Cognitive Access and Semantic Puzzles

Kripke's Puzzle About Belief:

Pierre assents to both:

(1) London is pretty

and

(2) London is not pretty.

And, by stipulation, Pierre is rational--he doesn't let contradictory beliefs pass.

Options to resolve the puzzle:

(A) Reject disquotation: Though he assents to them, Pierre doesn't actually believe (1) or (2) (Marcus).

(B) Reject assumption of Cartesian access: Pierre can believe both without impugning his rationality if he doesn't have immediate access to sameness and difference of content (Owens, Brown).

(C) Adopt subjective senses: "London" has different senses associated with it in (1) and (2), so the associated contents of belief are different. Pierre is not irrational.

Or:

(D) Reject assumption of Cartesian rationality: Pierre is not perfectly rational. He holds two contradictory beliefs. Rationality is not completely the subject's responsibility: he can be irrational without recognizing it (Millikan). Thinking (with Boghossian, Owens, Kripke, others) that rationality is completely within the subject's control is another version of Quine's dogmas of empiricism: it represents a fundamental cleavage between the domain of rationality and the domain of empirical inquiry. Maintaining such a cleavage requires an unacceptably formal understanding of rationality. (Marcus argues plausibly against the rationality of someone who holds contradictory beliefs.)

There is luck involved in rational culpability just as there is luck involved in claims to know, and in the ethical assessment of actions.

Varieties of Reference, Ch7

Evans argues against treating judgements involving "here" Ideas as having two components in his discussion of the super-light earphones. The argument, as I understand it, is as follows:

(1) "Here" Ideas get their content in virtue of the way they are connected with dispositions to act (in response to a noise heard off to the left, one turns one's head to the left, e.g.).

(2) In a situation where a subject has been (or suspects that he has been) outfitted with the earphones, the dispositions to act are severed from "here" thoughts, so that one can wonder, "Are those noises coming from around here, or are they coming from somewhere else?"

(3) A situation like (2) can't be normal, though it is possible. If it were normal, then we wouldn't receive information from our environment in the immediate way that we do receive it. We would need an additional judgement to the effect that "those noises are coming from around here".

Notice that Evans's comments on "here" are incompatible with the way he formulates the ICD on p. 19. If difference of sense follows from the mere possibility of coherently doubting that a = b, then the senses/Ideas associated with "here" and "where those sounds are coming from" must always be distinguished.

The ICD so formulated builds in skepticism to our understanding of sense, and stands in the way of a project like Evans's: a project of describing our actual cognitive lives (rather than the structure of merely possible cognitive lives).

So it is important to reformulate the ICD so that it does not build in skeptical requirements.

Some possibilities:

1. If a rational subject does actually doubt that a = b then a and b must have different senses.

2. If it is relevant to doubt that a = b then a and b must have different senses.

I think (1) is untenable, since it makes sense far too dependent on the details of a single subject.

(2) is more plausible, and hooks up with similar debates in the externalist and anti-skeptical literature in epistemology.

Whether a doubt is relevant depends on all sorts of features of a situation, and it may not reflect what the subjects involved in fact doubt. So there would be the possibility of a subject (a) doubting that a = b when no doubt is relevant (if the subject is unjustifiably skeptical, e.g.) and (b) not doubting that a = b when such a doubt is relevant (I'm not aware I'm in a bad situation).

So a subject might not realize that two senses are the same (failure of transparency of sameness) or that they are different (failure of transparency of difference). But these failures would occur in situations where a subject's assessment of the situation differs from how the situation actually is (when their assessment of relevance is incorrect). If a subject is a reliable epistemic judge, then sense will be transparent (transparency in sameness and in difference).

I take it that such a position would not be non-Fregean: it would not maintain that the content of a thought (object of a prop. attitude) was just a Russellian proposition--in cases in which a reliable epistemic subject correctly assesses the relevance of doubt and doubts that a = b, then a and b have different contents/senses. This position is also not really Fregean, if a Fregean position requires holding onto transparency of sameness across all situations.

Maybe it's best described as a Wittgensteinian position.

I'm here assembling ideas I found in Brown Anti-Indiv. & Know, Lawlor, New Thoughts About Old Things, and Campbell, "Is Sense Transparent?".

