Wolfgang Schwarz

Bergell

I've been hiking in the Italian Alps for a week. We had great weather, even featuring snow. Will be back in Berlin soon, searching for a new flat and trying to catch up with my email.

Assessment-relativity and pretended dialogs

Does the semantic value of expressions in a language sometimes depend on other things than their utterance context? That depends on what is meant by "semantic value", but for the most part, I think not.

It can appear otherwise if one identifies the content of an utterance with the main proposition it conveys to competent hearers.

Alice, Bob and Carol are searching for honey. Alice sees a bee hive on a tree near Bob and wants to inform both Bob and Carol about this. That is, she wants Bob to acquire the self-locating belief that there is a bee hive on the tree near him, and she wants Carol to acquire the belief that there is a bee hive on the tree over there near Bob. She achieves both goals simultaneously by pointing at the relevant tree and saying, "there's a bee hive on the tree over there".

Since Alice conveys two different (centered) propositions to Bob and Carol with her sentence, one might conclude that her sentence expresses two different contents, one relative to Bob's context of assessment and one relative to Carol's. Content, then, is relative to both an utterance context and an assessment context. However, it is quite implausible that Alice's utterance really has these two propositions as its literal semantic value. Instead, what she expressed was just the proposition that there is a bee hive on the tree she is pointing at, and Bob and Carol figured out the centered propositions they were meant to learn from this information.

Home(less)

After nine good months in Canberra (and a couple of conferences in Sydney and Armidale), I'm back in Berlin -- awaiting unemployment, homelessness and death. I'll probably be somewhat slow catching up with emails since I don't have electricity at home. (Nor gas or water, for that matter. At least I've been warned.)

Fundamental properties have no intrinsic nature

Let F be a fundamental property, understood as a maximal class of possible things that are perfectly similar in one respect. (This is one of Lewis's four proposed definitions of fundamental properties, and I think the best one.) And suppose I have F. What would it take to know that I have F?

Given that F is some class { Wo, Fred, ... }, and given that having F means being a member of F, it might seem puzzling how I can be ignorant about whether or not I'm F: how could I fail to know that I am a member of { I, Fred, ... }? But here we are substituting corefering expressions in a (hyper)intensional context, which is illegitimate. If I knew that F = { I, Fred, ... }, then I probably ought to know that I am F. So if I don't know that I am F, that's because I don't know that F = { I, Fred, ... }.

Property inheritance and generics

Some properties are inherited from wholes to their parts: if x is (completely) made of steel, then its parts are also (completely) made of steel; if x is in the top drawer, then its parts are also in the top drawer. Other properties are upwards inherited from parts to wholes: if a part of x contains steel, then x contains steel; if a part of x touches the ground, then x touches the ground. Yet other properties are not inherited either way: if x is a hand, then x usually has non-hands as parts and is part of non-hands.

Beliefs and thresholds

Following up on Weng-Hong (1, 2, 3), here are a few thoughts on thresholds for belief.

If beliefs come in different degrees or strength, what do we mean when we say not that Fred believes that P with strength x, but simply that Fred believes that P? Perhaps we mean that Fred believes that P with sufficient strength, where context may help determining what counts as sufficient. However, on this account, the following principles should be obviously invalid (both descriptively and normatively):

Centering C-propositions

Let's call the class of counterfactual circumstances at which a sentence S is true the C-proposition expressed by S. This is more or less what Kaplan calls the "content" of S. Here are three reasons why the circumstances constituting a C-proposition should be understood as centered possible worlds rather than old-fashioned uncentered worlds.

First reason: centering is needed for modal embeddings. The standard use of C-propositions is the analysis of modal constructions: "it is possible that hummingbirds can fly backwards" is true iff there is at least one relevant circumstance w at which "hummingbirds can fly backwards" is true. Now take a sentence such as "it is early afternoon", or "it is starting to rain". It doesn't make much sense to say of an entire world that it is early afternoon there, or starting to rain. So on the standard view, on which the circumstances in C-propositions are uncentered worlds, we first have to fix a time and place, presumably by drawing on the utterance context: "necessarily, it is early afternoon" is true iff it is early afternoon at every possible world at the time and place of the utterance. So "necessarily, it is early afternoon" is true whenever it is uttered on an early afternoon. That seems wrong.

No longer true

Here's something puzzling. Suppose sometime in 1869, Frege uttered

1) more people today die of tuberculosis than of cancer.

As far as I know, this was true in 1871, but it is no longer true now. Today, more people die of cancer than of tuberculosis. On the other hand, suppose Frege also uttered

2) I am not particularly well-known among philosophers.

This, too, is no longer true. Today, Frege is exceptionally well-known among philosophers.

Truth at a world, truth at a banana

Everyone who has taught Kripke and Putnam to undergraduates knows that philosophers nowadays use "truth at a world" in a special, technical sense that requires a lot of explaining. The most straightforward way to assign a sentence a truth value at another world w is to consider an utterance of the same words in w and ask whether or not that utterance is true. But this is not what we mean. Nor do we ask what truth value the sentence has conditional on the assumption that our world is w. (Lewis uses "truth at a world" in roughly this sense in "How to define theoretical terms"; the current convention appears to be really quite new.) What, then, do we mean? I find most introductions of the concept utterly obscure: I'm told to identify the 'proposition expressed' by a sentence in the actual world, and then to 'evaluate' this entity at another possible world. What on earth does that mean?

Fake zebras

Apparently, there's a Chinese park charging people to have pictures with a Dretske-style fake zebra. The experiment reveals the underappreciated role of fun in epistemology:

"We saw right away that the zebra is fake, but we are here for fun, so it doesn't really matter," said a mother who had just paid for her child's picture.

According to the City Evening News, the park says it doesn't know if the horse is a zebra or not: "It's not that important. It is for fun," said a spokesman.