The Trouble with Tarski

As a result of thinking ( pace Tarski, wrongly) that it is propositions, not sentences, that are true or false, it has been supposed (also wrongly) that propositions such as that 'Snow is white' is true if and only if snow is white are necessarily true. But changing the rules for the use of the words in a sentence has no effect on the truth of the proposition, only on what proposition it formulates. Many similar statements, e.g., that 'plus' does not mean plus, are only pragmatically contradictory: if this were true, it would be impossible to say so in these words. One should distinguish between sentences that express necessary truths, and sentences that necessarily express truths. It follows that many well known accounts of necessity are wrong, that the truth of an analytic proposition does not follow from the definitions of the words in the sentence that expresses it, that it is not helpful to define meaning in terms of truth, that truth is not relative to language, and that conventionalism is false. This paper is a move in the direction of establishing the eternity of truth.     

Does the Quine/duhem Thesis Prevent Us from Defining Analyticity?

Quine claims that holism (i.e., the Quine-Duhem thesis) prevents us from defining synonymy and analyticity (section 2). In Word and Object, he dismisses a notion of synonymy which works well even if holism is true. The notion goes back to a proposal from Grice and Strawson and runs thus: R and S are synonymous iff for all sentences T we have that the logical conjunction of R and T is stimulus-synonymous to that of S and T. Whereas Grice and Strawson did not attempt to defend this definition, I try to show that it indeed gives us a satisfactory account of synonymy. Contrary to Quine, the notion is tighter than stimulus-synonymy – particularly when applied to sentences with less than critical semantic mass (section 3). Now according to Quine, analyticity could be defined in terms of synonymy, if synonymy were to make sense: A sentence is analytic iff synonymous to self-conditionals. This leads us to the following notion of analyticity: S is analytic iff, for all sentences T, the logical conjunction of S and T is stimulus-synonymous to T; an analytic sentence does not change the semantic mass of any theory to which it may be conjoined (section 4). This notion is tighter than Quine's stimulus-analyticity; unlike stimulus-analyticity, it does not apply to those sentences from the very center of our theories which can be assented to come what may, even though they are not synthetic in the intuitive sense (section 5).     

Insincerity

This paper argues for an account of insincerity in speech according to which an utterance is insincere if and only if it communicates something that does not correspond to the speaker's conscious attitudes. Two main topics are addressed: the relation between insincerity and the saying‐meaning distinction, and the mental attitude underlying insincere speech. The account is applied to both assertoric and non‐assertoric utterances of declarative sentences, and to utterances of non‐declarative sentences. It is shown how the account gives the right results for a range of cases.     

The paradox of the first person singular pronoun

The author attempts to provide a characterization of statements which will avoid the twin perils of identifying them with sentences per se or with such non‐observable entities as “propositions”, “meanings” etc. In providing a positive account of the sorts of things statements are, he distinguishes between the utterances of sentences, and. sentences per se, and maintains that statements are to be identified with those utterances made in certain kinds of circumstances. In the light of this analysis, it is then argued that who or what the speaker refers to in the course of making a statement does not form part of the circumstances which determine what statement he is making, nor does it form part of the circumstances which determine whether he is making the same or different statements by the words he uses.     

Intentions,Permissibility, and Choice

T. M. Scanlon has argued that the intentions with which one acts, or more specifically, one’s reasons for acting, are non-derivatively irrelevant to the moral permissibility of one’s actions. According to one of his arguments in favor of that thesis, it can be permissible to act for one reason rather than another only if one can choose to act for a reason but, since that choice is impossible since believing as will is impossible, one can be permitted to act but one cannot be permitted to act for a reason. This paper aims to show that that argument is unsound. It first argues that the assumption that choosing an action is necessary for it being an object of a moral duty or permission cannot be made consistent with Scanlon’s idea that the same does not hold for an action being an object of blame. It then argues that even if direct control over forming beliefs is impossible, it is not impossible to choose one’s reason for action and, therefore, to be permitted or forbidden to act for it.     

