Analytic and a priori
I have a basic understanding of analytic, synthetic, a priori, a posteriori. But I have trouble distinguishing between analytic and a priori for example. Do they just have the same meaning with 2 different ways of saying it or is there some other distinction?
For instance, why is 'synthetic a priori' different to 'analytic a posteriori'?
For instance, why is 'synthetic a priori' different to 'analytic a posteriori'?
Comments (304)
A priori is an epistemological term, which means that something is known, or knowable, without experience, by means of reason alone. This need not be in virtue of its being analytic – for example, you might think 'I exist' is in some way a priori, even though it's contingent and so not analytic.
Quoting ladyphoenix86
Good question. Some philosophers have believed analytic and a priori to be coextensive, and the same goes for synthetic and a posteriori. From this empiricist point of view, whatever is analytic is a priori and whatever is synthetic is a posteriori, and vice versa.
But they have different meanings. Analytic-synthetic is semantic, and a priori-a posteriori is epistemological.
Analytic-synthetic is about what makes a proposition true. Analytic propositions are true by virtue of what their words mean, and synthetic propositions are not true merely by virtue of what their words mean. One of Kant's ways of thinking about the difference is that analytic truths don't tell us very much, i.e., they are explicative, whereas synthetic truths can tell us something new, i.e., they are ampliative.
A priori-a posteriori is about how we know things or how we justify our knowledge. A priori knowledge is known independently of experience. A posteriori, or empirical, knowledge is known from experience. The thing to note about a posteriori knowledge is that because it is confirmed or disconfirmed by experience, it tells us what happens to be the case, and not what must be the case, i.e., this kind of knowledge is about what is contingent. In contrast, a priori knowledge is neither confirmed nor disconfirmed by experience, and so concerns what must be the case, i.e., this kind of knowledge is about what is necessary.
As you've noticed, some philosophers think there is synthetic a priori knowledge.
Quoting ladyphoenix86
To know a synthetic proposition a priori is to know something that is not true merely due to the definitions of the terms involved, and to know it independently of experience too. This is important because, if such knowledge is possible, then we can have substantial, ampliative knowledge (from the synthetic component) that does not depend on experience, i.e., that we attain using our own reason unaided by experiential confirmation.
Analytic a posteriori knowledge, on the other hand, seems impossible. It doesn't make much sense to say a sentence that's true by virtue of the meaning of the constituent words can be known from experience. If you understand it then you know it's true already, without any perception or investigation of the world.
The main thing I haven't really addressed here is what "independently of experience" precisely means, because it can be interpreted strictly or loosely.
'All bachelors are unmarried'
is analytic while
'7+5=12'
is synthetic.
I wonder how Kant would class the following true proposition:
'If P is a bachelor at time T then (if P marries at time T2 then if (T2
And if that's still analytic, how about:
'If P is a bachelor at time T then (if P was born at time T2 then if (T2>T-5 years) it is the case that 1+1=3)'
I do get why Kant thinks 7+5 = 12 is synthetic, whilst all bachelors are unmarried is analytic. So if you elaborate a little I may understand.
Bachelor = unmarried: analytic because true in virtue of the meanings of the words.
7+5 = 12: not analytic because '7+5' does not mean '12'. Synthetic because 7+5 can be shown by counting in various ways that are self-evidently beyond question to equal 12.
Interesting cases, along the kind of lines you seem to be indicating, of fact that are at least quasi-analytic is exampled by "Paris is the capital of France". It is not a merely empirical proposition because there doesn't seem to be any imaginable way to falsify it.
Great, so how would you imagine it could be falsifiable, as all the other "plain old empirical propositions" such as "the sun is shining here and now" "Plato wrote the republic" "John F Kennedy was assasinated by Lee Harvey Oswald" and so on, can easily can be imagined to be ?
Are you seriously suggesting that France could have a capital other Paris?
That's Kripke's necessary aposteriori in a nutshell.
'Bachelor --> Unmarried' is NOT true in virtue of the words.
The definition of bachelor is not 'an object that is unmarried'. It is something like 'An adult, male, live, human that has never been married.' To get from there to the Theorem 'If X is a bachelor then X is unmarried' requires several steps of logical deduction.
For example one such step, but by no means the only one, is that, given ' X AND Y', we can conclude 'X'. This involves applying the rule of inference in Natural Deduction that is usually called either 'Simplification' or 'AND elimination'.
Similarly, to get '7+5=12' from the axioms of arithmetic requires a series of steps of logic. The series is longer than the series required to prove that from 'X is a bachelor' we can conclude 'X is not married'. I can see no other material difference between the two cases.
Is it then the length of the proof that determines whether deducing B from A is analytic or synthetic?
If so, what is the maximum number of steps before something can no longer be considered analytic?
I introduced the two propositions about bachelors in my above post because they are theorems that require longer proofs than 'if X is a bachelor then X is not married'. They are also not immediately obvious, yet they are true. I am trying to explore the boundary between analytic and synthetic, to see what the maximum length of proof is.
Quoting Mongrel
No, it's not. The necessary a posteriori applies to things like identity statements using differing names of the same individual. I.e., there is no world in which Hesperus isn't Phosphorus. There are certainly worlds in which France has a different capital.
That wouldn't be the thing we rigidly designated as France. How do we know that? Per Kripke, apriori. Let's read Naming and Necessity. And... get.... the... low down.
The thing we rigidly designated 'France,' is France, which is depending on how you slice it a geographical area, nation-state, or cultural locus in Western Europe. It's perfectly possible for that very thing to have a capital other than France. It's not like having France as a capital is some essential property of it, or part of the definition of the word. It's kind of bewildering that people are seriously suggesting this tbh.
Even if it were a modal possibility it certainly doesn't seem to be an empirical possibility that Paris is not the capital of France, and that is why TGW, despite his elaborate argumentation, is wrong.
Wouldn't the popular view of meaning as use make this a given? You learn how to use a word by growing up around people who use it, so...
It may not be an epistemic possibility, in that what we know about France rules out that the actual world is one in which some place other than Paris is the nation's capital. But this is true of all sorts of empirical propositions. It's an empirical proposition that the sun is shining here and now, like you said, but given what I know about today's weather, there is no serious epistemic possibility that it isn't.
Explain, then how that would be empirically, as opposed to merely modally, possible. I 'm not denying that it is a logical possibility that France could have had a capital in a different location, and named differently than Paris; but we are talking here about the empirical world, France and Paris as they now stand.
All you have to do is recognize that having Paris as its capital is essential to the thing we call France. And voila... it's necessary. I'm not sure why that seems bewildering. Kripke's possible worlds are just abstract objects anyway (there are no real grape growing regions in them, for instance.)
Then you're not talking about it being metaphysically possible or impossible, but about it being actual or factual.
To say a proposition is contingent is not to say that we don't know in the actual world whether it's true. I know it's sunny right now; but it could have been otherwise. Just because it actually is sunny doesn't mean the proposition expressing that isn't based on experience, or contingent, or whatever you like.
But I can see no other distinction between the assertion
'P1: If X is a bachelor then X is not married'
and
'P2: 7+5=12'
Statements such as 'P1 is true by virtue of the definition of bachelor' are meaningless. P2 is also true by virtue of the definitions of '7', '5', '+', and '12'. Given the definitions, one executes a sequence of deductive steps and arrives at the sentence '7+5=12'.
Similarly, given the definition
'D1: X is a bachelor at time T if X is a live, adult, male human at time T that has never been married at any time T2
we can execute a series of deductive steps to arrive at the sentence
'If X is a bachelor then X is not married'
I must own that I cannot see any substantive difference between the two cases other than the length of the deductive sequence.
If Kant's claim was that statement D1 is an analytic proposition because it is identical to the definition of bachelor, then we would have a clear meaning of 'analytic proposition'. An analytic proposition is simply a sentence that is also a definition.
But under that approach, as soon as a deduction is needed to get from the definition to the sentence - even if that deduction is only a single step - the sentence ceases to be analytic.
But it quite clearly isn't. France could change its capital in the future.
Quoting Mongrel
It seems bewildering because it's clearly false, and you're defending it apparently with a misreading of Kripke. I'm not sure of any reasonable way to claim that France's capital being Paris is an essential property of France. In fact it seems insane. Maybe you can explain why you think that?
What do you mean by "empirical possibility"?
If you think math is learned synthetically, then you're going to deny this. This was more or less the default position in philosophy prior to the rise of logicism, as far as I know. Mathematical equations were not taken to be made true in virtue of definitions, but in virtue of intuitions about space and number.
:D
Sorry John, but this made me laugh heartily. France could have had another capital, just as the US could have had a different president. TG is right. If that's not empirical, then nothing is.
It has nothing to do with misreading Kripke. It has to do with your inflexibility about essence. I think there's a lot more duck/rabbit to this than you're realizing.
See, here you are talking about modal possibility, not empirical actuality. Paris is the capital of France because we designate it as such. Tomorrow, without changing the meanings of any words Avignon could be designated as the capital of France. The sun is not shining today because we designate it as such; it may be either shining or not; and the proposition that it is shining here and now, may thus be falsified or verified, true or false. So, the two cases of the Sun shining and Paris being the capital are not analagous.
'Paris is the capital of France' is a plain empirical proposition, just like 'the sun is shining.' It can be verified or falsified just as easily as propositions about the sun shining. I'm not sure why you think otherwise. It's a matter of fact what city is France's capital.
:s
Well, I think you have not properly earned your hearty laugh, because I did not ask whether France "could have had" another capital, but whether it could have another capital right now, in this empirical world of ours, and given that nothing has changed from yesterday. To make it more clear, do you think it is possible that yesterday the capital of France was not Paris, in a way comparable to the possibility that at any given location and time yesterday the sun was shining or not?
I am unable to form an opinion on whether mathematics is learned synthetically, because I don't know what 'synthetic' means. If I did, I would then know what 'analytic' means, since my understanding is that they are supposed to be antonyms.
EDIT: But yes, fair point: I misread you. I agree that France as it now is, having Paris as its capital, cannot not have Paris as its capital. But as has been said already, that's not what is at issue here.
An empirical possibility is something that it is really possible could be an empirical actuality. Think of any set of coordinates on the earth. It is an empirical possibility in the sense I mean, that the sun is shining there now, or not. Is it an empirical possibility in this kind of sense that Paris is now not the capital of France (independently that is of any kind of event such as that the French government this morning declared that Avignon is now the capital)?
I don't understand why you don't understand the question; it seems perfectly straightforward to me.
:s
Is "epistemic modality" something different than "empirical terms"? It is relevant because Paris is defined as the capital of Paris in a way somewhat analogous to how bachelors are defined as unmarried men; whereas as whether the Sun is shining at some location is not a matter of definition at all.
Quoting jamalrob
No. It wouldn't commit me to saying France can't change its capital. Among the essential features of what we call France is that for a period of time (including this date), Paris was its capital. Pretty simple.
I guess you're not a fan of alternate history literature.
Whether Paris is the capital of France is not a matter of definition, it is a matter of fact, which city is the capital of the country. It might be a matter of some complex broader social agreement, but it's first of all not only a matter of that, and second of all this is not the same thing as it being a matter of definition.
Quoting Mongrel
Except it's not, because we can say things like, 'if France's capital had been Cannes right now...' This would be literally unintelligible if it were an essential property of France to have Paris as its capital during some stretch of time.
[quote=TGW]'Synthetic' means requiring the use of experience[/quote]
Here's the first part of section IV of the intro to CPR (first edition):
[quote=Immanuel Kant]In all judgements wherein the relation of a subject to the predicate is cogitated (I mention affirmative judgements only here; the application to negative will be very easy), this relation is possible in two different ways. Either the predicate B belongs to the subject A, as somewhat which is contained (though covertly) in the conception A; or the predicate B lies completely out of the conception A, although it stands in connection with it. In the first instance, I term the judgement analytical, in the second, synthetical[/quote]
To me, that says they are antonyms. I also note that he does not mention experience.
[quote=TGW]you can define this containment relation is various ways[/quote]Can you provide an example of one? I have never seen an attempted definition. People just seem to assume that its meaning is obvious - which it isn't.
It is perfectly obvious how the empirical proposition that the sun was shining yesterday at 10 am Greenwich mean time at such and such coordinates can be falsified; by checking to see if it was shining there or not. So, tell me how the proposition that Paris was the capital of France yesterday at 10 am could be falsified, (and remember I'm ruling out changes of designation made by humans here, although it is obvious that most people would already know if the capital of France had been changed yesterday). How could you check whether Paris was the capital of France yesterday or not?
I think of "empirical" as a type of justification. You're talking about actuality. I think I understand what you're saying. Say I toss a die... however many possibilities I claim exist prior to its landing, there's only one possibility when it does land. Right?
Sorry, I messed up, being synthetic doesn't have to do with relying on experience, that's a posteriori. It has to do with conceptual analysis, of a proposition's truth not being discernible in virtue of the rules of the language or thoughts the language conveys.
Quoting andrewk
Sure. For example let a property be a function from possible worlds to sets of individuals. Suppose that for some properties A and B, and for all possible worlds w, A(w) is a subset of B(w). Then the property A is contained within the property B, and it is impossible to be an A without being a B, and this is known to anyone who knows what the words denoting these properties mean.
You can check whether the sun was shining, and so verify or falsify that it was; likewise, you can check what the capital of a nation is.
Hopefully people who talk about alternate capitals for France know that they're talking about an alternate reality. The actual France can not be identical to the France in an alternate reality.
Kripke is not conducting philosophy by language analysis.
If we talk about what capital France might have had, we are not talking about some other thing besides France, we are talking about France. Pace Lewis, but I think Lewis is just wrong on this point.
(In fact to suggest that all modal considerations of France involve a different individual obviates the point of essential properties to begin with on many interpretations, since the whole point of an essential property is that it is invariant on an individual across worlds).
