Heidi Erika Brock

RESEARCH STATEMENT

PHILOSOPHICAL METHODOLOGY

While my current research is focused mainly on the semantics of proper names, my research interests vary widely, ranging from the topic of personal identity to the nature of free will, from issues in moral psychology to related issues in feminist scholarship. Amidst this diversity, however, runs a common philosophical approach. My varied interests are one and all informed by my standards for good philosophical theorizing set mainly by Kripke's work in Naming and Necessity in which he says:

Of course, some philosophers think that something's having intuitive content is very inconclusive evidence in favor of it. I think it is very heavy evidence in favor of anything, myself. I really don't know, in a way, what more conclusive evidence one can have about anything, ultimately speaking.

Based on Kripke's meta-philosophical scruples, most of my own philosophical work subscribes to a certain position on an underlying controversy concerning the relationship between intuitions and philosophical theories; I privilege taking certain intuitions as basic over values such as theoretical simplicity, something to strive for only once one has a certain amount of explanatory power. Because of Kripke's work in Naming and Necessity, one of the few pieces of philosophical work that I believe contains nuggets of basic uncontroversial data, I spend a good deal of time in my own philosophical work developing and explaining these bits of data, as well as attempting to discover some new nuggets myself. Yet another influence on my general philosophical outlook is due to Lewis. Specifically, I aim in my work to respect Lewis's claim in On the Plurality of Worlds that the way we judge a philosophical theory should be the same as the way we judge the value of any scientific theory. That is, how does it look in relation to other theories with respect to its theoretical virtues? For this reason, I invest much of my time in developing new theories that are at once intuitive and yet instantiate more theoretical virtues than other theories, rather than attempting to refute any particular theory. Even so, however, my conviction that Goodman's Fact, Fiction and Forecast, is a tour de force, largely a refutation of a collection of philosophical theories, does leads me, on occasion, to write some purely critical work.

PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE WORK

PAST WORK IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE

I've often wondered how I ended up working on the topic of the meaning of something as seemingly simple as a proper name for almost 20 years. Even more specifically, I worry about the fact that speakers assign the value true to sentences containing names from fiction, like this one: (1) 'Sherlock Holmes smokes'.

Why worry about this sentence? Well, this is how I came to worry about it, for what it's worth.

First, note that any philosopher who spends a lot of time on worrying about whether a sentence like (1) is true, you can by and large, safely bet are working within some kind of truth-conditional semantic framework -- that language is fundamentally for expressing what speakers believe or understand about the world, otherwise why bother even worrying about the truth value assignments to sentences at all?

Second, a warning: I talk about sentences as the bearers of truth — in the old-fashioned Fregean way — as if serious context-sensitivity, and the ubiquitous use of non-declaratives just never happened, which may frustrate those of you who have fully absorbed these “contemporary” lessons, assigning only utterances truth values, as well as relying heavily on the vocabulary of speech act theory. However, since I thought mostly about sentences containing just two or three words, these issues were not terribly important. For this reason, I simply find the old-fashioned vocabulary more efficient. Actually, this is somewhat ironic given that my view of names is a context-sensitive account, doubly so, in fact. Still, I will stick to that way of speaking, unless it makes a serious theoretical difference.

Now I certainly never intended be working in a literature in which Meinongianism -- the idea that there are objects that do not exist -- is still considered a live option, but I ended up taking an interest in fictional names -- a species of empty names -- because of the threat that their existence posed to what I saw as obvious truths about names contained in Kripke’s (1980) work Naming and Necessity.

One obvious way in which fictional names as empty names pose a threat to Kripkean theories is this: if we take his theory of names as equivalent to the idea that they are simply about individual referents AKA Millianism, then empty names should be equally meaningless to the expression 'sojifhdiuhgruh'. But the latter is gibberish, the former is not. This would suggest that Millianism is perhaps not the proper way to interpret Kripkean theories of names. This is not, then, what concerns me about fictional names, since I simply reject the Millian interpretation of Kripke’s theory. As Kripke himself even states: his theory is consistent with names having a “sense,” and I agree, although I take their senses to be akin to Kaplanian characters. For this reason, I accept that empty names could have senses in addition to having referents, and therefore could be meaningful in virtue of having a sense.

What does bother me is this: some discourse containing empty names is not merely meaningful, it also seems to be truth-evaluable, and sometimes even…true. And this fact is not at all consistent with Kripke’s ideas or so it seems. Whether you accept Millianism about names, or something a bit softer, as I do, on any standard interpretation of a Kripkean theory of names, their contribution to the truth condition of the sentences that contain them must be their referents, and by definition, empty names lack these. Truth-evaluable discourse containing empty names, then, should be impossible, if Kripke is right. But it does appear to be possible. This is the puzzle I find fascinating, which I resolve by giving an alternative account of a name's semantic content that I take to be a generalization of Kripke's 2 claims about names -- that their semantic content is had rigidly, and that they are meaningful de jure, not de facto.

