From owner-modality@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU Fri Mar 12 14:58:13 1999 Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 15:54:59 -0700 Sender: "Philosophy 596B: Mind and Modality" From: Rachael J Parkinson Subject: Re: your mail To: MODALITY@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU Status: RO Like Angela, I am confused about what the secondary intension points to in the case of the forty-second president of the United States. To elaborate on a point that Brad made about Deep Throat in our last meeting, I can think of a few cases where rigid designators don't seem to work the way Kripke intends. For example, Mark Twain; it would seem, given in our actual world that Mark Twain is Samuel Clemmons, Mark Twain would be Samuel Clemmons in all counterfactual worlds (I guess Samuel Clemmons isn't really a secondary intension?). But I can easily imagine a world where Mark Twain was Joe Schmoe. Likewise, I can imagine a world where Marilyn Monroe was not Norma Jean and Aristotle was a woman. I guess this is possible because I am assuming that the primary intension of those names apply to Mark Twain,the author; Marilyn Monroe, the actress; and Aristotle, the philosopher. But Kripke is intent on showing that names are not descriptive. The name, Marilyn Monroe, refers to, roughly, that woman that we call Marilyn Monroe. I think that Kripke can make a good case in respect to Aristotle (because Aristotle refers to the man and not to the Greek philosopher etc. it makes sense to say that Aristotle could have been a blacksmith.) I think that it does not make as much sense, however, to say that Deep Throat could have been a butcher, Mark Twain could have been a baker, etc. I guess I think that for these sorts of names, something like a descriptive theory is needed. I would appreciate if someone would expand on how primary and secondary intensions work in respect to definite descriptions and proper names. Thanks- Rachael From owner-modality@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU Tue Apr 20 12:33:56 1999 Date: Tue, 20 Apr 1999 12:14:54 -0700 Sender: "Philosophy 596B: Mind and Modality" From: Josh Cowley Subject: necessity of conitionals To: MODALITY@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU Status: R I have an observation on indicative and subjunctive conditionals that I want to run by all of you. In every example that I have come up with if an indicative conditional has its truth value necessarily, then its corresponding subjunctive conditional also has its truth value necessarily. The truth values may differ, but it doesn't seem that the necessity of those truth values differs. Consider the following examples. "If the CIA didn't arrange Kenedy's death then someone else did." [Possibly true] "If the CIA hadn't arranged Kenedy's death then someone else would have."[Possibly false] "If the stuff in the lakes and rivers is XYZ then water is H2O." [Necessarily False] "If the stuff in the lakes and rivers were XYZ then water would be H2O." [Necessarily True] "If Penguins don't live in Antarctica then my maps are missnaming the southern most continent in the world." [Possibly false] "If Penguins hadn't lived in Antarctica then my maps would have missnamed the southern most continent in the world." [Possibly false] Now this could be a fluke and someone may be able to generate a counter-example. But if there is a direct correspondence then surely it is because there is a connection between the necessity of indicative and subjunctive conditionals. And if there is a connection then one wonders whether we could do away with one or the other. Just some thoughts to chew on. Josh From owner-modality@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU Tue Apr 20 22:08:50 1999 Date: Tue, 20 Apr 1999 22:05:53 -0700 Sender: "Philosophy 596B: Mind and Modality" From: David Chalmers Subject: Re: necessity of conitionals To: MODALITY@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU Status: R Josh writes: >I have an observation on indicative and subjunctive conditionals that >I want to run by all of you. In every example that I have come up >with if an indicative conditional has its truth value necessarily, >then its corresponding subjunctive conditional also has its truth value >necessarily. The truth values may differ, but it doesn't seem that >the necessity of those truth values differs. Consider the following examples. We decided in the break today that the claim was as follows. Let S(IC) be the indicative conditional "If P is the case, then Q is the case", and S(SC) be the subjunctive conditional "If P were the case, Q would be the case." Then the claim is: S(IC) is indicatively necessary or indicatively impossible if and only if S(SC) is subjunctively necessary or subjunctively impossible. I think I can come up with a few counterexamples, as follows. I've labelled them in Josh's way. "If