Manifest validity and beyond: an inquiry into the nature of coordination and the identity of guises and propositional-attitude states

Abstract

This manuscript focuses on a problem for Millian Russellianism raised by Fine (Semantic relationism, Blackwell, Oxford, 2007: 82): “[Assuming] that we are in possession of the information that a Fs and the information that a Gs, it appears that we are sometimes justified in putting this information ‘together’ and inferring that a both Fs and Gs. But how?” It will be my goal to determine a Millian-Russellian solution to this problem. I will first examine Nathan Salmon’s (“Recurrence”, Philos Stud 159:407–441, 2012) Millian-Russellian solution, which appeals to a non-semantic and subjective notion of coordination defined in terms of guises. I will object that in order to convincingly solve a specific version of Fine’s problem (the “Bruce” case), identity conditions for guises must be provided. On the other hand, the most plausible way to individuate guises is by means of the equivalence classes (if any) of coordination itself. But, if so, the guise-based strategy to solve Fine’s problem risks being circular; in addition, there are serious doubts that coordination is transitive. An alternative Millian-Russellian solution to Fine’s problem will then be explored, which gives up guises and employs, instead, a non-semantic and subjective relation of coordination not defined in terms of guises, along with occurrences of Russellian propositions of a special sort, for which identity conditions will be provided and via which token attitude states intuitively more fine-grained than guises will be individuated.