On Naming

According to the classic description theory, names are synonymous with definite descriptions; they are said to abbreviate such descriptions, to be “short for” them. The two are therefore intersubstitutable. The description is said to “analyze” the name—spell out its meaning. Thus, there can’t be a language with names but no descriptions, and names work in the same way as descriptions. In principle, names are eliminable in favor of descriptions. But this synonymy claim raises an obvious question: if the two are synonymous, then aren’t descriptions synonymous with names—don’t they mean what names mean? Whenever the description occurs, we should be able to substitute the name and preserve meaning. In fact, couldn’t we construct a language in which all descriptions have associated names synonymous with them? Then we should be able to replace descriptions with names in all occurrences. The trouble is that synonymy is symmetrical, but the description theory is intended to provide an asymmetrical analysis in which descriptions are taken as primary and basic. We don’t want to end up saying that descriptions are analyzable by means of names—indeed, that they arenames. But what is to stop us saying that descriptions are just “long for” names? What if people spoke a language in which from childhood everything referred to is named but never definitely described (no expressions of the form “the F”), and then descriptions are added later? Wouldn’t these speakers naturally view the later descriptions as analyzable by means of names? For this is what goes through their minds when definite descriptions are used.

What is the right thing to say here? The first thing to say is that names and descriptions have a different function and play different linguistic roles. The name labels, the description characterizes—so the two are not semantically equivalent (strictly synonymous). The dictionary (OED) is helpful here: a name is defined as “a word or set of words by which someone or something is known, addressed, or referred to”; a description is defined as “a spoken or written account of a person, object, or event”. These are quite different concepts: descriptions are not words by which a thing is known or addressed, and names don’t provide accounts of things. The two types of expression do different jobs, answer to different needs. In fact, it is a misnomer to call definite descriptions “descriptions”—they don’t provide “accounts” of people and things. It would be better to call them singular predicative phrases; then the “description theory” would be claiming, implausibly, that words by which people and things are known or addressed are semantically indistinguishable from singular predicative phrases. A person known as “Socrates” would be defined as someone an account of whom would include the fact that he taught Plato. That sounds funny at best. The truth is that the naming relation and the describing relation are different relations; so, the corresponding phrases belong to different linguistic categories. One cannot be reduced to the other. They are not synonyms. Maybe they share sense and reference, but that doesn’t make them instances of the same linguistic type.

That objection may seem pedantic, philosophically, though it is suggestive. What about the issue of dependency—do names depend on descriptions (so-called) but not vice versa? Names certainly don’t depend on non-indexical descriptions; they can be introduced by means of suitable demonstratives. But more to the point descriptions typically work by employing names, either proper names or names of properties. We say “the capital of France” and we name the properties that things have (“red”, “capital”, “electricity”). So, descriptions depend on names not vice versa. We can’t find an asymmetry that way. What about the idea that descriptions are psychologically more basic, simpler, clearer? What if an avid Russellian went around speaking Russell-ese—using Russell’s analysis of descriptions everywhere other people use names and unanalyzed descriptions? Someone unfamiliar with this apparatus might not know what the hell he is talking about; a friend might interject saying, “He means Charles is a bit of a twerp”. Then why didn’t he just say that instead of all the rigmarole about “There is an x such that blah blah blah”? The description theory is not exactly good social psychology. Then what is it exactly? Why all the stuff about analysis, abbreviation, basicness? There is clearly a semantic relationship between names and descriptions, but that is a far cry from the rhetoric deployed in formulating the so-called description theory of names. Why not speak of the name theory of descriptions based on the same data? Indeed, descriptions are more name-like and name-involving than names are description-like and description-involving. Names don’t look and function like singular predicative phrases; if anything, these phrases are syntactically name-like (Frege’s actual theory). Among family members names are routinely employed in ignorance of the descriptions known by the general public; it would be very strange for Einstein’s relatives to think of little Alfred as “the inventor of relativity theory”. For them the name is far more salient than the description. In precisely what sense are names “less basic” than descriptions? The fundamental problem is that the description theory simply helps itself to an asymmetry claim while starting from a claim of symmetrical synonymy. That claim is dubious to begin with, but the further claim looks unwarranted. The two categories of expression are interrelated and share some semantic features, but the similarity doesn’t go much deeper than that. The idea that names are nothing but descriptions looks like an exaggeration, equally matched by the idea that descriptions are nothing but names. It is a case of over-assimilation in both directions.[1]

