possession on a certain view of that. What I've come to realize, is that by the "addressed" of the previous sentence, I can't meant "completely explained" because it seems that the condition I've developed as a restriction on allowable possible worlds (via allowable state-descriptions) is only a necessary one, rather than being necessary and sufficient one. As an illustration, it doesn't seem that my suggestion for delimiting the class of state-descriptions helps us out at all on the Goliath/Lumpl puzzle. (Maybe Ludwig's paper helps us out here.) And of course, the treatment I've offered of modality is not a reductive one, but rather only semi-reductive -- de dicto modality (and eventually de re modality) is reduced to concept possession and competence in referring to particulars. These respective notions do have a modal dimension, but the hope is that concept possession and competence with names in referring are easier to make sense of than full blown (prima facie mysterious) de re and de dicto modal claims.
 But in any case, I think this shows that (again if Shalkowski's criticisms hit their mark -- I need to take a look at Ted Sider's 2003 "Reductive Theories of Modality" in the Oxford Handbook of Metaphysics to see if he heads off Shalkowski's argument -- if so maybe I can head off the counter-argument) ontologically-based approaches to de dicto modality suffer precisely becase there is no separation between (possible) world and language. Perhaps this difficulty will feature again in arguments for conventionalism and de re modal claims. That is, we can't even secure reference to an individual in different possible worlds (we I say that, read "different imagined conceptually coherent scenarios") if we don't have some conceptual content associated with the names for those individuals -- and that requires some sort of separation between (possible) world (or individual) and language (or names for that individual).

Dissertation Proposal submitted on 29 May 2006

Here is what I submitted to Ludwig as a proposal for my project at the end of last semester.