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OUPCORRECTEDAUTOPAGEPROOFS–FINAL,17/1/2020,SPi The Metaphysics of Representation OUPCORRECTEDAUTOPAGEPROOFS–FINAL,17/1/2020,SPi OUPCORRECTEDAUTOPAGEPROOFS–FINAL,17/1/2020,SPi The Metaphysics of Representation J. ROBERT G. WILLIAMS 1 OUPCORRECTEDAUTOPAGEPROOFS–FINAL,17/1/2020,SPi 3 GreatClarendonStreet,Oxford,OX26DP, UnitedKingdom OxfordUniversityPressisadepartmentoftheUniversityofOxford. ItfurtherstheUniversity’sobjectiveofexcellenceinresearch,scholarship, andeducationbypublishingworldwide.Oxfordisaregisteredtrademarkof OxfordUniversityPressintheUKandincertainothercountries ©J.RobertG.Williams2020 Themoralrightsoftheauthorhavebeenasserted FirstEditionpublishedin2020 Impression:1 Allrightsreserved.Nopartofthispublicationmaybereproduced,storedin aretrievalsystem,ortransmitted,inanyformorbyanymeans,withoutthe priorpermissioninwritingofOxfordUniversityPress,orasexpresslypermitted bylaw,bylicenceorundertermsagreedwiththeappropriatereprographics rightsorganization.Enquiriesconcerningreproductionoutsidethescopeofthe aboveshouldbesenttotheRightsDepartment,OxfordUniversityPress,atthe addressabove Youmustnotcirculatethisworkinanyotherform andyoumustimposethissameconditiononanyacquirer PublishedintheUnitedStatesofAmericabyOxfordUniversityPress 198MadisonAvenue,NewYork,NY10016,UnitedStatesofAmerica BritishLibraryCataloguinginPublicationData Dataavailable LibraryofCongressControlNumber:2019949406 ISBN978–0–19–885020–5 DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198850205.001.0001 PrintedandboundinGreatBritainby ClaysLtd,ElcografS.p.A. LinkstothirdpartywebsitesareprovidedbyOxfordingoodfaithand forinformationonly.Oxforddisclaimsanyresponsibilityforthematerials containedinanythirdpartywebsitereferencedinthiswork. OUPCORRECTEDAUTOPAGEPROOFS–FINAL,17/1/2020,SPi Preface This is a book about the nature of representational facts: representation in language, in thought, in action and perception. My hypothesis is that the metaphysics of these states is hierarchical. Certain facts about action and perceptionaremetaphysicallypriorto,andindependentof,theothers.They constitute a first layer of representational facts. They are part of the basis that grounds facts about what a perceiver-actor believes and desires. Belief and desire constitute a second layer of representational facts. Facts about mentalcontentthenformpartofthebasisthatgroundsfactsaboutwhatthe words we speak mean. So linguistic representation is a third layer of representational facts. The story in the chapters to follow starts with the centralcaseofmentalcontent.Afterthat,itlooksaboveandbelow:building up to linguistic content, and finally laying the foundations in perception andaction. The story I tell is deeply influenced by David Lewis’s account of mental andlinguisticrepresentation.Heneversetouthisaccountinfulldetail,and foryearsI’vebeenpuzzledabouthowthedetailsweresupposedtogo.¹What follows is not an attempt at Lewis exegesis, but an improvisation on a Lewisian theme. The most striking global divergence from Lewis is that Icannotseehowtomaketheaccountflywithoutanappealtothefirstlayer ¹ A major difficulty, exegetically, is to understand how the story in Lewis (1974) was supposedtobeadjustedinthelightoftheobjectionsinLewis(1983)—thebubblepuzzleof my chapter 1. ThoughI thought I understoodhowLewis’s remedy for underdetermination challenges,involvinganappealtonaturalness,wastogo(seeWilliams2007,2015formytake onthis),Ididnotseehowthiswouldgointhecaseofmentalcontent,untilaclusterofpapersin the early 2010s made a connection between a role for naturalness in the epistemology of induction and radical interpretation. These were published as Weatherson (2013), Pautz (2013),andSchwarz(2014)(anearlierdraftoftheWeathersonpaperproposedamuchbolder version of a connection between induction and natural properties (‘inductive dogmatism’), whichwasinfluentialonme).Thebriefdiscussionsineachofthesepapersleftplentyofroom for further worries and development, as we’ll see in chapter 4, but at least the form of a naturalness-basedresolutionofthekeyunderdeterminationpuzzlewasinview.Istilldon’t fullyunderstandhowLewishimselfwouldsquarethisstorywithhiscoarse-grainedapproachto mentalcontent,andIampuzzledastowhy,ifthiswashispicture,hedidn’tcomeoutand articulatedirectlytheviewthatWeatherson(2013)veryplausiblyattributestohim. OUPCORRECTEDAUTOPAGEPROOFS–FINAL,17/1/2020,SPi vi  ofrepresentation—an autonomous account ofperceptual andaction-guiding content.