It might be easier if we imagine that Caesar was stabbed on a Monday and died on the Tuesday. "the death of Caesar" refers to what happened on Tuesday, whereas "the murder of Caesar" refers to what happened on Monday as well. — Michael

Ok, I agree that you can make this distinction in some cases. But if someone is stabbed and dies immediately on the spot, then I think it is plausible to say that his murder and death denote the same event.

And by the way, it also makes sense to talk about death as a process that can begin some time before the body actually shuts down (thus involving causes): take the expression "slow death".

You should change the descriptions to "the death of Caesar" and "the murder of Caesar", and then I think it will make more sense to think that they denote the same event (and you cannot really decide this just by analyzing the descriptions themselves, since it is after all possible for two different descriptions to denote the same event; e.g. "the death of Caesar" and "the death of the conqueror of Gaul"). — Fafner

That would be a valid objection if my criterion for saying that 'x' and 'y' refer to two distinct events is for them to have different Fregean senses. But that's not what my criterion of non-identity is. I'm rather saying that 'x' and 'y' refer to distinct events if (among other possible differentia of events) the predicates used to characterize the actions (or processes, etc.) that are predicated of some entities, in order to individuate those events, have different Fregean references. (Predicates, and not only singular terms, do have references as well as senses. They typically refer to properties, action forms, activities, etc.) In your example above, the same event is being referred to twice since the two singular terms "Caesar" and "the conqueror of Gaul" have the same reference. If they had had different references, then the events would have been numerically distinct, obviously. And so is it, on my view, if the references of the predicates has been different (as I'll argue some more below).

Since "murder" just means something like "violent death", then on your view it would follow that a person can die twice (if "murder" and "death" are two distinct things that happen to everyone who's murdered), which is be a pretty bizarre thing to say in my opinion.

I wouldn't say that Caesar died twice. I would say that he died because he was murdered. The 'violence' that is constitutive of the event's being a case of murder is the mens rea of the murderer(s). This mens rea isn't a constitutive part of Ceasar's dying. Hence, since the two events don't have the same constitutive parts, they are not the same. That is true (in this case, anyway) even when we restrict attention to what occurred in the actual world (and a fortiori if we consider the modal properties of those events).

I'm not claiming that dying and being murdered are always the same thing. I'm only claiming that in the particular case of Caesar the two descriptions happen to denote the same event (since they are non-rigid designators etc.). And there's nothing problematic in saying this. I'll try to illustrate this through your example. Crimson is a type of red, but it doesn't follow that a crimson apple has two distinct colors: crimson and red, but it has only one color that falls under two different descriptions (and this is consistent with the fact that being crimson and being red sometimes do refer to distinct colors).

I would not say that the apple has two different colors either, because counting as two colors a determinate quality and the determinable quality that it is a determination of would be misleading. That would be like saying that I have two pets: a cat and a mammal. But the fact that the apple is red isn't the same as the fact that the apple is crimson, is it? Likewise, (1) the fact that Pat is shorter than Chris isn't the same as (2) the fact that Pat is shorter than the Eiffel Tower. And neither of those facts are the same as (3) the fact that Pat is 5 feet tall. For all that, the properties ascribed to Pat in (1), (2) and (3) stand pairwise as determinable to determinate.

Let me just make a mention of the elephant in the room. Caesar's murder was an action whereas his death wasn't. Intentional actions have a principle of unity quite unlike the principles of unity of natural events and processes. This has been stressed quite a bit in the philosophy of action since the publication of Anscombe's Intention. Here is another relevant paper that I haven't read yet but that is on my very short list: Wittgenstein on Actions, Reasons and Causes

But what if somebody meant his murder by "his death?" Wouldn't the reference be the same in that case?

But what if somebody meant his murder by "his death?" Wouldn't the reference be the same in that case? — Mongrel

You mean the event she is thinking about and the reference of her utterance?

