Transitivos intensionales y presuposiciones.
| Autor | Sainsbury, R.M. |
RESUMEN: Mis comentadores señalan aspectos en los que la propuesta de Reference without Referents es incompleta: no ofrecía una explicación de cómo oraciones construidas con verbos intensionales (como "Juan pensó en Pegaso") pueden ser verdaderas cuando una de las expresiones referenciales no refiere; y dio una explicación incompleta, y quizás engañosa, de cómo entender ciertos usos serios de nombres de ficción como en "Anna Karenina es más inteligente que Emma Bovary" y "Anna Karenina no existe". En esta respuesta indico cómo quiero ahora subsanar estas deficiencias. La verdad de las oraciones construidas con verbos intensionales puede explicarse en términos de la verdad de oraciones que no son problemáticas para la explicación de Reference without Referents, por ejemplo, oraciones dominadas por operadores que expresan actitudes proposicionales. Una reflexión sobre cómo podemos aceptar temporalmente compromisos que de hecho no compartimos conduce a una explicación más matizada de los usos serios de los nombres de ficción, algunos de los cuales manifiestan precisamente esa aceptación temporal.
PALABRAS CLAVE: referencia, nombres vacíos, ficción, intensionalidad
SUMMARY: My commentators point to respects in which the picture provided in Reference without Referents is incomplete. The picture provided no account of how sentences constructed from intensional verbs (like "John thought about Pegasus") can be true when one of the referring expressions fails to refer. And it gave an incomplete, and possibly misleading, account of how to understand certain serious uses of fictional names, as in "Anna Karenina is more intelligent than Emma Bovary" and "Anna Karenina does not exist'. In the present response, I indicate how I would now wish to make good these deficiencies. The truth of sentences constructed from intensional verbs can be explained in terms of the truth of sentences that are unproblematic for RWR, for example, sentences dominated by operators expressing propositional attitudes. Reflection on the way in which we can temporarily accept commitments we do not in fact share leads to a more nuanced account of serious uses of fictional names, some of which manifest precisely such a temporary acceptance.
KEY WORDS: reference, empty names, fiction, intensionaliy
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It is a pleasure to have received such penetrating responses, and also to see that none of the respondents shows any inclination to return to the sterile oscillation between Millianism and descriptivism, which it was the main aim of the book to deconstruct. The comments raise a number of difficult questions, and I'm happy to have this opportunity to try to address them afresh. The overall structure of the responses is by theme, with the individual respondents discussed within the relevant themes.
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Homophony and Context
Manuel García-Carpintero asks why I say that homophony is an ideal: "If it is false that homophonic theories account for our language mastery, how can this falsehood nonetheless constitute any ideal?" (p. 00). I'm not sure that I accept the implied principle (presumably the things textbooks say about ideal gases are strictly speaking false), but I admit that my talk of homophony as an ideal was not happy. The main point I wanted to make was this: were it not for the context-sensitivity of language, all semantic specifications could properly be homophonic. To accept this point is to accept that one good project in semantics, in which object language and metalanguage coincide, consists in something other than what I called reduction: specifying meanings in other terms. A homophonic specification carries with it a guarantee of correctness. There is no analogous straightforward way to check that non-homophonic specifications are correct, and we can be sure that at least some are incorrect, since some words, like "red", have meanings that cannot be specified in other terms.
I did not wish to suggest that context-sensitivity would be absent from an ideal language. On the contrary, I find it impossible to envisage a language, usable for anything like the purposes to which natural languages are adapted, that could rail to be deeply sensitive to context. So I would regard it as folly to suggest that theorists should treat homophony as an ideal in the sense of something to which they should aspire in their treatment of natural language. On the contrary, I devoted some space to seeing how non-homophonic conditional truth-conditions should be constructed, and I agree with García-Carpintero that this is the best (and so in some sense ideal) approach to at least some kinds of context sensitivity. I also agree with him that the approach should probably be extended to proper names. Not doing so in the book was intended as a genuine case of "idealization": ignoring awkward details in order to simplify the presentation of the main elements of the proposal.
Or so I thought at the time. Since then, and spurred on by more than one of the present commentators, I now wonder whether that view is justified. It may be that, as García-Carpintero suggests here and elsewhere, a semantics of proper names should be developed using some notion of presupposition, in a way that will throw light on the use of proper names in fiction and similar contexts. I'll consider that idea towards the end of this reply.
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Intensional Transitives
Tim Crane is unpersuaded by the book's claim that it's false that Le Verrier thought about Vulcan. Here...
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