Ambiguities in Intensional Contexts

334 Pages·1981·9.709 MB·Synthese Language Library 12

by  Esa Saarinen (auth.), Frank Heny (eds.)

AMBIGUITIES IN INTENSIONAL CONTEXTS
SYNTHESE LANGUAGE LIBRARY
TEXTS AND STUDIES IN
LINGUISTICS AND PHILOSOPHY
Managing Editors:
J A A K K 0 HI N T I K K A, Florida State University
STANLEY PETERS, The University of Texas at Austin
Editorial Board:
EM M 0 N B A C H, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
J 0 A N B RES NAN, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
J 0 H N L YON S, University ofS ussex
JULIUS M. E. MORAVCSIK, Stanford University
PATRICK S UPPE S, Stanford University
DAN A S COT T, Oxford University
VOLUME 12
AMBIGUITIES IN
INTENSIONAL
CONTEXTS
Edited by
FRANK HE NY
Groningen University
D. REIDEL PUBLISHING COMPANY
DORDRECHT: HOLLAND/BOSTON: U. S.A.
LONDON: ENGLAND
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Main entry under title:
Ambiguities in intensional contexts.
(Synthese language library; v. 12)
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Semantics - Addresses, essays, lectures. 2. Ambiguity - Addresses,
essays, lectures. 3. Language and logic - Addresses, essays, lectures.
4. Pragmatics - Addresses, essays, lectures. I. Heny, Frank. II. Series.
P325.A425 415 80-25888
ISBN-13: 978-90-277-1168-7 e-ISBN-13: 978-94-009-8377-9
001: 10.1007/978-94-009-8377-9
Published by D. Reidel Publishing Company,
P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, Holland.
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All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 1981 by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or
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T ABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE vii
INTRODUCTION ix
ESA SAARINEN / Quantifier Phrases Are (At Least)
Five Ways Ambiguous in Intensional Contexts 1
LARS HELLAN / On Semantic Scope 47
EWAN KLEIN / Defensible Descriptions 83
DAVID WOODRUFF SMITH / The Ortcutt Connection 103
DAVID SCHWARZ / Reference and Relational Belief:
On Causality and the Pragmatics of 'Referring To' and
'Believing About' 133
JEROEN GROENENDIJK and MARTIN STOKHOF /
A Pragmatic Analysis of Specificity 153
BARRY RICHARDS / Pronouns, Reference and Semantic
Laziness 191
EVA EJERHED / Tense as a Source of Intensional Ambiguity 231
THEO M. V. JANSSEN and PETER VAN EM DE BOAS /
On Intensionality in Programming Languages 253
INDEX OF NAMES 271
INDEX OF SUBJECTS 277
PREFACE
The essays in this book deal with a number of problems in the analysis of
intensional language - more especially with the analysis of the personal
modalities in natural language. Together they cover a representative spectrum
of the problems of contemporary ,interest in this area, in a way that should
make them of interest to linguists, logicians and philosophers concerned
with natural language. The contributors are mostly more linguists than
logicians or philosophers but some are more logicians or philosophers than
linguists. As far as possible, we have tried to conduct the discussion in terms
that will enable students from any of these fields to come to grips with the
central issues.
This volume will provide, I think, material for a very stimulating course. I
have used it as the basis for a course at the introductory level in the philosophy
of language. The essays in the book led us back to look at the classic texts
and a good deal of the intervening literature crept in of its own accord. Out
of that experience grew the introduction that follows. In contrast with the
rest of the book, the introduction is frankly pedagogical. I hope and believe
that many who would otherwise find the papers themselves hard to digest will
~e helped on their way by that summary.
Perhaps such emphasis on the attempts to make the material accessible to
students will create the impression that the papers themselves are simply
pedagogical. They are not. All are original research contributions.
The idea for this book originated at an informal get-together at my house,
in Kiel Windeweer, Holland, one weekend in September 1977. Most of the
contributors were present on that occasion; most of the papers were read,
discussed or dreamed up over that weekend - at least in some embryonic
form. Then the volume grew a little. Because of the way in which the volume
originated and grew and changed, the publication of some of the papers
has been delayed for some time. I appreciate the patience of those who have
waited, and I thank them for it. I should also like to thank those who came
to Kiel Windeweer and have no paper in this volume for their unseen contri
butions. Thanks, also, to the members of my philosophy of language seminar
for helping to shape the introduction, and to Jet van Everdingen and Hermie
Zondervan-Kimsma for help with the typing.
