Content pluralism

ABSTRACT

How fine-grained are the contents of our beliefs and other cognitive attitudes? Are the contents of our beliefs individuated solely in terms of the objects, properties, and relations that figure in their truth conditions, or rather in terms of our concepts, or modes of presentation of those objects, properties, and relations? So-called Millians famously maintain the former whereas their Fregean rivals hold the latter. Though much ink was spilled on the question of grain, relatively little was ever achieved by way of consensus. We think the lack of consensus itself cries out for explanation. In this paper, we sketch a pluralist resolution (or, better, a dissolution) of the debate that flows from some extremely minimal commitments regarding the metaphysics of propositions and the attitudinal relations we bear to them. In doing so, we focus on the Act-type conception of propositions of Hanks (2015. Propositional Content. Oxford University Press) and Soames (2010. What is Meaning? Soochow University Lectures in Philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015) and our favored deflationary account, Minimalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Propositions
• Millianism
• Russellianism
• Fregeanism
• Cognitive significance‌

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the audience at the Workshop on Act-Type propositions at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), Donostia-San Sebastian, as well as Josh Dever, Jon Litland, and Gary Ostertag for discussion of this material. Thank you to Ron Avni for comments on an earlier version. A very special thanks is due to Peter Hanks. Much of our thinking on these matters is directly responsive to Hank's written work as well as discussions with him on related issues. Hanks emphasizes the underlying propositions-as-devices-of categorization thesis throughout his work and openly embraces a pluralism of content that seems to naturally follow (see the discussion of ‘The Uniqueness Thesis’ in Hanks (manuscript)).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Although conceiving of propositions in terms of sets of possible worlds remains important in formal semantics, the philosophical dispute has primarily been between two parties, Millians and Fregeans. See Schiffer (2008) for further discussion. In what follows, we will mostly set aside the possible worlds view of propositions.

2 See Hanks (2015), as well as Soames (2015), for how we might try to accommodate at least some of our Fregean intuitions on the act-type theory.

3 See Grzankowski and Buchanan (2019) and Buchanan and Grzankowski (forthcoming).

4 We have our general doubts about the orthodox account. See for example Bach (1997) and Buchanan (2012, 2016). We will leave this aside for present purposes.

5 Notice that one could endorse the Russelian conception propositions without being a Millian. One could, for example, be a descriptivist and hold that the contribution of a referring expression (say, ‘Aristotle’) is a uniqueness property (e.g, the property of being the one and only greatest philosopher of antiquity) .

6 We are assuming that the complex demonstrative ‘that guy’ in (1) is a genuine referring expression (for some dissent see King 2001).

7 The last step in this argument may be seen as implicitly based on a principle about the identity of propositions. An elementary version of this principle, involving simple propositions that predicate a property or relation of one or more objects, is given by (pi).

(pi) If p and q are simple propositions in which precisely the same properties are predicated of precisely the same things, then p = q.

The idea behind (pi) is that all there is to propositions is the way they represent things as being. Since the propositions semantically expressed by (1) and (2) both represent the same man as having the same property, and don't differ in the way in which they represent anything else as being, the proposition semantically expressed by (1) and the proposition semantically expressed by (2) are one and the same.

8 In our view, the biggest worry for the Millian account concerns the rationality of belief reporters who sincerely and competently assert propositions that are, according to the Millian, contradictory. Note that the same evidence that would incline us to assert (6) as true (her accepting ‘Garth Brooks is not Canadian’) would also be likely incline us to assert (i), which on first pass, would be represented by the Millian as (ia):

(i) Gwen does not believe that Garth is Canadian.

(ia) ∼Believes(<Gwen, <α, φ>>)

(ia) looks to be the contradiction of the Millian representation of (6) – i.e. (6a). But this is as puzzling, if not more so, than the situation regarding (5) and (6). However implausible it is to claim that Gwen is irrational given (5) and (6), it is even less plausible to think that a well-intentioned, well-informed speaker inclined asserting (6) and (i) is irrational. How can the Millian explain how a speaker sincerely uttering (6) and (i) is not irrational, given that on her account the semantic contents of those reports? Let's dub this worry The Speaker Rationality Problem. See Braun and Saul (2002) and Sider and Braun (2006) for attempts to address this worry for the Millian.

9 See Salmon (1986) and Soames (2002) for two sketches of how such a pragmatic story might go.

10 See Salmon (1986, 2015) and Braun (1998) for more details as well as Schiffer (2006, 2016) for further worries.

11 Recanati's favored Fregean account (including his ‘quasi-singular propositions’) was originally due to Schiffer (1978).

12 See Buchanan (2010) and (2016).

13 For further discussion and debate. King, Soames, and Speaks (2014).

14 See Grzankowski and Buchanan (2019) for further discussion.

15 See Soames (2010) for further development.

16 See Buchanan and Grzankowski (forthcoming) and Grzankowski and Buchanan (2019).

17 See Hanks (2015, 211) who aims to finesse this point by distinguishing between those states that are constitutively or fundamentally propositional versus those that have content in a non-constitutive or non-fundamental sense. We’d prefer a theory that doesn't force one's hand and leaves space for the view that perception is, fundamentally, a propositional attitude. See also Soames (2015, ch. 5) who looks to be committed to the view that perception does involve acts of predication by an agent.

18 See Crowther (2009).

19 See Schiller (2019).

20 On our preferred view, mental representation is itself explanatorily prior to linguistic representation, so in what follows we will focus on the former.

21 See Grzankowski and Buchanan (2019) as well as Rescorla’s (2020) for more on this point.

22 And in the extreme, there may be a sense – following Field (2017), call it an ‘egocentric content’ – in which representing-the-same-as that requires nothing short of sameness of truth-condition as well as sameness of conceptual role. Understood as such, these egocentric contents might (de facto) never be shared between two distinct agents (or even the same agent across times).

23 The causal properties of beliefs and other mental states are physical properties. Since Gwen's Freagean belief and her Millian belief are constituted by the same physical brain stuff, they both plausibly inherit the casual properties of the common neuro-physiological state.

24 We discuss this view and argue for it in more detail in Buchanan and Grzankowski (ms). Importantly, the constitution view is well motivated in the face of Kripke’s (1980) famous argument concerning pain and the nearby variant of that argument applied to representational states found in Burge (2009). Mental states cannot be identical to brain states but they can be constituted by them. On our favored view, your token mental states are ‘qua objects’ in Fine's sense (1982, 2003, 2008). For example, your belief that grass is green might be identified with a state of your brain qua-thing-with-such-such-history-and-functoinal-role.

25 As we pointed out earlier, one can see the Act-type theorist as someone who endorses PC, but then goes on to make further commitments – in particular, to propositions being understood as types of predicative acts. Notice that since a token act will always fall under indefinitely many different types, this further commitment might itself immediately be taken to entail pluralism about content. For example, Gwen's particular cognitive act, of say, predicating snoring of Oscar thought of as a pug will fall under infinitely many distinct types (including, for example, the act-type of predicating snoring of Oscar on a sunny day, while wearing a raincoat since that was all true of Oscar on the day). We will leave it up to the reader to decide whether this proliferate pluralism flowing directly from the type/token distinction is a cost (Båve 2019) or a benefit (see Hanks (manuscript)) of the act-type view.