[1] The abbreviation claim is both implausible and necessary to the description theory. A genuine abbreviation literally shortens a word or phrase, as with “Tom” for “Thomas” and “Sue” for “Susan”, but names don’t abbreviate descriptions in that way, or in any way; they are quite different words. But the claim is necessary because without it the objection would be that names are nothing like the descriptions supposed to define them. An abbreviation of “the capital of France” would be something like “the cap of Fra”, but “Paris” is nothing like that. The description theory is really a highly revisionary analysis of names, implausible on its face. We have all the counterexamples that have been brought against it, but it is also methodologically flawed. You can’t infer semantic identity from semantic similarity. I suspect Russell, in particular, was moved to this inference by his anti-substance metaphysics and love of sense-data.

American Guns

Suppose you visited a foreign country in which the following practices prevailed. Poisonous chemicals are freely available. You can buy them at your local pharmacy or at specialty poison outlets. They are lethal—they can kill people and often do. People buy them in large quantities. There is a thriving culture of chemical ownership. Some of these poisons have legitimate uses, as in pest control, but many people buy them for other reasons—often for criminal reasons, or self-defense, or as a hobby. There is no gun culture in this society; guns were banned years ago, or heavily regulated. People just aren’t interested in guns (they have a nasty history). Of course, murders are committed using poisonous chemicals, and the chemicals have been weaponized in special poison dispensers—you can kill people by spraying them, sometimes from great distances. There are movies and TV shows that feature chemical violence. People take it for granted. Insane individuals often get their hands on these poisons and do insane things, or just plain evil people. Let’s suppose there has recently been an epidemic of chemical mass murder: poison gas released in playgrounds, church sprayings, school food poisonings, etc. Thousands have died terrible deaths. There is trauma and fear everywhere; people stay at home rather than risk being poisoned. What to do about it? Ban poison chemicals, or restrict their use, or criminalize them except under special circumstances, obviously. Of course, the poison chemicals industry will protest—they make a ton of money out of selling poisons to the general population. They have their lobbyists and loyal politicians. Some “intellectuals” defend their prevalence as an expression of freedom—“They want to take our poisons away!” They allege that chemicals don’t kill, people do; they point to instances of chemical self-defense (you poison the aggressor first). There was that old lady who sprayed a bunch of burglars in her house and brought them to justice the old-fashioned way (you should have seen them writhe!). Poisons are part of our tradition, passed on from father to son, with a distinguished history (remember the battle of Arsenic Hill?). So, this society persists with its lax poison laws, its untrammeled capitalism, its time-honored folkways. Of course, it is perfectly true that tightening up the poisonous chemical laws along with community-wide confiscation would eliminate the problem, but the people of this country don’t see it that way, so the mass killings continue—often involving children. They tearfully say their prayers and send their condolences, but they don’t want to give up their chemicals in their attractive bottles and special display cases. And surely it won’t happen to them.