the tallest person in England committed those murders, the tallest person is Jack the Ripper". [Necessarily true.] "If the tallest person in England had committed those murders, the tallest person would have been Jack the Ripper". [Probably false, but not necessarily.] "If H2O is not in the oceans and lakes, water is XYZ". [Possibly true, possibly false.] "If H2O were not in the oceans and lakes, water would be XYZ." [Necessarily false.] It's interesting that many of the standard cases line up together in Josh's way. It might be an interesting exercise to figure out what those examples have in common which the examples above do not (apart from the property at issue). --Dave. From owner-modality@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU Tue Apr 27 14:26:11 1999 Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 14:23:43 -0700 Sender: "Philosophy 596B: Mind and Modality" From: Rachael J Parkinson Subject: Indicative and subjective. To: MODALITY@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU Status: R I just want to resolve a worry I expressed in seminar last week: Indicative: If XYZ is in the oceans and lakes, then water is XYZ. Subjunctive: If XYZ were the liquid in the oceans and the lakes, water wouldn't be. I argued that it made sense to say "If XYZ were the liquid in the oceans and lakes, water would be XYZ." That is to say, in considering this world as actual, we could discover that we were mistaken in identifying water with H2O, that it is actually XYZ. The sentence looks like a subjunctive one. The mistake here is that the sentence is actually indicative, roughly equivalent to "If we were to find out that XYZ is in the oceans and lakes, then water is XYZ." Still, I have a confusion which I'm sure someone will be able to easily dispel. Chalmers suggested that we can match the subjuntive up with secondary intensions and the indicative with primary intensions.It looks like the indicative sentence "If XYZ is in the oceans and lakes, then water is XYZ" applies to the secondary intension of water. What do you think? -Rachael From owner-modality@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU Tue Apr 27 17:14:44 1999 Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 17:12:53 -0700 Sender: "Philosophy 596B: Mind and Modality" From: Anthony T Lane Subject: Re: Indicative and subjective. To: MODALITY@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU Status: R I'm not sure if this will be helpful, but here goes... > > Indicative: If XYZ is in the oceans and lakes, then water is XYZ. > Subjunctive: If XYZ were the liquid in the oceans and the lakes, water > wouldn't be. > I argued that it made sense to say "If XYZ were the liquid in the oceans > and lakes, water would be XYZ." That is to say, in considering this world > as actual, we could discover that we were mistaken in identifying water > with H2O, that it is actually XYZ. The sentence looks like a subjunctive > one. I think you mean to say that this is an indicative conditional-- considering the centered world in which XYZ is the dominant watery stuff, water is XYZ. > The mistake here is that the sentence is actually indicative, roughly > equivalent to "If we were to find out that XYZ is in the oceans and lakes, > then water is XYZ." > Still, I have a confusion which I'm sure someone will be able to easily > dispel. Chalmers suggested that we can match the subjuntive up > with secondary intensions and the indicative with primary intensions.It > looks like the indicative sentence "If XYZ is in the oceans and lakes, > then water is XYZ" applies to the secondary intension of water. > What do you think? > -Rachael > It seems to me that this last sentence, "If XYZ is in the oceans and lakes, then water is XYZ", is making a statement about the primary intension of water. The way we pick out water according to the primary intension is that it is whatever plays the role of being the dominant watery stuff in a centered world. If we consider the secondary intension, however, water is H2O. Accordingly, a counterfactual world with XYZ in the rivers and lakes is actually a world without water. It seems that you can construct these conditionals using terms that make it sound that an indicative cond. is a subjuctive and the reverse. It seems, perhaps, that one needs to simply think about indicative conditionals as those that are saying something like, 'assuming that scu and such actually is the case, x follows'. And, similarly, subjunctives are thos conditionals that ask you to consider what wuld folloe if something that is not the case, was. sorry if this is not helpful. Anthony From owner-modality@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU Wed Apr 28 10:42:08 1999 x-sender: agillies@pop.u.arizona.edu Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 10:56:21 -0700 Sender: "Philosophy 596B: Mind and Modality" From: Anthony S Gillies Subject: truth