Lie-toe-tease: double negatives and unexcluded middles

Litotes, “a figure of speech in which an affirmative is expressed by the negative of the contrary” (OED) has had some tough reviews. For Pope and Swift (“Scriblerus” 1727), litotes—stock examples include “no mean feat”, “no small problem”, and “not bad at all”—is “the peculiar talent of Ladies, Whisperers, and Backbiters”; for Orwell (1946), it is a means to affect “an appearance of profundity” that we can deport from English “by memorizing this sentence: A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field.” But such ridicule is not without equivocation, given that litotes, or “logical” (non-concordial) double negation, may or may not be semantically redundant. When the negation of a logical contrary yields an unexcluded middle, it contributes to expressive power: someone who is not unhappy may not be happy either, and an occurrence may not be infrequent without being frequent. But if something is not possible, what can it be but possible? Why does Crashaw’s “not impossible she” survive rhetorically while Orwell’s “not unsmall rabbit” is doomed? How is Robbie being “not not friends” with Mary on 7th Heaven distinct from being friends with her, if not not-p reduces to p? The key is recognizing in litotes a corollary of MaxContrary, the tendency for contradictory (wide-scope) sentential negation ¬p to strengthen (at least) pragmatically to a contrary ©p, as when the formal contradictory Fr. “Il ne faut pas partir” (lit. ‘It is not necessary to leave’) is reinterpreted as expressing a contrary (‘one must not-leave’). Just as the Law of Excluded Middle can apply where it “shouldn’t”, resulting in pragmatically presupposed disjunctions between semantic contraries, so that “p v ©p” amounts to an instance of “p v ¬p”, the Law of Double Negation can fail to apply where it “should”. When not not-p conveys ¬©p, the negation of a virtual contrary, the middle between p and not-p is no longer excluded, rendering the Fregean dictum that “Wrapping up a thought in double negation does not alter its truth value” not unproblematic.     

On human needs and moral appraisals

For a large and important range of cases the connection between ‘X needs y’ and ‘X ought to have y’, though not an entailment, is still non‐contingent. Sentences in which ‘needs’ occurs have several uses) one of which is normative; when such sentences are used to make statements, the statements constitute a good reason for asserting that what is needed ought to be done. It must, however, be recognized that such a reason may not be a sufficient reason for the moral appraisal that what is needed ought to be done. It is not self‐contradictory to assert ‘He needs it but he ought not to have it’, though in moral contexts if it is stated that someone needs something or that something is needed we are entitled to infer that, everything else being equal, he should have it or that it should be done. But often there are countervailing considerations which defeat that initial presumption. I attempt to support these contentions by 1) describing several key uses of “need sentences” and 2) by elucidating the relations between the uses of such sentences and moral judgments.     

Incidental retention of speaker’s voice

Geiselman and Bellezza (1976) concluded that any retention in memory of the sex of a speaker of verbal material is automatic. Two possible reasons for this were hypothesized: the voice-connotation hypothesis and the dual-hemisphere parallel-processing hypothesis. In Experiment 1, the to-be-remembered sentences contained either male or female agents. Incidental retention of sex of speaker did not occur. This result does not support the dual-hemisphere parallel-processing hypothesis, which indicates that retention of voice should be independent of sentence content. In Experiment 2, the sentences contained neutral agents and incidental retention of sex of speaker did occur. The results of Experiments 1 and 2 support the connotation hypothesis. The different results with regard to incidental retention of speakers’s voice found in Experiments 1 and 2 were replicated in Experiment 3 using a within-subjects design. Experimemt 4 was conducted to determine if a speaker’s voice does, in fact, influence the meaning of a neutral sentence. In agreement with the voice-connotation hypothesis, sentences spoken by a male were rated as having more “potent” connotations than sentences spoken by a female.     