Propositions

What is a proposition? What indeed: no one really knows. There have been many proposals: a sentence, a statement, a thought, a meaning, a combination of concepts, a combination of objects, a set of possible worlds, a possible state of affairs, a picture, a model, an image, a name of a truth-value, a description of a fact, whatever is true or false, a family resemblance concept, a non-existent entity, a move in a language game, an ordered pair, the content of a belief, an argument of a truth-function, a sentence in the language of thought. The suggestions range from the mental and linguistic, on the one hand, to the modal and extralinguistic, on the other. Wittgenstein was obsessed with the question, and both his books are about it.[1] I know what a cat is and I know what a mat is, but I don’t know what the proposition that there’s a cat on the mat is; it has to do with cats and mats but it isn’t either or both. It hovers between the world and the mind, unsure where it belongs. It is metaphysically insecure. We might put the problem as follows: an ordinary object (a “substance”) consists of a plurality of properties (“accidents”) co-instantiated in a single thing, but a proposition doesn’t instantiate the properties it refers to—it attributes them. The proposition that the cat is on the mat isn’t a mat or a cat. It contains those properties in the mode of attribution but not instantiation. But what kind of entity does that? You can’t see it or touch it or store it in the attic. It doesn’t belong in the same box as the objects and properties it is about (and what is that?). It is ontologically peculiar; yet it is hardly a mystery. Propositions aren’t like consciousness—there is nothing it’s like to be one. They are ordinary but puzzlingly exceptional. Could the question be investigated empirically? Propositions aren’t individual substances, or accidents of substances, yet they seem to have an individual identity, a sort of cohesive unity. Do they even have parts? Hard to say—not in the way a car has parts. Somehow, we grasp them, know them, apprehend them; but what that is remains obscure. We believe them, but we don’t know what this belief relation amounts to—is it like uttering a sentence or singing a musical note? Do we construct them or do we find them ready-made? Neither answer seems obviously correct. Without them there would be neither language nor thought, but they aren’t themselves linguistic or mental—unless we stipulate as much. They aren’t really psychological, but they have a lot to do with psychology. They also form the subject matter of logic. To describe them as material is to court accusations of category confusion. The OED calls a proposition “a statement expressing a judgment or opinion”:  but beliefs are not statements and they take propositions as objects, and what about propositions as they occur in conditionals? A proposition is not a speech act, despite the speech act of propositioning. The dictionary seems as lost as the rest of us. Perhaps they can only be shown but not said, sensed but not sensed. If Alice were to encounter one, what would it say to her? “Don’t you know it’s rude to stare?” “But you are so—funny looking!”

But let’s not wallow in ignorance. Let’s take the proposition by the horns. Here is what I think: a proposition is first cousin to a possibility. The proposition that the cat is on the mat is akin to the possibility that the cat is on the mat. But it isn’t identical to that possibility, because it is not neutral about it; propositions are committed beings—they take a stand. They say of a possibility that it is actual. Of course, they don’t strictly say anything—people do that—but it is as if they say things (the dictionary isn’t wrong about that). A proposition declares its own truth. The proposition that snow is white rejects the proposition that snow is not white. It performs an act of exclusion. A proposition predicates actuality of possibility: it identifies a possibility and then classifies it as actual—all without saying a word. It is as if it speaks. Indeed, if it did not speak, we would be unable to, because in asserting propositions we rely on them to put their foot down. We can only assert things because they do. It is no good trying to assert something without expressing a proposition, say by turning pink; you have to say something propositional (perform an act of saying that p). Propositions are like guns: they kill people not people and their fingers (you can’t kill someone by crooking your index finger a certain way). Propositions are what enable statements to be made—the sine qua non of communication. Animal signaling systems don’t (as far as we know) express propositions, but human language does; and this is what makes languages such powerful tools. But they do so only by virtue of the propositions they encode—they are the real agents of communication (knowledge transmission). We affirm because they affirm. We can’t make them affirm by a sheer act of will—as if we could assert a proposition just by throwing a stone in the air and shouting “Say that p!”. Unless you know how to identify and express propositions you will not get very far as a communicator. Propositions are the machinery of human communication, as of thought; and they work because they have attributive powers built into them. A proposition is not an agnostic but a believer—it is committed. It knows (or thinks it knows) what possibilities are real. It isn’t just a complex but an opinionated complex (“The cat is bloody well on the mat!”). Of course, this is very strange—propositions are not people! But people are also not propositions; they need them to make statements or say anything meaningful (not counting “ouch!” and the like). They don’t need us, but we need them. They give thought content.