Paris is designated the capital of France, and one of the definitions of the name 'Paris' is 'capital of France'.
In any case you still haven't told us how the purportedly merely empirical proposition 'Paris is the capital of France' could be falsified.
No it isn't. If it were, then it would be impossible for anywhere else to be the capital, which it isn't. Paris is not defined as the capital of France, although it is the capital.
Quoting John
I am trying to understand what your problem is, but I really don't. Do you think it's not possible to check what city is the capital of a nation? You would falsify it by checking, and seeing that it's not that city, in the same way as you'd check and see the sun wasn't shining.
The actual France (whose capital is Paris) can not be identical to an alternate France (whose capital is Caen). That's pretty basic. It's two different objects.
The rigid designator identifies an object across all possible worlds in which that object exists. Not all possible worlds period. Many possible worlds don't have the thing we call France (with its Paris capital.)
There is no 'alternate France.' When we say 'if France had a different capital...' We are talking about France. We are not talking about some other thing. That is why we say, if France had a different capital... This is one of Kripke's most basic points.
Quoting Mongrel
First off, this is only one interpretation of rigid designation.
Second, it's moot because a world in which France has a different capital is one in which, a fortiori, France exists.
Yes, but you are avoiding the point that the proposition that the sun was shining at some place and time both can right now and could if the world were different be true or false; whereas the statement that Paris is the capital of France, perhaps could be false, if we were referring to a different world (although even that is controversial considering what Mongrel has been saying) but it cannot right now be actually false (given that nothing has changed as to which city in France is designated as the capital).
Go and look up "Paris" in the dictionary then and see if "capital of France" is not one of the definitions you find there.
I don't know what you mean. Can it be false right now that Paris is not the capital of France? Well, no, since it is. Can it be false right now that it's sunny in some location? Well, it either is sunny or it isn't, so it either can or it can't be, but I don't know which one.
Perhaps you're talking about epistemic modality, something along the lines of as far as I/we know, it might be sunny versus France might be the capital of Paris. But this is simply not what is at issue in determining whether a proposition is empirical.
If Paris were not the capital of France, it would not stop being Paris. Ergo it cannot be that the definition of 'Paris' includes its being the capital of France. There is no logical contradiction in saying that Paris is not the capital of France. Moreover, if another city became the capital of France, it would not become Paris. None of this should be controversial.
Yeh this comes from the way you think about mathematics. It's easier rather then to view things as an arbitrary distinction, to try to see where Kant is coming from, to see why he may have an issue with synthetic knowledge.
Kant didn't have the kind of axioms of arithmetic we have today. That isn't the way they worked out that 7+5 = 12.
But further I think the axioms are in some way secondary. Most people know that 7 + 5 = 12 without even knowing that it can be derived from axioms, or what the axioms may be. If we created a formal structure for proving arithmetic and it showed that 7+5 = 11, that we had been wrong the whole time about it equaling 12, we would reject that formal structure before questioning our intuitions.
So it's a question of how we actually know it, how are we justified in our complete certainty that this is a necessary truth.
I think it's also easier when using his other examples, like triangle have 180 degrees. We can prove it in an abstract way, by using examples of a triangle that is meant to stand in for all other triangles etc. It's an operation we can do in our minds, but what gives us the ability to be so certain that the triangle that I draw on a piece of paper will all have that property.
I'm talking about statements. It cannot be, strictly speaking, true or false that it is sunny right now in some location. It can be the case that it is sunny right now, and a statement that it is sunny right now can be true or false right now. But we know that the statement 'Paris is the capital of France' cannot possibly be false right now if nothing has changed regarding the designated status of Paris . Whether some statement that I make right now about it being sunny in some location right now is true or false is a different case because it has nothing to do with human designation.
In other words, 'Paris is the capital of France' cannot be false given that Paris is the capital of France.
I don't agree; under the current and past definition it is the capital of France. Definitions, just like designations, can change. It could never be the case that Paris was never the capital of France, whereas it could be the case that the sun never shone at some location; and that is the point that goes to the difference I have been trying to show.
Paris is not the capital of France according to any definition. It is the capital as a matter of fact.
Yeah, same
If you like; whereas "the sun is shining at some place and time" can be false given that it has nothing to do with what humans have designated in terms of names. I am astonished that others can not see that Paris being the capital of France is a different kind of fact than the kinds of merely empirical facts that can be confirmed or confirmed by the senses.
Yep. Kripke says "Possible worlds are stipulated, not discovered." I told you there's a duck/rabbit aspect to this. I told you that all you have to do is decide that the object you're calling "France" must have Paris as its capital. This is not an absurd thing to do. That's exactly what you might do if you're distinguishing the actual France from an alternate one.
Can we also do what you're describing, and say that having Paris as its capital is not essential? Of course. But there's no reason we have to do that.
So in regard to John's point, you should say..
"Well, if you're thinking of the actual France, then yes... it must have Paris as its capital. You're right, John." Sincerely, The Great Whatever.
So as you say, 'Paris is the capital of France' cannot be false given that Paris is the capital of France, but what is given here is a matter of fact that could have been otherwise.
It is a designated fact not a merely empirical fact. What experiment could you run to determine its truth or falsity that did not involve reading something that someone has written, and hence did not involve semantics? By contrast, if we were together inside a house and you said that the sun is shining outside I could just go and look to see if what you said was true.
No, this is not decided, not even according to Kripke. Kripke has certain controversial and strong views about which properties are essential to objects, but he takes these to be matters of metaphysics, not agreement or stipulation: such as, a table might essentially be made of certain physical constituents, or a person might essentially have some DNA. These are independent of his semantic thesis about proper names, however, and highly controversial, and I think not even Kripke would venture to say that Paris is essentially the capital of France.
According to Kripke, the name 'Paris' rigidly designates a certain individual, viz. a city. When stipulating a possible world, we say things like, 'If Paris hadn't been the capital of France...' Since we are using the word 'Paris,' which rigidly designates, even in this stipulated counterfactual scenario, we are still talking about Paris, hence why we use the word 'Paris.' We do not imagine if some other city might not have been the capital, we imagine if Paris, i.e. that very city, were different from what it was. This is what Kripke means in saying that possible worlds are not distant regions or alternate realities, but stipulated objects, and in stipulating, we stipulate that we are talking about Paris, that very city that the name 'Paris' refers to in all worlds.
Regardless of all of this, it's not a matter of linguistic stipulation what properties are essential to an individual, if any.
So you honestly can see no distinction between bare empirical propositions, and the empirical methods of confirming or dis-confirming them, and "Paris is the capital of France"?
If you go to Paris there is nothing you could see that could confirm that it is the capital of France. If you go outside and look you can confirm whether or not the sun is shining. "Vive la difference"!
I agree. So does Kripke. He says we identify essential properties by testing the limits of imagination.
Edit: looks like jamalrob beat me to it
You're still not getting the difference. There could be nothing immediately obvious to your eyes that would confirm that Paris is the capital, analogous to how basic empirical propositions can be obviously true or false . Even if you see 'The Capital of France' written somewhere that could still be false, or referring to something else or some other city. How do you know Paris is the capital of France in the first place? It's because everyone agrees that it is so, isn't it? And that agreement is a semantic not an empirical matter ( although of course it is in a sense an empirical matter that people agree). Paris could only cease to be the capital if people decided they didn't want it to be thought to be such any longer, isn't it? People are not agreeing that Paris is the capital because it has been empirically demonstrated to them in any way that is obvious to their senses.
Yes we can. When we do that, we're using something else to identify France. Something else is being called essential.
I guess my question to you would be this: what in your view is essential about France? Do you see this as being something you learned about it aposteriori?
Certainly there is an empirical component to such facts (of course because they are about real people and/ or places) but that doesn't change the fact that they are not basic empirical facts like "the sun is shining". there is much more of semantic contingency to them.
And butter?
Are you denying that some kinds of propositions may be confirmed by merely looking and/ or are you claiming that Paris being the capital of France is one of those kinds of propositions; that you could go to Paris and just see that it is the capital? It's pretty clearcut as I see it, not "slippery" at all.
Once you say, 'Imagine if France had been in Southeast Asia, and they spoke Hindi, and none of the major battles in French history happened there, and the people were black, and...' then I falter and say, 'I don't see in what we we could possibly be talking about France anymore.' So at the very least some disjunctive conglomeration of these properties are essential.
I think the tricky thing here is "we." by which I mean: Even if x is only the capital because we call x the capital, two people calling y the capital wouldn't change things. power (authority, legitimation?) and history slip in through the we.
If a proposition can be confirmed by merely looking then it is the most basic kind of empirical proposition. That's precisely what I have been saying all along, and have gone to some pains to explain why I am saying it, that "Paris is the capital of France" is not; that it has a much more overtly semantic element.
And yet you have appeared to be objecting to this claim without actually providing any counter-arguments, or have been claiming that you don't understand it (implying that it is trivial or even incoherent?) without explaining what it is that you don't understand, or why you think the distinction I want to make is trivial or not a valid one; and now you seem to be retreating by asking "what does it matter?" (which seems to be just another avoidance in the form of an unargued assertion of triviality).
:-}
Either way invoking "basic empirical propositions" doesn't help your argument.
Likewise, and this is argued explicitly by Kripke, if Joe's natural parents are Sue and Tom, then it is metaphysically necessary regarding Joe that Sue and Tom be his natural parents (something that we could phrase ambiguously through saying that it is metaphysically necessary that Sue and Tom be Joe's parents, thus inviting the misreading that this is intended as a de dicto necessity). There is no possible world in which Joe has different parents (or so Kripke suggests). But it hardly follows from this, even if we share Kripke's intuition about this case (which I do), that Sue and Tom couldn't possibly never have met, or not have had Joe as a son, or not have had any children. Similarly, if Paris had been somewhat instituted as the first capital of France at some point in time, it could have been metaphysically necessary of Paris that it be the first capital of France. But it would not follow from this modal fact that France could not have had another first capital instead (in which case Paris would not have existed at all) or that Paris could not have ceased to be the capital of France at any subsequent point in time.
But the fact that 'Paris is the capital of France' is not anything like an analytic truth shows this to be false, contra what people are claiming in this thread.
Likewise, most people might know Aristotle as the teacher of Alexander the Great, but it seems 'Aristotle' does not in any sense mean 'the teacher of Alexander the great,' because we can say that Alexander might not have been Alexander the Great's teacher.
There's a long and very boring history in analytic philosophy talking about these kinds of issues, but I've never found the pull toward 'descriptivism' all that compelling, and looking back on it I'm never sure why people thought names acted like definite descriptions to begin with.
Sure, but I am arguing that there can be non-basic empirical propositions or if you prefer propositions, the truth or falsity of which, may be more or less semantically determined. That is all I have been arguing.
If I say the sun is shining right now at such and such a location, how would you know whether that is true or false? Really, you'd have to be there, wouldn't you? Whereas if I said New York is the capital of France, you don't have to do any empirical checking to know that is wrong do you?
And yeah, I think you're right. I'll leave it to John to defend what he means.
Firstly, I haven't misread Kripke, since I haven't read him at all and have not mentioned him in any of my arguments.
Secondly I haven't claimed that France must have Paris as its capital. I have already said that could change. I don't know enough about modal logic to have an opinion about the modal question of whether there could be a possible world in which Paris was not the capital of France.
What I have claimed is that I know that Paris must be the capital of France right now, and that it was the capital in the past, unless it is the case that there has been a massive deception about the historical capitalhood, and/or in regard to its present capitalhood another city has been designated as capital since I last heard. I have also claimed that I don't need to go out into the world to do any empirical checking to know these things, so they are, to that degree at least, analytical.
This is just because he already knows it's not true, not because it's analytic or a priori. If he didn't know, he could check.
You wouldn't necessarily see "rays" (unless there were clouds or mist about), you'd see the sun shining if it was shining. Checking the news is fine, but as I have argued that introduces the semantic element, because you couldn't tell just by looking at the paper, whether New York is the capital of Paris or not; you'd have to read it.
How does he already know it is not true? Knowing that New York is not the capital of France is a complex semantical feat of understanding how humans designate, and assign symbolic functions to locales. It's not at all like knowing the sun is shining.
This seems wildly implausible. Surely you learned this fact in school?
If it's possible you could be deceived about it, as you admit it is, and it's possible that the capital of France might change in the future, as you also admit, then 'Paris is the capital of France' is not analytic to any degree at all--though I think I do see where you're coming from now.
My view is in keeping with Scott Soames' explanation of Kripke's views. Maybe you could add his comments to your tons. :)
I may disagreee with you, but more importanly I don't have any sense of what you think is at stake or what roads your distinction opens. What are you ultimately driving at?
I can accept that, insofar as it is analogous to a claim that no statement is analytical to any degree because the meanings of words might change. Bachelors, for example, might not be unmarried men in the future, if 'bachelor' no longer means 'unmarried man'. But that wouldn't change the fact that "bachelors are unmarried mean' was analytic when the words meant as they do now, or that "paris is the capital of France' has (at least) an analytic element to it in virtue of the present accepted meanings of 'Paris' and 'capital of France'.
Yeah, idk, I could go to Paris too and talk to people. For sure, a change of capitals would be a social fact, but I don't see how that changes things. I agree sight is involved in one case, not in the other, but I don't think sight is the sine qua non of the empirical. Do you?
Why are we here arguing about, and trying to understand what constitutes the differences between analytic and synthetic? I'm just defending a point that there are degrees of the empirical and the analytical; AP is by no means my main area of interest; but I don't like to be misunderstood or to have what I write mischaracterized.
In general, I think discussion on forums is a waste of precious time that could be spent on much higher level stuff, but it is an addictive indulgence not entirely without any benefit, and I have an addictive personality. so there you have it.