conditions of indicatives To: MODALITY@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU Status: R A lot of people talking about indicatives use the Ramsey Test to get assertabiliy conditions for indicatives. But to ground truth_1 and truth_2 (and therewith Nec_1 and Nec_2) we need bona fide truth conditions. The worry is that the Ramsey Test brings into play other stuff in our belief corpus, and so might not be capable of fixing truth conditions. Here's one way that the Ramsey Test for indicatives can get going on genuine truth conditions. Say that a world w2 is epistemically accessible to an agent in w1 just in case for all the agent knows, w2 might be the actual world. Accessibility of epistemic alternatives is an equivalence relation. An agent knows P iff P is true in all the epistemically accessible worlds to the agent. Now let's beef up the notion by saying that in this sense of 'knows', an agent knows all the consequences of what she knows. As a limiting case, some agents can know everything there is to know at their worlds. Let K be such an agent at w. Further, take worlds to be sets of propositions. Then: The indicative "P --> Q" is true at w iff: for any w' such that w' is epistemically accessible from w to K, the minimal revision of w' to include P includes Q. I think this gets out of the worry. Thony "Curious green ideas sleep furiously." From owner-modality@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU Thu Apr 29 14:08:49 1999 Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 13:54:43 -0700 Sender: "Philosophy 596B: Mind and Modality" From: David Chalmers Subject: Re: Indicative and subjunctive To: MODALITY@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU Status: R Rachael wrote: >I just want to resolve a worry I expressed in seminar last week: > >Indicative: If XYZ is in the oceans and lakes, then water is XYZ. >Subjunctive: If XYZ were the liquid in the oceans and the lakes, water >wouldn't be. > >I argued that it made sense to say "If XYZ were the liquid in the oceans >and lakes, water would be XYZ." That is to say, in considering this world >as actual, we could discover that we were mistaken in identifying water >with H2O, that it is actually XYZ. The sentence looks like a subjunctive >one. > >The mistake here is that the sentence is actually indicative, roughly >equivalent to "If we were to find out that XYZ is in the oceans and lakes, >then water is XYZ." Hmm, I'm not sure that that sentence is grammatical! It looks like a mixture of subjunctive and indicative to me. One could try making it more indicative all the way by going to: "If we find out that XYZ is in the oceans and lakes, then water is XYZ". Alternatively, one express something like this with a "metalinguistic subjunctive": "If XYZ were the liquid in the oceans and lakes, we would say that `water' refers to XYZ." Arguably, metalinguistic subjunctives like this, which *mention* the term `water' rather than *using* it, come close to tracking the primary intension of 'water' rather than the secondary intension (though there are subtleties here). >Still, I have a confusion which I'm sure someone will be able to easily >dispel. Chalmers suggested that we can match the subjuntive up >with secondary intensions and the indicative with primary intensions.It >looks like the indicative sentence "If XYZ is in the oceans and lakes, >then water is XYZ" applies to the secondary intension of water. I think I agree with Anthony's analysis of this. It seems to me that your (Rachael's) sentence tracks the primary intension of `water', not the secondary intension. Taking the secondary intension, `water is XYZ' will be false in a scenario where XYZ is in the oceans and lakes. But taking the primary intension, it will be true there. Insofar as we judge the indicative conditional above to be true (or assertible), it seems to mirror the primary intension. Anthony wrote: >It seems that you can construct these conditionals using terms that make >it sound that an indicative cond. is a subjuctive and the reverse. It >seems, perhaps, that one needs to simply think about indicative >conditionals as those that are saying something like, 'assuming that scu >and such actually is the case, x follows'. And, similarly, subjunctives >are thos conditionals that ask you to consider what wuld folloe if >something that is not the case, was. Right, an alternative is to think about the conceptual categories of "epistemic conditionals" and "counterfactual conditionals", or some such, rather than directly in terms of the grammatical categories. Epistemic conditionals are those that consider the antecedent as actual, and counterfactual conditionals are those that consider the antecedent as counterfactual (more or less as you suggest above). It then turns out that most of the time, grammatically indicative conditionals are epistemic conditionals, and grammatically subjunctive conditionals