Abstract
Propositions are a useful tool in philosophical theorizing, even though they are not beyond reasonable nominalistic doubts. Stephen Schiffer’s pleonasticism about propositions is a paradigm example of a realistic account that tries to alleviate such doubts by grounding truths about propositions in ontologically innocent facts. Schiffer maintains two characteristic theses about propositions: first, that they are so-called pleonastic entities whose existence is subject to what he calls something-from-nothing transformations (pleonasticism); and, second, that they are the referents of ‘that’-clauses that function as singular terms in propositional attitude ascriptions (the face value theory). The paper turns the first thesis against the second: if propositions are pleonastic entities, it is argued, we should not take them to be referred to in propositional attitude ascriptions. Rather, propositional attitude ascriptions should be available as bases for propositional something-from-nothing transformations.
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Notes
Cp., e.g., Künne (2003) and Forbes (forthcoming).
The schemata cannot hold in full generality because of the familiar paradoxes. Although any account will eventually have to find a satisfactory way of dealing with them, I will not address this difficulty in this paper. Cp., e.g., Leitgeb (2016).
For a discussion of what such concepts would have to look like in order to make good on this claim see Steinberg (2013b: §2) and Steinberg (2013a: ch. 4.1), where it is argued that, pace Schiffer, we should take the validity of such inferences to stem from the individual concepts involved (such as the concept expressed by the singular term ‘the proposition that Fido is a dog’) rather than from the sortals (such as the concept expressed by the general term ‘proposition’). Nothing hinges on this for the current discussion.
Cp. Mulligan (2006).
Schiffer (2003: ch. 2) takes fictional entities, properties and events to be plausible candidates for being pleonastic.
It should not be taken at face value. After all, Schiffer accepts that propositions exist necessarily and eternally. Thus, nothing literally pre-dates propositions.
What exactly belongs to the ontological core is debatable. Does it, for instance, consist in the objects of folk ontology such as trees, people and tables, or the very small particles of physics, or even the cosmic whole? How this debate is decided is irrelevant to the purposes of this paper, as long as propositions don’t belong to the core.
Cf. Schiffer (2003: p. 72ff).
It may be that the criteria for evaluating (8) also manage, as a by-product, to determine semantic values for the clause’s constituents—something like Fregean senses—in such a way that these semantic values, together with its structure, determine the reference of the ‘that’-clause. But even then, the reference of the ‘that’-clause will be ultimately determined by the criteria for evaluating (8).
Since it involves what appears to be an identity statement, argument (2) requires a different diagnosis. We will return to it in the next section.
For a suggestion of what the semantics of such uses of the natural language quantifiers may look like see Rosefeldt (2008: §8).
It may be worth pointing out that from the point of view of syntactic taxonomy, there isn’t all that much face value to the face value theory: paradigmatic examples of singular terms (such as proper names, pronouns and definite descriptions) belong to the syntactic category of determiner phrases (DPs), ‘that’-clauses are complementizer phrases (CPs). DPs and CPs differ in their syntactic distribution in various respects (for instance, sentence-initial CPs take DPs but not CPs as their subjects). This syntactic difference between them and paradigm singular terms makes the epithet ‘face value’ seem a bit tendentious. Capitalizing on such linguistic differences, philosophers and linguists have attempted to mount substitution failure arguments against the face value theory. See, e.g., Bach (1997), Moltmann (2003) and Rosefeldt (2008). For attempts at saving the face value theory from this charge see, e.g., King (2002) and Forbes (forthcoming).
Officially, I take inferences to proceed from premises to conclusions, all of which are propositions. The reader should have no difficulties understanding loose formulations in the main text in strict terms.
I conduct the subsequent discussion in terms of (14) rather than (15) because it generalizes more nicely: not all propositional attitude and speech act verbs seem to have pertinent transitive uses, witness ‘hope’ (‘Ann hopes the proposition that Hesperus is a planet’ seems to be defective) and ‘fear’ (‘Ann fears the proposition that Hesperus is a planet’ does not seem to have a reading in which it is entailed by ‘Ann fears that Hesperus is a planet’). See the discussion alluded to in fn. 15 above. For current purposes I take (14) to be roughly equivalent to (15). Everything I say about (14) carries over straightforwardly to (15).
Perhaps, not all truths about the pleonastic (or any kind of entity) can be fully grounded in truths entirely about other objects, as deRosset (2010) argues. The distinction in the main text between discriminatory relation ascriptions and classificatory truths circumvents this difficulty.
Of course, it may be that the truth of (8) is grounded in still more basic facts that do not involve propositions. The face value theorist could try to use this possibility for her purposes: she could claim that (1) all true belief reports are grounded in truths that do not involve propositions, truths about brain states perhaps, and (2) though explicit content ascriptions are not the conclusions of something-from-nothing transformations whose premises are belief reports, the latter nevertheless ground the former. Consequently, explicit content ascriptions would turn out to be grounded in the non-pleonastic, because they are grounded in belief ascriptions that are in turn grounded in the non-pleonastic. The prospects of establishing either of these two claims, let alone both of them, seem rather dim to me. In any case, as will be spelled out presently, the non-face value pleonasticist has an elegant systematic way of ensuring non-disruptiveness, while the fate of the face-value pleonasticist is tied to a reductive project in the theory of propositional attitudes.
Künne (2003: p. 249ff) also sees a close conceptual link between premises and conclusions of the something-from-nothing transformations advocated in the main text. However, he combines this insight with an endorsement of the face-value theory (Künne 2003: p. 253ff), which bars him from recognizing their premises as the non-proposition involving grounds of our proposition talk.
Actually, this assumption is rather implausible, since, recall, ‘[...]’ abbreviates ‘the proposition that ...’. What is less implausible is that the embedded ‘that’-clause has no semantically significant parts. In order not to complicate the discussion I stuck to the less plausible assumption to make my point.
But see Felka (2014) for reasons to mistrust philosophers’ classifications on such matters.
Graeme Forbes (forthcoming) conflates the use of ‘believes’ in ‘Ann believes him’ with the one used here: ‘believing a proposition’, Forbes writes, ‘is believing what it says’, just like believing a witness is believing what she says. Translation into German suggests that these uses can, and presumably should, be distinguished: in ‘Anne glaubt ihm’ (Ann believes him), ‘ihm’ is in the dative case, in ‘Anne glaubt den Satz des Pythagoras’ (Ann believes the Pythagorean Theorem), ‘den Satz des Pythagoras’ is accusative.
Thanks to a referee for this journal who pushed this objection.
See Künne (2006: §IV) for discussion and references.
A classic reference is Frege (1918/1993: p. 34).
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Acknowledgements
I’d like to thank Ralf Busse, Katharina Felka, Hanjo Glock, Nick Haverkamp, three referees for this journal as well as the participants of research colloquia in Mainz, Zurich, Constance, Uppsala, Stockholm and Geneva for helpful discussion of the paper at various stages of completion. I gratefully acknowledge support from the University of Zurich’s Forschungskredit (Grant Number FK-16-078).
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Steinberg, A. Pleonastic propositions and the face value theory. Synthese 197, 1165–1180 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-1742-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-1742-7