I own and have read the two volumes of his Philosophical Analysis in the 20th Century, as well as several of his papers. Although I disagree with Soames on some topics (mainly regarding the metaphysics of propositions, and his views on philosophical method), it never had seemed to me that his reading of Kripke was amiss. It's possible that you misread him too. Maybe another useful introduction to Kripke would be Gregory McCulloch's The Game of The Name.
In terms of the centrality of observation in empirical pursuits, yes I do think so.
Cool. Maybe you could point out where I'm wrong.
You're right, bachelors are unmarried men is analytic; whereas Paris is the capital of France is only quasi-analytic; which I what I said in my first post, if I recall.
A blind person can learn via the other senses: I did say the empirical is predominately a matter of visual observation, not solely. Much of what any of us takes to be empirical knowledge is actually semantically gained knowledge based on the understanding and acceptance of the reports of others.
The point is that Paris being the capital of France could be changed by bestowing the meaning 'capital' on another city. Purely empirical truths cannot be changed by fiat like that. And the fact that bachelors being unmarried men cannot be changed by fiat either makes for an interesting complication to the issue. When it comes to human conventions, the point is that they are not merely empirical matters, but partake of the symbolic, the semantic, they consist in meanings. That's all I've been trying to point out.
I did already in the first post from mine that you quoted. I explained where you may have gone wrong, though I may have mistargeted my comment at John. Early on in the thread you had commented that: "There is no possible world that contains the thing we've named "France" which has a capital that isn't Paris. That's Kripke's necessary aposteriori in a nutshell." This may involve the incorrect slide from one claim of de re necessity to another one, for one could maybe make the case that there isn't a possible world in which Paris is the capital of some country other than France. But your own statement (regarding France) would not follow from that, and it would still be false.
You also claimed that "The actual France (whose capital is Paris) can not be identical to an alternate France (whose capital is Caen). That's pretty basic. It's two different objects." This would only be true if having Paris as a capital were an essential property of France. You seemed to have been running together numerical identity and indiscernability.
I think that's irrelevant; we find everything in experience, one way or the other. My point is merely that there are useful distinctions to be made between kinds of empirical knowledge; it is not all one monolithic mass. There are degrees and interminglings of empiricality and analyticity, It is all interrelated and on a broad spectrum. I actually think it is you rather than I going for the conventionally narrow, as opposed to the eccentrically broad, definition of the empirical here.
I have no doubt that empirical knowledge does depend on a priori concepts of the understanding, ( and what might we think they in turn depend on? embodiment? anamnesis?) but that's an entirely different kettle of fish (or can of worms) than the one we have been trying to examine here.
Definitely agree...
Agreed. Kripke's general argument regarding rigidity or metaphysical necessity cut across natural and institutional facts. For one U.S dollar bill to be worth what it is, or for it to be worth more or less than a Canadian dollar bill depends on socially instituted rules. The propositions that one of them was devalued with respect to the other one, overnight, still is an empirical proposition. It describes the outcome of a process governed my market forces.
EDIT: actually I don't agree that analytic-synthetic is a spectrum, although I'm sympathetic to the idea that a priori-empirical is a spectrum.
Here's where I think you're going wrong. In contemplating a possible world, there is no claim of necessity in regard to any particular property. A claim would entail the possibility of confirmation (as through a telescope, as Kripke puts it.) The content of a possible world is stipulated.
If I stipulate a possible world that contains an object, France, an essential property of which is having Paris as it's capital, then this property is necessary (although I learned the facts of the case aposteriori.)
Quoting Pierre-Normand
Yes. It would be true if Paris is an essential property of France.
If you disagree that the essence of France is matter of stipulation, then could you explain how you understand the essence of France (as something not stipulated) and how that fits in with N&N?
From my point of view I haven't been putting my case more or less strongly; so I think it might have been a matter of how what I said was taken, rather than how it was intended. I do admit I made at least one mistaken claim though, but I think it was not relevant to the main thrust of my argument.
Quoting jamalrob
The problem I see here is the a priori covers only the necessary part of the semantic. So, in seeing that the semantic and the empirical are on a spectrum, and in assigning the part of the semantic which is not necessary meaning, but contingent meaning, to the analytic, I am left with the conclusion that the analytic and the empirical are on a spectrum. If, for instance, to go back to the example of bachelors being unmarried men; it is thought to be analytic, and analytic is thought to be forever; that seems to raise the problem that the analytic is defined as that which is true by definition, and definitions may change. In view of that perhaps we could say that unmarried men being bachelors remains synthetically a priori true, even if the meanings of the words are changed.
I have no idea what "the" (unique) essence of France is. It falls under the sortal concept 'country' or 'nation state'. So, maybe, falling under such a concept is an essential property France has. In any possible world where France exists, it is a country, and not, say, a turnip, a can opener, or a galaxy. It also likely has some historical roots necessarily, as TGW argued in a spirit similar to some Kripkean claims about necessity of origins for other sorts of items (e.g. human beings having the parents that they have, necessarily). However, to claim that having Paris as its capital is an essential property of France seems to do violence to our ordinary conception of what France is.
Think so? Let's ponder a possible world in which France is, in fact, a province of a nation known as the European Union. It's not a country any more than North Carolina is. Do you want to try again or do you already see where this is headed?
Quoting Pierre-Normand
So, again... you're using the word claim. What is a claim?
This seems to be raising a kind of 'Sorites' problem. If we wanted to say that there could be an alternative France in another possible world, exactly what characteristics would it need to have in order to qualify as being a France at all? If for example it existed for the same time period as our France and we posit provisionally that it had all the same towns and cities, but counted a different one of them as its capital for all the time that our France had counted Paris as its capital, is it even plausible to think that all its other towns and cities could look the same and have had the same history, or that there could actually be all the same towns of the same size, locations and so on. Could the alternative Paris be the same size given that it was not the capital. Could all the trade routes and hence all the trading relations between all the regions have been the same. Would it have had all the same citizens as our France has? Once you change one really significant thing ( such as the capital) there wouldn't seem to be much that would be plausibly left the same, such that we could feel justified in thinking of it as an alternative France, rather than simply a different country.
Yes, France could be swallowed up by the European Union in such a way that it would cease to be an independent nation state. Maybe this new province would go on being named "France". This would raise issues about the identification of the old France with this new (so called) "France" province. Under some conceptions (as a sovereign country), the old France would have ceased to exist, having been assimilated/dissolved into another entity. Under another, looser, conception it would still exist as the same ethnic cum historical cum geographical entity albeit now in a subordinated state. In any case, Paris being its capital (either the capital of the province or the capital of the country) would still be contingent.
Pierre. You're missing the point. Read N&N a third time. Add in another reading of the Soames.
Paris being the capital of France is contingent IFF you stipulate it as such.
Mongrel is right that it is a matter of stipulation whether or not this alternative France is or isn't France. Actually, merely calling it an alternative France, as TGW suggested, give the game away, and reveals that it's still France that you are purportedly talking about, albeit France has it could have been, could be, or could become. This stipulation merely concerns the 'numerical identity' of the possible item that you are considering with the actual item. You are stipulating that it is indeed France that you purport to be talking about. It is an altogether different set of stipulations that we, as users of a shared language, are making when we specify the identity and individuation criteria that attach to the general concept that France necessarily falls under (i.e. the 'sortal concept'). Those two quite different stipulations can rub against each other. For instance if you are talking about France as it would be if mankind hadn't evolved from apes at all, then you purport to be talking about France, but you are identifying it with a geographical region, maybe, where the conditions of France's existence as a country aren't fulfilled. Hence you aren't talking about a genuine possibility at all, or you are misusing language. You are using "France" to denote a geographical area, something that isn't the same as the country that may occupy this area at some point in time. However, when you are talking about France not having Paris as its capital, you are contemplating a possibility, historical and/or metaphysical, that doesn't rub against any norm regarding the general concepts that France necessarily falls under. So this is a genuine and unproblematical possibility.
More Pascal, Pierre. You're making up categories of possibility to cover over the underlying ambiguity.
If you are going to stipulate that some accidental properties of France are essential to it, then it isn't France anymore that you are talking about, but, maybe, some other entity that you wish to call "France". It is true that, given the already established norms that govern the use of the word France, some of its (so called) essential properties (e.g. its being some sort of a nation state) being indeed essential to is is a matter of stipulation. Those stipulations fix (part of) the sense of the name. I don't see having Paris as its capital being any part of it.
More generally, the equation that you seem to be attempting between (1) some property P being essential to X and, (2) P being stipulated to be essential to X, doesn't hold for Kripke. It may be essential to X being a sample of water that it be composed of H2O, and this being a matter of empirical discovery rather than stipulation. Likewise with Joe being the son of Sue and Tom. Neither Joe, nor anyone, may know who Joe's natural parents are, and yet know that whoever they are, Joe having them as parents is necessary.
It's not a different category. France could possibly have had another capital city than Paris just in the same sense (quite plain and uncontroversial) that Kurt Gödel could possibly not have been the author of the incompleteness theorems.
Try this:
I wonder what would have happened if Napolean hadn't lost at Waterloo.
In the process of pondering this, I have conjured up some number of possible worlds, one of which is the actual world. In every one of them, the capital of France is... which ever city is was when Napolean was alive. Let's say I'm not sure. I look it up. It was Paris.
In all of my possible worlds, Paris is always the capital of France. Over the range of these possibilities, Paris being the capital of France is necessary. But Napolean's victory isn't.
But then I wonder, what if Napolean had lost two weeks later than he did. Now Napolean's victory is necessary across all my worlds, but the timing of it isn't.
See?
Read the very passage you mentioned earlier.
The possibility of Napoleon having won at Waterloo has little bearing on the possibility of Paris not being the capital of France at that time. Further, you can't make a contingent proposition necessary merely through restricting your attention to possible worlds where this proposition is true. A proposition is necessarily true iff it is true at all possible worlds. If you stipulate from the get go that you are restricting your attention to only those possible worlds where it is true, you hardly have shown that the proposition is necessarily true -- only that is is true wherever it is true!
If you are going to consider possible worlds in which Napoleon won at Waterloo, and restrict your attention to possible worlds where historical circumstances aren't so far off from actual circumstances that Paris wouldn't be France's capital, then, fine, you can do that, but you hardly would have shown (and not even stipulated) that France necessarily has Paris as its capital. You've merely stated that this far off historical possibility, and what other propositions can or can't be conjoined with this possible state of affairs, don't interest you.
The issue has more to do with the inadequacies of the a priori/posteriori and analytical/synthetic understanding of knowledge. Rather than types of knowledge, what the are trying to distinguish is different sorts of meaning-- a state of world (posteriori) compared to a logical truth (priori), an contingent act of language (synthetic) in contrast to a truth not bound to what is spoken or done in the world (analytical).
In each case, the priori/posteriori and analytical/synthetic understanding is meant to act as reduction of the meaning involved, such that we know it significance to knowledge. Such as, for example, that 2+2=4 is a logical truth known by definition while a presence of a elephant is known by observing the world. In the context of only asking about different types of knowledge, this appears to work because we are only considering ideas we already have. Our role in knowing is obscured.
Problems arise in a priori/posteriori and analytical/synthetic account of knowledge when we start to consider ourselves. Consider the synthetic posteriori of "There's an elephant in the room." According to it's distinction, I would know it by observing the presence of an elephant in the room. I don't need any sort of (necessary) a priori logical concept and cannot know about the elephant unless I've observed it.
Yet, where is my experience of the elephant and my language? In observing the elephant, I have not encountered either. How then can my knowledge of the elephant be synthetic posteriori? I'm relying on concepts and language which are not observed to know about the elephant. Without knowing what I saw was necessarily an elephant, I would not be able to think or say what I observed was an elephant at all. To know a posteriori requires a priori.
The analytical/synthetic discintion also collapses. If I was the only one speaking English, what I observed would still be an elephant. In my English, it is necessarily an elephant, no matter how anyone else speaks, how English changes or if my language is never spoken anywhere else. My concept of elephant and so my knowledge of what I observe is analytic-- it's known by definition in my language.
Now circle completes. If any posteriori is known by an analytic a priori (e.g. the concept of an elephant in the time and space in question), I don't even need to observe it to know about it. Let's say on the day before observing the elephant, I thought: "There will be an elephant in that room tomorrow." I have knowledge of the elephant in the room prior to (or even without) observing it. Knowledge about a state of the world does not require observation or direct experience at all.
Yet, knowledge itself is a state of the world. To know about the elephant, I have to exist in a certain way. I must have the concept of the elephant, in my language (as opposed any other language). In my life I must have learnt this language and about the object of which it speaks. Despite my concepts being analytic a priori, they are only given in the synthetic.
I could have been different. I might have spoken differently, known differently or not existed at all. What I am and the content of the world is not necessary. So despite any instance of knowledge being formed by an analytic a priori, they are all synthetic. At anytime, we may understand differently. This is even true of any analytic a priori knowledge-- we could all wake up tomorrow and understand 2+2=5.
"Paris" might by the capital of France now, and is knowledge formed by an analytic a priori concept, but tomorrow its capital might be Nice, if our language and conceptual practices were to alter in the right way.
While Paris is necessarily the capital of France, it is only so until Paris ceases to be the capital of France.
Isn't that the definition of necessity though-- that there is no other possibility in the context?
Consider the proposition: "In our world, the capital of France is Paris." Is this true of our world? If so, how exactly are other possible worlds relevant? Why is Paris being true in all possible worlds a requirement if we are only talking about our own actual world? How would it even make sense to say necessity required the city of one possible world to be present in any possible world? Our Paris cannot be the Paris of another world.
To say that Paris is necessarily the capital of France in our world, we only need the truth that Paris is the capital of France in our world.
Necessity isn't the absence of possibility, just possibility's irrelevance. The capital of France isn't Paris because an alternative cannot occur. It's Paris because, at the moment, that is what is true of the capital of France.