are counterfactual conditionals. But maybe there can be cases or readings where this is not so. In any case, it's the conceptual rather than the grammatical distinction that runs deepest. --Dave. From owner-modality@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU Thu Apr 29 15:24:04 1999 Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 14:06:29 -0700 Sender: "Philosophy 596B: Mind and Modality" From: David Chalmers Subject: Re: truth conditions of indicatives To: MODALITY@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU Status: R Thony wrote: >A lot of people talking about indicatives use the Ramsey Test to get >assertabiliy conditions for indicatives. But to ground truth_1 and >truth_2 (and therewith Nec_1 and Nec_2) we need bona fide truth >conditions. The worry is that the Ramsey Test brings into play other >stuff in our belief corpus, and so might not be capable of fixing truth >conditions. Here's one way that the Ramsey Test for indicatives can get >going on genuine truth conditions. Well, my hope is that we needn't take a stand on whether typical indicative conditionals have truth-conditions or just assertibility-conditions. As we discussed in class last week, the belief-relativity seems to apply only to the way a partial antecedent gets fleshed out into a whole world, rather than to the way that world gets evaluated. And truth_1 just needs the world-evaluation. So even if indicative conditionals with partial antecedents have belief-relative truth- or assertibility-conditions, an objective sort of semantic evaluability across worlds seems to lie in the background. Still, it would be nice to have some sort of non-relative truth-conditions for indicatives with partial antecedents that comes close to capturing some of the intuitive assertibility-conditions. So let's see. >Say that a world w2 is epistemically accessible to an agent in w1 just in >case for all the agent knows, w2 might be the actual world. >Accessibility of epistemic alternatives is an equivalence relation. An >agent knows P iff P is true in all the epistemically accessible worlds to >the agent. Now let's beef up the notion by saying that in this sense of >'knows', an agent knows all the consequences of what she knows. As a >limiting case, some agents can know everything there is to know at their >worlds. Let K be such an agent at w. Further, take worlds to be sets of >propositions. Then: > >The indicative "P --> Q" is true at w iff: for any w' such that w' is >epistemically accessible from w to K, the minimal revision of w' to >include P includes Q. Interesting proposal! So basically, the truth-conditions of an indicative will correspond to the assertibility-conditions for an omniscient being. My main worry is that it is not obvious that there is an objective notion of "minimal revision" for an omniscient being. If a being who knows everything (or thinks they do) finds out that their belief that not-P is false, how will they revise? Presumably there will be lots of different ways to revise. And presumably any such way will require giving up on some other beliefs, and preserving others. The decision between these seems to turn on which linked beliefs are "strongest" or closest to the "core" for such a being. It seems to me that two omniscient being might well give two quite different judgments about the indicative above, depending on just which of their beliefs that view as most amenable to revision. If so, the problem of relativity arises once again. Of course this problem won't arise for indicatives with whole worlds in the antecedents. In this case, there won't be any "slack" in the belief revision process, and the outcome should be determined. --Dave. From owner-modality@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU Thu Apr 29 15:26:35 1999 Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 14:40:50 -0700 Sender: "Philosophy 596B: Mind and Modality" From: Josh Cowley Subject: Re: truth conditions of indicatives To: MODALITY@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU Status: R Thony and Dave wrote: > >Say that a world w2 is epistemically accessible to an agent in w1 just in > >case for all the agent knows, w2 might be the actual world. > >Accessibility of epistemic alternatives is an equivalence relation. An > >agent knows P iff P is true in all the epistemically accessible worlds to > >the agent. Now let's beef up the notion by saying that in this sense of > >'knows', an agent knows all the consequences of what she knows. As a > >limiting case, some agents can know everything there is to know at their > >worlds. Let K be such an agent at w. Further, take worlds to be sets of > >propositions. Then: > > > >The indicative "P --> Q" is true at w iff: for any w' such that w' is > >epistemically accessible from w to K, the minimal revision of w' to > >include P includes Q. > > Interesting proposal! So basically, the truth-conditions