August 1980 FRANK HENY
vii
INTRODUCTION
1. NAMES, THINGS, LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT
Most of the essays in this collection deal with problems that arise when
language, though perfectly meaningful, seems to be functioning without the
normal bonds between names, descriptions or quantifying expressions and
those things which usually give them meaning. In general such phenomena
occur in contexts that are easily recognizable by the presence of a 'logical'
adverb like necessarily or possibly; a verb expressing someone's intentions,
like hope, seek, want, or someone's attitude towards a state of affairs, like
believe, regret, surmise; or a tense-like operator such as the future modal, will.
This list is far from exhaustive. In all the examples, and many more that
could be given, ambiguities arise. And language seems to lose its hold on the
things of the world.
There are things. And things (sometimes) have names. We can use these
names to identify and hence to think and talk about the things they name. If
the world were just things, and if language were nothing but names - more
accurately, if the world were a fIxed set of pre-identifIed things, each supplied
with a distinct and unambiguous name, and if language were just that set of
names - then there would be little of interest to say about language. (And
no way to say it!)
But neither language nor the world is so simple. To begin with, there are
linguistic expressions which, if they are names at all, name sometimes one
thing, sometimes another. What they name depends on the changing properties
of the things rather than upon their identity. So the sentence Ralph is talking
to the owner of the supermarket may be true today if Ralph is talking today
to Smith; tomorrow if he is talking to Brown. Brown on the other hand is in
no wise Smith; Smith tomorrow remains himself. And to add to the confusion
he remains Smith even if he changes his name to Jones ... or even Brown.
He remains the same person, the same individual, even if he sells his store,
changes his name, and ... well, it is really not very clear how much he can
change and remain himself. But that is not a problem we can try to solve
here. We are concerned with language and with its relation to things, and
though this will inevitably bring us right to the brink of asking about the
ix
x INTRODUCTION
nature of the things themselves, we must stop short of seeking an answer
to that. On the other hand, there are times when language seems able to
function without any direct relation to things at all, no matter how abstract.
"Ralph is looking for the owner of the supermarket", I may say. "But he is
under a misapprehension. It is a communal enterprise." There is no owner,
and I knew it; yet I used the phrase the owner of the supermarket in a per
fectly normal fashion and even succeeded in saying something by means of
that usage. We need to ask how that can be.
In many contexts where it seems that language can function perfectly well
without naming or describing anything at all- even when a name or descrip
tion is used - the linguistic expressions act in a peculiar way. Here is an
example. Ralph is talking to the owner of the supermarket. The owner, we
have agreed, is the president of the sports club. So Ralph is talking to the
president of the sports club. But if Ralph tells the owner of the super
market that he is looking for the president of the sports club - not knowing
who that is: is he then also looking for the owner of the supermarket? Or
take Ralph's brother: he believes that the president of the sports club is
good at tennis. He need not believe that the owner of the supermarket plays
at all. The beliefs, the searches (the hopes and fears, and many other attitudes)
all seem to be phrasable only in terms of specific linguistic expressions.
Language itself can sometimes, in those cases, provide the things which it
names or describes.1 Then, since our subject is language, we do need to know
more about the things themselves. For they are language. When language seems
to name nothing, then it is most likely to be naming or describing linguistic
objects. Does that mean that the non-existent supermarket owner of a few
paragraphs back, Smith, the president of the club and so on are all, in some
elusive sense, abstract linguistic objects in so far as they playa role in the
meanings of these sentences? It would be neater if that were not so. It is hard
to conceive of the non-existent owner of the supermarket as a linguistic object.
At any rate, there sometimes seem too few things for the available names.
This super-abundance of names can arise in quite another way, too. For
the things that do have names tend to be blessed with a great number of
names. Smith is now not only the owner of the supermarket but the president
of the sports club. These are not names which like 'Smith' will change, if
ever, only a sort of re-baptism,2 but depend on Smith's properties. Still,
like 'Smith' they apply uniquely, and can be used to identify Smith. There
are yet other expressions which apply to Smith but not uniquely. These we
can barely regard as names in any sense,3 though if Smith is wearing a red
tie then he is indeed correctly described by the phrase a man in a red tie.
