L1.4 Lottie’s fourth lesson on concepts
Both pTravis and Masongill have other duties the next morning so Lottie goes along to Hipparchus’ study with mixed feelings. On the one hand: she will have her tutor’s full attention. On the other: she will have her tutor’s full attention. He seems in good spirits. “I’m always glad to put aside the temptation to venture into satisfaction and sequences and when existential and universally qualified sentences are true in Tarski’s theory” he says. “We don’t really need that to think about concepts more generally, however.
So let’s see, what general principles or ideas have we got on the table?”
Lottie casts her mind back over the eternities of the last three days and replies in what she obviously thinks is an amusing rapid, robotic monotone. “Whole thoughts! Context Principle. Abstractions. Generality Constraint. The Constitutive Ideal of Rationality. Sense and reference.”
Hipparchus reminds himself that until Lottie arrived he had quite light duties at the Potting Shed: a single if intellectually demanding job but with a very collegiate ‘distributed faculty’ of fellow intelligence specialists. It was, perhaps, too good to last.
“Very good. Today I want to think about some related abstractions from whole thoughts. Let’s think of a judgement we can make...?”
“The Potting Shed is pre-historic!”
“I hardly think that but it is ancient. Still, let’s take it. We could say that the shed is prehistoric or: s is p. How might we describe the abstract structure of this thought or judgement or sentence?”
“Well, you’d say – but no one else would! – that there is a name and a predicate. ‘Shed’ is the name though it might prefer ‘Mr Sheddy’ and the predicate is ‘prehistoric’.
The Theory of Descriptions“Good enough. Let us talk informally of the first part as a ‘name’ to contrast with predicate but, as we’ll see today, we may need to be a bit more careful how we use the word ‘name’. Let’s start with a famous example from Bertrand Russell. Let’s take the judgement that the present king of France is bald. What’s the ‘name’?”
“The present king of France”
“Now what is odd about that?”
“Well, there isn’t one.”
“So thinking of the judgement, of whom is it being thought that they are bald?”
“Well, the… Oh. There’s no one to be bald!”
“Who or what would you be tempted to think that a (quasi) ‘name’ such as that means? What does an actual name like ‘Lottie’ mean? That is, if this question makes sense.”
“‘Lottie’ means me! But that won’t work with the phantom king.”
“So if one were to think that ‘the present kind of France’ worked as you think ‘Lottie’ works, what happens to the judgement?”
“Dunno. It’s broken, somehow.”
“If one thinks that the ‘name’ part of a judgement means what it stands for, and if there is no such thing, then the judgement fails. But suppose that someone sincerely committed themselves to such a judgement, then they would think that they were thinking a coherent thought but they would not be. In other words, they would not be wrong about something in the external world. I was tempted to say not just wrong, but I was right first time: they would not be wrong about something in the external world. They would be wrong about what they thought they were thinking. Russell – showing himself to be somewhat Cartesian in this – thought that this was impossible. We cannot be in such ignorance about the contents of our minds.
And, thus, he proposed an alternative: the Theory of Descriptions. This analyses the example as involving a conjunction of three claims:
- There is at least one king of France.
- There is at most one king of France.
- Every king of France is bald.
If this is what the judgement that the present king of France is bald comprises, how does it apply if there is no such king? Look at each claim.”
“Er... the first one is false.”
“Yes. So if the first is false and it is linked to other claims with an ‘AND’ what follows?”
“Well the whole thing is false if the first bit of the ‘AND’ is false.”
“Exactly. The judgement or thought is thus merely false. It isn’t without content. It remains a thinkable judgement even with no king. We can obviously think that there is food in the fridge only to find there isn’t. So what looked like an actual name like ‘Lottie’ is, according to Russell, a disguised definite description made up of one existentially and one universally qualified general claim and one predication. And neither of the former are vulnerable if nothing instances them.
Names as disguised descriptions“But interestingly, Russell thinks that the underlying threat – of not knowing one’s own mind – applies to ordinary proper names. After all, it is possible that although we talk about, say, Elvis Presley that actually there never were any such person. Perhaps his biography is a fictionalised account of half a dozen different people. If so, then ‘Elvis is p’ thoughts would be vulnerable to the same sort of failure. And so again, Russell deploys the Theory of Descriptions and suggests that some proper names stand in for suitable descriptions: the sorts of things we think about Elvis.”
“So are there any proper proper names?”
“According to Russell only ‘this’ and ‘that’, said of sense data – the experiences you have and cannot doubt, the look and feel of things even if things don’t exist – and ‘I’, thought of myself by me or yourself by you.”
“But is that right? It seems a bit weird that even names aren’t names! Was he paid for this ‘research’?”
“We talked a little too long yesterday. The sun is shining. It is probably a good day for… football. So, I’ll just sketch one alternative way thoughts might latch onto the world and tomorrow we can think about this.
Russell’s Theory of Descriptions sets out a form that thought can certainly take. Even if he is wrong that the present king of France is bald says or means his threefold conjunction, still, that conjunction sets out the condition that would have to apply for the thought to be true. One could explicitly think his conjunction. Descriptive thoughts like that latch onto the world via a condition that something has to meet. If I think that the next person to arrive at the Potting Shed will be the 20th visitor this year, I need have no particular person in mind. Whoever it is is the person who will satisfy (or will not, if I am wrong) the rest of the judgement. But is there another way?
Singular thoughts
“Well, putting to one side Russell’s Cartesian worries about self-knowledge, here is what looks prima facie to be an alternative. I look at your football and judge: this football is rather dirty. I have a particular object in mind, because also in view. I could have thought: the only football in the Potting Shed is rather dirty. That would have been a descriptive thought about the very same object. But the thought I did think depends on this football in a specific way. It is an object dependent or singular thought. It also depends on a demonstrative element: this football. So it is plausible to think that thoughts might have at least two different ways of latching onto the world: descriptive and singular. If the target object does not exist, then the former is merely false. In the latter case, more needs to be said – in part in response to Russell’s worry – but if we do not accept his assumption that we cannot be in error about the nature of our own thoughts then these look to be genuinely different.
But what should we say about singular thoughts that fail in the way Russell was keen to rule out? Some philosophers have taken some unsuccessful singular thoughts to involve demonstrative thoughts about regions of space in which, mistakenly, one thinks a football exists. Others think that they are descriptive thoughts misrecognised as singular. Yet others are more relaxed and say with successful – true or false – singular thoughts in mind, one may simply think that one is thinking one of them when one isn’t. Such unsuccessful singular thoughts are merely ‘as if’ singular thoughts.
Let me leave you with an example to think about. When you’re older and go to a cocktail party, suppose that a colleague points across the room and says that the person drinking a martini is ‘something or other’. Suppose that you look and see that someone is drinking a colourless liquid out of a characteristic Y-shaped martini glass. Suppose, however, that they are really drinking water. Someone else in that direction has a coffee mug from which they are drinking a martini. Who would have to be ‘something or other’ for your colleague to have spoken truth?”
Lottie flicks one of her head tufts and blinks from the darkness of her tutor’s study towards the light she can see though the distant door. “Sure, Teach, I’ll think about it.”