of an > indicative will correspond to the assertibility-conditions for an > omniscient being. My main worry is that it is not obvious that there > is an objective notion of "minimal revision" for an omniscient being. > If a being who knows everything (or thinks they do) finds out that > their belief that not-P is false, how will they revise? Presumably > there will be lots of different ways to revise. And presumably any > such way will require giving up on some other beliefs, and preserving > others. The decision between these seems to turn on which linked > beliefs are "strongest" or closest to the "core" for such a being. > > It seems to me that two omniscient being might well give two quite > different judgments about the indicative above, depending on just > which of their beliefs that view as most amenable to revision. If so, > the problem of relativity arises once again. I took Thony to be saying that minimal revisions are not belief revisions, but world revisions. The idea is to get the nearest possible P world to w. So for Thony's case you first pick out the equiv. class of epistemically accessible worlds. Then look at all w' such that w' is an epistemically accessible world. P-->Q is true at w if for each w', the nearest P world to w' is also a Q world. It doesn't matter how K will update or revise his beliefs because "nearest P world" is a relation between worlds and is independent of agents. Now you might argue that the notion of a "nearest P world" isn't clear. In fact I think it isn't at all clear. But pretty much everyone that talks about possible worlds wants to say that there is some such relation. So long as you hold that possible worlds are not themselves dependent on agents then any such relation is going to be objective. Josh From owner-modality@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU Thu Apr 29 15:47:21 1999 Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 15:45:57 -0700 Sender: "Philosophy 596B: Mind and Modality" From: David Chalmers Subject: Re: truth conditions of indicatives To: MODALITY@LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU Status: R OK, so Josh suggests appealing to a non-epistemic notion of "nearness" between worlds to evaluate indicatives. I take it this is supposed to be the same nearness relation that is present in evaluating partial subjunctive conditionals, e.g. on the Stalnaker/Lewis analysis (as Josh points to the fact that everyone accepts this relation already). If this worked, it would give a nice link between the truth-values of indicatives and subjunctives. The subjunctive "If P, then Q" will be true iff the nearest P-worlds are Q-worlds, where P-worlds etc are worlds satisfying P's secondary intension. The indicative "If P, then Q" will be true iff the nearest P-worlds are Q-worlds, where P-worlds etc are worlds satisfying P's primary intension. I'm not sure that this is just what Thony intended, since the idea of an omniscient being now seems to drop out of the analysis. But in any case, I worry that the same nearness relation can't plausibly to the job in both cases. Take the conditional with P = "Butterly B flapped its wings like so last week", and Q = "It rained this week". It may well be that the subjunctive "If P then Q" is true -- if the butterfly *had* flapped its wings, it would have rained this week. (I'm assuming it didn't actually rain this week.) But it doesn't seem right to say that the indicative "If P, then Q" is true. If we were to discover that the butterfly flapped its wings, we wouldn't suddenly decide that it rained. And even an omniscient being probably wouldn't reason in that way, it seems. After all, that being will have a whole lot of beliefs about the way things are this week that would have to be overturned just to accommodate the tiny change in beliefs about the butterfly. It seems more plausible to say that the being would make a few local adjustment in its beliefs about the way things are in the vinicity of the butterly, in order that it can change those beliefs without having huge effects elsewhere (maybe adjusting beliefs about a few molecules in the vicinity to compensate). The intuitive moral, I think, is that indicative conditionals require something like "epistemic nearness", which is somewhat different from the sort of "metaphysical nearness" required for subjunctives. Of course one could always just stipulate the latter, but then one is moving a fair distance away from the intuitive correctness conditions for indicative conditionals. --Dave. P.S. Re Kripke/Wittgemstein on the social community, I tend to think that this is hopeless as a "solution" to the puzzle, as any in-principle argument that demonstrates indeterminacy in an individual will also demonstrate indeterminacy in a community. After all, in relevant respects, the community can be seenas a big individual, or an individual can be seen as a little community.