L1.6 Lottie’s sixth lesson on concepts
Lottie wakes late in her bunk high in the rafters of the Potting Shed. No one else sleeps at this level and to begin with, though she chose it, she found it quite scary. It would be a very long, and terminal, drop down to the ground if she somehow slipped over the low ‘wall’ of her bunk. She draws back the bunk’s curtain and looks upwards out of one the old skylights to see a blue sky and a thin sun and immediately thinks with joy “Football!”.
But it is Monday. The weekend is over and pleasure is ended. Dry education beckons. If only there were some way all the knowledge could simply be painlessly injected, preferably while asleep. Judging by the sound of washing up from the far end of the hall, she has also missed breakfast. Drat! Peering over the edge of the bunk she can see her boring old tutor is already behind the desk of his ‘study’ (a dark corner of this quiet end of the building), three ladder lengths below her. Ho hum. Best go and hear what he has to say.
Predication
Hipparchus greats her with a smile, asks her about her weekend and generously makes no effort to pretend that he thinks she will have been mulling over concepts.
“Today” he says “I’d like to talk to talk a little about predication.”
“# If you want to be the best, if you want to beat the rest, predication’s what you need! #” Lottie sings quietly, thinking back wistfully to her lost childhood.
Ignoring her, as he often seems to need to, her tutor continues.
“We decided to start thinking about concepts by thinking about whole thoughts or judgements sometimes explicitly expressed in linguistic claims. From that starting point, concepts are abstractions, articulations of whole thoughts into smaller parts, by contrast with them being built up from free-standing, ontologically independent smaller entities. (We rejected two versions of the latter view.)
We tried to ease your worry that this made concepts just part of a fairy story by telling another story – ‘a myth to kill a myth’ as Wilfrid Sellars says in a different context – which connects the ascription of thoughts to the possibility of their ascription in radical interpretation. That shows how thoughts, though abstract, have a role in our nature.
But in thinking about that, we saw that in ascribing thoughts to others we may need to distinguish between different ways of thinking about the same things. Even though Clark Kent is Superman it may not be helpful to ascribe to someone the thought that Superman is ‘nerdy’. Thus, whole thoughts have to be ascribed with sensitivity towards the realm of sense as well as reference. Reference remains important because it is what truth turns on. The fact is that Superman is indeed sometimes a bit ‘nerdy’ ie when he is being Clark Kent.”
“Enough of the ‘we’ already!”
“And then we turned to analysis of the conceptual structure of a sentence of the form ‘s is p’. We saw that what we informally called the ‘name’ (‘s’) could be understood in at least two ways. It might be a description, yielding an overall descriptive thought. Or it might be singular, yielding a singular or object-dependent thought. Some of the latter sort wear their status on their sleeves as demonstrative thoughts such as: that football is dirty. Others may not such as: the person drinking a martini is…
Today I want to think a little about the predicate part of the thought: is p
“Just a minute. Are all whole thoughts of the form ‘s is p’? I mean, I can see that one might think that football is brilliant and clever and entertaining and fun and the most important thing in the world. But that’s really just ‘s is p’ with a complicated ‘p’.”
“That’s a question I spent Sunday afternoon worrying about. You mustn’t forget that I am not a professional philosopher. I just dabble.” He pauses as though expecting her to disagree but, when she remains silent, continues… “The subject-predicate form seems central to how we think. Could we think in other ways? I am not sure how to answer that. But there is one distinct form that we have implicitly already touched on in pTravis’ example last week… And I mentioned it a moment ago…”
Lottie gets it at last: “You mean: ‘Clark Kent is Superman’?”
“Yes. Philosophers sometimes talk of the ‘is’ of predication and the ‘is’ of identity. Thinking that Clark Kent is Superman is not like thinking that your football is dirty. For example, given that your football is dirty and that you are dirty it does not follow that you are your football. So we have at least two different sorts of thought even if they might have seemed the same, saying x is y.
So let’s think a little about the difference between a name and a predicate. One thing concerns the way a judgement may somehow fail. Let’s take ‘Caesar crossed the Rubicon’. And for the moment, let’s not assume that ‘Caesar’ is a shorthand for a specific description or even a specific cluster of descriptions. Also, let’s ignore the fact that ‘Caesar’ is originally or formally a role not a name. Here it is used as a name.
