Disjunctions, Conjunctions, and their Truthmakers, II

My discussion of Rodriguez-Pereyra 2006 is finally out in Mind, yay!!

Following it, Gonzalo’s response:

López de Sa has objected both to my defence of the Disjunction Thesis and my case against the Conjunction Thesis. I shall show that his objections are unfounded and based on serious misunderstandings of my position, what the relevant debate is, and some fundamental notions of Truthmaker Theory.

Ouch.

Rhetoric aside, however, I did not really find in the piece replies to my objections.

A. My main objection against the the contention that if something is a truthmaker for a disjunctive truth, then it is a truthmaker for one of its disjuncts is simply that assuming some plausible but controversial views (on, say, vagueness, or open futures), there can be disjunctions that are (made) true, without true disjuncts. Gonzalo seems to concede the case against the principle, but then contends that the principle he was interested in was the restriction to "truth-conditional disjunctions". As I discussed in my paper (p. 420), it is not clear how to understand talk about a given disjunction being truth-functional in the present context. In any case, I considered one candidate such restriction (fn. 8):

(∨–) If T is a truthmaker for the truth that p or q, then—provided it is true that p or it is true that q—either T is a truthmaker for the truth that p or T is a truthmaker for the truth that q.

This seems capable of sustaining the relevant step in the trivializing argument (see my fn. 3) but, I contended, inherits the concerns one may have with respect to the unrestricted principle: in a nutshell, if something can be a truthmaker for a disjunctive truth and still fail to make true any of its disjuncts, then this can be so even if something else makes some of its disjuncts true.

The restriction I did not consider, of course, is something along the lines of:

(∨– –) If T is a truthmaker for the truth that p or q—and its truth is "entirely due" to the truth that p or to the truth that q—, then either T is a truthmaker for the truth that p or T is a truthmaker for the truth that q.

Arguably, some ways of understanding the clause would guarantee the truth of this restriction, but it seems to me it ceases to be capable of sustaining the trivializing argument: that the instance of excluded middle for an arbitrary truth is of this sort would then require motivation.

B. In connection with Gonzalo's objection against the contention that if something is a truthmaker for a conjunctive truth then it is a truthmaker for each conjunct, I claimed that in the paper he does not provide reasons to believe that the more embracing thing is a truthmaker when another more discerning truthmaker is available (p. 423), and that the suggestion that the excess does not "contribute" to the truthmaking of the more discerning one by itself merely amounts to a re-description of the fact that the more embracing candidates are precisely more embracing than other available truthmakers (fn. 17).

Fruitful discussion with David Liggins, Joan Pagès, and Benjamin Schnieder has convinced me that perhaps some considerations against the conjunction principle, exploring connections of truthmaking with explanation, might be forthcoming. I am still a bit skeptical, but I am open to be persuaded. To my mind, however, the point remains that these have not been provided by Gonzalo's paper I was discussing. Nor, for that matter, by his response now:

But it is not always the case that the more embracing or inclusive entity involves entities that are irrelevant to the truth of the proposition in question. For instance Calliope, Melpomene, and Thalia contribute and are relevant to the truth of [There are more than two muses], but the more inclusive group of Calliope, Melpomene, Thalia, and Clio also contribute and are relevant to its truth. Indeed both the group of three muses and the group of four are truthmakers for the proposition [There are more than two muses]. (p. 434)

Why not so in the present case at hand? This is in my view the kind of question answering which might provide the required considerations.

Kaplan-contexts = Lewis-contexts?

According to Lewis (1980), a context is a concrete situation where a sentence could be said, to be identified with a spatio-temporally centered possible world. Lewis seems to interpret Kaplan-context as being things such as his, as opposed to tuples of features of locations (see p. 42 of the reprint).

And indeed Kaplan says the following in ‘Afterthoughts:’

“... we should say that context provides whatever parameters are needed. [Footnote: This, rather than saying that context is the needed parameter, which seems more natural for the pretheoretical notion of a context of use, in which each parameter has an interpretation as a natural feature of a certain region of the world.]” (p. 591, emphases in the original).

In so far as I remember, this interpretation seems to be, in any case, at least consistent with the formal system in “Demonstratives” (p. 543). Or am I wrong here?

Relativizing Utterance-Truth?

Some time ago, Manolo García-Carpintero and Max Kölbel organized a very fine workshop, which was the origin of Relative Truth, forthcoming in OUP.

For some time I’ve been thinking about the title of the workshop, Relativizing Utterance Truth: some people seem to think that one could characterize a radical relativist position such as MacFarlane’s or Lasersohn’s via the rejection of the absoluteness of utterance-truth. But it seems to me this would fail as a characterization: there are versions of moderate views which reject it as well. I elaborate on this in this note, forthcoming in Synthese.

St Andrews

Wow, that was a long long blog-break! Hope this changes a little.

