Lately I was agonizing over the phenomenon of retraction in MacFarlane’s relativistic framework. As widely known, for MacFarlane utterance-truth is relative both to a context of use and a context of assessment, the latter providing the values for the relevant parameters of the circumstances of evaluation of a given utterance. Also, as widely known (and accepted), there is a distinction between the truth of an assertion and its correctness – or, as MacFarlane calls it, its “accuracy” (I will use this term in what follows) – a distinction that he wholeheartedly accepts. However, given the connection between truth and accuracy, and the fact that truth for him is relative, accuracy will in MacFarlane’s framework be relative too: an assertion is accurate (as assessed from a context of assessment) if its content (as determined in the context of use) is true relative to the context of assessment from which it is assessed. Now, one of the phenomena that MacFarlane has argued gives relativism an advantage over contextualism (both of the indexical and the non-indexical sort) is retraction. Retraction is understood by MacFarlane to involve the acknowledgement that the content of a previous assertion is false (relative to the current context of assessment) usually accompanied by a formal act of “taking it back”. However, as he is keen to stress, retracting an assertion doesn’t mean that the speaker was “at fault” when she made it – that is, the assertion was accurate, albeit (relative to the current context of assessment) false.

This all seems nice. What I don’t understand, however, is how MacFarlane could make the last claim, given the other things he endorses. In other words, I see a tension between the claim 2 and 3, assuming 1:

1. Truth-relativism is correct: the content of assertions is true relative both to contexts of use and to contexts of assessment.
2. Like truth, accuracy is relativized to contexts of assessment: an assertion is accurate if its content is true relative to the current context of assessment.
3. Retraction is the acknowledgment that the content of a previous assertion is false (relative to the current context of assessment), but retracting a previous assertion doesn’t mean that the asserter was “at fault” – i.e., her previous assertion was accurate.

Suppose one retracts an assertion whose content is false (at the current context of assessment), but was true when made. Given 1, I don’t see how MacFarlane could claim both 2 and 3: because the connection between truth and accuracy, any assertion that is retracted is therefore inaccurate (relative to the current context of assessment).

What am I missing?

At yesterday’s session of the LOGOS Colloqium, Juan Comesaña argued against inductivisim, incompatible with what he took to be three also very plausible basic principles. Like others in discussion, I didn’t see clearly what was the intuitive motivation for one of them, Ruling Out Principle (details below). But in any case it seemed to me that the other two rule it out, thus independently of the issue regarding Inductivisim. The particular counterexample I submitted didn’t quite work, as I was using a necessary truth, but the point remains, or so it seems to me. At least on the antiskeptical assumption that one is ever justified in believing anything. Let A be one such contingency. So:

1. One is justified in believing that A.

Now consider the (contingent, known) consequence (A v (A v ¬E)), where E is one’s total basic evidence. By Closure,

2. One is justified in believing that (A v (A v ¬E)).

By Only Basic Evidence Justifies we then have

3. E justifies (A v (A v ¬E)).

If I understand the relevant notion of a way for something to be true, A’s being true and E’s being false are two ways for (A v (A v ¬E)) to be true, E rules out one but not all of these. Thus

4. E only rules out one way for (A v (A v ¬E)) to be true

falsifying

If E only rules out one way for P to be true, E doesn’t justify P.

i.e., the Ruling Out Principle.

Am I wrong?

Regarding the discussion as to whether it is a condition for acceptance of T2 that T2 explains WHY T1 was successful, when it was.

1) I think we should distinguish strong and week explanations of this kind.

strong: Rel Mech explains why Class Mech was successful when it was, namely, because, roughly, the laws used in successful predictions of CM coincide with the laws used in predictions of RM for medium bodies and low speeds

weak: Helioc explains why Geoc was successful when it was, e.g. in predicting the apparent trajectories of the planets. How? well, SUPPOSING that the world is like Helio says, then GIVEN the theoretical claims of Helio we can infer that they have these and those true empirical consequences. But this is a very weak sense I think totally irrelevant at all for the realism debate

There may be cases in between, maybe Phlogiston

2) Some of you seemed to defend that Darwin explains WHY Nat Theol was successful, when it was. It is clear that the issue is NOT whether darwin explained WHAT Nat Theol (claimed to) explain. But WHY, i.e. whether if the world is like what darwin says, then Nat Theol succeeded in some “pre(retro)dictions”. I think that in this sense, this case is at the very bottom of the strong/weak divide in 1)
Is there any concrete example of biol phenomenon to which the strong sense (or at least stronger than the weakest one) in 1) applies in this case?

