A PRINCIPLED BASIS

Introduction

My concern in this chapter is to reject semantic holism and defend molecular semantic localism. The methodology described in the last chapter will play a central role.

I have pointed out (1.1) that holism is usually accompanied by a no-principled-basis consideration along the following lines:

Many who are not sympathetic to holism are impressed by the no-principled-basis consideration. Lepore and Fodor (1993) are striking examples. Quine has shown that an epistemic criterion like aprioricity cannot provide the principled basis. Lepore and Fodor think that the possibility of a nonepistemic criterion providing the basis is near enough empty:

So, if we accept that some inferential properties constitute meanings, we have no principled basis for denying that they all do. Molecular localism is untenable. Fodor, at least, concludes that no inferential properties count, thus embracing an atomistic localism.

Three important questions get insufficient attention in semantics. What are the semantic tasks? Why are they worthwhile? How should we accomplish them? The central purpose of this book is to answer these “methodological” questions and to see what semantic program follows from the answers.

It is troubling that much semantic theorizing proceeds with inexplicit reliance on apparently ad hoc views of the semantic tasks. Thus it is common to take for granted that semantics is concerned with truth and reference. I think that this view is right, but why is it right? What can we say to someone who disagrees, claiming that semantics should be concerned with, say, warranted assertability or “use”? Furthermore, it is troubling that, in attempting to accomplish the semantic task, we all go in for “intuition mongering,” even those of us who are naturalistically inclined and skeptical of the practice (e.g., Jerry Fodor 1990: 169). Broadly, it is troubling that we seem to lack a scientifically appealing method for settling the disputes that bedevil semantics. In Chapter 2, I propose a view of the semantic tasks by looking at the purposes we attempt to serve in ascribing meanings. And I propose a way of accomplishing them. This methodology has a place for intuitions, but it is the same limited place that they have elsewhere in science. I think that applying this methodology will help with all semantic issues. In this book I shall use it in the hope of settling some, including some of the most notorious.

A by-product of this methodological discussion is a naturalistic account of the thought experiments characteristic of “armchair” philosophy.

A REPRESENTATIONALIST PROGRAM

Representationalism

In the last chapter I have argued against the holistic threat to semantic localism. I have claimed that we ascribe localistic properties to our words for semantic purposes (descriptive), that we ought to do so (normative), and hence that these properties are meanings (basic). This raises the question: Which localistic properties do we and ought we to ascribe for semantic purposes? That question will be my main concern in this chapter. Certain wellknown arguments for eliminativism and revisionism will be set aside until the next chapter. My aim is to present a localistic program rather than a detailed theory.

The program I shall be presenting will be Representationalist. Representationalism is the view that meanings are entirely constituted by “representational” properties (3.11). So the meaning of a sentence is exhausted by the properties that determine its truth conditions} And the meaning of a word is exhausted by properties that determine its reference. Representationalism made an appearance in Chapter 1 in the guise of the Fregean assumption, but it played only a minor role in the critique of the case for holism. In Chapter 3, I argued that Representationalism counted decisively against holism, but I did not rest my case for localism on it. In the rest of this book, with holism rejected, I shall be arguing for Representationalism.

INTRODUCTION

Semantic Holism and Semantic Localism

At its most extreme, semantic, or meaning, holism is the doctrine that all of the inferential properties of a token in language or thought constitute its meaning. This doctrine is opposed by semantic localism, which, at its most extreme, denies that any of the inferential properties of a token constitute its meaning.

Despite its prima facie implausibility, semantic holism is ubiquitous. It has, as Jerry Fodor says, “something of the status of the received doctrine in the philosophy of language” (1987: 57). And it is urged, or taken for granted, in psychology and artificial intelligence. In this chapter, I shall look critically at the case for semantic holism.

The case can always be made to fit the folio wing “basic” argument:

1. Some of a token's inferential properties constitute its meaning.

2. If some of a token's inferential properties constitute its meaning then they all do.

3. So, all of a token's inferential properties constitute its meaning.

Fodor is an extreme “atomistic” localist: He resists this argument by rejecting premise (1) (pp. 73–95). Fodor's major reason for rejecting (1) is quite clear: He thinks that it leads inexorably to holism, which he regards as “a crazy doctrine” (p. 60) threatening Life As We Know It. He thinks that (1) has this unfortunate consequence because he accepts (2). Indeed, he is as committed to (2) as the most fervent holist.