²Here,itisnotLewis,butthe‘naturalising’traditionthatprovidesthe setting. Myoriginalplan wasto tackle this first layer of representationusing resourcesdrawnfromDretske’swork,butIwasfortunatethat,atalatestagein thisproject’sdevelopment,KarenNeanderpublishedabook-lengthtreatment ofperceptualrepresentationwhichsuitedmypurposesbeautifully. Accordingly, there are two traditions woven together in the story I am about to tell. The first tradition is that of ‘teleoinformational’ accounts of representation: roughly, that a state represents that p iff that state has the function to be caused by the fact that p. The second are ‘interpretationist’ accounts of representation, roughly: a state of an agent represents that p if themostrationalizingoverallinterpretationofthatagentmapsthatstateto thecontentthatp.Tokeepthestoryflowinginthemaintext,Iwillconfine discussionofthisbackgroundcontextandmymethodologicalassumptions tothispreface. Interpretationist Ancestry In this section I offer brief sketches of three central precedents for the interpretationist side of my account (the second and third layers of repre- sentation). I review the approaches of Quine, Davidson and Lewis, before comparing and contrasting them to each other and the approach to be developedhere. W.V. Quine didn’t think we should talk about meaning, but he had a theory about what we were up to when we ascribed reference and truth to bits of language.³ His work is one of the sources for interpretationist treatments of content. When dealing with self-ascriptions of reference and truth, his favoured approach appealed to disquotation schemata: ‘Willard’ refers to Willard, ‘is a rabbit’ is true of something iff that thing is a rabbit. Accordingly,‘Willardisarabbit’istrueiffWillardisarabbit.Thekeyhereis simply to say that by adding and removing quotation marks, we can characterizetheextensionofreferenceandtruth. ² SeePautz(2013)foratakeonthis,focusedontheroleforperceptualcontent. ³ ThelocusclassicusforQuineonradicaltranslationishis(1960).MyviewofQuineis heavilyinfluencedbythewaythatHartryFieldexplainsandco-optstheQuineanaccountinthe essayscollectedinField(2001). OUPCORRECTEDAUTOPAGEPROOFS–FINAL,17/1/2020,SPi  vii One can’t in general disquote (in L) expressions taken from a language otherthanL.Theclaim: • ‘estunchien’istrueofsomethingiffthatthingestunchien isneitherasentenceofFrench,norofEnglish.SoQuinefacedachallengeto makesenseofascriptionsofreference andtruthtosentencesbeyondone’s ‘home language’. In order to handle this, he appealed to translation. If we can appeal to the fact that the French phrase ‘est un chien’ translates into Englishas‘isadog’,thenwecouldreasonasfollows: • ForpredicateFandGwhereGtranslatesF,Fistrueofsomethingiff Gistrueofthatthing. • ‘isadog’istrueofsomethingiffthatthingisadog. • ‘isadog’(inEnglish)translates‘estunchien’(inFrench). • Therefore:‘estunchien’istrueofsomethingiffthatthingisadog. SothegeneralQuineanstrategyforhandlingcontent(truthandreferenceas appliedtolinguisticexpressions)istotranslate-and-deflate. But what is this translation relation? You might think: x (in English) translates y (in French) iff x and y are synonymous. But Quine thought synonymy disreputable (remember: he thought we were not to talk about meaning).Sowhatheproposedinsteadisasetofconstraintsonacceptable translation. Now, in everyday translation, we have a lot of data to work from—wecan ask bilinguals, wehave dictionaries to consult,and so forth. ButQuinealsoaskedaboutradicaltranslation,wherewehadnoantecedent knowledgeorresourcesaboutthetargetlanguagetodrawupon,andsothe whole task of constructing theinterpretationhadto proceedon an austere basis.ForQuine,theausterebasiswasjustthepatternsofassentanddissent ofspeakersofthelanguagetosentencesinavarietyofcircumstances.And so the fundamental Quinean challenge was set up: what are the principles constraining translation, that are available even to a radical translator? Quine suggested things like: make sure to make ‘observational sentences’ true,and:attributethesamelogictothetargetthatyouyourselfendorse. Dosuchprinciplesuniquelydeterminethetranslation?Quinesuggested that the answer was no: various deviant translation schemes were in prin- ciple possible, and while they would be less convenient for us to use,there would be nothing in principle wrong with using them. Thus we get the characteristic Quinean principle of inscrutability of reference: there are OUPCORRECTEDAUTOPAGEPROOFS–FINAL,17/1/2020,SPi viii  acceptable translations, from the radical-translation perspective, where ‘Willard’referstoasmallfurrycreatureonAlphaCentauri,nottheeminent HarvardProfessor. DonaldDavidsonworkedwithinterpretations,nottranslations.