Sure, something is necessarily true iff it can't possibly be false, and it is possibly true iff it isn't necessarily false. If "the context" defines the scope of generality, then this is just to say that generalized necessity is the dual of generalized possibility. 'Possibly' and 'necessarily' can thus be interdefined with the use of the negation operator. But if "the context" under consideration is the generalized conditions under which P is true, then saying that P is necessarily true in that context just is the tautological statement that P is true whenever P is true. That's not very philosophically interesting.
They are relevant to the evaluation of the modality of the statement, not to the evaluation of its truth. False propositions can not be necessary (since there is a possible world, namely the actual world, where they are false) but true propositions can be either necessarily true or contingently true. They are contingently true if there is a possible world where they are false, which is just to say that, while true, they possibly could have been false.
Because when we are talking about the modality of the proposition -- its being necessary, possible or impossible -- and not just talking about its truth, then we are also talking about the world as it could or couldn't possibly be, and not just about the world as it is.
'Possible worlds' aren't other worlds. It's just a fancy name for ways the world either is (actually) or could have been (counterfactually). It's a device for formalizing semantic theories of modal statements.
Everything necessarily is, in the actual world, as it is in the actual world. This tautology says nothing about something being necessary or contingent simpliciter. Something isn't necessarily true if the world could have been such that it is false. This is what is meant when we say that there is a possible world in which (or at which, as it is usually expressed in the technical literature) it is false.
Ok. Maybe I totally misunderstood. But I'm failing to see how my explanation doesn't follow.
Let's look at an example Soames considers. If Saul Kripke exists, he's human. We're going to see if this statement is necessarily true. The fact that the statement starts with "if" means we can judge it across all possible worlds. It works as necessary because we consider humanity to be essential to Kripke.
Now look at:
Karen said Paris is the capital of France.
To understand any proposition, you must examine context of utterance. On examination, we determine that Karen is talking about the actual France. So Karen could be understood to be saying:
In all possible worlds that contain the actual France, the capital of France is Paris.
And that is necessarily true. Why not?
Sorry.. just saw this. I think what you aren't considering is that you aren't free to choose the meaning of a statement. You have to bind yourself to the intentions of the speaker. This is why there are multiple ways to handle the same sentence:
Paris is the capital of France.
You have to consider how the speaker means "France." That's why it isn't necessarily true that the above sentence is contingently true. It could be necessarily true... if the speaker's intentions make it so.
For me this is the exact problem. If we were talking about Paris in our world, then we talking about what it is, not what it might have been or some other world entirely. To talk about our Paris is to exclude all other possibilities and worlds. Modality is what we don't want to talk about if we wish to understand the meaning of our Paris-- I don't want to know if Paris is the capital in some alternate history. I don't want to know if Paris can be a capital or not in some other place. I don't even want to know if Paris can be the capital of France in our world.
Modality doesn't tell me anything. Sure we can talk about it. Paris could be the capital of France in our world, but it leaves out all relevant information. If I say Paris might (or might not) be the capital (which is true), I don't have any information on whether I should treat it as a such. If someone says to me, "Go pick up the delivery in the capital of France," I'm stuck guessing. Paris might be the capital. It might not be the capital. Whether I can make the pick-up is down to a toss up. Is the Paris the capital of France? I have no idea. I'll only be able to tell with the addition of "Paris is the capital of France."
There is an ideality at play within the mainstream understanding of modality. Supposedly, if we can say "Paris being the capital" is a necessary true (in all possible worlds), then we have what we need to know Paris is the capital, otherwise it all still up in the air.
But this analysis ignores how Paris is of our world. Our Paris cannot be true in all possible worlds. By identity, any other Paris, whether a concept in modal analysis or an alternate world, is a different city. For Paris to the capital in all possible worlds is impossible. Not merely because there might be different states, but rather because our Paris in necessarily tied to our world. To say "Paris is (not) the capital in all possible worlds" or "Paris might be the capital" gets us nowhere. We can't draw what is true about the world from modality-- is the proposition "Paris is the capital of France" true? We don't still know. We won't until we learn whether Paris is the capital.
[quote=Pierre-Normand]'Possible worlds' aren't other worlds. It's just a fancy name for ways the world either is (actually) or could have been (counterfactually). It's a device for formalizing semantic theories of modal statements.[/quote]
Yes. They're all a logical construction-- even the possibility of our own world. In our world, it is true the Paris may or may not be the Capital of France. This possible world is not actual. It's only a logical concept which indicates which states might be actual.
Mainstream modal analysis fails so often because it treats actuality like this possibility. People get caught in the trap of thinking knowing the possible world gives knowledge of the actual world. Everyone starts tripping up over how Paris could (or could not) be the capital of France rather than paying attention whether it is.
[quote=Pierre-Normand]Everything necessarily is, in the actual world, as it is in the actual world. This tautology says nothing about something being necessary or contingent simpliciter. Something isn't necessarily true if the world could have been such that it is false. This is what is meant when we say that there is a possible world in which (or at which, as it is usually expressed in the technical literature) it is false.[/quote]
I know, but that's sort of the point. What use is knowing necessary or contingent simpliciter if our subject is the actual world? Since modality is only a logical construction, it can't help us if we want to know something about the actual world. All it can do is tell us about the possible one-- e.g. no short, tall, fire snowmen who are made of only sand. We can use it to disregard the existence of contradictory or incoherent states, but that's it. If is's not necessary by logic, the possible world can't make comment. So why exactly are we trying to use it to tell whether or not Paris is the capital of France in the actual world?
[quote=Pierre-Normand]That's not very philosophically interesting.[/quote]
I think it's the most philosophically interesting relation to modality. It represents the logic a describing the world. For us to say, logically, the capital of France is Paris, we need to now about Paris in our world. If I am to know where to pick-up the delivery, what I need to know is that Paris is the capital of France in the actual world. Far from being trivial, it points out the most important thing about knowledge: if it's of the actual world, then it must be knowledge of the actual world. We can't get there with modality. Possible worlds won't tell us anything about the actual world.
The supposed problems surrounding naming and reference stem from ignoring what the speaker intends with language.
Statements are mistaken to have a problem referencing if they are untrue (e.g. "Willow who is president of the US," talking about me) when that has no impact on reference. Just because I'm not US president, doesn't mean someone can't intend that I am. I can be referenced in untrue statements.
Furthermore, the true statement ( "Obama is the present of the US, not Willow" ) is a language used when someone points out the falsehood about me. The names "Obama" and "Willow" are used with meaning and reference to the world in this context.
To imagine either "Obama" and "Willow" as blank slates names is to miss the entire point of both statements and what each person is talking about.
I agree.
Sure. Kripke is necessarily human iff he's human in all the possible worlds in which he exists. The possible worlds in which Kripke doesn't exist aren't relevant to the evaluation of this de re modal claim.
In that case you aren't evaluating the de re modal claim, regarding Paris (as we ordinarily talk about it), that it is necessarily the capital of France (as we ordinarily talk about it). Neither are you evaluating the different de re modal claim, regarding France (as we ordinarily talk about it), that it necessarily has Paris (as we ordinarily talk about it) as its capital. Under the ordinary meanings of "Paris" or "France", as those words are normally used in English, neither of those de re necessities hold. Karen is free, for sure, to conjure up new meanings for those words such that one or both of those sorts of de re necessities would be true regarding the different objects -- which may coincide in respect of all their actual properties with France and Paris in the actual world) -- that she means to designate with the words "France" and "Paris", respectively. If the objects A and B have different de re modal properties, then they are two different objects, as follows from Leibniz law of indiscernability of identicals, under Kripke's (or Ruth Barcan Marcus') quite reasonable modal interpretation of this law.
Nothing about this shows that the truth of modal propositions depends on the meaning of the terms that we use to designate the objects those propositions are propositions about. It rather illustrates the rather humdrum fact that what propositions are expressed by our linguistic utterances depends on the meanings (either usual, reasonably intended, or merely stipulated for the occasion) of the words that we use to express them. Hence, for instance it is true of Kurt Gödel, but merely contingent, that he has authored the incompleteness theorems. However, someone could utter the sentence "Kurt Gödel is the author of the incompleteness theorems" meaning it is such a way that it is necessarily true as she means it (which could be a misuse of language, where what is said doesn't coincide with what is meant). This could be the case is she meant to be using "Kurt Gödel" as a descriptive name (and made it clear that that is what she meant to be doing). She would thus express a de dicto necessity that has no bearing whatsoever on the de re necessity that we quite reasonably deny when we claim that it is (metaphysically) possible that Kurt Gödel would not have authored the incompleteness theorems.
Said still differently: proper names rigidly designate, but it is of course required in order that an expression normally used as a proper name (e.g. "Kurt Gödel") rigidly designate that whoever is using this expression indeed be using it as the proper name which it is (relying on its already established use in her linguistic community) and not as something else (e.g. as shorthand for a descriptive phrase)!
Right. I assume that Kripke means to address actual utterances because he specifically mentions the speech of average people. I also assume that it's understood that context of utterance always has to be considered when discussing ordinary language use.
So the meaning of a rigid designator can't be known in any other way than by attending to how it's being used in a particular speech act. You can't just say..." well it ordinarily means X." Agree?
The two cases you outline here seem to be just the same kinds of cases, differing only in terms of degree. If Paris had never been the capital of some geographical region, then the entire history of that geographical region, including what that precise geographical region was called and even the language itself that was spoken there could not have been the same. So, that precise geographical region would not have been called France, and all the people born in that region would have been different than the people that have actually been born there. As you no doubt know, due to the 'butterfly effect' only one tiny detail changed will over a long period transform everything radically.
The language that would have been spoken in that geographical region would not have been the same, nor the configuration of towns,villages, cities and trade routes. So just as in the case you imagined where humans didn't evolve at all; you could not be talking about a genuine possibility in relation to France, because France is more than merely a geographical region. This seems to lead inexorably to the conclusion that it is incoherent to speak about an alternative France at all. The most we could say about any purportedly alternative France would be that it was a country in roughly the same geographical region as France, and that a language was spoken there that had some similarities with French. It could not then be meaningful to speak about Paris (because there would not have been a city with that name there in the same location as the actual Paris) in terms of not being the capital of that alternative somewhat France-like region.
It doesn't matter how very qualitatively different France might by in counterfactual scenarios that we imagine; It still will be numerically identical to the country that we call "France" in the actual world. Numerical identity and qualitative identity are two different concepts. It also is quite irrelevant what language French citizens would speak in the counterfactual scenarios that we imagine. We stipulate what country we are talking about, and we can imagine its citizens calling their own country whatever name they like without this making it into a different country. The Japanese don't call their country "Japan"; they call it "Nihon koku". It hardly follows that the country that they call "Nihon koku" is a different country from the country that we call "Japan". It's the same country that goes under two different names in two different languages.
Pragmatics makes a distinction between speaker meaning and conventional meaning ("Utterer's meaning" and "timeless meaning" in Grice). For Kripke it doesn't matter. We are either considering timeless sentences that contain proper names or utterances where the speaker makes use of proper names as they are normally understood. Else you are simply changing the subject away from the use of proper names.
Generally, when dealing with ordinary language use, one would look at an utterer's intention. And of course, pronouns can stand as rigid designators. There is no "normally understood" meaning to "you." It has to be gathered from the circumstances of utterance.
It appears to me to be blatantly obvious and unmistakable that Kripke is talking about ordinary language use in N+N.
But that's not the issue I was pointing to. It's sketched out well in the SEP article on rigid designators. What is the magic that attaches a rigid designator to a particular object in a possiible world? Though this may be unproblematic for you, the SEP article makes clear that it is an unresolved issue. Scott Soames follows a route involving propositions that makes a lot of intuitive sense to me.
And.. I'm not quite sure how with your having read it twice and the tons of secondary literature that you're blind to that issue. Maybe it's just a language barrier issue?
So what exactly is it that determines this "numerical identity"? What is it, that is, other than some quality or other, that makes the scenario of the 'France' where humans didn't evolve a "misuse of language" and other alternative scenarios where humans are thought as present not misuses of language?
And the issue is not about whether the inhabitants of France call it a different name than we do, but that the inbabitants of the purported alternative 'France' call it by a different name, in a different language, than the actual inhabitants of the real France do. So again what is it that makes an imagined purported alternative France numerically identical to the actual France?
Numerical identity is a relation that holds between something and itself. If A and B are numerically identical, this means that "A" and "B" are two names (or definite descriptions, demonstratives or other singular referring expressions) that refer to the same thing. A country can't be numerically identical with the stretch of land that it occupies since this stretch of land existed before the country was founded (or built) and it can go on existing after the country has disappeared.
The question doesn't make sense. It just happens that we are talking about France as it would be in some counterfactual circumstances, and not some different country merely similar to it. Doing so makes sense inasmuch as the imagined counterfactual circumstances aren't such that France can't exist (or couldn't have existed) were they to obtain. France could still exist if its capital would move (or had moved, or had been different to begin with), but it could not exist if it never had had any inhabitants, just like a hockey team could not have existed without ever having had any player in it, although it could have remained in existence as the same team that it is while undergoing some player exchanges in the past, and just like you can remain in existence while many, or all, the molecules that make up your body are exchanged, etc.
The "magic" involved simply is stipulation. There may seem to arise a problem if you endorse some sort of modal realism (i.e. realism about possible worlds). But Kripke was quite opposed to modal realism. To talk about a possible world W such that A is red at W (while A is blue in the actual world) just is to talk about the way the world could possibly be if A were red rather than blue. Thus phrased, the question about trans-world identification doesn't arise.
Suppose you make the counterfactual claim that had your alarm clock not failed to wake you up, you would have arrived to your workplace in time (rather than being late, as was the case in the actual circumstances, let us assume). And someone asks you by what magic you know that this "you" who would have arrived at work in time would be you and not someone else. The question is nonsensical unless you are some sort of neo-Heraclitean who questions the persistence of substances through material and/or qualitative change. But that would be a different issue than the issue of trans-world identification.
