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Two-Dimensionalism and the Social Character of Meaning

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Abstract

This paper develops and critiques the two-dimensionalist account of mental content developed by David Chalmers. I first explain Chalmers’s account and show that it resists some popular criticisms. I then argue that the main interest of two-dimensionalism lies in its accounts of cognitive significance and of the connection between conceivability and possibility. These accounts hinge on the claim that some thoughts have a primary intension that is necessarily true. In this respect, they are Carnapian, and subject to broadly Quinean attack. The remainder of the paper advances such an attack. I argue that there are possible thinkers who are willing to revise their beliefs in response to expert testimony (in a way familiar by Burge’s famous cases), and that such thinkers will have no thoughts with necessary primary intensions. I even suggest that many actual humans may well be such thinkers. I go on to argue that these possible thinkers show that the two-dimensionalist accounts fail.

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Notes

  1. I have in mind many of the arguments in Soames (2007), Schiffer (2003), Byrne and Pryor (2006). The critics have legitimate targets in Jackson (1998) and perhaps Chalmers (1996), but I will not consider descriptivist variants of 2D further. As will become clear, other critics of 2D have come close to anticipating my own objection; see my discussion of Block and Stalnaker (1999) and of Yablo (2002) in Sect. 1.1. In my view, these criticisms can be answered (and indeed, have been answered in Chalmers 2006, 2007). A further source of confusion is the idea that two-dimensionalism is an attempt to provide a compositional semantics for natural language. Of course, techniques derived from two-dimensional modal logics have been profitably applied to natural language by Kaplan (1977) and others, and I have no objection to these semantic programs. It is even possible that 2D will play a role in giving a semantics of belief reports (see Chalmers 2011a). But the distinctive epistemic theses of Chalmers’s two-dimensionalism have very little to do with natural language semantics, as it is understood by (say) Heim and Kratzer (1998); for one thing, Chalmers’s primary intensions can vary between tokens of a single natural language word type (see Sect. 2.2 below).

  2. These Carnapian roots are especially emphasised in Chalmers (2012).

  3. In Sect. 2.4, I suggest further that the objections apply to any view that attempts to account for the cognitive significance of our thoughts in terms of a notion of the apriori that is empirically indefeasible. 2D is perhaps the most prominent account of this type in the current literature, but the objections presented would generalise to any such account.

  4. The two-dimensionalist story is in principle applicable both to sentences and to mental representations such as beliefs. I use ‘representation’ to cover both linguistic and mental representations.

  5. My discussion abstracts away from some of the details (e.g., the construction of scenarios and the notion of a canonical description of a world) presented in Chalmers (2006); these details do not affect the criticism of 2D that I develop below.

  6. Of course, not every criticism turns on a descriptivist interpretation; in particular, the objections developed in series of papers by Laura Schroeter (2003, 2004, 2005) are congenial to my own view.

  7. A third possibility is that the 2D account provides a sufficient condition for the cognitive significance phenomena to occur, which would play a role in explaining how it is possible for such phenomena to occur. (Such “how possible” explanations have important precedents in philosophy; see the introduction to Nozick 1981 for discussion). A recent model of this sort of theory is Jerry Fodor’s theory of content, which attempts only to provide ‘naturally specifiable [… ] sufficient conditions for a physical state to have an intentional content.’ (1990, p. 96). But I set this aside for two reasons. First, it is pretty clear that this is not what Chalmers has in mind; he surely intends his account to explain our actual thinking and reasoning. And second, there is no real mystery about how it is possible for the cognitive significance phenomena to occur, once the resources needed to generate primary intensions are in place. Primary intensions depend on the ability to entertain detailed descriptions of possible cases and to make judgments about them; it is not surprising that the cognitive resources necessary for this ability can provide a sufficient condition for the cognitive significance phenomena. (This contrasts with Fodor’s theory of content; many philosophers have found it mysterious how intentionality could arise from the purely naturalistic resources to which Fodor appeals).

  8. This interpretation is suggested by some of Chalmers’s writing: e.g., Chalmers (2006, p. 105, 108).

  9. This style of argument is familiar in the literature on externalism and narrow content. Proponents of narrow content have sometimes argued that psychological explanations should cover (for example) both my twin-Earth doppelgänger and I. Externalists have also availed themselves of this sort of argument; for example, Williamson (2000, p. 62) argues that knowledge is explanatorily preferable to true belief because it covers other closely related cases.