Anti-Individualism and Knowledge

Brown, Anti-Individualism and Knowledge

Why does Brown think there can be "no motivation" for the Fregean position of denying transparency of difference of sense but affirming transparency of sameness? You might think that transparency of sameness is a requirement for recognizing that inferences are valid at all, and that failure of transparency of difference is a feature of making inferences in a changing world.

What would happen if there was no transparency of sameness for sense? You couldn't immediately (without additional empirical information) know that two tokens co-referred (and not just demonstratives--names too). And one might wonder what the status of the empirical information would have in making an inference valid: wouldn't you need to know, of a premise linking the sense of one token with the sense of another, that its terms shared sense with the terms it was meant to link? It seems that without some transparency of sameness, there can be no such thing as a valid inference (in Campbell's neo-Fregean sense of validity: that is, knowing that an inference is valid so that it can extend our knowledge).

So it looks like there is some motivation for holding onto transparency of sameness while rejecting transparency of difference of sense.

Tye on the Specious Present

Central Claim (CC): Represented order has no connection with the order of representations (p. 93).

E.g., I can say that I have an experience of red following an experience of green. In that representation, the order of "red" and "green" need not mirror the order of the experiences of red and green.

The Central Claim is incompatible with the Principle of Presentational Concurrence (PPC): The duration of a content being presented is concurrent with the act of presenting it (p. 90).

Tye uses the CC in his rejection of standard arguments against overlapping specious presents:

The Standard Argument:

1. Imagine a single click that occurs at a time during which specious present a and specious present b overlap.
2. The single click is experienced twice, since it occurs in two specious presents.
3. (2) Contradicts our experience in such a situation of experiencing only a single click, so the idea of overlapping specious presents is false.

Tye's Reply:

Premise (2) involves an equivocation between acts of experiencing the click and the content of those acts. While it is true that two acts of experiencing the click take place (at different times), their representational content is the same: they both represent a click as occurring at a particular time. So there is only one experienced click.

Tye's New Argument Against Overlapping Specious Presents

1. Mere overlap of contents does not generate unity of content (if I sing do-re and you sing re-mi so that we overlap in our acts of singing, we do not thereby generate a singing of do-re-mi [p. 94]).
2. Overlapping specious presents involve mere overlap of contents.
3. So overlapping specious presents do not generate unity of content.

At the end of the chapter, Tye makes the puzzling claim that if I were to fall asleep immediately after hearing do-re and then wake to hear mi, I have no experience of the succession of re by mi. Why not? It can surely seem to me as if re is followed by mi, especially if I don't realize that I have dozed off. He says that there are two token experiences in this case, separated by the lapse in consciousness. But why should the number of token experiences matter for how we understand the represented content?

At t1 I have the content of do followed by re. Then I fall asleep at t2 until t3. At t3 I awake to hear mi, and I then have the content of do followed by re followed by mi. I experience their succession.

The unity Tye is interested in concerns the content of the representations, not the acts of representing.

Plan for Dissertation, Stage One

Here is a stab at what the dissertation might look like. It might end up as maybe just a few of the following:

Varieties of Sense

1. Fregean Sense & Rationality (What notion of rationality is presupposed in Frege's arguments for sense? Are there alternatives?)
2. Sense and Self-Knowledge (Are we immediately aware of identity and difference of senses? What conception of self-knowledge does that require?)
3. Sense and Linguistic Meaning (Does sense capture what is essential to linguistic meaning?)
4. Sense and Cognitive Value (Does sense capture what is essential to cognitive significance in different areas: perception, action explanation, etc.?)
5. Neo-Wittgenstein (Travis) on Fregean Sense
6. Three Versions of the The Intuitive Criterion of Difference (Leibniz's Law, Evans's Criterion, Campbell's Criterion)
7. Skepticism in the ICD?
9. Rationality Revisited: Dynamic, Social, Worldly

Some online resources:

http://www.dif.unige.it/epi/hp/penco/papers.htm

www.kcl.ac.uk/kis/schools/ hums/philosophy/staff/ignorance.pdf

http://emerson.fas.harvard.edu/heck/online_papers.php

http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~jcampbel/allpubs.htm