This particular worry is not new, however. The problem of negative existentials illustrates this fact, which has been thought about for quite some time. But, I am of the opinion that the predicate ‘exists’ is suspect enough to table this worry. Sentences like this one, then, are not the particular focus of my work either: (2) Pegasus does not exist. In fact, note that any true negative existential is paradoxical: Vulcan does not exist, Hesperus does not exist, Ether does not exist, God does not exist. And these are not a priori paradoxical as sentence (2) is. Knowing that they are paradoxical depends on a posteriori knowledge. This fact leads me to believe that negative existentials raise only metaphysical issues, not necessarily issues concerning meaning, indicating that the issue is about existence claims and their truth. In contrast with sentence (2), the problem that sentence (1) poses cannot be dismissed on the above grounds, and therefore I believe that sentence (1) poses a quite different, and much stronger challenge to Kripkean theories of proper names than sentences like (2).

It seems to me, for instance, that I can rationally know that I am reading a work of fiction, finish reading it, and go on and truthfully assert that Sherlock Holmes smokes, and suffer no guilt, or cognitive dissonance of any kind. And then my students too, in class after class, seem to agree. If I write sentence (1) on the board and then ask if it is true or false, none of them struggle to answer. The answer is always, and almost instantly: yes. Although, I admit that putting it this way may be accused of presenting a false dilemma, but I do believe that there is a response. Simply present several contrasting options that settle and explain the previous answer that does not, sooner or later, bottom out on the truth value of sentences like (1). Furthermore, it is only philosophers that I have ever heard say that sentence (1) is false. And, for that reason, the idea strikes me as an coming from individuals gripped by previous theoretical commitments, which I take do not necessarily track the intuitions of speakers of natural language. And this is what motivates my concern. In contrast, Kripke somehow seemed to “see” what was intuitively true from a natural language user’s pre-theoretical perspective, at least as I read his work.

For the previous reasons, I am convinced that some kind of Kripkean theory of names must be correct, and yet I am also equally convinced that sentence (1) is literally true. Obviously, this is not because I believe there was some really smart detective Sherlock Holmes running around in the world that smoked, just as my students do not believe it on those grounds either. There is no Sherlock Holmes. He is a mere fictional character.

Worse still, other sentences like (3) 'Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character' seem like they too might be true, which many Kripkeans solve by claiming that the name 'Sherlock Holmes' really does refer. It refers to an abstract entity known as a fictional character. But, I rejected this idea when I asked my mother, who had attended school up until the eighth grade, why she believed that sentence, and she said it was because, well, Sherlock Holmes "just isn’t."

I finally came to the conclusion, then, that what was needed was an analysis of the truth of a sentence like (1) that is anti-realist, and yet supports a Kripkean theory of proper names — a seemingly impossible task — but one I hope I have at least made some progress on in my article “Proper Names and Their Fictional Uses” published in 2011. Somewhat unbelievably, I am still working on the assumptions and fall out of the ideas presented there currently to be, hopefully, published in a book at some point in the near future.

PRESENT WORK IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE

One of the assumptions I made previously, but could not offer a proper defense of, was the idea that a sentence like (1) is literally true. However, I now have an article in which I offer a detailed defense of this claim in “The Truth and Nothing but the Truth: Non-literalism and The Habits of Sherlock Holmes” (2020). In that work, I adopt a well-motivated methodological constraint that theories of natural language should stick as close as possible to its actual use by speakers. Considering this, my defense of the claim that a sentence like (1) is literally true, involves first pointing out that natural language speakers do, and without much thought, assign the value true to sentences like (1). Second, the standard explanation of this fact fails in a multitude of ways. Third, truth conditionalism itself, to remain scientific respectability, must modify the traditional rule for evaluating the truth of predicative sentences containing proper names -- that they are true just in case the referent of the name has the property delineated by the predicate. Fourth, and finally, scenarios that test for literal truth indicate that sentence (1) is in fact literally true.

A second issue concerning my view of names was why it should count as an anti-realist view about fictional entities, since my view is that the meaning of a fictional name is a set of properties, and a set is an object. Therefore, why does this fail to assign a referent to the name ‘Sherlock Holmes’. In fact, Garcia-Carpintero raises this issue in his “Semantics of Fictional Terms” (2019). My response is that because on my account of the meaning of fictional names, and the rule used for evaluating sentences containing such names, fictional names play the role of a function, in determining the truth of sentences containing them. They do not provide an argument, and therefore, there are no realist implications that follow from the view.