⁴Andhe wasinterestednotjustinisolatedascriptionsofreferenceandtruthtobitsof language,butwithwhatmakesasystematic,compositionalsemantictheory foratargetlanguage(e.g.English,French)correct.FarmorethanQuine,he alsotookseriouslythetaskofexplainingwhenitwascorrecttosaythatan individualbelievedthisordesiredthat.It’snotsoclearthatQuinethought belief-and-desire talk worth saving, though conditioned behaviours and in particular inclinations of speakers to assent to or dissent from a given sentence are made to stand in for those attitudes on occasion. Just as Quine developed a theory of radical translation, Davidson developed a theoryofradicalinterpretation—asetofconstraintsforfixinganinterpret- ationapplicableevenincaseswherewehavenopriorinformationaboutour interpretee’slanguageorattitudes. Davidson proposed that the radical interpreter start with access to a certain relation between the interpretee and sentences of their language— that S is ‘held true’ by Sally in thus-and-such circumstance, or that Sally ‘prefers-true’SoverT.Inearlyversionsofthetheory,startingfrompatterns in the sentence Sally holds true, he extracts from this some ‘target’ T-sentences like: ‘Grass is green’ is true iff grass is green. One side of a targetT-sentencewillbeasentenceheld-true,theotheradescriptionofthe circumstances under which they are held true. As Davidson presents it, thefundamentaljobisnowtofindalaw-liketheorythatgeneratesallthese T-sentences. He argued this should take the form of an axiomatized ‘T-theory’, with axioms specifying the interpretation of each atomic part ofasentenceinthelanguage,fromwhichthetargetbiconditionalsarewill be derivable. So, our fix on the correctness of a T-theory is just that it generatethetargetT-sentences. Sowhatdoes ittake for ‘Willard’to referto Willard, forDavidson? Itis forthecorrectT-theoryforEnglishtocontainthisasanaxiom.Whatisit forSallytobelievethatWillardisarabbit,orthatgrassisgreen?Itisforher tohold-truesentencesS,S*,sentencesinalanguagethecorrectT-theoryfor ⁴ TheessayscollectedinDavidson(1984)layouthistheoryofradicalinterpretation,though seealsoDavidson(1980),whichsetsupradicalinterpretationinasomewhatdifferentbutvery clear way. My favourite secondary text is the detailed and dense discussions in Lepore and Ludwig(2005),andseeWilliams(2008a,2013)formyowndiscussionsofaspectsofDavidson’s approach. OUPCORRECTEDAUTOPAGEPROOFS–FINAL,17/1/2020,SPi  ix whichcanonicallygeneratestheT-sentences:SistrueiffWillardisarabbit; S*istrueiffgrassisgreen. DavidLewis,likeDavidson,workedwithinterpretations.⁵LikeDavidson, hetookthetasktobetoidentifyacorrectinterpretation,intheabsenceof priorinformationaboutwhatlanguagetheinterpreteesspeakorabouttheir attitudes—sothisis stilltheprojectof radical interpretation.Unlike Quine and Davidson, Lewis proposed an account of the content of psychological attitudes that was independent of and prior to the content of public lan- guage.Inordertogetafixontheattitudes,Lewisappealstotheinterpretee’s behaviour and sensory input, and says that the correct interpretation of Sally is the one that best rationalizes her behaviour and depicts her as responding rationally to her sensory evidence. In order to get a fix on language, Lewis built on this, appealing to shared attitudes in a linguistic community,whichlinksentencestoparticularcontents—thecontentsofthe beliefs conventionally associated with utterances of that sentence. These sentence-proposition pairings played for Lewis much the same role that target-T-sentences did for Davidson, with Lewis’s highly developed theory ofconventionsreplacingtheprimitiveappealsto‘holdingtrueSincontextc’ in Davidson. For Lewis, the correct semantic theory pertaining to a set of utterances is the one that best captures the conventionally established sentence-proposition pairs. There was no need to take the further step of readingoffthesubject’sattitudesfromthesemantictheory,sincethefixon theattitudeswasestablishedpriortotheinterpretationoflanguage. Quine,Davidson,andLewis’streatmentsofrepresentationareancestors ofmyown.Butthedifferencesbetweenthemareasstrikingasthesimilar- ities.Quine’saccountisalongwayfromwhatIproposebelow.Notonlyis Quine’s a ‘wordfirst’ story—going straight in at my third layer, theorizing the representational properties of public language—but it’s a framework withafundamentallydifferentshape.ForQuine,thestartingpointisahome ⁵ KeytextsforLewisare(1969,1974,1975,1983,1984,1992,and1994a).Asourceofmuch confusionhasbeentheway,intheveryaccessible(1984)paper,Lewistakesupsomeassump- tionsofhisdialecticalopponent,Putnam(1980).Theseincludeafocusonlinguisticcontentto theexclusionofmentalcontent,andafocusonassigningsentencestherighttruthvalues,rather thantherighttruthconditions.Theroleformetaphysicallyfundamentalpropertiesinrespond- ingtoPutnamwasclearlylaidoutinthatpaper,butinthecontextofatheorythatisnotLewis’s own.Intheliteraturethatfollows,thePutnam-Lewishybridisoftenappealedtoorevaluated— threeexamplesareWeatherson(2003),Williams(2007),andDunawayandMcPherson(2016). InWilliams(2015),IsurveysomeoftheissuesinunderstandingtheroleofeligibilityinLewis’s theory.

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