How should we understand this property of propositions? As follows: a proposition selects a given possibility as real or actual. It is selective in what it is committed to, very selective; it won’t do to select a possibility coextensive with the possibility in question. It is very particular about what possibilities it selects as real. Again, this is agential talk, calculated to raise eyebrows, but it is hard to avoid it and intuitively appealing to indulge in it. The proposition selects a particular possibility and affirms it as actual: it performs a kind of double act—referring and endorsing. At least we naturally describe it so, borrowing from our vocabulary of human actions; the reality may well be better described otherwise. Our conception of propositions has them referring and endorsing (it’s a bit like how our conception of atoms has them attracting and repelling.) The proposition does something analogous to these human actions. That is, if we are realists about propositions, we end up talking this way—and realism seems the best bet, here as elsewhere. The workings of the mind depend on the workings of propositions not vice versa. We assert, deny, reason, and conclude with the aid of propositions; they don’t rely on us (what would that be?). We also rely on objects and properties to get our thoughts up and running; they don’t depend on us. Concepts without corresponding properties are empty and impotent; if reality contained no properties (“universals”), we would be unable to think about it. Propositions are the pre-existing material of thought and language not consequences of them—that is the realist doctrine. It may be puzzling, even totally confounding, but that’s down to us not them.[2]

I have described what propositions do but not what they are (their ontology). Here I think we draw a blank. We know they are not substances, or anything like substances (so worse off than numbers and geometrical figures). But we have no positive conception of their ontological category: they are not spatial occupants or cohesive bodies or perceptible particulars. They are creatures of their own devising—attributional beings, committed abstracta, opinionated oddballs. You can’t even imagine them. They belong in Wonderland like disembodied feline smiles and frumious bandersnatches. Yet here they are in the real world all around us, populating our minds, controlling our language, shaping our history. Propositions, you have a lot to answer for. Your politics is not always of the finest. You exist in the mouths and hearts of angels and demons.[3]

[1] It would be interesting to trace out this obsession in the two works; it dates back to his earliest philosophical preoccupations. Pictures or practices?

[2] The position I am defending, or presupposing, is clearly very similar to Frege’s conception of objective “thoughts”—propositional realism. I have always felt that he misnamed these entities, given his anti-psychologism, but perhaps he was motivated to do so by a recognition that propositions have an inbuilt commitment to their own truth, like thoughts in the psychological sense. Propositions are ascriptive: the cat is on the mat; it isn’t a mere possibility. It is as if they think.

[3] Personifying propositions seems unavoidable—as if they have opinions and will. They are, indeed, what makes us persons—thinkers, speakers, rational beings. We are propositional creatures. Our attitudes and emotions are propositional. And we share these propositions; they are not private property. There is a fund of them that we all tap into. If early modern philosophy discovered ideas, twentieth century philosophy discovered propositions. Human nature is (partly) constituted by our propositional competence. Our species success depends on this competence. When God created propositions, he made human thought possible—science, morality, art, conversation. No wonder we personify them; they make us the persons we are. But we don’t have a clear idea of their nature (and therefore of our own nature). We are both conscious and propositional, and neither of these traits is pellucid to us, immediate as they are.

Brain Views

Oh, those perishing bats, hogging all the limelight, with their fancy sense of echolocation! Let’s talk about the humble human and how things look to him or her. Can this be reduced to brain states? We have agreed that consciousness is having a point of view, specifically a visual one; can we argue that this point of view cannot be merely physical? Can we formulate an anti-physicalist argument based around the notion of a visual point of view? And is this helpful? Yes, we can, and yes, I think it’s a helpful to do so. The argument is very intuitive when framed this way. Suppose you are sitting across from me, with a different visual perspective; and suppose I can see your brain, specifically what is happening in your visual cortex. I see the physical correlate of your visual experience, but I don’t see your visual experience—I have to imagine that. I don’t use my imagination to know about your brain state, but I have to use it to know about your conscious state. So, how can the two things be identical? I might find it difficult to fire up my imagination in order to obtain this knowledge—it takes some effort. If I am very unimaginative, I might fail. But I don’t need to make any effort in order to know what is happening in your brain—I can just look and see (it might be recorded up on a screen or actually open to view). My view of your brain is unimpeded, but I have no view of your view, only an act of imagination. The brain is in its nature something open to visual inspection, but your visual experience is not; it is not perceptible at all, being (as we say) private. You can’t view a view.

