Marco Santambrogio

Kevin Mulligan has defended the view that perception is necessary for proper names to refer to spatiotemporal objects and, if the disjunctivist account of perceptual content is accepted, then the category of object-dependent singular terms must also be accepted, and proper names belong to it. I intend to take a different, more direct, route to reach the conclusion that proper names are object dependent. To ask whether, e.g., if Nixon had not existed, the name Nixon would have existed or whether the same name could have undergone a change in referent, is to ask whether it is a mere accident that the name Nixon as we have it now, names Nixon. Could our name Nixon have named, say, David Kaplan, either because it was originally given to him or because, at a certain stage, it changed its referent? This is what the issue of object dependence, as I understand it, amounts to. Here, I only address one half of the problem, namely the possibility of a change in referent. A familiar case of apparent change is that of the name Madagascar, first brought to our attention by Gareth Evans, and then briefly discussed by Saul Kripke in Naming and Necessity. Was it a real change in referent or was a new name created? I claim that the latter is the case. The chapter is mainly intended to clarify the Madagascar example, without drawing any general conclusion. But the issue has some obvious bearing on a number of well-known problems, including Kripke’s puzzles about belief and linguistic consumerism.

This chapter intends to offer a theory of empty names that is consistent with the doctrine of direct reference and respects the intuition that sentences such as _Vulcan does not exist, Le Verrier imagined Vulcan, and Le Verrier believed that Vulcan orbited between Mercury and the sun_, express propositions to which the name Vulcan makes its contribution and which are either true or false. The theory has recourse to a notion of structured propositions that are quite unlike singular propositions, but it still assumes that all proper names, empty or otherwise, have no descriptive content that is semantically relevant. The new-style propositions are language-bound. Thus, the theory reminds us of sententialism–i.e. the theory that the proper objects of propositional attitudes are sentences–but is not vulnerable to the same objections. It is argued that the new-style propositions fare better than the gappy ones in accounting for the semantics of empty names and, more generally, of attitude ascriptions.

According to neo-Russellianism, in a sentence such as John believes that Mont Blanc is 4000 m high, any other proper name co-referring with Mont Blanc can be substituted for it without any change in the proposition expressed. Prima facie, our practice of translation shows that this cannot be correct. We will then show that neo-Russellians have a way out of this problem, which consists in holding that actual translations are not (merely) a matter of semantics, but also make an attempt at preserving some pragmatic features of the sentences to be translated. We then turn to translations that only preserve the semantic characteristics of the sentences and we argue that, although these translations are unable to show that neo-Russellianism is incorrect, they still show that it relies on some theses that seem to have no justification, apart from saving neo-Russellianism itself.

Tarski and Quine argue that it is meaningless to quantify into quotation, the referentially opaque context par excellence. Building on Frege's thesis that ‘the introduction of a sign for identity of content necessarily produces a bifurcation in the meaning of all signs’ (Begriffsschrift, Section 8), we challenge this view. We advance a semantics for first-order languages in which every expression has a ‘bifurcated’ value — a pair consisting of the expression's ordinary referent and the expression itself. This allows treating quotation marks as a function symbol — something that is impossible to achieve within ordinary semantics. In addition to vindicating Frege's treatment of identity in Begriffsschrift, our theory of quotation solves a riddle about anaphora and gives an original account of Giorgione sentences. Building on this account, we offer a reading of quoted variables on which they retain their status as genuine variables. Finally, using this reading, we refute the Tarski–Quine orthodoxy.

According to neo-Russellianism, in a sentence such as John believes that Mont Blanc is 4000 m high, any other proper name co-referring with Mont Blanc can be substituted for it without any change in the proposition expressed. Prima facie, our practice of translation shows that this cannot be correct. We will then show that neo-Russellians have a way out of this problem, which consists in holding that actual translations are not a matter of semantics, but also make an attempt at preserving some pragmatic features of the sentences to be translated. We then turn to translations that only preserve the semantic characteristics of the sentences and we argue that, although these translations are unable to show that neo-Russellianism is incorrect, they still show that it relies on some theses that seem to have no justification, apart from saving neo-Russellianism itself.