So then, what can a country be numerically identical with? If the so-called alternative France did not have the same history, did not begin in exactly the same way as the actual France, and the only similarities they could plausibly have, given that they evolved to have different capitals, is that they both occupy roughly the same regions in their respective worlds; and the people who existed there (who could not be the same people except at the very divergent beginnings of their respective histories) speak languages that may ( although even this seems pretty unlikely given the flow on effect a different France would have on the rest of the alternative Europe) be somewhat alike.
I asked "so again what is it that makes an imagined purported alternative France numerically identical to the actual France?" but you haven't answered the question. If I had an alternative history, given that I am a more or less self-contained biological organism; I would still be recognizable as myself. But in what sense could this be the case with a so-called France that had an alternative history. It simply wouldn't be France at all, because it wouldn't have had any of the same people, or the same configuration of villages, towns and cites, or occupy exactly the same territory or speak the same language. So on the basis of what could we think that it really is an alternative France?
The basis of identity seems to be the whole history of an entity. If France changed its capital tomorrow of course it would still be France, but this would be our actual France, not some imagined so-called alternative France. In any case, my original point was that it is not possible that Paris has not been up to now the capital of France (even it is counter-factually possible that it might not have been from some point in time), and that that is not something we have to go and check as we would with some empirical propositions such as for example that the deep ocean trench is not as deep as was previously thought, or that carbon dating turns out to be a totally inaccurate method, or that water now boils at 101 degrees C, and so on. So, none of the counter-arguments offered so far have convinced me that my original point that Paris being the Capital of France is more reliant on semantics than ordinary empirical claims, claims that have nothing more to do with semantics than that they are expressed in language, does not still stand.
It is not a "purported alternative France" that I was talking about; it is France. France would still be France if, counterfactually, at some point in time, its history had diverged from its actual history in some inessential respects. Likewise, if you actually went to work today, you would still be the same person if you had chosen to skip work instead. Your talk about "actual France" and "alternative France" -- as if those were distinct entities -- confuses you. There is just one France being considered in respect of its actual state (or history), or possible counterfactual states (or histories).
Maybe you are an actualist. Many of your comments point in that direction. Actualists believe that whatever P is actually true is necessarily true, and whatever Q is actually false is necessarily false. Hence, anything that is possible is necessary, on that view; there is no non-actualized possibilities. But that is a rather contentious metaphysical doctrine.
If you mean that a possible world is conjured and it's just stipulated that someone named X is there, yes that's what Kripke proposed. The SEP explains the associated concerns (and no, the problem is not possible world realism.)
Kripke side-stepped the issue. So, apparently, have you.
The reason why your name picks you up rather than your body is because it has been introduced in the language (when you were baptized, say) as the name of a living human being, and not the name of your body, or the name of the set of molecules that make you up at a time, or whatever else might be copresent with you. Kripke's so called "causal theory of reference" (which he disown) creates that sort of problems for the initial anchoring of a proper name. Co-presence doesn't entail numerical identity, and sortal-concepts (such as the concept of a person) enable us to distinguish merely copresent items that have different individuation and persistance criteria. (See David Wiggins: Sameness and Substance Renewed)
So we covered this before. Kripke was talking about ordinary language use, so we have to attend to the intentions of the speaker.
If what you wrote there is true, there should be no issue with a speaker stipulating an object, France, which must have Paris as its capital. Any other "France" is not the object the speaker is talking about. Call it a baptism of this France-Paris object as "France."
Apparently you object to that scenario. I have no idea why.
Sure, and one might just as well stipulate that "France" is the name of a turnip and therefore is essentially a vegetable. So what? If you make up essential properties and tag them on France arbitrarily, it's not France anymore that you are talking about.
I baptize a turnip "France."
Pierre: "That's not France."
Me: "Well, it's not the country whose capital is Paris. That's true. But I'm calling it France."
Pierre: "But it's not France."
Me: "What do you mean by France? What picks it out of any world (including this one?"
Previously you responded with "It's stipulated."
Honestly, I think it would help if you read the SEP article I pointed you toward. The issue you're imagining as resolved is not. One solution (that you seem to lean toward every now and then) is that we link a proper name to an object in a possible world via a proposition.
This is an example where two different things of two different sorts (and hence that possess two distinct sets of essential properties), might both be named "France". If you are thus talking about counterfactual de re possibilities regarding some object that you are designating with the word "France", the context of your utterance may resolve whether it is France, the European country, or rather your favorite turnip that is at issue. When this ambiguity has been resolved then it is indeed your stipulation and nothing else that makes it the case that the objects that you mean to be talking about, in the counterfactual situation, is your turnip rather than France the country.
We are making use of established (or ah hoc) naming practices, and the associated conceptual apparatus, in order to secure reference both to objects as they are in the actual world and also to those objects (the very same objects) as we fancy them to possibly be (counterfactually). When I judge my turnip to be white, or countenance that it could possibly have ripened pink (counterfactually), it is the very same turnip (numerical identity) that I either perceive (and designate demonstratively, say) or predicate counterfactual determinations of. Talk about "possible worlds" may obscure this very trivial fact if one has inchoate modal realist intuitions, maybe. Then one may feel like one has first to posit a possible world, and then, in a second step, specify what specific counterpart (or Doppelganger) the "actual object" ought to be identified with in the possible world. But this is nonsense. The merely "possible world" wasn't dreamed up appart from the act of positing the "actual object" having, counterfactually, some different determinations.
It would also help if you would be rather more specific than that. You yourself have raised very many different issues under the same label "the issue". This SEP article on Rigid Designators also raises very many issues that apply specifically to different theories or conceptions about singular reference. Some of the issues only are issues if you are a modal realist, others only are issues if you hold on to a purely descriptive theory of Fregean senses (and hence have trouble countenancing genuine singular reference), or, in the same vein, if you are holding on to some so called causal theory of reference (similar to what Franck Jackson seems to be targeting). If you aren't beholden to any one of those theories, then most of the issues drop. Kripke isn't beholden to any one of them, but he doesn't claim to have a positive theory of his own. His talk about the unbroken "causal" chain that a naming practice must retain to an initial naming event may invite (and has invited) non-conceptual "causal theories".
Gareth Evans and John McDowell have developed an alternative conceptions to such non-conceptual "causal" anchoring theories. (See Evan's chapter 11 (Proper Names) in The Varieties of Reference, or McDowell's paper Putnam on Mind and Meaning for primers.
No realism necessary.
1. When considering ordinary language use, it is necessary to attend to context of utterance to gain an understanding of the meaning of an utterance.
2. One can baptize any object with any name one chooses. The language community for that sort of thing need not extend beyond two people.
3. I may tell you that: "France might have escaped invasion that year." From the context of the conversation, you know (beyond any shadow of a doubt) that I mean the France that actually existed in 1940. Since that particular France had Paris as its capital, considering a possible world in which France did not have Paris as its capital would be a mistake. The object I am considering must have Paris as its capital.
4. In this case, over the range of possible worlds we're considering (all of which are abstract objects), it is necessary that Paris is the capital of France (although this is not apriori knowledge.) Though this is not a strict expression of Kripke's intentions, it fits well enough.
It might clear things up if you could tell me which of these points you disagree with.
If you still want to talk about the mechanics of reference in regard to rigid designators, we can. I thought originally that talking about that would help with a meeting of the minds between us, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
Yes, for sure, you are talking about a counterfactual situation where France still has Paris as its capital. This hardly establishes that the country, France, that you are talking about, has Paris as its capital essentially. You seem to be assuming without argument that "the France that actually existed in 1940" is an object that has all its actual properties essentially. But this is a confusion of categories. The object talked about just is France, while also talked about are all the essential and contingent determinations that this object is countenanced to have in the counterfactual situation. If we were to countenance France having a different capital, instead, then we would not be countenancing a different object, but rather a different (counterfactual) determination of this very same object.
Since the the object I'm talking about must have Paris as its capital, perhaps it's a moot point whether we call it essential or not. It's necessary. And it's aposteriori knowledge.
Agree?
Quoting Pierre-Normand
If I am talking about an object that must have Paris as its capital, you can either acknowledge that necessity or fail understand me, in which case we are not communicating and certainly not in the domain of situations Kripke was interested in.
No it is not essential, neither is it necessary, logically or metaphysically. It just so happens that you are restricting you attention to counterfactual situations where France nevertheless still has Paris as its capital. That hardly makes it necessary that France has Paris as its capital. Likewise, I could restrict my attention to possible worlds where all water is liquid. This would not make it necessary that water is liquid in the same sense that water necessarily is composed of H2O. However, I am not free to posit possible worlds where water is composed of XYZ. This would be to misconstrue what water essentially is (if Kripke and Putnam are right).
Likewise, if Samuel Clemens is (numerically identical to) Mark Twain then they are the same person in all possible worlds where they exist; and that's not just because I've chosen to arbitrarily restrict my attention merely to possible worlds where this identity holds. The identity expressed (by us, in the actual world) by the sentence "Samuel Clemens is Mark Twain" is necessary (i.e. it holds at *all* possible worlds) assuming only that it holds in the actual world and that both "Samuel Clemens" and "Mark Twain" are proper names (and not conventionally abbreviated definite descriptions, say). Here also, the necessity of identity doesn't depend on the speaker's intention in the way that you suggest. Is is not relative to the specific counterfactual situation that the speaker countenances.
No it isn't. We covered this already. This sentence is necessarily true:
If Samuel Clemens exists, he is Mark Twain.
If the France that I'm thinking of exists, it's capital is Paris.
That is a necessarily true statement if the France I'm thinking of must have Paris as its capital.
I actually tried to explain to the Great Whatever twice that that's what I meant. Its not explicitly laid out by Kripke that the rigid designator can be used in this way to mark out necessary aposteriori knowledge, but I think it follows.
I don't think that's going to work. We aren't talking about artificial languages here. It's ordinary language use.
Of course they are identical in any world where they exist. In possible worlds where Mark Twain never was born, the issue doesn't arise. My point it that they aren't identical just because you are arbitrarily restricting your attention only to some set of possible worlds where they are identical, as you are attempting to do with the case of France having Paris as its capital. In the latter case, you remain free to widen the scope of your consideration to possible worlds where France's capital moved, whereas in the former case there just aren't any possible worlds for you to consider where Samuel Clemens isn't Mark Twain. A posteriori metaphysical necessity isn't a mere matter of stipulation or the arbitrary restriction of the range of possible worlds being considered in some scenario.
OK, so I think you're refusing to acknowledge something that should be very clear.
"Samuel Clemens is Mark Twain."
This is not a necessarily true statement. You should know why that is and you should know what you have to add to it to make it necessarily true.
You are making an invalid inference from one de re necessity statement to another unrelated de re necessity statement. Just because you are thinking about France in circumstances where it has Paris as its capital doesn't entail that the object you are thinking about, France, necessarily has Paris as its capital. It could possibly have some other capital. The first de re necessity is about you and your specific thought about France. That you are thinking about France having some specific determinations (either actual or counterfactual) may generate de re necessities about this very thought that you have, but it doesn't generate de re necessities about France. It would still be possible for you (counterfactually) to think intelligibly about France not having Paris as its capital. You would not thereby be thinking about a different country.
Also, the nominal phrase "France as it exists with Paris as its capital" is not the name of a Fregean object. It's just a device used to call attention to a possible determination of an object. Just because you can call attention to a possible determination of an object hardly make that determination metaphysically necessary.
Samuel Clemens is Mark Twain.
This is not a necessarily true statement.
What would you have to add to make it necessarily true?
Actually it is a necessary statement since the context is extensional and co-referential terms can be intersubstituted in it salva veritate. The sentence thus expresses the de re necessity, about Mark Twain, that he is identical with himself. It might not be necessary if it were embedded in some intensional context. Someone who ignores that Samuel Clemens is Mark Twain would thus not realize that this sentence expresses a de re necessity, just as someone who would ignore that water essentially is H2O would not grasp that the demonstrative sentence "this water sample is composed of H2O" (in context) expresses a metaphysical necessity.
When were they co-referential terms?
Consider the truth of the sentence when Clemens was a child. In case you don't know who we're talking about.... no, he was not Mark Twain at that time.
And obviously, the statement is not truth-apt where there is no Samuel Clemens (which is the vast majority of possible worlds...)
People don't come into existence when they are named. "Mark Twain was born in 1835" is a true statement in spite of the fact that he was actually baptized Samuel Langhorne Clemens. He was indeed Mark Twain when he was born, he was just not going by that name. In fact he wasn't going by the name Samuel Clemens either, in all probability. "He was not Mark Twain at that time" isn't the true denial of an identity claim, it's just shorthand for the true claim that he wasn't going by that name at the time.
Samuel Clemens didn't have to pick the pen-name Mark Twain. He could have picked something else.
My claim is rather more narrow than that. I am merely denying your claim that when people think of France in some counterfactual scenario, they are thinking of "France" as referring to an object that has its envisioned determinations necessarily. That's just not part of the speaker's intention, and even if it were, it would have no bearing on the issue of a posteriori necessity being discussed in the literature. If you were right about the relationship between necessity and speaker's intentions, then there would be no a posteriori necessity, for there would be no way to inquire empirically about such metaphysical necessities. Whatever one would envision to be necessary for X to exist as we intend to represent it to be determined would be metaphysically necessary by fiat. Each and every speaker would have his own vacuous and tautological conception about how it is necessary that an object be determined in some merely stipulated situation. Hence, what would make it 'necessary' for France to have Paris as its capital is that someone is imagining it in some situation where it has Paris as its capital. That seems to be your account of a posteriori necessity in a nutshell.
Explain to me again how "Samuel Clemens is Mark Twain" is necessarily true.