On edit: I think it's entirely possible that she means to be referring to Caesar's murder when she uses "his death" and be correctly understood thanks to the surrounding conversational context. For all that, someone else could refer to Caesar's death as such, and be referring to a distinct event. One might inquire, for instance: "I heard Caesar bled and suffered for many hours after he had been stabbed. Might not his dying have been abbreviated by his friends?" And this would surely not meant the same as: "Might not his being murdered have been abbreviated by his friends?" And the reason for this, I surmise, is because the murder and the death aren't identical events. (As well, we might say, of the murdering and the dying, which are the same two distinct events, correspondingly, being described from the progressive rather than the perfective grammatical aspects.)

Likewise, (1) the fact that Pat is shorter than Chris isn't the same as (2) the fact that Pat is shorter than the Eiffel Tower. And neither of those facts are the same as (3) the fact that Pat is 5 feet tall. For all that, the properties ascribed to Pat in (1), (2) and (3) stand pairwise as determinable to determinate. — Pierre-Normand

I keep thinking, as I suggested in the other thread, that what we want here is sets of propositions ordered by entailment, but it looks like that would have to be relative to a set of assumptions or background knowledge or something. I want Pat's being 5 feet tall to buy you, as a single fact, everything it entails. A separate fact for everything Pat is taller or shorter than seems less than optimal.

It's also beginning to seem to me that what's going on in these threads is paradigmatic: that insofar as there is a problem to be solved, it's not exactly the problem of uniquely picking out an entity or meaning or event, but deciding whether two (or more) propositions or descriptions pick out the same one. And it seems to me you could do that by looking at what they entail.

I'm rather saying that 'x' and 'y' refer to distinct events if [their predicates] have different Fregean references. — Pierre-Normand

I'm not necessarily disagreeing, but I have two questions (which are related): a) are you claiming that one can know the Fregean reference solely by virtue of knowing the meaning of the relevant predicates? (which clearly you can't since you cannot know apriori whether "Caesar" and "the conqueror of Gaul" denote the same person) and b) Is "the conqueror of Gaul" a rigid designator on your account? Because if it is not (and it is plain that it isn't) then I think your criteria for the non-identity of 'x' and 'y' (in the quote) becomes vacuous. Because consider that it is a contingent fact that "Caesar" and "the conqueror of Gaul" denote the same person (and you can further substitute 'Caesar' with another description to eliminate all names); but this you can know only aposteriori, so it means that on your criteria 'x' and 'y' (if 'x' and 'y' are definite descriptions) denote the same entity if their terms happen to denote the same entity, and of course everyone will agree with that...

And this is directly connected to our original example: since "Caesar's murder" and "Caesar's death" are non-rigid designators (because in some possible worlds they denote discrete events even on my view), then you cannot know apriori just from knowing the meaning of the predicates "__ died" and "__ was murdered" whether they happen to denote the same event or not, so I don't think these Fregean consideration can really help your case.

I wouldn't say that Caesar died twice. I would say that he died because he was murdered. The 'violence' that is constitutive of the event's being a case of murder is the mens rea of the murderer(s). This mens rea isn't a constitutive part of Ceasar's dying. Hence, since the two events don't have the same constitutive parts, they are not the same. That is true (in this case, anyway) even when we restrict attention to what occurred in the actual world (and a fortiori if we consider the modal properties of those events). — Pierre-Normand

I think that in the end it is an arbitrary matter whether we call it the same event or two different events, since we sometimes talk about the two interchangeably and sometimes not, so I don't think you can really prove that it must be the one way and not the other (and I took this example from Ramsey's paper, who might've chose a different less controversial example (and you can easily think of some like "the death of the conqueror of Gaul") - but the point remains that there's not principled apriori criterion to distinguish between co-refrential and non-coreferential descriptions).

But the fact that the apple is red isn't the same as the fact that the apple is crimson, is it? — Pierre-Normand

No, they are not the same facts, but the two descriptions (containing 'crimson' and 'red') do denote the same thing or entity in your example (an apple with a single color) :)

You mean the reference of the event she is thinking about and the reference of her utterance? — Pierre-Normand

Say she was talking about his murder and subsequently said "his death" in a way that it was clear to her listeners that she meant his murder. I'm suggesting that the words themselves only have meaning in use, so the case could only be settled by looking to use.

