Prejuicios homofonicos.
| Autor | Garc |
RESUMEN: En este artículo discuto críticamente algunos aspectos del libro de Mark Sainsbury Reference without Referents, desde una perspectiva por lo demás próxima. Mis objeciones se centran en la adecuación del marco que Sainsbury presupone: la semántica de condiciones de verdad. Argumento que tales propuestas son, en tanto que teorías semánticas, a la vez demasiado ambiciosas y demasiado austeras para ser genuinamente explicativas, y que ambos problemas tienen consecuencias en lo que respecta a la explicación de la referencia. El segundo problema tiene que ver con las dificultades para representar la contribución descriptiva de los deícticos y, en mi opinión, de los nombres propios también en el marco de condiciones de verdad. El primero tiene que ver con la contribución no semántica del contexto a la determinación de las condiciones de verdad en general y la referencia en particular.
PALABRAS CLAVE: referencia, condiciones de verdad, presuposiciones, deícticos, términos vacíos
SUMMARY: I critically discuss some aspects of Mark Sainsbury's Reference without Referents, from an otherwise sympathetic viewpoint. My objections focus on the adequacy of the truth-conditional framework that Sainsbury presupposes. I argue that, as semantic theories, truth-conditional accounts are both too ambitious, and too austere to be fully explanatory, and that both problems have consequences for an account of reference. The latter problem has to do with the difficulties to capture in a truth-conditional framework the descriptive contribution of indexicals and, in my view, proper names. The former has to do with the non-semantic contribution of context to the determination of truth-conditions in general and reference in particular.
KEY WORDS: reference, truth-conditions, presuppositions, indexicals, vacuous terms
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Reference without Referents is a concentrated, tightly argued defense of a theory of reference going by the same name, henceforth RWR. Against the prevailing Millian orthodoxy, RWR allows empty names to be intelligible, so that the semantic value of a name cannot be identified with its referent. However, RWR tries to steer away from traditional Fregeanism and its identification of the meaning of a name with a description. RWR assumes a Davidsonian truth-theoretic framework, which compositionally delivers truth-conditions as semantic values for declarative sentences, and reference-conditions for referring expressions, in both cases as close as possible to the ideal of homophony, thus renouncing any reductive ambitions. The reference condition for "Hesperus" and "Vulcan" is given by axioms such as these:
(1) For all x, "Hesperus" refers to x iff x is Hesperus.
(2) For all x, "Vulcan" refers to x iff x is Vulcan.
RWR assumes in the metalanguage a free logic of the "negative" sort championed by Burge (1974), which renders claims like (2) true; on the other hand, and unlike (1), the replacement of "Hesperus" by "Phosphorus" in the right-hand-side of (1) is held to produce an inadequate non-interpretative theory.
To articulate and elaborate RWR, after a historical stage-setting discussing the views of Mill, Frege, Russell, Kripke, Evans and McDowell, the book examines the main issues related to its topic: the working of proper names, indexicals and demonstratives, definite descriptions, plural referring expressions; reference in fiction; singular concepts in thought. Nonetheless the book is short and in fact is a joy to read: no sentence is expendable, every word seems to have been chosen thoughtfully. Readers with many different theoretical leanings will learn from its carefully stated claims and arguments.
I myself happen to share the main claims of the book--although, as it will transpire, the theoretical foundations that on my view underpin them are closer to traditional, descriptivist Fregeanism than to Sainsbury's RWR. To be more specific, except for a few qualms concerning the kind of free-logic I prefer (which may depend on the more foundational theoretical differences already mentioned), I share the claims in this useful summary:
a referring expression is one that "purports to refer": it needs to succeed if an unembedded occurrence of the expression is to express a truth; it may fail to refer without detriment to intelligibility; a correct semantics will associate it with a reference condition rather than with a referent; a semantic theory for such expressions will be set within free rather than classical logic; truth conditions for sentences of the form "t is F", where "t" is such a pronoun, will be Ockhamist (ones which do not require the existence of a referent for falsehood). (pp. 130-131) Here I will focus on raising some concerns in relation to these main discrepancies.