Yes, and he could also have been baptized some name other than Samuel? So what? You might just as well claim that "water is H2O" doesn't express an metaphysical necessity just because "water" has been used to name "iron" in some alternative history of the English language. When we are assessing the truth of a claim of de dicto necessity, we are interpreting the worlds in which the claim is made according to actual and present linguistic conventions, not the alternate conventions that hold at the different times or counterfactual situations that we are talking about.
When we say that "Mark Twain is Samuel Clemens" expresses a metaphysical necessity, we are not implying that "Mark Twain" always has been uses (if at all) with the reference that we are assigning to it now. What distinguishes a de dicto from a de re necessity is not the fact that linguistic expressions have arbitrary meanings. It is rather a matter of the scope of the modal operator relative to the scope of the existential statement (when the claim of necessity of made explicit in modal logic). The issue of the conventionality of linguistic meaning is entirely separate; it is unrelated to the de dicto/de re distinction.
Simply put, because, firstly, although "Samuel Clemens" and "Mark Twain" have different Fregean senses, they have the same references in all possible worlds (being rigid designators), and the truth of statements of identity between two items depend only on the references of the words used to refer to them. And, secondly, because Kripke and Ruth Barcan Marcus have argued convincingly that identity is a necessary relation.
By contrast, the de dicto necessity statement: 'necessarily, the man named "Samuel Clemens" is Mark Twain' is false because 'the man named "Samuel Clemens"' -- the first term of the identity relation -- isn't a rigid designator. It picks different items in different possible worlds, and in some of those, this man isn't Mark Twain (and neither is it Samuel Clemens! -- it's just someone else who was named "Samuel Clemens")
It is still truly said of the man named Samuel Clemens in the actual world (de re) that is Mark Twain (albeit not necessarily named Mark Twain!) in all possible worlds, and vice versa.
But what about worlds where this man does not exist? Is the extension of the statement true there as well? It doesn't look like it would be truth-apt.
Possible worlds in which Mark Twain never was born aren't relevant to the evaluations of the necessity of the identity between the people that we call "Mark Twain" and "Samuel Clemens" in the actual world. I am unsure why you think there being such possible worlds is relevant. The positive claims of necessary identity between them is equivalent the claim that there isn't any possible world at which the men that we designate with those two different names both exist and aren't numerically identical, or at which one of them only would exist.
Likewise, the claims that water essentially is H2O is equivalent to the claim that there is no possible world at which both water and H2O-stuff would exist and they would not be the same stuff, or at which only one of those two stuffs would exist. It is irrelevant to this claim of metaphysical identity (or claim of metaphysically necessary material constitution, if you prefer) that there are possible worlds at which water doesn't exist at all. Also, that there are possible worlds where France never came about, historically, isn't relevant to nationhood being an essential property of France (if it is one).
Well, if we are evaluating the de re modal status of a true statement (i.e. inquiring about its being necessary of merely contingently true predication of some object) then we are looking for a possible world at which this statement might be evaluated false. If the object mentioned in the statement does't exist in some possible worlds, then the statement can't be evaluated at all, so those worlds aren't relevant. But when the statements at issue are purported a posteriori necessary statements, then it is not up to us (or up to "speaker's intentions") whether or not such a possible world W exists, or doesn't exists, such that the statement would be evaluated false.
Hence, I may know who Mark Twain is, and also have heard about some writer called Samuel Clemens, and not know that they are the same person. When I make this discovery (in the actual world, through historical investigation) then I can rule out that there is any possible world at which Mark Twain isn't Samuel Clemens. Possible worlds where Mark Twain never was born (whoever else might have been given the same name) aren't relevant to my discovery.
By the way, it seems to me that the reason why we speak of evaluating statements at possible worlds, rather than in possibles worlds, in the technical literature, might be in order preempt the confusion that the statements are to be evaluated in accordance with the alternative linguistic conventions that hold among our Doppelgangers "in" those worlds. This is a mistake that you (and John, if I remember) have a tendency to make. Evaluating a statements at a world means assessing its truth value in the hypothesized circumstances of this world while interpreting the statement in accordance with our own language. Hence, who Mark Twain refers to in some possible world W, at which we are evaluating the statement "Mark Twain is a featherless biped" is insensitive to whatever name Mark Twain goes by in that world. When those conventions are lost track of, endless confusion ensues.
Yes indeed. The crude identity statement is quite a simplification. Hilary Putnam himself was sensitive to some of those pragmatic consideration, even as early as his original The Meaning of "Meaning" paper, if I remember.
Which is why I rather like the loose phrasing "Water is essentially materially constituted by H2O", since "essentially" has the ordinary language connotation "almost but not quite exactly". It's got to have some fair amount of H2O in it, and heavy water is almost but not quite H2O, isn't it? (For deuterium and tritium also are hydrogen isotopes). Putnam was also, of course, sensitive to the fact that some stuff-names, such as jade, aren't "natural kind" terms at all. And some acceptions of "water" may also be like that.
To me it seems that there's your problem, right there ; you haven't been able to specify what are the essential and what are the inessential "respects" that we could use to say that it is a counterfactual France that we are thinking about; or how we could come up with criteria for deciding which respects are essential and which inessential, and also how those criteria could be anything but determined by qualitative.
I don't know; this kind of philosophy is not really my area of interest, so I am not familiar with "actualism". I do believe that whatever has happened has necessarily happened, but I don't believe that whatever happens in the future is necessary now. In other words I am not a determinist; I think the future is radically open, and that there is now a real.diversity of possibility.
In any case, I didn't want to get into modal philosophy at all. I was originally making a point about the differences between the kinds of knowledge exemplified by "Paris is the capital of France" and "the Sun is shining at such and such a location at such and such a time", and TGW and Jamalrob denied that there is any valid distinction in kind between those two propositions. That there is such a valid distinction is all I have been arguing for.
If the statement can't be evaluated at all at those worlds, then it certainly isn't true at them.
The statement is only true at worlds in which Samuel Clemens exists. And you would disagree with this.... why?
But before we evaluate the statement, it would be important to know what it means. Does linguistic convention preclude multiple meanings of the sentence? Of course not. So by some means, a particular meaning would have to be chosen. For instance, by some means, it would have to be determined that Mark Twain means a person, and the sentence is not answering a question about what Samuel Clemens' pen-name was.
How do you suppose that sort of determination is made (choosing from the various possible meanings of an utterance?)
So far as I can see, that the Sun is shining at some place X at some time T is an empirical and contingent fact of geography/meteorology/astronomy, whereas that France has Paris as its capital city at some time T is an empirical and contingent fact of human history. The Sun would still be the Sun while hidden behind a thick cloud cover and France would still be France with its capital city established away from Paris. I don't see any categorical difference between those two cases in point of topic-neutral metaphysics.
Not necessarily. If you analyse all singular terms as definite descriptions (as Russell does in the case of all singular referring expression except for private demonstrative reference to one's own sense data and one's use of the first personal pronoun) then all statements of the form "The X is F" would be evaluated false at possible worlds where nothing answers to the description "X". But proper names (or ordinary demonstratives) aren't like that. If a proper name NN is empty, then the statement "NN is red", say, is not false. It is meaningless. It purports but fails to express a singular thought. Nobody would say that NN isn't red (which would logically follow from "it is not true that NN is red") who knows NN not to exist.
The difference you are still failing to see is that the fact that the sun is shining is directly observable; whereas the fact that Paris is the capital of France is not, The latter is a kind of secondary fact that can be known only by accepting what others have said; it is derivative on the fact that people say that they designate and consider Paris to be the capital. If people ceased to designate and consider Paris to be the capital tomorrow it would cease to be the capital. By contrast, whether the Sun is shining at some place and time has nothing to do with whether people consider it to be shining. Put very simply, the fact that Paris is capital is dependent on thought in a way that the sun shining is not. That is why I say it is a quasi-semantic proposition.To me this is a very simple and self-evident distinction, as far as I can I see no one has yet come up with a good argument against it and I am therefore quite astounded at the degree of resistance to it I have encountered here.
I hold that Samuel Clemens is Mark Twain can only be true at a possible world that contains an object picked out by Samuel Clemens.
If you disagree, we have an impasse, but all I can say is I think you're wrong.
I hold that in the case of any utterance, it will have to be sorted out somehow what it means. You can't just point to what you understand to be linguistic convention.
You apparently disagree with that as well. Again.. I think you're wrong.
Since you disagree with both the premises to the argument I think follows from here... you obviously aren't going to agree with the conclusion.
Good discussion. Thanks!
Yes, of course, social-institutional facts aren't the sorts of facts that physicists and other natural scientists are interested in. Facts of the former kind are, in a sense, human dependent in a way that facts of the latter kind aren't; although I would resist attempts to inflate this common sense distinction into a sharp dichotomy. If human beings were wiped off the surface of the Earth, most objects left behind would lose most of their socially instituted determinations (for instance, monetary tokens would cease to have determinate monetary values, dogs would cease to be pets, etc.), but they would retain their natural-scientific determinations. I am not denying or ignoring this distinction but it seems to have little relevance to the a priori/ a posteriori or the necessary/contingent distinction that are being discussed in this thread. Both of those distinctions cut across the institutional/natural divide that you are appealing to. Many natural facts can be known a priori and/or are necessary, and many social/institutional facts can be known a posteriori and/or are contingent. So I don't see how you can expect to ground the distinctions that are the topic of this thread on the social-institutional/natural divide.
I don't disagree. I quite agree. You misread me. I denied that the evaluation of this sentence at possible worlds where Samuel Clemens doesn't exist is relevant to the determination of the modal status of this sentence. Kripke agrees, since he restricts his attention to possible worlds where the relevant objects exist in his demonstration of the necessity of identity. See the first four pages of his paper Identity and Necessity, or the first few pages of John P. Burgess's paper On a Derivation of the Necessity of Identity.
Unless you are a modal realist, then you can simply hold, as does Kripke, that X is necessarily identical to Y if and only if there is no possibility that X not to be identical to Y, where X and Y are the objects designated by "X" and by "Y", respectively, in the actual world (*). It's not relevant to the evaluation of this claim that X's or Y's existence be contingent, and hence that there might be possible worlds where they don't exist. Likewise, to repeat myself, the evaluation of the a posteriori necessity of water being composed of H2O is insensitive to the mere possibility that the world might have been devoid of water (and thereby, of course, also devoid of H2O).
(*) See Kripke's Naming and Necessity p.14: "I will say something briefly about 'possible worlds'. (I hope to elaborate elsewhere.) In the present monograph I argued against those misuses of the concept that regard possible worlds as something like distant planets, like our own surroundings but somehow existing in a different dimension, or that lead to spurious problems of 'transworld identification'. Further, if one wishes to avoid the Weltangst and philosophical confusions that many philosophers have associated with the 'worlds' terminology, I recommended that 'possible state (or history) of the world', or 'counterfactual situation' might be better. One should even remind oneself that the 'worlds' terminology can often be replaced by modal talk—'It is possible that . . .'"
I certainly don't disagree with this either. I am questioning the inferences that you are drawing from this. It is one thing to evaluate what is said by a speaker who makes use of a sentence, accounting for pragmatic considerations and contextual features of the utterance, and another to evaluate the modal status of the claim being made. You wish to make the latter rest entirely on the former, but questions of a posteriori necessity obviously outrun mere considerations of the utterer's intentions. If they would rest entirely on intention and/or convention then those modal claims would be a priori, stipulated by mere fiat.
I wasn't trying anything as ambitious as you are suggesting here. I was just pointing out that the knowledge that Paris is capital of France is known quasi-analytically insofar as it is so as a matter of definition or designation if you don't like the word 'definition' in this context.
And this just to show that the analytic/ synthetic divide is not as clear cut as it is sometimes made out to be.
True, but then, if the division isn't clear cut, this means that many socially instituted facts (e.g. the values of currencies relative to the gold standard, of the legal/political/administrative functions of cities and institutions) also have an empirical character. Also, if some entity has an institutional status (e.g. some city being the capital of a sovereign state) as a result of the collective will of the people (or of the King, etc.), then if the determination of this human will is itself contingent, then so is the inherited status and official function of the entity.
It's relevant, and I would say critical to grasping the concept of aposteriori necessary truths that we're talking about statements that are true over a limited number of possible worlds as opposed to true over all possible worlds.
I understand the concern you're raising, but I think if you followed the line of thought, you'd see that it's not the problem you're envisioning it to be.
As it is, your position seems to leave you endorsing a contradiction. Intention matters when discerning meaning, but not when evaluating modal claims. That just seems crazy to me.
This is a puzzling remark that you would have to explain. That something is necessary rather than contingent just means that it could not have been otherwise in any circumstance, which is exactly how Kripke urges that the claim that there is no "possible world" where it is false be understood. If there were (per impossibile) a possible world where Samuel Clemens isn't Mark Twain, then this would mean that they aren't necessarily identical, and hence, a fortiori, that the claim of identity is not a posteriori necessary. Likewise, if there were a possible world where water isn't composed of H2O, that would mean that water isn't necessarily composed of H2O, and hence, a fortiori, that this claim of essence isn't a posteriori necessary either.
That seems rather trivial to me. If someone purports to make some statement of a posteriori necessity, then, in a first step, you may indeed have to pay attention of the circumstances of her utterance, and her communicative intentions, etc., in order to understand what it is that she is claiming to be a posteriori necessary. Then, in a second step, by dint of the fact that her claim can only be known to be true a posteriori, you have to investigate what it is, in the world, that makes it true (e.g. investigate the nature of water, or seek out, by means of investigative journalism, if Clark Kent and Superman really are the same person, as she claims them to be.
In short, it's one thing to assess what it is someone means to say, and another to evaluate if it is true. In the special case where the claim can be known to be true a priori, then, maybe, those two steps collapse into the first one, but it is precisely a distinctive feature of the a posteriori necessary that they do not so collapse.
This is a confusing statement. Necessary modifies true. I guess it could modify false... that could be managed. You seem to be thinking of some.... thing? as being contingent or necessary. Some thing that could have been otherwise if it's contingent.
