Millianism and the Metaphysics of Propositions
This entry was posted on 12/14/2007 7:41 PM and is filed under Intentionality,Metaphysics,Language and Communication.
The dominant view about the semantics of proper names is probably Millianism. According to Millianism, the meaning (i.e., semantic value) of proper names is just their referent. Most Millians cash out their view in terms of singular Russellian propositions.
(A Russellian proposition is an ordered tuple containing the objects and properties referred to by the names and predicates in the sentence expressing the proposition; for instance, the sentence 'Aristotle is a philosopher' expresses the proposition <Aristotle, the property of being a philosopher>.)
To solve several problems facing Millianism, such as the problem of handling names without a referent ('empty names'), some Millians appeal to pragmatic processes such as Gricean implicatures. I will call this combination of Millianism and pragmatic processes 'pragmatic Millianism'. Versions of it have been proposed by Scott Soames and many others.
Here is how pragmatic Millianism works in the case of empty names (as proposed by Ken Taylor and Fred Adams and collaborators). Since an empty name has no referent, it cannot contribute its referent to the singular proposition expressed by sentences containing it. The result is a so called 'gappy proposition', i.e. a proposition with an empty slot corresponding to the subject of the sentence. For instance, the sentence 'Santa Claus is a philosopher' expresses the gappy proposition <____, the property of being a philosopher>. Gappy propositions have no truth values (according to most theorists), but listeners of sentences containing empty names have the intuitions that such sentences have truth values. Where do such intuitions come from? According to pragmatic Millians, they come from non-singular propositions implicated by the gappy proposition. In our example, the implicated proposition might be expressed by a sentence along the lines of 'The jolly fat man who brings presents to children at Christmas is a philosopher'. According to pragmatic Millianism, listeners get a bit confused between what is actually expressed by the original sentence and what is implicated by it, so they attribute truth values to the original sentence.
Now, I find this theory somewhat implausible for a number of reasons having to do with the semantics of proper names and sentences in which they occur, but this is not what I want to ask about. I want to ask about the interaction between the metaphysics of propositions and the pragmatic processes postulated by pragmatic Millians.
The problem is that I don't understand how pragmatic processes such as inferring Gricean implicatures can possibly be defined over Russellian propositions. On one hand, Russellian propositions are ordered tuples of things in the world. On the other hand, inferences to Gricean implicatures are presumably defined over mental representations. So it seems that in order to be metaphysically kosher, pragmatic Millianism should be formulated in terms of mental representations (of propositions?), rather than the propositions themselves. But neither Taylor nor Adams et al., whose works I've been reading, ever qualify their talk of propositions in this direction.
Does anyone have any thoughts on what's going on here?