My main doubts centre on the truth-conditional framework: I am uncertain whether the austere resources of such proposals could really support the claims about reference definitive of RWR. The truth-theoretic approach is advertised in that "it deflates semantic ambition, and it helps restrain ad hoc proposals" (p. 47). The second virtue derives from the fact that "this theoretical task gives us a check on our theoretical grasp of the compositional character of the language" (pp. 39-40). The first "is manifest in the acceptance of 'homophonic' theorems, in which truth conditions for the object language expression are specified by reusing these very expressions in the metalanguage" (p. 47).
My departing point is the concern whether an adequate "check on our theoretical grasp" of compositionality capable of claiming the first merit should have the austerity advertised as the second virtue. As we will see, Sainsbury himself acknowledges that it cannot, but it will be helpful to present the reason why not against the background of a more general problem. Sainsbury's acknowledgement concerns well-known problems posed to the aspirations of truth-conditional approaches by context-dependent expressions: these expressions show that the approach falls short of what we need from a compositional semantic account, and, perhaps paradoxically, also that it is too ambitious. I think that, in both respects, the case of indexicals is just an instance of more general problems.
Sainsbury refers to Larson and Segal 1996, as a good indication of how far the Davidsonian truth-theoretic framework can take us in the direction of providing an explanatory account of the compositional structure of natural languages. My experience in teaching graduate courses on formal semantics indicates, however, that this otherwise impressive manual may also have the counterproductive effect of making glaringly obvious the Procrustean nature of the undertaking, when one compares the cumbersome derivations that its ontological paucity imposes on its students with corresponding ones in equally pedagogical manuals, such as Heim and Kratzer 1998, covering a similar range in introducing its readers to the rival, model-theoretic approach inspired instead by Montague's work. The comparison shows, I think, that the explanatory deficits of truth-theoretic semantics do not reduce to a comparative lack of perspicuity--a perhaps acceptable side effect of ontological austerity--but involve in addition real explanatory insufficiencies; the one I am interested in here concerns difficulties for capturing the differential semantic import of conventional implicatures and lexically-based presuppositions. Consider:
(3) Even John could prove the Completeness Theorem.
(i) John could prove the Completeness Theorem.
(ii) It is comparatively improbable that John could prove the Completeness Theorem.
Grice (1989, pp. 121, 361) maintained that, in his favored sense of "say", (3) says that (i) while it does not say, but merely indicates, that (ii); as a result, utterances such as (3) can be correctly counted as true, even if what corresponds for them to (ii) is false, as for instance in "Even Gödel could prove the Completeness Theorem". Utterances such as this should be classified as somehow inappropriate or infelicitous, rather than false. Barker (2003) defends the Gricean view, thereby objecting to theories of meaning that seek to reduce linguistic meaning to truth-conditions. He argues, with Grice, that while (i) is what is said by (3), and thus what determines its truth-condition, not just (i), but also (ii) is part of (2)'s semantic content, "the content it possesses by virtue of linguistic rules and context, and upon which logical particles may potentially operate" (Barker 2003, p. 2). He provides in my view convincing evidence for the latter claim, the semantic embeddability of what is indicated, of conventionally implicated, as part of the content to which some operators are sensitive (Barker 2003, pp. 8-13). Similar points could be made on the basis of presupposition-inducing lexical items and structures, such as "stop", "again", the cleft and pseudo-cleft constructions, etc. On the other hand, Heim and Kratzer (1998) show how these semantic facts can be properly captured in their alternative semantic framework.
With this in mind, let us consider now the case of referential expressions, starting with indexicals. In previous works (2000, 2006a), I have argued that, while referential expressions such as indexicals and proper names contribute their referents to what is said--the content asserted in utterances of...
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