How about a statement or proposition can be necessarily or contingently true?
And if a statement is necessarily true, it's true in all possible worlds.
Aside from mountains of unresolved issues involving theory of meaning and reference, theory of truth, and theory of possibility... it's not brain surgery. :)
It's easy to imagine possible worlds where Clemens didn't exist. Clemens is Twain is not true at those possible worlds because it isn't truth apt.
To make a necessarily true statement, we need to say:
If Clemens exists, he is Twain.
That's actually necessarily true. (Assuming you approve of the concept of rigid designators and aposteriori necessity.. not all professional philosophers do.... obviously.)
Having determined the meaning of a statement, one need not at any point abandon that meaning for some convention for the sake of predicating truth.
No philosopher I know of would disagree with that. Do you know of one?
You thought I was advancing something crazy and I merely clarified what I meant. Now you seem to agree. But in that case, once it is established what de re necessity it is someone is purporting to express, you haven't shown how this claim being a posteriori necessary could depend in any way on the intentions of the speaker (beyond specifying what she means to say), or -- what has been centrally at issue between us -- how it could depend on some arbitrarily restricted range of possible worlds being single out for special consideration by the speaker (e.g. worlds in which France has Paris as its capital city). You've merely muddled the issue with the insistence the the items under consideration must exist in those possible worlds, which is trivially accepted by everyone (see my earlier Kripke and Burgess references) and has nothing to do with the speaker's particular intentions. Worlds in which water or Samuel Clemens don't exist just don't have any relevance to the evaluation of the modal status of the claims of a posteriori necessity that we've been considering.
Sorry, this was a shorthand. I means something being said; some proposition, or claim of de re necessity.
Yes. That's what I am claiming. And that's what you seem to have been denying consistently:
You appear, strangely, not to have realized that a posteriori necessary statements are... necessary.
Is there some reason a speaker could not say "France" and mean a country that has Paris as its capital?
This is the state of this conversation... I really have no earthly idea how you're likely to answer that. You keep trying to think three steps ahead of me instead of just logically evaluating the questions I asked. You say one thing and in the next post say "Of coarse I don't think that..."
I'm honestly finding it tiresome. Aren't you?
Point to where I denied that.
Think about why necessity was once (and by some still is) thought to entirely overlap apriori and analytic. If you do that, you should get a hint as to why it matters if a statements shows up non-truth-apt in a possible world.
Whenever anyone speaks about France, one speaks about a country that indeed has Paris as its capital. It is generally understood that it doesn't have Paris as its capital essentially. That is, there are intelligible counterfactual circumstances in which France has (or would lave had) another city as its capital. It would still have been France. But you are rather meaning to say, it seems, that one could conjure up a new meaning for the word "France" such that the 'country' that answers to it has Paris as its capital essentially (which also requires an arbitrary modification of the ordinary concept of a country). I am unsure what the point of doing so would be. For whatever object X that has property P contingently, I can conjure up some concept X* such that X falls under X* and X* has property P essentially. This is a queer and artificial concept reminiscent of Quine's gavagai or Goodman's grue. It doesn't seem to have any bearing en the topic of a posteriori necessary truths, which are truths that we can investigate about, and are empirically falsifiable, rather than being modal truths that we stipulate by dint of arbitrary concept modification as you seemingly envision them to be. Stipulated truths aren't a posteriori.
I just did, immediately after the ":"
(My bold)
"... over a limited number ... as opposed to all possible worlds" would appear to contradict "...in all possible worlds."
True. I don't believe there is anything that precludes a person talking about an object, France, for which it is essential (to that object) that its capital is Paris.
I'll tell you what. I'm going to write out the question and send it to a bunch of living professional philosophers... obviously with Scott Soames being one.
I'll get back to you with the answers (if any). If they all disagree with my assessment, then you'll have that gratification. If even one of them says nothing precludes the scenario, you will be obligated to at least try to understand what I'm saying instead of shoving every word I say back down my throat.
Deal?
It's only in the light of aposteriori necessity that we limit our assessment.
Traditionally, there was no limitation. There is no possible world where a bachelor is not an unmarried man.... you don't need the existence of bachelors in a world for that statement to be true (at that world. :)).
Sure, if you wish. But give them a pointer to this thread so that your paraphrase of our disagreement doesn't misrepresent its nature. You still seem to be taking me to be denying truisms when I am rather questioning the implications that you are deriving from them.
I'll write it out and give it to you for approval. OK?
And if you have any philosophers you want on the list, just let me know where they work.
So, you are again pointing to a limitation agreed upon by everyone. This is the limitation to worlds in which the relevant objects (that are targets of de re a posteriori necessities) exist. In the case of France having Paris as its capital, that would be a limitation to worlds in which France exists. In the case of water being essentially composed of H2O, that would be worlds in which water exists. In the case of Samuel Clemens being Mark Twain, that would be worlds in which Samuel Clemens exists. In all of those cases, the relevant modal truths are a posteriori (and thus a matter of empirical investigation) precisely because it is not simply up to us to stipulate some arbitrarily range of possible worlds such that the modal claim would come out true. If we do so, in the way you are proposing, then it isn't France, water or Samuel Clemens that we are talking about, unrestrictedly, but rather what is true of them, tautologically, in those circumstances only where it is assumed to be true of them.
Again, you are missing that a posteriori necessary statements are empirically falsifiable. They aren't true by fiat, as they would be according to your analysis in terms of speaker intended limitation.
I wouldn't want you to ask him to read the thread -- just provide the link for reference. I wouldn't want to bother any of them, myself. But sure, if you want to submit a paraphrase of our conflicting positions, and submit it to me first, go ahead. You can post it here.
Of coarse not. The speaker I mentioned doesn't know apriori what the capital of France is.
And the question being evaluated wouldn't be about what the capital of France is. It would be about something else.. like the possibility of Paris, France hosting the Olympics.
.
Yes, and I do appreciate that Paris is not the capital of France, in a 'fully' analytic sense, that is strictly by definition, inasmuch as the word 'Paris' does not definitively mean 'capital of France'.
Oh, the ambiguities of language! But, I wouldn't have it any other way; else we would have no poetry...
The fiat at issue concerns the claim about France* (or whatever the speaker means to be referring to as "France") having Paris as it capital necessarily. If this sort of relativized necessity is merely a matter of interpreting the speaker's intention, then it is not a posteriori.
When you inquire about the possibility that Paris, France, hosting the Olympics, the country, France, that is at issue, still has Paris as its capital contingently. It just so happens that you are not interested in what would happen if Paris would lose its status as France's capital. Just because this possibility is irrelevant to your inquiry hardly makes is necessary (let alone a posteriori necessary) that the object, France, being considered in those counterfactual scenarios, has Paris as its capital.
You seem to be conflating the following two claims:
(1) Necessarily, if I am thinking of France in circumstances where it has Paris as its capital, then in all those circumstances, France has Paris as its capital.
(2) If I am thinking of France in circumstances where it has Paris as its capital, then, France, as I am thinking about it, necessarily has Paris as its capital.
The first claim is a truism that fails to entail the second. The second claim is false since disregarding a possibility doesn't make it an impossibility, let alone an a posteriori impossibility.
I think the smoking gun is that Paris preexists the time when Clovis made it the capital of his Kingdom. But what has mainly been at issue in my discussion with Mongrel isn't the de re modal status of Paris's being France's capital, but rather the de re modal status of France's having Paris as its capital city. It is the a posteriori necessary status of this latter de re claim that is a issue. The claims are independent. Likewise, you arguably have the natural parents that you have essentially (i.e. it is a de re necessity, on some reasonable accounts of personal identity) but it is a contingent fact about your natural parents (de re contingency) that they have had you as a child.
If I'm thinking of the actual France, it has Paris as its capital in all possible worlds where the actual France exists (which is exactly how many?)
And I learned aposteriori that the actual France has Paris as its capital.
Problem?
Yes, I think I see what you mean, you seem to want to say that it is an essential part of my identity that I have the parents that I have, but not an essential part of their identities that they had me a child, just as it is an essential part of the identity of Paris to have been the capital of France; whereas it is not an essential part of the identity of France to have had Paris as its capital.
I'll have to think more about this. It seems to rely on the idea of 'identity as existence'. So, it is an essential part of my identity to have had the parents I had, because it is not plausible to think that I could have existed otherwise; whereas it is not an essential part of my parent's identities to have had me, because their existence is not dependent on it.
When it comes to towns and countries, though I'm not sure such analogies follow, because towns and countries do not seem to be entities as precisely determinable, critically self-organizing or self-contained in the sense of being ontically bounded, as people are. For a start, the existential status, as opposed to the bare existence, of people does not seem to be subject to designations of thought, in the kind of way I pointed out earlier towns and countries are. On the other hand I can also see, that if Paris was suddenly declared not to be the capital of France, then it would not immediately change its character, although its character would rapidly diverge over time from what it would have been if it had remained capital. It is a very complex issue involving both empirical states of affairs and semantic determinations.
There are two problems. First, the "actual France" and some "alternative France" (as you might contemplate it in some possible world) are not distinct objects. If there exists a possible world where France has Toulouse as its capital, this simply means that France (the very same object) could possibly have had Toulouse as its capital. Likewise, in the actual world, me, being 6 feet tall isn't a different person from me, being Canadian. And if I cease to be Canadian, it doesn't follow that "me, being Canadian", some queer object with just one arbitrary determination tacked onto it by fiat, goes out of existence, but merely that, I, the flesh and blood individual, who was contingently Canadian all along, have lost my Canadian citizenship.
The second problem is that the question of the epistemological status (i.e. its being known a priori or a posteriori) of some proposition "X is F" that it is true, and of the de re modal claim "X necessarily is F" that it is true, are two distinct questions. So, that you learned the first sort of claim (factual) a posteriori doesn't get you off the charge that your procedure for establishing the second sort of fact (modal necessity) is not a posteriori. It is still by fiat that you are establishing the second sort of claim.
I disagree. The actual France exists in a particular possible world.. the actual world.
To introduce that you'd have to have some kind of relative domain, and if you want to make the even stronger Lewisian claim that each individual belongs only to one world, then it becomes possible to spea of the world in which an individual is. But, like Lewisian metaphysics generally, I think this is a profoundly confused way of looking at things.
That would make you a necessitarian rather than a determinist, although you may be a determinist as well. Necessitarianism is the view that everything that is actual is necessary. Determinists may hold that although only one future is consistent with the actual past, the whole history of the world isn't necessary, and hence they need not be necessitarians as well. This view (necessitarianism) had sometimes been called actualism in the older literature (e.g. by M. R. Ayers in his The Refutation of Determinism, Methuen, 1968) but now, the label actualism rather is used by analytic philosophers to refer to the denial of possibilism (or of 'modal realism', which is a sort of possibilism). Many things you said in this thread seem to stem from your being a necessitarian (or "actualist" in Ayers' sense), but also to be inconsistent with actualism in the new sense.
This would also explain why some of the things you say may seem to clash with what TGW, or Kripke, or Soames, or I myself, would say, since none of us are necessitarians.
Determinism doesn't have the implication that whatever is actual is necessary. Determinism rather is the weaker thesis that the state of the world at any given time, in conjunction with the laws of nature, determines uniquely the state of the world at any other time. Hence, if determinism is true, and P and Q are 'maximal' propositions that express the actual states of the world at times t1 and t2, respectively, then it follows that, necessarily, if P then Q. However, if P is actual (and t1 is some time in the past), it doesn't follow from determinism, in conjunction with P and the laws of nature, that Q is necessary. That's an elementary blunder in modal logic that leads some people (mainly in philosophy forums) to slide fallaciously from determinism to necessitarianism.
From the two premises
(1) P is actual,
(2) if P then Q
doesn't follow
(3) nec(Q)
In order to derive the conclusion (3) validly from something like (1) and (2) you would need to modify the first premise to read
(1b) nec(P).
But it doesn't follow from the thesis of determinism that the state of the world, at any given time in the past, necessarily obtains. Hence necessitarianism, the thesis that you are endorsing, doesn't follow from determinism. You also need the thesis of the necessity of the past, and this thesis is independent from determinism.
Let P be a proposition that expresses the state of the world at some past time t.
The following two premises are true:
(1) P is actual
(2) nec(if P is actual, then P)
But it doesn't follow from those two premises that nec(P).
So determinism, at least in this strong sense that allows for no true randomness, is coterminous with necessitarianism.
That's only true if the first state of the world (if there is one) obtains not just actually but necessarily. This additional premise maybe something that you believe to be true, but it isn't part of determinism as ordinarily conceived.
In any case, if determinism obtains and the origin is not determined then it is still the case for all epistemological,semantic and ontological intents and purposes that all events are as good as necessary, because they are necessary given the actuality of the origin. And that would mean that Paris is necessarily the capital of France.
Note: I don't personally believe determinism obtains.
This is where your fascination with jargon is letting you down. Determinism is a concept that predates analytic philosophy. And yes.. it most certainly can be the thesis that every actuality happens necessarily.
Even if determinism is true, the state of the world at any time could still have been different if the state of the world as a whole had been different. If it is just an unquestionable premise for you that the state of the world as a whole is necessary, and not merely actual (and hence, conceivably, contingent), then you are simply assuming the truth of necessitarianism without argument. You don't even need to rely on the thesis of determinism. This also has nothing to do with randomness. Contingent occurrences need not be random. Being determined by the past, and being necessary, are two different things.
Yes, but that doesn't mean is is in conflict with possibility. Modern forms of determinism frequently drop (and rightly so) pre-determinism. Necessity is only a question of actually-- if X exist, then X must exist. Possibility remains throughout. For any necessarily state of actuality, there is the possibility something else could have been.
;)
Actual possibility is an incoherence. Possibility is, by definition, not an actual state. We can't have X which exists as maybe X or distinct state of Y. For X to Y is a contradiction. If it is true, I made this post, then there no possibility that making his post is not making this post.