This is a mild example of epistemic difficulty; most people have no trouble imagining the other person’s perspective (but do they know it as well as the person who has that perspective?). Imagination can provide knowledge of other minds. But notoriously, it will only take you so far: can a person with impaired vision imagine the vision of someone visually unimpaired, or a color-blind person imagine the vision of someone not color-blind, or a bat imagine the vision of an eagle, or a human imagine the vision of a fly, or a human imagine the vision of a visually superior alien, or even of a bee? Imagination is a frail reed when it comes to knowing the nature of visual experience in general—and why should be it be omniscient in this respect? But this limitation is irrelevant to knowledge of the brain; here we can just look and see—we can inspect the brain to our heart’s content. It puts up no resistance; it doesn’t run and hide; it is quite open about what is in there. It can be viewed from afar or up close or under a microscope. But visual experience can’t be viewed at all and must be conjectured based on imagination or projection or surmise. The mind is private by nature and the brain is public to a fault (introvert and extravert, respectively). Suppose the difference between my brain and yours is that I have neurons that fire with greater frequency than yours do, or my neurons have longer axons; and suppose this is the physical basis of the difference in the way we see things, say colors. In such a case I have absolutely no difficulty knowing the physical difference between us, but I face an opaque wall when it comes to knowing your visual experiences, supposing these to be very different from mine. Your experience is closed to me but your brain is an open book. And this is part of the essence of experience and the brain: the brain is inherently knowable in a certain way, but the mind is inherently not knowable in that way. To be conscious is to have a point of view, but points of view can’t be viewed, while brains can be. Thus, I can form a conception of your brain by perception, but I can’t do that with your mind; I can’t perceive your perceptions. My consciousness cannot be a consciousness of your consciousness—my point of view can’t take in your point of view as direct object. Views can’t be viewed. Simple as that.

This is really just another way to state the bat argument or the “knowledge argument”. But it is extremely simple and requires no elaborate thought experiments or alien beasts. It requires only the simple idea that points of view can’t be viewed: you can’t look at what someone else is experiencing; you can’t have an experience as of an experience. If you could, there would be no limitation on our knowledge of other minds deriving from differences in how we experience the world. Everyone would know what anyone else is experiencing just by looking at their brain (or face): visible brains (or faces) would produce knowable minds. Indeed, to see a brain would be exactly the same experience as seeing a mind, but it isn’t. There would be no other minds problem, but there is. There would be no ignorance of an alien creature’s experience, but there is. It follows that mind cannot be identified with brain. The root cause is privacy; or rather, mental privacy combined with brain publicity. For if the brain were as private as the mind, there would be no epistemic discrepancy. This is really the thrust of the standard argument, though it may be obscured by standard presentations. Just remember: you can’t view a view, but you can view a non-view (like the physical brain). This is why you can’t know alien experience but you can know alien brains. Brains cause themselves to be seen, but minds don’t cause themselves to be seen. It would not be possible to start with not seeing someone else’s mental state (as such) and then gradually home in on it till you see it in the form of a brain state. Nor would it be possible to start with a seen brain state and gradually alter the viewing conditions until it vanished into a mental state. But you could begin by seeing water in the normal way and gradually magnify it till the H2O molecules became visible, or begin with the molecules and pull back till you saw the watery liquid as you normally see it. You cannot see a mental state as a brain state or a brain state as a mental state.[1]

[1] The problem with the bat is that we can’t see its echolocation experiences; if we could, we would be able to form a conception of them. But then, there would be no argument to the effect that one can be known and the other not known. However, the imperceptibility point immediately shows that mind and brain cannot be identical (short of a convincing rebuttal). That is the underlying mechanics of the argument. Other minds must be imagined, since they cannot be perceived; but brains can always be perceived, so there is no need to imagine them.