I agree with Fodor's view of the holistic conclusion but think that he is quite wrong about (2). My aim in this chapter is to reject the case for (2).

Two things led to this book. The more immediate, but less important, cause was my concern about semantic, or meaning, holism. Holism has, as Jerry Fodor says, “something of the status of the received doctrine in the philosophy of language” (1987: 57). And it is urged, or taken for granted, in psychology and artificial intelligence. Yet it seemed to me, as it did to Fodor, clearly false (“crazy” was his word). So, in 1989, I set out to show this.

First, I had to show that the arguments for holism were no good. The main argument stems from Quine: The localist idea that some but not all inferential properties of a token constitute its meaning (or content) is alleged to yield an analytic-synthetic distinction with epistemologically objectionable consequences. You can accept this argument without becoming a holist, of course, if you are prepared to adopt an “atomistic” localism according to which no inferential property ever constitutes the meaning of a token. That is Fodor's path. However, atomism strikes me as implausibly extreme. Very likely, the meanings of some tokens are atomistic, but surely the meanings of others – perhaps ‘bachelor’ is an example – are not. I want to defend a “molecular” localism, according to which a few of the inferential properties of a token may constitute its meaning. I think that I can have what I want because I reject the Quinean argument: Molecular localism does not have epistemologically objectionable consequences unless it is saddled, gratuitously, with an epistemic thesis. I also reject other arguments against there being a “principled basis” for the molecular localises distinction among inferential properties.

INTRODUCTION

The Problem

Semantics is a veritable Balkans of the intellectual world. Localists war with holists, truth conditionalists with verificationists, deflationists with substantivists, direct-reference theorists with Fregeans, one-factor theorists with two-factor theorists, and so on. An army of enthusiasts for narrow content have occupied the territory formerly held by the proponents of wide content. Finally, no settlement of these disputes seems to be in sight.

One sound stands out in these battles: the clash of semantic intuitions. Indeed, sometimes that is the only sound to be heard. Intuitions are almost always aired in “thought experiments.”

This reliance on intuitions may be untroubling from some perspectives because it seems to exemplify the characteristic method of “armchair” philosophy. Yet it is surely troubling from the naturalistic perspective that I favor. According to naturalism, semantics is an empirical science like any other. Intuitions and thought experiments do not have this central role elsewhere in science. Why should they in semantics?

This question leads to the general ones that are the main concern of this chapter: How should we get to the truth in semantics? How should we go about settling semantic disputes? What is the right methodology for semantics?

A naturalistic approach to these questions can only hope for modest answers. We cannot expect to make more progress with the methodology of semantics than has been made with scientific methodologies in general. And we know how limited that progress is. It has turned out to be very difficult to say how we should get to the truth and settle disputes in science. My hope is only to bring semantic methodology close to other scientific methodologies.

INTRODUCTION

What Are Eliminativism and Revisionism?

The view of meanings that has emerged in the last chapter is realist and conservative: Thoughts and utterances have meanings, and meanings are, minor revisions aside (4.12), the properties that we already ascribe for semantic purposes. And meanings are, as many suppose, truth referential, “Representationalist.” But I have not yet seriously considered the radical alternatives of eliminativism (or nihilism) and revisionism. In this chapter, I shall do so. We need to start by clarifying both these alternatives. Eliminativism. Eliminativism about F's is the doctrine that there are no F's. It is important to note that this eliminativism needs to be accompanied by a background assumption about what it would be like for there to be F's, about what is essential to being an F, about the nature of F-hood. For, it is not sufficient simply to say there are no F's; one needs an argument. And that argument will have the following form:

The first premise is the background assumption. A possible realist response is then to deny the assumption: F's are not essentially G. How do we settle this disagreement? That is precisely the methodological issue discussed earlier (2.10). We saw then that it may be difficult to settle the issue even by the “ultimate” method.