Esseri umani, paesi, paesaggi, sono alcuni dei maggiori oggetti del nostro amore. Lo stesso si puň dire di certi ideali, per esempio dell'ideale di giustizia. Harry Frankfurt ha dedicato parte della sua riflessione alla fenomenologia dell'amore, ma dice relativamente poco riguardo alla possibilitÀ che sorgano conflitti tra i nostri oggetti d'amore - specialmente quando č in gioco la giustizia. Questo saggio prende spunto, ancora una volta, dal caso dell'uomo su una barca troppo piccola per trasportare tre persone, che si trova a dover decidere chi salvare tra le due che sono con lui, una delle quali č sua moglie. Il problema č piů arduo di quanto pensi Frankfurt.

A rational subject who believes that a = b, and also believes that j, cannot at the same time disbelieve that j, i.e. believe that not-j. John Searle points out that no such constraint holds for desire and some other propositional attitudes. Which ones, exactly? Where is the divide located and what determines it? These are no minor questions, as they directly bear on the larger issue of how far rationality reaches and the extent to which practical reasoning obeys logical rules. It will be argued that there is no reason for despairing that deductive logic will find a way of dealing with practical reasoning, contrary to Searle’s pessimistic attitude.

What do we see in a mirror? There is an ongoing debate whether mirrors present us with images of objects or whether we see, through the mirror, the objects themselves. Roberto Casati has recently argued that there is a categorical difference between images and mirror-reflections. His argument depends on the observation that mirrors, but not paintings, are sensitive to changes in the observer’s prospective. In our paper we scrutinize Casati’s argument and present a modal argument that shows that it cannot establish this conclusion. We suggest that Casati’s line of reasoning suffers from the fact that he does not take dynamic images, i.e., images that change over time, into account.

In order to know what a belief is, we need to know when it is appropriate to say that two subjects (or the same subject at two different times) believe(s) the same or entertain the same thought. This is not entirely straightforward. Consider for instance1. Tom thinks that he himself is the smartest and Tim believes the same2. In 2001, Bill believed that some action had to be taken to save the rain forest and today he believes the same.What does Tim think? That he, Tim, is the smartest, or that Tom is? And what does Bill believe today? That action had to be taken in 2001 or that it has to be taken now? Both answers are intuitively acceptable. This has to be accounted for somehow.Building on Mark Richard's work on tense, Scott Soames 1 claims that the substitutional interpretation of the quantifiers is unable to account for the intended meaning of such statements as (2) and the validity of some inferences involving them. I will show that his argument is not convincing. Not only does the substitutional interpretation fare no worse than the objectual one, but it seems to be able to avoid a problem which could be seriously damaging for any account of the sameness of thoughts based on the notion of structured proposition. In the first section, I state the problem allegedly raised by tensed belief ascriptions to the substitutional interpretation of the quantifiers. In the second, Soames's argument is shown to be flawed. I also show that the content of the that-clause in (2) is not faithfully represented by any kind of structured proposition. Finally, I show how the substitutional interpretation can handle all such statements as (1) and (2) and the inferences involving them.

Many philosophers who thought about democracy in the Twentieth century haverejected the notion of absolute truth and even that of truth as such. Hans Kelsendraws a parallel between, on the one hand, philosophical absolutism and autocracy and, on the other, relativism and democracy. For the very same reasons, Hannah Arendt directly infers from her democratic conception of politics that truth is to be rejected. It seems that such views are closely reminiscent of some statements by John Rawls about the notion of truth. I claim that the similarity is only superficial. Joshua Cohen’s interpretation of some passages of Political Liberalism concerning truth will be discussed, in an attempt at showing that Rawls’ view is not the No Concept View, which Cohen ascribes to him. Rawls endorses no particular conception of truth, but he freely uses the notion with its ordinary meaning. The arguments of public reason should start not just from agreed premises, but from true ones, if that is possible. This is quite consistent with the view that the conclusions of those arguments are put forward as being only reasonable – not as being true.Relativism about truth, on the other hand, is definitely inconsistent with Rawls’conception of public reason and, in particular, cannot jibe with his notion of over-lapping consensus