Pleonastic propositions and de re belief
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Pleonastic propositions and de re belief Gary Ostertag1,2
Springer Nature B.V. 2019
Abstract In The Things We Mean, Stephen Schiffer defends a novel account of the entities to which belief reports relate us and to which their that-clauses refer. For Schiffer, the referred-to entities—propositions—exist in virtue of contingencies of our linguistic practices, deriving from ‘‘pleonastic restatements’’ of ontologically neutral discourse. Schiffer’s account of the individuation of propositions derives from his treatment of that -clause reference. While that -clauses are referential singular terms, their reference is not determined by the speaker’s referential intentions. Rather, their reference is determined in a top-down manner—in Schiffer’s words, ‘‘by what the speaker and audience mutually take to be essential to the truth-value of the belief report.’’ While this accounts for a deep disanalogy between belief reports and other relational propositions—a disanalogy emphasized by Schiffer—I argue that the proposal runs into trouble when we consider the case of de re belief. I close by showing how a modification of Schiffer’s approach—one differing in essential ways from the theory developed in Things—is capable of handling these difficulties. Keywords Pleonastic proposition That-clause Object-dependent proposition Belief report De re belief
& Gary Ostertag [email protected] 1
The Graduate Center, CUNY, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016-4309, USA
2
Department of Philosophy, Nassau Community College, One Education Drive, Garden City, NY 11530, USA
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G. Ostertag
1 Introduction In Chapter 2 of The Things We Mean,1 Stephen Schiffer notes a curiously unremarked disanalogy between the following cases: 1a. 1b.
Henri admires Picasso. Michelle believes that Barack jogs.
In interpreting (1a), we first identify the references of the terms flanking the main verb, and then check whether or not they instantiate the relation it expresses, thereby determining whether or not what (1a) says is true. But when interpreting (1b) we seem to work in the opposite direction. We don’t first identify the referent of its that-clause and then check to see if the referent of ‘Michelle’ bears believes—the relation expressed by the main verb—to it. Rather, says Schiffer, we first attend to ‘‘the [contextually-determined] criteria for truth-evaluating the belief report’’ (81). It is only with these criteria in hand that we are able to fix the reference of the contained that-clause.2 Of course, the introspective data that Schiffer appeals to might be misleading about how reference is actually determined. It is, after all, entirely possible that (1b) says what it does in virtue of the referential properties of its that-clause, in much the same way that (1a) says what it does in virtue of the referential properties of ‘Picasso’. But an alternative way of stating the contrast is available. What intuitively grounds the reference of (1b)’s that-clause is a sentence-level (as opposed to a constituent-level) property—in particular,
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