Not Propositions

Current computational accounts of meaning in the cognitive sciences are based on abstract, amodal symbols (e.g., nodes, links, propositions) that are arbitrarily related to their referents. We argue that such accounts lack convincing empirical support and that they do not provide a satisfactory account for linguistic meaning. One historic set of results supporting the abstract symbol view has come from investigation into comprehension of negated sentences, such as “The buttons are not black.” These sentences are presumed to be understood as two propositions composed of abstract symbols. One proposition corresponds to “the buttons are black,” and it is embedded in another proposition corresponding to “it is not true.” Thus, the propositional account predicts (a) that comprehension of negated sentences should take longer than comprehension of the corresponding positive sentence (because of the time needed to construct the embedding), but (b) that the resulting embedded propositions are informationally equivalent (but of opposite valence) to the simple proposition underlying the positive sentence. Contrary to these predictions, Experiment 1 demonstrates that negated sentences out of context are interpreted as situationally ambiguous, that is, as conveying less specific information than positive sentences. Furthermore, Experiment 2 demonstrates that when negated sentences are used in an appropriate context, readers do not take longer to understand them. Thus, difficulty with negation is demonstrated to be an artifact of presentation out of context. After discussing other serious problems with the use of abstract symbols, we describe the Indexical Hypothesis. This embodied account of meaning does not depend on abstract symbols, and hence it provides a more satisfactory account of meaning.     

A psychological study of unconnected conditionals

Unconnected conditionals, also called irrelevant conditionals, are sentences of form if A, C, whose antecedent and consequent bear no connection. According to the main theories of conditional reasoning, the truth or high probability of an antecedent and a consequent is sufficient to make true or highly probable the corresponding conditional. We tested this assumption and showed that it does not hold for unconnected conditionals. Furthermore, we investigated experimentally the factors which favour the endorsement of irrelevant conditional constructions and found that this rate increases when an analogy can be built between the antecedent and the consequent or when the conditional is asserted before its components.     

Reasoning about a rule

Two experiments were carried out to investigate the difficulty of making the contra-positive inference from conditional sentences of the form, “if P then Q.” This inference, that not-P follows from not-Q, requires the transformation of the information presented in the conditional sentence. It is suggested that the difficulty is due to a mental set for expecting a relation of truth, correspondence, or match to hold between sentences and states of affairs. The elicitation of the inference was not facilitated by attempting to induce two kinds of therapy designed to break this set. It is argued that the subjects did not give evidence of having acquired the characteristics of Piaget's “formal operational thought.”     

The comprehension and verification of ambiguous sentences

When Ss are presented with an ambiguous sentence they tend to interpret it in only one way. If later events warrant, Ss can recover the other meaning, a process which takes time. These conclusions follow from the results of a study in which 40 undergraduate Ss verified whether or not pictures shown at the end of a sentence represented the meaning of the sentence. When ambiguous sentences were presented, the verification time (VT) was no slower than for unambiguous sentences if the picture represented the “expected” meaning (as determined on a pre-test) of the ambiguity. The VT to the picture representing the “unexpected” meaning of the ambiguity was longer than VT to corresponding control sentences.     

Development of comprehension of sentences with “because” or “if”

The comprehension of sentences with “because” or “if” was investigated in children aged 2;9–11;11. Imitation, comprehension (choosing one of two picture sequences to go with a sentence), recognition (judging sentences with connective or structure differences as heard before or not), and synonymy (judging equivalence of meaning in sentences with different connectives or structures) tasks were administered, along with logical ordering, reversibility, and classification tasks. Above-chance responding in the comprehension task occurred by age 8, and in recognition and synonymy by age 10. Cognitive performance predicted 28.4% of the variance in the linguistic scores and cognitive success was concurrent with or preceded linguistic success. Comprehension of “because” and “if” appears to develop gradually, and is related to the development of certain operative rules.     

The Pareto Argument and Inequality

The Pareto argument for inequality holds that any change from a position of equality to one of inequality is justified so long as everyone benefits from the change. G.A. Cohen criticizes this argument (which he attributes to Rawls) on the ground that changes can normally be found which preserve both equality and Pareto-efficiency. However, this does not resolve the basic conflict between the two desiderata . Strong egalitarians hold that Pareto changes are not for the better if they increase inequality too greatly. Thus if the Pareto argument holds, then strong egalitarianism is unsustainable. I argue that egalitarians need not be troubled by the Pareto argument for inequality. The Pareto criterion would not be widely accepted unless it takes account of moral harms; but if it does take account of moral harms then there is no reason to doubt that egalitarian concerns can be incorporated into the Pareto argument.
email : p.shaw@philosophy.arts.gla.ac.uk     

Person Memory: Organization of Behaviors by Traits

Subjects studied a list of sentences describing a fictional person in terms of the “Big Five” personality traits (neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to experience). Although recall improved across trials in both memorization and impression formation instructions, clustering of the sentences by Big Five categories remained at very low levels throughout the experiment. Nor did blocking the sentences by Big Five category improve recall. Although the Big Five structure has been suggested as a universally applicable framework for personality structure, it does not appear to play a salient role in organizing person memory.     

