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Friday, January 29, 2016

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>>Knowing Ed, he will probably find a way to disagree with a good chunk what I am about to say.
I totally disagree with this.

However aside from that, I broadly agree with your characterisation of the puzzle.

But note the puzzle above is the Frege puzzle, not the Kripke puzzle, aka Paderewski puzzle.

You're right. I am not yet discussing the Paderewski puzzle. But part of its motivation is the Frege puzzle. See section II of Kripke's paper right near the beginning.

>>See section II of Kripke's paper right near the beginning.

That's section I isn’t it? The section entitled ‘I. Preliminaries: Substitutivity’, and which begins ‘In other writings, I developed a view of proper names closer in many ways to the old Millian paradigm …’?

It would be worth listing some of the arguments Kripke gives for the Millian view.

1. While it may be plausible to suppose that ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’ had different senses before they sorted the astronomy out, what corresponding conventional senses, even taking ‘senses’ to be ‘modes of fixing the reference rigidly’ can plausibly be supposed to exist for ‘Cicero’ and ‘Tully’ (or ‘Holland’ and ‘the Netherlands’)? Aren't these just two names (in English) for the same man? Is there any special conventional, community-wide ‘connotation’ in the one lacking in the other? K says he is unaware of any. There is an ‘obvious intuitive unpalatability’ that we use proper names like ‘Cicero’, ‘Venice’, ‘Venus’ with differing senses, and that we thus do not ‘strictly speaking’ use the same language.

2. There is a considerable literature that even synonyms like ‘doctor’ and ‘physician’ are not interchangeable in belief contexts.

3. If Frege-Russell are right, it is not easy to state the very argument from belief contexts that appears to support them. E.g. if I say ‘Many are unaware that Cicero is Tully’, I would use ‘that Cicero is Tully’ to denote the proposition that I understand by these words. What proposition is that? What is the proposition that these people are unaware of?

4. People who are able define ‘Cicero’ as ‘the denouncer of Cataline’ are pretty rare. Philosophers use the example because they are classically educated, unlike ‘the common man’. Common men may just think of Cicero as ‘some famous Roman orator’, i.e. the sense they attach to the name may just be an indefinite description. And clearly they can reasonably ask ‘were Cicero and Tully one Roman orator, or two different ones’. Thus the underlying assumption of the Frege-Russell argument, that substitution failure arises from a difference in a definite descriptions attached to names, is false. ‘So the apparent failure of codesignative names to be everywhere interchangeable in belief contexts, is not to be explained by differences in the ‘senses’ of these names’.

I hope I have summarised these correctly.

No, I mean section II, first para, where SK speaks of the "initial argument against Mill." My tetrad was supposed to capture it.

Isn't Kripke's Paderewski puzzle just Quine's Ortcutt puzzle recycled? No doubt you have studied Quine's seminal 1956 J of Phil paper, "Quantifiers and Propositional Attitudes."

Back to Ortcutt! (There was a neo-Kantian who ended every chapter with "Zurueck zu Kant!"

I will now begin a separate post on Ortcutt and Paderewski.

Another relevant discussion is Appendix C of Chisholm's *Person and Object.*

Ah right.

If reference is all there is to naming, what semantic difference can there be between ‘Cicero’ and ‘Tully’? And if there is no semantic difference, do not ‘Cicero was bald’ and ‘Tully was bald’ express exactly the same proposition? How, then, can anyone believe that Cicero was bold, yet doubt or disbelieve that Tully was?
But this must be read in the context of the arguments he gives in Section I. He concedes that anyone who grasps the meaning of ‘Cicero’ as ‘a Roman orator’, i.e. as indefinite description, and the same for Tully, can believe that Cicero was bold, yet doubt or disbelieve that Tully was. But this is not reference. Reading ‘Cicero’ as an indefinite description, which Kripke concedes is possible, is not reading the names as proper names. Thus it is perfectly possible that reference is all there is to proper names, read as proper names, but that doesn’t mean we can’t read them as indefinite descriptions.

This is why, in setting up the problem later on, he insists that the proper name is read in the standard or usual way, i.e. as a proper name.

>> Isn't Kripke's Paderewski puzzle just Quine's Ortcutt puzzle recycled?
It’s in front of me as we speak. Or you could say it’s the masked man puzzle of the ancient Greeks, which Quine recycled. I have just looked at it again. Yes, the Paderewski puzzle is similar to the Ortcutt puzzle. But Quine is writing in 1956, when a Frege-Russell view of proper names was in vogue, whereas Kripke introduced and popularised the doctrine of direct reference. Quine solves the problem by two different kinds of belief, such that

(B1) It is impossible that S sincerely denies ‘p’ and S believes-1 that p
(B2) It is possible that S sincerely denies ‘p’ and S believes-2 that p
Kripke, as I understand him, only wants to accept belief-2, which is consistent with direct referentialism. His reasoning is based on the ‘standard meaning’ doctrine of proper names, although he concedes that belief-2 presents puzzles.

>>"Zurueck zu Kant!"
If you hold down the Alt key then the number 129, you get the umlaut. Zurück zu Kant.

I was also looking at ‘Quantifying In’, by David Kaplan, Synthese 19, 1968. For those who do not have the patience to wade through Kaplan’s meandering prose, try Marc Cohen’s accessible paper about Kaplan’s paper here. As Cohen explains, Kaplan has two belief operators B and Bel, which I think correspond to Quine’s belief-1 and belief-2 respectively. Also known as ‘notional’ and ‘relational’ belief respectively.

We can quantify into relational belief sentences, i.e. ‘Hegel Bel (‘x is greater than five’, nine)’ implies Ey Hegel Bel (‘x is greater than five’, y), but we can’t quantify into notional belief sentences. I.e. Ralph B ‘the man in the brown hat is a spy’ does not imply Ralph Bel (‘x is a spy’, the man in the brown hat).

Nor from ‘Ralph B “the shortest spy is a spy”’ can we infer Ralph Bel (“x is a spy,” the shortest spy). As Kaplan wittily says, the first sentence would not interest the FBI.

>>"Zurueck zu Kant!"
If you hold down the Alt key then the number 129, you get the umlaut. Zurück zu Kant.

Do you have three hands like the Venusian in the famous Twilight Zone episode, "Will the real Martian Please Stand Up?"

I am looking forward to your post on Ortcutt and Paderewski. So far so good. Broad agreement.

I am working on it now. Fascinating topic. And think there is a significant tie-in with the 'same God?' business.

>>And think there is a significant tie-in with the 'same God?' business.

Yes. How can we get from B sentences which mention the name 'God', to Bel sentences, which invoke 'ofness', and which use the name ‘God’. When the Muslim and the Christian each assents to 'God is great', do they believe of the same being that this being is great?

Can we get from B(‘God is great’) to Bel(‘x is great’, God)? Was that what you were thinking?

And have you revisited Kaplan's idea of a 'vivid name'? Cohen discusses it in the paper linked to above.

As follows. According to Kaplan, a name alpha represents x to a person if and only if (i) alpha denotes x, (ii) alpha is a name of x for that person, and (iii) alpha is (sufficiently) vivid.

Thus we could say the name ‘God’ represents God to a person if and only if (i) ‘God’ denotes God, (ii) ‘God’ is a name of God for that person, and (iii) the name ‘God’ is (sufficiently) vivid.

Likewise ‘Allah’ represents God to a person if and only if (i) ‘Allah’ denotes God, (ii) ‘Allah’ is a name of God for that person, and (iii) the name ‘Allah’ is (sufficiently) vivid.

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