Abstract
In this paper we present a solution to Saul Kripke’s Puzzle About Belief (in: Margalit (ed) Meaning and use, Dordrecht, 1979) based on Kaplan’s metaphysical picture of words (Proc Aristotelian Soc 64:93–119, 1990, J Philos 11:504–529, 2011). Although it is widely accepted that providing such a solution was one of the main incentives for the development of Kaplan’s theory, it was never presented by Kaplan in a systematic manner and was regarded by many as unsatisfactory. We agree with these critiques, and develop an extension of Kaplan’s theory by introducing the notion of “conservative” word uses, as well as arguing for the restriction of Kripke’s Disquotational Principle only to such uses. This restriction allows us to solve Kripke’s Puzzle by arguing that the assent of the puzzle’s protagonist does not allow disquotation and ascription of corresponding inconsistent belief, as it contains the non-conservative use of a proper name. At the end of the paper, we defend two of Kaplan’s theses that we find essential for our argument to work: that individuation of word tokens involves taking into account the intention of the speaker, and that different uniquely referring proper names of the same shape should be regarded as different homonymous words.
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Notes
Of course, the conditions as stated refer to a highly idealized situation. No actual reasoner is flawless and has enough computing power to state all the logical consequences of his or her beliefs (for a discussion see Tarnowski, 2020). If it were the case, there would be no reason to pursue or fund research in mathematics. The idealization though only reinforces Kripke’s conclusions: if even such a flawless reasoner can arrive at inconsistency, the same applies to the real-world ones.
Note that in this formulation it is rather a scheme of a principle not a single proposition The intended reading of DP is that the principle holds with p replaced by any English sentence. See (Kripke, 1979, pp. 248–249).
It requires internalization from him of an additional principle, namely the so-called Leibniz Principle, according to which two objects are identical if, and only if, they have the same properties (or at least the weaker implication of the identity to the sameness of properties, known as the principle of the indiscernibility of identicals). Although Kripke did not explicitly mention Peter drawing “Paderewski is not Paderewski” conclusion from his beliefs, under uncontroversial rationality conditions (abovementioned Leibniz Principle and Closure) it seems perfectly rational for him to do so. Such formulation allows us to treat Kripke’s Puzzle as a kind of identity puzzle—as it has been done e.g. by Ruth Barcan Marcus (1983, p. 336; Zabłudowski, 1986, p. 282). As will become clear further in the article, our solution works also for Kripke’s original formulation with Peter believing only contradictory statements (1) and (2). We would like to thank an anonymous referee for pressing us on this point.
It is the second version of the puzzle given in Kripke's paper. The other version, concerning the bilingual Pierre who seems to have inconsistent beliefs about London and Londres, is more complicated and needs an additional Principle of Translation. Although we believe that our solution may be extended to cover this version as well, we focus on the one-language version of the puzzle, for the sake of simplicity.
Apart from this remark we would like to remain neutral here on the issue of metaphysics of belief.
We will come back to such examples later on when discussing Kaplan’s distinction between generic and common currency names.
Ramsey writes in his Critical Notice of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus logico-philosophicus: “[the] ‘propositional sign’ has type-token ambiguity; the tokens (like those of any sign) are grouped into types by physical similarity (and by conventions associating certain noises with certain shapes) just as are the instances of a word” (Ramsey, 1923, pp. 468–469).
It should be noted that the orthographic conception is not the only platonic theory of words. Other platonic attempts were given e.g. by Katz (2000) and Wetzel (2009). These theories do not rely solely on the orthographic resemblance of tokens of the same word type, but it is not obvious how they can avoid the general problems of platonism.
One could ask, for example, how an abstract object (like the word: „esperanto”) could be created (e.g. by Ludwik Zamenhof, the inventor of Esperanto language), if the abstract objects are cannot have any direct causal relationship with the material world. This problem is addressed by Irmak (2018), but in a fashion which significantly distances itself from the orthographic conception.
See (Wetzel, 1993).
For an in-depth discussion of this distinction see Głowacki (2021).