Maybe you could answer this. Did Wittgenstein accept that reference can be determined? Was the point of meaning is use to show that in many cases there is no reference?

There is the capacity to inaugurate new uses, new meanings that may very well break with 'convention' - all the while being amenable - in principle - to becoming conventional. — StreetlightX

This is true, but new usages cannot "break" entirely, they must retain some link, some connection or association, however tenuous, with "convention"; I would say that link would be precisely what enables new usages to become "conventional".

(Y)

Really? Surely there is at least one interpretation of Wittgenstein that allows first person data about the experience of speaking. — Mongrel

Oh yeah, there are many different interpretations of Wittgenstein, that's the issue which got me into this thread.

But don't you agree that sometimes there's value in asking if a statement is informative? To me that's a marker for ordinary language use vs unnecessary philosophical shenanigans (and sometimes other forms of bullshit.) — Mongrel

I can't see the point you're making here. If a statement is meaningful, it is informative. If it were completely void of meaning it would be nonsense, gibberish, so it wouldn't even qualify as a "statement". Are you saying that there are some philosophical statements, and forms of bullshit, which are not informative, yet they are still meaningful statements? Wouldn't these meaningful statements provide some form of information, say something about the author for example, and so they'd still be informative?

So what would be the point in asking whether a statement is informative. By calling it a "statement", it is already assumed that it is in some way informative. Perhaps what you are asking is whether or not the statement is of interest to yourself. The problem with this is that what is not of interest to yourself, such that you might designate it uninformative, might be of interest to another, and be designated informative.

Right and wrong is just settled via success in communication, right? — Mongrel

Yes, but this is not real right and wrong, is it? Real right and wrong is determined by moral principles, not by success in one's activities. Having success in doing what is wrong, doesn't make that wrongful activity right. So success cannot be used distinguish right from wrong.

One can accept that (although in truth I see no reason to), without being commited to accepting that meaning is 'conventional' use.

Having dragged in convention, I'll do another: I think it's worth noting that the word "representation" has barely appeared in this thread at all. We talk about beliefs, about utterances and propositions, about truth, but representation is nowhere to be seen. I suppose Harry has sometimes been arguing for language as representational, but for the most part it seems to be the farthest thing from everyone's minds.

Is that down to philosophical fashion? Or is there something we know that most of cognitive science doesn't?

As Saussure well-pointed out, language is representational to other parts of itself. It's why a tree refers to the words "a big brown plant with leaves" or other acceptable words structurally associated to the word tree. There is no metaphysical concept or even necessarily a physical object needed for representation. Only the language itself.

OK, I'm interested to hear why you think we should not accept it. Also, I don't want, and have not wanted, to say that meaning is use, whether conventional or otherwise.

Of course language is representational, and truth is (in a certain sense) dependent on representation. This goes without saying :)

But it isn't just representational. It's also, if not primarily, generative, as it continually refers back to itself and its components

Is that down to philosophical fashion? Or is there something we know that most of cognitive science doesn't? — Srap Tasmaner

Quite possibly. I think cognitive science, by an large, has not kept up with J. J. Gibson, among other anti anti-representationalist pioneers; although there had been a salutatory revival of a variety of embodied/embedded/situated/scaffolded paradigms recently (See Robert A. Wilson, Boundaries of the Mind: The Individual in the Fragile Sciences - Cognition, Cambridge University Press, 2004). Cognitive scientists still tend to be mired in psychologism and representationalism when they theorizes about mental abilities and mental states in a way that construe the mind and its operations as being sandwiched in between the "inputs" from the senses and the "outputs" of motor action. (Susan Hurley characterized this as "the classical sandwich model of the mind", which goes hand in hand with representationalism). This is not necessarily damaging when they seek to understand how specific cognitive abilities are being enabled by physiology, for instance, or what are favorable or unfavorable learning conditions for this or that skill being efficiently acquired, etc. But when they theorize about the very 'person-level' skills and phenomena (e.g. the ability to remember or what it is to believe this or that) that they seek to understand, then they are being biased in their theoretical undertakings by inchoate Cartesian-empiricist presuppositions. This is being argued forcefully in Max Bennett and Peter Hacker, The Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, Wiley-Blackwell, 2003.

