The Singularity of Singular Thought

I just found an excellent paper by Tim Crane - "The Singularity of Singular Thought".  Today I will say some things I like about the paper, tomorrow some things I don't like so much.

Crane begins by picking up a remark by Quine that "a singular term is one that ‘purports to refer to just one object’".  This suggests to Crane that a singular term is one that appears or ‘claims’ to be doing something – referring to just one object, and which still appears to do this even if there is no such object.  Readers of Beyond Necessity will understand that I find this attractive.  Common sense suggests that a proper name, together with many other types of singular terms, has the same semantics whether or not there is an object corresponding to it.  The semantics of proper names, I have argued, is object independent.

The difficulty, as Crane acknowledges, is to explain how this is consistent with the distinction between singular and general thought, which any adequate theory of mind must account for. As I suggested in some earlier posts, there are apparently strong arguments showing that we can only explain the distinction by invoking semantic dependency on objects.  Singular thoughts (according to these arguments) are precisely those which depend for their existence on the existence of the objects they are about.  John McDowell defines a singular thought as ‘a thought that would not be available to be thought or expressed if the relevant object, or objects, did not exist’.

Crane's objective is a theory of singular thought - of which he provides only a brief sketch - which accommodates the distinction between singular and general thought, "but which also takes seriously the idea that a singular thought might merely purport to refer. In other words, a thinker can think about a particular object and yet fail to refer to that object in thought.”

More tomorrow.

Brandon: reply on fictional creation

Brandon (who has an excellent and praiseworthy internet residence called Siris) asks whether "Does writing [a fiction about a planet) miraculously create a fictional object the size of Jupiter?" should not really be "Does this describe a fictional miraculously created object the size of Jupiter?"

A good and Brandonesque objection. Well, the question is whether fictional statements (as opposed to merely false ones) 'bestow' properties on fictional objects. If so fictional statements have to be true.

(1) The statement that A is B 'bestows' B upon the fictional A, according to the theory.

(2) So A now has B.

(3) Since the fictional statement 'A is B' now corresponds to the fictional reality, the statement 'A is B' is true as a result.

This raises the question of when the fictional A begins to exist. I suppose it could coherently be held that A always existed, because the author was going to write about A, but that doesn't altogether make sense. What if the world were to turn out otherwise? What happens to the fictional object in a possible world where no one wrote about 'it'?

More plausible (plausibility being relative) is that the fictional object is created just as soon as I talk or write about it. It doesn't possess any properties until I 'bestow' them by making the fictional claim. So why shouldn't we suppose that the existence of the object is also bestowed at the point of writing. Another argument for this is that it is absurd for the the object to exist before it has any properties 'bestowed' upon it, so that there exists an object without any properties whatsoever (except perhaps of existence). Another problem is that this view requires existence being a property, so does it possess this property before the author has said that exists, i.e. bestows existence upon it?

It goes the other way about

Here is a blog that I don't follow enough. Cambridge logician Peter Smith reflects on some profound issues on the philosophy of logic and language while drinking wine in Tuscany (how much do they pay him?). In this post he makes two points close to my heart.

1) Formal languages don't magically do what ordinary language can't do: they just do ordinary things like use singular terms and quantify in tidier ways.

2) We can't first pick out a class of genuine objects and then locate the genuine singular terms as those that refer to them: it goes the other way about.

Yes. The second point in particular makes a point that divides the philosophers of language from the metaphysicians - a shame Vallicella is in his self-imposed temporary exile. Metaphysically-inclined types will want to look for and investigate 'objects' first. Analytic types will investigate the language by which we talk about objects.

But this still leaves us with the problem of empty names. Signifying follows understanding, as the medievals said: significare sequitur intelligere. And it seems we can understand empty names, so why don't they signify? My understanding of 'Noah' is just the same whether or not 'Noah' refers to an existing person, or not. And 'Noah' seems a 'genuine singular term' in Smith's sense. But there may be no corresponding object.

We could resolve the difficulty by dropping or modifying (1). Perhaps empty names are not those items of ordinary language that we can 'tidy up' using the formal apparatus of constants and quantifiers. But that goes against the spirit of it. Formal language doesn't magically do what ordinary language can't. It is, literally 'formal'. It captures the 'form', literally the figure, that is characteristic of certain propositions and arguments.

There is a difficulty with this that I don't altogether see how to resolve.