Steven E. Boër

A performadox in truth-conditional semantics

An argument is developed at some length to show that any semantical theory which treats superficially nonperformative sentences as being governed by performative prefaces at some level of underlying structure must either leave those sentences semantically uninterpreted or assign them the wrong truth-conditions. Several possible escapes from this dilemma are examined; it is tentatively concluded that such hypotheses as the Ross-Lakoff-Sadock “Performative Analysis” should be rejected despite their attractions.

Propositional attitudes and formal ontology

This paper develops — within an axiomatic theory of properties, relations, and propositions which accords them well-defined existence and identity conditions — a sententialist-functionalist account of belief as a symbolically mediated relation to a special kind of propositional entity, theproxy-encoding abstract proposition. It is then shown how, in terms of this account, the truth conditions of English belief reports may be captured in a formally precise and empirically adequate way that accords genuinely semantic status to familiar opacity data.

Chisholm on Intentionality, Thought, and Reference

Owing largely to the impetus of Professor Chisholm’s writings, the topic of Intentionality has come to occupy a prominent place in current work in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of psychology. The aim of this paper is threefold: (i) briefly to characterize the topic — the Intentionality of thought — and the associated philosophical problems; (ii) to survey Chisholm’s contributions to the issue; and (iii) to offer a critical assessment of Chisholm’s position in the context of some of its major contemporary rivals.

Propositions and the Substitution Anomaly

The Substitution Anomaly is the failure of intuitively coreferential expressions of the corresponding forms “that S” and “the proposition that S” to be intersubstitutable salva veritate under certain ‘selective’ attitudinal verbs that grammatically accept both sorts of terms as complements. The Substitution Anomaly poses a direct threat to the basic assumptions of Millianism, which predict the interchangeability of “that S” and “the proposition that S”. Jeffrey King has argued persuasively that the most plausible Millian solution is to treat the selective attitudinal verbs as lexically ambiguous, having distinct meanings associated with the different sorts of complement terms. In opposition this approach, I argue that there are independent reasons for maintaining the univocality of these verbs and that this can be done while accommodating the Substitution Anomaly and without sacrificing the transparency of the relevant attitude ascriptions. In particular, I show how, by employing an extended version of Edward Zalta’s system of intensional logic for abstract objects, one can construct for a regimented fragment ℜ of English containing the relevant vocabulary a semantical theory ℑ which (a) treats ℜ’s selective attitudinal verbs as univocal, (b) regards genuine terms as occurring transparently under such verbs in sentences of ℜ, and yet (c) predicts the occurrence of the Substitution Anomaly in ℜ.

Castañeda’S Theory of Knowing

While continuing to think deeply and write tumultuously on topics in metaphysics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, action theory, ethics, metaphilosophy,…, Hector CastaŇeda has found time over the years to compose a significant body of material on knowledge and epistemic justification.1 It culminates (to date) in his imposing paper (1980), in which he presents “a tentative analysis of knowledge that p” (p. 226), embedded within a more general “contribution to basic epistemology and to the philosophy of cognitive language” (p. 193). His approach departs in several useful ways from current orthodoxies in epistemology. In our study of his theory of knowing we shall concentrate on this paper, adverting to others where appropriate.2

Thought-Contents and the Formal Ontology of Sense

This paper articulates a formal theory of belief incorporating three key theses: (1) belief is a dyadic relation between an agent and a property; (2) this property is not the beliefs truth condition (i.e., the intuitively self-ascribed property which the agent must exemplify for the belief to be true) but is instead a certain abstract property (a “thought-content”) which contains a way of thinking of that truth condition; (3) for an agent a to have a belief “about” such-and-such items it is necessary that a possesses a language of thought, Ma, and that a (is disposed as one who) inwardly affirms a sentence of Ma in which there are terms that denote those objects.Employing an extended version of E. Zaltas system ILAO, the proffered theory locates thought-contents within a typed hierarchy of “senses” and their “modes of presentation”, the provisional definitions of which (suppressing complications added later to accommodate the contents of beliefs about beliefs) are as follows. A mode of presentation of e is a ternary relation of the sort [λxyzz is a name in My that denotes x, and Deyz] in which De is an e-determiner – a relation between agents and their mental expressions imposing a syntactico-semantic condition sufficient for such an expression to denote e therein. A sense of an entity e is an abstract property that “contains” a mode of presentation Re of e by dint of encoding its property-reduct [λx(∃y)(∃z)Rexyz]. In particular, a thought-content is a sense T of an ordinary first-order property P containing a mode of presentation whose P-determiner DP is such that, for any y and z, DPyz entails that z is a λ-abstract [λv S] of My in which S is a sentence whose non-logical parts stand in appropriate semantic relations to the constituents of Ts (some of which may themselves be senses).Where Ia is agent as dedicated self-demonstrative and |T| is the mode of presentation contained in a thought-content T, the belief relation itself is then characterized as obtaining between a and T iff a( is disposed as one who) inwardly affirms the substitution instance S(Ia/v) of a sentence S in Ma such that |T|(P,a,[λv S]). The aforementioned “constituents” and “appropriate semantic relations” are formally characterized so as to permit a system of canonical descriptions for thought-contents of arbitrary complexity. These canonical descriptions are then employed to chart the nature and interrelations of belief de re, de dicto and de se and to identify the source of opacity in belief ascription.

Names and Attitudes

Arthur Burks was one of the first philosophers to recognize the inadequacy of the traditional “Description Theory” of proper names inherited from Frege and Russell; he was also one of the first to suggest a plausible revision of that theory (Burks [5]). His suggestion — that proper names be viewed as indexical definite descriptions — anticipated by nearly three decades the general drift of accounts of proper names such as those currently offered by Tyler Burge (in [4]) and Stephen Schiffer (in [22]). Description Theories, however, have recently come under frontal attack from proponents of so-called Causal-Historical Theories (e.g., Kripke [13] and Donnellan [10]), who urge a radically different account of the mechanisms of reference. Whatever one may think of this attack — and its success is by no means uncontested (cf. McKinsey [19]–[20] and Boor [2]) — Description Theories still have many enthusiastic supporters (including Burks in [6]). Nor do they lack ammunition for a counteroffensive. Their most powerful weapon is derived from the well-known tangle of problems attending the interpretation of names in propositional attitude contexts, which they increasingly point to as evidence against the Causal-Historical Theorists’ contention that names “merely designate” and do not “express (descriptive) senses” (cf., e.g., Loar [18]).