Later in the paper, we also speak of lexical representations of words, which we denote using a distinct font.
This name is also due to the reservations Kaplan has about the type/token distinction usage in the context of the metaphysics of words (Kaplan, 1990, p. 98). Although we find these reservations legitimate, we chose to retain this terminology. We also decided to replace Kaplan’s notion of “word-token production” with a more neutral “word-token usage”, unless we want to specifically address the act of uttering or inscribing the physical token of a word.
The claim that proper names are ambiguous in the sense proposed by Kripke (1981, pp. 7–8) and defended by Kaplan (that is that that some proper names are homonymous, not polysemous) is not new and may be found in many other sources, see Millikan (1984), Richard (1990). The explanation of the difference in terms of “generic” and “common-currency names” and the metaphysical justification for it are however taken from Kaplan and it is one of the most developed accounts among those proposed by causal-chain theorists. Devitt (1976, 1981) seems to follow this route, speaking of “name-type-uses” and “name-types” as distinct, where the first seems to correspond to Kaplan’s “common-currency” and the latter to “generic names”—the limits of this analogy are however beyond the scope of this paper.
Kaplan in his article uses the notion of “syntax” in a peculiar way: „When I use the word “syntax” or “syntactical” (…) or “logical syntax” it is usually this syntactical-lexical form notion that I have in mind” (Kaplan, 1990, p. 94, ft. 4).
Not an uncommon mistake among English as a Second Language speakers—and certainly a struggle for one of the authors.
This presupposes the difference between public language and idiolects (and respectively their lexicons), which is a controversial matter. We believe however that this difference is fundamental if we are to use notions such as linguistic competence (which needs to be the competence of something) of English/Japanese/French speakers and provide an intersubjective linguistic description of our mental states (assuming that idiolects, by their nature, cannot be shared). In this article we follow roughly the Lewisian (1983) picture of natural language as conventional (in Lewis’ sense of convention) pairings between sentences and meanings, where idiolects are languages spoken by only one person exhibiting certain differences from the conventional language of the community. For more in-depth review of different stances on the relation between idiolects and natural languages see: Barber and Garcia Ramirez (2021).
We would like to thank the anonymous referee of the journal for pressing us on this point.
Cf. a similar example given in Elmar Unnsteinsson’s paper A Gricean Theory of Malaprops (2017, p. 455).
The assumption of the polysemy of the nonexistent word that Botan represents is not essential here, however if one wonders whether it classifies as polysemous one may further elaborate on how Botan represents the semantics of this word. Maybe he is not only confused about linguistic matters, but also about institutional conventions at Harvey Yard, thinking that every rector is also a lector at some point. Without changing the rest of the argument, we can also alternatively assume that Botan thinks of the word, which he represents as (r|l)ecto(r|l)(r|l) as having a disjunctive connotation: either rector or lector, or take this word to be a sort of a weird indexical. What is essential is that he, unlike Akira, is unaware of the existence of two distinct words and thinks of them as one.
One may regard Akira’s peculiar pronunciation as a case of malapropism. It does not commit us to the conclusion that he in fact said that he is a rector of Harvey Yard. As Unnsteinsson argues in his paper (2017) even in cases of malaprop-utterances the content of the utterance is determined by speaker’s communicative intentions. And Akira’s intention is to communicate that he is a lector of Harvey Yard.
Note that, although implicitly, this definition essentially involves user’s intentions since it is mentions use, which is an intentional action performed by the user. In a more elaborate form, the definition may be stated in the following way: The use U of a token of the word-type “W” is conservative if U was performed with an intention of use that conforms to public standards of individuation of “W.”.
We specifically differ from Kaplan in acknowledging the role of mental representation in word-token usage and abandoning behavioristic „black box”-talk. A more charitable reading of Kaplan perhaps would be to treat lexical representations as his “mysterious intrapersonal stages” of words (Kaplan, 1990, p. 98), but apart from these rather obscure remarks we see no specific evidence for such interpretation in Kaplan’s texts.