At yesterday’s LOGOS Colloqium, Anandi presented her thoughts on semantic zombies. As I understood it, the main element in the considerations had to do with the fact that, for a number of expressions, whatever in the thoughts, practices, and experiences of language-users could determine meaning, it does not determinate one in particular out of several admissible, equally natural candidate referents. Now according to the view of vagueness as semantic indecision, this is precisely what constitutes vagueness (or, anyway, the familiar kind of semantic indeterminacy, if one wishes to reserve ‘vagueness’ for the particular case of this associated with, say, sorites-susceptibility and the like). The worry I had was that then the candidate “semantic truths” S that allegedly are not apriori scrutable from the physical (plus the “that’s all” clause) would be either not (super-)true, corresponding to particular precisifications, or else such that the claim that they are not apriori scrutable cannot be grounded on the “inscrutability arguments”. What do people think?

At the last LOGOS Seminar, Delia introduced her notion of underarticulation, to be used in characterizing the phenomenon semantic underdetermination while trying to avoid a domestication policy of reducing it to more familiar phenomena, notably “indexicality”, broadly conceived. Her definition was something like this (I don’t have my notes in Idaho):

S is underarticulated iff there is a context C such that some other sentence S’ that “articulates” S would have the same truth-conditions in it.

where the notion of a sentence “articulating” another is left somehow intuitive, but so that ‘I’m sitting’ is articulated, in the relevant sense, by ‘The utterer of that sentence is sitting’.

Delia herself remarked that, as alluded in the example, indexical sentences can be underarticulated, in her sense. As observed by Genoveva, underarticulation in Delia’s sense, seems to be quite a general phenomenon, provided that, for instance, ‘indeed I’m sitting’ or ‘gee, I’m sitting’ would have the same truth-conditions as ‘I’m sitting’. That, as stressed by both Genoveva and Max, may give rise to legitimate worries in connection with the prospects of the notion vis-à-vis the characterization of what (allegedly) is peculiar to semantic underdetermination.

Be it as it were, Manolo M and Stephan offered cases sustaining the claim that, even if quite general, underarticulation was not a completely general phenomenon:

(a) This is five words long.
(b) This is articulated enough.

On reflection, I don’t see why the following wouldn’t be articulations of them, in Delia’s sense:

(a’) The relevant utterance of (a) is five words long.

(b’) The relevant utterance of (b) is articulated enough.

Any thoughts?

I will try to articulate better the objection I was making at the Q&A part.

In order to characterize Bert’s situation, vindicating in so doing realism about subjectivity and rejecting universality, Giovanni wants a fact that is only “otherpersonally” the case, while it is not the case “at me” said from Bert’s perspective, which is why he cannot know “it”. The asymmetry between what is the case “at one” vs. “otherpersonally” is supposed to be understood along the lines of the asymmetry between what is the case presently vs. at other times, in a seriously-tensed metaphysics. Now, my problem is that, on the basis of Giovanni’s examples or others I can think of, I cannot understand how the operators work so as to establish what Giovanni wants about Bert’s case.

Giovanni characterizes a fact of the intended sort as: there is no instance of PR. Now, this can be understood in two ways. I will successively express my difficulties with both readings.

(i) It can be understood as a temporal fact, that there (presently) is no instance of PR. But, to the extent that I have any grip on the operators “at one/me” vs. “otherpersonally”, this does not distinguish Bert from me, say: it is also not presently the case “at me” (let us assume) that there is no instance of PR, while it is “otherpersonally” the case that there is PR (it is the case “at” other subjects). But I assume that any knowledge argument essentially purports to distinguish Bert (and Mary) from me: it is irrelevant that Bert and me share the contingent fact that no instance of PR is going on in us, the point is that I am in a position to know facts involving PR, while Bert is not. (Incidentally, it is also irrelevant for the argument whether instances of PR are going on in other subjects; for we can run the argument with respect to in fact never-instantiated-Humean-shades-of-blue.)