Introduction

It is no secret that where A and B denote distinct types of properties, entities, or what have you, philosophers disagree as to what is precisely implied by the assertion that As supervene on Bs. On the other hand, there is general philosophical agreement that at the very core of this assertion is the idea of nonreducibility-cum-dependence: As' covariation with and dependence on Bs is consistent with their irreducibility to Bs. It is precisely this core feature of supervenience that looks attractive when we discuss the ontic status of events. It is well known that Donald Davidson formidably pioneered, and many after him pursued, the idea that events are best thought of as ontologically distinct, irreducible entities. The case for the dependence of events, on the other hand, may be easier to make. It suffices, for example, to go along with the currently popular view of events as instances of properties. If events are exemplifyings, as this account has it, then, clearly, there must be something that exemplifies, something on which events are, to some degree or other, dependent. The upshot of the combination of these ideas is that events and supervenience seem to be made for each other.

The issue of the supervenience of events has received its first, and to date only, systematic examination in Lawrence Lombard's Events: A Metaphysical Study. The account of event-supervenience of Events is important in many ways.

Jerry Fodor enunciates the physicalist credo thus:

Fodor is claiming that if intentional predicates – for example, ‘believes that tigers have stripes’ and ‘desires to see a tiger’ – express genuine properties, then these properties must either be identical to or supervene on the properties of basic physics; that is, the properties in the physicists' completed catalogue or complexes composed of such properties. A thoroughgoing physicalist holds that all genuine properties, or at least all properties that play a role in science, are identical to or supervene on physical properties. Of course, most philosophers nowadays do not think that psychological properties (intentional properties among them) are identical to physical properties (or complexes of physical properties). Their view, which it is fair to say is now the received view, is that psychological properties either are not real or supervene on basic physical properties.

Philosophical literature is rich with attempts to identify the different species of the supervenience relation, to work out the logical relations among the different species, and to determine the causal efficacy of supervenient properties. I will here confine my investigation to what has been called strong supervenience. There seem to exist two species of this type of supervenience: local (or mereological) and global. One can illustrate the difference by considering two cases. (i) Many materialists will probably be committed to the view that if an individual of this world and its twin in some possible world differ in some psychological way at a given moment, then these two individuals must also differ in some physical way at that moment. In being so committed, these materialists will be viewing psychological properties as being locally (and strongly) supervenient on physical properties. (ii) A philosopher might think that it is impossible for two individuals, say Oscar and Twinoscar, to have distinct psychological properties at some moment (say, one believes that something is water, and the other believes that it is twater) and yet for the worlds they inhabit, including their own bodily constitution, to be physically identical at that moment. Such a philosopher would be expressing the view that psychological properties are globally (and strongly) supervenient on the physical.

In recent years, supervenience has been the subject of extensive philosophical analysis. Varieties of supervenience have been distinguished, their pairwise logical relationships examined, and their usefulness for various purposes scrutinized. However, despite extensive analysis, some details are askew, some controversies unresolved. I will by no means attempt to straighten out all the details or to settle all the controversies. But I will take a detailed look at what others have said and add a couple of wrinkles.

In Section 1, I present and explore the core intuitive idea of supervenience. In Section 2, I argue that the possible-world versions of weak and strong supervenience do not imply, respectively, the modal-operator versions of weak and strong. In Section 3, I discuss an aspect of global supervenience, in particular what it is for two worlds to have the same total pattern of distribution of properties of a certain sort. In Section 4, I examine the logical relationships between weak and global supervenience, and between strong and global. In Section 5, I make some observations about multiple-domain weak and strong supervenience. In Section 6, I consider whether any variety of supervenience implies reduction. Finally, in Section 7, I briefly note two theoretical uses of supervenience.

Introduction

Everything whatever is determined by the physical. So goes the sweeping physicalist slogan. The thesis is “global” in the sense, among others, of being about all things and their properties everywhere everywhen. For each thing in the world and for any nonphysical property it may have – mental, semantic, valuational, whatever – physical conditions determine whether it has that property. An equivalent formulation of the thesis, current in the literature, is this: given the physical conditions that obtain in our world, and given any other world in which the same physical conditions obtain, the two worlds are the same as regards what things have what nonphysical properties. Worlds that are physical duplicates are duplicates in nonphysical conditions as well.

