Susan Stebbing's Intellectualism Pickel, Bryan
The journal for the history of analytical philosophy,
06/2022, Volume:
10, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
This paper reconstructs Susan Stebbing’s account of intelligentdealing with a problem and defends this account against chargesthat it relies on a “censurable kind” of intellectualism. This chargewas ...made in Stebbing’s own time by Laird and Wittgenstein. MichaelKremer has recently made the case that Stebbing is also a proximatetarget of Gilbert Ryle’s attack on intellectualism. This paper arguesthat Stebbing should indeed be counted as an intellectualist since sheholds that intelligent dealing with a problem requires propositionalthought. Yet, for Stebbing, thinking is an activity of a whole personand is enabled and constrained by their dispositions. This complexpicture of a thinker enables Stebbing’s account to resist argumentstargeting certain forms of intellectualism such as Ryle’s regressargument. It also helps her to respond to the charge that sheoveremphasizes the importance of intellectual failures. On the picturethat emerges, Stebbing offers a strikingly modern epistemology thatincorporates the social features of a person as well as their purelyintellectual features.
Russell's notion of an incomplete symbol has become a standard against which philosophers compare their views on the relationship between language and the world. But Russell's exact characterization ...of incomplete symbols and the role they play in his philosophy are still disputed. In this paper, I trace the development of the notion of an incomplete symbol in Russell's philosophy. I suggest – against Kaplan, Evans, and others – that Russell's many characterizations of the notion of an incomplete symbol are compatible. To this end, I examine and reject arguments for the purported incompatibility between declaring an expression to be incomplete and incorporating that symbol into a compositional semantic theory. I then examine how Russell puts the notion of an incomplete symbol to use in metaphysics.
A central dispute in understanding Frege’s philosophy concerns how the sense of a complex expression relates to the senses of its component expressions. According to one reading, the sense of a ...complex expression is a whole built from the senses of the component expressions. On this interpretation, Frege is an early proponent of structured propositions. A rival reading says that senses compose by functional application: the sense of a complex expression is the value of the function denoted by its functional component for the arguments denoted by its remaining components. I argue that two non-negotiable Fregean theses entail that senses compose by functional application. One thesis is that referents compose by functional application. The other thesis is that an expression in an indirect context refers to its customary sense.
Structured propositions are often invoked to explain why intensionally equivalent sentences do not substitute salva veritate into attitude ascriptions. As the semantics is standardly developed—for ...example, in Salmon (Frege’s puzzle. Ridgeview, Atascadero, CA,
1986
), Soames (Philos Top 15(1):47–87,
1987
) and King (Noûs 29(4):516–535,
1995
), the semantic value of a complex expression is an ordered complex consisting of the semantic values of its components. Such views, however, trivialize semantic composition since they do not allow for independent constraints on the meaning of complexes. Trivializing semantic composition risks “trivializing semantics” (King and Stanley, in: Szabó (ed) Semantics versus pragmatics, Oxford University Press, Oxford,
2005
). Yet, proponents of structured propositions suggest a route to reimpose substantive compositionality. While the mapping from a sentence to the structured proposition it expresses is trivially compositional, there is a non-trivial mapping from the structured proposition to its truth-value. This non-trivial level of semantic composition allows the meanings assigned to complex expressions to impose substantive constraints on the meanings of the simple ones. I first articulate the basic desiderata: an account of structured propositions capable of explaining attitude attributions and of delivering a non-trivially compositional semantics. I then show that the two-stage semantics proposed by standard proponents of structured propositions does not satisfy these joint goals.
Unity through truth Pickel, Bryan
Synthese,
04/2019, Volume:
196, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Renewed worries about the unity of the proposition have been taken as a crucial stumbling block for any traditional conception of propositions. These worries are often framed in terms of how entities ...independent of mind and language can have truth conditions: why is the proposition that Desdemona loves Cassio true if and only if she loves him? I argue that the best understanding of these worries shows that they should be solved by our theory of truth and not our theory of content. Specifically, I propose a version of the redundancy theory according to which 'it is true that Desdemona loves Cassio' expresses the same proposition as 'Desdemona loves Cassio'. Surprisingly, this variant of the redundancy theory treats 'is true' as an ordinary predicate of the language, thereby defusing many standard criticisms of the redundancy theory.
The principle of compositionality requires that the meaning of a complex expression remains the same after substitution of synonymous expressions. Alleged counterexamples to compositionality seem to ...force a theoretical choice: either apparent synonyms are not synonyms or synonyms do not syntactically occur where they appear to occur. Some theorists have instead looked to Frege’s doctrine of “reference shift” according to which the meaning of an expression is sensitive to its linguistic context. This doctrine is alleged to retain the relevant claims about synonymy and substitution while respecting the compositionality principle. Thus, Salmon (Philos Rev 115(4):415,
2006
) and Glanzberg and King (Philosophers’ Imprint 20(2):1–29,
2020
) offer occurrence-based accounts of variable binding, and Pagin and Westerståhl (Linguist Philos 33(5):381–415,
2010c
) argue that an occurrence-based semantics delivers a compositional account of quotation. Our thesis is this: the occurrence-based strategies resolve the apparent failures of substitutivity in the same general way as the standard expression-based semantics do. So it is a myth that a Frege-inspired occurrence-based semantics affords a genuine alternative strategy.
Jeffrey King argues that nothing has truth conditions except by being taken to be true or false by rational agents. But – for good reason – King claims that propositions possess truth conditions ...essentially and intrinsically. I will argue that King cannot have both: if the truth conditions of a proposition depend on the reactions of rational agents, then the possession of truth conditions can't follow from the intrinsic nature or existence of the proposition. This leaves two options. Either, nothing can do the job that motivates positing propositions. Or, there is no need to explain what bestows a truth condition on a proposition.
Frege and saving substitution Pickel, Bryan; Rabern, Brian
Philosophical studies,
08/2021, Volume:
178, Issue:
8
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Goodman and Lederman (Philos Stud 177(4):947–952, 2020) argue that the traditional Fregean strategy for preserving the validity of Leibniz’s Law of substitution fails when confronted with apparent ...counterexamples involving proper names embedded under propositional attitude verbs. We argue, on the contrary, that the Fregean strategy succeeds and that Goodman and Lederman’s argument misfires.
It is commonplace for philosophers to distinguish mere truths from truths that perspicuously represent the world's structure. According to a popular view, the perspicuous truths are supposed to be ...metaphysically revelatory and to play an important role in the accounts of law-hood, confirmation, and linguistic interpretation. Yet, there is no consensus about how to characterize this distinction. I examine strategies developed by Lewis and by Sider in his Writing the Book of the World which purport to explain this distinction in terms of vocabulary: the truths that represent the world perspicuously have better, joint-carving vocabulary. I argue that the distinction between a perspicuous and mere truth concerns both the vocabulary of the sentence and its grammar. I then show that the collective motivations for distinguishing perspicuous from mere truths do not allow Lewis and Sider to properly impose constraints on grammar.
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