(ii) Alternatively, we can think of the fact that there is PR not as a temporal one, but as a general, atemporal one: “at Bert” it is not just the case that, at the relevant moment, there is no instance of PR; it is rather that, “at him”, there is no PR (the property, not just its instances, somehow does not even exist for him). The problem with this is that I find obscure what the relevant notion of variable existence for properties is, and in particular what it means that a property exist or not “at a subject”. What sense does it make to say that “at me” properties with which I am not acquainted (perhaps theoretical properties to grasp which I lack the required cognitive equipment) do not exist? We can say, metaphorically, that they do not exist for me; but I guess this just means what I said, that I cannot conceive of them. More in general, I fail to see how the operators “at one”/”otherpersonally” can meaningfully operate on general facts, such as whether a property exists, or whether it is the property typically instantiated under such-and-such circumstances.

Today at the LOGOS Seminar Giovanni presented a very interesting paper. As the discussion was so rich, I didn’t get to ask my second question. Here it comes. I wasn’t clear I completely followed the dialectics. Suppose I genuinely exemplify phenomenal greyness, whereas you guys merely other-personally exemplify it. Suppose however that God exemplifies every phenomenal property. Thus (Universality) is false and (Realism about Subjectivity) is true. Suppose however that I am Bert. Doesn’t the same problem arise?

Towards the end of our RG there were some points raised concerning underdetermination arguments and compositionality. I was a bit baffled and I tried to clarify a few things for myself.

First, I think it is a bit misleading that Szabó calls the argument against compositionality that he presents, the underdetermination argument. This is a different argument than what is usually called such in the literature. I found this a bit confusing.

Here is a reconstruction of what Szabó calls the underdetermination argument against compositionality (page 265 last paragraph). (I talk of utterance content and not speech act content in order to simplify things).

The sentence (S) ¨The leaves are green¨ is uttered in two different contexts. In one is evaluated as false, in the other as true. The two utterances of the same sentence have different contents in the two contexts (assuming that the circumstances of evaluation are the same, which is not uncontroversial).  But, the constituents of the utterances have the same contents in both contexts. That is, the constituents ¨leaves¨, ¨green¨, ¨the¨, ¨are¨ have the same contents in both utterances of S in the two contexts. If this is so, the contents of the two utterances of S are not compositionally determined out of the contents of the utterances’ constituents. This is the sort of argument that shows a failure of compositionality: two utterances with different contents but with the same syntactic structure and whose constituents have the same content.

The argument can be put along the following lines:

1) the content of utterance u of S in C is different than the content of utterance v of S in C’: Cu ≠ Cv

2) The contents of the constituents of the two utterances, u and v, are the same: C(green)v = C(green)u, C(leaves)v = C(leaves)u, and so on for all the constituents of the two utterances of S.

3) the two utterances have the same structure.

Szabo´s solution to this argument was to show that the difference in the contents of the two utterances u and v is due to, and can be traced to, differences in the contents of (some) its constituents. The utterance u of S has a different content than utterance v of S because some of the constituents of u have a different content than some of the constituents of v. The content of ¨are green¨ in the utterance u is different than the content of ¨are green¨ in the utterance v. If so, compositionality is preserved and the argument against it defused.   Szabó´s way of defusing the argument is to show that (2) doesn´t hold. (I think what’s really important is not the particular way in which Szabó does this, as much as the template he offers: to show that there is no failure of compositionality just show that (2) doesn’t hold and back up your claim with intuitions regarding the difference in contents of u and v’s constituents).

Now, two points were raised: (a) that (someone like) Travis can reject (2) and still run an underdetermination argument against compositionality and (b) that rejection of (2) and acceptance of Szabó’s way of defusing the argument is compatible with Travis’ contextualism.

As far as I can see (b) is correct but that’s not the case with (a).

