Reference, predication, judgment and their relations

ABSTRACT

Over the course of the past ten-plus years, Peter Hanks and Scott Soames have developed detailed versions of Act-Based views of propositions which operate with the notions of reference to objects, indicating properties, predication, and judgment (or entertaining). In this paper I discuss certain foundational aspects of the Act-Based approach having to do with the relations between these notions. In particular, I argue for the following three points. First, that the approach needs both an atomistically understood thin notion of reference, a bare act of thinking of o, as well as a more involved notion, something like making o a target of predication. Second, that the acts of thinking of o and indication of the property of being F are in no sense parts of the acts of predication of being F of o and judgment that o is F. Rather, the former are simply necessary preconditions for the performance of the latter. The acts of predication or judgment are emphatically not structured sequences of separate acts but unities in and of themselves. Finally, that we should understand the Act-Based theorists' claim that to predicate is to judge as the claim that judgment can be reductively analyzed in terms of predication. Furthermore, while predication is metaphysically a multiple relation between a predicator, a target, and the property predicated, judgment is a monadic property, just one that has propositional content.

KEYWORDS:

• Reference
• predication
• judgment
• propositions
• content
• unity

Acknowledgements

I want to thank Alex Grzankowski, Peter Hanks, and the audience at the workshop Act-Type Theory of Propositions at the University of Basque Country for helpful comments and discussion.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Hanks takes the act to be one of judging that o is F, Soames it to be that of entertaining the proposition that o is F. I will follow Hanks here, pretending that this difference doesn’t exist since it doesn’t matter for any of the points I’m making.

2 It should be clear that this doesn’t really amount to an analysis of quantification since our understanding of what it is for a property to be universally instantiated is plausibly derived from our understanding of everything having it, rather than vice versa. Whether anything more informative can be said is an open question.

3 In cases where what is predicated is a relation we can write it like this: ├ <___T1, __ _T2, ___P>, etc. Note that the targets now come as ordered to make clear what the order of predication is, to accommodate cases where this is needed.

4 The above symbols are supposed to primarily stand for the relevant act-tokens. However, they can also do double duty for the act-types.

5 I used to present both Soames and Hanks’s views along those lines myself in Reiland (2013).

6 For Soames’ reasons for distinguishing between predication and judgment see Soames (2010, 61–66).

7 Don’t be put off the plausibility of the reductive claim by the fact that ‘judgment’ as used in ordinary language and in a lot of philosophy, especially epistemology, is a much richer notion than something that could result from mere predication. I’ve discussed this before, arguing that we should distinguish between the thin predication-resultant notion of judging, S(emantic)-judging, from the much richer notion used in epistemology, E(pistemic)-judging which is something like the act of settling a question about how things are in the light of one’s evidence (a theoretical decision that concludes theoretical deliberation, analogously to how a practical decision concludes practical deliberation.) To illustrate the difference between these two notions: when one guesses that p, one S-judges that p, but doesn’t E-judge that p. When you S-judge you exhibit being a representational creature, but not necessarily yet an epistemic one. The analytic or reductive claim of the Act-Based theory is strictly about S-judging (for more, see Reiland 2019b).

8 This also means that Hanks’s own view is inconsistent with his claim that propositions qua types could exist without any acts of predication (Hanks 2015, 27). I’ve discussed this inconsistency briefly before in Reiland 2017. It’s also unclear how the above claims about the primacy of token acts in the generation of content relate to the interpretivist aspects of Hanks’s view on which he claims that it’s the subsequent assignment of acts into types that creates determinate content (Hanks 2015, 208–210).

9 See also the discussion of fearing that p vs. fearing the proposition that p in Grzankowski (2016, 317–318). Like judgment that p, fear that p is a propositional attitude, one that has propositional content. However, like fear of Fido, fear of the proposition that p is an objectual attitude, one that is directed towards an object, the proposition that p. Treating judgments as binary relations to propositions seems very much like treating them on the second model whereas it is the first one that is the right one. All of this might be due to the prejudicial use of the standard Russellian terminology on which propositions are supposed to be ‘objects of the attitudes’. As if for a judgment or fear that p to have the propositional content that p were for it to be related to a proposition qua an object. That was true on Rusell’s own conception of propositions as chunks of the world the attitudes were about. But it makes very little sense on the broadly Fregean conception of propositions, held also by the Act-Theorists, on which they are themselves supposed to be representational and have truth-conditions.