Sainsbury sobre pensar acerca de un objeto.
| Autor | Crane, Tim |
RESUMEN: La explicación que ofrece R.M. Sainsbury de la referencia tiene muchas características convincentes y atractivas, pero tiene la consecuencia indeseable de que oraciones de la forma "x está pensando acerca de y" nunca pueden ser verdaderas cuando se reemplaza y con un término no referencial. De las dos maneras obvías de tratar este problema dentro del marco teórico de Sainsbury, rechazo una (el análisis de pensar acerca de como una actitud proposicional) y acepto la otra (que trata "pensar acerca de" como semejante a un verbo intensional transitivo). Aceptar esta última también cae dentro del espíritu de la explicación de la referencia ofrecida por Sainsbury.
PALABRAS CLAVE: referencia, nombres vacíos, transitivos intensionales, actitudes proposicionales, proposicionalismo
SUMMARY: R.M. Sainsbury's account of reference has many compelling and attractive features. But it has the undesirable consequence that sentences of the form "x is thinking about y" can never be true when y is replaced by a non-referring term. Of the two obvious ways to deal with this problem within Sainsbury's framework, I reject one (the analysis of thinking about as a propositional attitude) and endorse the other (treating "thinks about" as akin to ah intensional transitive verb). This endorsement is also within the spirit of Sainsbury's account of reference.
KEY WORDS: reference, empty names, intensional transitives, propositional attitudes, propositionalism
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Introduction
One of the many distinctive and plausible features of R.M. Sainsbury's Reference without Referents (2005) is the way it treats all singular referring expressions uniformly, whether of not they have referents, without assigning them all descriptive content. Moreover, Sainsbury's system (RWR) does this while preserving a conservative, orthodox ontology: non-empty terms refer to ordinary things, but empty terms do not refer to non-ordinary things, like non-existent objects, abstract objects, concrete possibilia or other "exotic" things. Sainsbury (rightly, in my view) holds the orthodox opinion that there are no such things. Empty terms do not refer to anything, but they are semantically significant.
I believe that RWR solves many of the outstanding puzzles about empty terms, fiction and non-existence, and gives a very plausible account of names and their role in thought. However, RWR in its 2005 version seems to have the consequence that it can never be literally true that someone can think about a non-existent object.
In Reference without Referents, Sainsbury explicitly accepts this consequence. But given the centrality of the notion of "thinking about" to the study of intentionality, this seems somewhat perverse. In some recent work, Sainsbury agrees, and has given a different account of "thinking about" consistent with the main theses of RWR (see Sainsbury forthcoming). My aim in this note is threefold: to explain the problem with the 2005 account; to criticise Sainsbury's proposed solution; and to sketch an alternative solution which is within the spirit of RWR (even if it is not quite within the letter of the 2005 book).
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Negative Free Logic and Empty Terms
Sainsbury follows Burge (1974) and others in endorsing a negative free logic (NFL), which holds that all simple sentences containing empty names are false. A simple sentence Sainsbury defines as "one constructed by inserting n referring expressions into an n-place predicate" (Sainsbury 2005, p. 66). So sentences which are embedded in non-truth-functional or intensional operators do not count as simple.
According to NFL, "Sherlock Holmes is a detective" is false. Not (as Nathan Salmon (1998) says) because Sherlock Holmes is an abstract object, and no abstract object is a detective, but simply because Sherlock Holmes does not exist. Likewise, "Sherlock Holmes exists" is false, and its negation "Sherlock Holmes does not exist" is true.
This account of negative existential sentences has a pleasing simplicity compared to a view like Evans's (1982), which holds that "Sherlock Holmes does not really exist" (rather than "Sherlock Holmes does not exist") is the negation of "Sherlock Holmes exists". NFL also can maintain an intuitive conception of predication and truth: where "a" is a name and "is F" is a predicate, a simple sentence of the form "a is F" is true iff there is an object denoted by "a" and the object denoted by "a" has the property denoted by "F", and false otherwise (Sainsbury 2005, p. 46). (1) When simple sentences containing empty names are embedded within intensional operators like "believes that", then of course there is no mechanical way to calculate the truth-value of the resulting sentence, which is just as things should be.
One obvious question for the view is how exactly we should demarcate the "simple" sentences. Mere morphology or surface form will not do it: "Holmes is unreal" or "Holmes is non-existent" may look simple, but treating them as such under NFL would give the wrong truth-value: false instead of true. So we have to treat (surely not implausibly) the sentence "Holmes is non-existent" as meaning "It's not the case that Holmes is existent" to get the right result. Sainsbury addresses the question of what simplicity is head-on, and frankly concedes that the notion of a simple sentence is itself partly a product of the theory (2005, p. 69). This seems right: the detection of more hidden structure in a...
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