All possibilities are logical. Some are just expressions of particular existing states-- e.g. a six sided die having six possible outcomes.
Have it your way then. "Determinism" in your sense is equivalent to necessitarianism, or to actualism in M. R. Arers's sense. It is a contentious metaphysical doctrine that I dont know any living analytic philosophers to be endorsing. I wonder what your ground might be for endorsing it, if it isn't the mistake in modal logic that I have highlighted.
Of course there are actual possibilities. It is an actual possibility that you will respond to this post, Of course it is also a logical possibility. It is a logical possibility that you might transform yourself into a tiger tomorrow morning at 8 AM, but that is only an actual possibility if such a contravention of what we call natural law might really happen. If determinism obtains what is actually possible now is what actually happens later; that and nothing else. But if indeterminism is true then that no longer holds, but then nor does necessity.
Your are more right than you are giving yourself credit for here.
Paris is the capital of France is a fully analytic sense. If we are talking about our Paris, our language, then it is by definition the capital of France. We can't speak our language without this being true. Within our language about our world, it's necessary that Paris is the capital of France.
Don't worry, it might have been more than you were giving me credit for, but I was giving myself credit for it from the start; that is precisely what I have been arguing and why I introduced the "Paris is the capital of France" example in the first place.
But, as I have also acknowledged 'Paris' does not mean 'capital of France' in as 'full' a sense as 'spinster' means 'never married woman'.
"Natural" law is a lie. It's merely a misreading of our current theories about the world as pre-deterministic.
Yes. Determinism is an interesting viewpoint. No living analytic philosopher has proven determinism to be true or false.
And I'm pretty sure you misunderstand my position...
No, not as used by logicians and analytic philosophers. It's a basic axiom of modal logic that what is actual is, a fortiori, possible. It's not even a connotation of the term as used in ordinary language that something that's said to be possible isn't actual. If you ask me if it's possible that I may have left my keys in the car, and I reply that it is indeed possible, I am certainly not implying that it isn't actual -- that it is merely an unactualized possibility -- but rather that it might me the case.
How could you possibly know that? Why would it not be possible that the nature of things is such that it is really and incontrovertibly impossible for you to transform yourself into a tiger? Do you have an argument?
Put it another way, forgetting about the laws of nature; it is actually impossible for you to transform yourself into a tiger right now; meaning that you actually don't know how to do it right now. If it was actually possible for you to do it right now, then you could do it right now, and refute my claim.
Did you do it? Nope, you didn't...and there are countless examples of what is actually impossible for you right now; triple back somersault, walking through walls, coming up with the next advance in QM, transporting yourself instantaneously into my living room, even knowing where my living room is, and so on, ad infinitum....
I didn't say that forms expressed in actuality were not also a possible world. I merely said that possibility does not equal actuality. Any possible world is, by definition, possible. This includes one with expression of the things in the actual world.
The basic axiom of many modal logic is "what is actual is possible." But that's the problem. It equates actuality with possibility, as if they we're the same. The issue is not saying that possibility is actuality, but rather that actuality is possibility.
They are not. The possible world where Paris is the capital is not the actual world where Paris is the capital, despite them expressing the same form. One is what might be. The other is what is.
The issue is when you have left you keys in the car. For using the "actual is possible" axiom, it results in saying: "It's actual my keys are in the car. It's only possible. They might not be."
This is not true.
I am not going to understand your position any better if you are unwilling to clarify it. You've expressed your view thus: "Any statement about actuality that is true is necessarily true." There are no contingent facts, on your view, it would seem. The only contemporary philosopher I can think of who has endorsed a view that comes anything close to this is Timothy Williamson, but his thesis is restricted to the predicate of existence. He has argued that anything that actually exists exists necessarily. But things that exist can still have some of their properties contingently, on his view.
To say otherwise is a contradiction. If is is possible I may turn myself into a tiger tomorrow, then the world may work differently than how it does now. The "law" cannot be pre-determinstic. What I am depends on how I exist (e.g. human or tiger), not on the logical expression of how we think the world must work.
If it is impossible for me to turn into a tiger, there can be no possibility of me turning into a tiger (whether we call it "logical" or "actual" ).
No, that's not what you had said. You had said that "Possibility is, by definition, not an actual state." That's a bit like saying that mammals are, by definition, not elephants. And then walking it back: "...I merely said that being a mammal doesn't equal being an elephant." Sure, no contest. Actuality entails possibility, but possibility doesn't entail actuality.
No, even if it is actually impossible for you to turn yourself into a tiger either because you just don't know how, or because the laws of nature simply don't permit it; that doesn't mean it is logically impossible for you to turn yourself into a tiger, except in the limited sense that it is logically impossible for you to do something you cannot do.
But, again this just reverts to actual impossibility. The unconstrainedly logical possibility consists just in the idea that things might have been different with you and the world such that you could transform yourself into a tiger; nothing purely logically precludes that possibility, even though actuality might very well preclude it.
My point is actuality doesn't contain possibility. If we are talking about an actual elephant, then we cannot say: "being [that] mammal doesn't equal being an elephant."
The issue with the standard modal approach is not in confusing possibility with actuality, it is in confusing actuality with possibility. The necessity of actual state is treated as if it is only possible.
Sometimes we look at things deterministically. Sometimes we don't. Modal logic can be used to examine both modes of experience and expression.
It's not a mistake of modal logic (or of "the standard modal approach", whatever that is) to resist the slide from actuality to necessity. Not everything that is actual is necessary. Hence the actuality of P doesn't preclude the possibility of not-P. If you deny this then you can't begin to make sense of the contingent/necessary distinction as applied to the states material objects are in at specific times, say. Every accidental property that an object contingently manifests at a time becomes an essential property for this object to have at that time. This makes nonsense of the idea of unactualized powers.
Still missing my point. The mistake of standard modal logic is to slide from actuality to possibility. To treat the actual world as if it's the same as the possible one-- creating confusion like over Paris in this thread. When someone tries to talk about actual Paris (e.g. as Mongrel has), it tries to suggest that actual Paris doesn't necessarily mean anything, that it is merely possible world.
Supposedly, Mongrel is wrong for suggesting actual Paris necessarily means the capital of France, as actual Paris is (supposedly) also only a possible world.
My point is standard model logic has confused the presence of the actual world for the possible one. There is a possible world in which France is the capital of Paris, but it is not given in actuality of Paris. Even is the meaning of the actual world is the same as this possible one, the possible one is still only logic.
Thus, even though Paris being the capital of France is a possible world, it is also true that actual Paris necessarily means the capital of France (until such time as that state of the world changes).
Indeed. I am talking about the relationship of necessity though. That the actuality/necessity of P (Paris exists as the capital of France) does not preclude the possibility of Paris being (or not being) the capital. The possible worlds (possibility) are true no matter what is necessary (actual).
So this claim is too weak. Everything which is actual (necessary) has a true possible world which corresponds to it. The necessity of existence-- "if X is exists, then X must be"-- is not opposed or in conflict with possibility. Every state of the world is merely one possible outcome. Not even necessity of every actual state ( "if X is exists, then X must be") can overcome possibility. For states of the world to have logical necessity ("X is true anywhere, no matter what exists") is incoherent.
That doesn't make any sense. You are not using "necessary", or "possible world" in the same way any one else uses those terms. "Necessary" doesn't mean "actual", and, yes, the necessity of some proposition P does preclude the possibility of not-P. You are letting talk of possible worlds confuse you. Also, possible worlds aren't true or false. Possible worlds aren't propositions. A possible world just is a way the world could possibly be (or have been). Paris being the capital of France (during some specified time interval) isn't a possible world, but rather is part of the specification of a possible world. Possible worlds, or the possibilities that are part of their specifications, can't be true of false anymore than a carrot can be true or false. Propositions are true or false; objects aren't.
Chalmers wrote back that he agreed with you. None of the lesser known philosophy people wrote me back. Yet.
Uh.. this answer is on the verge of confusing me. I haven't finished Soames' essay Actually. Maybe after I finish it, I'll be able to assess this answer a little better.
Actually
What?
You actually have to use the actually operator to turn a contingent truth into a necessary one. Why couldn't it just be implied? What Scott Soames is talking about here is not ordinary language use.... that's why.
Bizarre.
Yes, under the interpretation that Soames proposes, under Kaplan's 2D semantic framework, that is indeed the case. But one must be careful about what proposition is thereby taken to be necessarily true. First, notice that 'Actually...' is a sentential operator that operates on a complete sentence suitable as to expresses different propositions in a variety of context/situation pairs (where the context of utterance determines the references of the indexicals such as to determine the proposition expressed, and hence its truth conditions, and the situation refers to the state of the possible world relevant to the evaluation of the truth of this proposition. On Soames' proposed intepretation, 'Actually...' is a semantic device stating explicitly that the evaluation of the embedded sentence must take place at the actual world. Hence, if the sentence S is evaluated as true at the actual world (which we may find out a posteriori, through empirical investigation) then it is thereby necessarily true that 'actually S'. In that case, 'actually S' is not taken to be synonymous with the bare sentence 'S'. But neither one of them refers to distinct objects across possible worlds.
Anyway.. "Actually, the capital of France is Paris."
We agree the above statement is necessarily true and aposteriori?
Cool.
Let us denote "AS" the sentence "Actually, the capital of France is Paris."
Agreed, if by "the above statement" you mean to refer to the proposition P1 expressed while uttering this sentence ("AS") in the actual world, then, indeed, this proposition P1 is necessarily true. Our being in the actual world (in which Paris happens to be, contingently, the capital of France) provides a context of utterance such that the sentence "AS" can be used to express a necessarily true proposition. The proposition P1 therefore is true at all possible worlds.
Be aware, however, that in possible worlds in which Paris isn't the capital of France, the very same sentence "AS" -- "Actually, the capital of France is Paris." -- can be used to express a proposition P2 that is necessarily false (assuming that ordinary English is also in use in that possible world, or else a suitable translation of the sentence "AS" can be used). Hence, a fortiori, the proposition P2 thus expressed in such a world is false at the actual world! We must thus evaluate, empirically, whether or not Paris is the capital of France in order to know whether the proposition expressed by us with the use of "AS" is necessarily true or necessarily false.
But all of this just is a quirk of the actuality operator as interpreted in two-dimensional semantics. It has nothing to do with the essentialness (or lack thereof) for France to have Paris as its capital, or for Paris to be France's capital. The latter rather has to do with the socio/historical/conceptual roots of the concepts of cities, nations and capitals.
Actually, the capital of France is Paris. This is an example of aposteriori necessity.
We're so smart to have figured that out. The fact that we aren't examining ordinary language is significant here, Pierre. It means there's an artificial, stilted element to the proceedings. The conclusion is constructed. It's not something that follows from any logic and therefore being able to repeat that conclusion is not a sign of wisdom... certainly not a love of wisdom.
I'm not quite sure why it ended up this way, though. Is it that ordinary language is just too complex to fathom? Possibly. AP started out examining fake languages with the hope that something would be learned in the process.. something that would advance understanding of ordinary language.
It didn't work out that way, I don't think.
Is "AP" analytic philosophy? Yes, Frege, Russell, Carnap, Quine, Davidson, Kripke and many other philosophers have devoted much energy studying formal and ideal languages. The paybacks have been tremendous although, for sure, many lines of inquiry have led to dead ends and/or have spawned degenerative research programs. All one can do is try to sort out the philosophical wheat from the chaff. I am fond of David Wiggins' methodological dictum that whenever one uses some technical or semi-technical term in order to make a substantive philosophical point, one ought to check one's own sanity through trying to convey the same point in plain English (or whatever ordinary language one speaks). Many of my favorite philosophers belong to quietist or broadly OLP traditions (i.e. ordinary language philosophy) and hence I'd be the first one to complain about the overuse of formal methods in analytic philosophy. But such tools, however overused they may be in some quarters, can still be indispensable to enforcing rigor, when needed, and can provide insight through the disentanglement of formerly conflated ideas.
Also insightful are the worries Soames raises against the validity of Kripke's demonstration of the aposteriority of such necessary statements (in chapter 15, volume 2 of his Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, see especially note 15.) But what it is that Soames' valid criticism highlights, in my view, is the limitation of the idea (tacitly relied on by both Kripke and Soames) that what utterances express (and what the objects of propositional attitudes such as beliefs are) are Russellian rather than Fregean propositions. Such an approach makes it hard to fathom that one can think of a particular under a Fregean mode of presentation, or sense (Sinn), that isn't equivalent to a definite description. The view of singular Fregean senses as being essentially object involving has been developed by Gareth Evans in his book The Varieties of Reference and by John McDowell in his paper De Re Senses. Hilary Putnam, who, like Kripke, has been a target of Evans' constructive criticism had written a harsh review of Evans' book, initially, and then eventually came to gain an appreciation of its profound significance.
"What I am objecting to, at bottom, is a presumption that seems to be shared by both the anti-descriptivists and their neo-descriptivist opponents: namely, that philosophically interesting modal and essentialist theses in metaphysics can be extracted from a combination of semantic theory and empirical science. Because they differ radically regarding semantic theory, the rival camps have very different views as to the ground and character of such modal and essentialist theses and as to how our knowledge of them is attained. What neither camp seems to be prepared to acknowledge is that questions concerning modal truths and modal knowledge cannot be decided by appeal to semantic theory and empirical science, since these are not questions to do with either the workings of language or scientific facts. This is why I am deeply suspicious of the idea that a resolution of the descriptivist/anti-descriptivist debate, if it is ever achieved, will have any genuine bearing whatever on substantive issues in metaphysics. Serious metaphysicians and philosophers of science, I suggest, would do well to ignore the debate as an in-house dispute between philosophers of language and simply get on with their own business in their own way."
Lowe's full piece, followed by Soames' reply, appeared in Philosophical Books, 2007, 48,1