Abstract
It is widely, though not universally, acknowledged that the truth of fully determinate propositions often depend on the contexts in which they occur. In addition to that fairly innocuous claim I venture the much bolder claim that context can aid in demonstrating the truth of a number of propositions that ascribe homely properties to fictional (and, I assume, non-existent) subjects. After summarizing salient and what I deem to be worthwhile objections to my view, I set out to expose their flaws. With that in the archives I build the case for my conclusion. It consists in showing how accounting for differences among cases make judgments of truth and falsity unavoidable, and how to circumvent some familiar pitfalls.
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Notes
- 1.
See Richard Cartwright (1987).
- 2.
J.L.A. is careful not to say that these are true, but the suggestion is unmistakable. Here I am defending the truth of the statements, not merely our entitlement to judge so.
- 3.
For example, Françios Recanati writes “‘Contextualism’ is my name for the doctrine that no proposition could be expressed independent of context” (1993: 267n5, my emphasis). I have no objection to the view or its use of the label, but it is not the view now being considered.
- 4.
For a number of additional examples see Robin Carston (1988).
- 5.
- 6.
Crimmins and Perry (1989: 700).
- 7.
I say ‘a’ rather than ‘the’ determinant because fit with the world, the rough correspondence component, is always a factor in the relevant cases.
- 8.
Future page references to Crane are to his 2013. He rejects talk of non-existent entities (5), but is content to write about non-existent objects (of thought and talk) (16), things (12), or even items (27).
- 9.
The one reason he gives is that it conforms to “the usual philosophers’ practice of calling names like ‘Pegasus’ non-referring” (46). However, that practice is far from universal, and concerns the adoption of what is to be called ‘term reference’ as the only legitimate such notion. Moreover, it is at odds with Crane’s own insight. I shall continue to talk here about personal and term reference. (A brief excuse for this appears in §6.) My choice of terms will make no difference to the substance of Crane’s views.
- 10.
I distinguish these cases from those of false scientific, theological, etc. hypotheses, which in many instances warrant a different sort of treatment. My remarks are not intended to form a perfectly general account about reference to whatever non-existent one can dream up.
- 11.
Two points. First, for simplicity I assume that all predications express properties, even ‘exists’ and ‘does not exist’. This does not affect the points under discussion. Next, Zalta (2000) claims that existing subjects exemplify their properties, fictional ones encode them; for Van Inwagen (2000) existing subjects have their properties and fictional ones (merely) hold them. So far as I can tell these are distinctions in search of a difference. Also, it is unclear how those property distinctions change the sentences in which they appear. Like Crane, I ignore those distinctions here.
- 12.
- 13.
Of course, ‘technical’ needn’t mean invented whole cloth; it can have a firm basis in ordinary discourse, regimented only to keep that discourse from going off the rails. Nevertheless, the sense in which a condition promoted by Plato in the Sophist, and by Parmenides before him, is technical is not as clear as one would hope. Did they suppose they were imposing a specialized vocabulary?
- 14.
I offer reasons for rejecting the preface strategy in Vision (1993). The gravamen of my charge there is that the intensional contexts created by fictive pefaces prevents us from using them to draw inferences in conjunction with even the most innocuous commonplaces. Treating fictive sentences as detached bulletins does scant justice to anyone’s reasons for wanting to preserve them. As for abstractions, they could not possess most of the properties of fictional characters we want to account for. And whereas the last strategy, inspired by Kendall Walton’s (1990) make-believe account, may withstand scrutiny in the simple cases with which Walton illustrates it, attempts to extend it from authorial to non-authorial utterances stretches the notion of pretense to extremes that I believe only those with prior leanings in that direction would be inclined to countenance.
- 15.
Cf. Urmson: “if the story begins with the words ‘Tom was a middle-aged man from Columbus, Ohio,’ we may assume that he is visible to other men, needs food and drink, speaks English, and so on, unless we are explicitly warned to the contrary. Without some such presuppositions as these the story will be unintelligible” (1976: 153–54).
- 16.
Crane remarks that unlike horses as members of the animal kingdom, Pegasus has no parents (62). (‘He’ sprang from the blood of Medusa.) That may be a good cladistic reason for Pegasus not being a horse, but as far as intrinsic features go, and whatever is implied by the addition of wings, is there any reason to suppose that Pegasus is not otherwise equine-like?
- 17.
Pace the historian Yuval Harari (2014), who writes, working on a highly refined notion of existence, “if you examine any large-scale human cooperation, you will always find that it is based on some fiction like the nation, like money, like human rights. These are all things that do not exist objectively, but they exist only in the stories that we tell and that we spread around.” Perhaps human rights are mere ideals, but nations and money?
- 18.
Could one avoid this by taking the existence-entailment of those properties as equally minimalist? That would require a massive re-reading of Crane’s entire earlier exposition.
- 19.
But see my (2004)
- 20.
Unlike the more modest version I am defending, Searle supposes this extends to every statement, not just to some of them. I need not take a stand pro or con on that extension.
- 21.
- 22.
The claim is regularly taken for a truism in philosophy. For one of many examples Jerrold Katz writes, “an atomic sentence is true if and only if the thing designated by its subject has the property designated by its predicate” (1966: 46).
- 23.
I am aware that more must be said about the price to be paid by regarding the requirements for reference as less than absolute. For example, reference is generally taken to be a relation; accordingly, the relata of a referential vehicle must belong to a set-theoretic domain, for which existence is a standard condition of membership. Granting the first step, a comprehensive treatment would need to examine in much finer detail the requirements for domain membership. Perhaps existence is too facile—relevance might do for some subjects, or one or another form of free logic may be more suitable. However, I make no commitment on the issue, assuming that it should follow rather than precede the level of data collection at which the present discussion is pitched.
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Vision, G. (2020). Truth and Context. In: Ciecierski, T., Grabarczyk, P. (eds) The Architecture of Context and Context-Sensitivity. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 103. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34485-6_14
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