I am still recovering from the Arché tempo for ten days: the Assertion Workshop, the First Contextualism & Relativism Workshop, plus giving one paper to the C&R Seminar and another for the Nostalgia Seminar. The discussions were very very useful for me, I hope I’ll post on them soon.

It was just great seeing again friends and meeting the new crowd there!!

Lasersohn (2005) vs Non-Indexical Contextualism

I just came back from Paris, where I participated in the CPR07 organized by François, Isidora, and Neftalí. It has been a great fun, many thanks to them for that! Now I really look forward to submiting something also for the next one on vagueness.

Isidora presented her 'Talking about Taste,' where she discusses Lasersohn (2005) on the assumption that the view is a version of non-indexical contextualism, and I've met some other people attributing that view to him likewise. But I think this is not correct.

Lasersohn does say that the truth of contents is relative to a further, non-standard coordinate in indices, a judge, who will be provided by the context. But he also says:

In order to maintain an authentically subjective assignment of truth values to sentences containing predicates of personal taste, we must allow that the objective facts of the situation of utterance do not uniquely determine a judge. The formalism developed ... required that for any context c, there must be a unique individual j_c, the judge of c. That is, it was stipulated that the contexts uniquely determine a judge. If we are to retain this feature of the formalism, therefore, we must conclude that the objective facts of the situation of utterance do not uniquely determine a context. (p. 669, emphasis added)

Hence, contrary to the appearances produced by his non-standard use of 'context,' Lasersohn view is indeed radical relativism proper.

Happy Birthday, bleb!!

Yep, one year already!

I'm back in Barcelona -- I feel I'm still moving, but has been a month now! Hope I manage to get some normality soon!

Vagueness at NYU

Yesterday we had the first session of the NYU Seminar on Vagueness. Wow. As you’ll imagine, it’s just impressive to get the topic introduced by Crispin Wright, and discussed by Hartry Field, Kit Fine, Stephen Schiffer, and Ted Sider, among others. Very very impressive.

I will only attend to the very first sessions, though. In October, I’ll be joining ICREA—from the Catalan for Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies—back in Barcelona as a (junior) researcher. I’m both excited for everything I'll get there and sad for everything I’ll miss here… Oh well whatayagonnado?

On the Semantic Indecision of Vague Singular Terms

I've just seen that Donald Smith's ‘Vague Singulars, Semantic Indecision, and the Metaphysics of Persons’ is out in PPR.

Smith argues that if ‘I’ is indeed vague, and the view of vagueness as semantic indecision correct after all, then ‘I’ cannot refer to a composite material object. But his considerations would, if sound, also establish that ‘Tibbles,’ ‘Everest,’ or ‘Toronto,’ do not refer to composite material objects either—nor hence, presumably, to cats, mountains, or cities. And both considerations can be resisted, anyway.

As to the first, it suffices to observe that if ‘I’ (or ‘Tibbles’) is vague, and the view of vagueness as semantic indecision is correct, then, when I assert a sentence containing it, I do no need to take myself to having successfully referred to any particular thing—if that is understood as definitely referring to something. Rather, I aim my statement to turn out true on any admissible way of making the semantic decisions that are not (and should not, and maybe could not, be) made.

As to the second, one just has to notice that the “many” solution to the problem of the many is certainly not the only solution that defenders of the view of vagueness as semantic indecision can adopt—and have indeed adopted. One rival solution by disqualification is the so-called “supervaluationist” solution, mentioned by Lewis and more recently defended by McGee & McLaughlin, Varzi, and Weatherson. According to this alternative solution, each sharpening of ‘is a cat’ or ‘is a person’ selects just one of the many candidates—different ones in the different sharpenings, thus respecting the arbitrariness felt in denying that they all had an equal claim. ‘Tibbles is a cat’ serves as a penumbral connection, guarantying that it is rendered inadmissible any sharpening that selects a different candidate as the referent of ‘Tibbles’ from the one that is selected as belonging to the extension of ‘is a cat’—inasmuch as ‘If it is not red, then it is orange’ serves to exclude sharpenings in which borderline rose Fifí is assigned both to the extension of ‘is red’ and to that of ‘is orange.’ Thus the many candidates are indeed equally eligible as referents of ‘Tibbles,’ but it definitely the case that one and just one of them is a cat after all. Mutatis mutandis, once again, for persons.

My response will appear shortly in Sorites.

‘Indifferentism’?

In connection with the issue about labels here, Ghislain Guigon has suggested to me ‘indifferentism’:

"it seems to me that it reflects two aspects of your true dismissivism: first there is no difference in truthmakers between the opposite views. Second, the right philosophical attitude is to remain indifferent regarding the dispute."

I've just leared that the label does already exist:

"In Roman Catholicism, indifferentism is a condemned heresy that holds that one religion is as good as another, and that all religions are equally valid paths to salvation. Its condemnation is closely linked to the dogmatic definition that outside the Church there is no salvation."

I'm not sure about whether this goes against or in favor of using the label in the metametaphysical discussion (although I'm inclined to say that probably the latter)!