对塔斯基“真”理论的批评与重建

塔斯基首先提出关于真之定义的T模式即:"p"是真的,当且仅当,p。随后他又用X取代T模式中的"p",并且用"满足"来定义"真"。本文一方面根据"内容恰当性"要求,提出另一种模式T′即:"p"是真的,当且仅当,p是存在的;用以补充T模式,并完善塔斯基的语言层次论。另一方面根据"形式正确性"要求,指出塔斯基对T模式的这两项修改都是多余的。     

On non-pragmatic Millianism

Speakers often judge the sentence “Lois Lane believes that Superman flies” to be true and the sentence “Lois Lane believes that Clark Kent flies” to be false. If Millianism is true, however, these sentences express the very same proposition and must therefore have same truth value. “Pragmatic” Millians like Salmon and Soames have tried to explain speakers’ “anti-substitution intuitions” by claiming that the two sentences are routinely used to pragmatically convey different propositions which do have different truth values. “Non-Pragmatic” Millians like Braun, on the other hand, have argued that the Millian should not appeal to pragmatics and opt instead for a purely psychological explanation. I will present two objections against Non-Pragmatic Millianism. The first one is that the view cannot account for the intuitions of speakers who accept the identity sentence “Superman is Clark Kent”: applying a psychological account in this case, I will argue, would yield wrong predictions about speakers who resist substitution with simple sentences. I will then consider a possible response from the non-pragmatic Millian and show that the response would in fact require an appeal to pragmatics. My conclusion will be that Braun’s psychological explanation of anti-substitution intuitions is untenable, and that the Millian is therefore forced to adopt a pragmatic account. My second objection is that Non-Pragmatic Millianism cannot account for the role that certain commonsense intentional generalizations play in the explanation of behavior. I will consider a reply offered by Braun and argue that it still leaves out a large class of important generalizations. My conclusion will be that Braun’s non-pragmatic strategy fails, and that the Millian will again be forced to adopt a pragmatic account of intentional generalizations if he wants to respond to the objection. In light of my two objections, my general conclusion will be that non-pragmatic versions of Millianism should be rejected. This has an important consequence: if Millianism is true, then some pragmatic Millian account must be correct. It follows that, if standard objections against pragmatic accounts succeed, then Millianism must be rejected altogether.     

The Influence of Focus Operators on Syntactic Processing of Short Relative Clause Sentences

Ni, Crain, and Shankweiler (1996) present evidence to suggest that the focus operator only can guide how reduced relative clause sentences are initially parsed. In this paper, we demonstrate that this does not hold for relative clause sentences that start with a noun-phrase, verb, noun-phrase construction. We report an eye movement study in which subjects read reduced and unreduced sentences of this type with and without the focus operator only. There were longer first-pass reading times in the critical region of reduced sentences than in the same region of unreduced sentences, regardless of the inclusion of only. Furthermore, readers spent less time re-inspecting portions of text after being garden pathed when reading reduced relative clause sentences that contained the focus operator than when reading reduced relative clause sentences that did not. We conclude that subjects initially syntactically misanalysed reduced relative clause sentences with and without only, and the inclusion of a focus operator facilitated recovery procedures rather than guiding initial parsing. These results are inconsistent with the referential theory and undermine the conclusions of Ni et al. (1996).     

Systems of modal logic for impossible worlds

The intuitive notion behind the usual semantics of most systems of modal logic is that of ‘possible worlds’. Loosely speaking, an expression is necessary if and only if it holds in all possible worlds; it is possible if and only if it holds in some possible world. Of course, contradictory expressions turn out to hold in no possible worlds, and logically true expressions turn out to hold in every possible world. A method is presented for transforming standard modal systems into systems of modal logic for impossible worlds. To each possible world there corresponds an impossible world such that an expression holds in the impossible world if and only if it does not hold in the possible world. One can then talk about such worlds quite consistently, and there seems to be no logical reason for excluding them from consideration.