Note that Hawthorne and Lepore’s Tolerance actually does not help us to get Akira and Botan’s cases; if “[p]erformance p is of a word w only if it meets relevant performance standards” (Hawthorne & Lepore, 2011, p. 17), then Akira’s /rector/ should not be counted as a successful performance of the word “lector”, while Botan’s /lector/ should, despite the only difference in how these standards were met between the two is blind chance of getting the pronunciation right.
In theis formulation of CDP we use the term ‘conservative understanding’. The speaker S understands p conservatively iff s/he interprets it lexically with respective words of public lexicon.
Interestingly, an even closer analogy between the cases could be drawn if we imagine that Botan takes two proper names, not common nouns, to have the same referent. Paolo Bonardi (2021) proposes such a scenario, which involves a rational speaker believing that the names of Cicero—the Roman orator, and Cicero—the German II World War spy, to be names of the same person and assents to the statement (S) „Cicero is an orator and a spy.” We believe that our proposal works here, as well: As this speaker intends to utter the name “Cicero” which maps onto both common-currency names in the public language, we should abstain from disquoting (S).
Important thing to note here is that these lexical representations are representations of names as words, not different representations of Paderewski. In his discussion of Kripke’s Puzzle Jerry Fodor (2008: 71–79) hypothesizes that Peter actually believes that Paderewski1 is not Paderewski2, where “Paderewski1” and “Paderewski2” are expressions of Mentalese; according to Fodor we simply deal here with a mistranslation between English and Mentalese (and therefore DP should not be applied). We make no such assumption and wish to remain neutral with respect to the Language of Thought Hypothesis—on our view it is sufficient to say that Peter misrepresents the lexicon of public language and when he does so, DP should not be applied. Fodor’s proposal comes here with a significant cost of assuming that there are in fact two distinct Mentalese expressions “Paderewski1” and “Paderewski2”—and by Language of Thought Hypothesis that not only Peter, but all humans possess these two in their Mentalese lexicon or are able to form it. We take this consequence to be highly implausible and share much of the problems of Kaplan’s and Larson & Ludlow’s solutions discussed above.
In particular we do not think we are committed to defending Kaplan’s view that having an appropriate intention is sufficient for word-token use, as well as his view that it is the intention to repeat some other token (we explicitly denounced this thesis earlier). Although we are sympathetic to Kaplan’s wide tolerance and we certainly agree that the variety of idiosyncratic differences is not easily covered by some strict canon envisaged by the orthographic conception, our solution to Kripke’s Puzzle works as well if we, for instance, limit the scope of acceptable difference from the standard pronunciation or inscription as Hawthorne and Lepore do with their principle of Tolerance (2011, p. 17).
A similar point on the importance of the distinction between metaphysical and epistemological considerations is made by Stephen Neale (2016, pp. 268–270).
See (Russell, 1950, p. 24).
The quote is from Nyquist’s unpublished PhD thesis, pp. 159–160.
From Nyquist’s unpublished PhD thesis, p. 160.
The difference between polysemy and homonymy is usually introduced on the basis of either genetic considerations of word’s shape (whether the similarity is coincidental or tied to identical root) or semantic considerations (Lehrer, 1974). The existence of this difference is however a subject of debate among linguists [see Panman (1982)].
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Tadeusz Ciecierski, James Miller, Antonina Jamrozik and two anonymous referees for Synthese for their helpful and insightful remarks during the drafting and revising of this article. We also express our gratitude towards Mons Nyquist for sharing his work with us and thank audiences at the Propositions, Language and Meaning conference in Bratislava (2019), Philosophy in Progress conference in Nottingham (2020) and Polish Semiotic Society seminar for stimulating discussion on the early presentation of paper’s content. The second author was supported by the scholarship in the grant from the National Science Centre in Cracow (NCN), Project Number 2019/34/A/HS1/00399. Both authors contributed equally to the development and writing of the article.
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Tarnowski, M., Głowacki, M. Words on Kripke’s Puzzle. Synthese 200, 292 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03769-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03769-w