Just to be clear, what anti-representationaists such as the authors mentioned above object to isn't the quite reasonable idea that brains and internal cognitive processes enable people to use language, represent the world to be thus and so, and act skilfully in the world. Neither are they denying that we are indeed representing to ourselves the world to be thus and so. Rather, they object to the construal of our abilities to represent the world (and act in it) as a matter of our (or our brains') constructing internal representations that have their contents independently of the form of our engagements in the social/material world (such as our playing language games, or our skilfully exploiting behavioral affordances).

Another paper that is quite relevant to anti-representationalism is Jennifer Hornsby's Personal and sub‐personal; A defence of Dennett's early distinction, Philosophical Exploratons, 3, 1, 2000

Another paper that is quite relevant to anti-representationalism is: Jennifer Hornsby, Personal and sub‐personal; A defence of Dennett's early distinction, Philosophical Exploratons, 3, 1, 2000 — Pierre-Normand

There's also a very good paper by john McDowell "The Content of Perceptual Experience" (appears in "Mind, Value and Reality"), that argues for a very similar idea to Hornsby.

There's also a very good paper by john McDowell "The Content of Perceptual Experience" (appears in "Mind, Value and Reality"), that argues for a very similar idea to Hornsby. — Fafner

Seconded. This is a paper that ought to figure in any anthology on the philosophy of mind.

What is especially noteworthy about that McDowell paper is his argument about frogs. He uses a Davidsonian argument to argue that even if you take such a simple organism as a frog, you are not going to make much sense of the idea of the frog as 'internally' representing his environment, if you only consider his internal parts in isolation from his 'froggy way of life' (that is, as a living organism inhabiting a particular sort of environment). So the idea of 'mental representetions' as some sort of theoretical psychological entities discoverable inside organisms (that prevails in contemporary cognitive science) doesn't even make sense when applied to frogs, let alone humans.

To be lazy, I meant it quite literally - you didn't, in affirming that new usages must maintain a 'link' to convention, actually provide a reason to believe that. In this thread at least, it remains an assertion. Perhaps you might elaborate on the initial claim?

To be lazy, Chomsky.

I think this is a useful example of how meaning is different to reference. Both "it is raining" and "the weather outside" can refer to the same thing (if it's raining), but don't mean the same thing. So it is wrong to say that the meaning of a word (or a phrase) is the thing it refers to.

The same with my earlier example of "the son of of Edward VIII" and "the father of Elizabeth II".

So neither of Harry's proposed accounts of meaning (the other being concerned with intention) works at all. — Michael

Wrong. "It is raining" is more specific (provides more information) than "the weather outside". Would you answer the question, "What is the weather outside?", with the "the weather outside"? You would use the string of scribbles, "the weather outside" when you know that the reader knows what the weather outside is, or you would use it as part of the sentence, "the weather outside is rainy." It all comes down to understanding what is it the listener already knows in order to speak efficiently (by not wasting energy speaking or writing to inform someone what they already know). If "the weather outside" and "it is raining" means the same thing, the saying, "the weather outside is rainy" would be a redundant sentence, but it isn't in the mind of the listener that doesn't know the weather outside.

"Caesar's dying" doesn't provide any information about the cause of his dying. If you were teaching someone who doesn't know anything about Caesar, about Caesar, is "Caesar dying" enough to inform them all about what happened? It seems that "Caesar's murder" is more informative, because it implies that Caesar's dying as well as informs how and why he is dying. Again, we are talking about what the listener already knows, and what it is that you intend to inform them about.

Both examples only refer to the same thing for those that know what it is that it is referring to. For those that don't know, one is more informative (means more) than the other.