The truth of the thought turns on a person – Caesar – and an action – crossing the Rubicon – and their combination in the right way. The thought would not be true if Caesar did something and, also, someone crossed the Rubicon, unless crossing the Rubicon was what Caesar did and the crosser of the Rubicon was him.”
He is unable entirely to be blind to the sneer that Lottie suddenly sports now.
“But suppose that, somehow, there were no Caesar?”
“We’ve had this, or something like it, with the present king of France, before we solved that with Russell’s theory. But if you’re saying we can’t use our only weapon against this baddie, so we’re all doomed!”
Realising that she is just being silly, Hipparchus interprets her charitably. “Yes. If, somehow, there were no Caesar then our thought would fail in a profound way. To explain what we had thought would require careful paraphrase. Perhaps we mistook a fiction about a Roman leader for truth? So we mistakenly thought that there had been a Roman leader etc. The paraphrase might borrow from the Theory of Descriptions.
Now looking to the predicate, what if he didn’t cross the Rubicon
“Well you’d just be wrong then. He didn’t. It’s… false!”
“So we can begin to see the point when, in analysing whole thoughts, we break them into subject and predicate. They – subject and predicate – behave differently. And we can also see their similarities to other thoughts such as that Caesar was murdered or that Augustine crossed the Rubicon, which is Evans’ Generality Constraint, again.
I’m now going to try to say something more abstract. But it might help to have a less obviously structured example. Take: Socrates was mortal. ‘Socrates’ is a proper name. It enables the truth of the thought to turn on just that man. ‘Mortal’ is a predicate. It speaks of the inevitability of dying, with, here, the one predicated of the other. Now, ‘Socrates’ names Socrates but does ‘mortal’ name its instances?”
Teaching is a risky business. Sometimes a perfectly plausible-seeming pedagogic question can go awry, can fail to get a grip. Lottie merely looks blank and a bit bored. There is so much else she could be doing with the morning. Trees need climbing. Stones need skimming.
“If ‘mortal’ were a name that named its instances, ie. those cases to which it applies, then understanding its meaning would involve being able to have in mind that to which it applies. Knowing the meaning of ‘mortal’ would already mean knowing that Socrates was mortal without needing any further argument (such as that: all men are mortal, Socrates is a man, so…).
In fact, grasping the meaning of ‘mortal’ leaves open the question of to what it applies. Grasping the meaning of the proper name ‘Socrates’ does not. Predicates do not name their instances.”
Generality
As though making one final effort before the sweet release of death, Lottie arranges her thoughts into a question.
“So is what you’re saying, fundamentally, that names stand for what they name in a very strong, close way? It’s almost as if the name just is, or just stands for, the thing, though, come to think of it, you did say that you think that even names have senses not just referents. But predicates have a looser relationship to what they… ‘instance’. No one speaks like this, by the way. With predicates, the game’s not over til the ref blows the whistle. It’s all still to play for. On my head!”
“Indeed. Something like that. Let’s end with one example. Let’s use a description, not a name, for what we’ve called informally the ‘naming part’ of a thought. It doesn’t really matter but it will help. So think of Keith Donnellan’s attributive use of a description applied to ‘The next visitor to the Potting Shed…’ That’s the subject: whoever the next visitor is, and neither you nor I know who that will be yet. Let’s say the full thought is: The next visitor to the Potting Shed will be shorter than me, ie. Hipparchus. That’s the judgement. I am making a claim. It will be true or false, assuming someone, sometime visits us. But neither of us can have in mind, can be ‘acquainted’ with, what (or who) will make this true or false because it hasn’t happened yet.
Let’s assume it turns out to be true because, being a hippo, I’m quite tall. Still, it could be true in as many ways as there are of being shorter than me. But also for each height, shorter than me, there is an infinitude of creatures who could be that height. And for each creature and each height, they could be happy or sad, wearing green or pink or whatever. Carrying a macaroon or a hedgehog. Etc etc etc. The predicate ‘being shorter than me’ can be instanced in an infinite number of ways. It is very general indeed. And thus, so is the thought out of which we carved it.”
Lottie has the distinct feeling that there’s probably something significant about this. It sounds a bit like a story. But what’s its moral?