I've been meaning to address a post Chris Ragg did on the problem of A/B theories of time and sentences a while ago. (Well, June actually) I just kept putting it off. He'd had a series that made some excellent points, only to post a concluding one saying he changed his mind. I was curious about it because, to me, the problem got to the heart of the sentence/proposition distinction that I've long considered problematic. The basic issue is the issue of translating sentences from A-time sentences to B-time sentences. That is, from a four-dimensional perspective and a view with the notion of a presence. Now there were lots of discussions on this. Chris listed most of them in that post, although he had a followup that ought be read. A few other blogs discussed it as well.
My big concern is that it seems to me that people focus on the problem of time-indexicals but neglect the problem of space-indexicals. That is, why is the sentence, "I am at the store now," fundamentally different from "A dog is in front of you." Both have indexicals. But the former are considered more problematic than the latter. If we can deal with spatial indexicals though, I don't see why we can't apply the same reasoning to space. (Perhaps there is a reason. But I don't see it)
The other concern is that I think sentences, as opposed to their particular utterance, are simply vaguer and not fundamentally different. Once again I may be mistaken. But I think the focus on sentences versus pragmatic use of them is a bit of a red herring. When I utter a sentence in a particular setting, I don't believe I change the sentence. Rather the context or horizon merely limits how one can interpret the sentence. And both the speaker and the hearer are doing that, hoping for communication.
Now there is some very good reasons to doubt that one can truly speak of sentences as having meaning independent of any context. But clearly language to work, we assume that they can survive a radical translation of context. However one answer to the problem Chris brings up is simply to suggest that sentences are, contrary to some philosophers, meaningless independent of a given context. They seem otherwise simply because we implicitly supply either a vague context or an assumed set of contexts. Further (and this is something many philosophers are guilty of) we assume a certain narrow meaning to the sentences upon which all other meanings are parasitic. Typically this is called a "serious" or non-metaphoric meaning. Thus the sentence, "I am blue," which seems tremendously ambiguous and inherently metaphoric to me, is given some fixed foundational meaning.
Let's not deal with that whole train of reasoning, even though I'm largely in agreement with it. (Indeed one can quickly see that this is the heart of the criticism by Derrida of Speech Act Theory)
Instead, let's stick to vagueness. Given any setence, S, that includes an indexical term, one need only say that the meaning crosses all possible applications of that indexical. Clearly some of those will be true while others will be false. But this merely highlights the problem of trying to treat sentences as propositions. I follow Peirce in seeing propositions as possible assertions - but falsehood in that context merely means that some sentences can't be asserted truthfully in all contexts. But is that a bad thing?
Let's consider Quenton Smith's argument, which Chris largely follows. (I'll not reproduce it here — read the link) If A-sentences can't be translated into B-sentences, it's simply because we don't understand the nature of vagueness. The underlying issue is that B-sentences appear to treat time as place and require it filled in. The assumption Smith makes is that we can't be vague (that is have undetermined terms) in our B-sentences. (At least it appears that way to me) But we clearly do allow vague sentences. "I am thinking of some man."
So consider the sentence, "It is now raining." As I said, we don't have problem with "It is raining here." We recognize that this meaning only has a meaning when here is defined. If we follow Peirce and consider propositions as potential assertions, then it means at time t, and location x, it is raining, where t and x are vague. That is undefined. Now note that for Peirce, vagueness means we don't get to pick how they are determined. Thus x and t are only determinate at the time of the assertion. Now Chris mentions this in his followup post. However he thinks it is odd and presumably counter-intuitive.
However if we think of the problem as less indexicals and instead vagueness, then it makes more sense. In other words, indexicals are but one small example of an overall phenomena of vagueness. Further many features of indexicals, that they are only true or false at the time of utterance, is indeed a factor of vagueness in general.
Further this connection to time/place of utterance is simply a fact that sentences don't have a fixed meaning except in a potential sense. So if we want to speak of a "Corporate Meaning" to sentences, at best we narrow the context to one culture and iterate over all possible assertions. That might be uncomfortable to some, as it makes sentences mean more than I think many wish. But it certainly explains why vagueness is important. Further we'd have to distinguish between vagueness and generality. "Any man was a boy" is genera, since it iterates over all men. "Some man I'm thinking of" is vague, in that it picks out one man, but we don't decide which man.
I've closed comments in order to avoid spam since I don't check this older blog as much anymore.
and Theology
Number of unique visitors:
Blogged by Clark Goble