If one wants to make an argument against compositionality one must accept (2) (in fact, must accept (1), (2) and (3)). Without (2) there is no argument against compositionality. To show that compositionality fails one needs to show that there are cases where our intuitions match the situation described in (1) through (3). That is, we must have the intuitions that two utterances u in C and v in C’ of S have different contents. We must also have the intuition that the constituents of the two utterances have identical contents (that is, any of the expressions uttered in u and v has the same contents in both utterances). And finally, we must have the intuition that u and v have the same structure. Finding an expression that satisfies all three intuitions is finding an example of failure of compositionality.  As long as one wants to run an argument against compositionality (of content) one cannot give up (2).

On the other hand accepting Szabó’s way of defusing the argument (by rejecting (2)) is compatible with contextualism (i.e. the thesis that the contents of u in C and v in C’ of S are different and nothing in the lexical meaning of S determines the difference in contents). Even if denying (2), Travis (& Travis-like people) can run the following argument:

1’) two utterances u and v of the same sentence S in two contexts C and C´ have different contents.

2’) The lexical meanings of S’s constituents are identical in both of its utterances in the two contexts.

3’) the two utterances share the same structure.

Therefore the contents of the utterances u and v of S are underdetermined by the lexical meanings of S´s constituents. Or, if the lexical meanings of constituents compose into the lexical meaning of S, one can reformulate as: the contents of utterances u and v of S (in C and C’ respectively) are underdetermined by the lexical meaning of the sentence S.

This argument is an argument about the relation between the lexically encoded meaning (contextually insensitive meaning) and content (utterance content).It supposedly shows that the lexical meaning of a sentence fails to determine the (truth conditional) contents of the utterances of the sentence. So, it should be distinguished from what Szabó calls the underdetermination argument against compositionality which is an argument about the compositionality of content. (notice that (2) and (2’) are different)

All in all, I see no reason why (b) should be false: one can accept that contents of utterances of S are compositionally determined out of the contents of their parts and accept that the contents of utterances are nevertheless underdetermined by  the lexically encoded meaning of S.

Today we’ve had the first session of Susanna Siegel’s course. I’ve enjoyed it a lot. Anyway, she has spent some time drawing some distinctions, and one of them got me thinking. It was the distinction between propositional and doxastic justification. As she presented it, you can think about justification by starting from the justifying evidence, or from the justified belief. According to Siegel, more or less,

An experience of a subject provides propositional justification, if it provides rational support for a proposition, whether or not the subject believes the proposition or adjusts her confidence in it on the basis of the experience.

In contrast, an experience provides doxastic justification for a belief with content p, if the experience plays a role in forming or maintaining a belief that p.

(I’ve copied these two sentences from the lecture notes from this session, but it would be quite unfair to take them as her last word on the distinction. Anyway, I hope they are not too far off the mark.)

Propositional justification is not tied to any particular belief, and one can have it without going to form the relevant beliefs at all, while doxastic justification is so tied. Apart from that, I don’t see that this distinction is terribly important and, in particular, it seems that one can inter-define both kinds of justifications trivially, more or less thus:

A belief that p formed on the basis of evidence E is (partially/all-things-considered) doxastically justified iff E provides (partial/all-things-considered) propositional justification to the proposition that p.

I put this question (rather clumsily) to Siegel during the session, and, apparently, this kind of inter-definition is faulty. But I don’t see why; can anyone enlighten me?

We just had our Egan Fest, discussing one, two, and three papers by him, a lot of fun!!

This is about the second. Suppose Ernie and Vert are phenomenally spectrum inverted with respect to each other. According to Andy’s proposal for “appearance properties”, there are centered features such as being disposed to cause G experiences in me and being disposed to cause R experiences in me that Ernie’s and Vert’s visual experiences represent Kermit as having (respectively). According to the following “indexical” alternative, their experiences attribute to Kermit the corresponding properties being disposed to cause G experiences in those like Ernie and being disposed to cause R experiences in those like Vert. This alternative vindicates near-CONTRARINESS, which seems to me to be what the rationale for CONTRARINESS actually supports, although assuming SAMENESS, near-CONTRARINESS would suffice for CONTRARINESS. The “indexical” proposal does not respect SAMENESS, however. After the paper and the discussion I am still uncertain as to how bad would this really be. Any thoughts?