Which worlds? Probably the physically possible worlds (the ppws) – those in which the laws of physics hold. The sweeping thesis is not meant as a logically or conceptually necessary truth, and as we will see in Section 5, the empirical evidence for it warrants generalization only over the ppws. In any case, the thesis is “global” in a further sense: it generalizes over all the relevant worlds and over whole worlds to boot. This is especially clear in the following formulation, also current: in ppws, the physical conditions φ determine the nonphysical conditions ψ iff

where the same physical (or other) conditions obtain in both of two worlds just in case, for each such condition χ, χ obtains in one iff χ obtains in the other.

There are two problems concerning the implications of certain forms of supervenience that I wish to discuss. The problems are connected in that their resolution depends on deciding what sort of enterprise we are engaged in when we approach the problems. Supervenience can be formulated and discussed as a purely logical set of formulas, which are indeed quite engaging in their own right. On the other hand, much of the interest in supervenience has been generated by its apparent usefulness in understanding certain philosophically perplexing realms of life, for example, mentality and morality. These two conceptions of supervenience can come into conflict with one another, as we will see. The conflicts provide the opportunity to assess our motivations.

The First Problem

Suppose we accept supervenience in the form of the Quinean slogan “No difference without a physical difference,” or, as Davidson puts it for one particular case, “There cannot be two events alike in all physical respects but differing in some mental respects.” Does it follow from this that there are principles, that is, universal generalizations, in which sufficient conditions are given in physical (or subvening) terms for the presence of certain supervening qualities?

It might seem as though there obviously are such principles. Consider some mental state that I am now in, say one of anxiety. By our assumption, no one can be nonanxious without also differing from me in some physical way.

Introduction

In this essay my primary focus will be on the why of supervenience, rather than the what. That is, I shall be more concerned with the arguments for supervenience, in particular for the supervenience of the mental on the physical, than with questions of precisely how to formulate the doctrine. Much has been written on the latter topic, but relatively little on the former. I think this is a pity, for it has encouraged the view that the supervenience of the mental on the physical depends on some kind of basic intuition and that those who find physicalism unappealing are therefore free to reject it. I will show that, on the contrary, the doctrine of supervenience is a simple consequence of some evident truths. (Of course, the “why” of supervenience is not entirely irrelevant to the “what”: once we understand the argument for the doctrine, we will be better able to see which versions of it are defensible.)

Once I have laid out the argument for supervenience, it will be helpful to compare it with a related argument for the thesis of physical realization (i.e., in the mind–brain case, the thesis that mental states are always realized by physical states). The relationship between the doctrine of supervenience and the doctrine of physical realization is not always well understood. Distinguishing the reasons for believing these two doctrines will help to clarify their relationship.

In this essay, I shall explore the relationship between supervenience and epistemology. There are many theories of supervenience and many theories of epistemology, and that means that it will be extremely difficult to say anything definitive. It is not my aim to explore this subject in a definitive way. My interest in the subject of supervenience and epistemology was aroused by the work of Alston, Van Cleve, and Sosa. They have argued that if epistemic terms supervene on nonepistemic ones, then one argument in favor of coherence theories over foundation theories of justification is undermined. The argument is one to the effect that if the supervenience thesis is correct, then the coherence theorist must sacrifice her primary alleged advantage over any foundation theorist. That advantage is that the coherence theorist can explain why our most fundamental beliefs are justified, namely, because they cohere with some system of beliefs, while the foundation theorist is limited to saying that our basic beliefs are justified without giving any explanation of why. Any explanation of why our basic beliefs are justified would become the basis of an argument to the conclusion that they are justified, and such an argument would render the justification of the beliefs in question nonbasic. The coherence theorist thus claims that the foundation theorist is left with a kind of explanatory surd that the coherence theorist can avoid by explaining justification in terms of coherence.