FUTURE PLANS IN PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE

In a book called Naming and Referring, I explain how the approach I take to proper names, while jettisoning reference as essential for being a name, is still Kripkean in nature. In fact, I take it simply as a generalization of Kripke’s view that fully exploits its advantages more so than its more Millian counterparts.

This generalization of Kripke’s view, solves the problem of fictional names without the ontological mess that pure referentialist views, like Millianism, seem to generate (2011). In fact, in “Kypris, Venus, And Aphrodite: More Puzzles About Belief” I argue that realism about fictional entities is entailed by Millianism, assuming they wish to solve puzzles about belief that involve synonymous fictional names.

In addition to solving the problem of fictional names, the generalized Kripkean approach also solves problems posed by other types of names. For instance, Kripke argues that all empty names are necessarily empty. Our intuitions, however, do not always comport with this claim. Some names we might think are merely contingently empty. In “Four Problems for Empty Names,” I show how generalizing Kripke’s view can accommodate these intuitions. In addition, it can also be used to explain the apparently mixed nature of descriptive names as I do in “Descriptive Names and Shifty Characters: A Case for Tensed Rigidity.”

In the book, I will also pay special attention to the fact that not only does Kripke say that names are rigid, but that he also says that they are de jure expressions. In fact, I claim that it is this feature of proper names as de jure expressions that makes them their own unique kind of expression.

For the previous reason, I also argue against views that attempt to assimilate or reduce names to another expression kind. For instance, I argue against predicative views of names (at least those that make them first-order predicates), the most plausible of which, as I explain in “Being Called Names: The Predicative Attributive Account,” simply fails. In fact, in “Names Are Not Predicates,” I show that no predicative views are justified since all predicative constructions containing names have plausible non-predicative analyses.

Furthermore, attending to the de jure nature of proper names also allows for an understanding of the relation between name types and name tokens, which I claim, once properly understood, does not generate dichotomous views of the identity conditions on proper names. Another consequence of attending to the de jure nature of fictional names is that there must be a significant role for mentioning names as well as using them in a full account of the role of names in the language. This calls for revisiting Kripke’s dismissal of the role of meta-linguistic theories in accounts of proper names. I argue that meta-linguistic actions and analyses have two fundamental roles in a complete theory of names. Certain kinds of meta-linguistic actions have the status of being performative, and this explains how acts of naming work. The second role that mentioning a name plays is in explaining how speaker’s can be competent with a proper name. These issues I explore in “You Never Even Called Me by my Name: A Meta-linguistic Analysis of Competence with Proper Names.”

Lastly, while the progress, and simplification of semantic analysis that Frege’s notion of composition as function application cannot be underestimated, it has been applied in ways that erase the nuance of the notion of predication. Once reference is de-emphasized, new possibilities for compositional rules for evaluating predications arise that allow it to involve more than property exemplification, a traditional issue of concern for many philosophers. Furthermore, if predication does not simply involve property exemplification, the issue of ontological commitment re-arises, as it may no longer be possible to capture our ontological commitments simply with first-order existential generalization. I offer an alternative analysis in “The Contingencies of Ontological Commitment.” All of the mentioned papers in draft form are summarized below, along with others.

PRESENT WORK IN THE METAPHYSICS OF PERSONAL IDENTITY

As a graduate student, I took a course on the topic of personal identity. I was skeptical of the very idea of giving a theory of the necessary and sufficient conditions on a person's persistence due to skepticism about the kind person in general. This made me sympathetic to Parfitian non-identity theories almost immediately, and yet my reaction to fission as a form of survival was to reject it. I spent years attempting to reconcile these intuitions, which finally led me to develop an externalist theory of what matters in survival, and to adopt a corresponding externalist theory of the kind persons. These ideas are elucidated in their final form, I hope, in a paper currently under review now titled "What Matters in Survival: Self-determination and The Continuity of Life Trajectories," which you can find posted below.

FUTURE PLANS IN THE METAPHYSICS OF PERSONAL IDENTITY

Recently, I finally came to understand my skepticism about the kind persons -- that it was based in skepticism about persons as the kinds of things that one could give a metaphysical theory of without considering its normative consequences. This led to examining some of the underlying assumptions about the metaphysics of the kind persons in the literature on personal identity. I came to focus on the fact that our concept of the kind person at least has serious normative consequences, and might even be constitutively normative. I therefore adopted a the methodological principle that in giving metaphysical theories of personal identity, our background assumptions about the kind persons and its normative consequences must be considered, and if found to have serious negative normative consequences, the metaphysical theory itself should be doubted, if not outright rejected. My future aim is to write a book defending this principle, and then arguing against certain theories of personal identity due to relying on normatively loaded assumptions that are politically biased, defending the idea that they are, and then arguing that my own metaphysical theory does not harbor such assumptions. A description appears below in the Book Projects section.