  10. Are such attempts not explanations at all, or are they merely bad explanations? Resolving this terminological issue is of little importance.

  11. Note that the argument does not purport to show that primary intensions would not be defined for a Quinean thinker; I am granting this, at least for the sake of argument. Rather, the objection is that if a Quinean thinker is possible, then primary intensions cannot be the basis of a successful account of cognitive significance.

  12. On some views, knowledge gained by testimony may count as apriori (e.g., Burge 1993). But this sort of view stands in serious tension with the Core Thesis and the account of primary intension described above.

  13. According to The US Department of Health and Human Services/National Institutes of Health’s publication Handout on Health: Rheumatoid Arthritis: ‘Rheumatoid arthritis is an inflammatory disease that causes pain, swelling, stiffness, and loss of function in the joints. It has several special features that make it different from other kinds of arthritis. [… ] It can also affect other parts of the body besides the joints’ (2004, p. 1). (Remarkably, this can include ‘inflammation of the blood vessels, the lining of the lungs, or the sac enclosing the heart’ 2004, p. 5). This fact can also be found in standard medical reference books, e.g. Macpherson (2002): ‘Rheumatoid Arthritis: A chronic inflammation of the synovial lining of several joints, tendon sheaths or bursae which is not due to sepsis or a reaction to uric acid crystals’ (p. 541, my emphasis).

  14. This case illustrates that the cases do not depend on actual ignorance or error. Even in many cases in which we in fact have correct beliefs, it is possible that we are mistaken; and if we were corrected by experts, we would change our beliefs. This is all that is needed to get the argument off the ground.

  15. I return to a related proposal in Sect. 2.4 below.

  16. I set aside controversial (e.g. Davidsonian or Wittgensteinian) views about the nature of meaning and content that would provide further reasons if true.

  17. Indeed, when I consider my own case, it seems to me very likely that I am a Quinean thinker. But of course I do not expect the two-dimensionalist to be impressed by my introspection.

  18. In fact, this sort of consideration raises some subtle issues. Could there be types of mathematical reasoning that some possible thinker could complete, but that we could not (even given idealisation) without undergoing massive changes to our psychologies? For example, suppose that our reasoning capacities are limited to the Turing machine computable. Even if we were idealised by giving us unlimited time, memory, and so forth, there would still be limits to the sort of reasoning that we could perform, limits that could be overcome only by fundamentally changing our psychological natures. But there might be thinkers with computationally different psychological architecture (for examples, see Copeland and Sylvan 1999) who can perform reasoning that we could not. The testimony of such thinkers might be valuable even to an agent who was as ideally rational as someone psychologically like us could possibly be.

  19. There are certain special cases where it is controversial whether it is acceptable to believe on testimonial grounds: for example, some philosophers maintain that moral and aesthetic testimony are problematic in various respects. But the respects in which these sorts of testimony are problematic seem orthogonal to our concerns. For example, it seems problematic for me to believe testimony to the effect that Beethoven’s piano sonatas are not beautiful if I have not heard them and the testifier’s grounds are that she does not find them aesthetically appealing. But it is not obvious that there is a similar problem if the testifier’s grounds are based on (e.g.) the idea that it as a matter of conceptual or definitional truth, entities of that kind cannot be beautiful.

  20. A closely related strategy for defending 2D would define quasi-apriority* by appealing to the primary intension that an expression would have in a nearby world where the subject used it non-deferentially. This would evade the second objection as stated, but would still be subject to the first and third objections. And it would threaten to generate other problematic quasi-apriorities*. For example, it would turn out to be quasi-apriori* for me on such a view that I do not defer to my linguistic community about whether arthritis can occur in the thigh. But this is both false, and an empirical matter.

  21. At least, it is hard to see as long as we set aside Millian views (Salmon 1986) according to which one can know apriori that water is H2O by knowing that water is water.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Dilip Ninan, Bryan Pickel, Mark Sainsbury, and Michael Tye. Special thanks are due to David Chalmers, who very generously gave detailed, incisive, and extremely helpful comments on multiple drafts of this essay.

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Ball, D. Two-Dimensionalism and the Social Character of Meaning. Erkenn 79 (Suppl 3), 567–595 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-013-9553-1

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