Both examples only refer to the same thing for those that know what it is that it is referring to. For those that don't know, one is more informative than the other. — Harry Hindu

I don't see how this follows. If one sentence is more informative than another then they don't refer to the same thing?

I would say that "Andrew" and "my brother" both refer to the same person, even if you don't know who the name "Andrew" refers to, or that he's my brother.

And, to repeat my previous example, "the son of Edward VIII" and "George VI" refer to the same person, even if you didn't know that George VI is the son of Edward VIII.

They don't refer to the same thing for the listener, but they do for the speaker who already knows what it is that he is talking about.

If "the weather outside" and "it is raining" means/refers to the same thing, then saying, "the weather outside is rainy" would be a redundant sentence, but it isn't in the mind of the listener that doesn't know the weather outside.

If "the weather outside" and "it is raining" means/refers to the same thing, then saying, "the weather outside is rainy" would be a redundant sentence, but it isn't in the mind of the listener that doesn't know the weather outside. — Harry Hindu

Even if I know that Donald Trump is the President of the United States, it doesn't follow that "Donald Trump is the President of the United States" is redundant.

"Donald Trump" and "the President of the United States" refer to the same person, but they don't mean the same thing. The meaning of a word/phrase is not the same thing as its referent.

What a word refers to is one thing. What a word means is something else.

Straw-man. Stop changing the example. Please stay with the example we both were using.

I keep thinking, as I suggested in the other thread, that what we want here is sets of propositions ordered by entailment, but it looks like that would have to be relative to a set of assumptions or background knowledge or something. I want Pat's being 5 feet tall to buy you, as a single fact, everything it entails. A separate fact for everything Pat is taller or shorter than seems less than optimal. — Srap Tasmaner

I think this proposal raises a few problematic issues. First, through attempting to do away with the multiple realizability of coarse-grainedly specified facts, it tends to restrict our fundamental ontology to something akin to a 'fundamental' supervenience base like the set of microphysical facts, and that seems to me to be a profound error. Secondly, there is an issue regarding the nature of the entailment relations that are allowed for eliminating entailed 'facts' in favor of the 'real' or 'fully determinate' facts that entail them all. Is it only logical entailments from (ultimately) 'raw' empirical facts that are being allowed or are entailments that make use of premises expressing conceptual truths also allowed? The latter would seem to be the case if the fact that an apple is red is to be derived from the fact that it is crimson. One also needs the conceptual truth (if it is one) that all crimson things are red. (Or, at least, that crimson apples are red). Augmenting our special ontologies with a priori conceptual truths seems problematic to me since conceptual truths rather seem to belong to the transcendental background of those ontologies: the a priori conceptual truths in virtue of which empirical facts can be disclosed to us at all.

(In this post and the following one I had sketched a defence, following Haugeland, of a pragmatized Sellarsian/neo-Kantian conception of 'impure' synthetic a priori statements that are dependent on experience without them being objects of experience -- or without then 'arising from' experience, as Kant would say)

Consider the following case that has been discussed to illustrate 'contrastive' causal explanations: A pigeon has been trained to peck at red objects. A red apple that happens to be crimson is presented to the pigeon and the pigeon pecks at it. The fact that the apple is red, in conjonction with the fact that the pigeon has acquired a disposition to peck at red objects, causally explains why the pigeon pecked at the apple. The fact that the apple is crimson may also explain why the pecking occurred provided we are reminded that crimson is a shade of red. However, causal explanations of events seek not only to determine, on each occasion, why some specific effect followed some specific cause. It is no real explanation that 'explains' only one single occurrence. The real explanation of the fact that the apple was pecked at is that it was red, and this explanation unifies a whole range of similar phenomena (i.e. other instances of the same pigeon pecking at, or failing to pick at, various objects). Hence, the fact the the apple is crimson, unlike the fact that it is red, may fails to provide the real causal ground of its nomological relation with definite ranges of effects. (I may try to come up with a somewhat less contrived example. However, you can refer to the two posts liked above where I discussed an example from Newtonian mechanics and another one from the game of chess.)