As I mentioned below, last week Kit Fine
presented the Blackwell/Brown lectures. These are intended to be an annual
lecture series by leading philosophers, just like the Locke lectures at Oxford
or the James lectures at Harvard. Since Brown isnt Oxford or Harvard we might
have some difficulty competing with the likes of those series, but we will try!
And if all the subsequent lectures are of the quality of Fines, we at least
will match the quality of the Locke or James lectures, even if we cant
match their reputation.
The lectures defended what Fine calls
semantic relationalism. He thinks that as well as having intrinsic semantic
properties, words have irreducibly relational semantic properties. In
particular, some words are co-ordinated, so it is a semantic fact that they
have the same denotation. Other words that are not co-ordinated may, because of
the non-semantic facts, turn out to have the same denotation, but it is not a
semantic fact that they do. So if Jonesy is a nickname for Jones, then it is
a semantic fact that Jonesy and Jones co-refer, but it is not a semantic
fact that, for example, Mark Twain and Samuel Clemens co-refer. So it is a
semantic fact that (1) is true, but it is not a semantic fact that (2) is true.
(1) Jones
is Jonesy
(2) Samuel
Clemens is Mark Twain
This explains why (1) might be a priori,
while (2) is a posteriori. And it does so without directly attributing
something like a sense to any of the names involved. The only intrinsic
semantic property that names have is that they refer to who they refer to. The
difference between (1) and (2) is explained in terms of the fact that the two
names in (1) instantiate a particular semantic relation, being strictly
co-referential, while the names in (2) do not instantiate that relation.
There are a few issues that one might
immediately raise. First, one might worry that it will be possible to reconstruct
senses within this framework. For example, since the only semantic relation is
this relation of strict co-reference, and this is an equivalence relation, we
can find a relation like being in such-and-such an equivalence class with
respect to strict co-reference that might play the role of a sense. Then wed
be back to saying that Jones and Jonesy have the same sense, and Samuel
Clemens and Mark Twain do not. Fine thinks that this wont work because (roughly)
the only plausible way to specify the relevant equivalence class is by
mentioning the names involved, and it is implausible that the meaning of the
names is metalinguistic.
Secondly, one might worry what this does to
compositionality. Fines semantics is not compositional, in a sense. The intrinsic
semantic properties of whole sentences are not functions of the intrinsic semantic
properties of their parts. Fine bites the bullet here (proclaiming, I think
with respect to this point, Its not a bullet, its a donut), but we need a
story to explain the kind of data that compositionality was meant to explain.
One small step towards writing that story: since the only semantic relation is being
strictly co-referential, and since this is symmetric, we wouldnt expect
the failures of compositionality here to lead to violations of systematicity in
linguistic understanding. If, like Fodor, you think its systematicity not
productivity that stands most in need of explanation, Fines semantics might be
compositional enough to explain that.
Unfortunately the lectures are not yet on
Fines website, but hopefully they will be appearing soon. The lectures were
incredibly well received. I dont think Ive heard quite as sustained an
ovation at the end of a philosophy paper as there was at the end of the third
lecture. It was sad that there werent more people from outside Rhode Island
attending. We did a reasonable job, I think, advertising to other Rhode Island
schools, and to other departments in Brown, but no one from Yale or either of
the Cambridge departments attended. The long hard struggle to put Brown on the
New England philosophy map continues