INTRODUCTION xi
If I know no other way of identifying him, I may say, "A man in a red tie was
looking for you". Whether I was naming, or referring to Smith is another
question, and for the present we shall concentrate on uniquely identifying
descriptions and proper names rather than such indeftnite, quantifying ex
pressions. But quantifted expressions misbehave, like names, in these contexts,
as evidenced by the ambiguity of Ralph is looking for a man in a red tie.
One term that has been used for the contexts in which such problems
arise is 'opaque'.4 Expressions in these contexts, behaving as if they have no
reference at all in the real world have been regarded as 'referentially opaque'.
Interestingly, they may, in the same contexts function is another way, so that
they retain (almost) their full normal, 'transparent' referential properties.5
Let us go back to Ralph's brother. We failed to derme precisely what it was
he really believed. On the one hand, he might just have heard a convincing
rumor about the president's tennis game, without having any idea who the
president is; on the other hand, he may know who the president is and believe
of him that he plays a good game. In the ftrst case, there is no-one of whom
we can say, "Ralph's brother believes he plays well." In the second case, there
is. Even in the second case, we might hesitate to say that Ralph's brother
believes of the owner of the supermarket that he plays well-if the identity
of the owner is unknown to him. But otherwise the behavior of the terms
involved seems normal. They refer, albeit not so as to be fully transparent.
As a second example, take Ralph's search for the president of the sports
club. In the scenario above, he was already talking to the president. So he is
searching, not for someone whom he has identified as the president, but simply
for whoever turns out to be the president. When the sentence is understood
in this way, it would not affect the truth of the sentence in any way if there
were no president of the sports club. For the other reading, we must suppose
that Ralph slightly knows the president, and is searching for him personally.
There is someone for whom he is looking. But in his search he is given a
number, which he calls, only to ftnd that it is the number of the super
market - where it is not known that the owner is the club president. Is
Ralph telling the truth if he denies that he is looking for the owner of the
supermarket? Arguably.
Apart from the specific linguistic expressions that seem to characterize
opaque contexts, and the ambiguity, there are two kinds of phenomena
which are sometimes regarded as criterial. On the one hand, substitution
under identity may fail to preserve truth; on the other, existential generaliz
ation may fail. The ftrst is exemplifted by the fact we cannot infer from
Ralph is looking for the president of the sports club and The owner of the
xii INTRODUCTION
supermarket is the president of the sports club to Ralph is looking for the
owner of the supermarket. Had the verb been talking to, this inference would
have been justified. The second phenomenon was exemplified by the fact that
Ralph's brother believes that the president of the sports club plays a good
game of tennis can be true without it also being true that There is someone
of whom Ralph believes that he plays a good game of tennis. A simpler
example: Ralph is looking for the owner of the supermarket did not require
There is someone Ralph is looking for. Ralph is talking to the owner of the
supermarket requires that there be someone to whom he is talking.
Expressions inducing the relevant kind of ambiguity or cases of these
phenomena (which tend to go together but do not always do so) have been
called 'intensional,.6 Expressions which do not do so are 'extensional'. Con
texts where the ambiguity and failure of substitution or generalization occur
can be called 'intensional' instead of 'opaque'. In the next section we shall
explore some of the characteristics of extensional and intensional expressions.
2. EXTENSIONALITY, INTENSIONALITY AND AMBIGUITY
The simplest languages do not possess the complications described above.
The relationship between the expressions of such a language and the things
they name or describe remains constant. They are also unambiguous. We
approach the description of ambiguity in intensional contexts by reflecting
briefly on what it would be like for natural language to be like that.
Among the unambiguous, extensional languages is first order predicate
logic. The expressions of predicate logic depend for their truth value solely
on the extension of the predicates which they include. The extension of
a predicate is the set of entities which possess the attribute in question.
For a predicate F and a domain of entities D, every individual member of
D is either F or not F. The extension of F in D is that subset of D which
contains all those members of D which are F. If the domain of quantification
is fixed in this way, then the truth (in D) of Vx Fx, Ax Fx, AxVy Gxy,
VyAx Gxy will be the values of (different) functions of the extension of
the predicates F and G (in D). When there is at least one member of D that
is F, the first will be true; a single entity in not-F will falsify the second;
and the third and fourth, while potentially differing in value in accordance
with the interpretation of the differing scopes of the universal and existential
quantifiers, will ultimately depend on the extension of the predicate G. A
binary predicate like G will be represented not as a subset of D, but as a
set of ordered pairs of members of D. From the set of all such pairs the